((ooc: just to give the rp'ers here a sense of what Verity is like, where she is working and living, etc.))

Verity wiped her weary eyes with the back of her jumper sleeve and yawned a bit. She had been sitting in the same position for quite some time now, tallying up the day's totals for the Diagon Alley... She tripple checked the Skiving Snack Box numbers....."Up a few sickles from last week. That's good," she quietly said to herself, mentally comparing last week's totals to this week's. 

Her eyes stared intently at the numbers in front of her, as her quill quickly added and subtracted. Even with the Tally Quill the Twins' had invented for her to make addition and subtraction easier, she hadn't needed it in the least. She was good at numbers, as her mother always said. She looked up briefly and turned to stretch her neck for a bit. She stared out her tiny window in her tiny office located at the back of the store. Sort of scary and dark down in the streets of Hogsmeade, she thought. She shook off a cold and eerie sense that over took her and turned her attention back to her numbers. She had almost finished for Merlin's sake, and she wanted to apparate as soon as possible back to Diagon. She wanted to get in some rest before tomorrow's trip home to visit her parents for two days. She was surprised the Twins had let her take time off. They really needed help, and Verity was more than happy to give them all they nedded....but apparating back and forth from location to location for months straight was tiring and it was taking its toll.

 She hadn't even taken proper care of herself over the last few weeks. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, her temples hurting from the strain. It wasn't like the Joke Shoppe business was a glamorous one, so there wasn't a need for her hair tobe loose, or Muggle makeup, or fancy jumpers normally. She had taken a liking to an old wirch's robe her mother had used when she had attended Hogwarts. 

Verity's mother was in Gryffindor. She had fond stories to tell, but Verity couldn't help feel a bit cheated out of not attending a wizarding school. Instead her mom had homeschooled her in the ways of the witch, so as to keep her life some what "normal" and to acclimate her to the wizarding world slowly, on her parents' own terms. Verity silently scoffed at this thought while she remembered it and when she did, her hand jerked. She knocked over her ink and it slowly spread over the parchment in front of her. "Marvelous," Verity sighed. She shook her head and her daydreams aside, picked up her wand and muttered a spell calmly over the ink. It vanished and she checked to make sure her numbers were ledgible. They were, thank heavens. 

"Time to go home," she sighed. She stood up, stretched again and bent to gather her things on the floor. She quickly ran through a mental list. Records? Check. Paycheck? Check (She smiled at this truth). Orders for this weekend? Double check. "Hmmm...." she thought,"am I missing anything?" She stood up again with her open bag to ponder and she scanned her tiny office. Her blank walls were just that, blank. She hadn't any time to even put pictures up on them. She looked on her desk, searching it for anything important. "Oh, geez, my reading glasses." She flicked her wand and they flew into her bag at once. "AND my wallet." She rolled her eyes at her thoughtlessness and her wand tossed them into her bag as well. "That does it then, I am off for three days!" She smiled again and left her office neat and clean. 

As she was leaving the store, she decided to leave Fred and George a note and a silver key. She scribbled the following onto a tiny piece of parchment that she left on their counter, 

F&G,

 I'm off you two, don't burn the shoppe down.....No, seriously. I'll be back in three days' time. I'll be at my parents' in London. Here are the numbers for this week. Great job you two. You truly are brilliant. I'll place next week's orders as soon as possible. Diagon Alley's shoppe is locked. Here's the key. See you soon. 

*V

With that, she locked the front door, stepped out into the cold October evening, and apparated to London. Her thoughts mixed with a feeling of dread and longing. Her parents usually made her feel that way...