Sirius looked up at the sound of the door and saw the little silver-haired girl slip into the room, her robes swirling around her as she shut the door and spun to face him. A single leap took her across the room to stand in front of him. She smirked at the startled look on his face.
"The old man agreed to let me stay," she said, grinning suddenly. "He gave me a list of things to get, said I need to go to some alley in London.
"You were right, by the way. I showed off a bit, and once they saw I could do real magic they agreed there was no point in making me take the introductory courses, so they put me in with my age group. Hah! If they only knew," she laughed. She gave him an appraising examination and nodded sharply. "You're looking better."
Sirius agreed. He was looking and feeling better than he had in a long while. His hair, while still long, was clean and well-brushed, and bound back in a ponytail. He had filled out a bit from eating regularly, and his skin was no longer sallow. What was more, he was no longer alone. He had an intermediary who was willing to try and convince Harry that Sirius was not what he had been portrayed as.
"I can't go with you," he said apologetically, "it's not safe for me there, even as Padfoot. There are simply too many wizards and witches there." He smiled and held up a key. "I can give you this, though. It's the key to my vault in Gringott's, the bank there. Take what you need and bring a bit back for me, if you would."
"Right. But before I go, can you tell me what I'd want a broom for? It says here that we can have a broom, but what for? We aren't going to be cleaning all the time are we?"
Sirius laughed so hard he collapsed and it was several minutes before he managed to choke out an explanation. "You want one to fly on, of course."
Ranko scowled for a moment when she realized that he was laughing at her lack of knowledge then brushed it aside. She would have a look at the brooms anyway, but she figured she would end up using a broom of her own essence if it came to it, as she was doing for her wand, rather than buying one.
"I'm off to London. Neko'll look after ya. Don't do anything to make 'im mad." She spun around and stalked away, slamming the door behind her as she left, irritated that he still hadn't stopped laughing.
She looked at the forest around her, still feeling that spark of irritation. "London," she muttered. "Well, if it's the capital it should be visible from the air when I get near." She shook her head. "No, that's foolish. I'll just fly till I get to the nearest town and ask directions."
Reaching inward to find the right skein of gold, the gold that had come from the ring she'd taken from the Calimshite assassin, she drew on its power and cloaked herself in invisibility.
A seam appeared in her robes and the shirt she wore beneath, then another, side-by-side near her shoulder blades. A rippling wash of metal flowed outward from the holes then solidified into two great dragon wings. Mentally she called out to the ancient celestial dragon that shared her prison, but once more she received no reply. "You know I'm not going to let you rest until I've learned to fly like this," she shouted into the emptiness within her.
Momentarily shifting her awareness of her arms to her wings, she flexed them and stretched them out. She was learning to move them, slowly, but she was still no nearer to actually being able to fly with them. Positioning them spread wide, angled slightly to the rear, she released her awareness of them, locking them into place, then called on the power of her ring of flight. Soon she was gliding unseen over the forest.
From the air she was quick to find a town and two soaring overflights showed her its layout and the location of the open stores. Dropping downward, she shifted her attention to her wings, drawing them in as she swooped into an alleyway where she withdrew her wings and sealed the holes in her clothing.
---
Ranko looked up curiously at the door of the Leaky Cauldron, set almost unnoticeably between two normal stores. It was getting on towards evening and she feared the shops would soon be closing, but if she could get to Gringott's before it closed, she would have the funds to purchase a room for the night.
"I hope it looks better inside than out," she muttered, though inside she was grinning. This was more what she was used to, seedy taverns at the start of adventures and such. Opening the door, she slipped in and shut it quickly behind her. She walked quickly through the tavern, not taking much note of the inhabitants, until she recalled that she would need someone to open the brick wall behind the tavern, according to Dumbledore. They probably wouldn't take too kindly to it if she simply knocked it out of the way.
