And then she falls some more, through different air, and then she hits the ground.

She's on smooth grass in the middle of some sort of stadium. The stands above are full of people, mostly children. Their attention is split between the person who just appeared in and then fell out of the air, and the people who are still in the air, riding broomsticks and throwing a ball to each other. 

"And it looks like someone just apparated onto the pitch, I dunno why, hopefully one of the captains will call for a time out so we can oh Merlin's beard, what are the dementors doing here?"

This last is probably referring to the trio of horrible figures in ragged black cloaks drifting out from under the stands, emanating an aura of despair.

She doesn't feel despair. 

She feels--wrong, itchy, there is something wrong--

Almost involuntarily, she lights up, blazing the light of life like a tiny and unusually nonjudgmental star. 

The awful floating things turn their absence of faces towards her and slow to a stop. The flying people stop what they're doing to stare, except the one in red who's too focused on not passing out.

It feels like--someone being dead, except without the someone, and--people being dead isn't this--intrusive--

She has no idea where she is or what's going on.

But she knows that death is bad. 

The choice of life over death, always, she speaks in a single word of crystals-in-river voice. 

The creatures that shouldn't exist scream, and their scream is a silence deeper than the absence of sound, a sucking silence from a place where sound cannot exist, and then they are not. Reality flows together seamlessly into the place where the holes in the world used to be, and the air is clear and the sun is bright and the hundreds of people watching sigh in instinctive relief before they gasp in shock.

Okay! That dealt with, she looks around, and--

Is this...the Surface? Can't be, the light shining on her skin--well, it looks like sunlight, but she can feel that it's, it's as inert as candle-light. From the most normal, non-Neathily weird candle ever. 

She looks skyward--well, that looks like the Sun, but. 

She calls up to it, in the loudest rocks-and-river voice, she can, Concern for one behaving in an uncharacteristic way???

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace! It does not tell her this because it can't talk.

She is so concerned right now!!!

Having exhausted all avenues of directly addressing her concerns she starts actually paying attention to the human beings around her. 

There's a white-bearded old man coming across the field towards her. He says, "All you alright, young lady?"

"I am confused and concerned. Is this supposed to be the surface of the planet? There's something very wrong with the sun."

He was expecting confused and concerned, because it would take a rather impressive magical accident to appear right through the wards on the grounds, but that's still a surprising batch of sentences. It doesn't show on his face.

"This is the surface of the planet, yes. Do you know how you came to be here?"

"I fell in a well while being chased by Seekers. Honestly, that could've gone worse."

That raises more questions than it answers, especially the part where she seems to expect him to understand it. 

"And what did you do to those Dementors? I would have said destroying them was impossible."

"Are there more of those things? They were--um--okay, this probably requires context, actually maybe the last thing I said does too, there probably aren't Seekers on the surface--how much do you know about the Neath?"

"I am beginning to suspect that this will be a rather long conversation. Why don't you come to my office?" He starts trying to lead her off the field; several of the players have landed and are arguing with each other and the referee about whether this counts as a stoppage in play and whether anyone committed a foul.

"Alright." She agreeably follows him off the field.

Then they can cross some more lawn and enter an enormous beautiful castle. The outside is all elegant towers and gleaming windows; the inside is distinctly mobile and noneuclidean. They go up two flights of stairs, wait for a third to swing around to where they can get on it, and once off it make five left turns in quick succession without seeing the same bit of hallway twice.

Lucy does not comment on the oddly Parabolan architecture. 

It doesn't comment on her, unless you count the occasional portrait waving and saying hello.

Thaaaat's weird. Um. 

"Are you sure this is the Surface and not some part of Parabola?"

"This is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in Scotland."

"That's...not less confusing but okay."

"I'm sure we can sort it all out and get you back to wherever you were going. Chocolate frog." This last is addressed to a gargoyle, which hops to one side, revealing a door, which in turn opens to reveal a stone spiral escalator.

"I wasn't strictly going to anywhere, just away from some people who meant me harm," she says dryly, following him up the stairs. 

