Outfit

Cat food. One could never have enough, it seemed. Where had all the cat food gone? Molly knew the answer to that. Frosty, the seven-year-old mutt of a cat who had been the size of a sickle when she'd found him, was in dire need of a kitty diet. But Molly just hadn't the heart to tell him. And so she pretended not to notice when Frosty crept into the pantry in the dead of night and chewed the bottom of the cat food bag open like a mouse. Clever kitty. Bad kitty. (Alright, perhaps Molly was sleeping when that happened-- but it was the middle of the night!)

To no one's surprise but her own, the young woman wound up on the opposite end of the pet shop-- and then next door, in the Owl Emporium-- on her simple mission to buy feline fat-burning food. Frosty's pinched portions would have to wait another couple of hours. Now Molly was thinking of bringing a new friend home for the resident owl, Franklin ("Frank Jr")., who was quite possibly older than her baby brother himself.

Why not give him some company to share the load? It wasn't as if Molly mailed much in the first place, but with her job as Dolly's assistant, one never knew when one might require the enlisting of a whole army of owls. Better safe than sorry.

She came to the end of a row of baby owls, and her blue gaze locked in on a spotted, speckled, slightly bearded, little puff of an owl. It looked like a setter puppy... in owl form. A winged dog. Molly was always a sucker for the scruffy guys.

"Why, hello," hse cooed at it, reaching out to scratch under its chin. To Molly's astonishment, the owl gave a shiver, a quaver, and a sneeze. Feathers flounced from the bird like a volcano, and the woman was left wondering whether the poor dear was allergic. To her.

Was that?  That witch, was she...?  Niobe Thursby had stopped short outside of Eeylops Owl Emporium and used the cuff of her sleeve to wipe away the frost and grime.  She squinted and and cocked her head back and forth to get a better look at the blonde witch with the distinctive profile.

It was! It was Molly Pratt, one of Dolly St. James's poor assistants.  Niobe had recently begun to hate Dolly St. James, who previously had held a warm place in Niobe's fangirl heart.  Slither Girls was an excellent series, but Dolly herself had turned out to be as venemous as Salazar Slytherin himself.  All honor and journalistic integrity aside, there was nothing more that Niobe wanted than to regain some of the blood Dolly had spilled earlier that month.  God, that had been absolutely brutal.  Niobe grew tense just thinking about it, and had been feeling paranoid ever since.

She entered the shop briskly and with resolve, her dreadlocks bouncing wildly around her face, a mane for a Gryffindor lion. 

She sidled up to the other side of the big round, ornate cage with the owelets inside and grinned through the bars and feathers at Molly Pratt.

"Hello yourself, Molly Pratt!" she bubbled femininely.  "Looking for some feathery company?  Pleasure or business?"

The two witches had never met, but journalism was a gregarious business.  It paid to be friendly, even if you hated their boss's guts lately.

Molly flinched, her hand apparently in possession of a mind of its own. As her fingers debated reaching out to help the little creature, her eyes darted round to the source of the voice-- it certainly hadn't been the owl to greet her. Molly wasn't that dense. Only parrots could talk!

She found herself staring a friendly-faced, animated woman with the sort of wild hair Molly would have loved to have. Hers was wild in a different way: it never did anything she wanted it to. Other than that, it was rather mousy, and often laid flat. She quickly tucked a strand behind her ear and dropped her hand (the same one that had nearly reached for the owlet). She smiled, mild but confused. "Do I know you?"

And then, "Oh, Merlin, sorry-- I didn't mean it like that-- it's just." She squinted a bit, even as she blushed. "I'm so bad with names! Honest!" It was a terrible trait to have, considering her job. But she met so many people that sometimes she just... jumbled them up. And everyone knew it wasn't polite to consult one's charmed day planner while having a casual chat in an owlery. "Er, right, I'm molly-- but you knew that." She laughed, rolling her eyes at herself. If she'd been a little quicker, she might have turned over the newspaper tucked in the side of her bag-- where the woman's face was printed, plain as day, below a column, and moving just so in the tradition of wizarding photography. "I'm just here on my own time," she explained quickly, nodding her head at the semi-stranger. "Dolly's got plenty of owls, even she'd agree." Oh, Dolly.

