Thoughts

'Not translated dialogue '

"Translated dialogue"

Chapter Three

Three months later: June 20th: near noontime

'Now where is it?' muttered Hiko as he rummaged through piles of letters.

'Why do you have so many letters, Master?' Kenshin, who was standing right behind Hiko while trying to read one of the hundreds of letters his master was shuffling through, asked curiously. Nothing much had changed about the red-head's appearance over the months, other than that his hair had become slightly longer. Without warning, Hiko casually threw a crumpled up letter at his apprentice's face. Seeing the ball of paper as if it were moving through jelly, Kenshin kept his eyes on it and moved his head out of the way when the paper was mere millimeters away… right into the path of a second, much, much faster wad of paper. 'Oro?'

'We've been training for three months already and you still are too incompetent at hiding your ki, my idiot pupil,' Hiko sighed. 'And I haven't always been a hermit, you know. Do you think someone who looked as good as I did wouldn't get any letters from girls?' he added in an undertone to answer Kenshin's question.

'Master, are you saying I should be able to completely hide my ki from someone as experienced as you?' Kenshin asked.

'I'm saying that I should not be able to predict which direction you will be moving in so easily,' Hiko explained. 'You seemed to dodge the objects I threw at you much better when the objects were rocks,' Hiko mused. 'Maybe I should go back to doing that.'

'But…those hurt, especially since you throw them,' Kenshin said almost whiningly, thinking of the bruises he got before Hiko decided that rocks were to be saved for the time when Kenshin was faster.

'Yeah, that might not be a good idea,' Hiko relented. 'Ah, here it is,' Hiko said, finally finding what he was looking for.

'What is it?' asked Kenshin, who was looking over Hiko's shoulder.

'It, my idiot apprentice, is the letter telling us how we're getting to London,' Hiko answered, shrugging Kenshin away from his shoulder.

'Oh, yeah,' Kenshin said, remembering that his school supplies were going to be bought in London. 'So, how exactly is this "Keyport" going to get us to London, Master?'

'One, it's called a "Portkey"; two, I'm not exactly sure how it works,' Hiko said reading over the letter. 'It says we just touch it and we'll be whisked away to someplace in London.'

Kenshin took a moment to contemplate the concept. 'Well,' Kenshin said after a minute. 'If it works, I guess I'll just have to believe that magic exists.' 'How come you believe in magic, Master? Did you get any kind of proof?' Kenshin added inquisitively.

'Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,' Hiko said.

After not getting a better answer than that for at least ten minutes while his master kept reading the rather long letter, Kenshin decided to expand his question. 'Ummm… Master, exactly what kind of proof did you get?'

Without looking up from his letter, Hiko replied 'I received this letter a few months after I received one from the same sender, Albus Dumbledore. As you can imagine, when I read the letter that was tied to an owl's, I was every bit as skeptical as you are right now about this whole magic business. But this Albus Dumbledore that if your powers were left untrained, as strong as they are, they wouldn't just go away. They would probably become more powerful, and without the training, you would have no control over them and probably cause a lot of trouble for me, thus ruining the quiet life of solitude I had. I wouldn't want to take any chances with that would I, so I wrote back to him saying I wanted some kind of proof. A few months later, he sent another letter-the one I'm holding in my hand- saying that he would pay me a visit at a certain time that would convince me if I just stayed inside my cabin warming up to the fire in the fireplace. I sent you away for more sake at the time he said he was going to arrive,' Hiko seemed to have finished reading his letter then and looked up at Kenshin. 'You should remember; it was the day I sent you to get sake from that store that didn't exist.'

'I knew that shop didn't exist!' Kenshin blurted out angrily, remembering that day a few weeks after his tenth birthday. 'No one I asked knew where it was. I looked for it for hours.'

'Yeah, well, while you were off on your wild goose chase, I was sitting in front of the fireplace, re-reading the letter, waiting for something unusual to happen,' Hiko began again. 'Sure enough, at the exact time Dumbledore said in his letter, the fire became green. Even more strange was that a man-a very old man judging from his hair and beard- stepped out of the fire. Though I was not stricken with awe or fear as a lesser man would be, I was absolutely convinced of the existence of magic in this world. Dumbledore wasted no time-he said he had pulled a few strings and called in quite a few favors to be there and could not stay long- in writing down, onto this very letter, the exact instructions we would have to follow to get to where we're going.'