When the stairs stop turning they're at the entrance to a very crowded and curious office. Every inch of space is covered in books, parchment, strange blatantly-magical devices, or all three. An ancient pointed hat with a face is dozing on a shelf; they open one black seam-eye to look at her before going back to sleep. And sitting on a golden perch above the desk is a gloriously red and gold bird the size of a swan, who looks at Lucy and trills a single perfect, ringing note that somehow conveys feelings of greeting and friendship and warmth and comfort.

"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." 

"Did they retain any memories? Of what happens next, I mean."

"Yep! Everyone does, well, mostly, I mean, infantile amnesia still applies."

"And were they able to grow, afterward? To change and become wiser, as living people do and ghosts cannot?"

"Y...es...resurrected babies can grow up and stuff and...resurrection is just being alive instead of dead, it doesn't give you brain damage or anything." 

Dumbledore is silent for a long moment.

"I have seen many unprecedented things in my time, and I must say, you are one of the strangest yet. How did you come by this ability? Is it common, in your world?"

"Uh...well--nobody comes back to life on the Surface. In the Neath, you can usually come back, but sometimes you don't come back on your own, but I can bring you back anyways. I need a soul or a body, either one works, if I don't have a body then getting someone who's been dead a long time is an unsolved problem but if it's recent I can just slit my own throat to pay a visit to the shore where the Boatman gathers the dead and spirit them off before they cross."

Dumbledore goes right back to looking perturbed. "Please do not harm yourself in this world until we have determined that you will be able to return as you have before. Have you always been able to do this, or was it something you had to learn?"

"I've always been able to do this."

"And what does it mean that you need either a body or a soul?"

"...I mean I can take a body and make it be alive with its soul in it again, or I can take a soul and make it a new body, but I can't just start from nothing and go 'okay, I want this specific person to be here and alive and stuff.'"

"I am concerned about what it means to 'take a soul'. In my experience they cannot usually be found without bodies. Are you referring to ghosts?"

"We don't so much have ghosts where I'm from but I don't see as how that wouldn't work; I'm referring to the thing I do when I slit my throat to go pick up souls the boatman hasn't taken across the shore yet."

"I see. Unfortunately, no one has ever returned from the dead in this world, so I cannot guess whether our souls go to the same place as yours."

"That's what science is for!"

"Are you currently planning any experiments?"

"I don't really have enough information to make plans, but like, as soon as I get my hands on some corpses that have been dead for years we're gonna find out what happened to the people between dying and coming back."

"There is one other problem. Is your magic secret in your world from those without it? In this world, revealing magic to anyone but a witch or wizard would be both illegal and dangerous. Muggles fear what they do not understand."

"...More dangerous than a one hundred percent chance of being dead?"

"I have high hopes that someday the magical and non-magical worlds will be able to integrate peacefully. But a sudden, unplanned revelation would be likely to lead to war, with a great many deaths on both sides."

"Is there a specific reason to think that, or just general pessimism about human nature?"

"Wizards were persecuted by muggle authorities before we went into hiding. I don't know if the intervening centuries have made things better or worse. Wars are less common, now, but fought with far deadlier weapons."

"--What kinda cutrate magic do you have that they can touch you?"

"Any trained wizard can defend against most muggle weapons if they have warning, but those defenses cannot be maintained continuously. And some weapons can overcome our shields." 

"Okay. Well, if they're still like that, I guess I'll have to convince them to cut it out." 

He looks skeptical, but also like he thinks predicting what Lucy can and can't do is a sucker's game.

"In the shorter term, do you know where you want to stay? You would of course be welcome to remain at Hogwarts."

"Does Hogwarts have like...history books. Of the last century. And a bit. And/or dead people."

"We have an excellent library. And several ghosts. Including our history professor." 

"What a serendipitous coincidence! Where's the history professor?"

"Almost certainly in his office. It's on the fourth floor; I can write you a set of directions." He takes a piece of parchment and a flamingo feather quill out of a desk drawer.