Niobe would have liked to have been recognized, in fact, she'd assumed it!  She really really liked having a distinct appearance and her name all over the Daily Prophet every day, being attached to her hard work.  So when Miss Pratt couldn't place her, she bit her lip in a subconscious display of disappointment.  But the slighted expression didn't reach her eyes and they smiled, still friendly.

She was so sincere!  Niobe was struck by it.  She wasn't hard and polished like Dolly, who was a glittering fingernail.  Molly was plain.  Earnest. Nice.  Niobe realized she had no idea what she planned to do with her - Molly was disarming.

"I recognized you.  Got a knack for faces, I do," she said, still speaking more loudly than Molly.  "I write for the Daily Prophet; I'm Niobe Thursby." 

Niobe was around on Molly's side of the cage now, and offering her hand for a shake.  Would the artless Molly remain as sweet and gentle with a predator afoot?  Niobe's claws were sheathed, but Dolly knew better than to trust that on its own merits.

Five fingers darted to a soft and sugary mouth, splaying most appropriately in sincere surprise that could only be Molly's. Merlin, here she was, the personal assistant to Wizarding Britain's best-selling author, and she couldn't tell a journalist from a veterinarian. Worse, yet, she had seen Niobe's face in the paper every day for the past year, at least.

"Oh, of course," she gushed, lowering her hand, her eyes blinking like a deer's as she adjusted to the dawning of literary light. "You're the one who--" But she stopped herself suddenly, blushing like mad. She smiled, all guilty and caught, and made to touch the owl again for want of something to busy her animated digits. "Wrote that lovely piece about Dennis Creevey. Is he really so dreamy in person?" She finished, trying to save face in the clever way Dolly might have. (Unfortunately, she was not Dolly, and she couldn't lie half so well.)

You're the who my boss wants chased out of Britain, she thought to herself, focusing on the tiny owl, smoothing his feathers where they'd been ruffled. It was hopeless, she was already in love with the thing, and would have to take him home.

As for Niobe, she didn't seem half as poisonous as some of Molly's superiors made the woman out to be. In fact, she was sort of nice. "I bet remembering faces comes in handy when you interview so many people," she ventured, trying to be her usual friendly self. "My brother's a freelancer, you might know him. Frank Pratt?" She tilted her head, finally, catching the woman's eye again. "He's a bookhunter, mostly, though."

Niobe was amazed that this blushing, eyelash-batty creature could be real.  How did someone so docile survive under the thumb (and that is how Niobe assumed things were in that entourage) of Dolly St. James?  Niobe half wondered if she was being played this very moment and that, unawares, she'd already had her pocket picked.  Molly was... abashedly friendly and engaging.  How peculiar.

At the mention of her write up on Creevey's new son, Niobe shrugged with a falsely humble grin - all in a day's work.  It was a show though; she'd never met Creevey who was notoriously roguish when it came to sitting for interviews.  Plus the real story in that article had been the horrible poisoning of his squib girlfriend.  But who'd read about a squib if there wasn't a name like Creevey in the first line of the article? Sometimes the truth needed a little glamor to be noticed.  "They always seem shorter than you expect," she said evasively, referring to all celebrities that she met in her writerly comings and goings.  Prideful Niobe with her prideful mane.

"Frank Pratt?" she asked, surprised.  "Really?"  But then, with another moment's thought it made sense.  Frank Pratt was just... horribly cheerful.  Niobe had always assumed he freelanced because he lacked the grit to be unkind when necessary.  He was around the Daily Prophet from time to time, working on who knows what public interest silliness.  The really only notable thing about him was the rumors last fall about him being mugged.

"Didn't Frank get mugged last fall," Niobe asked.  Clearly rumors about the family of a person you just met were not out of bounds.  "Folks around the Prophet said he showed up after a few days with a broken nose and acting all dafty.  I mean, don't mean to spread gossip, but a nice bloke like Frank getting into trouble? Doesn't seem at all true, does it?"

