Paying Your Dues

Owls to the left of him, owls to the right of him, and no place left to sit. They were standing on his desk, perched on the back of his chair, and lined up along the mantelpiece. Penn stood glaring at them from the doorway.

"Suzan! Suzan!"

His secretary entered, windmilling her arms to shoo more owls out of the way. "Yes, Sir?"

"What is going on? Since when have we been running a rescue operation for homeless owls?" He batted away something small and excitable.

"It's the scroll campaign, Sir. We're paying them off as fast as we can, but we ran out of petty cash an hour ago, and Gringotts is shut for the lunch break. We have to wait till it opens again before we can send them away."

"Which scroll campaign?"

"To free the Weasley twins, Sir. You were sent a memo about it this morning."

"Eh? Was at my club this morning. Never got it."

"Someone's started a campaign to get the Weasley twins out of jail, Sir, and they're pretty upset with us too. They seem to feel we've been unfairly dragging the family through the mud. Scrolls have been arriving since yesterday. Most of them are howlers. We've had to start opening them in the basement. Poor Ernie's going deaf trying to get them all open."

Penn flinched as a trio of owls hurtled toward them from the corridor. "Well, get these ones out of here. I can't work with that lot taking up my desk."

"I'm sorry, Sir, but every other available space in the building except the meeting room has been taken over. We've managed to keep that free, but I don't know how much longer we can keep them out of there."

"Every available space, you say?"

"Yes, Sir."

Penn frowned, then glared, then frowned again. "Right. Right." He glared once more at the offending owls to be sure they understood he was not best pleased, then stomped off to the meeting room. "Get the reporting staff together. Emergency conference right now!"

"Yes, Sir." Suzan replied and hurried off to find the journalists, pausing only to wipe guano off her shoe.

"By the beard of the prophets, what an unholy mess this is."

"Have you ever wondered why being unholy should make a mess seem worse?"

Penn and Pratt just glared at Hislop. Then Pratt turned to Penn.

"If we keep pushing this, we'll ruin the paper."

"Do you think I don't know that? You broke this story. How are you going to fix it?"

Pratt clamped his mouth shut. He seemed to be struggling with something in his head for a minute, then very slowly and clearly spoke. "We could try backing up the twins instead."

"Doing an about face on our position?" asked Penn.

"Yeah, tell the public that the Ministry was wrong for trying to impose such ancient brain dead laws on two naive young lads trying to get an even break."

"Out of the question. We are a respectable newspaper. We tell the truth, we don't make it."

There was dead silence as everyone in the room stared at Penn.

Eventually Hislop spoke up. "You mean like the time we told everyone that Potter was a nutcase out for his own publicity when we knew there was Ministry evidence that You Know Who had returned."

"That was..." Penn began.

"Or the time we insinuated that Dumbledore had lost his marbles and needed to be removed from all his offices?" asked junior reporter Todd.

"That's hardly..." Penn tried but was once again interrupted.

"Or the time that ..."

"Yes alright!" Penn was red in the face.

"Penn, you know we can't continue down this track. Our readers have been exceedingly clear that they aren't impressed with us. Either we lose face and change our position, or we lose our readers. Which would you rather?"

Penn's face continued to get redder. His fists clenched. Pratt stood his ground. The staff watched with interest. Money was riding on the outcome.

Finally Penn let out a breath. It whooshed out of him and all the tension he'd been building up just seemed to evaporate. "Fine. Do it. Come up with something that supports the Weasleys' activists and supporters but doesn't make us look like a bunch of brain dead idiots."

Hislop cocked his head. "Isn't it a little late for that?"

"Have it on my desk by 2pm!" bawled Penn, then he turned and stomped out of the room.

The rest of the experienced team of reporters remained at the conference desk, fidgeting slightly. None of them looked at the others.

Pratt addressed the ceiling. "Well, that went well."

"Yeah," said Hislop. "Now we just have to turn the tide of public opinion in our favour, get the sales up to record levels, fend off the inevitable Ministry backlash, make sure we don't get caught in the middle of any of it, and Bob's your uncle, we should all be able to hold onto our jobs."

Pratt grimaced. "That's okay then. Should be able to do that by deadline. No problem."