"The deadly traps, while easily capable of killing people, aren't deadly enough to be a credible defense" does not seem like a good justification for their existence. Nor is buying time for an intervention that never happened and by all evidence had no prospect of happening.
Hermione learns a thing
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An XXXX rating indicates a beast that is dangerous by definition, and requires either specialized knowledge or a skilled wizard (or both) to handle safely. Prefects are, whatever their academic and magical accomplishments, still students who have not necessarily taken a day of COMC in their lives. It is certainly plausible that prefects and upper-year students might be able to successfully deal with a mountain troll, but it's hardly the sort of plan that is going to impress wealthy pureblooded parents who are going to complain if their children are, oh, I don't know, scratched by a hippogriff they insulted, to pull a random scenario about another XXXX-rated beast out of my ass.
Alternately, if the threat is - as asserted by Quirrell - a single troll, leaving one or two staff members to defend the student body who are safely corralled in the Great Hall rather than move them through the castle while there is an active threat sounds pretty sensible to me. Kind of like that's where they put the students when there was an active threat by an actual dark wizard, or something.
Sandy River DL
(Verified Destroyer Leader)
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Or, and here's a shocking idea, Dumbledore's a fallible old man who isn't plugged into an extradimensional analytical engine and is focused on the 'Greater Good' of a decaying static society. Sure, he may care about individuals such as Harry, but finds them less important than gaining the world he grew up in a few more decades. Like, do you have any idea how many failure points his plan to beat Riddle had? I can think of a dozen off the top of my head.
And as for 'ending the bloody reign of the death stick'? Break the damn thing and toss the pieces into the lava lake of Mount Erebus, or burn it in Fiendfyre. Anything but having it buried with you after ensuring it ends up under the control of someone who will be fighting in a fucking war!
Which is the greater sin, to kill one person, or to allow evil to run unchecked when you could have stopped it? And which would lead someone to change, disciplining wrongdoing, or turning a blind eye so that they may think their actions are acceptable?
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And why was it necessary to lay a trap in the first place? If you had to why do it in a school of all places? That's just daft as well as potentially incredibly dangerous. If the answer is "He knew Voldemort was possessing Quirrel," or something similar, why would he not simply deal with that problem rather than setting up the whole Rube Goldberg arrangement of lots of challenges that could be penetrated by reasonably bright first years? Why was he apparently unavailable on that specific date and time due to having inexplicably decided that flying a broom from Scotland all the way to London was a brilliant idea, when he had at least four different near-instantaneous methods of covering the distance? And as far as is shown, for that matter, it was the only time he was known to use a broom at all.
That specific episode has so many holes in it that if you take it as written it's blatantly obvious that there was a much deeper plot in operation. Or a massive chunk of stupidity. It just doesn't hang together.
HP canon is full of that sort of thing, and very little of it casts Dumbledore in a positive light unless you also assume he wasn't really that competent any more to begin with. I mean, there was allegedly a curse on the DADA position. Why wasn't a professional cursebreaker called in to sort it out? They certainly exist as one of the elder Weasleys was one. Dumbledore was many things but he wasn't an expert on everything. But instead of getting an expert to fix the problem, he just left it as was and kept hiring new teachers.
Why was Snape allowed, for that matter, to teach? He clearly wasn't very good at it and certainly didn't enjoy it, no matter how good he was at the subject personally. If Dumbledore wanted him close at hand the sensible approach would have been to set up a Potions research lab and let the man get on with it, while hiring someone who didn't hate pretty much everyone and knew how to teach even if they weren't the master-level prodigy Snape was.
And so on. As soon as you start thinking about the story you can't help but find gaping holes all over the place. Which does, of course, leave it ripe for fanfics to fill some of them
That specific episode has so many holes in it that if you take it as written it's blatantly obvious that there was a much deeper plot in operation. Or a massive chunk of stupidity. It just doesn't hang together.
HP canon is full of that sort of thing, and very little of it casts Dumbledore in a positive light unless you also assume he wasn't really that competent any more to begin with. I mean, there was allegedly a curse on the DADA position. Why wasn't a professional cursebreaker called in to sort it out? They certainly exist as one of the elder Weasleys was one. Dumbledore was many things but he wasn't an expert on everything. But instead of getting an expert to fix the problem, he just left it as was and kept hiring new teachers.
Why was Snape allowed, for that matter, to teach? He clearly wasn't very good at it and certainly didn't enjoy it, no matter how good he was at the subject personally. If Dumbledore wanted him close at hand the sensible approach would have been to set up a Potions research lab and let the man get on with it, while hiring someone who didn't hate pretty much everyone and knew how to teach even if they weren't the master-level prodigy Snape was.
And so on. As soon as you start thinking about the story you can't help but find gaping holes all over the place. Which does, of course, leave it ripe for fanfics to fill some of them
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If Harry was a little bit slower or not there at all, the intervention would have happened. And which traps were actually deadly to innocent people intruding? Three first years barged into the room with the Cerberus and made it out without a problem. A plant that can be defeated by fire shouldn't kill anyone above first year. The only way Ron got injured by the chess set was by sacrificing himself. The most dangerous thing there was a troll, and after getting a warning about the danger and going through all the other challenges you only have to blame yourself if you face it.
After that dark wizard demonstrated that he can penetrate the common rooms. The decision might not have been perfect, but with the knowledge Dumbledore had ( A dark wizard is after the philosophers stone, and this might be the first sign of an attack ) and the little added risk ( they already were near the dungeons and could get to their common rooms quickly and in groups) is pretty easily defensible. And I would argue that if a single wizard can deal with a troll, a whole house of Hogwarts students will be able to at least get away from it without being in any real danger. If you, as a headmaster, learn that the school is under attack getting the students out of danger and getting the teachers to actively defend the school while they are out of the way isn't that bad of a choice. If Voldemort was actually attacking at that point in time you want to have all the wands at your side and not worry about the children getting caught in the crossfire. And to escort all the students you would need at least 4 staff members.
Sandy River DL
(Verified Destroyer Leader)
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Personally, my favorite explanation for Dumbledore is something that came up on Caer Azkaban. The man of too many names is a retired adventurer looking for a successor and using the school as the site of a variety of mad schemes to find one. I'm using it in a project I'm calling Death Maiden, featuring a D&D nut Hermione and a necromancer fem!Harry. Probably should put some work into that...
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What I meant was Dumbledore had theorised this method of Harry surviving and that's why he left the imposter alone hoping it would happen. Then once the Horcruxes were destroyed he would arrange Harry to get killed by Voldemort and then hopefully revived without the horcrux. Then he's rescued leaving Voldemort mortal and hopefully they can kill him in the brief disorientation from the horcrux destruction. This fits with a good Dumbledore.
Why set a trap? Because it delays Voldemort by an entire year as he schemes to steal the stone which means he cannot be doing other things. And the earlier traps are to make him waste time figuring them out and prevent him studying the mirror. When he decides to steal the stone he has to get it or leave the castle since his covers blown.And why was it necessary to lay a trap in the first place? If you had to why do it in a school of all places? That's just daft as well as potentially incredibly dangerous. If the answer is "He knew Voldemort was possessing Quirrel," or something similar, why would he not simply deal with that problem rather than setting up the whole Rube Goldberg arrangement of lots of challenges that could be penetrated by reasonably bright first years? Why was he apparently unavailable on that specific date and time due to having inexplicably decided that flying a broom from Scotland all the way to London was a brilliant idea, when he had at least four different near-instantaneous methods of covering the distance? And as far as is shown, for that matter, it was the only time he was known to use a broom at all.
That specific episode has so many holes in it that if you take it as written it's blatantly obvious that there was a much deeper plot in operation. Or a massive chunk of stupidity. It just doesn't hang together.
HP canon is full of that sort of thing, and very little of it casts Dumbledore in a positive light unless you also assume he wasn't really that competent any more to begin with. I mean, there was allegedly a curse on the DADA position. Why wasn't a professional cursebreaker called in to sort it out? They certainly exist as one of the elder Weasleys was one. Dumbledore was many things but he wasn't an expert on everything. But instead of getting an expert to fix the problem, he just left it as was and kept hiring new teachers.
Why was Snape allowed, for that matter, to teach? He clearly wasn't very good at it and certainly didn't enjoy it, no matter how good he was at the subject personally. If Dumbledore wanted him close at hand the sensible approach would have been to set up a Potions research lab and let the man get on with it, while hiring someone who didn't hate pretty much everyone and knew how to teach even if they weren't the master-level prodigy Snape was.
And so on. As soon as you start thinking about the story you can't help but find gaping holes all over the place. Which does, of course, leave it ripe for fanfics to fill some of them
For travel? Well Dumbledore does have a job at the ministry as Chief Warlock so its entirely possible he was absent for legitimate reasons and in meetings rather than spending the time travelling. Its also possibly not the only meeting that year but the one the trio noticed since they now knew about the Stone.
As for the curse well prehaps he did but without knowing about the Horcrux in the room they couldn't find or break it?
Snape I've got nothing.
Frankly the series is fine for a children fairy tale but flounders when it get to the more serious examination and later books introducing new plot points which invalidate the earlier ones.
