Chapter 46 : A Tour, As Promised

"Be genuinely interested in everyone you meet and everyone you meet will be genuinely interested in you." - Rasheed Ogunlaru

After saying goodbye to Yuna, Harriet set about bringing Furina to the Wizarding World's shopping district, and for that, she'd decided to give her the "normal" tour. She took her by the arm, told her to trust her, and Apparated them both into a narrow alley not far from the Leaky Cauldron.

"What was that? Is that how you people teleport? Are you all insane, how are you not dead yet, exactly?" Furina demanded, visibly rattled by what had just happened, though not badly hurt, not like the first time someone experiences it.

"I'm not really seeing the problem. It's rough the first few times, sure, you get the vertigo, but you get used to it fast." Harriet found herself wondering if devils got motion sick their first time too, though Furina seemed to be handling it fine physically.

"No, you don't understand what you just did, do you?" This time Furina had genuinely panicked. "We just passed straight through the Dimensional Gap and back into reality. We weren't in there long, sure, but that could have gone very, very badly."

"It's just a spell." Harriet frowned, thrown by the overreaction. "Everyone uses it, there's never really been any accidents with it. I don't get why you're so shaken up. How do you people teleport?"

"Okay, you clearly don't understand what just happened." Furina still hadn't fully recovered. "The Dimensional Gap is called that, but that doesn't mean there's nobody in it. That's Great Red's home. Do you realize we just passed straight through the territory of the single most powerful being in existence?"

"Huh. That's..." Harriet genuinely didn't know what to say to that. "Well, he hasn't come to complain yet, so I guess we're fine?" She found herself wondering how many times witches and wizards had come that close to dying without ever knowing it. "Yeah, if he's that powerful, he probably doesn't even register us, that tracks. But wait, there's an actual power hierarchy? I didn't know that."

"Yeah. Blessed are the ignorant." Furina rolled her eyes. "There's an official ranking, actually. The top two are Great Red, the dream dragon, and Ophis, the Ouroboros, the Dragon of the Void and Infinity. Those two sit at the absolute top of power in our world, and there's a real gap between them and whoever's in third."

"These Dragons," Harriet asked, "do they look anything like a Hungarian Horntail?" She described the beast from the first task of the Triwizard Tournament, black scales, spiked tail, breathing fire hot enough to melt stone.

"No, that's closer to what we'd call a wyvern." Furina shook her head. "Dragons, with a capital D, aren't just powerful, they literally embody the concept they represent. And unlike wyverns, they have their own will, they can think and speak, same as you or me. It's a whole different order of magnitude, honestly a bigger one than even Big G, the one who created us angels and devils."

"That's fascinating, actually. What does he even do out there in the Dimensional Gap? Doesn't he get bored?" Pondered Harriet.

"That, I couldn't tell you. Probably because he's got nothing else to do?" Furina rolled her eyes again. "I'm not sure I could ever explain what goes on in that dragon's head, Harriet." She clapped her hands together, mood shifting right back to its usual brightness. "Anyway, enough of that for now. Show me around! That's the price you owe me, remember!"

At that, Harriet took her hand and pulled her along, right past Furina's wide-eyed expression.

"You're joking, right? This isn't funny, Harriet." Furina looked faintly offended.

In front of them stood a pub that seemed to be held upright by sheer force of holy spirit alone. There was, in fact, a spell keeping non-magical people from noticing it at all, which was likely the only reason Furina didn't complain any further, but still.

"I told you we had a serious old blood problem, matching robes, the whole tired routine, same as your underworld apparently." Harriet explained, a touch of schadenfreude creeping into her voice. It was, admittedly, fairly entertaining to watch Furina's mood swing back and forth like this, and too good an opportunity to pass up. "But yes, I promise this is the real entrance to Diagon Alley, from the non-magical side. Our little shopping district."

With that, they stepped inside, and every conversation in the room died the moment people caught sight of the Girl-Who-Lived. A cluster of old drunks in the corner immediately started whispering among themselves.

"Tom, I'm heading through to the back." Harriet said, entirely unbothered, flipping a Galleon onto the bar as a tip while Furina studied the general decay of the place up close, equal parts fascinated and repulsed.

"Of course, right this way. Have a good day, you and your friend." Tom replied, pocketing the tip without so much as blinking.

"Why do they whisper like that when they see you?" Furina asked, still walking, still faintly disgusted by the place and its collection of old drunks, though it wasn't really her fault, she wasn't normally the judgmental type, even with everything she was used to in terms of luxury. Still, she'd expected better. A gateway into a magical community was usually meant to be beautiful, there was no good reason not to keep up appearances, France certainly hadn't cut corners on that front.

"Ignore them, they're not important." Harriet tapped out the sequence on the brick wall at the back, and the moment it split open, the difference was immediate and total. Cobblestones spilled out ahead of them in a crooked, sun-bright lane, shopfronts stacked three and four stories high leaning into each other overhead like old friends who'd forgotten personal space, cauldrons of every size stacked in a window display, an owl shrieking somewhere above the crowd, robes in every color drifting past, and somewhere in the distance, the low golden gleam of Gringotts rising over the rooftops like it was daring the rest of the street to try and outshine it.

"Not bad, not bad!" Furina said, finally getting the pleasant surprise she'd been hoping for. "The aesthetic's a little unhinged, but I can respect the chaotic magical energy, that's exactly what I was expecting to see." That's the positive side, the alley was certainly not boring.

Furina looked rapidly behind her and saw the entrance shrink instantly back into solid wall.

