While Allen soothed Penelope and fed her Sprite to calm her down, the situation in the German Magical World, which had been boiling like a pot of water these past few days, showed no sign of improving. What had begun as protests was already starting to evolve toward riots.
At first, after the bank was robbed, it was mostly the robbed citizens who gathered outside Gringotts to protest. The amount the goblins of Gringotts were willing to compensate them was far from what the victims demanded.
Under the influence of the Magical World's lax management habits, the goblins themselves could not determine exactly how many Galleons their customers had stored in their vaults, and the value of heirlooms such as works of art or magical curios was even harder to estimate. Faced with the full compensation amounts demanded by the victims, the goblins believed many wizards were simply taking advantage of the crisis and falsely inflating the figures—though that was indeed the case.
With the stalemate unresolved, the goblins simply closed Gringotts for the time being, publicly citing the need for repairs and temporarily barring wizards from entering to conduct business. But at just this moment, rumors somehow spread among the wizarding community that Gringotts was about to collapse, and under such circumstances, many wizards who had originally felt secure because their vaults were deep enough also panicked and wanted to withdraw their wealth.
At a time like this, people ignored the fact that Gringotts was a transnational goblin organization—because the bank the goblins had claimed was the safest had already been proven unsafe. Naturally, among wizards who already discriminated against and distrusted non-wizard beings, those seeds of distrust sprouted in their hearts under the incitement of certain rumors.
The goblins sought help from the Goblin Liaison Office of the