Stopping midway through the room she spun on one toe and looked about. She saw a number of older witches and wizards, but she didn't really feel like dealing with condescension at the moment. Finally she spied a young boy looking at her with wide, startled eyes. He looked to be about thirteen, the same as her appearance. She made her way quickly through the tables toward him, smirking to herself as she saw him gulping.
Harry hoped the girl wasn't mad about him staring. He simply couldn't help it. He'd seen dark-skinned kids at Hogwart's before, but her skin wasn't dark, it was black, blacker than the night sky, framed by a halo of silvery hair that cast a soft shimmering light over her perfect features. She was wearing black robes that glimmered with a faint sheen that not only kept them from giving her the appearance of a silhouette, but also outlined the curves of her body as they clung to them. He gulped against the dryness in his throat when she fixed her deep blue eyes on him and began making her way towards him.
She stepped up to the table and asked in a soft, pleasant voice, "Can you show me how to get into Diagon Alley?"
"Uh, yeah, sure," stammered Harry, standing quickly, almost knocking over his chair. He was surprised that she sounded so, so... gentle. Given her appearance, her beauty notwithstanding, he had guessed her to be a Slytherin.
He led her out the back door and into the small yard behind the inn and drawing out his wand, showed her where to tap thrice. Her face seemed to light up as she smiled at him. To his surprise, she sketched a small bow. "Thank you. I am Ranko, may I have the honor of your name?"
Harry nodded quickly. "I'm Harry," he said. She had not recognized him and as she had given only her first name, he had some reason to hope she would not ask for his last name.
"Well, thank you again, Harry," she said with a second smile, then slipped off into the slowing activity of the Alley. Harry raised his hand for a moment, about to call after her, but thought better of it and went back inside.
"Is she a new student?" he wondered, "She looked about my age."
Ranko walked quickly down the street, noting the shops as she passed them, but focusing her intent on the large building at the street's end. "Gringott's," it said, in massive carved letters.
"It looks silly," she muttered to herself as she approached. Indeed it did, seeming to lean first to one side then to the other as her eyes traveled up it. "Sure doesn't look impregnable to me."
Entering through the large doors, she stood for a time bemused at the sight of the bank workers. They looked to her eyes like a warped, more evil version of gnomes. Finally she walked up to an open teller and handed him the key. "I need to make a withdrawal," she told him.
When she left Gringott's she had with her a considerable sum of galleons, as well as a curious sense of unreality. She had just walked into a bank and withdrawn money from the vault of a wanted criminal and no-one had made the least comment about it.
Seeing that the other stores were closing, she returned to the inn, stopping along the way to read the posters at the broom store, which was named after 'Quidditch,' which she supposed was a strange word for brooms. She would obtain her supplies in the morning. Entering the inn she noticed that the boy who had given her directions was absent from his table. Speaking to the bartender, she arranged for a room. It was pointless, she had no need for protection from the elements nor for sleep, but it would be best if she drew as little attention to herself as possible, for Sirius' sake.
In her room she pulled out the one other item she had obtained that day, a stick of wood she had picked up from the ground behind the inn. Setting it on a table, she then withdrew from her storage space her spellbook and a roll of parchment.
She did not generally care for the magic she had learned during her long sojourn on Distanfae's world. It had to be memorized each morning, for it was lost in sleep or by being cast. Well, she did not sleep, so she had no reason to worry about that, but her usual magic, employing spellfire or the abilities of items she absorbed, served well enough for most purposes, especially attack and defense and required no mental effort to recoup. Rememorizing spells after she had cast them, on the other hand, was far too much like studying, something she had never particularly enjoyed.
For this purpose, however, she needed structured magic. Flipping through her spellbook, she began not to memorize, but to plan, writing out on the parchment, which was magical and turned black at the touch of gold and cleared again at the touch of silver, the series of spells she would use.
