The Portkey's yank behind her navel sent her stomach reeling, but Hermione was able to suppress the nausea, desperately focusing on the sensation of air inside of her to help her stabilize her sense of self. She didn't want the first thing she did at her new internship to be vomiting on Mr. Vitac's shoes.
"Hermione Granger! Right on time!"
Hermione opened her eyes to see Cadmus Vitac offering her a grin, looking just as frazzled as he'd looked in Professor Snape's office. He was wearing a sort of mustard-colored tweed suit with a burnt orange robe.
"Mr. Vitac," Hermione said, tucking her portkey into her purse. She offered him a slight bow. "Thank you very much again for the opportunity. I'm very excited to get started."
Cadmus raised an eyebrow and gave her a slow look, carefully regarding her.
"First lesson," he said abruptly. "What is appropriate to wear and not wear to work."
Hermione felt her heart plummet.
"I- I'm so sorry," she said. "I did my best to look professional- I really did-"
And she had. Her mother had helped her impossible curls into an elegant French twist, and Hermione had even put on nylons with her dress and heels, and she'd worn her nicest black robe over it. She thought she looked very grown-up. To hear that she'd gotten it all wrong was heartbreaking.
"You do look very professional," Cadmus reassured her, "but just for the wrong profession. Come. Let me show you."
He gestured for her to follow her, and Hermione walked after him, doing her best not to teeter in her mother's heels. They went down the hallway to a large set of red doors, which Cadmus threw open, and Hermione gasped.
It looked almost like a warehouse, but somehow incredibly not. There were people with desks all over and oddly-glowing lights on them, murmuring over manuscript pages. Another side of the room seemed to be sewing covers together. Behind them all were incredibly large bookcases, with the ladders on them that looked two or three stories tall. Pages were running around, grabbing references off the shelves and running over with them to editors, who snatched them up, muttering to themselves as they read.
"This is the work room," Cadmus told her. "Now: what is the first thing you notice about how everyone is dressed?"
Hermione looked, watching for a minute.
"No one is in outer robes," she observed. "You're the only person who I could say has one on."
"Very good," Cadmus said. "And what else?"
Hermione gave the room another look, before looking up beseechingly. Cadmus chuckled.
"Let's go introduce you around, and we'll see if you can't figure it out," he told her.
He guided her toward the tables. Hermione felt a buzzing sort of nervousness in her throat, and she tried her best to keep it pushed down.
To her surprise, as they neared one of the tables, the couple people who looked up abruptly looked nervous themselves and leapt to their feet. Hermione looked at Cadmus, quizzical.
"Lads, this is Hermione Granger," he told them. "She's going to be helping us this summer."
The two men exchanged a look, before offering her deep bows.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Granger," they both told her. Hermione's eyes bulged.
"Ah, you don't have to-"
"Hermione here is learning today about how we dress here at Lleuwlynn and Selwyn," Cadmus said, chuckling. "Now, Hermione – what do you observe?"
Hermione bit her lip.
"They're only wearing basic robes, and they're dusty," Hermione said. "The- the woman over there, she's wearing a split robe, too."
"Exactly," Cadmus said, nodding. "Practical. Easy. Nothing fancy here – no one's going to see us except the books." He gave her an appraising look. "You're dressed more for the Daily Prophet office than here, since reporters are in the public eye. Here, no one cares what you wear, so long as you're adequately covered and can get around quickly."
Hermione sighed.
"I'll try again tomorrow," she told him.
"I'm sure you'll get the hang of it," he assured her. He smiled indulgently. "Besides – I'm supposed to teach you business things like this, right? That's what Severus said."
He led her around, introducing her to the others. Hermione felt more and more awkward as it went on, everyone bowing to her and such. At least she was overdressed, she thought to herself, not underdressed. Better overprepared than underprepared.
After meeting everyone, Cadmus took her over to a desk. There was a quill, a pot of red ink, and a stack of papers.
"This is your desk," he told her. "Your first job is to grammar-check this manuscript. It's been fact-checked already, so don't worry about that."
"Do you want me to check for style, too?" Hermione said, taking a seat and scooting her chair in. "Confusing wording, that sort of thing?"
Cadmus considered for a moment, then shrugged.
"Might as well," he said. "Couldn't hurt!"
He left her to it and wandered off.
Hermione spent the first day of her internship reading all about garden pests and different ways of handling them. She ate a sandwich at her desk for lunch, but she kept reading and marking while she did. By the end of the day, she'd finished the manuscript and had it all marked up, and she had learned more than she ever thought she'd need to know about gophers, rabbits, doxies, fairies, and gnomes.
"Well done," Cadmus told her upon returning. "This will help out a lot."
"I could have probably gotten started on another one," Hermione admitted. "Not finished, but started. You could leave two tomorrow?"
Cadmus's eyebrows rose almost into his hairline.
"We'll see how this one is, and we'll discuss it tomorrow," he told her. "Let me help you back to the foyer, just until you get the feel for the place."
Hermione tottered after him in heels to the reception area, before withdrawing her Portkey. She glanced at the clock – two minutes to go – and then bowed to him.
"Thank you again for this opportunity," she told him honestly. "I'm really excited to learn about publishing."
Cadmus chuckled.
"Miss Granger, if you marked this," he said, holding the manuscript aloft, "with the same skill and thoroughness you did your test essay, believe me – I am going to be getting rather more out of the arrangement than you."
The Portkey abruptly yanked at her navel, spinning Hermione through space to land hard in her living room. She stumbled in the heels and fell backwards onto the sofa, slightly queasy, but relieved that her first day hadn't turned out so badly after all.
