The morning of their departure dawned bright and unseasonably warm for October in Britain, as though the universe had decided to provide excellent weather for international travel as a gesture of cosmic approval. Harry woke early—his enhanced metabolism apparently considered six hours of sleep more than adequate—and spent the pre-dawn hours in Charlie's dragon-scale room organizing his thoughts into something resembling a coherent travel plan.
The Burrow was already stirring by the time he made his way downstairs. Mrs. Weasley had apparently been up for hours, judging by the amount of food covering every available surface in the kitchen—sandwiches wrapped in cloth, fruit carefully packed in containers, biscuits stacked in tins, and what appeared to be an entire roast chicken that she was in the process of dismembering into more portable portions.
"Good morning, dear," she said without looking up from her culinary warfare. "I'm making sure you have proper provisions for the journey. Airport food is terrible—overpriced and undersized—and I won't have you lot starving on those aeroplanes just because the Muggles haven't sorted out how to feed people properly at thirty thousand feet."
"Mrs. Weasley," Harry said gently, eyeing the growing mountain of food with a mixture of gratitude and concern, "we're going to be on the plane for nine hours, not nine days. And they do serve meals during the flight."
"Tiny portions," she replied with the kind of dismissive certainty that suggested she'd been reading about airline food and found it wanting. "Barely enough to feed a garden gnome, and those have proper appetites. No, you'll need real food—substantial food—and I've made sure you have plenty."
Harry decided that arguing with Mrs. Weasley about appropriate quantities of travel provisions was a battle he couldn't win and probably shouldn't attempt. Besides, having backup food seemed sensible given that they'd be traveling with a six-month-old whose meal schedule might not align perfectly with airline service times.
The others began trickling down as the morning progressed. Ron appeared first, drawn by the smell of bacon and the sound of his mother's industrious cooking. Hermione followed shortly after, already dressed and carrying a folder full of what appeared to be final checklists and travel documents. Ginny emerged looking slightly disheveled but alert, accepted tea with grateful enthusiasm, and immediately began helping her mother organize the provisions into more manageable packages.
Bill arrived via Floo around seven o'clock, looking professional despite the early hour and carrying news about the borrowed transportation.
"Got us a car," he announced with satisfaction, brushing soot from his dragonhide jacket. "My mate Gregory owes me a favor—I helped him with some cursed jewelry last year that his gran left him. He's lending us his people carrier for the airport run. Seats eight comfortably, plenty of boot space for luggage."
"A people carrier," Ron repeated slowly. "Is that the Muggle vehicle that looks like it could hold a small Quidditch team?"
"Essentially, yeah," Bill confirmed. "Though Gregory calls it a 'minivan' because Americans have apparently colonized British automotive terminology. Either way, it's big enough to fit all of you plus luggage without anyone needing to sit on someone's lap or have trunks balanced on their head."
"How does it work?" Harry asked with genuine curiosity. He'd spent years living with the Dursleys, but Uncle Vernon had never actually explained automobile mechanics—he'd just shouted about petrol prices and traffic jams while Harry sat in the back seat trying to be as invisible as possible.
"You turn a key, press some pedals, and steer with the wheel," Bill explained with the patience of someone who'd dealt with his family's collective confusion about Muggle technology for years. "Gregory showed me the basics yesterday. It's not complicated once you get the hang of it, though I have to admit the lack of magical assistance makes everything feel oddly manual."
"Can you actually drive it?" Hermione asked with concern. "Because I'm fairly certain that operating Muggle vehicles requires proper licenses and training, and if we're stopped by Muggle police, they'll want to see documentation."
"I've got a license," Bill said, pulling out what appeared to be a legitimate Muggle driving license with his photograph and details. "Part of curse-breaking work involves international travel, and Gringotts requires all field operatives to obtain proper Muggle documentation for countries where we might need to operate. The license is completely legal—I actually took the test and everything."
"You took a Muggle driving test?" Ron asked with obvious admiration. "That's brilliant. How hard was it?"
"Easier than you'd think," Bill replied. "Most of the questions were common sense—don't drive too fast, don't hit pedestrians, always check your mirrors before changing lanes. The practical portion was trickier, but I managed."