Examining the basic limits of the flight spell, she compared them to the specifications for the latest brooms that she had read on the posters at the broom shop. Making a quick notation to remind herself to add in levitation and feather fall spells, she flipped through her spellbook to the metamagic section, the spells that modified other spells. It was irritating and far too much like math, calculating the effect of each metamagic spell as she worked on designing the right pattern of altering spells to give the flight spell the characteristics she desired, but the underlying subject held her interest, particularly given her eventual plans for it.
As the night wore on, she grew steadily more frustrated. She could readily extend the duration of the spell, or its range of effect, but she could find nothing that would substantially increase its speed. Haste and expeditious retreat were options, but neither could get the overall effect into the speed range described for the broom she had been looking at, and multiple castings of either simply resulted in an overlapping period of effect, without actually increasing the strength of the dweomer nor the speed it imparted.
Frustrated after fighting with the design for the spells after several hours, she turned her attention to the stick. "Now, you're going to be a problem," she growled. She did not really understand how those broomsticks could be made, not with the magic she knew, for it was a general rule that permanent magical items had to be formed of extremely valuable substances.
Yet all the broomsticks, as far as she could see, were made of wood and twigs or straw, hardly the sort of item that could be expected to last. "You've just got to last long enough to take the spells," she said, putting her chin in her hands as she looked at it, knowing that if it could take the spells, she would require only moments to absorb it, at which point it would be truly permanent. Was not there one other sort of object that could be used? "Art," she said suddenly. "That's it!"
She grasped the stick and quicksilver poured from her palms to engulf it. Under the influence of the quicksilver, she reshaped the stick, concentrating on an image in her mind. The wood flowed smoothly but she still had to release it twice to prevent the quicksilver from beginning to absorb it. The wood fibers were far less resistant to the absorption than the metals she had first learned this sort of manipulation on.
When completed, the stick had become a perfect scale model of a broomstick, with a neat bundle of twigs bunched at the rear. "A work of art, if I do say so myself," Ranko said then she set the broom aside and took up her spellbook.
She had hoped that leaving the spells for a while before coming back to them would help her see something she had missed, but it was not to be. She simply could not find any combination of spells that would reproduce the abilities listed in the advertisement. "El could probably do it easy," she grumbled. Of course, he would simply have made up a new spell to do it. She was nowhere near that level, unfortunately.
The sky outside her window was beginning to lighten when she was finally ready to give up. Even as she conceded defeat, however, her mouth turned up in a sudden pleased smile. If she had not been so concentrated on duplicating the broom, she would have realized far earlier that it was actually a very good thing that she could not duplicate it. That meant that all she had to do was buy one and absorb it and she would have expanded her capabilities dramatically.
She considered again the description of the broom's abilities and her smile grew wider still. She greatly enjoyed flight but her ring was limited, even as flying with Tofu was, for in neither case could she hover, nor turn on a yen. With this broom, though, she ought to be able to!
Recognition of her own momentary cluelessness brought back memories of her childhood. Never in Nerima would she have had the peace and quiet to even attempt that magnitude of research. "Someone would have burst in at just the wrong point," she muttered, "and all that effort would have gone up in smoke."
As if in answer to her thoughts, a heavy knocking sounded at her door.
---
As usual, Harry began his day with breakfast in the main room of the Leaky Cauldron, watching the morning clientele go about their business. As he sat and watched, though, he found his mind returning to the silver-haired girl he had given directions to the previous day. He had not seen her since their first encounter, and probably never would again, but questions about her ran insistently through his mind.
Was she a student? She looked no older than he was, but she had been alone, unescorted, when she entered the tavern from muggle London. It would have made more sense if he had first encountered her in Diagon Alley. It was not unfeasible that her parents might have sent her there alone; but to send her through London? If she had been wearing ordinary clothes that might make sense; she might have had muggles for parents, like Hermione, or more like his aunt and uncle, rather, who were unwilling to get involved with magic. She would not be wearing witch's robes already in that case, though.
Of course, it was equally possible that she was not a student at all, or that she was a student at some other school, just visiting England for the summer, particularly given her exotic looks. She had definitely looked Eastern, but her skin had been this unbelievable black. Harry wondered if she might be descended from some exotic creature to get that true black color. Was that even possible?
