14 February 1993, Hogwarts
Harry had been ready to go down the stairs, to the common room, like every Sunday morning,
It had been almost a month since his meeting in Hogsmeade and finally, everything went through. The paperwork needed to get Harry certified legally as an investor in the Firebolt took a couple of weeks to process, and it took an additional week for Terrence Smythe to build the seven brooms. Finally, after a little negotiation, the Chudley Cannons accepted experimenting with the new brooms for a few matches in the season. Hopefully, the brooms would help stop the record-breaking losing streak that they currently held.
Yeah, Harry found it odd that no one batted an eyelash when he registered the paperwork for his ownership, but since there was a standard contract of the purchase and a copy of the Gringotts transaction was sent to the ministry, no one seemed to care. At no point was there anyone asking for his age. It was surprisingly straightforward, especially since property worked weirdly in the wizarding world.
That's the thing, for a property to be bought or sold, it's not the actual person who owns it, but the holder of the vault used to buy it. It was an efficient way for the ministry to track down the owner of any property without bothering with the paperwork. Because technically speaking, if someone stole a property or committed fraud, they would need to fool the bank and Gringotts are not merciful when it comes to thieves.
Every single wizard or witch that attends Hogwarts has a monetary vault that's opened just for them. As part of an agreement between the school and the Goblin Nation, these vaults do not require any fees until their owners graduate. Even the scions of rich families get a vault if they specifically don't have one in their name. In Harry's case, since he was the last Potter, the bank didn't need to create a new account for him.
It was actually pretty efficient. In a way, instead of having an identification number, the ministry could use Gringotts' vault numbers. Additionally, large scale transactions using physical gold were rare and usually done off the table, meaning that whatever you're buying is not something that you want the ministry to know about it. You can, of course, get a signed proof of purchase and use it to file the paperwork, but usually, going through Gringotts was just easier for everyone.
But yeah, hopefully, everything would go fine with Firebolt, and Harry would start refilling the Potter vault after the mess that his father made of it. He invested five thousand galleons into what was essentially a sinking company with only the knowledge from the stories of his past life as a reference. He only hoped it would end up working.
The issue wasn't even the broom, it was Smythe's ability to market his product. The broom was an amazing artefact, but Harry didn't have the capital to market it on a large scale so he employed a method that a certain energy drink used to market their products in the early days when they didn't have enough money for a large-scale advertising campaign.
The trick was to subtly incorporate it into athletes' routines, in Harry's case it was making the broom show how much better the team had gotten with the new brooms. Oh, they'll probably be shit, but a substantial increase in performance, and maybe even a winning streak, and the fact that the brooms looked unique, would generate organic buzz and word-of-mouth marketing, which wouldn't cost them a single galleon.
It was a dirty trick, and the fact that Harry subtly threatened the broom maker by figuring out how his invention worked didn't help ease his conscience. Alas, in the long run, they would both benefit from it. For the moment, he would trust Smythe to follow the plan he had outlined to him.
So, as promised, the Potter scion decided to not get involved and came back to the main issue of Riddle's inevitable return. So far, Harry only focused on his ice magic, but he did distract himself by reading about spacial expansion charms in his downtime to enchant his hat. It was a nice calm project that was completely independent from the whole Chamber of Secrets thing, and that was just calming. The Potter scion had dedicated almost his entire year to dealing with the chamber and it was getting tiring.
When he got down, he was met with Daphne, who brightened when she saw him, "Good morning, Harry. Did you have a good night's sleep?"
He nodded, "What about you?"
"Great, but Tracy wouldn't get up early on a Sunday. Where's Blaise?"
Harry shrugged, "It didn't seem fair to wake him up, to be honest. It's a Sunday, Daphne. You shouldn't wake them up just because you want to have breakfast with them."
"Fine, it's just that keeping things from them for so long has been hard."
"You're the one who picked the red pill, and they didn't. They haven't answered my decision, so I'm assuming that they don't want to be involved, and I will respect that."
And Harry was serious about that. He wasn't going to involve them in his mess unless they specifically asked him to do it. Yeah, there was some tension because it was obvious that Daphne knew something that they didn't, and they definitely noticed the Greengrass scion disappearing with Harry for hours. Yeah, the whole thing weighed on Daphne's conscience, and she wanted nothing more than to tell them. Fortunately, she couldn't take out her anger at him since he did offer them a chance and a standing offer. They just didn't take it.
"Let's just get some breakfast and meet up with Luna for our lessons," the Greengrass scion grumbled.
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