Because Hogwarts was the only place more secure than Gringotts in this world. Dumbledore had the choice between risking Voldemort attacking the school ( which he might do anyways if he had the power to do so, just to kill Harry and his former teacher) and giving him an easy way to revive himself. Securing the stone in Hogwarts wasn't perfect, but in universe it was the better choice between the two. And again, Voldemort himself couldn't penetrate all the protections because Dumbledore's way of securing the stone.And why was it necessary to lay a trap in the first place? If you had to why do it in a school of all places? That's just daft as well as potentially incredibly dangerous. If the answer is "He knew Voldemort was possessing Quirrel," or something similar, why would he not simply deal with that problem rather than setting up the whole Rube Goldberg arrangement of lots of challenges that could be penetrated by reasonably bright first years? Why was he apparently unavailable on that specific date and time due to having inexplicably decided that flying a broom from Scotland all the way to London was a brilliant idea, when he had at least four different near-instantaneous methods of covering the distance? And as far as is shown, for that matter, it was the only time he was known to use a broom at all.
That specific episode has so many holes in it that if you take it as written it's blatantly obvious that there was a much deeper plot in operation. Or a massive chunk of stupidity. It just doesn't hang together.
HP canon is full of that sort of thing, and very little of it casts Dumbledore in a positive light unless you also assume he wasn't really that competent any more to begin with. I mean, there was allegedly a curse on the DADA position. Why wasn't a professional cursebreaker called in to sort it out? They certainly exist as one of the elder Weasleys was one. Dumbledore was many things but he wasn't an expert on everything. But instead of getting an expert to fix the problem, he just left it as was and kept hiring new teachers.
Why was Snape allowed, for that matter, to teach? He clearly wasn't very good at it and certainly didn't enjoy it, no matter how good he was at the subject personally. If Dumbledore wanted him close at hand the sensible approach would have been to set up a Potions research lab and let the man get on with it, while hiring someone who didn't hate pretty much everyone and knew how to teach even if they weren't the master-level prodigy Snape was.
And so on. As soon as you start thinking about the story you can't help but find gaping holes all over the place. Which does, of course, leave it ripe for fanfics to fill some of them
He wasn't there because
he got tricked into leaving. Again, Dumbledore is not perfect, but he also isn't a mustache twirling, evil master manipulator or a doddering old fool. How do you know that there never was a curse breaker hired to take a look at the curse on the position, I don't think Dumbledore was happy about it. The only way we know to fix it is to kill Voldemort, and I wish every curse breaker good luck with that. Yeah, Snape is a shitty teacher, but you could argue that he wouldn't be taken into confidence by Voldemort without having any worth as a spy. And a Hogwarts teacher close to Dumbledore is certainly worthy. Of all of Dumbledore's decisions I disagree the second most with that one, but Snape pressed all his buttons pretty hard ( redemption of a man who once fell to evil and is now working against it ), so I can say that making a false judgement here is congruent with the way he was portrayed. A great, but not perfect man with a lot of regrets and the weight of the world on his shoulders, even though he doesn't trust himself with the power everyone wants to give him. He would be happy as a clam if he could just enjoy teaching at Hogwarts and the world could deal with this Dark Lord on it's own after everything he went through.
I believe Dumbledore left that philosophy behind long ago, he now tries to save everyone even at great costs, and pays a steep price for that sometimes. Yeah, the plan wasn't without risks, but in the end it worked. And it is pretty hard to come up with one that works much better and doesn't force Dumbledore to actually sacrifice Harry.
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Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
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I've been guilty of that myself. sometimes I'm far harder on myself than other people are.
Sure, you're perfectly safe so long as you identify the murder-plant in the process of murdering you and remember its vulnerability. I have zero belief that the dog wouldn't attack someone trying to get past it even if we assume that it dependably doesn't attack people withdrawing without challenging it. The troll you aren't even defending. The chess set would clobber anyone who got captured in playing through. Etc.
As for the timing, I'm unconvinced on several levels but the most useful one is...what part of that was benefitted by the traps, again? Are you proposing that the 5 minutes it took Quirrel to rampage through the lot was somehow all that stood between him and overcoming the mirror?
Why exactly would you think that presenting a herd of panicky prey to a large predator is a good way to keep the prey safe?
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How to hide a philosopher's stone.
harrypotter.fandom.com
With the secret that the stone was with the Flamels.
That get the stone back to the Flamels and makes the stone and the Flamels safe.
No problem.
Edit: Even better would be that the secret was that there was a philosopher's stone.
Fidelius Charm
The Fidelius Charm (incantation unknown) was a very powerful spell used to hide things or places, or to conceal secrets. It was an extremely difficult, multifaceted, and potent charm that could be used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul. The witch or wizard who housed the secret was...
harrypotter.fandom.com
That get the stone back to the Flamels and makes the stone and the Flamels safe.
No problem.
Edit: Even better would be that the secret was that there was a philosopher's stone.
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Well, I have a small block of wordz for you. I was planning on doing this and the next chapter as one long one, but it ended up having a natural splitting point before I finished the second part and I thought I'd leave it there, to keep the demons of notenoughwordz away from everyone
The next chapter is likely to be where things start getting a little odd...
Because up until now, everything's been entirely normal, of course
Stand by for incoming...
The next chapter is likely to be where things start getting a little odd...
Because up until now, everything's been entirely normal, of course
Stand by for incoming...
5. Hermione learns a thing V - What was that thing?
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"How curious," Helen remarked, having listened to her daughter's story of the previous day's outing. "I wonder what that was?"
"I really have no idea yet, Mummy" Hermione admitted, frowning and fiddling with her hair as she though. "It was quite large, the area felt like it must have been at least as big as the cul-de-sac, probably bigger, but… It's very odd. I'm not at all sure what it's meant to do. I'd need to get closer and study it properly but I think it was possibly attempting to interfere with some method of detecting things on the other side of it? But I honestly can't be certain. It definitely wasn't a HOP, or at least anything like my HOPs. Although it was doing something with the H-field, that stood out like mad."
"If it's some form of stealth system or something of that nature it seems counterproductive to have it so obvious," Michael commented. Hermione looked at him and nodded.
"That's what I though. But I might be wrong. It's just a guess, since I can't quite understand what those constructs are doing or how they're made." She studied her notes for a while as Helen and Michael exchanged glances. "If I could get a better look at it…" the girl muttered. She wrote a few more sentences, did a little math under that, underlined the result, and stared at it. Then she shook her head.
"It doesn't make any sense. Like that thing that woman had in her pocket," she grumbled.
"How do you mean, dear?" Michael asked.
Their daughter turned to him. "I have no idea what it was, but it seemed to be doing whatever it did… wrong."
"How can you be sure it's doing something wrong if you don't even know what it does in the first place?" Helen asked with curiosity, moving to make some tea. She held up a cup meaningfully to Michael, who nodded, then put filled the kettle and turned it on.
"That does seem a stretch, dear, Helen has a point," Michael agreed. "Don't fall into the trap of jumping to a conclusion from insufficient evidence."
Hermione sighed a little. "I know, but that's how I can't help thinking about it. It felt like a very complicated HOP, but there were a lot of gaps, and bits and pieces that didn't seem to connect to anything, or do anything much. And what there was used far more energy to do whatever it was doing, with almost all of that being wasted. Or…" She thought some more, then shrugged. "Possibly it wasn't wasted, perhaps it was doing something I can't work out, but that's how it looked to me. Again, if I could see one for longer, more closely, I could probably figure out what it was doing. I think."
She paused for a few seconds, looking at her notes, then went on, "I'm also almost certain that neither the large one at Charing Cross or the small portable ones are directly manipulating the H-field like a HOP does, or like telekinesis does for that matter. They're…" The girl waved a hand a bit vaguely. "Doing something similar to that, but indirectly. As if there was another layer above the field and they were…"
Trailing off, she got a faraway expression for some moments, making Helen and Michael look at her then each other. The kettle emitting a loud click as it turned off made Hermione twitch, then seem to rejoin them in the room as Helen poured the water into the teapot.
"No. There's something I can almost see but it won't quite come into focus," the young girl said, sounding annoyed. "It's very irritating."
Michael patted her on the shoulder. "I'm sure you'll work it out in the end, dear. Don't get upset if you can't instantly do it. You're doing exceptionally well so far and no one can always be right every single time no matter how good they are."
She nodded with a small grimace of unwilling acceptance. "I know, Daddy, but it's still irritating. I don't like not knowing something."
Helen giggled. "That we are very well aware of, sweetie. You do tend to want to know everything. That's not always possible, unfortunately."
Hermione sighed, making both her parents exchange looks of mild resignation, but she finally nodded. "I wish there were some books on psionics I could look this up in," she mumbled, flipping back through her notes, then closing the notebook and putting it down.
"There will be soon enough," Helen pointed out, as she started pouring three cups of tea. "You're writing them." She looked meaningfully at the notebook, and thought of the dozen or more like it in her daughter's desk. The girl seemed a little startled as if she hadn't realized that, then smiled brilliantly.
"I am, aren't I?" she exclaimed. "Wicked."
Amused at the unusually age-appropriate expression, Helen stared hard at the sugar bowl, managing after a few seconds to make the spoon float out of it and over her tea. Hermione watched with a broad smile, as did Michael. Both clapped when the sugar in the spoon mostly ended up in the cup. "You're getting better, Mommy," Hermione exclaimed with joy.
