Parvati Patil (india_ink) wrote in reduxpitch, @ 2016-01-29 19:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | !bingo, !challenge, !thread, character: parvati patil |
WHO: Parvati Patil (Narrative)
WHEN: April 2001
WHERE: Flourish and Blott's
WHAT: Miss Patil has a few things to prove
CHALLENGE: Backstory (Hoodwink), Bingo ("There was no way...", Flourish and Blott's)
The job of a reporter, as Parvati well knew, was to get the story whatever the cost. It wasn't easy to make the leap from copyeditor to reporter; the paper needed all kinds of people behind the scenes to make it all work, but Parvati wasn't exactly content to fix other people's grammatical errors. She wanted to be in this, to find the stories, to see her byline. Sure, bylines would be a long time coming. She could be patient, as long as she was making progress.
This wasn't her story - stories of her own were far in the future still. Another reporter had asked her to help get a bit of information to fill out an article, and the paranoid subject he had in mind simply did not want to talk to the Prophet. Obviously it would be wrong to lie to him, but there were other ways to hoodwink somebody.
There was no way he could escape Parvati. Not with this lipstick and that bag. Oh, and a well-placed hex.
Said hex rebounded off a bookshelf and made the man stumble directly into her, and Parvati let her bag, with its wide, open mouth, fall, spilling all her things all over the floor of the bookshop. "Oh!" she cried. "Oh, I'm so sorry, are you okay?"
He blushed when he got a proper look at her, and bent down to help her gather her things. Pushing a strand of black hair behind her ear, she let him babble on about how sorry he was to have knocked into her. He blushed even deeper when he saw that he had - apparently - inadvertently caused a bottle of expensive-looking perfume to break, ruining half of her things. "That's all right," she insisted. "Really, it is!"
"No, no, I insist. There must be something I can do to make it up to you," he said. "Let me - buy you a coffee?"
She graciously agreed, and soon they were sitting comfortable in a reading area in the bookshop, with Parvati chatting to him like an old friend. She confided in him that she was having trouble with something for work, and when he asked about it, she went in for the kill.
"It's this story for the Prophet," she said. "I don't suppose you know anything about the thefts in Diagon Alley?"
Of course he knew about the thefts. He was a witness, supposedly, to the theft from this very shop just the other day. He could hardly say no to her at this juncture, especially when she gave him a charming, sheepish smile with her ruby-red lips.
The best thing was that when she went away with the quote for the paper, he still didn't seem to have any idea he'd been tricked.