Harry Potter awoke from his nap with a jerk. A quick glance out of the window of the sedan showed that he was almost at his destination; the site of his first job assignment since graduating from Hogwarts. He was in Nottinghamshire, in the heart of England, tasked with auditing the operations of a great sleep mine owned by his employer, Hibernia Industrial. The car pulled to a halt on the gravel parking lot, and the driver went around to let Harry out of the vehicle. A visibly angry man came out of the mine offices to greet him.
"Oi, you'll be Harry Potter then? The wizard?"
Harry nodded. It was clear from his tone that the man didn't like wizards much. Most people believed that wizards skated through a life of privilege, magicking any and all problems away with a gesture. It would seem that the mine liaison was among them.
Of course, the darker sides of wizardly life were carefully kept from public consciousness.
The representative said, "I'm the Assistant Director of Plant Operations; name's Jasper Jerkwad. Save it; I've heard them all already."
Harry couldn't stop himself. "Jerkwad?"
Jasper glared. "Old Nottinghamshire name. Very good pedigree, you'd find. I'm sure it's just a bit too much bother for a wizard."
"Sorry. Shall we begin the inspection?"
"May as well get it over with," Jasper agreed with a sigh.
The first order of business was to get a bird's eye view of plant operations from inside the facility's offices. A small building that graced one side of the vast lot served as the mine's nerve center. Harry took careful notes on how many employees were at work and how busy they seemed; it was a far cry from the airy adventures of his youth, but he had to do something to pay the bills. Unfortunately, contrary to public expectation, he couldn't just magick away his and Ginny's monthly rent.
In the foyer, there was a small, shining stone under Plexiglas. Harry recognized it at once – it was carmot, the strange, crystalline mineral the mine was tearing out of the bones of the earth. This chunk of carmot was unrefined and mostly spent, but it still had the otherworldly luster that gave the material away every time. Scenes from the subconscious mines of nearby employees played on the chunk's irregular surfaces, and with a sudden blush of embarrassment Harry realized that one of the surfaces showed a scene from his own inner life.
The stone showed an entirely naked Ginny twirling seductively on a pole. Her breasts bounced with each rotation, and a bush of trimmed red pubic fur ground against the cool steel of the stripper pole. Her labia left long smears of honey along the sides of the pole as she spun. Harry tried to exorcise the image by thinking of his graduating class in their underwear, but it was no use. The ghostly image of Ginny slipped, fell, and smashed her head on the edge of the stage. Jasper actually pointed and laughed.
"Let's just keep moving," Harry said icily.
Since the discovery of carmot in the year xxxx, the people of the world had turned its refinement and distribution into a science. The crystal was cleaned, pulverized, and extracted until it was a powder available over the counter in any druggist from Daventry to Djibouti. The drug was inhaled through the nose and now hardly anyone could get a regular night's sleep without it. The carmot veins of Nottinghamshire became a precious natural resource, and gave a floundering British economy a much needed source of income.
Harry was bored as shit as they toured the rest of the offices. Harry thought he might fall asleep standing on his own feet, though he continued to take careful notes on the iPad Air provided by his employers. Finally, Jasper led him to a locker room on the first floor of the building.
"Put this on." Jasper tossed the wizard a dusty jumpsuit that, by its Hagrid-like odor, had clearly contained hundreds of other men in its day.
"Er, why?"
Jasper stared at him, and answered slowly, as if speaking to a mongoloid. "It's fair filthy down in the mines. You wouldn't want to ruin your fancy clothes, now would you?"
Harry saw the point at once, and stripped off his starched business suit. Following Jasper's lead, he climbed into the dusty, malodorous beige jumpsuit. The wizard carefully hung his clothes in the locker, and realized with some annoyance that his expensive new wingtips, bought solely for his job, were bound to get ruined if it were as dirty down in the mines as he was being led to expect.
"You don't have any spare shoes, have you?" Harry asked without much hope.
"Sorry, mate."
Their next stop was a room with a biohazard seal emblazoned on the door and the thick stench of animal urine penetrating Harry's every pore. He almost gagged.
"What's all this?" Harry demanded.
