Disclaimer: I own every last pixel in this story. Sadly, I don't own the pattern they make, especially when those patterns involve characters not created by me. But I still own the pixels, and I could prove it if the pattern of the ownership document wasn't copyrighted by someone else too! Dang.
The journey from London to Paris proved to be another exercise in sitting and waiting. Outside King's Cross, Sirius hailed a cab that took them to a different rail station (purely to annoy whoever ended up tracking them), where they took the evening train to Dover. At Dover, Sirius produced passports that declared them to be Steven and Gerald Boardman, and they boarded the ferry together. Harry sat by the window the whole time, watching the setting sun reflect off the water, and Sirius spent his time chatting up one of the other passengers. At Calais, they had dinner in a little café. Sirius did the ordering, the food was excellent, and the pair of them fell upon it like starving wolves.
After dinner, they sleepily took a cab to the train station, where tickets for the night train to Paris were purchased. Though more modern than the Hogwarts Express, it was similar in that it really wasn't all that express-like. The night train made its way through the countryside at a reasonable pace, and the compartments had fold-down beds that Sirius immediately took advantage of. Harry let Hedwig out of her cage and let the snowy owl stretch her wings before asking "How are you doing, Hedwig?"
She sighed and twisted her head from side to side to loosen it. "I do hate that cage, but since flying to Japan on my own would take months I'll just have to make the best of it. How are YOU feeling, Harry? You look very tired."
He sighed. "I am. It's …been a very long day and it feels really odd to be leaving behind everything like this. And don't get me wrong, I like Sirius, but why did you pick him?"
Hedwig gently stirred the air in the compartment with her wings. "He's an adult – or can pass for one, at least, his first allegiance is to the memory of your parents and to you, he has little to tie him to England, and he isn't afraid of foreign places like most British wizards. In fact, he's been to Japan before."
"Really?"
"Indeed, according to Sirius he and your father went on a 'madcap adventure' there in the summer after their sixth year. He didn't give me any details, but from the look on his face there was probably a highly inappropriate story or three there."
"There is," Sirius commented as he cracked open an eye. "And unless you'd like to hear it, I advise you both to get some sleep. Or at least let me get some."
Harry and Hedwig took the hint and folded down the other bunk. The train arrived at Paris just after sunrise the next morning, and while none of them had gotten as much rest as they'd have liked, they were functional at least. At the station, Sirius pulled Harry into the washroom. "I should have given you this last night," he remarked as he pulled out a small box.
"Sirius, I'm not getting engaged at thirteen, least of all to you." Harry quipped nervously.
His godfather let out a small bark of a laugh. "You're not my type either. This is a Translating Charm, like the one I'm wearing. We're going to have to pierce your ear, I'm afraid, but that won't take long and I remember enough healing to keep it clean and painless."
Harry opened the box; inside was a plain silver earring. He took it out and examined it. "This will let me understand French?"
"It lets you understand and speak French, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. It'll also give you a head start in learning them; the more time you spend conversing in a language the more it'll sink into your head. It doesn't help you with reading and writing, though, that you'll have to learn through study. You didn't by any chance take Ancient Runes this year, did you?"
"No, Ron talked me into taking Divination with him. Horrible class…"
"That's a pity. Runes is a tough class, but it would have given you some experience in identifying fiddly little characters. Well, you'll just have to do it the hard way, then, but being able to talk to people will give you the leg up. Let's get this done before you have time to get nervous about it." Sirius produced his wand and carefully used a spell to pierce Harry's right earlobe, and another to clean and cauterize the wound. A Numbing Charm after that made it stop hurting, and the ring was put in place.
When they stepped back out of the washroom, it was like the whole world had changed. Everyone around him was still speaking French, but suddenly it made sense to Harry. "This is fantastic, where did you get these?"
Sirius grinned. "James and I bought them from a travel agency back in the Seventies. They cost more than our airline tickets, but oh they were worth it… They've been in my box at Gringott's ever since."
"How did you get into Gringott's? Wouldn't they have turned you over to the Aurors?"