Andromeda arrived at eight o'clock with Teddy in a carrier, both of them looking considerably more composed than Harry had expected given the early hour and the significant journey ahead. Teddy was wearing what appeared to be completely ordinary baby clothing—a soft blue jumper, comfortable trousers, tiny shoes—and on his wrist was a delicate silver bracelet that hummed with carefully woven enchantments.
"Glamour charm," Andromeda explained when she noticed Harry looking at it. "Linked to the bracelet—as long as he's wearing it, his metamorphmagus abilities are suppressed. His hair will stay whatever color I set it to, and he won't accidentally shift features in response to emotional changes."
"That's brilliant," Hermione said, examining the bracelet with obvious interest. "Where did you get it?"
"Made it myself last night," Andromeda replied with quiet pride. "I'm not as skilled as my sister Narcissa was with enchantment work, but I know enough to create basic suppression charms. This one's keyed specifically to Teddy's magical signature—it won't prevent him from using magic entirely, just the involuntary physical transformations that would cause problems in Muggle environments."
Teddy, apparently unconcerned about having his abilities temporarily suppressed, was currently engaged in trying to grab Harry's nose with both hands while making pleased gurgling sounds that suggested he'd missed his godfather during their day apart.
"Someone's in a good mood this morning," Harry observed, carefully extracting his nose from Teddy's determined grip. "Ready for your first airplane adventure?"
Teddy responded by attempting to eat Harry's finger, which Harry chose to interpret as enthusiastic agreement.
The next hour was spent in organized chaos as they conducted final preparations. The five mansion-trunks were shrunk to pocket size with careful application of reduction charms—they'd expand them once they reached their American accommodations, but traveling through Muggle spaces required subtlety. Mrs. Weasley's provisions were distributed among various bags, because apparently traveling with enough food to survive a small siege was non-negotiable.
The communication mirrors were packed carefully in protective cases—they'd set them up properly once they reached Kansas, but for now they just needed to survive international travel without breaking or accidentally activating in someone's luggage. Documentation was triple-checked—passports, tickets, travel confirmations, and a folder full of "just in case" paperwork that Hermione had assembled with characteristic thoroughness.
By nine-thirty, they were as ready as they were going to be. The borrowed people carrier—which did indeed look like it could transport a small Quidditch team in reasonable comfort—sat in the Burrow's front yard, its blue paint gleaming in the morning sun and its Muggle mechanical systems humming with the kind of mundane reliability that wizards found both impressive and slightly unsettling.
"Right then," Bill said, consulting his watch with professional efficiency. "The flight leaves at one o'clock, which means we need to be at Heathrow by eleven at the latest. That gives us ninety minutes to get there, which should be plenty of time assuming London traffic doesn't have opinions about our schedule."
"What's London traffic?" Ron asked suspiciously.
"Imagine hundreds of Muggle vehicles all trying to use the same roads simultaneously," Bill explained. "Now imagine that those vehicles can't fly, can't use magic to create additional space, and are being operated by people who range from 'reasonably competent' to 'actively dangerous.' That's traffic."
"That sounds terrible," Ginny observed. "Why don't they just use magic to fix it?"
"They're Muggles, Gin. They don't have magic to fix it. They just... cope. And complain. Mostly complain."
The loading process took longer than Harry expected, despite having shrunk the trunks and consolidated their provisions. Apparently fitting six people, one infant, multiple bags of travel essentials, and Mrs. Weasley's comprehensive food supply into even a large vehicle required creative spatial management and several attempts at optimal organization.
"This would be so much easier with Extension Charms," Ron muttered as he tried to find space for yet another package of sandwiches.
"Welcome to Muggle travel," Bill replied cheerfully. "Where spatial constraints are actual constraints and everything has to fit in normal three-dimensional space without magical intervention. Builds character."
Finally, they were loaded: Bill in the driver's seat, looking slightly nervous about operating Muggle machinery without magical backup. Mr. Weasley in the passenger seat, practically vibrating with excitement about experiencing automobile travel from the inside. Harry, Ginny, and Hermione in the middle row, with Teddy secured in what Andromeda called a "car seat"—an elaborate Muggle device designed to protect infants during vehicular travel. Ron and Andromeda in the rear seats, surrounded by carefully stacked luggage.