"It's hard work, but I do think I'm becoming more adept at it," Helen replied, fumbling the spoon which dropped to the table with a clink, then sighing and picking it up to stir the tea the old fashioned way. "Although I can't manage it for all that long yet."
Michael gave her a somewhat smug look as his teaspoon started stirring without him touching it. She raised an eyebrow, causing him to chuckle.
"Don't show off, love."
"Of course not," he replied mildly, taking a sip.
Both of them watched as Hermione's tea was sweetened by the sugar directly flying from bowl to cup in a white cascade, while she was apparently looking at her mother and not either of the other items. There was a tiny grin on her lips during this, which made Helen giggle. "Clearly we have a long way to go yet," she chortled.
"You're picking it up much faster than I did to begin with," the girl smiled.
"We know it can be done, dear, which is half the battle," her husband said in reply. "You had no idea if it was even possible at all, and managed to succeed anyway. Which is remarkably impressive." He sipped more tea, then put the cup back in his saucer. "Although I do think you most likely have a natural talent for it that dwarfs that of either of us."
Hermione shrugged, shaking her head slightly at the same time. "I really don't know. Possibly I was just lucky?"
"Perhaps. You were certainly far more persistent than most people would be, regardless," he retorted. "Very few people would have stuck at something so unlikely for so long, until they managed to get results. Trust me, I've seen it at university, when people are fully aware something is possible and still feel it's too much work to keep at it."
She seemed somewhat pleased but also a little embarrassed. "I just wanted to know if I could make it work," she mumbled. He ruffled her hair affectionately.
"And you did. You certainly did."
Smiling to herself, Hermione drank her tea. Helen got out some biscuits, deciding that they were due a small reward for their hard work and the extra tooth-brushing was a price worth paying.
"So… we would seem to have some evidence that Hermione may not be the first person to come up with psionics," she said a little later, after pouring some more tea for all of them.
"Possibly," the girl replied, looking pensive. "Possibly not. What I saw really didn't seem to be exactly what we're doing. It was certainly related in some manner but it's quite different in others. I can't quite put my finger on what the difference means though." She shook her head. "Both are using the H-field but telekinesis and the HOPs are doing it…" Hermione trailed off, her expression thoughtful. "All I can describe it as at the moment is more directly," she finished after a few seconds. "I need more data."
"Our little scientist," Michael joked. "Always needing data."
"Data is important, Daddy!" she protested, smiling. "How else am I to work if I don't have data? That's what experiments are for. And observation, of course."
"Of course. Observe away, by all means. I'll be fascinated to see what you come up with."
Finishing his tea and biscuits, he stood up. "I have some accounting work to do, but perhaps when I finish we could practice some more and you could observe that to tell us where we're going wrong?" he suggested. Their daughter nodded.
"I'd love to," she replied. "Call me when you're ready. I'm going to go upstairs and finish my latest project, now I have the parts I need."
"Do be careful not to fire any more pencils through walls or anything of that nature," he remarked with a grin, making Hermione sigh.
"I know, I made a mistake," she mumbled. "I'll try to avoid making any more."
"You will no matter how hard you try, that's life unfortunately," he chuckled. "Everyone, even you, has the occasional moment where things don't quite go as planned. The trick is to avoid making the same mistake twice. And to think ahead so when it does go pear shaped the damage is minimal."
Hermione nodded, looking understanding. Helen was just glad her little pencil incident had only resulted in a hole in the ceiling and not in anything important. The girl had very obviously learned from that event and taken the lesson to heart. Which was a good thing. The idea of her doing the same to a rock the size of a car didn't bear thinking about…
Telekinesis could clearly be quite hazardous if someone was careless. Like most things in life.
Also standing, she collected the tea things and put it all in the sink to wash. Hermione got up and came over as she turned the tap on, floating a tea towel into her hand from the other side of the kitchen with the air of someone to whom such things were entirely routine, which made Helen smile. "I hope you remember not to do something like that in school," she commented as the sink filled with hot water.
"I nearly did forget once or twice," her daughter admitted, giggling a little. "It's so easy now and really useful. But I don't want to show it off in public because it will only cause them to look at me even more oddly." She sighed faintly. Helen put her hand on her shoulder comfortingly for a moment before beginning to wash the tea things along with some plates left over from breakfast earlier, handing each to Hermione to dry.
"You'll make friends who can keep up with you one day, sweetie. I'm sure of that. And someone like that is likely to become a very good friend." She glanced at the girl, who was staring at the cloth and the plate she was working on, both of which were hanging in front of her in an implausible manner if you weren't aware of quite how strange the Granger household had become in the last months. "You need some friends your own age, after all."
"I've got you and Daddy and Granny," Hermione replied. "And Mr Boots, even though he keeps tracking mud all over my desk no matter how much I tell him not to. And even though he doesn't live here."
"That cat is certainly somewhat ambiguous about his home," she agreed with a smile. "Affectionate but a little dim, I think." She sighed. "Still, I think you need other friends."
Hermione hugged her for a couple of seconds. "I'm not unhappy, Mummy. It would be nice if the children at school weren't quite so mean sometimes, but it could be worse. Some of them are horrible to other people too. The teachers try but they can be very sneaky about it."
"Bullying is never right, but I'll agree from my own childhood that it can be hard for the adults to stop," Helen replied sadly. "Just remember that you can tell the teachers about it."
Hermione scowled. "That just makes some of the bullies even worse and say nasty things" she grumbled. "Teacher's pet, and why are you so bossy, and why do you always have a book in your hand. Honestly, some of them are just stupid. Education is important."
Helen pulled the plug out, letting the water drain away, and turned to her daughter. Kneeling down she put both hands on Hermione's shoulders. "You will never please everyone, Hermione," she said, meeting her daughter's eyes. "There will always be people who don't understand you, and a lot of people can be quite unpleasant about things they don't understand. Don't let it upset you if you can, and remember that it's not your fault. Try to get along if possible, and live with the fact that sometimes it isn't. Don't let the bullies make you feel that you're wrong to like learning, because you are not. You're a very intelligent young woman who has a bright future ahead of her. And we love you, never forget that either."
"I know, Mummy," the girl replied, sighing. "I try not to let them upset me. Sometimes it's hard though." She stepped forward and they hugged each other. "I do my best not to shake them with my mind until they fall over too," she added with a small giggle.
"That would be… unwise," Helen said dryly. "As well as something of an overreaction. Best to ignore them, I think." Releasing her hold on her daughter she stood. "Do you fancy steak tonight?" she asked.
"Ooh. Yes, I'd love a nice steak," Hermione replied eagerly.
"I'll take some out of the freezer to defrost, then." Proceeding to do just that, she asked over her shoulder, "What do you think these other people you detected are doing? It's a curious discovery you made. I wonder if it's some secret government thing?"
Hermione giggled. "Agents of a shadowy government agency walking among us and no one knows but the plucky girl and her parents," she hissed, making a strange face. "No! I know, it's aliens! They've got a secret base right in… the… middle… of London…" She slowed down as her face changed from hilarity to sudden thoughtfulness. Helen stared at her, a pack of frozen steaks in her hand.
"Aliens?" she echoed. "That sounds somewhat unlikely."
Her daughter nodded, still staring into the middle distance with an expression of deep thought. "Very unlikely. But…"
They exchanged wondering glances.
Coming to her senses with a jerk as she realized her right hand was very cold, Helen put the steak packet on the counter and dried her fingers with the cloth. "I can't help thinking that aliens are some way down the list of possibilities," she finally said. "But I confess I can't think of anything obvious."
"Neither can I," Hermione sighed. "Because I don't have enough information." She looked at her mother. "Perhaps we should investigate?"
"You are not Nancy Drew, Hermione. We should probably be careful not to prod something we don't know enough about. It's probably some sort of government thing like you said, as mad as that sounds, and the government never appreciates random members of the public turning up asking questions." Helen shook her head as her daughter appeared just a little truculent, but Hermione was more than smart enough to let her realize it wasn't a good idea despite her ever-present hunger for knowledge. "You concentrate on your own studies and let whoever it is stick to theirs. You haven't detected anything like that around here, have you?"
"Only that one I thought I did weeks ago as I was falling asleep and I'm not sure it was really there," the girl replied, brightening up. "The closest one I'm sure about was miles and miles away on the way to London. And even though I found several during the day, there weren't many of them. Whatever is behind it doesn't seem to be very common. I still want to know what's going on near Charing Cross, though."
"Of course you do, you wouldn't be Hermione if you didn't," Helen smiled. "Let's leave that for later."
"Oh, all right, I suppose." Hermione shrugged in mild disappointment. "But I'm going to keep an eye open for anything odd happening around here."
"I would expect nothing else from you, sweetie."
