Harry Potter is owned by JK Rowling. This version of Aleister Crowley, along with 1,083,092,867 others, was created by Kamachi Kazuma.

Minor clarification, to respond to a review: in Chapter 1 Part 2, the blood magic stopped Harry from leaving the house that time because it detected Elly in his head, when it wasn't there previously.

Chapter 02: Hidden Away by Magic – 魔法隠し。

Part 3

"It's called 'Hogwarts', the magic school." Elly explained. "But I don't think you need to worry about that; you've still got a year to go."

"I still think it's a stupid name." Harry said.

"Now, now. It's important to respect the people that are giving you knowledge." Elly said, but inwardly, she agreed. And it seems Sally's attitude has been rubbing off on him a little.

Sally Perks… Elly thought a little more. Green eyes and a perfect memory, and we're in Britain, the seat of the Anglicans…does the Anglican Church as I know it even exist in this world? A more pressing issue entered her mind. Coronzon…but again, many things are different. Academy City doesn't exist.

Or does it? There was the counterargument. We are still in the previous millennium. It may simply be the case that Academy City may not have gained enough international prominence to appear in a British newspaper.

"Elly? Are you…okay?" She was startled out of her train of thought by Harry's waving hand.

"Yes, I'm fine." The old man who had become a young woman through one of his 'possibilities' responded.

"Are you sure?" Harry demanded. "You've been weird since that day you said a lot of weird things."

"Your concern is much appreciated, but I assure you, I am fine." Elly said once again. But for all intents and purposes, the old world was simply a very, very long dream.

But before she could think of anything more, or before Harry could respond, a clatter sounded–not from Elly's room, but from the external world.

"I'll go see!" Harry disappeared on the spot, and opened his eyes, where he was lying in bed.

There was another noise, and Harry cautiously got up, swinging his legs off the bed. Where…the ceiling?

Sure enough, one of the boards of hard plastic began to shift. Harry's feet moved to a fighting stance, and in his mind he readied a spell.

Then there was a crash, and a very dusty green-eyed brunette in pyjamas fell onto Harry's bed with a loud whump.

Harry closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, then reopened them. When he found the scene in front of him unchanged, he was forced to accept it as real. "Sally," he said, in a tone that suggested that nothing was out of the ordinary, "what are you doing here?"

"Exploring." She was trying to be nonchalant, but her excitement was leaking. "Did you know there's a lot of space in the ceiling? You can practically go anywhere in the building with this!"

"And the first place you decided to come to was my room?" Harry asked, only half-sarcastically.

"Is there a problem?" Sally glared at him. "You should be honoured as the first person I visit, you know. Hmph."

"Yeah, yeah." Harry grinned. "Oh, and by the way. Scourgify."

"Ouch!" Sally hopped a foot sideways as the accumulated dust of the ages was scoured off her skin.

"Sorry!" Harry put up a hand. "Didn't mean to–"

"It's fine. I've had worse." Sally slashed the air with her hand, then her eyes fell on Harry's bed. "Scourgify."

Harry's head turned to his bed, which was now noticeably less filthy. "Ah." A moment of silence passed, before he turned his eyes back up to the displaced ceiling board. "Huh. Looks like you could stash some stuff there too."

The subtlest of shadows crossed Sally's face. "I wouldn't count on it."

"Aaanyway," Harry continued, "How are you going to get back? Do you even know how to?"

"For every left turn make a right." Sally said impatiently. "I'm not stupid, you know."

"And how do you plan to get back up?"

"I–" The girl scanned Harry's room quickly. "You can just help me."

"So you just dropped in with no plan, huh?"

"Shut up." Sally said. "Or I'll wreck your stuff and use that instead."

"Fine, fine."

However, twenty minutes later, there was another tap on Harry's ceiling, and a board slid back, revealing half of Sally's face. "Harry?"

"What?" Harry's own face was directly below, a straight line down.

"I can't find the way back."

"Even with your perfect memory?" It felt strange to be able to look someone right in the eyes even though he was flat on his back.

"It just didn't work." Sally said. With some awkward movement, she dropped right onto Harry's bed again, her feet narrowly missing Harry's stomach. "Oh well, good night."

Of course it didn't. Elly, who was sipping a cup of imaginary cocoa, thought to herself. The girl didn't reverse the list back to front, after all. Oh well, best not to intrude too much on their moments.

"Good n–excuse me?"

"You heard me." Once more Sally cleaned up the dirt, before she curled up and tossed Harry's blanket over herself.

"Go back to your own room!" Harry hissed at her. "If the adults find out–"

"I'll go back in the morning." Sally said nonchalantly. "I'm tired and its dark."