"...silver-haired lass..." Harry looked up. Had he just heard that, or was it... His eyes fixed on a pair of wizards in Auror's robes sitting just two tables away. There was no-one between them and himself, and he could not suppress his shiver. He still did not know why the Ministry had suddenly turned a blind eye to his accidental blowing up of his Aunt Marge, when they had sent him a letter threatening expulsion after Dobby had levitated a pudding to smash it. That hadn't even been his wand doing the magic, and they had threatened him, and when he himself had blown up his aunt, he had fled the house, expecting to be captured by the Aurors and thrown in prison if he stayed.
"Reckon it must have been an illusion?"
"Must have. No way a little slip of a girl could have killed two of the guards." The speaker was a grey haired man with shifting eyes that seemed to be in constant motion. The man he was replying to was younger, with light brown hair, facing away from Harry.
"Black skin and silver hair. What do you reckon we're really facing? If they were using illusions, why'd they pick something so obvious. And why'd they stick to it afterwards. Why not just change it?"
"Been thinking about that," grey-hair answered. "I reckon it must be one o'them types illusions don't work so well on. Maybe the only illusion is her size or age."
"But still, it's kind of brazen, ain't it, to come waltzing into the alley, going right into Gringott's plain as you please, after killing two dementors and injuring several more?"
"And then to take a room in the Cauldron, when 'Arry Potter's staying here? We're facing sommat that ain't got much fear. They've checked. Nothin's flooed or apparated outta that room up there what she took, and she ain't been seen leaving."
"Could have left under an invisibility cloak."
"Don't think so. There's evidence of ongoing magic in the room, and I don't mean the lasting stuff as was there 'fore she came, neither."
Harry stared at his hands. He had talked to her, told her how to get into Diagon Alley. She was a murderess? Was it possible? Harry jerked when the door to the alleyway slammed open, sure that it would be more Auror's come to finally take him away. After all, blowing up his aunt by an accident they might overlook, but allowing a murderess into Diagon Alley?
He tried to shrink into his chair as much as he could, peering up through his bangs. His heart clenched when he saw that the fellow making quick strides across the room was in fact wearing Auror's robes, and coming right towards him. He nearly passed out when the Auror reached him, but the man swept past to stand just behind the brown haired man.
"Took a bit of doing," he hissed under his breath. "And you're not gonna like it, not at all, but I managed to worm the vault number out of the goblins." The man took a deep breath as if to steady himself, then continued. "She made a withdrawal... from the account of Sirius Black!"
"What!?" Both of the other Aurors stood at once, incidentally knocking their table over, though they ignored the crash of wood. It did get them the undivided attention of everyone in the place. "She's in league with Sirius Black?!"
"Shh! Quiet, damnit," the new man said, glancing upstairs nervously. "I've sent word to Hogwarts. We've got to get Potter out of here before we do anything!"
Harry perked up at this. He wasn't in trouble? He was going to get to go to Hogwarts early? But he hadn't purchased his supplies yet! He was not given an opportunity to protest. He wasn't even given the chance to get back into his room, number eleven, and fetch his things. He had to give a list of everything he had to an auror. Soon enough the auror came back downstairs with his trunk and Hedwig in her cage looking irritable.
Then it was off to Hogsmeade, through the floo network, after having gone over the list from the school and marking everything he needed and writing down all the potions supplies he knew that he was missing or short of.
Harry was rather irritable himself by the time they got to the castle. After Minister Fudge had refused to sign his permission form to allow him to go to Hogsmeade as third years were allowed to do, the least they could have done was let him have a look at it while they were passing through. After all, they had left the danger back at the Cauldron, so there should have been no reason not to let him have a look about. But he was bustled through Hogsmeade so quickly that he had scarcely more than an idea how large a village it was, and little more.
