These people had committed no crimes either… and she had to agree with the shirtless man's assessment. What would happen if Ministry officials learned what this lot could do?
...
Tonks didn't really want to think about it. She wouldn't pretend to understand the mind's of the Ministry officials right now. What if Fudge thought they were too dangerous and ordered them incarcerated in Azkaban? What if they actually were subjected to experimentation to see if their magic could be extracted or duplicated or learned.
Oh, there was no way in heck that Tonks was going to let people who looked only a little older than the maximum Hogwarts school age go through that.
"I'm probably going to get in a lot of trouble for this," Tonks muttered slightly. "But if you want, you can all crash at mine for a while. At least until we figure out what the heck you're going to do next."
"Really?" Lisanna smiled brightly. "Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!"
"Hey, you saved me from being bird chow or a stain on the pavement - it's the least I can do," Tonks smiled.
Gray still looked suspicious but slowly nodded. "We appreciate it. But how do you plan on getting us past those others?"
"I'll take you to my home via Side-Along Apparition," Tonks supplied. "Um… do you know what that is? If you don't, its basically like a kind of magical teleportation, I think the word would be. Instant transfer from one place to another. I'll have to make two trips though - I can only take two people at a time."
"How do we know that you're actually going to take us to your house with this and not dump us in some prison somewhere?" Gray asked.
"Gray-sama…" Juvia rested her arm on his slightly. "Juvia believes we can trust Tonks-san. But also, Juvia doesn't believe we have too many other options."
"We could bust our way out and escape on our own," Gray pointed out.
"Yeah, but that might make us automatic enemies of this Ministry," Lisanna pointed out. "I think it might be best to avoid that happening if we can."
Gray grimaced but acknowledged Lisanna's advice - she'd spent two whole years on the run from the Royal Court of Edolas, after all. She knew as well as anyone that that was no way to live if you could avoid it.
"Alright then, let's do it," he nodded. "Who's going first?"
"Juvia will do," the rain woman volunteered as she stepped closer to Tonks. "How does this work?"
"Just hold my arm tightly," Tonks said as she held it up. "And be warned, most people throw up the first time they Apparate. It really doesn't feel pleasant."
"Juvia has probably experienced worse," Juvia said as she took Tonks' arm, and as Tonks scanned the bandages that were covering Juvia's limbs she realised she might just be telling the truth.
"Wait!" Lisanna suddenly gasped before they could do anything. "What about the Clippers? What's going to become of them?"
"The birds?" Tonks blinked. "They'll be rounded up and held by the Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures as they try and work out what they are."
"They won't hurt them will they? There's nothing magical about Clippers - they're just ordinary birds from our world that landed here by mistake like we did."
Tonks floundered, having no answer to that question. She didn't know what the Department would do under circumstances like that. "Well, I'm… sure they'll be fine. If they're really not magical I imagine they'd just try and find an island for them somewhere to set them free on."
"But what if they don't?" Lisanna asked.
"Lisanna…" Gray placed a hand on her shoulder. "I know how much you love animals but we really can't worry too much about those birds right now. We've got bigger problems, like worrying about ourselves and the rest of our friends. There's nothing that we can do about them anyway so the best thing we can do now is get the heck out of here and hope these people have a shred of decency about them."
Lisanna bit her lip, but after a moment's deliberation, she sighed and lowered her head. "I guess you're right. I don't like it, but you're right."
"Alright, let's go," Tonks nodded, and suddenly twisted around and Disapparated with a popping noise.
...
Juvia gasped as her body felt like it was being condensed and forced through some kind of tube, the whole world around her and Tonks spinning and blurring into a swirling mess until suddenly the two of them were standing in what looked like a living room. And a rather messy one, with a few clothes and empty packets of sweets and stuff littered all over the place.
"You alright?" Tonks asked as Juvia let go.
"Yes, Juvia is fine," Juvia nodded, stepping away, and indeed she was fine. "Juvia's body is water. Water flows."
