Chapter 15:

The Abbott siblings met with the muggleborn Ravenclaw in a small café in the muggle word. This happened to prevent potential business rivals from overhearing their discussion.
Charles McKennzy was a very talented wizard whose strengths lied especially in Ancient Runes and Arithmancy. He had been prophesied a brilliant career after graduation from Hogwarts, but had only found a job with difficulty and only four months later he had been let go because a pureblood had wanted his job.
Bitter and frustrated Charles had been working 3 menial jobs in the muggle world to keep himself from landing on the streets until the unexpected letter of Michael had reached him after his afternoon shift.

At the café Charles had been slightly surprised when he had been introduced to Michaels younger sister. He could vaguely remember a slightly pudgy and very shy child.
This Marianne Abbott in comparison had lost quite a bit of her weight and while she still was a bit shy it was a tremendous improvement to when he had seen her last.
After hearing the business proposal and checking out her prototype he started to see the witch in front of him with new eyes. What he held in his hands was a very tricky piece of rune and charm work that could potentially change the music industry in the Wizarding world and Marianne had only just turned 15.
Throwing caution in the wind he agreed instantly to help her found a company to sell her product. They promised to meet again the following week after taking care of the paperwork and legalities at the ministry. Leaving the café with a positive sentiment Charles couldn't shake the feeling that things were majorly looking up for him.

In the next few days the muggleborn Ravenclaw thoroughly informed himself about the different prizes for metal in both the magical and the muggle world and finally found a cheap supplier in the muggle world. The company would even produce and deliver the completed chases, while the magical world only sold the raw materials.
He also made discreet enquiries about former muggleborn students that he knew were handy with a wand, if this business took off like he hoped they would soon need any wand they could get their hands on.
He also investigated their potential business partners, especially the different bands and singers and examined what brands they were using.
To his surprise he found that there were no magical amplifiers in the Wizarding world, most bands used the sonorous charm. Which was quite often not only unreliable, but also damaged both voice and the instruments.
Writing his ideas about changing that up and also what running a business would entail he prepared himself as well as he could for the second meeting with his hopefully future employer.

Marianne was this time alone, Michael and her father had to work and couldn't accompany her to the meeting. She was a little bit nervous but suppressed it; she had liked the calm and collected nature of Michael's friend. She had planned to have some tea to get to know the wizard better before inviting him to the Abbott house, where they could work out the formalities of their business deal and exactly that happened.
Their meeting went well the only surprise was that Charles was a lot more prepared and informed about their endeavor then she herself. After telling him about the name she had decided to use for her company, MagicSound.
They were going over the prices for the materials and founding costs that he had complied for the meeting. Marianne found that she easily could pay this with half of the money she had earned through selling her books.
Charles would take care of acquiring materials and handling employing other wizards and witches while she would be the owner and holder of the patent as well as financial backing the company.
While she had a veto right in bigger decisions, he would take care of the daily happenings during her time at Hogwarts. She also welcomed his idea about the magical amplifiers enthusiastically and wondered out loudly about creating other magical equipment and products for the music branch
Shortly before her father and brother came home Charles signed the contract drawn up by the law firm of the Abbotts, as well as the Product confidentiality agreement before joining the family for dinner.

Thomas Abbott hadn't been happy about his daughter investing in such a precarious idea, but had kept silent after telling her this right at the beginning. He would not interfere with how his daughter used her rightfully earned money and if the business idea went awry she would have learned a valuable lesson. Now seeing the way Charles had given everything a careful thought and the way his daughter kept giving well thought out comments and suggestions he started to change his mind. Those two could really make this idea work and with a slightly better mood he watched the three younger ones as they talked about Marianne's project.

Michael submitted the documents for the new company in his sister's name the next day and it happened just like he had predicted. After the wizard being responsible for checking the paperwork had read the name in which the business was created and checked it against a list of Wizarding family names, he filed it quickly and without giving it another glance.

After starting up the business two weeks after the beginning of the summer holidays it took nearly the complete summer for the audmos to take off.
It would have taken even longer if Marianne hadn't used a clever marketing trick.
The magical amplifiers, which had been designed by a clever muggleborn witch with connections to the muggle music industry, were an instant hit with all magical bands in Britain and even Europe.
After noticing this, Marianne started to give away one or two audmos as a free gift for the bigger orders.
As a result famous bands were seen using the audmos and in the last three weeks of the summer holidays, young wizards and witches stormed the MagicSound shop to buy the new 'must have' in the Wizarding world.
The audmos were sold for 10 galleons and came with 10 starter songs that the customer could chose from the shops selection. For every additional song they had to pay between 10 knuts and a sickle. The cost for the materials as well as production were 1 galleon and 11 sickles, including the patent for the magical songs. So they had a profit of 8 galleons and 16 sickles.

To produce recordings from the Wizarding bands, Charles had set up a meeting with Celestina Warbeck and other magical bands. Most of them agreed to them using their songs in exchange of 15% of the income per song they sold. Charles and his team of muggleborns recorded close to 70 songs on the metal blocks that would store the songs and keep them from deteriorating like runes on paper would have.
And after the audmos started to take off there was a mad dash to be recorded by MagicSound.

After the first few long waits in the shop, Marianne's employees started connecting the sheets the moment the audmo had been finished and put them together in one box. From then on the employee in the shop opened the box, took out the customer sheet, wrote down the name and connected the first 10 chosen songs or more to the sheet. After that the songs turned up on the second sheet which was then showed to the customer and explained how to use it before he could take his audmo with him.

