Post by Vivian River Jordan on Jul 22, 2023 9:23:12 GMT -7
14 April 2029
Okay, Viv was definitely noticing the vibe. Look, she wasn’t going to pretend that Potterwatch hadn’t changed things for her. She’d been decently well-liked at school, but that had never translated into whispers following after her in the corridors. And at the beginning, Potterwatch had just been a tiny little show doing its best to keep up with the sharks of the industry – the talk shows and segments that had a dedicated time slot and loyal fans that kept them afloat. But then she’d gotten real popular real fast, and ever since her memorial episode for the Battle of Hogwarts a couple years ago…well, it was like constantly adding fuel to a blazing fire. You did what you could and hoped it would survive the winds that came to challenge it.
So she’d been riding the wave since then and yeah, that meant getting recognized when she went out in public. Viv was always happy to snap a selfie or fist-bump enthusiastic Potterheads when she passed them in Diagon Alley, but it wasn’t like that today. No, she’d definitely noticed the vibe and something felt off. She hadn’t noticed it at first, because her mind had been dwelling almost exclusively on Fortescue’s and the new flavors they’d been advertising for the last few weeks. So crossing from the Leaky Cauldron into Diagon Alley was pretty unremarkable, and Vivian followed the momentum of the crowd while she walked past witches doing their shopping and a group of goblins that seemed to be playing some kind of unrecognizable card game. But after a few moments, she began to notice the difference. Like…she hadn’t had to use her elbows to push through the crowd yet. No one was jostling her or squeezing past to enter one of the storefronts.
She stopped suddenly in the street, and the bubble followed her -- except maybe with a few more glances in her direction. And that was when she began to really notice it. There was a nervous sort of energy in this part of the Alley, and people kept shooting her furtive glances and then looking away whenever they noticed her staring. Whatever it was, nobody seemed to have worked up the courage to approach her yet, so Viv frowned slightly and kept walking. She could see the colorful ice cream parlor straight ahead, but some of her infectious energy had dimmed at the possibility that people…well, they seemed apprehensive about being near her, didn’t they? She couldn’t imagine why. Viv’s last segment on the show had been about the new puffskein play place that’d just opened up in Horizont. And who didn’t love puffskeins?
The wide array of ice creams in front of her didn’t seem to have the answers, but Viv gazed intently at them as if they’d shout something at her anyway. Like maybe they could point out if she had bad breath or had accidentally insulted the niffler lobby by playing with puffskeins. A little bell tinkled as somebody opened the door, and Viv glanced behind her before turning around more fully. She finally felt more like herself as she smiled crookedly at Albus Potter standing rigid as a bowtruckle in his blood-red Auror robes. “Let me guess,” she said before he could do anything silly like turn right around and leave, “There’s an ice cream caper ‘bout to go down and you’re the last man standing between ice cream and justice.”
Albus Severus Potter