"You–" Harry wanted to protest, but drawing out the argument any longer meant less sleeping time, so he simply let his head fall back onto his pillow–

–which had been stolen. He sighed. Well, it wasn't as if he had forgotten how to sleep without one; the one in his old cot had been too small to rest his head upon.

But at least the cupboard was stuffy enough to be warm!

"Can't you stop your teeth from chattering?" Sally said, while snugly wrapped up.

"If you would g-g-give back my blanket, that wouldn't be a p-p-problem." Harry ground out. He was practically curled into a ball.

Sally rolled over to face him. There was an odd expression on her face, and she shifted the pillow slightly. "Here, I'll share."

"It was mine in the first place." Harry grumbled, but was cut off as the girl wrapped him in the blanket…as well as a hug. "Um." He stopped speaking at the sudden warmth, as well as the fact that the both of them were now eyeball to eyeball.

"Is it really yours if I can take it away so easily?" Sally whispered. Her green eyes seemed to gleam in the darkness. "This is why I…" She closed her eyes.

Harry extricated an arm, which had been pinned to his side by virtue of being used as a human bolster, and patted Sally on the back. There was a sudden intake of breath, before he felt the girl grip him even tighter, but only momentarily.

"That's right. They can't take this away." The girl murmured, half-asleep. "They can't take this away…"

Harry only closed his eyes and held her tighter, trying not to think to hard about her words.

~~[a]~~

Days passed, and late autumn became winter. Snow began to fall on St. Ursula's, and Harry and Sally's somewhat-peaceful daily lives continued.

"It might be getting too c-cold to keep coming up here." Harry's teeth chattered. With a few motions of his twig-wand, he recast the Warming Charm over the both of them.

"A little cold's not gonna stop me from using my f-favourite spot." Sally retorted. From her coat she took out a swiped jam jar from the trash (empty and thoroughly cleaned), which now held what was called Bluebell Flames, and placed it on some unknown but humming rooftop contraption. "Now help me stack the bricks."

"Stupefy again?" Harry asked.

"Of course." Sally answered. She waved her wand, and the Stunning Spell hit a hastily constructed tower of bricks, blasting the top one off, and itself ricocheted into the night sky. Meanwhile, Harry sat down against a concrete…something…and leaned back and watched.

Really, I should be practicing also, but each of those always take so much out of me…

"This feels really good." Sally remarked. Another brick got blasted off. "Really wish I could do this to Mr Bennett. Pow!" Yet another brick toppled over.

"You could just do his homework properly, you know." Harry said. "Then he won't be able to say anything."

"But it's boooooring." Sally said. "Just the same thing over and over. It's just finding the answer in the stupid times tables."

"Not all of us have a perfect image of that in our heads." Harry retorted.

"I'm sorry all of you are so dumb." Sally was not sympathetic in the slightest. "Stupefy!" The spell hit the final brick in the tower, making it flop over like a turtle returning from being on its shell. The twig in her hand finally gave up and disintegrated into hot sawdust, and she hissed, flicking her hands. "Ow ow ow!"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Come to think of it," he said, "all you've been doing for the past few months is stealing my techniques. How about you teach me something for a change?"

Sally turned around. "That's true." It was a rare moment of charity. "But I don't really know anything. Not real spells like you." She opened her mouth to say something more, then closed it again, apparently deciding against it.

"So how do you do stuff with your magic?"

"I just think very hard about what I want to happen and it happens." Sally said, raising her eyebrows. "It's not the same for you?"

"It was, until Elly–" Harry stopped short. Had he not been conditioned against swearing by the discipline of the Dursleys, he would undoubtedly have been cursing up a storm about now. As it stood, he simply stared out into the distance with a dead look in his eyes. Mercifully, the person herself in question did not interject with any comment.

Sally, of course, pounced on the slip. "Who's–"

"Don't ask." Harry said immediately. "Just forget–just put it out of your mind."

"Who's–"

"Don't ask!" Harry shouted at her, and the girl cowered backwards, her hands shielding her face. "Don't," he said, "ask."

(There were multiple possible reasons for why Harry was reacting so strongly, from him not wanting Sally to think him a freak, even though they both knew magic, to him being worried that any soul that knew of Elly would somehow take her from him. Of course, none of these were known to Harry consciously.)

When Sally was reassured that Harry was not going to hit her, she slowly put down her hands. "All right," she said seriously. "I'm not going to ask. Not if...not if it's that important to you. Here." She strode up to him, handed him a twig. "You shoot some spells for a bit."

Harry took the makeshift wand without a word. "Depulso!" The Banishing Charm, aimed with a shaky hand, blasted away the second brick in the stack instead of the topmost, and the entire tower swayed. "Depulso!" The small tower toppled over, became a pile. "Homura, no–Homenum Revelio!"