Mrs. Weasley stood in the front garden, waving with barely suppressed tears and shouting last-minute instructions about remembering to write, eating properly, and not doing anything too dangerous without proper supervision.
"We'll be fine, Mum!" Ginny called through the window. "It's just Kansas—what's the worst that could happen?"
"Famous last words," Harry muttered, but he was grinning.
Bill turned the key in the ignition, and the car roared to life with mechanical enthusiasm that made half the passengers jump. Mr. Weasley made an excited sound that might have been appreciation for Muggle engineering or might have been barely contained glee at experiencing automotive technology firsthand.
"Right," Bill said, adjusting mirrors and checking various dashboard instruments with the careful attention of someone who'd studied this procedure but was still getting comfortable with practical application. "Everyone buckled in? Good. Let's see if I remember how to do this without accidentally enchanting anything."
He put the car in gear—a process that involved several false starts and what sounded like grinding metal that made Hermione wince—and they rolled forward down the Burrow's long driveway with the kind of jerky momentum that suggested Bill's driving skills were still being calibrated.
"This is brilliant!" Mr. Weasley announced, looking around at the car's interior with the enthusiasm of someone discovering a new and fascinating magical artifact. "Look at all these controls! What does this button do? And this lever? Oh, and there's a dial here with numbers—is that for speed measurement? Temperature? Magical resonance frequencies?"
"Dad, please don't touch anything," Bill said with the strained patience of someone trying to concentrate on driving while their father treated the dashboard like an interactive exhibit. "Everything in here serves a purpose, and randomly pushing buttons could cause problems."
"But how does it work?" Mr. Weasley persisted. "Where's the power source? Is it burning something? Converting energy? Using some sort of Muggle charm system?"
"It's called an internal combustion engine," Hermione explained, taking pity on Mr. Weasley's obvious fascination. "It burns a fuel called petrol—essentially refined petroleum—and converts the heat energy into mechanical motion that turns the wheels."
"It burns something to make it go?" Mr. Weasley sounded absolutely delighted. "That's brilliant! Simple, elegant, and completely mental when you think about it. Who looked at liquid rocks and thought 'yes, let's set that on fire inside a metal container and use it to propel vehicles'?"
"Muggles," Bill replied. "Muggles looked at liquid rocks and thought that. And then they built an entire transportation system around the concept. That's basically how Muggle technology works—find something that seems ridiculous, apply engineering principles until it becomes practical, then mass-produce it until everyone depends on it."
The drive from the Burrow to Heathrow took approximately ninety minutes—longer than Bill had estimated, thanks to what he described as "typical London traffic nonsense" involving construction zones, inexplicably slow-moving vehicles, and what appeared to be a traffic jam caused by people slowing down to look at a minor accident that had already been cleared.
Harry spent the journey alternating between watching the scenery blur past and trying not to be sick from the motion. His enhanced senses, it turned out, were not entirely compatible with enclosed vehicular travel—every bump in the road registered with excessive clarity, and the constant acceleration and deceleration made his stomach do interesting things that his cosmic metabolism couldn't quite compensate for.
"You alright, mate?" Ron asked, noticing Harry's slightly green complexion. "You look like you're about to revisit breakfast."
"I'm fine," Harry said through gritted teeth. "Just adjusting to the sensation of being in a metal box that's hurtling down roads at speeds that would have killed our ancestors while breathing recycled air and trying not to think about how much I'd rather be flying under my own power right now."
"Motion sickness," Hermione diagnosed immediately. "Try looking at the horizon instead of the road immediately in front of us. Fixed visual reference points help the inner ear calibrate."
Harry tried this, and it did help slightly. Teddy, by contrast, seemed perfectly content with automobile travel—he'd fallen asleep in his car seat within twenty minutes of departure and was currently snoring softly while his glamour-charmed hair stayed a perfectly ordinary brown that wouldn't attract attention in Muggle environments.
Heathrow Airport turned out to be everything Harry had feared and nothing he'd expected. The terminal buildings were massive—genuinely massive, the kind of massive that made Hogwarts look quaint by comparison. Hundreds of people moved through the spaces with purposeful chaos, pulling wheeled luggage, checking departure boards, and generally radiating the particular brand of stressed urgency that apparently characterized modern air travel.