---
Ranko glared at the door. A shout sounded from without and Ranko shook her head in irritation. Apparently someone had in fact noticed her pulling money from Black's account. Either that or someone objected to her lack of restraint in defending herself at the gates of Hogwarts. At least, that was what she gathered from the shout. Ordinary people doing ordinary things did not usually, at least in her experience, go around telling other folk to come out with their hands empty.
Regardless, she had no interest in dealing with this world's version of authority. She heard something impacting loudly against the door as she faded into the shadows, but paid it no mind. Appearing within the woods near the castle of Hogwarts, she leapt into the branches of the tree in whose shadow she arrived. There she crouched, waiting, watching for any signs that her pursuers had managed to track her escape through the shadows.
After an interminable period spent alternating between thinking that enough time had passed, and thinking that it was unwise to risk Black-san's health over her impatience, she finally conceded that she had apparently escaped cleanly. Dropping backwards into the shadow of the trunk behind her, she rolled over and onto her feet in the Orthanc-house.
She grinned at the startled cry Black gave at her sudden and odd manner of appearance. In fact, had she but known it, it was not so unnerving to Black to see her appear out of nowhere, as it was simply jarring to see her do so without there being a fireplace behind her. Portkeys and apparition did not usually involve a tumble, but travel by floo often did.
He shook his head ruefully, acknowledging his own startlement with a wry grin. "So, have all you need now?"
Ranko shook her head, tossing him a heavy bag of coins. "Apparently that bank wasn't quite as hush-hush as you thought. They showed up at my door in the inn just before I was about to go finish my shopping."
Sirius shook his head doubtfully. "The goblins are almost always steadfastly neutral about that sort of thing. I find it hard to accept that they would report someone accessing my account."
Ranko grinned. "Well, then I guess they must be peeved about those dementors I beat up."
Sirius' jaw dropped. "You... you beat..."
"About five or six dementors, I think it was. Hey, they attacked me first. They had it coming. I dunno, I hit two of 'em kinda hard. They might not have made it."
"How can you be so calm about that?" demanded Sirius, eyes narrowing. Though he knew it was not her true appearance, it was still hard to look past her current appearance, that of a thirteen or fourteen year old witch.
Ranko cast a sardonic glance at him as she fell backward into the chair that rippled up out of the floor to meet her. "I've encountered their sort before. We called them 'mind flayers.' I don't know what the experts called them. If these things are anything like the ones I've encountered, and they are, by appearance and by your own words, they've no respect for the lives of anything other than themselves. They take pleasure in pain and fear. I'm not going to lose any sleep over them, dead or alive." She did not mention that she was physically incapable of losing sleep over them. He did not need to know her full background.
"Anyway, I expect I will have to go back there to pick up the rest of my supplies before the week is out. But before I work on how to do that, there is something I need to know. You told me that you could not risk doing magic because it would lead them right to you, yet you changed from a dog to a man. You said that was not Jusenkyou, so I think it's about time I got an explanation." It had been thinking about the magic of the broom and the difficulty of performing it herself that had caused her to finally catch that little discrepancy in his claims.
---
Ranko looked out of the shadows of the forest's edge at the slowly moving forms of the dementors guarding the castle's perimeter. She watched carefully, but none of them ever seemed to move inward. She knew why they were there now; the authorities seemed to think that Sirius, having been responsible, in their eyes, for the deaths of Harry Potter's parents, his own best friends, at the hands of Lord Voldemort, had escaped Azkaban to take revenge on Potter himself, the one responsible for the fall of Lord Voldemort. After all, his actions seemed to them clear indication that he had been Voldemort's right hand man.
She had felt the effect of the dementors' near presence and had Sirius describe the effects of long term exposure and it made sense to her that if the school was to operate as a school the Azkaban guards would have to be kept away from the children.
