Chapter 89: Vaisey, the Golden Goose
Vaisey had intended to head to Diagon Alley first thing in the morning, but as he was leaving, he received a message on his communicator from the Weasley twins. They asked when he was going and if they could hitch a ride. He delayed his departure until the three of them had met up, and then Apparated them all together.
"So this is Apparition," George said, looking a little green around the gills as he caught his breath. "Much more exciting than Floo Powder or Portkeys."
"I hear you need a license for this," Fred added, looking equally queasy.
"According to wizarding law, yes," Vaisey confirmed. He had brought them to a secluded corner of the street outside the Leaky Cauldron rather than directly into Diagon Alley. "Fancy a drink?" he asked as they stepped into the pub.
"I wouldn't say no," said George.
"Me neither," said Fred.
"But," they said in unison, "we have work to do, and drinking on the job is bad form."
"Afterward, then."
The trio passed through the pub and out into the small courtyard, where Vaisey tapped the bricks to reveal the entrance to Diagon Alley. The first, and indeed only, thing that caught their eye was the towering structure of the Tower of Wonders. In the morning sun, its orbiting rings shifted and shimmered as if they were absorbing the light, performing some mysterious, arcane ritual. The tower itself had a smooth, glossy finish, a mixture of obsidian and obsidian, that seemed to entrance every passerby who gazed upon it.
As they drew closer, they could hear the stunned exclamations of the wizards who had gathered to stare.
"Ryan Welles built this entire tower by himself, in just a few minutes!"
"Impossible! He's just a student!"
"Ryan Welles, the prophet? But isn't he a prophet?"
"Building a tower in minutes... is that something a wizard can even do?"
One particularly well-informed wizard, who likely had pure-blood connections, puffed out his chest and preened, stroking his mustache. "You're all behind the times!" he declared.
"Do you have more astonishing news for us, then?" someone asked.
"Of course! You'll see it for yourselves when today's Daily Prophet comes out. Last night, the House of Selwyn—one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight—suddenly appointed a new patriarch. And this new patriarch is a fifth-year student." He leaned in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "This new patriarch, Vaisey, is supposedly best mates with Ryan Welles. And before yesterday, he had absolutely no power within his family!"
The implication hung in the air, and the surrounding crowd let out a collective gasp, doing their part to contribute to global warming.
"But that's one of the sacred pure-blood houses! How could they be—" A wizard couldn't even bring himself to say the word "threatened." He couldn't imagine how Ryan could have forced a noble house to hand over its leadership to a schoolboy.
Before he could finish, George and Fred began shouldering their way through the crowd. "Make way, make way!" they shouted. "The great Mr. Vaisey Selwyn is here to inspect the communicator operations at the Tower of Wonders!"
At the mention of the name, every head turned. The crowd stared at Vaisey as if he were a unicorn prancing down the street, trying to size him up.
"He's quite handsome."
"He certainly looks the part. So young and already so accomplished."
The middle-aged wizards with daughters of a suitable age suddenly looked at Vaisey with a new, intense interest, as if he were a prized Hippogriff. They eyed each other warily, each seeing a potential rival for a very advantageous match.
Vaisey, though used to being in the spotlight, felt a prickle of discomfort under the weight of so many calculating stares. He quickened his pace, dragging the smirking Weasley twins with him into the Tower of Wonders.
Even after the three had disappeared inside, the crowd continued to buzz. "Three minutes! I want all the information you can find on this Vaisey Selwyn!" one wizard barked at his owl.
Inside the tower, the production area of the ground floor was already piled high with standard-issue communicators. Vaisey, his mind still reeling from the events of the past twenty-four hours, was not as shocked as he might have been. The Weasley twins, however, whose lifelong dream had been to open a simple joke shop, were utterly staggered.
"Merlin's beard!" George exclaimed, picking up a communicator with a trembling hand. "How long would it take us to make this many of our products?"
"I thought Ryan only just set this all up yesterday," Fred said, his voice full of awe. "This is a year's worth of our work, produced in a single day." He felt a pang of relief that he was now in a different line of business. His own handmade products would have been completely obliterated by this kind of alchemical assembly line, both in quantity and quality. And that wasn't even considering the complexity of the craftsmanship. Even the standard communicator required a level of technical skill far beyond anything found in a joke shop.
"You're here to install Hogwarts: The Betrayal," Vaisey said, recovering his composure. "How does it work?" He knew these two would be his key lieutenants. As the game was tied to the communicator, it fell under his purview, and as the head of the project, he needed to understand every aspect of the operation.
"It's simple, really. Ryan's already built the master unit," George said, pointing to an idle alchemical device. "He said it uses a technique similar to a Pensieve. We just have to extract our memories of the game's rules, background, and settings, and infuse them into the device. It creates a template that can then be installed as a new layer on every communicator."
"The installation uses a powerful, modified Transfiguration Charm," Fred added. "So, when we have new ideas for what Ryan called 'game updates,' we can just use this device to implement them. The changes will be pushed out to every single communicator at the same time."
Even as they explained it, their voices were filled with reverence. As members of an ancient pure-blood family themselves, they had access to old family spellbooks. They understood just how incredibly difficult this was. A normal Transfiguration Charm had a limited range. But Ryan had told them that the charm on this machine could cover every place on the planet where wizards existed. It was a terrifying thought.
(Ryan, currently locked in a library: When the Headmaster told me about it, I thought the same thing. The White Lord could probably conquer the entire wizarding world by himself if no one stood in his way.)
As they were talking, their communicators all vibrated. They checked them to see a new discussion popping up in the group chat about that day's Daily Prophet.
But contrary to the speculation of the crowd outside, the headline was not about the communicator, nor was it about Vaisey becoming the new patriarch of the House of Selwyn.
Today's front page of the Daily Prophet read:
SHOCKING MASSACRE IN NORTH AMERICA'S GREAT LAKES REGION!
~~~
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