"Well, I had my disguise on yesterday morning and time to kill waiting for the Express, so I walked down the middle of Diagon Alley in broad daylight to go in the front door. I did have to reveal my identity in private, but as it turns out the goblins don't care much about my criminal status so long as I don't do anything to them or start a fight in their bank. Gringott's and what's below it are sovereign territory, thanks to the Gramhault Treaty of …I forget when exactly. But anyway, it seems that they cut their Most Valued Customers a great deal of slack when it comes to things like warrants for their arrest."
"Most Valued Customer?"
Sirius winked at a passing woman. "Rich. Apparently my parents didn't disown me properly when they kicked me out, and as a result I inherited the repulsive house I grew up in and a disgusting amount of money when the last of them died. I didn't have time to deal with it all, so I exchanged a few thousand galleons into francs and yen, and then hired a goblin account manager who will receive further instructions by Muggle post. Suffice it to say, we're not going to be hurting for money any time soon."
Harry reached up to finger the earring. "So this was…?"
"That was your dad's, yes. He only wore it during the trip, but I wasn't about to let him throw out a perfectly good bit of enchanted goblin silver just because his girlfriend didn't like it. I was hoping there was going to be a next time, you see…" Sirius sighed. "There wasn't. James and Lily got married straight out of school, and then …you know."
"Right. But what about Professor Lupin? Why didn't he go?"
"I invited him, but he refused. There was going to be a full moon during the trip, and he insisted that there was no way he was willing to make James and I try to contain a werewolf in unfamiliar territory in a strange country. We argued about it, but he was right and we eventually agreed. As for Peter, well…" he said with a faint growl. "Peter was scared to go abroad. Even after six years of hanging around with us, his idea of an adventure was a weekend in Cornwall. Looking back, it was just as well."
Harry had no response to that, partly because he was lost in thought. The idea of having something else of his dad's was nice, the invisibility cloak was very useful but this was something he could wear all the time. Besides, he thought as he glanced at a window, it made him look and feel a bit like a pirate.
Sirius was as good as his threat; after a pleasant breakfast in a sidewalk café, he took Harry shopping in Paris. There are few words to describe the hell that is shopping with a woman in one of the fashion capitals of the world when you are a teenage boy, and she has a great deal of funds and an excuse to outfit you completely. Thankfully, those words weren't needed, as Sirius Black's idea of a shopping expedition was probably a great deal less exhausting but perhaps far more embarrassing. Sirius wasn't interested in buying Harry a full wardrobe, they'd only have to load it straight on an airplane and that would be annoying and cost extra and they'd probably lose the bags somewhere over the Himalayas. No, Sirius simply wanted two or three good outfits for each of them… and to introduce his godson to the delights of French women.
His method was simple. Once inside a shop, he'd commandeer the attentions of the female shop employees by being rich, charming, handsome, and rich, then he'd announce that he was bringing his nephew shopping as a reward for saving a female schoolmate's life from a rabid wolf. Worse, he would actually tell the story, making it all sound very plausible and heroic. Then he would turn the woman loose on Harry with an admonition to "make him look like the dashing young man he is, so we can burn the trash he is wearing."
Harry felt something like a wounded antelope on the Serengeti, facing down a pack of lionesses. The shop women descended on him in a horde, pronouncing him 'simply adorable', and whisked him off to the changing rooms. What followed him was a whirlwind of bewilderment and humiliation, as Harry was stripped to his underwear, measured, made to try on several different outfits, made to show them off to his audience, fussed over, and above all flirted with to the point of blushing non-stop. When each group finally released him from their clutches, Sirius would thank them profusely, tip each of them, and buy whatever they had assembled plus what he had picked out for himself (he would usually still have the help of one or two of the shopgirls, which he quite enjoyed). Once they were out of the shop, he would send Harry to a washroom to change back into his Dursley clothes and they would repeat the experience at the next shop.