Her daughter grinned then dashed upstairs, from where a few seconds later an aggrieved cry of "Mr Boots! Just look what you did to my desk!" came to Helen's ears, making her laugh before getting on with things of her own.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Lying in bed with her eyes closed and next door's cat purring next to her head, since he seemed to have fallen into a routine of visiting almost every night, Hermione extended her energy sense slowly outwards. She noted each distortion in the field as she encountered it, the static ones that represented objects, the ground, and everything else inanimate by now easily distinguishable from living things, even trees and other plants. Life had a distinctly different effect on the omnipresent energy flow, although she didn't yet know why. She was steadily learning to interpret what she sensed, by now coming close to almost seeing it as images rather than the ghostly and nebulous effect she'd initially managed to produce.
The overall result was amazingly complex, absolutely fascinating, and contained so much information that it was sometimes hard to deal with. The more she concentrated on the details the finer the level she could sense, although the further away she pushed it from herself the more effort it took. The girl had been carefully considering the best way to make a HOP of the right type to aid her, but so far was just a little hesitant about doing so just in case she ended up with the energy sense equivalent of a flashgun or something like that.
She had no wish to accidentally experience what it was like to have the local H-field distortions amplified by a few million times and dumped directly into her brain. That sounded like a recipe for a monstrous headache if not something worse.
Hermione was curious, and keen on experimentation, but she wasn't daft. And she'd already had one close call. So each new HOP was the result of a lot of careful thought and extremely cautious testing at a safe distance. She was fairly sure she'd work it out sooner or later, even so.
Now, she examined the local neighborhood in detail, noting how Mr Killian at Number 47 seemed to be a bit tipsy again based on what she could feel, the dog at Number 19 was very upset about a squirrel that was in a tree out of reach, someone in a car going past a couple of hundred yards away seemed very tired, and many other facets of her local environment. She'd spent at least an hour every night for months now doing this exercise and was intimately familiar with far more things that most people wouldn't even consider over a fairly substantial area. It was good practice, and something she could do from the comfort of her bed.
Feeling Mr Boots purring, she idly spared some attention for his own unique field distortion pattern, smiling as she felt what seemed to be contentment. The cat was not the smartest animal around but he did seem fond of her. And put up with her experimenting on floating him around the room, which if anything he'd decided he quite enjoyed.
She considered the idea she'd had for a long time of seeing whether she could float herself. Hermione couldn't see any reason why it wouldn't work, and in fact was almost certain it would, but there was still a hole in the ceiling that bore mute testimony to what could happen if someone was a little overenthusiastic…
Not wanting to leave a much larger hole in something with her own head, she'd resisted the temptation so far. Again, it was something she wanted to be certain was safe. Some form of force field around her would also be a good idea, which should be easy enough. Remembering reading Dune, she made a mental note to work out a solid design for a personal shield. Only one that wasn't quite as catastrophically dangerous in the presence of certain types of energy. That seemed like rather a drawback to her, overall.
Having come to the conclusion that nothing much had changed in the area, she gradually expanded her zone to the limit she was currently able to reach, which was close to a mile and a half in all directions. At the edges it was nothing like as clear as it was much nearer, but she could still distinctly feel an aircraft pass overhead, from the direction of Gatwick, with nearly two hundred people on board. It climbed rapidly and soon passed out of her range. In the other direction, she could sense the differing materials under the ground, ultimately becoming fairly uniform rock about a hundred or so feet down.
Hermione had the thought that it would be interesting to see what a mine felt like. Her parents had suggested a holiday in the spring down to Cornwall, and that area was riddled with mines from what she'd learned, so she'd be able to find out.
Wondering what range she'd ultimately be capable of, she kept poking around in the mental map of the field surrounding her, noting all the minor variations that changed the otherwise uniform energy. Even now she wasn't sure where it actually originated from, it was just there. It would be interesting to go up in a plane and see if there was any change much higher up, but from the ground she couldn't detect anything. Perhaps during the summer holidays they'd go to France like her mother had suggested? If that was on a plane rather than the ferry it would be more useful information one way or the other.
Slowly moving her attention from place to place in the sensory zone, she kept her mental eye open for any signs of the odd phenomena that she'd spotted on the trip to London a couple of weeks ago. So far she hadn't yet sensed anything of that nature anywhere near her since then. It was still puzzling her, that entire experience. What was going on near Charing Cross station was a question she didn't have an answer to, but dearly wanted one. And even now she was somewhat stuck on what the difference between what she did and what that was doing. There very definitely was a difference, she was sure of it, but at the moment it defied her full understanding.
And she was nearly certain that whatever it was that was causing those bizarre H-field distortions, it was doing something extremely strange indeed. The girl couldn't shake the feeling that she was going to be very upset with herself when she finally figured it out, since she had a nagging sense it should be obvious if only she could look at it in the right manner.
Oh well. As her parents had said, understanding would come in time, and she had a lot of other things to think about. Not to mention whoever was behind it probably was best left alone for now in case they turned out to be upset about her asking questions.
She still wondered if it was aliens.
Hermione fell asleep with a small smile on her lips, half-way through yet another mental attempt at designing some method to detect the H-field without using the energy sense.
It would help if she knew what it actually was, of course.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"That's brilliant, Daddy. Keep it going… Come on, I know you can do it." Hermione sounded excited as Michael concentrated hard. All of them watched as three apples slowly moved in a horizontal circle above the living room table. "Ten seconds."
He pushed himself to do something that he'd never in his wildest dreams expected to actually be able to do, a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead.
"Twenty seconds."
It was getting easier, he knew that, but easier and easy were two utterly different things. Not to mention his daughter, who had an astonishingly greater ability at telekinesis, had also had nearly a year's head start on either himself or his wife. And was at least as smart as both of them put together, which might well help.
"Thirty seconds."
He was in an almost zen-like state, as odd as that seemed, even as he concentrated as hard as if he was working on a tricky root canal. The effort wasn't physical at all, it was as you'd expect entirely mental, but that didn't mean it wasn't remarkably tiring.
"Forty seconds."
On the other hand it was worth every second spent on it, he thought at the back of his mind, still amazed at what he was doing. He'd been reading science fiction and fantasy books since he was seven and this sort of thing was a staple of more of them than he could count. Now he was actually doing it.
"Fifty seconds."
'Use the force, Michael,' he thought with a mental snicker, wishing some of his friends from school could have seen this. Back in his tabletop gaming days it would have really set them going. Rolling dice would have been fun, too. He wondered how much trouble you'd get in at a casino with telekinesis…
"One minute. You can stop."
With a sensation of relief, he allowed the orbiting fruit to fall back into the bowl they'd come from and relaxed, letting out a long breath. "That is harder than it looks," he gasped.
"You did very well, Daddy," Hermione told him with a broad smile as she made some notes. "That's ten seconds longer than last time. You're getting steadily better with practice."
"I'd hate to think I'd get worse with practice," he chuckled, wiping his brow with the tissue Helen handed him wordlessly. "That would just be embarrassing."
His daughter giggled a little. "True," she replied. "Mummy's improving even faster, though, so you can't slack off."
"Remarkable," Nancy, who had stopped in for a visit, said with a shake of her head. "That really is something to see. All I can do is make a feather twitch so far."
Hermione smiled at her. "It takes time like I said. I'm sure you'll pick it up though."
His mother smiled back. The girl had done the same exercises with her that she'd done for both Helen and Michael a couple of weeks afterwards, and it had resulted in much the same thing if somewhat more slowly. It seemed likely, Michael believed, that the younger you were when you started learning such a talent that the faster and better you'd develop it, like with so many other things. His daughter starting off so young and moreover, having come up with the whole thing by herself, quite probably meant she was always going to be far ahead of any adult that acquired the skill in later life.
"I'll keep practicing, Hermione, but I'm probably too old to learn something so extraordinary in the way you did," Nancy replied, echoing his own thoughts.
"Even old people can learn, Granny! Look at Daddy!" Hermione gave him a cheeky grin.
"Oi! I'll have you know, young lady, that I am neither old nor infirm," he responded with a mock glare at her as Helen snickered. Nancy was laughing too. He levitated an apple out of the bowl into his hand, somewhat unevenly, and bit into it with an expression of triumph while the other three grinned at him. "See? I can learn new things."
All the other apples flew into the air and proceeded to execute a complicated three dimensional dance, while Hermione met his eyes and giggled. He sighed. "Fine. You win. Again. But I shall have my revenge!"
"Eek!" The girl shuffled away on the carpet, obviously trying to stifle laughter. "I have angered the beast!"
Helen lost it completely at that point and fell about laughing, Nancy joining in a moment later. Michael sighed. "I have no respect in this household at all sometimes," he muttered, winking at his daughter who put the apples back and nodded gravely.
"Earned, respect is," she croaked in a rather good Yoda impression. "Learned, skills are."
"Foolish child." He pointed with his free hand. "Get the monopoly set out and you'll see real skill."
Hermione jumped to her feet with a smile and quickly retrieved the game from the cupboard under the television, setting it up on the coffee table. Twenty minutes later they were deeply involved in attempting to thrash each other at it, a family pursuit of long tradition and much viciousness. Added to in this case by all four of them pushing the pieces around without touching them, although his mother mostly seemed to be using her currently untrained telekinesis to cheat with the chance cards when no one was looking.
All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I think that's got it," Hermione said under her breath as she looked at the prototype circuit she'd spend a solid week carefully building from surplus components, veroboard, and a lot of wire. Surrounding it on her desk were half a dozen books and manuals, including a TTL 74 series data book, the thick yellow and blue tome a lucky find during their trip to London that time. She'd been reading up on logic circuits for a while now and could see some interesting possibilities there, both for her electronics projects and for inspiring H-field Operators.
