To my very special (and only StarKid) friend, who is (thank God) not moving to Cape Town anymore, Kayla Millicent…
Chapter 21
Dumbledore told Quirrell to find more people to trust, though Quirrell knew of no one. Yet again he was sitting on the couch staring at the fireplace with the Floo Powder in hand. He went through his own mind looking for friends he knew from school. His raven came up to his shoulder and poked him in the ear with his beak. "No, not now Millicent…"
Oh! Duh! Of course!
He wondered if Millicent still lived in a house connected to the Floo network. Well, only one way to find out. Quirrell took powder and threw it into the fireplace saying "Millicent Grand's place." Then he stuck his face into the green flames.
On the other side of the connection a fire place burst to flames, lighting a cosy little living room with greenish light. On the couch across from the fireplace sat a lady with her nose in a book. Quirrell looked through the fire to see the lady; suddenly he doubted if he was at the right residence.
She peered over her book to see the fire. "Yes?" she asked. "Uh, Millicent Grand?" Quirrell asked. She sat the book down on the coffee table. "Yep, that's me. What do you want?" she asked, a bit impatient. Quirrell smiled brightly at her attitude. "My, my Millie, you haven't changed a day!"
Immediately she recognized him. "Quirinus Quirrell! Step through! Step through!" she invited him into her home. Quirrell happily stepped through the fireplace. She greeted him with a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Oh Quirrell! You look…" he looked dull and depressed "… you look good." He looked terrible. Quirrell laughed. "Uh, please! I'm not exactly in my best shape, but you look great! Wow! It's been far too long!"
"Yes! I last saw you when you were fifteen at your father's funeral. That was very long ago! We really did lie to ourselves when we said we'd stay in touch! A lot has happened. Especially with you I believe…"
"The past few years has been rough, ever since my dad died I had to stay with mother all the time, she really makes people understand why muggles think witches are evil. Though I had a nice time at Hogwarts, I did outstanding in Herbology so I went and studied it after school. After that I haven't really figured out my life ye. I was a teacher at Hogwarts for almost two years, but that didn't really work for me, since I was teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts there. So I took the money I inhabited from my dad, sold the farm and came to live here."
Quirrell quickly told her his story, but left out the part about Voldemort. He thought since she lived in the South African muggle society she wouldn't know all the small and gory details of the past year. But then again, Millicent is full of surprises!
"That's nice! Herbology you say? Hm, I studied Muggle Studies after school. It was my job to cover up all the loose ends about the suspicions that Voldemort left the muggles with…" She stopped for a moment and Quirrell cringed for a moment, Wow… South Africa was more on top of things than I thought, he thought to himself. "You left me with one heck of a job Quirrell!"
"Oh… right… Sorry about that…" Quirrell said to her. Her face softened and she placed a hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry. It must have been bad to be possessed. I'm glad you acted like a fool; I got a bloody good raise, but now that it's all over. I'm jobless, doing studies about muggles from time to time." Quirrell understood, but couldn't help to wonder for who she worked. "Uh, if you had to cover up the story and calm down the suspicions, why are you here in South Africa? I mean, there aren't really many wizards here."
Millie looked at Quirrell in surprize and then smiled. "You don't know do you? Oh my word, I have SO much to show you!" She then took Quirrell's hand and pulled him to her back door. "Come with me!" Quirrell didn't really have time to respond before she pulled him outside. They stood in her back yard as she walked to her small pool. Quirrell followed her there and she smiled from him to the pool. Quirrell was dumbstruck.
"Uuuh, a Jacuzzi?"
She laughed. "No! Well, yes, but that's not what I use it for. Watch." She took out her wand and pointed it to the pool. "Watermarch Avenue 2, 4, 5, 3, 6, 7." Colourful flashes shot from her wand to the pool, which turned colour from simple blue to rainbow coloured water. Quirrell stood in awe, but still didn't get what was going on. He looked at Millie in confusion. "So…?"
She jerked her head to the direction of the pool. "Jump!"
Quirrell's eyes rounded with shock. "No! I didn't come to swim, it's winter. And besides, this is a new shirt, Egyptian silk! It shouldn't get wet!" Millie's shoulder's dropped in irritancy. "Ugh, you gays always act like this. It can get quite annoying. Don't you trust me? Just jump!"
Quirrell swallowed hard and decided to trust her, that's actually what he came here to do. He walked to the side of the splash pool and quickly hopped into the water.
He closed his eyes tightly and waited for the water to splash, but it never did. Instead when Quirrell opened his eyes he found he was falling from the sky. He didn't panic, for he knew this was magic and, have had used Portkey traveling before, he just got himself straight up and with running motion ran to the ground. Ha landed with a thump, but thankfully still on his feet when he looked around and up. The sky was far above him and looked watery, it felt as far away as the normal sky was, but yet he knew it was more like a very high roof made from water.
A few seconds later Millie landed beside him. "Where are we?" He asked in awe, he looked around the large alley they stood in. On the one side was a tall dead end wall with the numbers 245367 plated on the bricks. "Welcome to Watermarch Avenue, I guess you know why they call it that. This is the very small Wizarding world of South Africa. It's not much, but to me it is home. Basically it's a four way crossing. Watermarch runs down this alley from the Small Wizarding Republic of South Africa (SWROSA) building (pretty much like the Ministry in London) on that side, to this dead end wall.