Tonks raised a brow, but she conceded that Apparition must be nothing compared to morphing your entire body into liquid and swirling around in the air the way that she'd seen this woman do. "Right. Well, be right back," she said, as she vanished again with another pop, leaving Juvia alone to take in her surroundings.
"This looks cosy… Juvia supposes," she murmured as she picked her way over a couple of shirts strewn haphazardly on the floor and peered through a doorway into a nearby kitchen, which all seemed to be normal enough as far as she was concerned, and through another door which seemed to lead to some kind of bathroom. But then when she walked to a window and looked through it, she gasped in amazement.
They appeared to be quite a long way off the ground and immediately stretched out before her was an extremely wide river that curved away around the bend, with several long bridges spanning its width, all extremely different in design. On both sides of the river she could see huge, towering buildings, much large than most of the ones she'd seen in Fiore, many with equally spaced windows running horizontally and vertically across their entire length and no building seemingly the same height as another.
And wow… that had to be the biggest ferris wheel that Juvia had ever seen in her entire life.
Juvia's attention was so riveted that she didn't notice that Tonks had appeared behind her again with Gray and Lisanna in tow, right up until the point where Gray choked and fell to the floor with a crash, gasping for breath.
"Gray-sama! Are you okay?" Juvia immediately rushed to him.
"Looks like the effect of Apparition had more of an effect on him than you," Tonks chuckled, glancing up at Lisanna who had stumbled and looked extremely shaken, but still seemed to be better than Gray, perhaps since her body was used to being changed too. "It usually takes a bit of getting used to. If you're going to throw up, please do it in the bathroom, not…"
A split second later Gray threw up. Juvia reacted immediately and summoned a ball of water that caught the foul projectile and sent it flowing across the room and straight into the toilet before it could make a mess of Tonks' floor.
"Thanks," Gray croaked. "Ugh, that was rough."
Juvia practically levitated with giddiness at being thanked by Gray but she quickly shook her head and said, "Juvia can tell. But as least Gray-sama is safe now."
"Can only hope so," Gray pushed himself to his feet, even as Tonks ogled slightly at what Juvia had just done.
"That's a neat trick," she admitted. "I'll have to remember that one if I can."
"So… where are we?" Lisanna asked, sitting a little heavily down on the messy sofa.
"My apartment building in the city of London. It's the capital city of England in case you didn't know that… and I'm guessing you don't by the looks of your faces. Jeez, you guys are going to be hard to talk to, I reckon. Anyway, it's not that big and I've been thinking of moving but for now its home."
"Whatever the case, thank you for helping us out," Gray replied stiffly. "It is appreciated."
"You realise that if my boss found out that I'd been harbouring you three without taking you in, I'd be in all kinds of trouble, right?" Tonks asked.
"That just makes us appreciate it all the more," Lisanna smiled. "Thank you."
Tonks smiled lightly. "No problem… but I really need to get back now before they notice I'm not out in the field where I should be. I'll be back as soon as I can, but until then please don't go anywhere. But make yourself comfortable - there's milk and other stuff in the kitchen and yeah… hang tight and try not to break anything." She turned around instantly tripped on one of her own stray shirts and came crashing down to the floor, knocking a vase of flowers off a table as she went, which Lisanna was thankfully able to catch with the tips of her fingers before it could smash.
"I was about to say we'll try our hardest but it looks like you might have as much of a penchant for breaking things as we do," Gray smirked.
"Ha. Ha. Ha…" Tonks rolled her eyes as she scrambled up, dusted off her ropes and vanished with another popping noise, leaving the three Fairy Tail mages alone in the apartment.
"Looks like at least something's going right," Lisanna sighed as she placed the flowers back on the table. "We were probably lucky to meet her. She seems like a very nice person."
"We can only hope that's true and that this isn't some… elaborate and overly complicated trap," Gray muttered.
"Juvia doesn't think it is. Tonks-san seems to be genuine to me," Juvia threw in. "But still… Juvia truly does think we may have landed in an alternate world now. If Gray-sama and Lisanna-san look outside, they may see what I mean."
...
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