Wizards came of age at seventeen.
Today happened to be Loren's birthday.
The two got up at first light, left their New York hotel, and followed the directions in a travel brochure to a volcano in eastern Maui Island, Hawaii State.
The volcano was called Haleakala, a dormant volcano.
Geologists had written hundreds of thousands of words of explanation, examining geological movements, tectonic compression, and ocean current effects over thousands or even tens of thousands of years, proving that it had not erupted in two hundred years. Yet at the end, they abruptly added a rigorous warning that another eruption in the future could not be ruled out.
Merchants and tourists naturally ignored the warning, treating it as the ramblings of old scholars. The place had now been developed into a tourist attraction, and the travel brochure described it as having the most beautiful sunrise.
It took the two of them more than ten minutes to Apparate there.
When they reached the base of the volcano, the sky was still dim. Between the lava piles were only rough trails, which shortened the route to the crater for tourists. Their sole drawback was the loose ground; tourists in poorer physical condition struggled desperately to climb them.
It also took the two of them more than ten minutes to climb to the crater.
For wizards who had mastered Apparition, crossing half a country was really about the same as crossing several hundred meters of vertical distance.
There was no public transportation for part of the distance within the scenic area, and several drivers even blacker than Obsidian were soliciting passengers. Whether tourists got fleeced depended on their skin color; black tourists got it worst. Judging by how arrogantly they cursed at tourists, the Federal Tax Bureau probably had no authority here.
Loren