This device was a fairly straightforward proof of concept, nothing preposterously complex but one of the more involved ones she'd designed, mostly, from scratch. It had taken quite a bit of research but she was fairly sure it would work.
Now she picked up her multimeter probes, turned the meter on and set it to continuity, then started testing the wiring while referring to a pile of hand drawn diagrams on A4 paper. The meter beeped happily as she checked each connection, once or twice not doing so and telling her which joint needed touching up. Overall she was pleased by the time she'd finished to find that she'd made only three actual errors, and one more wire had snapped where she must have accidentally tugged a little too hard on it at some point.
Satisfied, she set the meter to the voltage range, then connected a pair of wires with alligator clips on to the little bench power supply she'd built from a kit from Maplin a while ago. Turning it on, she made sure that the five volt power rail on each IC socket was correct, finally putting the probes down when she'd checked all of them.
"Good," the girl commented happily as she turned the power supply off again. A meow from behind her made her look over her shoulder at Mr Boots, who was lying on his back on the bed with his legs in the air watching her upside down, his whiskers curled forward. "You do realize this isn't your home, don't you?" she said with mild exasperation. "And I'm not going to feed you."
The cat waved his tail and merped. She shook her head in a fondly bemused way and turned back to the circuit. "Cats are such strange creatures." Opening her top drawer she pulled out flat black plastic box about six by nine inches in size, which she opened to reveal a number of DIP packaged integrated circuits. Most of them were logic chips of various types, largely surplus parts from Proops and the other shops. A few were bought from the local Maplin, and one or two had been salvaged from an old broken radio her grandmother had given her to take to pieces. All were sitting with their leads firmly pressed into the hard black foam that lined the box, a conductive material to protect them from static electricity.
Once again reading her notes, she selected each required chip in turn, carefully straightening the leads then pushing them into the sockets she'd soldered to the veroboard. The last one snapped into place, the 74LS154 being one of the larger chips, then she sat back. Inspecting the prototype one final time, she reconnected the power supply with the multimeter set to current inserted between supply and board, then held her breath and flipped the switch.
The needle jumped and settled down at a perfectly reasonable eighty five milliamps. No smoke made an appearance and no nasty crackling sounds happened. She smiled a little and picked up the logic probe she'd also built from a kit, carefully connected the power leads to the bench supply as well, and began poking the tip on IC leads to see what was going on. She nodded happily as she found that the oscillator was running, the ripple counter driven from it was counting correctly, and the binary to decimal decoders were doing the right thing too. All the switches made the right signals appear in the right places when she pressed each in turn.
"We're nearly there, Mr Boots," she remarked, putting the tool down and turning the circuit off. The cat lifted his head and peered at her at the sound of his name, making her reach over and stroke him. "All I need to do is make the HOP now. This one is really complicated, so you must be quiet while I think, all right?"
Giving him one last tickle, she picked up another notebook and flipped through it to the right part, then studied the diagram carefully for some time. The basic idea wasn't hard, but implementing it was a bit more involved than anything she'd done so far. It would be a good test of whether her ideas about how to make HOPs that connected together in a modular fashion, very similarly to how the logic chips in front of her worked, was viable or not.
She was certain that the basic concept was sound but unsure if she'd worked out the best way to do it yet. Hence the experimentation. Initial manual tests had shown promise but the full scope wouldn't really be tested until she got everything working together.
Hermione set to work, the immaterial energy construct growing steadily in front of her, only visible to someone through the energy sense. A more and more complex arrangement of little knots of H-field distortion appeared and connected together, forming a pattern that she'd have had a hard time to explain to someone without actually showing it to them. Words didn't really do it justice. She made sure that each part was stable before moving onto the next, duplicating elements where required as she'd found she could do after a lot of practice. It was much quicker than making each from scratch once she had something that worked. Linking them all together in a web of connections remarkably analogous to the electronic circuit in front of her, she finally finished.
"I think that's got it," she said to the cat, who was now sitting up and watching her with a feline look of mild indifference. "I hope. It looks good as far as I can see." The girl reached out and waved a hand through the not really there pattern of knots, not feeling a thing with her normal senses but easily able to detect it with the special one she'd spent so long training.
Picking up the circuit board, she smiled when the HOP array followed it precisely. That had worked as well, it was positionally linked to the prototype. So far so good. Now all it needed was the connections between the electronics and the H-field construct.
That only took another minute or so. When she was done, there were H-field sensors monitoring the state of a couple of dozen outputs on the PCB, two rows of wire wrap terminals each driving a HOP node. She took a deep breath.
"I hope this works or I'll have to start all over again," she remarked to Mr Boots, who meowed at her in apparent encouragement. Whether for her work or in request of some tuna she didn't know.
Hermione activated the main HOP power channel, then reached out and snapped the power switch to ON.
The little red LED came on to indicate power was flowing but nothing else visibly happened. However, to her H-field sense, the HOP array was now running. She started to grin before very gently pressing one of the four by four arrangement of push button switches on the bottom of her circuit.
Then she yipped in triumph as a foot off the desk a pinpoint of green light illuminated out of nowhere. It hung there in space as she gazed at it with a massive smile on her face.
"It works!" she shouted in glee.
Releasing the button, she watched the point of light winked out. Pressing another one got her a different illuminated point half an inch to the right. Absolutely exalted she pressed each button in turn, then several at once, before mashing the entire set of switches with her hand. All of them produced a corresponding point of light in a grid replicating the switch layout.
"That's rather good," her father's voice said from behind her, making her look over her shoulder to see him standing in the doorway to her bedroom. "Like a hologram."
"Exactly," she laughed, jumping up and spinning in a circle, before flopping on the bed and making next door's cat complain. "Hush, you, this is my room," she told him as she grinned at the ceiling.
Her father bent over the desk and inspected her work, then experimentally prodded one of the switches. When the floating green point of light came on, he cautiously poked it with a fingertip, then waved his hand through it when he didn't feel anything. "Very good indeed. How does it work?" he asked, playing with the switches some more.
"It's like a much more complicated version of the torches, Daddy," she explained, sitting up to look at him. "I built a keyboard scan circuit in a way, it's based on the sort of thing a computer uses, except simpler. It scans a matrix of switches and if any of them are pressed it generates a unique code. There's also an output scan circuit that's synchronized to the first one which takes that code and converts it back to a position in another matrix. Then the HOP array looks for those signals and generates a visible output in the correct position."
He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. After a moment, he asked, "You know more about this than I do, but isn't that overcomplicated? Do you need to take the switches and convert them into a code then back again just to make lights come on? Couldn't you use the switches to directly drive the lights?"
"Of course, but that's not quite what I was trying to do," Hermione replied happily. "The keyboard scan part is just to make a code that the other part can read. That's the interesting bit. Because if I could make it work properly, I can produce the code in a different way. What I was thinking about was using the output of a computer to drive it."
He looked at her, then back at the prototype on the bench, his eyebrows up a little. "So… you're half way to building a holographic monitor?"
"Yes!" She grinned. "It'll take a lot more work, and I need to learn more about how to design a circuit that can run fast enough, but this is a proof of concept. It shows I can interface a HOP to an electronic circuit, as well as a simple switch like the torches show. And that I can make a HOP array that does something much more complicated than any of the other ones I've made so far."
She pulled her legs up and sat cross legged on the bed while he sat in her chair, Mr Boots hopping onto her lap and curling up. Stroking the cat, she carried on excitedly, "There's all sorts of things I can think of now I've managed to make this work. I could probably do the entire thing as a HOP array in the end, but this is already brilliant. I still need to come up with a good method to go the other way, but I think I can, and that means interfacing electronics directly to the H-field should be possible." The girl almost bounced up and down where she was sitting, she was so excited at the prospects.
"You really are a very clever young woman at times," he smiled, shaking his head in wonder.
"I try," she giggled. "I think I need to learn more programming though. And I need a computer. We do a little at school with the BBC Masters in the computer room but they don't really let us play around on them, only do the set work which isn't very complicated."
"A pity my old BBC micro died a few years ago," her father remarked. "Just gave off a big bang and a lot of smoke. Shame, I had some good games for that thing."
"I remember," she replied. "I liked Planetoid."
"Well, Christmas is coming up very soon, so if you're good, you never know what Santa might bring you." Standing up, he looked amused as she rolled her eyes.
"Daddy, I knew it was you when I was five."
"No, it's Santa, honest. Everyone knows that."
She humphed at him but she was grinning.
"Anyway, dinner is ready, so wash up and come down."
"Alright," she replied, putting the cat that wasn't hers on the bed that was, where he complained but fell asleep again, then heading to the bathroom.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Are you sure this will work?" Helen looked askance at her husband and daughter who were fiddling around with her old dressmaker's dummy, which they'd set up in the middle of the garage. Again, the car was in the drive, and it was a horrible Saturday a week from Christmas, blowing like mad and not entirely certain if it wanted to snow or rain, so it was doing both. No one had left the house all day and had no intention of so doing. Luckily they were all more than capable of making their own entertainment, more so these days than in the past although it had never been a problem even then.