She watches him write out the directions, then accepts them and thanks him and heads off to start following the directions. She would think they were weird if she hadn't already seen how damn Parabolan this place's architecture was. 

She knocks on the office door. 

The architecture is very Parabolan, and also occasionally hyperbolic. Her knock is answered with a soft, surprised "Come in?".

She opens the door. 

"Hi! I'm from another timeline where it's a hundred years ago and London was taken underground and I was hoping to catch up on the local history, and also find out if you will stop being dead if I glow at you, because I have glowing-at-people-and-making-them-not-be-dead powers."

"Hello. I don't think I've seen you in any of my classes," says the transparent elderly man. "You say you want to learn history? We can start in 1066 . . ." he appears to be winding up for a lecture.

"--Uh, I'm definitely not in any of your classes, and I was wondering if we could start a bit later than that, also, the resurrection thing, I mean if you'd rather be a ghost that's fine but."

Lucy can almost see the gears turning in Binns' head as he tries to think an original thought.

"Not being a ghost, you say? Well, it was certainly more convenient being alive and able to hold papers . . ."

"Excellent!" she says brightly. 

She glows. 

And suddenly there is a youngish man, solid and alive and made of meat, dropping into his desk chair from where he had been hovering above it. It creaks unnervingly. 

"My goodness! Everything is so much clearer now, I clearly wasn't thinking straight before. Thank you, miss . . . oh dear, if you said your name I failed to retain it."

"Lucy Whitman. Pleased to meet you. What was wrong?"

"Professor Cuthbert Binns, and very much likewise. What was wrong? Well, it appears that in addition to being dead, I was rather old and barmy. Anyway, did you mention you wanted to learn some history?"

"Yes, I'm from an alternate timeline where it's a hundred years ago and I'd like to catch up."

"An alternate timeline? I'll definitely want to hear more about that later. But you want the last hundred years, eh? They've been very eventful ones . . ." he winds up for an exposition dump again, this one much more animated (you might even say reanimated) and on topic. The muggle Industrial Revolution and attendant faster population growth got some wizards worried (wizards have always had a harder time having children than muggles, but were for most of history better at keeping those children alive), and this escalating tension plus the disruption of the first world war gave the dark wizard Grindelwald an opening to attempt to unify the muggle world under a puppet muggle conqueror and then conquer the result. He was eventually stopped by the combined efforts of Albus Dumbledore, several wizarding governments, and all the muggles who didn't want to get conquered. 

Professor Binns now has to breathe occasionally; does Lucy have any questions so far?

"Why do wizards have a harder time having children?"

"Nobody's sure! It's been like that for all of recorded history. It gets worse in cultures that marry their cousins a lot, but even without that wizards just end up with smaller families than muggles."

"That happens with royalty too. The cousins thing." 

"Yes, hemophilia and so forth. While it's certainly better than interbreeding with muggles, there are plenty of wizards who aren't one's cousin around."

"--Wait, why is it better?"

"Because then you'd be married to a muggle and have half-blood children?"

"Are half-blood children in any way materially disadvantaged compared to non-half-blood children, because for your edification, if my blood wasn't half-and-quarter-and-quarter you would still be dead."

Blink blink. "I'm sorry? Half and quarter and quarter what, exactly?"

"Half human, quarter giant space crab, quarter star." 

"And here I thought you were just an extremely gifted witch. . . . You don't look like a crab. I suppose you did look a bit like a star, earlier."

"Oh, this isn't my natural form, but that wouldn't fit indoors. I figured out how to look like a human and not like a giant diamond crab when I was eighteen. The transformation doesn't quite go all the way, my bones stay diamond," she opens her mouth and sticks a finger behind her teeth to demonstrate their transparency, "and I don't have any of your sort of magic at all. Just star magic and space crab magic."

"Fascinating. I've heard of wizards hybridizing with magical creatures before, but the offspring are generally wizards as well. And, pardon me if this is indelicate, but how does one hybridize with a star?"