There was a muffled squeak, and both Harry and Sally immediately turned in the source's direction. Harry took it further, and ran ahead–

–where he collided with a girl whose dark hair curled up at her shoulders. "Francesca Branwen." Harry spat out, several degrees more aggressively than his usual self.

"P-Potter?"

"Franny." Sally said neutrally. "What are you doing here?"

"I..well…" The girl stammered. "P-p-please…l-let…"

"Harry." Sally sighed. "I think you should let her go. Physically, I mean."

Harry's green eyes continued to bore into Branwen's own purple irises.

"Scarhead, you idiot." Sally slapped a hand on Harry's shoulder. "You're scaring her half to death."

"If she dies, she can't reveal what she's seen here." Harry said, faux-menacingly, seemingly having regained his senses. He let go of Franny's shirt, and the girl stumbled back to rest against a wall. "Why are you spying on us?"

"I just…" The girl seemed to fight against something. "I want to learn magic!"

Harry exchanged a glance with Sally. "You know, I don't know if that's possible," he eventually said.

"Oh." The girl seemed crestfallen. "But…"

"But I guess there's no harm trying." Harry said. "However, you have to promise me one thing."

"What?" said the girl.

"If it turns out that 'normal people' can't learn magic after all…you have to promise to stop." Harry said seriously. "Don't go chasing a dream that can never come true. Become like, I don't know, an artist or an engineer or something."

Branwen took a deep breath. "I understand."

"Anything else to add?" Harry turned to Sally.

"Hey, you're the teacher here. The master. The instructor." Sally shrugged. "It's all up to you. But I do have something." She rounded on the older, taller girl. "I know you've known for a while now, since we helped you before. But I'll say this again, because Harry's too nice of a person."

Oh? Harry thought to himself.

"If you breathe a single word of this to anyone else, or if anyone find out…I will make your life worse than it was before."

The raven-haired girl took a step back.

"You know what I mean, Franny."

"Y-yeah. I won't tell."

~~[a]~~

"You're not worried, Elly? About people finding out about you?"

"If anyone knows enough to specifically read minds to search me out, we are in far deeper trouble than any precaution could help." Elly lounged on a sofa. "A similar principle applies to that girl, Francesca Branwen, finding out about magic. Although that might be a different case…" the magician mused. "Still, it'll be better for you to accept her than to ignore her, if only so that she doesn't fixate too much on it. Scarcity effects, you know."

"Scarcity…effects?"

"It's part of human psychology." Harry's magic teacher explained. "People place more value on rare things–either things that are difficult to get, or things that are kept secret and hidden."

"So…if Elly and I had said no to Branwen…then she would have become even more obsessed with magic?" Harry said hesitantly.

"That was what I had been thinking of, yes." Elly said. "Another example would be yourself. I still remember how respectful to me you were in the beginning, always mindful and worried. Months later, once you got accustomed to my presence, you no longer even hesitate to talk back. That is, ah, my worth has gone down in your eyes." Elly mimed wiping away a tear.

Harry felt a pang in his chest. Is that…did I really…

Upon seeing Harry's stricken expression, Elly quickly walked over and embraced him from behind. "There, there. Don't worry, I was merely jesting. I didn't mean to rebuke you." She began rubbing his head and messing with his hair.

"I value you a lot, Elly." Harry was still mildly tense, but gradually calmed down due to Elly's ministrations. "I'm sorry. If you want me to be more respectful–"

"You can just keep on being a brat." Elly said. "The powers above know that you've been starved of it since before we met."

Since before we met… "Elly, can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Where did you come from? All this time you only said 'Japan', but…" And she said stuff about climbing mountains and having gold and building a city as well!

"The toughest question of all." Elly sighed. Somehow 'Aleister Crowley from a parallel universe's United Kingdom' doesn't seem like the right answer. Would he even understand the full implications of that? As for that matter, do I, myself, even understand the full implications of what it meant for me to be here, at this moment?

"Elly?"

"I'm sorry." Elly said. As much as she wanted to be as open with Harry as possible, she also knew that a little knowledge was much more dangerous than knowing either everything or nothing at all. "It's for your own safety. Mind readers, remember?"

"Yeah, fine." Harry said. He slid out of the hug. "I don't think I can complain, not if you're continuing to teach me stuff. Magic and science and how to fight and other things."

"If a stranger appeared out of nowhere and offered to teach me magic, I too would be rightfully suspicious." Elly said with a wry smile. "Okay, but enough of that dreary topic. If you would, Harry, I need you to do me a favour."

~~[a]~~

Teach Branwen magic, huh? And it's so…different from what me and Sally have been doing. And she wants me to keep it a secret from Sally…'if possible'. I don't even want to know what that means!

