6 Sept 2012
4pm, Thursday
Daily Prophet Headquarters, Diagon AlleyIt had been about a fortnight since the Daily Prophet's tyrannical editor Barnabas Cuffe had un-vanished
[1] and he was in a cyclone getting caught up. Assessing the damage, cleaning house, fending of nosy questions, reclaiming his space. Things had gotten unsettlingly
democratic in his absence; there was a distinct casual smell over everything, a slackening of urgency.
This afternoon, he was in his office which overlooked the bullpen and its rows of cubicles. On the other side of the converted warehouse, the massive printing press whirred away with the evening edition.
Figaro Sellaphix, the fuck-up errand-boy who was no longer cowering, shouldered his way through the glass doors of the office without knocking owing to his hands being full. He was carrying a heavy crate of files and document cases.
"Does this look like the &!&@'ing mailroom, Simmons?" he snapped. "Head injury? Seizure - no! Not there! @#$!"
Figaro had set the crate down on the chair in front of Cuffe's desk and truly did seem barely cowed at the unwelcome. "It's for you," he said, a touch breathless from carrying it up. "Well, Thursby said I should deliver it directly."
Niobe Thursby was constantly setting Figaro up for suicide-mission deliveries. Cuffe came around the desk and took one of the files from on top of the file.
"Where did this come from?" he demanded.
"Came in the post," Figaro said putting his hands in his pockets. "Took six owls to bring it in. There's a note - whole thing got lost in the system. From '94."
"Stop grinning, you look &#^ing stupid," Cuffe grumbled, then halted when he read the name of the owner of the files. "Eastman!"
They were all apparently the property of Judith Eastman, meant to be sent on to whatever shitty thing she had left the Daily Prophet to do in the 90s. Some idiot had rerouted the entire thing back to the Daily Prophet twenty years late.
Cuffe ought to have handed off the entire thing to an assistant, delegate the meaningless out-dated papers to someone less busy than the editor. But Cuffe was a spiteful man, and jealous, and certainly hadn't been following Judith Eastman's successful career. With a little more checking, he knew just where to find her.
[6 Sept 2012] Back From the Dead and Not Even a Letter