he pushed it open, sending it creaking open on its ponderous corpulent hinges. Even the malfeasance of his memory, though, could not protect him from surprise at the sight he encountered within. A pallid arachnid, dressed in some kind of papal bustier, turned to face him. This mutant horror, closer to the size of a blimp than an ant, turned with a horrible temporal scream and faced him. It whipped back a corner of its bizarre liturgical negligee and pulled a deadly rune-covered sword from its scabbard. "Hm! No happy shindig today," he thought to himself, the single thought filling the usual vacuum of his mind. The sword swooped down and caught him a glancing blow. The horrific spider laughed with glee, but the cheer caught in its thorax as he rose, unhurt, to his feet. Thank God he was wearing his kevlar
"It's not like that in the magical world, 'Arry," Hagrid said, voice lowered in concern. "Y'see, when Vol... well, when You-Know-Who set up a trust deposit insurance scheme, 'e didn't account for rising interest rates. And 'e didn't give codflakes about whether it would influence currency issues abroad, or take into account nominal seasonal fluctuations in the GNP as accounted for in Dumbledore's rules. See, that's what makes him so evil, Harry; by doin' this he unpinned meaningful values from real estate an' just left 'em floatin', an' so the loss in equity was inevitable
"Woo woo woo! Look at them legs!" the fresh maple leaves shouted. The cloth catnip mouse was offended, but said nothing. She had long been exposed to that kind of behaviour from deciduous plants. "I'll be glad to get home," she thought to herself. "I'm hungry, and at least Finky will treat me with some respect." She reached 44th Street and entered her building where Adolfo, the bumble-ball doorman, was on duty. He rose unsteadily and nodded to her. Next to his chair was a nearly-empty bottle of kaopectate. "'S' nothin'," he lisped drunkenly. "Jus' a little shot t' hold me until I getta break." She said nothing and, avoiding his gaze, quickly went inside. The elevator arrived at her floor and she dashed into their small apartment. To her surprise she saw the familiar large plastic penguin standing in the doorway to the kitchen, naked, holding a dozen roofing nails in one flipper and a birthday cake, with candles, in the other. "Finky!" she laughed. "You remembered!" "Happy birthday, Sheiloo, my favorite little cloth catnip mouse," Finky replied. After a leisurely candlelit dinner of cake and roofing nails, the two giggled and retired to the bedroom
"Accio Jensen index!" Harry cried, pointing his wand at the maintenance margin requirement. If he could just prevent Voldemort from off-balance-sheeting a little longer, he knew Hermione would come through with the EAMS differential disclosure. But Voldemort's equity was powerful, even with Dumbledore's setting value date on the Eurodollar; his random-walk didn't seem so random, and Harry was sure that even with translation exposure he could paper over his losses. "Autoregressive kedavra!" Voldemort snarled with a sudden fiduciary. Harry leaped aside, nearly forced to sell at a dirty price. If he hadn't set his global bonds to Market-if-touched he would have been forced into liquidity