18 months later, June 20 2006
Susan leaned against the bright green railing and watched the traffic on the floor below, queued and orderly. Step up to the screen, select a destination, walk through the gate when the lights turn green, over and over. She'd seen the numbers, and Britain was nowhere near as profitable as any of the American branches, but travel was steadily increasing despite the six-month anti-JoPo propaganda campaign that had raged since the branch finally opened.
The bank of five coordinator stations, one for each gate, sat just behind her and sipped their mid-morning tea, just as she did. Rose said good morning to them all before she joined Susan at the railing.
"Good morning yourself, miss Branch Manager." Susan smiled at the woman.
"And you, miss District Manager." Rose smiled back. It was a running joke between them at that point, as they both did whatever duties needed to be done whenever Sue was present. She also had to oversee the Belfast and Dublin branches, but only did so one day each per week.
"Best part of the morning, this is." Rose sipped her tea and smiled out over the gate floor. "I absolutely love this building. So much light, so open, and so completely alien to everything else in the Alley."
Susan chuckled in return, and absolutely felt the same. It was state-of-the-art twenty-first-century steel-and-glass architecture sat next to crumbling Tudor 'charm'. It let Sue and Rose stand at the railing and watch the entire Alley, all the way down. From Gringott's next door to Flourish and Blott's all the way down the path, they could see anything and everything.
"Best view, best company, best job, best colleagues." Sue smiled back.
"And sticking it to the Ministry doesn't have anything to do with it, of course." Rose's smile went savage for a moment, and then dropped entirely. "It makes me wonder how long it will be before they -" The rest of her sentence was cut off by a sudden klaxon.
The lights around gate three went red, and slowly strobed.
Rose dashed to coordinator station three to see what the issue was, and Sue followed at a more sedate pace.
"Please step away from pad three. Incoming Auror transport." Rose's pre-recorded voice sounded throughout the gate floor, "Please step away from pad three. Incoming Auror transport."
When she caught up with Rose, the coordinator had already finished inputting the coordinates, and sat with finger poised above the Enter button, ready to activate the gate as soon as the Aurors had assembled. A series of four CRACK sounds announced their arrival directly in front of pad three, and they all simultaneously turned to look up at Rose.
The portal opened as Rose gave the Aurors the thumbs-up go signal, and the four of them dashed through the portal. Once they were clear of the gate, it closed and the lights went back to green. The klaxon shut off, and within ten seconds it was like nothing had happened at all.
The coordinator, a younger woman who Sue swore must be fresh out of Hogwarts, relaxed back into her chair and sipped her own tea, a contented smile on her face.
"Nicely done, Nat." Rose congratulated her.
Nat smiled back and clinked mugs with her. "Cheers, Rosie."
Then again, seeing them together, she and Rose looked the same age. It hit Sue in the guts again that she was the boss. The senior. "Surrounded by kids." She grumbled.
Then again, the co-owner of the company - one of the two people she worked for - was her own age, so she felt a little better about that.
She watched the traffic ebb and flow below for a few more minutes, but before she could reach the bottom of her cup of tea, she saw trouble coming up the alley toward them.
A troupe of three Aurors followed a smiling Rebarbus Nott toward the front door.
Rose saw the group approach, and sighed heavily. "Trouble." She said tensely.
"Definitely." She agreed, "I'll handle them."
"Good." Rose capitulated, "I'd rather hex them blue." She frowned at the group as they entered the building, pushing paying customers aside to get to the stairs that led to the coordinator's balcony and the offices beyond.
Sue stood up tall and made sure her wand was loose in its holster.
"This is a restricted area, Rhubarb." She said when they approached. "I'll have to ask you to return to the business floor below."
"Cunt." Nott grunted, and held up the piece of parchment in his hand. "By order of the Wizengamot, you are to immediately cease all operations and hand over all assets and control codes to me." He tried to be commanding with his voice, but Sue had grown up with her Aunt doing the same thing and it had the opposite effect.
Sue laughed in his face. "Yeah, that'll happen." She said, "We have a contract, and you're breaking the law by even suggesting it."
Nott's face twisted into petulant anger. "As a matter of fact, some laws changed recently, and demanding my Pureblood due from your filthy mudblood boss is my right and privilege." He shook the parchment in front of her. "As per this order! The codes! Now!"
Susan sighed and shook her head, though she wore a suffering smile. "I swear to Merlin wizards in Britain must be born with brain damage. You really don't have a single clue what you're doing, do you?"
"I'm taking what is rightfully mine, slag! Give me the fucking codes NOW!"
Susan looked him in his beady little eyes, and let him see how much she wanted to curse him. "Alright, you asked for this." She said, and turned to the operating floor. "Ident confirm Susan Bones, District Director for the UK." She shouted.