To get into the school, she would have to pass through them, and the searches she had observed while obtaining the rest of her supplies from Diagon Alley under the influence of an appearance altering illusion strongly indicated that she herself was now one of their prime targets. Though the goblins at Gringott's had not reacted to her retrieving money from Black's account, that had apparently been put together with her self-defense against the dementors and the aurors were now firmly of the opinion that she was in league with Black. Astute of them.
Sirius had warned her about the various wards that guarded the school and she did not particularly care to risk testing whether the wards would detect and block her various forms of travel. Particularly since Sirius had been kind enough to divulge the location of an entrance to a secret passage onto the school grounds from the nearby village of Hogsmeade.
Ranko moved silently through the trees, but to her considerable irritation, she could not find a vantage point that would let her see the large willow tree that was her expected point of egress.
Shaking her head, she pulled back and dropped through the shadows back to the small shack on a hill just beyond Hogsmeade. The Shrieking Shack, Sirius had called it. Claimed that the villagers believed it to be haunted, though he had hinted that such was not the case, without offering any alternative explanation for the villager's beliefs.
She wasted no time trying to follow Sirius's instructions to find the secret entrance to the tunnel, choosing instead to draw up the substance of one of the most valuable gems she had absorbed during her stay on Distanfae's world, a gem of true seeing. With it serving as her eye, she located the door and had it open in moments.
Slipping in, she cautiously shut the door behind her. Her true seeing eyes pierced easily through the darkness and though quicksilver would have done as well, she left the true seeing gem in place. It might give her a moment's warning if this passage was no longer secret and traps had been laid for her.
As she moved carefully through the darkness, watching for the telltale glimmer of magic, a heavy rumble moved through the earth, a steady, deep vibration. The Hogwarts train had arrived. In a very short while, carriages would begin bringing the students to the castle through the gates, with the exception of the first year students, who would be brought, Sirius had informed her, across the lake in boats.
Ranko increased her pace, desiring to come to the castle in time to mingle with the entering older students, where she would have a better chance to fit in. Dumbledore had not said anything to her about being sorted, though Sirius had implied it happened to every student, so she was not sure whether she would be singled out or not.
Regardless, she expected a very dubious reception once they realized she was there, given the behavior of the aurors in Diagon Alley.
Reaching the tunnel's end, she ignored the knot that would still the great willow tree. She slipped out of the opening and immediately faded into a shadow, just as a thin, whip-like willow branch slashed through the space she had occupied but a moment before. She grinned at the lack of reaction around her. She had hoped that as long as her means of travel did not attempt to pass through the wards it would pass undetected, and so far it seemed she was correct.
Drifting across the grounds as a spot of darkness, she spied the great doors, open wide to welcome the students, who, she could see, were still some distance away in the horseless carriages. She drifted up to lurk beside the doors, grinning when a ghost darted away, spooked by her presence.
The carriages trundled up and halted, one after another, to disburse a tight group of usually four children apiece, occasionally more or less. Ranko watched them closely as they began to pass in, watching for green eyes behind glasses and unruly black hair concealing a scar of great import.
Finally she entered the castle, after the last of the students, though she quickly overtook them. Why had he not been there? A shiver passed through the throng of students as a shadow flickered past them bearing an immense presence, felt but unseen, and with it passed a silence as accompanies the person of one too great to dare bother without pressing need.
Taking advantage of a particularly dark corner near the head of the jostling snake of students, Ranko returned to material form shrouded by darkness and let the shadows slowly slip away as she neatly inserted herself into the students' ranks.
Almost instantly she was awarded space by the nervous students, as a barely half-understood intuition warned them of danger. To students whose nerves were already frayed by recent events, the warning was keenly felt and even more quickly heeded.
She passed into silence through the doors to the great candle-lit hall where long tables waited, her entrance announced, as it were, all eyes drawn to the sudden cessation of the usual bustle of students entering just before she reached it, and for a moment thereafter. A tense hush fell over the crowd as they for the first time consciously realized to whom they were reacting, a hush broken by a startled cry from the Gryffindor table.
"Ranko!"