They visited four shops in this manner, and by the time they were done Harry couldn't decide if he wanted to murder his godfather or simply die of embarrassment. Sirius, of course, was grinning like a madman and convinced that he'd done his godson an enormous favor. "You may as well get used to it, Harry," he said. "You're heading for a life where you'll be surrounded by older girls, you're a good-looking kid and will only get better, and you've got this self-deprecating hero aura that just makes women go squishy inside. I'm not expecting you to take advantage of the attention, but you shouldn't hide from it either. Most of all, you shouldn't let it go to your head – not that I think that's likely for you. Magic knows it went to your father's…"
"What do you mean?" Harry asked, still unable to walk straight.
"James wasn't the Boy-Who-Lived or anything like that, thank Merlin, but he was good-looking, talented with magic, and a star on the Quidditch pitch. He got a pretty big head about it, though frankly every teenage boy turns into a rotten little berk at some point. Moony was the best of us, and even he had his snotty days. Anyway, James and I both got pretty arrogant for a while. It took your mum to straighten him out, and eventually the two of them got my head mostly out of my backside. It took Peter and Azkaban to finish the job, I think." Sirius sighed. "I'm probably going on too much, aren't I? I apologize for that, it's just that I've had a dozen years in a stone box to think things over and no one to really talk to about it."
Harry thought about it. "No, I don't mind. I …like hearing about my parents, even if it's not good stuff." He grimaced at that, it sounded wrong somehow.
"No, Harry, your parents were good people. You've probably heard THAT a lot." Harry nodded and Sirius grinned. "But they weren't perfect. They made mistakes and had bad days just like everyone else. I should know, I mooched off them quite a bit. Lily used to yell at me to go home before she had me tagged, registered, and chained to a shed in the garden. I swear, I almost took her up on it a few times." He laughed at Harry's expression. "No, I didn't have a pash for your mum or anything like that, I just hated being alone. Still do, in fact. Being an Auror recruit paid well enough that I could afford a small flat in muggle London, but I didn't spend a lot of time there. Moony would come around when invited, but after graduation he spent more and more time in the muggle world and things got a bit awkward. Peter… Well, Peter got a job in a shop off Diagon Alley and always seemed to be busy at work. In retrospect, he was probably busy at something else…"
"So yes, I was practically the Potter family dog in those days. I saw both your parents at their best and worst, even when the worst wasn't in response to my antics. James had trouble letting a joke die, even long after it stopped being funny. Lily was NOT a morning person, and if you so much as spoke to her before she'd had breakfast and a chance to sort out her hair and face she'd like as not hex you. They were both pretty headstrong, and when they disagreed on something it was best to stay out of it and let them settle it themselves. They were getting better about it when you came along, but hoo boy, in the early days…"
Sirius reached over and ruffled Harry's already-messy hair. "They were my best friends and I loved them. You've got every reason to be proud of your parents, Harry, but don't let anyone convince you they were some kind of perfect storybook prince and princess. They'd be proud of you, not because of the great big things you've done…well, okay, they would be proud of those, but they'd be more proud that you did them to protect your friends and the people around you. I'm proud of you too, though I can't accept the credit for a single bit of you."
Harry ran his fingers through his hair to try in vain to make it lie down. "…Thanks, Sirius. So…where do we go from here?"
"Well, I imagine that we will keep on bonding until we develop a comfortable immature adult/punk kid relationship, with lots of pranks and bad jokes mainly because that's who I am, and hopefully a girlfriend or six for each of us…"
"Not that, you git! Where are we GOING? We're in the middle of Paris, aside from that I have no bloody idea where we are."
"Well, look to your left, you see that big, pointy, iron thing that sort of looks like the Eiffel Tower?"
"Yes, what about it?"
"Want to go see it while we're here? Our flight leaves this evening, so we've got the time for a little sight-seeing."
Harry thought that over for a minute. "That would be fantastic. The Dursleys did their best never to take me anywhere, so the most exotic place I've ever seen is Diagon Alley."
