JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

American sport is with all the rings and Cudgels, and… well, meeting girls. If the world needs saving, then it's a job best left to your father and Merlin and the rest of them. They've all done it before, after all. It's rather old hat for them. You don't need to worry about it.'

       James sighed and rolled his eyes. 'We're not, Mum. Lay off us, all right?'

       Ginny met her son's eyes and searched them. After a long moment, she seemed to grudgingly accept what she saw there. She nodded slowly.

       'It's going to be all right,' she said, turning to address the three of them. 'Are you hearing me? You lot don't need to worry about it. It's going to be fine. It always is, isn't it?'

       James nodded as his mother put her arm around him again. It did always seem to end up being all right, no matter how bad things looked at any given moment. And yet he couldn't help thinking of Merlin's words when they'd all seen the Loom with its broken crimson thread: this changes everything.

       And on the heels of that, echoing in his memory like a tickling feather, he recalled Scorpius Malfoy's comment on the morning their journey had begun. Fate seems to enjoy placing you Potters right onto the bull's-eyes of history, he'd said, as if anticipating James' mother's words. It might be a good idea to try not to be too… distracted if that should happen again.

       In the moonlight, James shuddered slightly under his mother's arm.

       As with all initially unfamiliar things, James found life at Alma Aleron dizzyingly foreign at first, and then merely odd, and finally, nearing the end of his first week, only occasionally eccentric but otherwise fairly manageable.

       Unlike the sleeping quarters he had been used to at Hogwarts, the Bigfoot dormitory was divided into a warren of small bedrooms on the third floor, extending up into the attic. Some of the rooms housed as many as six students, but Ralph and James found themselves in a very small twoperson room at the end of the main hall. Upon inspection, James determined that until fairly recently, the room had probably served as a maintenance closet. This suspicion was cemented late during their first night when the janitor came in and shone a torch around the room, claiming to be in search of a spare mop. He didn't seem particularly surprised to find James and Ralph blinking blearily at him from the darkness, however, and spent some time rummaging under their beds in search of the missing mop, which he eventually found.

       Over the course of the first few days of school, James and Ralph enlisted Zane's help in decorating their room, filling it with Quidditch posters, a makeshift Gryffindor banner (hung tactfully next to a Bigfoot House crest), an old carpet they'd rescued from the trash cans behind the common dorm, and a small bust of Sir Percival Pepperpock, which was enchanted to say amusingly crass phrases whenever the dorm room door opened.

       The upshot of life in Apollo Mansion, however, was that the rest of Bigfoot House seemed to accept James and Ralph with a fairly universal degree of equanimity, nearly approaching boredom. They seemed to be a good and loyal bunch, surprisingly diverse, with members from all over the world and even representing a variety of humanoid species. There was a sophomore goblin named Nicklebrigg and an overweight junior Veela named Jazmine Jade, upon whom Ralph seemed to have a rather hopeless crush despite her obvious, and perplexing, lack of self-esteem. There was even an actual Bigfoot with long ape-like arms, feet the size of frying pans, and an inexplicable predilection for polka music, which he played for hours at a time on the house's ancient record player.

       Oliver Wood was quick to introduce James and Ralph to all of their housemates during evenings spent in the basement game room, under the twin gazes of the stuffed deer and moose heads, affectionately known as Heckle and Jeckle. Both boys found themselves becoming increasingly familiar with the names and faces of their fellow Bigfoots as they passed them on their way to the common bathroom each morning. There were no bullies or obnoxious gits in Bigfoot House, but neither were there any apparently shining stars, either academically or athletically.

       'We're a team,' Wood proclaimed happily, nodding at the Bigfoots as they congregated around the game room of an evening. 'No standouts on either end, but that just makes us stronger in the middle. No other house can boast that.'

       Secretly, James wondered if that was such a particularly good thing. When he asked Zane about it, the boy nodded enthusiastically.

       'I know exactly what you mean!' he exclaimed. 'Apart from you and the Ralphinator, Bigfoot House is like a magnet for the mediocre. It's like living on the Island of Misfit Toys!'

       James didn't understand the reference and stopped Zane with a sigh and a roll of his eyes when the blonde boy attempted to explain it.

       Getting the hang of all the new classes was by far the hardest part of adjusting to life at Alma Aleron. Finding the classrooms, which were scattered all over the sprawling autumn campus, was made far easier by the fact that Zane seemed to be in almost all of the same classes as James and Ralph, and he knew his way around the campus very well.

       The class names, however, often seemed unnecessarily obtuse and confusing. Many of the classes James was accustomed to at Hogwarts didn't seem to have any American equivalent whatsoever. On the other hand, the American wizarding curriculum included courses on such things as Muggle Occupation Studies (or Mug-Occ, as it was known among the students) and Clockwork Mechanics, which were not at all a part of James' previous Hogwarts studies.

       Some of the classes he liked quite a lot, such as Magi-American History, which was taught by a full-fledged American giant named Paul Bunyan, and Advanced Elemental Transmutation, which was the American version of Transfiguration. Others he dreaded exquisitely, such as Precognitive Engineering and Mageography, with the stultifyingly dull Professor Wimrinkle. His most hated class, however, was the American equivalent of Defense Against the Dark Arts, known locally as Forbidden Practices and Cursology. Taught by the insufferable Persephone Remora, the only students that seemed to enjoy the class were the members of her own Vampire House, who adored and revered the professor with something like fanatical devotion.

       As it turned out, Remora had made quite a reputation for herself by writing a series of wizarding romance novels about fictional American vampires with amazingly cool names and darkly dashing personalities. In class, she made thinly veiled references to the ongoing progress of her latest book, claiming that her stories were not fictional at all, but merely novelized accounts of her own life experiences.

       'Much like another series of books based loosely on the exploits of a certain famous wizard,' she said in class, sniffing disdainfully and glancing furtively at James. 'Although mine,' she went on breezily, 'are not biased in favor of the main characters. I write my tales exactly as they happened, with an eye toward intellectual honesty.'

       'And adjective-heavy run-on sentences,' Zane mumbled under his breath, his face low over his parchment as he doodled.

The Shard of the Amsera Certh had proven to be exactly as refreshing to James and Ralph as Merlin had implied. Most afternoons, James would return to his and Ralph's dormitory room on the third floor of Apollo Mansion and uncover the Shard. He'd tap it with his wand and say the phrase that Merlin had taught him and watch as the Gryffindor common room swam into view, usually filled with late evening activity. The first time he had done it, both Ralph and Zane had been with him, and they had succeeded in startling Cameron Creevey quite badly, calling his name from the enchanted mirror over the Gryffindor fireplace.

       'Cam!' James had called, cupping his hands to his mouth and leaning close to the Shard where it hung on the back of his dormitory room door. 'Cam! Can you hear me? It's me and Ralph and Zane! Where's Rose and everybody?'

       Cameron had lowered the Potions book he'd been studying and glanced around uncertainly. When James