"Please. I'm not even a regular masochist, let alone the hardcore emotional kind of masochist it would take to ask my grandparents how they had sex. But it's probably relevant that my parents are a human and a star/crab hybrid, I don't think a human could survive being close enough to a whole Judgment to produce offspring. I could be wrong, though, if they were protected...anyway. My father is just a giant glowing mountain, not a star, and no I don't know how that worked either."

Binns has the grace to look extremely uncomfortable. "I apologize for my rudeness. Did you want to learn more about recent history?"

"Yes please." 

Okay, post-Grindelwald British wizarding history, much less unpleasant than thinking about getting raised from the dead by a part-human! Muggles got potentially world-destroying weapons and also got a lot more numerous, which made all the magical governments very nervous. Britain in particular also had to deal with the rise of He Who Must Not Be Named, another dark wizard who wasn't as good at building a power base as Grindelwald but was a lot more unhinged, to the point where there might not have been any British wizards left to conquer if the war had gone on much longer. Then You-Know-Who was defeated, some say killed, by a one-year-old baby, Harry Potter, who's actually old enough to be attending Hogwarts right now. "Why, I probably have him in my classes. I stopped keeping track a long time ago, it didn't seem to matter who was in the classes because I would give the same lecture regardless."

"Being dead is bad for your health. Thank you for explaining. Do you know where I can find other ghosts?"

"Well, there are another four in this castle, but I don't know where any others live."

"It's a big castle, and I'm new here."

"The house ghosts mainly spend time near their house common rooms--but I suppose you wouldn't know where those are. What brings you to Hogwarts, anyway?"

"Oh, I fell down a magic well and randomly appeared on a field where some children were playing some kind of game on broomsticks. And then these horrible things in cloaks showed up and they must've been death-based in some way because my healing light destroyed them."

"How odd. Well, I hope you find Hogwarts hospitable as long as you're here. I'd offer to help you find your way to one of the other ghosts' common haunts, but, ah, I'm afraid I don't remember much besides how to get from here to my classroom and back. That's going to be rather bothersome when it gets to be suppertime. Ah, well, we shall both have to emulate the first years and ask the portraits for directions."

"Ask the--hm. Alright. How does that work exactly? The portraits, I mean."

"They're sort of, recordings of a wizard? They remember most of what the wizard remembered when they were painted. They can see out of their frames, and move into adjacent ones, so they get to know their way around.

"So there's a sort of parallel area behind the frames, that the portraits can move around in?"

"I'm not entirely sure; you might want to ask a portrait about it. I know if one person gets painted multiple times there ends up being only one and they can move between those frames at any distance."

"I will ask a portrait about it. Thanks."

"You're welcome. And thank you again for the, ah, resurrection. I'm going to need to revise my lesson plans, they've gone rather out of date, but do feel free to stop by any time I'm not teaching a class."

"I will!" 

She leaves the classroom and looks around for a painting.

There are several paintings in the area! She can talk to a stern-looking old witch drinking tea, or a group of three wizards playing cards, or a witch in a blue dress picking flowers.

"Hi!" she says to the flower witch. "Where I'm from paintings aren't alive and I'm curious how that works."

"Hi! I'm Mildred. I don't know how paintings work exactly, but I know a wizard has to paint them and I'm pretty sure the canvas gets soaked in a potion either before or after. Maybe both."

"That is good to know but it's not what I meant, I was more curious what it's like on the other side of the canvas."

"Oh! Silly me. Hmm. Well, it's always sunny, at least in this frame. And if I don't want to talk to anyone I can just walk off into the background for a while. And things don't change much. It's very . . . calm. Peaceful."

"I'm glad to hear that. How does going between frames work? Is there space inbetween? Is it a sharp transition? If different paintings are on different walls of a room, does going from one to another feel like going in a straight line or turning a corner?"

"Hm. I've never tried to explain it before. .  . It's not that there isn't a space between, but you can't really be in that space. It's like stepping from one rock to another in a stream, except you can't fall in the stream because it isn't anything. I've never noticed turning a corner to feel different, but going up or down the wall does. You still go out the side of the frame but in a different direction than aiming for the frame to the left or right."