'Ummmm…' said Kenshin, who had been lost ever since the part when the fire turned green. 'Could you… repeat everything you said since the green fire part, Master?'

Hiko sighed. 'A… man…named…Dumbledore… stepped… out… of…'

'I'm not a baby, Master. Please, just repeat it.'

'Alright, a man named Albus Dumbledore, - who is your headmaster I think- stepped out of the green fire. He only had a limited time to be there so he quickly wrote down our instructions onto here,' Hiko said, holding out the letter. 'And then he left.'

Kenshin thought about this and realized something strange about the whole thing. 'Why is it so important that I go to Hogwarts when I haven't shown any magical talent, Master?'

As if he were expecting this question, Hiko immediately answered, 'You did do something magical. Last year, the pottery I accused you of throwing away, you made it disappear magically,'

Any other time, Kenshin would have been mad at his master for blaming him for something Hiko had known wasn't his fault all along, but this time, something still was bothering him about the whole thing.

'So when did Dumbledore, I mean, Professor Dumbledore visit you, Master? Kenshin asked.

'Last year.'

'No, I mean in which month?'

'Around February I guess, why?' Hiko asked suspiciously.

'Isn't that during the school term?' Kenshin asked watching his master's reaction closely.

Because he was looking for it, Kenshin saw a small flicker of hesitation flash across Hiko's eyes before he answered, 'Yes.'

'So why would Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster, leave school just so he could convince you to let me go to school? Was the job somehow too important to entrust to someone else, Master?' Kenshin asked, still watching his teacher.

This time however, Hiko's eyes were stony and gave away nothing. 'You are being paranoid, my idiot pupil. Why would convincing me to let you go to his school be too important for anyone else? He probably had a little free time and wanted something to do.' Then, Hiko smirked, 'Of course, ensuring that my quiet life went without interruptions is very important indeed. Maybe it was too big of a job to leave to someone else.'

Kenshin decided to stop interrogating him, thinking he would get nothing else out of it. 'Whatever you say, Master,' Kenshin said.

'It's getting late, idiot apprentice,' Hiko declared. 'Don't you want to know what we're supposed to do beforehand?'

'Yes, Master,' replied Kenshin, who had forgotten all about the portkey. 'How exactly do we use a portkey?'

Hiko pointed at the letter still in his hand and said, 'It says here that we must find it before noon on June 21st, which is tomorrow. It will be an old, moldy, black leather boot with missing buckles. We should find it right out next to an oak tree in the forest if we…'

'A boot, Master?' Kenshin interrupted incredulously. 'How is a boot going to get us to London?'

'It's magic, idiot apprentice,' Hiko said reprovingly. 'It's only in the form of a boot so other people won't touch it at the right time and accidentally go where we were supposed to go.'

'Ohhh,' Kenshin said, realizing the logic of the statement. 'Go on, Master'

'Where was I?…Oh yes, we will find the boot next to an oak tree in a clearing that we will find if we walk straight forward from the front of the cabin.'

When will you admit that it's a shack and not a cabin? Kenshin thought idly.

'And, if we're touching it by noon, it will take us to London.'

'Alright,' said Kenshin. After a few minutes of total silence, Kenshin asked, 'Master, how are we going to get the money to buy my supplies?'

'We can exchange our money for wizard's money,' Hiko replied.

'They have their own kind of money?' Kenshin asked.

'I would think so; what were you trying to ask?'

'Do we have any money, Master?'

'How do you think I buy my sake?'

'You sell the pottery you make, Master'

'That's right, so what's the problem?'

'You haven't sold any pottery ever since I made half your collection disappear, but you keep buying sake every week.'

'Oh.'

'…'

'…'

'…'

'Apprentice?'

'Yes, Master?'

'Go to town and sell the pottery.'

'Yes, Master.'

And for the first time in years, it was Kenshin who was chuckling at Hiko while he walked down to town- not the other way around.

This time, a note on Ki:

Ki translates most nearly into 'spirit'. I don't know a lot about Ki but from I do know is that Ki is most commonly used for Ken-Ki which either translates into 'fighter's spirit' or 'swordsman's spirit'. When a swordsman is as skilled as Hiko, he can not only sense other people's Ki but also hide his own almost completely from other swordsmen. How well he can hide it is determined by how skilled the other swordsmen are. Ki is in every living thing, not only in fighters, also. Ki has many uses but I'm not too sure on what they are exactly. Ki in Chinese is Chi- which is the word I think they used in the manga but I'm not sure on that either.