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Chapter 29: More customers
🕑 Added 2025-09-12 02:31:20 +0000 UTC“Annoyed?” asked Emmeline, standing a few meters from Ryan.
Ryan looked up, closed his book, and smiled faintly at the sight of her. “Of the few people who can interrupt my reading without bothering me, you’re one of them, Vance.”
Emmeline raised a brow slightly as she walked closer.
“Your first flirty comment after class,” she said in a calm tone, with no reproach or exaggerated enthusiasm. “I thought you weren’t going to make one today.”
Ryan smiled faintly. “I was thinking about some things. You know how genius inventors are… they have their moments of deep introspection and fleeting existentialism…”
Emmeline rolled her eyes slightly and sat down on the sofa beside him, at just the right distance. Not too close, not compromising.
“Tell me, what do you need? You’re not the type to come closer for nothing,” Ryan added.
“And what if I simply wanted to sit here? It’s not like every time I’m with you it’s to ask for something,” Emmeline replied serenely, without a trace of nervousness, or hiding it very well.
They looked at each other for a few seconds. There was no tension, but there was a curious mutual attention.
Ryan arched a brow, amused. “Did the flirting roles switch and no one told me? I’m outdated.”
“It was just a joke,” said Emmeline with a faint, fleeting smile, barely perceptible. “Although… you’re right. I came to ask if you already had the glasses ready.”
“Oh? That?” said Ryan, feigning surprise. “Yes, yes. I finished them. I gave them to Pandora today.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me? I thought I was first on your waiting list,” said Emmeline, raising a brow.
“You were,” Ryan replied dramatically, lowering his gaze as if guilty. “But today you didn’t share a seat with me… and I was too embarrassed to come over. You know… you were sitting with Marlene.”
“And?”
“My ex-girlfriend,” Ryan stressed, acting like a first-year kid intimidated. “Her presence terrifies me.”
Emmeline looked at him with a neutral expression… though her lips curved just slightly. “I didn’t know girls intimidated you, with all the flirting you do, including with seventh-years…”
“Only the ones who’ve thrown books, potions, and, at the time, veiled death threats at me,” Ryan justified himself.
“Marlene isn’t that terrible.”
“You didn’t date her,” Ryan replied, while leaning slightly forward and pulling out from inside his robe a black, elegant case with a metal clasp and reinforced edges.
He handed it to her with a small bow of his head. “Here you are, Miss Vance. One-of-a-kind model. Enchanted lens, reinforced frame. Reading-speed booster. And, of course, perfectly fitting your air of mysterious intellectual.”
She took it carefully, but her genuine interest showed. She opened it discreetly, examined the glasses… and for the first time that day, she truly smiled. “They’re very pretty.”
“Try them on,” said Ryan, still not mentioning the price.
She complied, calmly putting the glasses on. When she lifted her gaze, Ryan was already watching her.
“You look very good in them,” he said, with that half-flirty, half-genuine tone of his.
Emmeline glanced at him sideways, still wearing the glasses. “Did you say the same to Pandora?”
“What? Of course not!” he answered, exaggerating his offense. “Do you think I flirt with everything that moves?”
“You’re close to it,” she said, amused, though she barely showed it on her face.
Then, without warning, she snatched the book from his lap and opened it where Ryan had been reading. Her eyes ran over the lines at a pace she herself hadn’t imagined. She frowned just slightly, focused, then looked back at Ryan, still with the glasses on.
“They work,” she murmured. She had already tried Ryan’s days before. She trusted the product and had seen him use them recently.
Ryan smiled, satisfied. “Of course they work. A genius made them, didn’t he?”
“What’s the cost?”
He looked at her. He hesitated. For a moment, he said nothing.
“Why are you thinking so much?” asked Emmeline, tilting her head slightly.
“I’m considering giving them to you… because of how good you look in them,” said Ryan, with his crooked smile, leaving in the air whether he was serious or not.
Emmeline didn’t reply immediately. She just looked at him. Then, she lowered her gaze for a second.
“How much did you charge Pandora?”
“Thirty galleons. In three installments of ten. She already paid me the first one. Two left.”
Emmeline nodded with slight seriousness, then spoke, “I’ll pay you thirty as well. But without installments. I don’t want a gift. This invention is worth every galleon. Besides, Pandora and I are your first two clients. You need to start valuing your work properly.”