"Harry, my boy, stick with me and I'll show you the world. Sadly, most of it will be through the window of a passenger plane…" With a shrug and a grin, Sirius led Harry to an alley where their purchases were placed in Harry's trunk and then shrunk down to fit in a pocket. Hedwig was let out of her cage to get in one last good fly before she would be subjected to the indignity of air travel, and the two humans made their way on foot to the Eiffel Tower.
When they reached the foot of the enormous structure they fell in with one of the tour groups. Of course, Sirius chose to join the group that included a quartet of cute Swedish girls. They turned out to be recent secondary school graduates, backpacking across western Europe for the summer before starting college. At first they were a bit leery of the mid-thirties stranger, but Harry's presence reassured them that he wasn't just some letch trying to pick up girls way too young for him (If Harry's earring had been able to translate Swedish, he would have fallen over laughing) and soon they were all chatting away happily. The shortest of them, Inge, declared herself to be Harry's big sister for the afternoon, and soon all six were in an elevator climbing its way up to the observation deck.
For his own part, Harry found Inge and her friends much less intimidating than the French shop women, and he was able to chat with them with only slight embarrassment. When asked what sports he played at his obscure Scottish boarding school, he did his best to talk about football using what jargon he'd picked up from Dean Thomas, relegating himself to a defensive position while talking about Katie, Alicia, and Angelina as the most dangerous scorers at the school. Oddly enough, his enthusiasm for his teammates impressed his listeners enough that they never caught on that he was lying out both ears and actually knew very little about football.
The elevator's destination put conversation to an end for a while. Harry made his way to the railing as quickly as was polite, and was immediately engrossed in the view. The city of Paris stretched out before him on each side, and all he could do was drink in the sight. The land around Hogwarts was pretty in its own rough, cranky, Scottish way, but the only time Harry got a view anywhere near this good was on a broomstick – and there was usually something else he needed to do at the time. The Astronomy tower had a great view too, but it was only open at night for some reason. Here, Harry had no reason not to soak in the world around him, so he did. His gaze swept the streets with their tiny cars and tinier pedestrians, the curves of the river, buildings that looked centuries old, buildings that looked like they were built last week, even a few that were under construction.
Harry just stood there and stared for what felt like a few minutes before he was snapped out of it by a touch on his shoulder. Inge smiled, then gave him an affectionate hug. "You look like I woke you up from a dream."
He smiled, embarrassed from both the contact and her comment. "I think you did. The city is …beautiful."
"Yes, it is… But your uncle says that you must go soon or you will miss your airplane. You've been watching the city for at least an hour."
"Have I?" he asked, scratching the back of his head. "Wow."
She giggled. "Yes, but it was worth it, I can tell from the look on your face. It was good meeting you, Harry. Enjoy your journey." And with that, she kissed him on the cheek and escorted him back to the elevators, where Sirius was waiting with the rest of the Swedish girls and a souvenir beret that covered Harry's messy hair perfectly. At the foot of the tower, they parted ways with friendly words and waves, and Sirius managed to keep a straight face for three hundred yards before finally telling Harry that he had a gleaming mark on his cheek from Inge's lip gloss.
They arrived at the airport two hours before their flight, and they were nearly late getting to their plane. The reason was simple – the ticket agents had no idea what to do about an owl in a cage. You could not put an animal in the passenger compartment, argued one agent relentlessly. But it was not safe for a bird to ride among the luggage, replied the other. The argument went round and round in circles, with both agents becoming more heated and colorful in their opinions. A baggage attendant was consulted, as was an official of the airline. An expert on ornithology was being searched for, when Sirius finally broke through the argument and asked if he could just buy a third seat on the plane for the owl and be done with it. The agents accepted this compromise after a couple more minutes of bickering, and privately Harry was just glad they hadn't looked twice at his shrunken trunk.
