Grindelwald handled setting the stage; the rest of the time belonged to Tom.
There was no further negotiation to fold in this time, only the Guild's press conference.
The moment the Catherines walked out, they naturally drew a wave of astonishment, and once the crowd realized these were all constructs, it forced everyone present to reconsider the sheer scale of Tom's mastery over alchemy.
Pierce watched the young man holding forth with easy confidence, and whatever emotion stirred in him leaned decidedly negative.
He might be destined to eventually helm the International Confederation of Wizards, but at heart he was still a North American wizard, and North America's relationship with this particular boy had never been an easy one.
He'd even wondered, once, whether Tom was some kind of decoy Dumbledore had set up, a distraction dressed up in flashy achievements to serve some hidden agenda.
Then he'd realized the boy's abilities were simply, genuinely that formidable.
So even irritated as he was, Pierce had no intention of picking a fight with Tom now, not even the smallest bit of friction, unless he could first guarantee his own survival before finding a way to actually kill the boy.
But Pierce badly underestimated just how deep Tom's mastery of the mind ran, to say nothing of the Voice of Revelation talent he'd inherited through Joan.
Even the faintest trace of hostility surfaced clearly in his perception the instant it formed.
Tom glanced Pierce's way once, and the man immediately reined himself in, abandoning whatever he'd been about to attempt.
Pierce's hostility was so pitifully small that Tom didn't bother sparing it another thought.
If he moved against everyone who harbored even a trace of ill will toward him, Hogwarts would already be in chaos. Setting the other three Houses aside entirely, even within Slytherin itself, plenty of students stayed outwardly deferential while quietly resenting him underneath.
That was simply how it was. He was never going to be universally liked, especially not by a House steeped for generations in bloodline ideology.
So long as the resentment stayed beneath the surface, he let it be. The moment anyone actually acted on it, he'd deal with them without hesitation.
Tom carried on with the press conference, laying out the Guild's current framework for the room.
The core of the whole system was its membership tier structure.
First, anyone could register free of charge as an Honorary Member. Honorary membership carried no special benefits beyond the basic right to post and accept jobs through the Guild.
For now, that Honorary status functioned essentially as a passport. Simply holding it meant a wizard was no longer bound by their prior standing as a Sacred Confederation member or anything else, and so long as they broke no local laws, the regional Ministry was obligated to treat them the same as anyone else.
That single clause amounted to a multinational passport of sorts, and without Grindelwald's constant pressure behind it, negotiating such a concession during peacetime would have been all but impossible.
Some things, it turned out, still needed a wand pointed at someone's throat to actually get done.
For now, this only covered the surrounding nations. Once things settled, Grindelwald intended to keep expanding outward, and the value of Guild membership would only climb the further it spread.
Above that tier sat the truly coveted rank: Cherished Membership.
Cherished Membership ran from Tier One through Tier Eight, offering perks like free lodging, priority job listings, a fixed monthly stipend, and reduced commission fees. Tom didn't dwell on the specifics; people would find out for themselves soon enough.
Most of the room was made up of high-ranking Ministry officials, largely unmoved by talk of money or subsidies; their perspective on the whole thing ran along different lines entirely.
Quite a few of them noticed something interesting: Guild members functioned remarkably like part-time contractors for their own departments.
Post a job when you needed help, set it aside when you didn't, all without the ongoing cost of a permanent hire. Compare that to bringing someone onto Ministry payroll, which essentially meant supporting them for life, and it was no wonder so many Ministries had grown wary of hiring at all, squeezing their existing staff instead of expanding.
Their opinion of the Guild rose sharply in that moment.
Being able to hire Sacred Confederation members as contract labor, with Grindelwald having no grounds to object, was a satisfying thought all on its own.
Dumbledore, throughout all of this, stayed quiet.
He saw Tom's ambition with perfect clarity, and it was hard to reconcile that scale of vision with a mere third-year student. Even Voldemort, in his day, hadn't reached this far this fast.
But Dumbledore's opposition to Voldemort had never really been about ambition itself. It was about how the man operated, the sheer brutality of his methods. Voldemort had seemed to govern without a heart at all, treating destruction as his only tool of deterrence, ruling through slaughter alone.
Tom, by contrast, worked with the current rather than against it, weaving violence together with genuine mutual benefit.
The one thing Dumbledore couldn't quite work out was why Grindelwald was cooperating this readily. What was he actually getting out of it, and what scheme might be hiding underneath?
"This badge is the sole mark of membership."
Tom produced a small, unadorned circular badge, its only design a single serpent coiled around its face, the Guild's official emblem.
He'd originally wanted a panda for the emblem, but once Usagi found out, she'd made such a fuss about it that he'd had no choice but to switch to her likeness instead.
That little creature got jealous far too easily.
"Start me off with ten thousand slots." Grindelwald said it almost carelessly. "Trade and exchange are good things. The wizarding world's grown stagnant, each generation worse than the last. It's overdue for real change."
"There are enough badges in supply to cover every wizard in the world, though each one still has to travel to a Guild outpost to complete registration before it activates. Once registered, the badge binds itself to that wizard's magical signature. No one else can ever make use of it."
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