Ryan looked at her for a moment in silence. The usual sarcasm faded ever so slightly from his face.
“Alright, as you wish,” he finally replied, his voice plain, without embellishment.
Emmeline settled the book on her lap, lowered her gaze with elegance, and pulled a leather purse from her robe. With a calmness only she could muster, she began counting the galleons softly, one by one. The metallic sound carried clearly in the Gryffindor common room, which, at that hour, five in the afternoon, was fairly crowded.
At first, a few students had already been sneaking glances at Ryan ever since they saw him reading alone with those dark glasses that didn’t look magical… but clearly did something, since he was turning pages at a ridiculous pace. Now, with Emmeline Vance sitting beside him, not too far, not compromisingly close, the attention doubled.
And then, the scene fully captured everyone’s eyes when she began counting galleons, one after another. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty.
Ryan accepted them calmly, slipping them into his own purse without hiding it or hurrying. Every gesture carried an almost defiant naturalness, as if he didn’t care at all that half of Gryffindor was watching.
And indeed, they were.
“Did he sell her something?” whispered a second-year boy to his friend.
“Glasses? But what do they do?”
“They must be magical, like the quills.”
“Do they have enhancements? Secret enchantments?”
The voices stayed low, but the murmur spread, growing. Some eyed the glasses Emmeline still wore, trying to see what made them special. Others wondered about the price. Thirty galleons was steep for students.
What they didn’t know was that both Pandora and Emmeline had received a special price. Ryan had treated them as his first clients, almost pioneer collaborators. But if anyone else asked… the figure would not drop below forty or fifty galleons. And that was being generous.
Because, while the materials barely cost seven, the true value lay in the enchanting work and rune inscriptions that doubled reading speed without causing eye strain or harming basic comprehension. An invention found nowhere else, genuinely useful, that boosted study productivity.
Ryan, still seated, took back the book that had been his only minutes earlier. Emmeline handed it to him carefully. For an instant, she looked at him in silence, as if wondering whether to remain seated a bit longer.
But finally, noticing he was about to resume reading, she stood with the same calmness with which she had arrived.
“Thank you, Ryan.”
“Thank you for buying,” Ryan said more seriously, before smiling again and adding, “Now go and spread good publicity. I expect my next clients. Maybe Alicia will be next, if she doesn’t consider it illegal.”
Emmeline smiled without turning back, walking away at her usual tranquil pace toward the girls’ dormitory stairs, leaving behind a trail of curiosity and low-voiced chatter.
Without lifting his gaze, Ryan noticed Alicia, Marlene, Dorcas, and Celeste rise to go talk to her.
Three potential clients, Ryan thought, with a faint smile. Three, not four.
Because Marlene, his ex-girlfriend, hadn’t bought the enchanted quill. Nor did she seem inclined to.
Not out of lack of interest. He had seen the way she watched Emmeline and Alicia use it, how she tried to hide her curiosity every time someone wrote in the air with one. But approaching Ryan, or accepting one of his inventions, was something she simply wasn’t willing to do. At least, not yet.
It wasn’t open resentment. Marlene wasn’t like that. But pride. A matter of setting a distance. Of not granting him, even in appearance, any kind of “victory.”
And Ryan understood.
He didn’t blame her. After all, if the roles were reversed… he’d probably do the same.
But he also knew usefulness always won out. That efficiency, innovation, and practicality eventually prevailed.
Marlene could resist buying an enchanted quill. It was flashy, visible, attention-grabbing. Even if useful, it could be dismissed as an aesthetic luxury or a passing fad.
But the glasses were something else.
The advantage of reading twice as fast was a devastating change if you knew how to use it. To Ryan, it was a kind of Pay To Win.
A hypothetical experiment:
Two students in the same year. Same level of intelligence. One dedicated, the other lazy.
The diligent one read two hours a day. Without glasses, of course. He progressed, worked hard, retained. The lazy one… well, he barely read for an hour.
But if you gave the lazy one the glasses…
With the same effort as always, just one hour, now he read the equivalent of two. The same as the other.
And if, for some reason, he decided to take things a bit more seriously and read two hours like the other… he would read the equivalent of four.
And he could surpass him.
Comprehension depended on him, yes. The glasses didn’t improve memory or reasoning, only speed… but sometimes, that was all you needed. More time. More pages. More opportunities to learn.