Molly giggled, nodding as she understood, and then stopped, realizing she... didn't. As far as she was concerned, every celebrity she'd been lucky enough to meet (usually through Dolly) was as golden-auraed as they trophies they won in heaps at annual award celebrations. She'd never noticed anything off about their heights. But perhaps that was why Molly Pratt wasn't an investigative journalist. Her eye was more for... the clouds, or gum on the bottoms of her shoes. Anything she could doodle later on a pad of paper while listening to the Wireless and eating a bowl of-- hmm, what was for dinner?

Shaking herself out of the daydream, she grinned. "Oh, yes. Well, half-brother. Technically. But he's as whole a brother as anyone has ever had, I imagine..." Plus, he was the only one Molly had ever had. She be even more lost without him, even if the pair of them together could make a blushing maid in a Hogwarts painting roll her eyes. "He--"

Mugged? Molly knitted her brows, tilted her head, and looked rather like that little owl she planned to scoop up and take home. In her inquisitiveness, her eyes widened, and her brows lost their initial furrow, instead favoring arcs like a bridge breaking for boats. Frank, mugged! Never... well, sure he was a little clumsy, sometimes. Too nice their dad might say. But he was tall and sort of... burly... of late. Way more intimidating than Molly! Who would mug Frank?!

Molly's laugh gained a nervous edge. "I think you've got the wrong Frank Pratt," she offered. "Or maybe just the wrong Pratt. There are a lot of us running around. So many I'm still meeting them as I age." If her brother had broken his nose... She would have known about it, right? He would have told her, wouldn't he have? He would have told the law enforcement, at the very least. "He's too much of a giant teddy bear to be mugged. And journalists don't make a whole lot of--" Molly stopped, swished her lips to the side, and looked to the owl. "I mean book hunters, it's sort of a crazy, freelance... thingy," she murmured. Frank actually seemed to do well for himself, but neither of them were... well, Dolly St. James. If Molly were a petty thief, she'd cash in to felony level. She had to pay the rent some how!

Molly's hand reached nervously for her wand, and she gave it a little wave, clearing away some of the extra feathers that had fallen wayward post-sneeze. "I guess you do have your enemies," she finished, covering for herself. Badly. She looked back at Niobe hopefully. "But Frank, Frank wasn't mugged. He doesn't carry big bags of galleons around him. He's never broken his nose."

She smiled again. It seemed the safest route. She felt positively pushy, telling a journalist her facts were wrong. "Poor lad who did, though, right?"

Niobe shrugged, a little disappointed.  She'd have liked to have gotten some good talk on Frank, just for entertainment's sake.  But if anyone knew, it'd be Sister Pratt here - or, along that same line, if anyone would lie for Frank, again it'd be his sister.  Maybe Niobe had caught a whiff of what made such a genuine witch like Molly such a good candidate to be on the heels of Crazy People like St. James.

"My apologies," she said in retreat.  Cracking Molly Pratt would be like trying to keep a litter of puppies in one basket for a photo - cute but impossible.  "Must be thinking of someone else."

She stood there awkwardly and clicked her tongue.  "Do owl me, though, if Dolly ever needs anything from the Prophet,  yes?"

Molly nodded apologetically even as the journalist... apologized. She really wasn't so bad, this woman whom Dolly was so wary of. Her boss and dear friend had confided in her many a nights, but she still wondered the extent of the war between the two women. Sometimes it was hard to decipher what Dolly was telling her-- or what she'd written in her books-- and other times the St. James woman's lifestyle was so glamorous, so full of ballsy adventure, that Molly was left sitting there like an open-mouthed child. All in all, it was hard to conceptualize. But she was a little disappointed (and more than a little relieved) to discover that Niobe's painfully cool hair was not, in fact, made of snakes.

So! Should she play the spy for her boss? Admit a few coy truths that might appease them both? Badger the woman for more stories of this man named Frank Pratt, who surely must have been her brother's doppelganger?

"Oh, of course, we'll-- I'll be sure to do that. To let her know. Of your services." She winced. "Er, talents. I really do like your pieces on music and quidditch!" She admitted in a rush before she had time to think. But there was no harm in that, right? She blushed, and then smiled. "Do you think this little owl's allergies mean he's doomed as a message carrier?" She gestured to the woman's quill-savvy hands. "What sort of feathers do you prefer? I always wonder about writers... Frank, he... well, we're sort of different. I'm better at drawing things that never existed than writing anything worth reading."