But it is true that Sally would probably ask a lot of questions. Harry's thoughts continued. But I don't want to hide things from her either!

"Got things on your mind, huh?" Sally lightly nudged his foot from under the table. The bustle and clinking of cutlery continued, a background clamour of the canteen. A stray fork casually shot over to skewer a piece of chicken on Harry's plate, but Harry met it with his own utensil in a parry.

"You could say that." Harry said, after having safely eaten his target-of-theft food. "I have an idea about what I could teach Branwen."

"Are you serious?" Sally said. "We already know she can't do anything with the sticks, at least, not with every spell that we know of. And she hasn't been able to…well, make anything happen. Actually, I was thinking it might be better for her to just stop coming altogether."

"There's one more thing to try." Harry said. "But," and Harry dropped to a more weighty tone, "it might seem weird. Nothing like the things with the sticks, or the stuff that you can just force to happen."

"And you want me to not ask questions again, right?"

Harry looked up in surprise from where he was picking at the food on his plate, to see Sally's sort-of resigned face. "Yeah. How did you know?"

"Because I'm smart." Sally flashed a grin for a moment, then dropped back to a more neutral expression.

And then, later that evening, or more accurately, that night...

"Libra. Vau, Heh, Yod, Heh. Guide the light of the seventh sign, angel with a six-letter divine name. Lend me your airy hands!"

In response to Branwen's chant, the simple chalk circle and its inscribed sign glowed a soft emerald green. The object within, a simple feather taken from some pillow's stuffing, began to float, as if suspended by a gentle breeze.

"This really looks a lot more serious than what Harry and I have been doing," Sally muttered to herself.

Contrary to what one might believe, achieving this had not been simple. Harry, guided by Elly, had to drill the black-haired girl for several hours, ensuring that she could accurately remember all the signs and correspondences.

"So cardinal signs are for doing stuff, fixed signs are for preserving stuff, and mutable signs are for tampering with other people's stuff. I think I get it." Branwen said. It was easily the most animated Harry had seen the girl ever. "But these angels…"

"Just go with it." Harry sighed.

And yet, it was simultaneously also more easy than Harry had thought it would be.

"You know them by heart?"

"Uh, well…" Branwen twiddled her thumbs. "Sort of. The magazines did say…"

"Harry, are you done yet? I'm getting bored over here."

"Then come over." Harry said. Sally sauntered over, and Harry steered her by the shoulders to crouch opposite Branwen. "Now stare into her eyes," Harry instructed the wannabe magician.

"What?" Branwen turned her head in surprise.

"You need to envision emerald green for this spell, and there's no other reference we have." Harry explained. "And we're finishing this tonight."

Stare…

"Are you serious, Scarhead? This is what you called me over for? After not even letting me listen to your teaching? I will kick your butt for this later." Sally was protesting, but even she did not break her gaze with Branwen's.

"Sorry. Your memory's too good. I don't want to accidentally say something that'll melt your brain if it sticks in it for too long." Harry retorted.

Branwen looked over at Harry at his point, concern appearing on her face. "Um, is that something that can–"

"Magic is not without risk," Harry intoned, faux-ominously. "But really, it's more because Sally's a bit of a weirdo. If you do exactly as I say–" or rather, as Elly had told me to say "-you should be fine."

"Um, okay." Branwen said, still looking mildly nervous. "Hey, wait a minute." She seemed to have realised something. "Don't you have green eyes too? Couldn't you have just–"

"Look into my eyes, Franny." Sally said immediately, taking her turn to be faux-ominous. "Burn their color into your brain."

Harry sighed.

"So, what happens now?" Sally said, after the light had faded and the feather had returned to the floor. Branwen's own eyes were positively sparkling like the very celestial bodies she had just called upon.

"Don't do magic without supervision." Harry immediately turned to Branwen. "And don't try to think of new spells on your own. "You might blow your fingers off or melt your brain."

"Okay." The black-haired girl agreed immediately. "And keep it secret too, right?"

"Right." Harry said. "Remember, don't do magic without supervision."

"You said that already."

"I'm saying it twice because it's important." Harry said.

"And all of a sudden you're acting like a responsible adult." Sally threw in a remark. "Lighten up."

"Because I don't want either of you to get hurt." Harry turned again to Branwen. "If you want to practice but don't want to see me, ask Sally instead."

"Don't go ordering me around, Harry." Sally sighed. "But fine."

And that's Elly's request done. Harry thought to himself. Will everything really be all right?

Dear lord, it's almost February. Where did all the time go?

Not much action this chapter, just children learning magic. But there's no point in fighting if there's nothing to fight for, right? As always, let me know what you think.

Review please!