"Right," Bill said once he'd successfully navigated the car park—a process that had involved considerable creative language and several near-misses with other vehicles—"this is where I leave you. Gregory needs the car back by this evening, and I've got curse-breaking work waiting. You've got your tickets, your documentation, and Hermione's comprehensive instructions. You should be fine."
"Should be fine," Ron repeated with dark humor. "That's what Harry said before we faced the troll in first year, and look how that turned out."
"We defeated the troll and everyone survived," Harry pointed out.
"Exactly," Ron said. "Which is exactly the kind of optimistic outcome I'm hoping for here. Survival with minimal property damage and hopefully no international incidents."
They said their goodbyes—Bill hugging everyone with the kind of fierce affection that came from being the eldest brother who'd watched his siblings grow up and now worried about them constantly. Mr. Weasley distributed last-minute advice about Muggle behavior ("Don't mention magic, don't try to pay with Galleons, and for Merlin's sake, don't ask the airport security people how their detection equipment works—they get very suspicious when people show excessive interest in their scanning devices").
"Be safe," Bill said finally, looking at each of them in turn. "Be careful. Be smart. And Harry?"
"Yeah?"
"Try not to accidentally reshape American reality with your cosmic abilities. The international incident paperwork would be a nightmare."
"I'll do my best," Harry promised. "Though I'm making no guarantees about the reality-reshaping. Sometimes these things just happen."
"Story of your life, mate," Bill said with a grin. "Right, off with you lot. You've got a plane to catch and an adventure to begin."
They watched Bill and Mr. Weasley drive away—Mr. Weasley still asking questions about automotive engineering while Bill patiently explained internal combustion for the third time—then turned to face the terminal building with the collective expression of people preparing for an ordeal they weren't entirely confident they'd survive.
"Right," Hermione said, pulling out her folder of documentation with the kind of focused determination that had gotten them through seven years of magical education and multiple near-death experiences. "Let's review: we're British tourists traveling to Kansas for agricultural tourism and cultural exchange. We've got our passports, our tickets, and our completely innocent cover story. We do not mention magic, we do not draw attention to ourselves, and we absolutely do not let anyone examine Teddy's glamour bracelet too closely."
"What if they ask why we're going to Kansas?" Ron asked. "Because I'm not entirely sure 'agricultural tourism' sounds like a real thing that real people do."
"It is a real thing," Hermione insisted. "I researched it. Americans love showing foreigners their regional cultures, and Kansas is very proud of its farming heritage. We're interested in learning about American agricultural techniques, particularly organic farming and sustainable practices. It's perfectly believable."
"For someone who spent their formative years hunting Horcruxes and fighting dark wizards?" Ron asked skeptically.
"We're expanding our horizons," Hermione replied firmly. "Trying new things. Experiencing different cultures. All completely reasonable explanations for international travel."
Ginny adjusted her backpack—which contained emergency supplies, entertainment for the flight, and enough of Mrs. Weasley's provisions to feed a small army—and grinned with the kind of anticipatory excitement that suggested she was enjoying this adventure already.
"Come on then," she said. "Let's go experience international air travel like proper Muggles. How hard can it be?"
The answer, it turned out, was "considerably harder than anyone anticipated, but in ways that were mostly just tedious rather than actually dangerous."
Check-in involved standing in queues—multiple queues, for different purposes, all moving with the kind of glacial slowness that made Harry grateful for his enhanced patience. They had to weigh their luggage (Hermione's magical reduction charms meant their bags were suspiciously light, but the check-in agent didn't comment). Confirm their seat assignments (Hermione had arranged them in a cluster that would allow for coordinated baby-wrangling). And answer questions about whether they'd packed their bags themselves and whether anyone had asked them to carry anything suspicious.
"Why would someone ask us to carry suspicious items?" Ron asked with genuine confusion.
"Security protocols," Hermione whispered urgently. "Just say no to everything and we'll be fine."
Security screening turned out to be the most nerve-wracking part. They had to remove their shoes (why?), place their bags on a conveyor belt that fed into a scanning machine (how did Muggles build equipment that could see inside closed containers?), and walk through metal detectors that beeped alarmingly when Harry passed through them.