The next day, to Ryan’s surprise, that theory materialized in a way he hadn’t foreseen.
Classes had ended, and the afternoon sun bathed Hogwarts’ inner courtyard with a warm, slanted light. Ryan was half-reclined on one of the stone benches, book open in his lap and glasses on. He had earned a rare moment of peace, away from the bustle… until he heard footsteps.
Five pairs of female feet approaching at once.
When he looked up, they surrounded him.
Alice in front, arms crossed, her posture straight as if taking attendance in the militia. Dorcas, with her wrinkled robe and half-tied hair, watched him with a raised brow, as though she were now evaluating a change in him she never thought she’d see.
Celeste, sweet and quiet, limited herself to looking at him with a mix of curiosity and expectation.
Marlene, his ex-girlfriend, kept her arms behind her back, distant but present, with that subtle way of feigning indifference that only fooled those who didn’t know her.
And lastly, Emmeline, who said nothing. She stayed slightly behind, as if she already knew the script.
Ryan blinked.
“This is intimidating,” Ryan said, feigning discomfort. “You do realize I could scream and accuse you of attempted kidnapping?”
Dorcas rolled her eyes and huffed, not believing a word, “We want the glasses.”
“All of you?” Ryan looked around, surprised. “What kind of advertising did you pull off in a day, Vance?”
Emmeline only looked at him calmly. The shadow of a smile appeared on her lips.
“She told us days ago they existed,” Alice interjected. “That she tried yours on the train and already put herself on the waiting list with Pandora. That alone left us… curious and skeptical…”
“But yesterday,” Dorcas continued, “we tried them. Five minutes. It was enough to know she wasn’t exaggerating, nor acting as your official promoter.”
Celeste nodded. Even Marlene, who until then had pretended she was only passing by, murmured, “They’re not bad…”
Ryan looked at her. And for an instant, he felt something. Not a real, current feeling of his own… but an echo.
An emotional memory.
The original Ryan, the true Ollivander who had inhabited that body before him, had indeed loved her. In his way. And though the memories were hazy, the sensations came in bursts that were hard to ignore.
He didn’t know her. Not really.
And he wasn’t about to let a borrowed memory decide anything for him. He coughed lightly, uncomfortable, and forced an ironic smile to mask it.
“Well… as you know, they’re not cheap artifacts,” he said, adjusting himself, “and making four will take time.”
They all nodded, already expecting that.
“We know they went for thirty galleons,” Alice said. “We’re willing to pay it.”
“No,” Ryan raised a calm hand to stop them. “Thirty was a special price. Pandora and Emmeline were my first clients, so I gave them a better deal.”
He looked at them steadily, without arrogance. “The price will be forty galleons. In the future, it will likely go up. But since you’re clients right after the start, I’ll leave it at forty. I know your families have plenty of money,” he added with a crooked smile.
Dorcas snorted through her nose, amused. Alice raised a brow. Celeste smiled faintly. Marlene said nothing.
“Deal,” the four said, almost in unison.
So quickly…? Ryan thought. He had expected more resistance, some negotiation. Maybe the price was too low?
“And when will we have them?” asked Dorcas. “They’ll help for reading the boring texts in History of Magic.”
“I can’t give you an exact date,” Ryan replied. “But when I finish the first, I’ll deliver it right away. The only thing left is to define the order.”
The four looked at one another. And without another word, they played rock, paper, scissors.
One single round.
Celeste smiled triumphantly. Marlene rolled her eyes. Alice huffed. Dorcas clicked her tongue.
“So: Celeste, Marlene, Alice… and Dorcas,” Ryan announced.
“And the frames?” asked Celeste.
“When I start with each of you, I’ll show you the options. You can choose the color and the style,” Ryan replied.
They all nodded and looked at one another. Marlene gave them a slight nod, and as if everything had been rehearsed, the four of them walked off together toward the castle entrance. Even Emmeline, who had hardly said a word.
Marlene stayed behind. And Ryan clearly noticed. He felt the bench beside him sink slightly when she sat down.
Oh no, he thought.
This wasn’t good. Your ex-girlfriend, who was not only part of your past, but now also sees you as someone different: more focused, more ambitious, with two useful inventions already in circulation, a growing reputation, good grades in class, and without the emotional train-wreck attitude you used to have, wants to talk.