Jerkwad didn't answer him, and instead, led the consultant inside the revolting animal prison without the slightest hint of olfactory distress.
The walls of the room were lined with cages, and the hysterical-looking ferrets inside chattered angrily and hissed at the pair. They were clearly ill cared for, and two lay dead in their own shit. The cages were labeled with information; something about the arrangement of data suggested to Harry that the most important question was when the ferret had last been allowed to sleep. The wizard said nothing and watched, torn between disgust, confusion, and downright curiosity. Jasper selected one of the cages and pulled it off the wall. The ferret inside shrieked angrily. Despite the small enclosure, the ferret writhed in the cage like a mad thing, a miniature inferno of fur and flesh. Jasper just ignored it and picked a wicked-looking syringe off a nearby wall.
"What on earth are you doing?" asked Harry.
"Oh, this one's Gertrude." Jasper poked the ferret with the needle, eliciting a seething hiss from the deranged creature. "We keep them awake for days at a time, and then crank'em up on amphetamines when we go down into the mine. If she still manages to fall asleep, we know we've got a major Sleep leak on our hands and we evacuate the mine immediately."
Harry shuddered, but the reasoning was sound enough. He also didn't feel that he had much place telling Jasper his business; after all, Harry was just a corporate suit and didn't have the expertise to suggest a better course of action.
The two made their way to the mine's huge freight elevator, and Harry almost quit his job then and there. It was an oily, rickety, industrial thing, and stepping aboard was enough to make the metal cage sway beneath their feet. Potter blanched, and Jasper grinned the grin of a man looking forward to an opportunity to stick it to his betters. The ground gave way beneath Harry without warning and then the elevator was going down.
It took them almost ten minutes to reach the bottom of the shaft, with Harry clinging to one of the elevator's steel rails the entire time. Jasper looked nonchalant, and the man had the gall to actually clip his fingernails despite the violent shaking of the contraption bearing them down into the bowels of the Earth. Harry would have glared, but he could barely keep his eyes focused, let alone work up a good stinkeye. Finally, the elevator clattered into its foundation at the bottom of the shaft, and Jasper opened the narrow rail that was all that prevented them from falling to their deaths.
"After you," Jasper said airily.
As for Harry, he was so grateful to get off the thing that he didn't protest. Gertrude rattled her cage, hissing like a deranged dragon.
Jasper said, "Oi, that one."
Harry looked to where the man was pointing. There was a second elevator, which obviously led even deeper into the mines.
"Isn't this deep enough?" asked Harry weakly.
"'course not. If you're going to really get a sight of working conditions here, you'll have to see the heart of darkness, as it were. All aboard!"
Harry stepped onto the second freight elevator with great trepidation. If anything, it was even more rickety than the one leading to the surface. The ride to the bottom seemed eternal, and Harry noticed pinpricks of sweat leaking out of his forehead as the air got hotter and thicker as they descended. He judged the temperature at a hundred degrees or more when they finally reached the bottom of the shaft.
After they debarked, they walked. They were in an enormous tunnel dynamited into existence with hundreds of tons of explosives, and it was held up by wooden girders woven together with pure steel. Harry expected that it would only take them a few minutes of walking through the mammoth tunnel to reach an active vein, but to his astonishment, they walked, walked, and walked some more before they heard the characteristic plink of steel against stone.
"We must be a mile from the elevator!" Harry gasped with astonishment.
Jasper paused long enough to peer into Gertrude's cage. Sure enough, the ferret was still beside herself with coked-up wrath.
"Aye, more or less. It actually goes much further than this. Some tunnels are a full five miles from the elevator. The bosses want to sink more shafts, for safety and efficiency, but your owners won't hear of it."
"I'll be sure to add a note to that effect in my report," Harry replied weakly.
Finally they made it to a tunnel where men were actually working. At first Harry wondered if he were looking at some sort of imp or sprite, but with a sudden start, he realized that the miner's short statures actually meant –
"You employ children to work the mine?" Harry asked, aghast.
The man shrugged. "They're just Pakis, innit?"
