"Your guess is as good as mine. If you don't know how it works, might as well call it magic. These stairs, on the other hand, are a sort of machine." He stepped forward onto the downward moving escalator. "Mostly harmless. I only know the bulletin boards work. I saw a note from a Tonks, from England, and a reply from a Severus Snape. They seemed to be from the same bunch of magic users. Snape said something about there not seeming to be an American Ministry."
"And I did meet another user of magic, a woman named Zatanna, and of course there is my own sort of magic - which seems to be unrelated to all of those others."
Galen listened with interest to Longbottom's explanation. "Please-man? Ah, do you mean policeman?" He broke the word down into syllables when he said it. "They have those here, not aurors. War criminals? A wizarding war? Always war, I suppose, no matter the culture. Went through one of those myself. Don't have much use for wands; I prefer a staff."