"It should do, Mummy," Hermione replied, nodding as she looked over to where Helen was sitting on a stool watching. The door to the kitchen was open and warm air was flowing into the garage, offsetting the usual somewhat chilly environment. At one point Helen would have made sure the door was closed as there was no point paying to heat the poorly insulated room, but since Michael and Hermione had first sorted out free water heating, then recently upgraded that to free heating as well, all courtesy of one of her HOPs, there was no real reason to be militant about it.
"I was thinking about how to make it safe to try self levitation, which does work, I've tried it without an amplifier, but it would be very dangerous if you lost your concentration or got distracted or hit a bird or something," the girl chattered away, making Helen smile. She was, as usual, very excited to be trying one of her ideas. Yet another notebook was rapidly filling up with observations and calculations, making the woman wonder how many she actually had now. Dozens, at least. "And if an amplifier was used it could really go horribly wrong. So I thought that we could design a sort of personal shield. A force field specifically designed to protect a person, like in Dune."
"And I suggested that it might be safer to try it on something inanimate before we risk using the same idea on a person," her husband added. She gave him a look, knowing full well that he was at least as excited as their daughter was about all this, his inner science fiction nerd coming to the fore yet again as it did every time Hermione managed to pull off another ridiculous trick. "Just in case she got her sums wrong."
Hermione put her hands on her hips. "I got the calculations right, I'm sure," she huffed.
"Just like you did when you made a supersonic pencil?" he teased.
"You're never going to let me forget that, are you?" the girl sighed. He shook his head as Helen hid a smile.
"No. It was a lesson you have to remember." He patted her hair affectionately. "Even you make mistakes, like all of us, and the fact that you can do some amazing things only means that a mistake could be that much worse. So keep it in mind and always check everything carefully."
Their daughter looked embarrassed as she always did when her little miscalculation was brought up, but nodded understanding. "Believe me, I won't forget that in a hurry," she said quietly, before turning back to her work. Helen met Michael's eyes and smiled slightly, her husband returning it.
Hopefully between Hermione's native wit and common sense, and their urging, they could keep the disasters few and far between.
"All right, I think that's got it," the girl announced half a minute later, as she squinted at something that wasn't really there in the usual sense of the word. Helen tried to use her own nascent H-field sense and was able to detect a surprisingly complex little matrix of energy hovering over the top of the dressmaker's form. She turned to them and took on her very small scientist air, straightening the sleeves of her lab coat.
Helen though it was hilarious but would never ever say that.
"There's a HOP array here," Hermione began, pointing at the construct. "It's got a standard power amplifier module, which connects through a feedback module to a force field one, which is set up to make a field surrounding the target about two inches away. There's also another very low powered field running all the time which is acting as a detector, and it will trigger if something goes through it moving faster than a certain level. When it does, it makes the main field turn on to block whatever it is." She pointed at different parts of the invisible array as she spoke, both parents studying what they could make out of it. Neither understood how it worked yet, but the explanation was clear enough.
"How fast does it react?" Helen asked curiously.
"Effectively instantly, I think," their daughter replied, her expression mildly pensive. "I can't quite think of how to properly test it, but as far as I can work out it shouldn't take more than microseconds at most. I haven't been able to detect any delays in the HOP speeds, they work immediately whenever I activate them. Certainly it's much faster than a person can notice."
"And what speed does the hazard have to hit the trigger?" Michael asked.
Hermione shrugged. "Whatever speed I set it for. It took me a while to design a method to detect motion but it turned out to be quite simple in the end when I thought about it the right way. I can make it so sensitive it will go off it you blow on it, or so insensitive you'd probably have to hit it with a bullet or something."
"Would it actually stop a bullet?"
"Oh, certainly, the amount of energy needed to break it would be enormous," Hermione replied confidently. "That part I'm sure of now."
"Hmm. Not bad. Let's see what happens, then," Michael remarked, picking up the same broom he'd used when they'd first been experimenting with force fields.
"Poke it gently and I'll see how it reacts," their daughter instructed. He held the broom out and prodded the dummy in the chest, making it rock slightly. "Good. Harder, please?"
Again, he tapped it. She asked for steadily increasing hits, until she nodded. "That should do it. I think I've got a good calibration for it now. Hold on, I'll just tweak this like this…" Hermione concentrated for a second or two. "There. It should turn on if you hit it a bit harder than that last one."
Michael examined the dressmaker's form, then pulled the broom back and swung it, hard enough that if he'd hit someone with it they'd have had a bruise. The moment the end of the wooden pole got within a foot of the surface, a glassy translucent shield formed around it roughly a couple of inches off the thing, following the contours. He was unable to stop the swing in time and winced as the broom handle clattered against the force field.
Everyone stared in amazement, even Hermione. "Wow," she said under her breath. "That was amazing!"
Michael pulled the broom away and the effect disappeared instantly. "Wow indeed," he mumbled, grinning like an idiot. Helen's eyes were wide. "Best special effect I've ever seen."
"I can make it invisible but I wanted to be able to see it properly," Hermione said, smiling broadly. "It works!"
"Hang on, let's try something else," her father commented, leaning the broom against the wall and picking up a sledge hammer he'd bought a couple of weeks ago. Hefting it, he swung the thing as hard as he could at the center of their test object, the result being identical to the broom handle as the head of the hammer stopped dead, recoiling a little and making him grunt. The form barely moved behind the glimmering shield, which again vanished once he lowered the hammer. "Ow." He rested the tool on the floor and flexed his hands.
"Where did all the energy go?" Helen asked, memories of long ago physics lessons in school tweaking at her thoughts. "The form hardly moved, and the hammer didn't bounce as much as it should have."
"I think it mostly got transferred back into the H-field, Mummy," Hermione replied after thinking about it for a moment. "It did the opposite of what the light emitter does. That converts a tiny amount of the H-field into electromagnetic energy, or transfers it from somewhere, I haven't worked that out properly yet, and this turns kinetic energy back into something the H-field can absorb. It's how telekinesis seems to work. It doesn't lift something like putting your hand under it, it acts on the entire object you're targeting." She waved a hand at their test subject. "So, in theory, if you had that on and fell off a building, it would stop you at the ground but not squish you against the inside. Which would be bad."
"Doesn't that break about half the rules of physics?" she queried. Hermione frowned.
"Yes. I think, according to what the books say. But I also think that those rules are missing something I don't understand. Because this obviously works, and as far as I can see if theory tells you one thing and the universe shows you you're wrong, it wins."
"You have a point, dear," Michael agreed, picking the hammer up and returning it to the corner of the garage. "Well, I'd say that was a successful test. Another one for the win column."
Hermione looked pleased. "Yes. And it gives me even more ideas for variations on the concept." She looked at him. "Do you want to try it?"
He smiled back at her. "Obviously." With a giggle she nodded.
"All right. Stand there, I'll just make you one." Helen watched as another complex construct quickly took shape, marveling at the surety with which their daughter did something that should have been impossible but clearly wasn't. "There," the girl said a few seconds later. "That should do it. I'll turn it on and…" Michael looked at her, then Helen.
"I didn't feel anything," he reported.
"I didn't think you would," Hermione replied, studying an area of space just above his head. "But it's working."
"I suppose you'd better test that then," he told her, folding his arms.
She grinned, then grabbed the broom and swung it at his ribs.
Half an hour later Helen shook her head and went into the house to watch the news, leaving the pair to their light saber battle with a broom and a mop, clacks of wood on force fields following her inside.
"I sometimes think I've got two children," she said to herself, highly amused.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Happy New Year, Hermione," her mother said, turning to her as they watched the celebrations on television. Hermione hugged her, her father on her other side putting her arm over her shoulder.
"Thank you for letting me stay up to watch," the girl replied before yawning widely. "It was fun. And dinner was lovely."
"Agreed," her father said, leaning back to reach over and pick up his champagne flute. He tapped it against her mother's one, and Hermione's which was filled with sparkling apple juice. "I hope 1990 will be as interesting as 1989 was."
"Probably more so," her mother commented wryly, shaking her head a little. "I can't see it being less involved."
"Life does seem to have become rather more unusual recently," her father chortled. "It's certainly fun though."
"However, I think it's time a certain young woman was in bed," her mother put in. "It's gone midnight now and you need your sleep or you'll be a mess tomorrow."
Hermione yawned even more vigorously and couldn't really deny that. "I'll see you in the morning," she told her parents, as she got up from the sofa and rubbed her eyes, floating the empty glass back to the table while she did this. "Good night."
"Night, Hermione," they echoed. She trudged out of the room and up the stairs, feeling very tired but happy, brushed and flossed carefully, and stumbled into her bedroom. Getting into her pajamas and sliding under the duvet, she smiled at the shiny new BBC Master 128K home computer that was sitting on her desk, a Christmas present she was extremely grateful for, then turned the light out with a flick of telekinesis on the switch even as she closed her eyes.
"I really have no idea yet, Mummy" Hermione admitted, frowning and fiddling with her hair as she though. "It was quite large, the area felt like it must have been at least as big as the cul-de-sac, probably bigger, but… It's very odd. I'm not at all sure what it's meant to do. I'd need to get closer and study it properly but I think it was possibly attempting to interfere with some method of detecting things on the other side of it? But I honestly can't be certain. It definitely wasn't a HOP, or at least anything like my HOPs. Although it was doing something with the H-field, that stood out like mad."
