Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I make no money from this. I have no nefarious intentions towards other people's intellectual property!
Chapter 2: Por Nada
I tried a Point Me first. It wasn't likely to work as it is a simple spell to block, but I held some hope that I could find the two quickly and return to my work. Of course my wand spun aimlessly each time. Pointless. I couldn't be sure if the failure of the spell meant anything in itself, it could have been blocked by any number of things: distance, a warded location, or even that house elves don't use true names. I sighed, I would have to put in some legwork after all.
Despite its name, Under City Importers was not part of the main underground wizarding quarter in Seattle. It took advantage of the cheap rents in the industrial district just off Harbor Island where it was located in a huge warehouse. It was well known for having the cheapest prices for the overstocked miscellany of the wizarding world. I had even been there once myself chasing down cheap vials. It of course turned out too good to be true – the vials were terrible Latvian knockoffs and I cracked the neck of the first one I tried to pry the stopper out of. I had never seen fit to return to the store until now.
The apparition point was near a loading dock across from the main entrance. I watched for a moment the shoppers entering in small groups, parents and students mostly, by the looks of them. I tried to convince myself that it would not feel crowded inside, even if it seemed a bit busy out front, as the cavernous space would quickly swallow them up. It would be nothing so bad as the markets in Manaus.
I passed through a couple of wards on the way in; just the basic anti-apparition and an alarm against removing objects whose alerting charms hadn't been deactivated. The lines were labeled in green lettering on the threshold.
The impersonal methods were undoubtedly effective for the big box stores favored by the Americans, but it made it almost impossible to find a clerk when you wanted one. I searched through a maze of aisles. I saw several clerks, but as they were all struggling to hold a Wingardium Leviosa on an enormous cage as they maneuvered it onto an upper shelf, I thought it safer not to disturb them. At length I spotted one of the store's bright purple vests at the end of an aisle. The young woman in it was shoving jars of bulk scrying solution onto a shelf.
"Excuse me," I ventured.
"Yeah?" She didn't pause or look up.
"I need to speak to a manager."
"If you've got a product complaint or return you take it to the Returns desk, behind aisle 57." She finally straightened so she could point the way around the end of the aisle. She was quite young and had the off—center ragged haircut favored by the student customers of the shop.
"It's not a return or a complaint. I need to speak to a manager."
"What about? Look, the managers aren't always here so," she said impatiently. Why can't Americans finish their sentences? It seems like their brains shut down halfway through their thought.
"I need to speak to one of the elves who work here."
She snorted. "Ok, definitely not management. They don't give a crap about the little guys. You want to talk to Angie, she hangs out with them. Angie?" She shouted the name and started around the end of the aisle, still talking. "Couldn't tell you why, I mean, can't stand those voices, like frickin' nails on a blackboard…" She drew up next to a small brass horn bolted to the end of a shelf.
"Kelsey 348" she said into it. There was a buzzing hiss as a sonorous charm activated. "Angie, customer, aisle 23, Angie, aisle 23," she boomed across the store. "There, she'll be by, just hang out here." She swept away without looking back.
I spent some interminable minutes looking at the shelves, which were crowded with rows and rows of stuffed fantods under glass. Who the hell could possibly want them?
Another purple vest finally appeared around the far end of the aisle. It was a slightly older woman than the first, perhaps in her late 20s, with dyed-black hair pulled back except for a fringe. Her clothes under the horrid vest actually showed some of her figure. She wasn't making an effort for this place, surely? There must be something afterward.
"Angie, I presume?" Her eyes had a little intelligent spark to them.
"Ha, yeah. How can I help you?" Her voice was sliding into her trained customer-service formality. That wasn't what I needed.
"Kelsey said that perhaps you could. I'm trying to get in touch with one of the elves who works here: Mayni."
"Oh, she's gone, she left a couple of weeks ago, I think."
"Oh, no." I tried to show surprised disappointment. "Is there any way to contact her? A position she was looking for just opened up with her family. She was very insistent that we contact her if that happened."
"Well, we can ask the others. The store doesn't keep records on the elves. It doesn't have to since they're… officially 'independent magical creatures,' and the management doesn't want to deal with any paperwork they don't have to." She started to walk down the aisle. I followed.
"Are you in charge of the elves?"
"Oh no, I just like talking to them, so I know them pretty well, that's why Kelsey paged me. Once you get past all the formal crap with them they're great to talk to, you know?" She threw a glance back at me, but I must have looked blank because she chuckled. "Really, they get all straightforward and they have this perverse sense of humor…"
I couldn't honestly think of any elf who had ever been straightforward with me. She was tapping a steel door labeled "Employees Only" with her wand. "Come on," she said, ushering me into the massive stockroom of the warehouse. I followed her past boxes and crates until she found a group of elves trying to herd a tangle of animated Fusebox Dwarves back into their crate with whisk brooms.
"Hey, Nimmo!" Angie called above the "Dreeb, dreeb" of the dwarves, "Nimmo, just for a second, ok?"
One of the elves broke away from the fray and came over to us. "Nimmo, have you heard anything from Mayni?"
He gave a short shake of his head and gave me a look before turning back to Angie. "Mr. –" she began.
"I'm Mr. Ramson. Her family is looking for her. Do you know where she went?" He studied me with some care for a moment. If he were looking for truth on my face, well, my statement was true enough, as far as it went. "Or perhaps you could pass a message on to her?"
"No, she doesn't tell us where she goes, but she wanted a position with a house and a family, and she says she gets it."
"Did she say what family?"
"No, just a new family, a couple with child."
"And where?
"Nothing, she just has to leave quick as they are moving up north."
I felt that I couldn't push any further without them becoming suspicious. "Look, perhaps I could leave my number somewhere, in case she does contact anyone here. Would that be alright?" Angie took my scrawled number on the back of a shipping label and pinned it to a dusty corkboard on the wall. Nimmo gave me a glance, but picked up his whisk broom without another word and went back to the clattering dwarves.
"Well, thank you," I told Angie resignedly as she shoved open the steel door.
"Hey, por nada," she called as it swung between us. I was afraid she was right.
A/N: The Point Me spell here, and some others later in the story, might not work exactly as they do in canon. Partly it's for the purpose of the story, partly because I couldn't always figure out how they DO work in canon. If it bothers you, please, um, pretend it's an ever so slightly different spell with the same name. Yeah, that's right.