Chapter Text
"Coming!" Ranboo whisper-shouted down to his husband from where he was curled around Micheal. "I've been captured by a Zombie Piglin so it might take a while to release myself!" Michael grunted softly in what Ranboo knew to be laughter at his joke and Ranboo fought the urge to coo at his son, instead wrapping his tail around him in an extra makeshift hug. The kid was so small! Ranboo could literally hold him in one hand! (Granted, Ranboo had pretty big hands but still!) Michael was reaching the precocious toddler age where he didn't want to be regarded as cute so Ranboo refrained from being outwardly condescending towards him.
"Really." Ranboo's husband said - from surprisingly close by and Ranboo turned to see Tubbo gripping the ladder into the room, trapdoor having swung open without Ranboo's noticing. Tubbo lifted his mop of hair off his working eye to take in the scene, three golden apples and an enchanted book balanced precariously in the crook of his elbow. "You don't look very caught, big man. Just looks like you surrendered to the stronger opponent."
Ranboo sighed dramatically over Michael's delighted giggle-grunts. "I have. I really have."
"Stronger opponent! Stronger opponent!" Michael echoed pleased, turning to give Ranboo an ecstatic look, snout and eye scrunched up against white bone, Ranboo grinned back and covered his eyes with his spare hand in the Enderman gesture of goodwill and submission in battle. Michael scrunched harder in excitement, clearly recognising the move.
"Ranboo couldn't win against a wet piece of paper so you could definitely beat him little man." Tubbo smiled a close mouthed smile, his scar tissue twitching slightly with the effort of moving the unresponsive flesh. He crouched down to hand Michael one of the apples and Michael's eye blew wide at the sight of the gold, the little Zombified Piglin gnawed on the fruit immediately, his tusks chipping away at the hard outer layer. "Here you go." Tubbo handed the other apple to Ranboo and laughed in amazement as Ranboo unhinged his jaw to crunch it down in one bite. "I'll never get used to that, you know." He admitted as he threw himself onto the bed next to Ranboo, leaning into his side.
"Mn hm." Ranboo hummed contentedly and slipped his spare arm around his husband's shoulders, nudging Michael so he was positioned on both of their laps. Prime he just felt so... Comfortable with his little family, like he never had in his panic room or his comfort room or in any other attempt he'd made to calm his frequent anxieties. And he'd stumbled upon it completely by accident as well, only really proposing to Tubbo on a whim and only adopting Michael because he felt bad.
They sat there in silence for a while, Ranboo content to just listen to the crunch of them eating. He'd gotten so lucky with these two.
"Oh!" Tubbo began and he wiggled out of Ranboo's grasp to grab the enchanted book he'd put down on his way in. "I found this in the mailbox, Jack said he hadn't seen anything like it before and wanted us to take a look. He found it in a shipwreck while exploring with Niki."
"Really?" Asked Ranboo lazily as he reached over to take it and he glanced at the cover, Galactic, obviously. The cover read Travel or maybe Jump depending on how you translated it. It was an old, archaic word in Galactic that was used to describe extraordinarily long journeys or the act of traveling to a different dimension like the nether or from the nether to the overworld. The word had an odd prefix though, and Ranboo's brow furrowed as he tried to decipher it. "This is weird." He murmured, sitting up slightly, taking care not to jostle Michael.
"I know right!?" Tubbo said excitedly and he reached forward to press a finger on the same three letter prefix that Ranboo had struggled with. "This thingy, the preflux or something, it means three person, like 'tri' in common but more specific as it's usually applied to vehicles or housing, like a three person boat or a three person bed. Foolish practically beat me up because I got it wrong so often when I was learning, you can't apply it to a- to an abstract concept like Jump."
"Really?" Ranboo, who hadn't had formal training in the language and knew it like he knew how to tie his shoes in the morning- without remembering when he'd first learned . "I didn't know that."
Tubbo flicked his head up and down in excitement and Ranboo grabbed one of his horns absentmindedly before he could gouge out an eye. "Yeah! Galactic is so much easier to read than common, it doesn't jump around as much. And it's a much- it's much more interesting in how it's structured, very log-ee-cal"
Ranboo didn't think writing moved at all but maybe that was an enderman thing. "That's nice." He commented idly. "So you think this is a misprint?"
Tubbo leant in closer to grab a corner and inspect it closer. "Probably." He answered. "Neat, huh. Michael, you wanna look?" He tilted it closer to their son. Michael grunted in ascent and yanked the opposite corner of the book towards his mouth.
Tubbos frantic gestures were the last thing Ranboo saw before his surroundings changed completely.
----
"Fuck off, Fred." Ron complained, looking slightly queasy. "You know I don't like this."
"Yes but that's what makes it so fun!" George chortled, cheering his twin on from the background as Fred levitated the dead spider towards Ron. Ron skittered back slightly at the sight, leaning away from the eight legged critter and almost dropping his cleaning rag.
Harry eyed the three with interest as the brothers fought, idly sorting through a dusty, magically crammed bookshelf. It was different to how he and his cousin interacted, though to an untrained eye it would look somewhat similar, the difference in question being malicious intent. If Fred somehow injured Ron badly he'd back off, if Dudley injured Harry, well, downed opponents fought worse.
