"Aww, hello!" she says, delighted. It's almost like the Correspondence, in a way, but at the same time not at all. "You're lovely. I've never met anyone quite like you before."

"This is Fawkes," says Dumbledore, with fondness and something like relief in his voice. "He's a phoenix. Marvelous creatures, phoenixes." Fawkes rustles his wings proudly. "Incidentally, I appear to have neglected to introduce myself. I am Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts."

"I am Lucy Whitman, the Light-Hearted Wastelander."

"Pleased to meet you. And where do you live?" She sounds at least sort of British, but a British witch her age would have been at Hogwarts for years.

"In the Prickfinger Wastes! Just outside of London."

"How curious. I am familiar with London, but have never heard of the Prickfinger Wastes. Furthermore, the London of which I am aware is definitely on the Earth's surface, and under the same sun."

"--London hasn't been on the Surface in decades."

"Miss Whitman, have you been traveling through time?"

She throws up her hands. "Maybe! I guess that wouldn't be the stupidest thing to have happened to me this month. What year is it?"

"Nineteen ninety-three."

"--That doesn't make any sense, for London to still be on the surface I'd have had to go backwards, not forwards! I came from eighteen ninety-three."

"I remember London in eighteen ninety-three, and it was most certainly not subterranean. Except the trains, of course. No, I suspect something even stranger has happened."

"I suppose it would have had to." Sigh. "I guess that might be the stupidest thing to happen to me this month, depending on what it was. I'm in...some kind of alternate timeline now? Or something? I guess?"

"Between that and the unfamiliarity of your magic, I would suspect, not an alternate timeline, but another world entirely. Can you also do wanded magic?"

"Can I do what now."

"This world's most common form of magic is cast using a magical object as a focus, usually a wand." By way of demonstration, he pulls a stick out of his sleeve and gestures with it; the tip lights up with a soft heatless glow. "Are you familiar with anything similar?"

"Not remotely."

Dumbledore puts his wand away and picks up one of the many strange devices on his shelves, a silver contraption shaped like a flower with several layers of petals. Most of the petals light up when he touches it. He holds it out to her. "If you would hold this for a moment?"

She takes the flower. 

The lights go out as soon as she's the only one touching it. "Fascinating," says Dumbledore. "It appears you don't have our kind of magic at all, but something entirely different. . . . I'm afraid it's not immediately obvious how to get you home. But don't worry; a great many things are possible that aren't immediately obvious."

"Don't I know it. Do you have any dead people around? I can raise the dead and if this timeline doesn't have a Judgment shining its paradigm on the Surface there's no reason I can't do it here too."

"You can raise the dead? That is . . . even more impossible than the rest. And even if it's possible, it may not be wise. Have you done this before?"

"Y...es? Why would it be unwise. It is literally just people being alive instead of dead."

"The dead have moved on; they may not wish to return."

"Well, none of the mummies I resurrected had any complaints."