"No one can get over that wall, somehow it's impossible. Then in the middle is the crossing, which to your left, east, ran down Door Street. To right, west, is Sleep Street. At the end of Sleep Street is the Sleeping Hotel, which though it looks quite small, is very large inside. 5 Star service, I live there from time to time, but it's hard to do muggle studies down here, since there is literally no way for a muggle to get in.
"Door Street is the shopping street and at the end of that is the bank, Gringotts. It's a branch from Britain. You could enter your vault; we could go get you some ca-ching to spend there!" She finished. Quirrell had a lot of questions. "But if this Wizarding place is so small, why don't they just use the South African Rand?"
"Good question, Watermarch is mostly just for business, everybody lives up top. You get paid Galleons and the bank will convert it to Rand for you. It's pretty awesome! Come, I'll show you." She grabbed Quirrell's hand again and hurried off to Door Street. In Door Street a few people wandered, pulling miniature doors behind them or in front like trolleys. "Millie, why are those wizards pulling mini doors around?"
"I'll show you later, but we're going to the bank first."
This Gringotts building was a bit smaller than the original one in Diagon Alley, though it was just as impressive. Inside the building they were surrounded by small purple creatures with pointy ears on the top of their heads. They were shorter than the average goblin and could barely see over the edge of a bed. They had long tails witch they threw forward over their chest, or twisted around their necks like a scarf. "What are they?" Quirrell asked curiously, but actually quite freaked out.
"They are tokoloshe, plural and singular the same, you can call them our goblins. Only difference is they also act as our Repo-men! They carry your stuff away at night if you don't pay your bills. The muggles are scared out of their pants of them, but only because one time a tokoloshe went rogue and carried one muggle off. Most muggles now put bricks beneath their beds; because they think then the tokoloshe wouldn't be able to reach over the bed. But tokoloshe, though they are small, are very smart and could figure out different ways to spook silly muggles."
Millie kept telling Quirrell about all the urban legends the muggles came up with, but he was too captured by his surroundings to listen. All the tokoloshe were watching them, though there wasn't really anything creepy about them. They just looked like slightly bigger Cornish pixies with smaller pointy ears and very long tails, without wings and normal green cat eyes. Quirrell and Millie stopped at the register desk across the hallway and were greeted by a more lady-like tokoloshe whose tail was stylishly wrapped around her neck.
"Hello missies, sir. How may I help you?" she asked. Tokoloshe seemed much kinder than the goblins did, and Quirrell rather liked them. "Hi, we're here to make an extraction from his vault." Millie said. "Does he have his wallet?" The tokoloshe asked Millie. "No." Millie answered. Quirrell wanted to protest, because he did actually have his wallet with him, but figured Millie would've asked. "Key?"
Luckily Quirrell did still keep his key in his wallet. He took it out and gave it to the tokoloshe. She took the key from him and motioned that they should follow her. "Please follow me."
They followed her through a door behind the desk to a large-ish room. A large vault door was at the end of the room. It was sort of like a muggle ATM; accept it opened up magically to your personal vault. But Quirrell had quite a shock when they opened his vault. In his vault he was surprized to find a rather large fortune.
"What—what is this? I don't have this many money. I haven't been paid galleons since December… the year before last year. Then it was a teacher's salary… not this much!" Quirrell looked at the tokoloshe confused. She took a file from a magical bookcase and quickly ran her small fingers through the pages till she found a small piece of paper.
"The last money put into this vault was… a few weeks ago, before that… May, last year." Quirrell walked into the vault and gaped at the fortune. "A few weeks ago? May? Who made it?"
"Uh… In May: someone named Marvolo Rydle. Gringotts doesn't have any files on him, but he had a lot of money for your vault. 283, 100 galleon bonds. Then a few weeks ago all the inheritance from… Merope Gaunt." The tokoloshe finished. Quirrell knew who Merope was, it was Voldemort's mother. Voldemort must've put the bonds of money into his vault before he died in May. And the inheritance he probably put in because he wasn't going to use it ever again… or it meant more than that.
Quirrell ignored the lump in his throat and then took a bit of money. The tokoloshe stopped him and explained that they invented a special wallet for converting galleons to South African Rand. It was an averagely sized wallet with a silver zipper on the one side and a golden one on the other. She explained that the galleons go into the golden one (which is only visible to wizards) and rand comes out from the silver one. Since it was generated by magic you could be able to put in as much money in as you liked.
Quirrell stuffed the wallet with money then he and Millie headed for Door Street.
"Okay Mil, so how does this doors work? And why?" Quirrell asked while they were walking in Door Street. She took him to a small warehouse at the end of the street. Inside there was a large hall with a long conveyer belt with doors hanging from it running in and out of the walls.
"You give in your key to your house and they find your door which you shrink to size you like and then you can go walk down Door Street and buy whatever you want. Then just shrink whatever you bought and throw it through the door. So when you go home you literally only have to rearrange the stuff."
"Sounds awesome! So I can shop as much as I want to!" Quirrell squealed with delight. "But then how do I get home? Do I just walk back through the door?" He asked. "Yes, you bring your door back here and they give you back your key. Then you walk back through the door into your house, but can't walk back through to Watermarch."
Quirrell nodded understandingly.
"Well Q, which shops do you want to see first? Shoes? Clothes? Furniture? You can literally get everything here!"
"Hm… new living room sofas would be nice!"