By the end of August they had been sold out again and had to increase their production again. The news about the audmo had finally reached the rest of Europe and people were fighting over international portkeys to be able to buy one.
Charles took on even more unemployed muggleborns and halfbloods with the right credentials and at the 1st of September Marianne had nearly 20 fulltime employees and another 15 part time workers. All under contracts to prevent idea theft, this had catapulted MagicSound to one of the biggest companies in magical Britain.
Before she left for school she asked Charles to buy hundreds of muggle music records. They could supplement the audmo selection with very cheap muggle music because they didn't have to buy the extra patent on those songs thanks to the corrupt government.
Some of the purebloods had created loopholes to circumvent muggle patents which spared Charles from a lot of headache inducing meetings. She also gave him permission to work on improving the audmo and invent new magical gadgets.
She wanted to establish a deluxe audmo to appeal to the purebloods and if they earned a fortune on the arrogance of the so called elite, the better for them. Charles and the rest of the muggleborns were very pleased with their "little boss". The quiet and shy girl was always unfailingly polite, never talked down to anybody of the company.
During the holidays she visited every other day and dumped a handful of ideas at the research and development department to improve their products or supplied them with new product ideas. She had given them and many other muggleborns a future in the magical world with a steady and generous income and an interesting and fun job.

Although Marianne had been quite busy with the establishing of her company she had also enjoyed her holidays in the company of the two Gryffindor girls.
The three of them had spent a good deal of their free time all over England, Lily and Alice who had already turned 17 in January and March respectively, took it onto themselves to apparate with Marianne all over Britain and visit the diverse magical and muggle attractions.
They even spent a day bathing in the British Channel when the weather had been unbearable hot. Both Lily and Alice had been dubbed as good influences by the Abbott men and had a standing invitation to the Abbott residence.
Especially Lily took advantage of this, having grown distant to her parents during her years in Hogwarts and with her older sister downright loathing her she took every chance to escape the tense atmosphere of her childhood home. This also led to the fact that she was nearly daily informed about the exploits of the Marauders across the Channel as well as somewhat involved with MagicSound. She had helped a lot in the design department and had earned some money and a free audmo as thanks. At first Lily wanted to refuse the money but Charles had convinced her to take it because while Marianne was the owner, he was the one paying and employing the workers at MagicSound.

Sirius and Marianne had continued the active correspondence that they had started during the Winter holidays, the letters were often accompanied by pictures on both sides. Most of the time it were pictures of this and that place the girls had visited or end result of a prank going haywire on the boys side.
James especially liked the fact that Lily was in nearly every picture Marianne sent to them and seemed to enjoy herself. Sirius and Remus good naturedly complained about James when he had his 'Lily phases' as they called it, where he was absolutely useless for anything other than staring into the air.
Thanks to the funny written letters and hilarious pictures Lily's animosity had slowly started to dwindle, until the Marauder's antics only evoked an eye roll and a long suffering sigh. Marianne wasn't sure if Lily tried to fight it but the quirking lips had turned over the course of two months into an amused smile and she was now looking forward to news from the Marauders as much as Marianne was, even if she sometimes still tried to deny it. But hey old habits die hard.
The Marauders had been supportive right from the start of her company, their encouraging words had really helped Marianne to get over the frustration that they didn't sell at first. All three boys had already received their audmos and had been steadily adding songs per owl request.
Marianne really like the idea of ordering songs per owl, after all not everybody wanted to run to the shop every time they wanted to add a new song. And so she forwarded the proposal to the idea apartment who promptly started to work on a solution so that they wouldn't be overwhelmed with the requests.

The Hogwarts students met up in the second to last August week to escape the other shoppers. The six were joined by Alice's boyfriend Frank who had returned from his trip to visit relatives in America. Peter was still with his family in Slovenia and wouldn't arrive until three days before school began.

While shopping Marianne didn't say anything about her business while being in public. She didn't want to have it spread all over the Wizarding world that it was her idea and company, thank you very much.
Her friends understood her need for anonymity and talked about other topics.
But when they passed the MagicSound shop and they saw the line in front of it James and Sirius couldn't help themselves and sent her teasing glances.

After finishing their shopping in record time they spent the rest of the day at Fortescue's recounting their holiday experiences. James had held himself admiringly back from boasting too much and was a complete gentleman to all the girls present.

This impressed Lily, who had given Marianne's theory of under challenged prodigies some serious thought and had decided to give James a chance. Now that she wasn't rejection him on every turn out of principle she noticed how attentive he was and how even the smallest reaction of her seemed to make him happy.
Feeling slightly guilty about having been so stubborn and never giving the Quidditch captain a proper chance she decided to rectify this. After finishing their ice cream, the group wandered slowly down the street to the entrance of Crossing road, which led into the living area of the London community. The Abbotts lived there as well as the Springs'.
Because Lily and James were the last ones of the group Lily saw her opportunity to talk to James without the others watching and suddenly grabbed his hand and led him into a smaller side street. James eyebrows rose into his hairline but resigned himself to a final and complete rejection.

"Well, aren't you going to ask me to go out with you?" Lily asked with an indefinable gaze.

James just sighed and said "You will just shoot me down again."

"Try me."

Looking at her confused he complied with her wish and asked earnestly "Will you go out with me Lily Evans?"

Lily smiled slightly while she said "Yes James I will."

Said Gryffindors eyes widened and looked slightly dazed while he stuttered "You,… you will?"

"One date, we will see how it goes from there." Lily said definite before she grabbed his arm again and led the stunned Potter heir back to their group.