Chapter 24.4- Doom Days

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The portkey terminal reminded me so much of an airport that one of them surely had to have guided the design of the other. Considering portkey terminals were much much older, then my money was on some enterprising muggle born thinking it would be funny to make them similar. Well, either that or there were just only so many ways one could design a transport terminal. I walked in and was instantly directed to the check in station. The place wasn’t crowded.

Like I noted earlier, portkey tickets were prohibitively expensive. It didn’t make sense in the beginning since I felt all you needed was a piece of junk and a charm. But that was for the local portkeys. The Portkey terminals worked very differently. I checked in, having my ticket verified before I was directed to a waiting lounge. There a house elf was waiting with free pastries and drinks available. I rejected both. Ij this world, there was no limit to the things that could be added to food, and I wasn’t going to risk it.

My portkey was scheduled for five minutes later, and those five minutes passed easily as I spent my time going over my arguments for Sirius’ case. I had multiple avenues to follow. Some of them were riskier than the others, but my initial plan of suing the ministry was the one with the most appeal. At the very least, the fact that he hadn’t even been given a trial meant I could at the very least get the international warrant on his head removed. With that, he just had to move to an ICW member-nation that didn’t have extremely friendly relations with Britain. The Black’s happened to have property in both France and Germany, but I was far more partial to the former than the latter for obvious reasons.

The bell rang, I walked to the Dias along with three others. The portkey terminal used a special kind of portkey. We stood atop a disk that was about 2 metres in diameter- figure out the circumference from there. The disc was white. We didn’t have to touch anything because the disc itself was the portkey. It would take us straight to a fixed location- the terminal in Geneva. There was no chance of it being hijacked or whatever because the spells on the disks would only allow them to move to fixed locations. The downside here was that if I wanted to go to somewhere more exotic, I would have to use this terminal to go to another terminal that had a disc fixed for that location. Rather similar to airports as well.

The conductor, a burly man stepped on to the disk last.

“Now, we will be making the trip to Geneva. If there is no cause for delay from any of you, we will be off in three, two, one” He counted down with his fingers, and then we began to spin. Rather the disc began to spin as we were held in place atop it. We didn’t even have to hold on to our luggage.

In about half a minute, the disc slid to a slow stop.