"Step aside please, sir," a security officer said, gesturing Harry toward a secondary screening area. "Metal detector's registering something. Do you have any metal objects in your pockets?"
Harry patted himself down with growing concern, mentally cataloguing everything he was carrying. "Just my phone, keys, some coins..."
"Please place all metal objects in this tray and walk through again."
Harry did so, but the detector still beeped. The security officer frowned and pulled out what looked like a handheld scanning wand. "I'm going to need to perform a manual search. It'll just take a moment."
Oh bloody hell, Harry thought. His enhanced physiology was probably registering as something anomalous on their equipment—denser bone structure, different electromagnetic signature, or any of a dozen other physical changes that came with cosmic enhancement.
The officer waved the wand around Harry's torso and it immediately went crazy, beeping with enthusiastic alarm.
"Sir, are you wearing any medical devices? Pacemaker? Metal implants?"
"No," Harry said truthfully. "Nothing like that."
The officer looked puzzled, checked the scanner again, then apparently decided that whatever was causing the reading wasn't threatening. "Alright, you're cleared. Must be equipment malfunction. Happens sometimes."
Harry collected his belongings with relief and rejoined the others, who'd watched the entire interaction with varying degrees of concern.
"That was close," Hermione muttered once they were safely past security. "Your enhanced physiology is registering on their scanning equipment. We'll need to be more careful."
"How do I be more careful about having cosmic enhancements?" Harry asked. "It's not like I can turn them off."
"Just... try to look normal. Act normal. Be as boring and unremarkable as possible."
"I'm six-foot-two, I look like I was carved by angels, and I radiate enough cosmic energy to make magical detection equipment recalibrate itself," Harry pointed out. "Normal and unremarkable aren't really in my current repertoire."
"Do your best," Hermione said firmly.
The departure lounge was crowded, noisy, and smelled like a combination of coffee, cleaning products, and what Harry's enhanced senses identified as "collective human anxiety about air travel." They found seats near their departure gate and settled in for the forty-minute wait before boarding.
Teddy woke up and immediately demanded attention—not crying, just making it very clear that he'd been asleep for quite long enough and would now like to interact with interesting people who could make funny faces and provide entertainment. Andromeda handled this with practiced efficiency, producing toys from seemingly nowhere and engaging Teddy in the kind of simple games that six-month-olds found endlessly fascinating.
"You're very good with him," Harry observed, watching Andromeda make silly faces while Teddy giggled with delight.
"Practice," she replied. "Tonks was exactly like this at his age—constant need for stimulation, easily bored, and absolutely charming when she wanted to be. I learned that the key to managing energetic babies is to keep them engaged before they get fussy."
"She sounds like she was wonderful," Ginny said softly.
"She was," Andromeda agreed, her voice catching slightly. "Exhausting, frequently exasperating, and wonderful in ways that made every challenge worth it. I see so much of her in Teddy—the same bright curiosity, the same determination to interact with everything around him, the same ability to make people smile just by existing."
Harry reached over and squeezed her hand gently. "He's lucky to have you."
"I'm lucky to have him," Andromeda corrected. "He's what keeps me going, what gives me purpose. Without him..." She trailed off, then visibly pulled herself together. "But I do have him, and I'm going to make sure he grows up knowing how much his parents loved him, and how many people care about his future."
Boarding was announced with bureaucratic efficiency—rows starting from the back, families with young children invited to board first, first-class passengers given priority access. Their seats were in the middle section—not quite first class (despite Harry's wealth, Hermione had insisted that excessive luxury would draw attention) but comfortable enough for the nine-hour journey.
The airplane itself was simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Harry's enhanced senses immediately began cataloguing everything—the mechanical hum of the engines, the particular smell of recycled air and industrial cleaning products, the electromagnetic fields from all the Muggle technology, and most concerning, the structural stresses on what appeared to be a metal tube that was somehow supposed to fly.
"This is mental," Ron muttered, staring at the overhead compartments and narrow aisles with obvious concern. "We're trusting our lives to Muggle engineering. This thing doesn't even have magic to hold it together—just metal and hope and probably some very optimistic mathematics."
"Millions of people fly safely every day," Hermione said, though her voice carried a slight edge that suggested she was also slightly concerned about the whole "flying in metal tube without magical assistance" concept. "Muggle aviation has an excellent safety record."