The space behind Ron warped slightly as he backed into it and for a second Harry swore he'd spontaneously learnt how to apparate, the way the magic bent and distorted the shelves behind him was very reminiscent of the twins constant popping in and out.
But no, it wasn't Ron's magic at all and three of the strangest looking people popped into existence behind Harry's friend.
The first (and most human looking between the three) person Harry noticed was a stocky, horned muscular man with coarse rough brown hair that hung over his eyes- rather like a brunette Highland cow but instead of the classic elongated U shape his horns were curled like a rams. The man was also intensely scarred and Harry hated to think it but he looked like one of those dramatisations the fire stations used around the fifth of November to show how bad it was to mishandle fireworks. Harry shook himself mentally, if it was bad enough to not be healed with magic it probably wasn't caused by something as mundane as a firework. Anyway the horned man was... Wrestling? With the shortest of the trio, trying to wrench something from their grip.
The smallest of the group was incredibly short, about the size of a toddler. Harry knew that that wasn't any indication of age however, Goblins were short, after all, as were house elves and the second visiting order member (Harry assumed they were order members, otherwise this was quite a severe breach in security) certainly wasn't human. They had the head and hooves of a rotting pig and green mold lined the border between what pink flesh they had left and their clean, white skull. They only had one vacant looking eye and they looked surprisingly sterile for something that should objectively be disgusting, wearing a little striped jumper and dungarees. That made sense really, Harry wouldn't want to have maggots crawling in his face or be any dirtier than he had to be, even if he was decaying.
The tallest member of the trio was the weirdest looking one, and also the most passive, merely standing back and taking in his surroundings with a look of shock. His head swung side to side on an abnormally long neck and he had to duck to avoid hitting the extravagant chandelier with most of his height coming from his long spindly legs. Harry felt like he was looking at an oddly coloured gecko, black and white split down the middle with huge, lidless green and red eyes accented by groves corresponding to each eye colour marking their way down his cheeks to his chin, like some sort of permanent war paint. For a delirious second Harry wondered if he licked his eyeballs like a gecko as well but he ignored the thought, the man wasn't completely a lizard, he had hair so he probably just didn't need to blink. He was wearing a Muggle suit tailored to fit his stretched out body and Harry wondered how he even managed to buy one without raising suspicion, Wizards couldn't make normal looking suits if their lives depended on it and he wasn't exactly average looking enough to go into the Muggle world.
"Tubbo." The tall man said insistently. "Tuboo look around."
The burned man paused, only now seeming to take in his surroundings. "Oh wow." Apparently-Tubbo murmured before shouting in realisation. "Oh! That's what that prefix was for! We're in a different server!"
"Server?" The tall man questioned. "We didn't go through a portal?"
"It must be a portable portal! With a limit of three people! Like a boat you know?"
"A portkey?" Harry found himself asking before he could stop himself. Maybe these weren't order members after all, Grimauld Place was very old, maybe a portkey to it had been lost years ago?
"That's a good name for it." Tubbo agreed before abruptly pouncing on his smaller companion. "Come on Michael, give the book back to Daddy."
"Please don't call yourself Daddy." The Tall Man grimaced, eyes darting around the room, taking in everybody without ever looking anyone in the eye. Interestingly his gaze skipped right over Harry's scar, focusing instead on the floating spider. "Prime, that spider is tiny!"
"You're right, you're more of the Sugar Daddy in this relationship." Tubbo agreed, hiking Micheal up onto his hip like an unruly child and lifting his hair off his eyes (or eye? One was dead looking and unfocused) to take a look at the dead spider. "Fuck! It is!"
"What spiders have you met?" George began, in what seemed to Harry like an effort to bring the room back into something he understood.
"Acromantula?" Fred finished, sending the spider speeding towards the trio with a flick of his wand. The tall man snatched it out of the air without issue and Fred looked slightly put out.
"There's something wrong with it." The tall man said, maneuvering it around and stretching its limbs with deft, slim fingers. "It's not moving."
"It's dead." Ron managed and when Harry switched his gaze to his friend, Ron looked slightly sick.
"Some modded servers leave behind 'corpses' of dead things." Tubbo explained to the tall man, using quotation marks as if the very concept of a corpse was foreign to him. "It's like a block of the animal, you can use it as decoration or in crafting."
"Oh that's cool." The tall man said and then dragged a claw down his face to stuff the spider into it? "You think it will stay in my inventory after we portal back?"
Harry was beginning to think he was in over his head with these three. It was like they were speaking American English, understandable until they took a hard right turn into incomprehensible. Harry knew what a server was, he knew what an inventory was, he knew what modded meant. He just couldn't understand how they could be even close to applicable in these sentences.
"Muuuum!" Ron yelled, eyes not moving from the now closed patch of skin the dead spider had disappeared into. "Were we expecting visitors?"
"No?" Molly called back, sounding vaguely worried. At the same time the tall man said.
"Oh we're here by accident. Sorry about that."