The flight from France to Japan was boring and interminable. Expanding Harry's trunk to retrieve a book was out of the question, and the magazines in the seatback pocket were all in French, as were the in-flight movies. They did their best to sleep through as much of it as possible, and when the plane stopped to refuel in New Delhi they didn't bother to get off. Sirius ended up sharing a few tips on dealing with boredom with Harry, though obviously turning into a dog and giving himself a good, thorough scratch was not an option. By the time they arrived at Narita Airport they were hungry, tired all over again, bored silly, and looking out at afternoon sunshine. By simple agreement they caught a taxi to the nearest hotel, rented a pair of rooms (after the last two days they were ready to be alone for a few hours), and slept until morning.
In the morning, Harry and Sirius were joined at breakfast by a man with a cat carrier. "Excuse me, are you Hari Potter and Shirius Burack?" The translation charms were working fine, but for some reason names came through as they were pronounced rather than as they were meant, even names that had meaning, like 'Black'.
"Yes, we are, can I help you?" Sirius replied, teacup in one hand.
The man bowed. "My name is Mamoru Chiba, I am here to greet you on behalf of our …moon-watching club. Welcome to Japan."
"Thank you, Chiba-san. Won't you join us? And what…or should I say who, do you have there?"
Mamoru sat down, placing the cat carrier on the fourth chair. "His name is Artemis…is something wrong, Potter-san?"
Harry thumped his chest to dislodge the bit of fish in his throat. "I'm sorry, Mister Chiba, it's just that….Artemis was a girl goddess, wasn't she?"
"Would you like me to make fun of YOUR name?" came a quieter voice from the cat carrier. "Why would anyone want pots covered in hair?"
Harry flushed. "I'm sorry, Mr. Artemis. It just came out."
"Apology accepted."
Mamoru smiled. He was a youngish man, maybe twenty years old, with wavy dark hair and watchful eyes. He was handsome and very tall for a Japanese man, but there was something in his face that Harry could relate to. "Please excuse Artemis, he's been touchy about that ever since the girls found out it belonged to a goddess. They've been teasing him relentlessly."
"Someone named after a rabbit has no room to talk…" Artemis grumbled inside his box.
"Just call her Meatball Head, that one still gets to her." Mamoru said with a wicked grin.
"Look, Chiba-san, we've just flown over five thousand miles on the advice of two talking animals who say that you need Harry's help. Can you please tell us more about what we've gotten ourselves into?" asked Sirius.
"Yes, of course, that's part of why I'm here, but this is a conversation we should probably not have in public. When you are ready to leave, I will take you somewhere safe."
Mamoru joined them for breakfast, and they chatted about more mundane things as they ate. Mamoru was a college student nearing the end of his bachelor's degree, and the eldest of the reincarnated Moon Kingdom subjects (though he did admit that there was one woman named Setsuna who had been alive the whole time, protected by her unnamed duty). He was also relieved to hear that Sirius and Harry had their own money, as while he was comparatively well-off he was still living on an inheritance from his deceased parents. They were still welcome to stay with him until they found a place of their own; his apartment had far more space that he generally used.
After breakfast, they checked out of the hotel and climbed into Mamoru's car. It was a large vehicle for Japan, but Mamoru admitted that he couldn't fit into most Japan-made automobiles, and so had bought an American sedan. "Unfortunately, the girls have taken it as a sign that they should beg me every time they want to go to the beach or somewhere since all five of them can fit in here." He sighed. "I really need to grow a tougher backbone."
"So, where would you like me to start?" Mamoru asked as he pulled out of the parking lot. "It's going to take us more than an hour to drive back to the Juuban district in morning traffic."
Sirius was sitting in the front seat, as he too needed the legroom. "Tell us about what you are facing. What is your enemy like?"
Mamoru thought about it for a minute. "The leader is named Jedite. He was originally one of the four Generals of Queen Beryl, the leader of the Negaverse both when they destroyed the Moon Kingdom and when they first came back to Earth. Jedite was the first one given the job of gathering energy to fuel the invasion, but Sailors Moon, Mercury, and Mars kept stumbling onto his front operations and destroying them. He finally ended up challenging them to an open battle, and when that failed Queen Beryl trapped him in a stasis crystal and used him as décor for her throne room to motivate the other Generals. He was still there after Queen Beryl and the other three Generals were destroyed, and apparently the stasis failed sometime last summer. Since the Negaverse was leaderless and we've been occupied dealing with other foes, he took some time to consolidate his rule and study the mistakes of the past. He returned to Earth four months ago, and he's been a lot more successful since."