"If it's some form of stealth system or something of that nature it seems counterproductive to have it so obvious," Michael commented. Hermione looked at him and nodded.
"That's what I though. But I might be wrong. It's just a guess, since I can't quite understand what those constructs are doing or how they're made." She studied her notes for a while as Helen and Michael exchanged glances. "If I could get a better look at it…" the girl muttered. She wrote a few more sentences, did a little math under that, underlined the result, and stared at it. Then she shook her head.
"It doesn't make any sense. Like that thing that woman had in her pocket," she grumbled.
"How do you mean, dear?" Michael asked.
Their daughter turned to him. "I have no idea what it was, but it seemed to be doing whatever it did… wrong."
"How can you be sure it's doing something wrong if you don't even know what it does in the first place?" Helen asked with curiosity, moving to make some tea. She held up a cup meaningfully to Michael, who nodded, then put filled the kettle and turned it on.
"That does seem a stretch, dear, Helen has a point," Michael agreed. "Don't fall into the trap of jumping to a conclusion from insufficient evidence."
Hermione sighed a little. "I know, but that's how I can't help thinking about it. It felt like a very complicated HOP, but there were a lot of gaps, and bits and pieces that didn't seem to connect to anything, or do anything much. And what there was used far more energy to do whatever it was doing, with almost all of that being wasted. Or…" She thought some more, then shrugged. "Possibly it wasn't wasted, perhaps it was doing something I can't work out, but that's how it looked to me. Again, if I could see one for longer, more closely, I could probably figure out what it was doing. I think."
She paused for a few seconds, looking at her notes, then went on, "I'm also almost certain that neither the large one at Charing Cross or the small portable ones are directly manipulating the H-field like a HOP does, or like telekinesis does for that matter. They're…" The girl waved a hand a bit vaguely. "Doing something similar to that, but indirectly. As if there was another layer above the field and they were…"
Trailing off, she got a faraway expression for some moments, making Helen and Michael look at her then each other. The kettle emitting a loud click as it turned off made Hermione twitch, then seem to rejoin them in the room as Helen poured the water into the teapot.
"No. There's something I can almost see but it won't quite come into focus," the young girl said, sounding annoyed. "It's very irritating."
Michael patted her on the shoulder. "I'm sure you'll work it out in the end, dear. Don't get upset if you can't instantly do it. You're doing exceptionally well so far and no one can always be right every single time no matter how good they are."
She nodded with a small grimace of unwilling acceptance. "I know, Daddy, but it's still irritating. I don't like not knowing something."
Helen giggled. "That we are very well aware of, sweetie. You do tend to want to know everything. That's not always possible, unfortunately."
Hermione sighed, making both her parents exchange looks of mild resignation, but she finally nodded. "I wish there were some books on psionics I could look this up in," she mumbled, flipping back through her notes, then closing the notebook and putting it down.
"There will be soon enough," Helen pointed out, as she started pouring three cups of tea. "You're writing them." She looked meaningfully at the notebook, and thought of the dozen or more like it in her daughter's desk. The girl seemed a little startled as if she hadn't realized that, then smiled brilliantly.
"I am, aren't I?" she exclaimed. "Wicked."
Amused at the unusually age-appropriate expression, Helen stared hard at the sugar bowl, managing after a few seconds to make the spoon float out of it and over her tea. Hermione watched with a broad smile, as did Michael. Both clapped when the sugar in the spoon mostly ended up in the cup. "You're getting better, Mommy," Hermione exclaimed with joy.
"It's hard work, but I do think I'm becoming more adept at it," Helen replied, fumbling the spoon which dropped to the table with a clink, then sighing and picking it up to stir the tea the old fashioned way. "Although I can't manage it for all that long yet."
Michael gave her a somewhat smug look as his teaspoon started stirring without him touching it. She raised an eyebrow, causing him to chuckle.
"Don't show off, love."
"Of course not," he replied mildly, taking a sip.
Both of them watched as Hermione's tea was sweetened by the sugar directly flying from bowl to cup in a white cascade, while she was apparently looking at her mother and not either of the other items. There was a tiny grin on her lips during this, which made Helen giggle. "Clearly we have a long way to go yet," she chortled.
"You're picking it up much faster than I did to begin with," the girl smiled.
"We know it can be done, dear, which is half the battle," her husband said in reply. "You had no idea if it was even possible at all, and managed to succeed anyway. Which is remarkably impressive." He sipped more tea, then put the cup back in his saucer. "Although I do think you most likely have a natural talent for it that dwarfs that of either of us."
Hermione shrugged, shaking her head slightly at the same time. "I really don't know. Possibly I was just lucky?"
"Perhaps. You were certainly far more persistent than most people would be, regardless," he retorted. "Very few people would have stuck at something so unlikely for so long, until they managed to get results. Trust me, I've seen it at university, when people are fully aware something is possible and still feel it's too much work to keep at it."
She seemed somewhat pleased but also a little embarrassed. "I just wanted to know if I could make it work," she mumbled. He ruffled her hair affectionately.
"And you did. You certainly did."
Smiling to herself, Hermione drank her tea. Helen got out some biscuits, deciding that they were due a small reward for their hard work and the extra tooth-brushing was a price worth paying.
"So… we would seem to have some evidence that Hermione may not be the first person to come up with psionics," she said a little later, after pouring some more tea for all of them.
"Possibly," the girl replied, looking pensive. "Possibly not. What I saw really didn't seem to be exactly what we're doing. It was certainly related in some manner but it's quite different in others. I can't quite put my finger on what the difference means though." She shook her head. "Both are using the H-field but telekinesis and the HOPs are doing it…" Hermione trailed off, her expression thoughtful. "All I can describe it as at the moment is more directly," she finished after a few seconds. "I need more data."
"Our little scientist," Michael joked. "Always needing data."
"Data is important, Daddy!" she protested, smiling. "How else am I to work if I don't have data? That's what experiments are for. And observation, of course."
"Of course. Observe away, by all means. I'll be fascinated to see what you come up with."
Finishing his tea and biscuits, he stood up. "I have some accounting work to do, but perhaps when I finish we could practice some more and you could observe that to tell us where we're going wrong?" he suggested. Their daughter nodded.
"I'd love to," she replied. "Call me when you're ready. I'm going to go upstairs and finish my latest project, now I have the parts I need."
"Do be careful not to fire any more pencils through walls or anything of that nature," he remarked with a grin, making Hermione sigh.
"I know, I made a mistake," she mumbled. "I'll try to avoid making any more."
"You will no matter how hard you try, that's life unfortunately," he chuckled. "Everyone, even you, has the occasional moment where things don't quite go as planned. The trick is to avoid making the same mistake twice. And to think ahead so when it does go pear shaped the damage is minimal."
Hermione nodded, looking understanding. Helen was just glad her little pencil incident had only resulted in a hole in the ceiling and not in anything important. The girl had very obviously learned from that event and taken the lesson to heart. Which was a good thing. The idea of her doing the same to a rock the size of a car didn't bear thinking about…
Telekinesis could clearly be quite hazardous if someone was careless. Like most things in life.
Also standing, she collected the tea things and put it all in the sink to wash. Hermione got up and came over as she turned the tap on, floating a tea towel into her hand from the other side of the kitchen with the air of someone to whom such things were entirely routine, which made Helen smile. "I hope you remember not to do something like that in school," she commented as the sink filled with hot water.
"I nearly did forget once or twice," her daughter admitted, giggling a little. "It's so easy now and really useful. But I don't want to show it off in public because it will only cause them to look at me even more oddly." She sighed faintly. Helen put her hand on her shoulder comfortingly for a moment before beginning to wash the tea things along with some plates left over from breakfast earlier, handing each to Hermione to dry.
"You'll make friends who can keep up with you one day, sweetie. I'm sure of that. And someone like that is likely to become a very good friend." She glanced at the girl, who was staring at the cloth and the plate she was working on, both of which were hanging in front of her in an implausible manner if you weren't aware of quite how strange the Granger household had become in the last months. "You need some friends your own age, after all."
"I've got you and Daddy and Granny," Hermione replied. "And Mr Boots, even though he keeps tracking mud all over my desk no matter how much I tell him not to. And even though he doesn't live here."
"That cat is certainly somewhat ambiguous about his home," she agreed with a smile. "Affectionate but a little dim, I think." She sighed. "Still, I think you need other friends."
Hermione hugged her for a couple of seconds. "I'm not unhappy, Mummy. It would be nice if the children at school weren't quite so mean sometimes, but it could be worse. Some of them are horrible to other people too. The teachers try but they can be very sneaky about it."
"Bullying is never right, but I'll agree from my own childhood that it can be hard for the adults to stop," Helen replied sadly. "Just remember that you can tell the teachers about it."
Hermione scowled. "That just makes some of the bullies even worse and say nasty things" she grumbled. "Teacher's pet, and why are you so bossy, and why do you always have a book in your hand. Honestly, some of them are just stupid. Education is important."