Harry Potter stirred in protest, but a closer look revealed that the man's the logic was sound. Underneath the patina of dust that covered everything underground, brown skin showed through. Under the Subadult Occupational Licensing regulations of xxxx, children were allowed to work the mines, just so long as they were foreign. Further rules stipulated that they couldn't be beaten with sticks wider than a human thumb and that they must be fed a healthy minimum of calories per day. They didn't get paid, of course, but everyone except the children themselves agreed that it was a much better deal than they would have gotten in their home countries; furthermore, they got valuable work experience that could help them land a job in their home countries after they were unceremoniously deported on their eighteenth birthdays. So it all worked out.
The boys wore dust masks to keep carmot from getting into their lungs and putting them straight to sleep, and Harry and Jasper both quickly affixed their own over their noses and mouths. The boys sang in muffled Urdu as they worked, hammering out large crystals of unpolished, unrefined carmot ore and throwing them into a nearby hopper.
"Do they make good workers?" Harry asked over the din.
"Aye, well enough," Jasper answered. "It takes a few beatings to break them in and no mistake. No doubt they have it better here in Merry Olde England than they'd have it in their home cesspools, at any rate. Too bad nobody can understand a damn word the buggers say."
"Maybe a translator…?" Harry suggested meekly.
Jasper just waved him off.
"Doubt any of them are working out the Theory of Relativity down here, if you know what I mean," Jerkwad explained.
Harry observed the boys working and made some notes on his increasingly dust-covered tablet. Greater efficiency could be eked out of the mine, perhaps, but it would require a larger scale investment from its parent corporation. Since such investment was unlikely to be forthcoming, it looked like the mine was going to keep on operating just the way it was, making his presence there very nearly superfluous. Still, Harry couldn't afford to get fired on his first assignment and it was a resume building exercise that might one day lead him to middle management if he was lucky. The boys plinked on.
One of the plinks suddenly turned into a clang, and there was shouting in Urdu as one of the boys fell to the ground. Apparently, he'd hit a particularly hard patch of rock, and his pickaxe bounced off and knocked the dust mask off from over his mouth. The boy lay on the ground, and a quick examination showed him out like a light. Jasper was furious.
"Take Ahmed Ahmed back to the surface," he roared at the nearest boy, who was terrified. "Go on, or I'll switch you!"
Apparently the accosted boy knew just enough English to understand basic minework, and with no small difficulty, he hefted his stricken companion onto his shoulders and slowly dragged the boy towards the freight elevator.
"Will… will he be okay?" Harry asked weakly.
"Aye, he'll sleep like a baby for twenty hours and then wake up fresh as daisy," Jasper muttered. "Waste of 1200 kcal."
The other boys quickly went back to their task, unwilling to risk the wrath of Jasper.
"Anything else you need to see here, Mr. Potter?" Jerkwad asked with just enough solicitousness to be sarcastic.
"No, I suppose we're done here."
The two rode back up to the surface in silence. Gertrude continued to thrash around in her cage like a mad thing, desperate to sleep but too chemically wired to lie down for more than a few seconds at a time. Harry sighed. This wasn't the kind of world that a Hogwart's education had prepared him for. Finally, the elevator spat them out just outside the mine headquarters.
"Did you like your little tour?" asked Jasper.
"Fine, fine. It was fine," Harry coughed dusty phlegm. "I'm… eager to get back to London so I can make my report. I'll be sure to add your comments about the benefits of digging new shafts down into the mines."
"You do that. I'd be mooooost appreciative."
Jasper and Harry went back to the locker room, and Harry gratefully shucked off the jumpsuit and took a shower to try to sluice the dust off of him. He was dismayed to discover that rock dust not only all over his skin, but also in his tear ducts, in his ears, up his noise, and even in more delicate mucous membranes hardly fit to mention in a family tale. Like – inexplicably - inside his anus. It would be days before he'd be able to vacate powdered rock from everywhere in his body into which it had crept.
Finally, Harry put his suit back on, smearing the inside with wet grit. Jasper was nowhere to be seen so Harry decided to simply flee. He had to rap on the door of the sedan to wake his driver. He gratefully climbed into the backseat and took a short nap on his way back to corporate headquarters in London. When he arrived, he already had a new assignment scheduled by his boss after the next day's debriefing; he had to tour the company's carmot refinery in Leeds. Harry sighed.