The silence in the room was thick, broken only by Astoria's muffled sniffles and the frantic rustle of Theodore Nott testing the locked door again, his shoulders tight with frustration.
"It's no use," Anthony said, his voice low. He had moved to the room's single large window, his hands pressed against the cool, grimy glass. "Whoever put us here isn't just listening."
Ron, feeling a desperate need to do something, joined him. The view was even more staggering up close. The skyscrapers were a jagged, concrete forest, layered with a maze of elevated roads where strange, boxy cars moved in silent, orderly streams. Bright, colorful signs glowed even in the daytime haze, adorned with bizarre, angular writing.
"Blimey," Ron breathed, his nose almost touching the glass. "Where… is this? It's massive."
"It's a city," Anthony stated the obvious, his brow furrowed. "A huge one. Bigger than London. But… the writing…" He squinted, pointing at a vibrant red sign nearby with white characters. "That's not any language I know. It's not French, it's not German… the alphabet is all wrong."
Theodore, abandoning the door with a scoff, strode over and shouldered Ron aside to get a better look. "Let me see." His eyes, sharp and critical, scanned the signage. He stared at a bold, black-on-white sign on a building across the street: 株式会社.
For a long moment, he was silent, his face a mask of concentration. Then, a flicker of recognition, followed by dawning disbelief.
"No," he muttered, more to himself than to them. "That's not possible."
"What?" Ron asked, irritation flaring. "What is it?"
Theodore pointed a slender finger at the sign. "That… those characters. I've seen them before. In my father's library. In a book on international wizarding communities." He turned to face them, his pale face even paler. "That's Japanese."
The word hung in the air, alien and heavy.
"Japanese?" Ron repeated, dumbfounded. "As in… Japan? But that's… that's on the other side of the world!"
"Precisely," Theodore snapped, his composure cracking. "How in Merlin's name did we get from Scotland to Japan in the blink of an eye? No Portkey, no Floo powder… nothing!"
Anthony's analytical mind was racing, trying to fit the pieces into a framework that made sense. "A powerful, long-range international Portkey? But why? And why us? Why lock us in a… a Muggle flat?" The word "Muggle" felt strange and inadequate to describe the sheer, overwhelming scale of the technology outside.
Astoria had uncurled slightly, listening. Her large, grey eyes were wide with a new kind of fear. Japan wasn't a magical concept; it was a place on a globe, impossibly far from home.
Ron stared back out the window, but now he was seeing it differently. It wasn't just a strange city; it was a specific, real place he knew only from whispered mentions in History of Magic. The sheer distance hit him like a physical blow. The familiar comfort of the Burrow, the Great Hall, even the Forbidden Forest—all of it was gone, replaced by this humming, anonymous, concrete behemoth.
"Japan," Ron whispered again, the word tasting foreign on his tongue. It wasn't an answer. It was a deeper, more profound question. How? And why? The four of them, from four different houses, bound together by nothing but their robes and this terrifying, shared dislocation, were stranded in a country whose language they didn't speak, whose world they didn't understand, with no way home in sight. The locked door was now the least of their problems.