Imperfect
Episode 0.5
Ginny bounces in through the backdoor, lollipop in hand.
"You guys!" she shouts gleefully. "It's confirmed! I can talk now!" She gives a wordless squeal, stretching her arms out with obvious joy. It's catching.
Lily looks amused while Harry grins back. He knows there was something in the works that she wasn't allowed to talk about, something to do with the game she plays professionally.
"Oh, yeah?" he asks curiously. "Is there a press release?"
Ginny waves that away with her lollipop. "Tomorrow, but management has allowed us to talk about it with our families." She sits herself down on the soft yellow sofa between mother and son. "And since you're my family, well." She shimmies her shoulders. "Guess what, Aunt Lily."
"What?" Lily asks with an indulgent smile.
Ginny beams at her. "In six months there's a new game coming out based on the Quidditch setting." She stamps her feet with joy, shaking the sofa. "It's VR, and it'll debut with the NerveGear everyone's been talking about."
"What's it called?"
His old neighbour takes a deep breath. "Hogwarts: Chamber of Secrets. I swear to god, Harry, it's so cool. It's gonna be in beta next month, for two months. You know that castle you see in the background all the time?"
Harry gives her a winning smile. "I wouldn't know, I'm always too busy watching you destroy your opponents," he says charmingly.
She hits his shoulder with a flat hand. "Oh, stop."
"Yes, I know the castle." Of course he does. He plays Quidditch himself, just not professionally like Ginny. He's flown around the castle often enough in search of the snitch. "What about it?"
"It's going to be set in a dungeon! You're going to play with me, aren't you? You have to, you and Ron both. It's going to be awesome. Plus, management seems to think it's good PR for the team to stream launch day."
Harry grimaces. "Launch day is never good PR."
Ginny snort-laughs in reply.
"I thought NerveGear was going to be extremely expensive," Lily says slowly.
The girl deflates a little. "Yeah, I know. I don't know if I can get any extras, but I'm going to try. I know my other brothers aren't interested, so there's that."
"Charlie might," Harry offers, but he knows the man is too busy with family and work to bother with games. He manages to tune in to Ginny's tournaments sometimes, but that's about the extent of it. "What about the twins?"
"They're too busy with Uni."
"In six months it'll be summer," Harry says.
Ginny hums. "True enough," she concedes. "I doubt they'll pick it up, though. I'll try to see if I can get you and Ron one, but getting them one too?"
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In the end, Ginny only manages to get one free of charge. Aside from her own, which is paid for by her sponsors, but she can get them a nice discount. Sirius, who gets word of this, insists on paying for them, and so two identical boxes get delivered to Harry and Ron's flat while they're on a weekend trip to Spain.
They stow the boxes, unopened, into a closet and forget all about them until Ginny visits to show off the champion trophy after the Quidditch World Cup ends. He gives Ginny a congratulatory kiss that has her laughing and ducking out from his hug while she rolls her eyes. He spends some time admiring the cup while Ginny hunts down the boxes to inspect their NerveGear.
It's Ginny's turn with the trophy for a week, and the redhead takes it wherever she goes. There are pictures flooding the internet of her at a restaurant with the trophy sitting in its own seat. It's her second year as a professional Seeker, and it's a bit of a miracle she made the national team at all. Ron figures she's just that good, and it's true, although he also insists that Harry would have made it on any pro team, had he wanted to.
"Don't forget to register!" she tells them sternly before she climbs into her car.
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Username: RedNGold
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"You've got to be kidding me."
XXX
Ginny looks chagrined, sprawled over Ron and Harry's worn sofa. She's a frequent visitor, and likes to stay over whenever she can. Her parents are stifling, or so she claims. Harry loves his almost-sister, he truly does, but sometimes he wonders why she doesn't just move out if she's always butting heads with her mum this much.
"They want me to stream launch day," Ginny confirms. "It's only for the first couple days, we can play together afterwards if you don't want to be in it."
Harry shrugs. He's been in her Quidditch streams before, has been briefed on what not to do before, and he isn't going to start caring about appearing on a H:CoS stream now.
"It's fine," he replies.
Ron's more the one who gets nervous about people watching them. He also gets upset about the rubbish people say to his little sister solely because she's a woman playing Quidditch on a professional level. Jealous snots, but that's a different thing altogether.
"Have you registered yet?"
"Of course," Harry says immediately. He has, he just had a bit of trouble remembering his password, that's all. "I'm RedNGold."
"That's just your login name though, that's not going to be your IGN," Ginny tells him. "We can only create those once we're actually in."
"If we even get in on the first day."
"Streaming loading screens is going to be the easiest money I'll ever make," Ginny says with a bit of a smirk. "You know, their servers are in the UK, our ping's going to be insane."