"Right," Ron said. "Excellent safety record. That's reassuring. How excellent are we talking? Like, 'mostly safe' or 'reasonably confident you won't die'?"
"Ron, please stop talking about dying before we've even taken off," Ginny requested. "You're making Andromeda nervous."
"I'm not nervous," Andromeda said, though her grip on Teddy was perhaps slightly tighter than strictly necessary. "I'm just... mentally reviewing the probability calculations for safe air travel and trying not to think about how we're trusting our lives to Muggle technology that I don't understand."
"Welcome to being a Muggle," Harry said dryly. "They do this every day and somehow most of them survive. We'll be fine."
The plane began to fill up with other passengers—businessmen in suits who looked like they did this regularly and were thoroughly bored by the experience, families with children who were either excited or terrified depending on age, and elderly tourists who moved through the aisles with the kind of careful precision that suggested they were acutely aware of their own physical limitations.
Their little group drew some attention—six people traveling together with an infant attracted notice—but most passengers just smiled politely and went about settling into their own seats. Teddy, for his part, seemed fascinated by all the new sights and sounds, his glamour-charmed hair staying perfectly ordinary brown while his eyes tracked every interesting movement with the focus of someone determined to miss nothing.
The safety demonstration was simultaneously informative and concerning. A flight attendant walked through procedures for emergency situations that Harry desperately hoped they wouldn't need—oxygen masks, emergency exits, flotation devices—while his enhanced hearing picked up mechanical sounds from the plane that suggested complex systems operating just barely within normal parameters.
"This is fine," Ron muttered to himself. "This is totally fine. Millions of people do this every day. Most of them survive. The statistics are in our favor."
"Ron," Hermione said firmly, "you're spiraling. Take deep breaths. We're going to be fine."
"Easy for you to say—you're not a Pureblood who grew up thinking that Muggle transportation was basically experimental magic that sometimes worked and sometimes catastrophically failed."
"Ron, you've been in Mr. Weasley's enchanted Ford Anglia, which literally crashed into a tree. This commercial aircraft is considerably safer than anything your family has ever transported you in."
"Fair point," Ron conceded. "Though I still reserve the right to be nervous about flying in a metal tube held together by Muggle engineering and optimistic thinking."
The plane began to move—backing away from the gate with the kind of awkward mechanical reversing that suggested even Muggles found this part challenging—and then taxiing toward the runway with increasing speed. Harry's enhanced senses picked up everything: the mechanical vibrations, the acceleration forces, the particular sound of the engines powering up for takeoff.
And then they were accelerating for real, the plane hurtling down the runway at speeds that made even Harry's cosmic-enhanced reflexes take notice, the nose lifting as the aircraft defied gravity through sheer mechanical force and stubborn refusal to acknowledge that metal tubes shouldn't fly.
The moment they left the ground, Harry felt his stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with motion sickness and everything to do with the sudden awareness that they were now suspended thousands of feet above solid earth with nothing but Muggle engineering between them and a very permanent meeting with the ground.
"We're flying," Ginny breathed, looking out the window with wide eyes. "Actually flying. In a Muggle machine. This is mad."
"This is brilliant," Harry corrected, though his voice was slightly unsteady. "Terrifying, yes, but brilliant. Look at what they've accomplished—they've built machines that can fly without magic, without magical creatures, just pure engineering and determination."
The plane climbed steadily, the ground falling away below them as they punched through clouds and emerged into brilliant sunshine at cruising altitude. The engines settled into a steady drone, the seatbelt signs switched off, and suddenly they were just... traveling. Sitting in comfortable seats, reading magazines, watching movies on tiny screens, and generally behaving as though hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour in a metal tube was the most normal thing in the world.
Teddy, it turned out, was an excellent air traveler. He slept through most of the first few hours, woke for feeding with minimal fussing, and seemed perfectly content to be entertained by the simple toys Andromeda had brought along. His glamour charm held perfectly—no accidental hair color changes, no spontaneous feature shifts, just an ordinary (if unusually well-behaved) infant enjoying his first international flight.
The meal service was exactly as mediocre as Mrs. Weasley had predicted—small portions, questionable quality, served on tiny trays that barely fit on the fold-down tables. Harry was grateful for the backup provisions they'd packed, and judging by how quickly Ron consumed his supplementary sandwiches, everyone else felt the same way.