"What is he doing different?" Harry asked from the back seat.
"The first time around, he would set up a front operation, like a gym or a cram school, by possessing the owners with a yoma and draining everyone who came in." Harry wanted to ask what a yoma was, but decided not to interrupt. "Through force of coincidence or by noticing the after-effects of the draining on people, the Sailor Scouts would figure out what was going on, destroy the yoma, and drive off Jedite if he happened to be around. They were reluctant to fight him directly since he seemed to be human, and he preferred to fight only when backed into a corner. When he did fight, though, he was actually pretty strong."
"How strong?" Sirius asked.
"Strong enough to possess a couple passenger planes and try to run Sailor Moon over with them."
"Ouch. What happened?"
"Sailor Mars found a way to turn them back on him, he retreated, and then his Queen trapped him in crystal and used him as a paperweight to show her feelings on failure."
"And now he's free again. What is he like now?" Sirius continued.
"Now…he's more cunning. I think he's gotten more powerful, but we don't see him very often. He's still using fronts to gather energy, but he's more careful in how he takes it. He's been setting things up to take less of each victim's energy than before."
"And that's bad?" Harry asked.
"Well, it's less bad for the individual victim. Before, one of the people he drained would be staggering home looking like a zombie or they'd collapse and be recovering in bed for days. Now, most of his victims walk out feeling a little tired and the next morning they have more or less recovered. This means that it's harder for us to spot anything happening, and so he can keep an operation running for longer before we spot it. All in all, he gets a much bigger harvest, one that would have made Queen Beryl very happy with him. He also re-invests some of that energy in his followers, which means stronger and more obedient yoma."
"So, what IS a yoma?" Sirius asked.
"A yoma is a monster, plain and simple. They have no souls and they live off of energy, either the ambient negative energy of the Negaverse or whatever they can steal from another living thing. The ones we've fought tend to look like women with strange mutations or attachments, and generally the more bizarre or benign it looks the more dangerous it is. A yoma that looks like a cake decoration and shoots frosting and cupcakes at you can hurt you just as badly as a yoma covered in spikes and fangs."
"Are you serious?" Harry asked incredulously.
Mamoru didn't miss a beat, pointing to the man beside him. "No, he is. My name is Mamoru."
Sirius barked out a laugh. "Okay, I think we're going to get along."
"Is it too late to go back to Privet Drive?" Harry groaned. "If the monsters don't kill me, the comedy just might."
Mamoru grinned. Teasing the young was something he'd never gotten over. "As I was saying, yoma live off energy. Ambient energy will keep them alive, but to grow and thrive requires life energy. Normally, they get that by attacking and draining either an innocent victim or each other. The Negaverse is very much a survival of the fittest kind of place. The weak got eaten, and the strong served Queen Beryl because she was the strongest of all. Obey her, and you got a chance to sip from a pure and uncorrupted source. Even if you had to yield up the majority of the feast to the Queen, it was still enough to make the yoma suicidally eager."
"Jedite's methods are different, though. He chooses the ones that can show some self-control and rewards them by feeding them a portion from his ongoing harvest, making them stronger. If it goes to their head and they lose control, their rampage draws our attention and we take them down. As annoying as it is, we're helping him by serving as an object lesson. Each time we manage to find one of his operations, we run into yoma that are stronger and smarter than we've been used to dealing with. Lately, there are also more of them. We're not sure what Jedite's end-goal is, but the fact is that he may very well be winning."
"That's encouraging," Sirius sighed. "Look, I'm out of practice and I don't know how my spells stack up against your 'High Magic', but if Harry's going to be involved in this mess then I'll help out in any way I can. I was part of an order of wizards dedicated to fighting a Dark Lord back in the late '70s. We weren't winning against old Moldyshorts, but on the other hand I think he was a lot less concerned about secrecy than your boy Jedidiah."