Harriet had never bothered hiding, and with her face plastered across every newspaper in the country, plenty of people noticed her on sight. Add Furina's looks and wardrobe to the mix, and the two of them were simply impossible to miss. Both were used to it by now, so neither paid it any mind, and the witches and wizards around them mostly just carried on with whatever they'd been doing, unbothered in turn.

Wanting to withdraw some money, Harriet led them first to Gringotts, the wizarding bank. It was, of course, impossible to miss, the building alone dwarfed everything around it. As they passed, one wizard muttering over some financial dispute could be heard grumbling, "Bloody goblins..."

"So you actually trust your savings to goblins. I genuinely can't tell if that's brave or just plain insane." Furina studied the goblin guards posted at the first set of open doors, who for some inexplicable reason had broken out in a cold sweat the moment they sensed her arriving, though they stayed perfectly professional about it. She found the whole thing thoroughly entertaining, right up until she reached the second set of doors, solid silver, engraved with a warning about the fate awaiting anyone foolish enough to try stealing from the vaults below. 

Then something cold seemed to pass through her. "No, no. You're insane. You people wander around the Dimensional Gap unbothered, of course you are."

A pair of goblins bowed to her through the silver doors, and they stepped into a vast hall built entirely from marble. Their arrival didn't go unnoticed, easily a hundred goblins sat perched on high stools behind a long counter, scribbling in enormous ledgers, weighing coins on brass scales, examining precious stones through eyeglasses. But if you looked closely, you could see all of them had gone suddenly, unmistakably tense.

This time, it wasn't the Girl-Who-Lived splashed across every newspaper that had set them on edge. It was the devil beside her, who wasn't bothering to hide her aura at all, likely out of fear that trying to hide it would draw more attention, not less. And goblins were, as a species, remarkably sensitive to that kind of thing, they'd clearly recognized exactly what she was. So when Harriet finally stepped up to an open counter, the rest of the hall let out a nearly inaudible collective breath of relief.

"Good morning," Harriet said to the goblin behind the counter. "I'd like to withdraw a thousand Galleons into an extendable bag, please. Here's the key." She held it out.

The goblin sprang into action without a word, hurrying off to see to it. Harriet clearly hadn't expected that kind of speed, and found it fairly amusing herself, though nowhere near as amusing as Furina apparently found it, who'd taken to sauntering around the hall with obvious delight, thoroughly entertained by the goblins' nerves. The other witches and wizards barely noticed anything out of the ordinary, proof that even with fear sitting in their stomachs, goblin business sense was apparently unstoppable.

The goblin returned with Harriet's money, which she took with a quick thanks.

"We're good to go, Harriet?" Furina asked, drifting in noticeably close to her side.

"Let's head out. I think we've overstayed our welcome." Harriet said, dry.

On their way out, the conversation picked back up.

"So this is where the cowards ended up. We don't hear much about them anymore, I suppose this is where they crawled off to." Furina said, still amused.

"Oh, you know them?" Harriet asked, intrigued.

"They used to live in the Underworld, once upon a time. Let's just say their greed for gold got them into some serious trouble, and to avoid getting wiped out entirely, they left. At least they're not like some of the ones I've read about in a few manga, no kidnapping women from other species to do horrible things to them. These ones just have an absolutely relentless superiority complex about their own aesthetic, they think anything that doesn't look like them is hideous. No idea why." Furina explained.

"So, what do you want to do now?" Harriet asked.

"I want cake! I haven't tried any from here yet!" Furina's eyes practically lit up.

"As you wish, mademoiselle." Harriet gave a mock salute and steered them both toward Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour and the row of sweet shops nearby, a part of the alley she was discovering herself for the first time too, honestly. She'd never really had a reason to wander through this stretch before, past the yearly school shopping trips. The window displays alone were enough to make it clear this wasn't ordinary confectionery, cauldron cakes that steamed gently without ever cooling, chocolate frogs leaping across trays in restless little hops, sugar quills that wrote in looping silver ink if you so much as glanced at them, spun-sugar creatures the size of a hand that moved on their own for a few seconds before dissolving into sweetness. Watching Furina light up over every single pastry she tried left Harriet oddly relaxed. Maybe this was a day she'd needed too, especially in company this good.

They spent the rest of their walk ducking into every shop that caught their eye, Furina thoroughly delighted to discover the flying-witches-on-broomsticks cliché was, in fact, entirely real, and that these people had somehow turned it into an actual sport.

If the original reason Harriet had summoned Furina was to learn more about devils, a fairly low-risk bet either way, whether she was going purely on instinct or on the memory of the Furina she'd known from Genshin Impact, that adorable Hydro Archon who'd given so much of herself for her people... the fact remained that around this Furina, she felt entirely at ease. Whatever scheming she might have had in the back of her mind had completely slipped away, because she was genuinely, simply having fun.

And that was true of the real person standing in front of her now, not the one she'd imagined. She found Furina remarkably human, funny, endearing in her reactions. But there was an edge underneath all of it too, something closer to a fool's grin than a performer's mask, not hidden exactly, Furina wasn't the type to hide anything, but easy to mistake for just more theatrics if you weren't looking for what it actually was.

So once they'd looped back to Florean Fortescue's, the clear favorite of the two of them, cake and ice cream in hand, both of them silently thanking their own physiques for somehow not showing a single ounce of everything they'd eaten, Harriet finally asked, a little nervous.

"Why did you actually want to see me again, Furina?" She'd felt it clearly enough by now, that Furina had genuinely been waiting for that summons.