"This is going to be a long nine hours," Ron observed around a mouthful of Mrs. Weasley's chicken. "I mean, it's not terrible—the seats are comfortable, the entertainment system is quite clever, and nobody's trying to kill us—but it's still nine hours of sitting in a metal tube wondering when we'll reach our destination."
"Welcome to international travel," Hermione said. "It's tedious, occasionally uncomfortable, and much slower than magical transportation. But it gets us where we're going without having to explain to American magical authorities why we're using unauthorized Portkeys."
Hours blurred together in the peculiar way that long flights seemed to compress and expand time simultaneously. Harry tried reading, dozed fitfully (his enhanced metabolism made proper sleep difficult in the confined space), and spent considerable time staring out the window at clouds and distant landscape while his mind wandered through thoughts about what awaited them in Kansas.
Somewhere down there—probably still thousands of miles away, but getting closer with every passing minute—a young man with abilities similar to his own was going about his life, completely unaware that help was coming. A farm boy learning to use powers that could reshape reality, trying to balance ordinary life with extraordinary capabilities, probably wondering if he was the only one who could do impossible things.
Harry knew exactly what that felt like.
The loneliness of being different, the responsibility of having abilities that exceeded normal human limitations, the constant question of whether using those abilities made you a hero or just someone interfering in situations that might be better left alone.
He was going to help. That's what he'd decided, what he'd planned for, what he'd spent considerable money and effort preparing to do. Not because he had all the answers—he definitely didn't—but because he understood the questions better than anyone else could.
And maybe, just maybe, they'd both learn something in the process.
"We're descending," the pilot's voice announced over the intercom, pulling Harry from his thoughts. "Should be landing in Kansas City in approximately thirty minutes. Local time is 3:47 PM, temperature is a pleasant 68 degrees, and I'd like to thank you all for flying with us today."
The plane began its descent, and Harry felt his ears pop with the pressure change. Below them, the landscape was beginning to resolve into specifics—farmland spreading in geometric patterns, roads cutting straight lines across vast distances, and in the distance, the urban sprawl of what had to be Kansas City.
"We made it," Ron said with obvious relief. "Nine hours of Muggle aviation, and we actually survived. I'm genuinely impressed with myself for not panicking even once."
"You panicked at least three times," Hermione corrected. "But quietly, so I suppose that counts as personal growth."
"I maintained my composure in the face of terrifying Muggle technology," Ron insisted. "That deserves recognition."
The plane touched down with only minimal jarring, taxied to the gate with mechanical efficiency, and finally came to rest with the kind of anticlimactic conclusion that made nine hours of travel feel almost mundane in retrospect.
"Right," Harry said, collecting his things as passengers began standing and retrieving luggage with the organized chaos that apparently characterized deplaning. "We're here. Kansas, America. Time to begin our superhero consulting adventure."
"Time to find a hotel, get some sleep, and then tomorrow start looking for your cosmic farm boy," Hermione corrected. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
They filed off the plane with the rest of the passengers—Andromeda carrying Teddy, who'd woken just in time to be fascinated by all the new sights and sounds. Immigration was surprisingly straightforward (Hermione's documentation was flawless, as expected), and baggage claim reunited them with their checked luggage without incident.
Standing in the Kansas City airport terminal, surrounded by Americans speaking with accents that Harry found both familiar and foreign, holding claim tickets and pulling wheeled luggage and trying to look like ordinary tourists rather than a group of British wizards on an impossible mission, Harry felt something that might have been anticipation or might have been apprehension settle in his chest.
They were here. Actually here. In America, about to begin an adventure that was equal parts planned and improvised, sensible and completely mad, necessary and possibly the most ambitious thing any of them had ever attempted.
But they were together, they were prepared, and they had mansion-trunks, communication mirrors, and enough backup provisions to survive small disasters.
Adventure, international edition, had officially begun.
And knowing their luck, it was going to be interesting in ways none of them had quite anticipated.
But then again, that was just life with Harry Potter.
Welcome to Kansas. Population: about to get one cosmic superhero consulting service and hopefully not too many international incidents.
The story was just beginning.
---
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