"Ident Confirmed." A different disembodied voice acknowledged. Susan suspected it was Gwenog Jones's voice, her other boss, but as they hadn't met she couldn't be sure.
"Whirlwind touchdown!" She yelled, "Scorched Earth protocol!"
The portals all closed and turned purple instantly, then all pulsed as one. They seemed to twist inside out as they were all pulled into a single point and all vanished in an instant. The inlaid runepads on the floor beneath each portal flared with white light and melted into glass slag.
Nott's jaw opened and his eyes went round as saucers as he watched.
The coordinators all shoved themselves backward, rolling in their chairs away from their terminals as they too melted into glass slag that steamed on the floor.
"What have you done?!" Nott screamed at her. The hand he didn't have on his precious little parchment balled into a fist.
"My job," Susan answered, "You functionally retarded chimpanzee. Enjoy your ICW sanctions."
"Arrest her!" Nott yelled, and pointed his finger at her. The Aurors behind him pulled their wands out.
"All London HQ emergency recall." Susan said, and everyone in the room vanished as the entire staff of JoPo London branch appeared together in the Sydney headquarters.
"What a fucking idiot." Rose said sadly.
Sue opened her mouth to agree, but was prevented by an Australian-accented voice coming over the loudspeaker. "Miss Bones, Miss Zeller, please proceed to the CEO's office on the seventh floor."
Sue sighed. "Now I have to explain to the boss why I melted the London branch."
"For what it's worth, I'm glad it's you instead of me. She scared the shit out of me in school." Rose whispered.
Sue had to chuckle at that. She remembered Malfoy getting punched into the hospital wing. "Well we're both going, so clench up."
She walked over to the elevator and rode it to the seventh floor.
"Go right in, she's waiting for you both." The secretary said when they approached her office.
They opened the door to the office and stepped through, though Rose took a quick look back at the secretary before the door closed again. Sue strode forward and shook hands with Hermione.
"I melted the London branch, Sorry." She said immediately.
To her surprise, Hermione chuckled. "Relax. Take a seat." Hermione gestured to the plush sofas that faced each other. Between them was a low coffee table, and a flat screen adorned the wall in line with the coffee table. Hermione took her laptop from the desk and set it on the coffee table in front of her, opposite herself and Rose.
"First of all, you did everything perfectly." Hermione smiled at them. "I couldn't have asked for a better outcome."
"You what?" Rose blurted.
Hermione chuckled again. "We've been expecting this for days. We suspected something like this would happen in Britain, especially after we made them pay through the nose for access. While you and I were setting up the branch Sue, Harry installed cameras in the Wizengamot chambers. Muggle ones. Because they don't have any magic on them, nobody ever found them."
She tapped a few keys on her laptop, and the screen on the wall flared to life. It showed a minute-long clip of the Wizengamot voting to 'put the mudblood in her place'. There were a few who voted against of course - Neville, his grandmother, and few others, but it was resoundingly passed. The author of the legislation, Rebarbus Nott, grinned hungrily.
"Honestly, I'm surprised it took them a whole six months to invalidate the contract." Hermione smiled at them.
"Well, that's a load of stress off my mind, thanks for that." Sue replied.
"Remind me never to plot against you." Rose said.
Hermione chuckled again, and tapped some more keys. Another video played, this one a compilation of the previous Wizengamot vote, with video of Nott's confrontation inside the branch added to it. The very end of the video showed the printed message 'JoPo service is hereby permanently removed from Britain. This is who you have to thank for it.'
"This is already playing on screens in every branch around the world, as well as every screen that JoPo owns otherwise - including inside the Leaky Cauldron and the Three Broomsticks." Hermione closed her laptop and relaxed back on the sofa.
"I would NOT want to be Nott in the coming weeks." Rose said.
"As I said, we expected things would go this way, so we've prepared a transfer package for everyone from the London branch. Do you want to keep watch over Ireland, or would you like somewhere else?" Hermione asked her.
"I'll stay in Ireland if you need me to." Sue replied, "Do you need me to?"
Hermione shook her head. "Truthfully Ireland ticks along wonderfully by itself. I could really use you in Buenos Aires. You'd be doing me a favour."
"Buenos... that's where?" She asked.
"Capital of Argentina." Hermione replied. "Weather-wise, it's like the Majorca of South America."
"Sold!" Sue answered immediately.
Hermione smiled, and turned to Rose. "How about you Rose, any preference?"
"Umm..." Rose looked between the two of them. "I think I'd like Buenos Aires... and your secretary's phone number. He is cute." Rose blushed.
Hermione laughed. "Buenos Aires I can give you, the phone number you'll have to get on your own."
Sue and Rose left the office a minute later, and Sue proceeded alone to the elevator, where she dropped to the portal room in the basement. Less than a minute later, she overlooked the south Atlantic from her penthouse window.
Life was good.