"Jedite."
Sirius shook his head. "Jedidiah. Or Jedhead. Or even Jeddy the Wonder Biscuit. Always give your enemy an insulting nickname, I say, it helps you keep from fearing them. Respect a dangerous enemy, sure, but fear is just another weapon you give him."
Mamoru glanced over at him. "I guess you have a point there. …Potter-kun, are you alright?"
Harry was shaking in the back seat, holding in a laugh. Finally, he wheezed out "…Moldyshorts…"
"Come on, pup, didn't that nickname ever occur to you? You're thirteen, for Merlin's sake, you should have six nicknames for each teacher by now."
Harry took a deep breath. "Obviously you didn't have Hermione correcting you every five minutes."
Hedwig, her cage next to Harry on the back seat, spoke up for the first time in more than a day. "She means well, but they call her Bossy Boots for a reason."
"Who is Hermione?" Mamoru asked, pronouncing the unfamiliar name slowly to avoid mangling it.
"Hermione Granger is Harry's best friend, and the prospective candidate we were originally watching. We still weren't sure one way or the other when it was time to leave, so Crookshanks opted to stay with her and keep watching. Since Harry told her the truth about where he was going and why, she might be more willing to exhibit signs of unusual magic now." Hedwig reported.
"Potter-kun, I'm not sure that was wise. We don't tell people about the Negaverse because either they'd think we were crazy or it'd start a national panic. Most of the Sailor Scouts haven't even told their parents about the battles they fight at night."
Harry scowled. "They're my friends, I couldn't lie to them. They already know about our kind of magic, so hearing about one more isn't going to scare them. Merlin, the moment Hermione figures out that it's Crookshanks watching her she'll spend her summer interrogating him about High Magic and trying to learn it herself."
Mamoru sighed. "Well, it's done and it's …that guardian's problem now." He wasn't sure he could say 'Crookshanks' without mangling it.
"So, what exactly is the plan considering Harry? It sounds like you're fighting a guerilla war, and Hogwart's doesn't exactly train thirteen-year-olds for that." asked Sirius.
"Today, we will deal with the paperwork that moving to Japan requires, including getting Harry registered for school. You can both stay with me for now, but I assume you will want to look for an apartment of your own soon."
Sirius nodded. "Or a house."
"That….might prove very expensive, Black-san, Tokyo has the highest real-estate prices in the world."
"Well, back in the '70's my best friend and I did the monetary conversions just for a laugh. We had just come back from a summer trip here at the time, and I started kidding that I was going to empty my parent's vault and spend the rest of my life in Japan. James talked me out of that, but we calculated that my family had somewhere in the range of eight billion yen in cash alone."
Mamoru nearly ran off the road, luckily there were no other cars close by. "BILLION?" he gasped.
Sirius nodded. "Billion, in cash alone and not taking into account any inflation or investment income over the last fifteen years. I've since inherited the entire estate. I think a small house should be within my reach, don't you?"
Mamoru nodded slowly. "…Yes, I think you can afford a house."
"So, we'll get Harry in school and look for a house. What then?"
"As for the …magical side of things, I will be taking Harry as my student. After school and any extra lessons he needs, I'll teach him about how to call forth his power and how to use it. We won't be taking him on any hunting trips until we're sure he can defend himself."
"And when he's trained?"
"Then he'll go out with us. We never go out in less than groups of three, it's too risky otherwise." Mamoru didn't like the answer he was giving, but he didn't know how to make a shadow war against monster guerillas sound better.
"Then let me make my position clear, Chiba-san. Unless you can convince me that my abilities will be completely useless, I am going to be involved in this every step of the way." Sirius's eyes were like steel. "Harry is my godson and the only family I am ever likely to have. If he chooses to fight, he will not fight alone."
Mamoru nodded. "I understand completely, Black-san. Frankly, I think we will all welcome the help."
The rest of the trip was very quiet after that.