Working at Lleuwlynn and Selwyn went much better the next day, when Hermione wore a simple black summer robe, and no one had any cause to stare at her and give her odd looks. By Friday, she'd ditched robes altogether and was wearing black denims and dark tops to work – no one paid attention to what people were wearing, so long as it wasn't fancy. She'd caught one of the pages in the stacks in worn blue jeans and an old Quidditch jersey; as long as she could run around and get her work done, she suspected she'd be fine.
Her main job continued to be grammar-checking manuscripts. Cadmus Vitac was very appreciative of her skill in doing so and had loudly begun wondering aloud if he should make a habit of sending his copy editors to Muggle school to learn their grammar properly. Hermione sank further and further into her chair each time he did this, uneasily watching the faces of the other copy editors around her grow redder and redder. Hermione suspected her skill with grammar came more from how much she liked to read and her mother's constant corrections as she grew up than just Muggle school, but she wasn't about to say a word.
There was the added bonus that even as she was working, she was reading and learning about magic, depending on what she was reading. A lot of the books she read were a bit beyond her, but she was pleased with the amount she was able to grasp. There were a lot of good books about defending against Dark magic and creatures that Hermione found fascinating, and Hermione found herself with a list of spells she wanted to learn next to her notes, the Patronus Charm topping the list. Anything that could fight off something as terrifying as a Dementor was bound to be handy.
When she wasn't copy-editing, Hermione was fetching coffee for the other editors, shadowing them at their jobs, or helping the fact-checkers by running and finding reference books in the giant library they had.
The fact-checkers were impressive, and Hermione admired them immensely. It was incredible to see them reading, sometimes murmuring along silently with the words, then jerk suddenly and come to life, barking out instructions. It was made more impressive by the fact that they didn't need to check every fact, just some of them; each of the fact checkers seemed to have an incredible memory filled with all kinds of obscure magical minutia they could reference against. Hermione wished she could remember so much.
Hermione's fellow copywriters didn't seem to like her very much, which she didn't mind – the pages were more fun for Hermione to try and make friends with anyway. They all tended to be eccentric bookworms who had taken the job more for the benefits of being around books all day than the salary that came with it – an impulse Hermione could well understand.
They also tended to be younger. One of them, Michael, was a tall and lanky fellow not long out of Hogwarts who enjoyed discussing obscure magical theories with her. Another, Claire, was a pretty young woman in her early twenties who took to teaching Hermione the different theories of publishing and cataloging, as well as what magic was affected by the different phases of the moon. Whenever Hermione asked where they had learned such things, she always just got a shrug and "the stacks" as an answer. It was always from a book somewhere in the stacks.
"The stacks" referred to the rows and rows of large, two-story bookshelves kept in the back of the room; enormous, looming, and fascinating. Hermione found it incredible. They had books from centuries ago, charmed and protected against damage. Hermione asked one of the pages about them at one point, and the page had shrugged.
"A lot of it's just a reference library for the fact-checkers, but we keep all the original editions of things we publish," she'd told her. "If a change to a book isn't considered serious enough to publish a retraction or a new edition, we just edit the master and fix it up."
"Edit the master…?" Hermione had wondered.
That had led Hermione on a crash-course on how books were published in the wizarding world.
There was a printing press that was used to typeset the pages of books and press the ink to the pages. However, each page was only pressed two or three times, not hundreds of times for the hundreds of books to be made. After enough pages for two or three books had been made, the book's pages were bound together, the cover sewn, and the books completed.
After that, the books went on to the spell casting department – a group of determined but weary-looking people in a side room of the warehouse. One book of the three would be designated the "master" copy, and a series of spells would secure it as such. The Gemino Curse would then be used to duplicate the master copy over and over and over, until they had the amount of copies needed for the print run. More spellworkers would then spell the copies with copyright protection spells, to ensure that that copies couldn't be copied, and with linking spells to link them back to the master copy. This ensured that if any changes needed to be made, a small change in the master copy would show up in all the duplicate copies, and that if a book sold out, another print run could be made from the master copy with little fuss.
The second book was designated the "original" copy. These were marked clearly in their inner covers and spelled against all decay and changes. This was the original edition of the book and was to be kept pristine and never touched; these were put in a different part of the library than all the other books.
Sometimes there was a third copy of the book made, designated the "tracker". If a book was particularly academic and might change as more advances came out, tracker copies were more common. The tracker copy was bespelled to reflect all changes made, in different ink colors, and to record each edition update on its inner cover. By pressing her wand to the words "third edition" in a book, Hermione could watch the text of the book change and flow backwards in time to show her what had been in the book at another time, and watch the text change back when she let go, resuming its current sixth edition presentation.
It was fascinating to Hermione, and she found herself begging the book casters for lessons on how to cast the publishing spells when she was on her breaks. The casters were very stringent and refused, citing copyright and how the spells were protected and only to be used for the publishing house, but one of the younger casters relented, occasionally teaching Hermione the wand movements or incantation for a spell or two by the coffee pot. He told her strictly that they were spells only to be used for the publishing house, and not by her, at least not for several years, until she was powerful enough to manage them, but he taught them to her anyway. Hermione made secret notes in a journal of the incantations and the wand movements to try again when she was older. She hoped that she'd be able to get the same internship next summer, but just in case she didn't, she wanted to try on her own sometime.
Book-making was fascinating, and it cheered Hermione to see how important books still were in the magical world; books in the Muggle world were becoming less and less popular over time with the growing popularity of the television.
For once, Hermione found herself grateful at the wizarding world's old-fashioned ways.