Helen pulled the plug out, letting the water drain away, and turned to her daughter. Kneeling down she put both hands on Hermione's shoulders. "You will never please everyone, Hermione," she said, meeting her daughter's eyes. "There will always be people who don't understand you, and a lot of people can be quite unpleasant about things they don't understand. Don't let it upset you if you can, and remember that it's not your fault. Try to get along if possible, and live with the fact that sometimes it isn't. Don't let the bullies make you feel that you're wrong to like learning, because you are not. You're a very intelligent young woman who has a bright future ahead of her. And we love you, never forget that either."
"I know, Mummy," the girl replied, sighing. "I try not to let them upset me. Sometimes it's hard though." She stepped forward and they hugged each other. "I do my best not to shake them with my mind until they fall over too," she added with a small giggle.
"That would be… unwise," Helen said dryly. "As well as something of an overreaction. Best to ignore them, I think." Releasing her hold on her daughter she stood. "Do you fancy steak tonight?" she asked.
"Ooh. Yes, I'd love a nice steak," Hermione replied eagerly.
"I'll take some out of the freezer to defrost, then." Proceeding to do just that, she asked over her shoulder, "What do you think these other people you detected are doing? It's a curious discovery you made. I wonder if it's some secret government thing?"
Hermione giggled. "Agents of a shadowy government agency walking among us and no one knows but the plucky girl and her parents," she hissed, making a strange face. "No! I know, it's aliens! They've got a secret base right in… the… middle… of London…" She slowed down as her face changed from hilarity to sudden thoughtfulness. Helen stared at her, a pack of frozen steaks in her hand.
"Aliens?" she echoed. "That sounds somewhat unlikely."
Her daughter nodded, still staring into the middle distance with an expression of deep thought. "Very unlikely. But…"
They exchanged wondering glances.
Coming to her senses with a jerk as she realized her right hand was very cold, Helen put the steak packet on the counter and dried her fingers with the cloth. "I can't help thinking that aliens are some way down the list of possibilities," she finally said. "But I confess I can't think of anything obvious."
"Neither can I," Hermione sighed. "Because I don't have enough information." She looked at her mother. "Perhaps we should investigate?"
"You are not Nancy Drew, Hermione. We should probably be careful not to prod something we don't know enough about. It's probably some sort of government thing like you said, as mad as that sounds, and the government never appreciates random members of the public turning up asking questions." Helen shook her head as her daughter appeared just a little truculent, but Hermione was more than smart enough to let her realize it wasn't a good idea despite her ever-present hunger for knowledge. "You concentrate on your own studies and let whoever it is stick to theirs. You haven't detected anything like that around here, have you?"
"Only that one I thought I did weeks ago as I was falling asleep and I'm not sure it was really there," the girl replied, brightening up. "The closest one I'm sure about was miles and miles away on the way to London. And even though I found several during the day, there weren't many of them. Whatever is behind it doesn't seem to be very common. I still want to know what's going on near Charing Cross, though."
"Of course you do, you wouldn't be Hermione if you didn't," Helen smiled. "Let's leave that for later."
"Oh, all right, I suppose." Hermione shrugged in mild disappointment. "But I'm going to keep an eye open for anything odd happening around here."
"I would expect nothing else from you, sweetie."
Her daughter grinned then dashed upstairs, from where a few seconds later an aggrieved cry of "Mr Boots! Just look what you did to my desk!" came to Helen's ears, making her laugh before getting on with things of her own.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Lying in bed with her eyes closed and next door's cat purring next to her head, since he seemed to have fallen into a routine of visiting almost every night, Hermione extended her energy sense slowly outwards. She noted each distortion in the field as she encountered it, the static ones that represented objects, the ground, and everything else inanimate by now easily distinguishable from living things, even trees and other plants. Life had a distinctly different effect on the omnipresent energy flow, although she didn't yet know why. She was steadily learning to interpret what she sensed, by now coming close to almost seeing it as images rather than the ghostly and nebulous effect she'd initially managed to produce.
The overall result was amazingly complex, absolutely fascinating, and contained so much information that it was sometimes hard to deal with. The more she concentrated on the details the finer the level she could sense, although the further away she pushed it from herself the more effort it took. The girl had been carefully considering the best way to make a HOP of the right type to aid her, but so far was just a little hesitant about doing so just in case she ended up with the energy sense equivalent of a flashgun or something like that.
She had no wish to accidentally experience what it was like to have the local H-field distortions amplified by a few million times and dumped directly into her brain. That sounded like a recipe for a monstrous headache if not something worse.
Hermione was curious, and keen on experimentation, but she wasn't daft. And she'd already had one close call. So each new HOP was the result of a lot of careful thought and extremely cautious testing at a safe distance. She was fairly sure she'd work it out sooner or later, even so.
Now, she examined the local neighborhood in detail, noting how Mr Killian at Number 47 seemed to be a bit tipsy again based on what she could feel, the dog at Number 19 was very upset about a squirrel that was in a tree out of reach, someone in a car going past a couple of hundred yards away seemed very tired, and many other facets of her local environment. She'd spent at least an hour every night for months now doing this exercise and was intimately familiar with far more things that most people wouldn't even consider over a fairly substantial area. It was good practice, and something she could do from the comfort of her bed.
Feeling Mr Boots purring, she idly spared some attention for his own unique field distortion pattern, smiling as she felt what seemed to be contentment. The cat was not the smartest animal around but he did seem fond of her. And put up with her experimenting on floating him around the room, which if anything he'd decided he quite enjoyed.
She considered the idea she'd had for a long time of seeing whether she could float herself. Hermione couldn't see any reason why it wouldn't work, and in fact was almost certain it would, but there was still a hole in the ceiling that bore mute testimony to what could happen if someone was a little overenthusiastic…
Not wanting to leave a much larger hole in something with her own head, she'd resisted the temptation so far. Again, it was something she wanted to be certain was safe. Some form of force field around her would also be a good idea, which should be easy enough. Remembering reading Dune, she made a mental note to work out a solid design for a personal shield. Only one that wasn't quite as catastrophically dangerous in the presence of certain types of energy. That seemed like rather a drawback to her, overall.
Having come to the conclusion that nothing much had changed in the area, she gradually expanded her zone to the limit she was currently able to reach, which was close to a mile and a half in all directions. At the edges it was nothing like as clear as it was much nearer, but she could still distinctly feel an aircraft pass overhead, from the direction of Gatwick, with nearly two hundred people on board. It climbed rapidly and soon passed out of her range. In the other direction, she could sense the differing materials under the ground, ultimately becoming fairly uniform rock about a hundred or so feet down.
Hermione had the thought that it would be interesting to see what a mine felt like. Her parents had suggested a holiday in the spring down to Cornwall, and that area was riddled with mines from what she'd learned, so she'd be able to find out.
Wondering what range she'd ultimately be capable of, she kept poking around in the mental map of the field surrounding her, noting all the minor variations that changed the otherwise uniform energy. Even now she wasn't sure where it actually originated from, it was just there. It would be interesting to go up in a plane and see if there was any change much higher up, but from the ground she couldn't detect anything. Perhaps during the summer holidays they'd go to France like her mother had suggested? If that was on a plane rather than the ferry it would be more useful information one way or the other.
Slowly moving her attention from place to place in the sensory zone, she kept her mental eye open for any signs of the odd phenomena that she'd spotted on the trip to London a couple of weeks ago. So far she hadn't yet sensed anything of that nature anywhere near her since then. It was still puzzling her, that entire experience. What was going on near Charing Cross station was a question she didn't have an answer to, but dearly wanted one. And even now she was somewhat stuck on what the difference between what she did and what that was doing. There very definitely was a difference, she was sure of it, but at the moment it defied her full understanding.
And she was nearly certain that whatever it was that was causing those bizarre H-field distortions, it was doing something extremely strange indeed. The girl couldn't shake the feeling that she was going to be very upset with herself when she finally figured it out, since she had a nagging sense it should be obvious if only she could look at it in the right manner.
Oh well. As her parents had said, understanding would come in time, and she had a lot of other things to think about. Not to mention whoever was behind it probably was best left alone for now in case they turned out to be upset about her asking questions.
She still wondered if it was aliens.
Hermione fell asleep with a small smile on her lips, half-way through yet another mental attempt at designing some method to detect the H-field without using the energy sense.
It would help if she knew what it actually was, of course.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"That's brilliant, Daddy. Keep it going… Come on, I know you can do it." Hermione sounded excited as Michael concentrated hard. All of them watched as three apples slowly moved in a horizontal circle above the living room table. "Ten seconds."
He pushed himself to do something that he'd never in his wildest dreams expected to actually be able to do, a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead.
"Twenty seconds."
It was getting easier, he knew that, but easier and easy were two utterly different things. Not to mention his daughter, who had an astonishingly greater ability at telekinesis, had also had nearly a year's head start on either himself or his wife. And was at least as smart as both of them put together, which might well help.
"Thirty seconds."
He was in an almost zen-like state, as odd as that seemed, even as he concentrated as hard as if he was working on a tricky root canal. The effort wasn't physical at all, it was as you'd expect entirely mental, but that didn't mean it wasn't remarkably tiring.
"Forty seconds."
On the other hand it was worth every second spent on it, he thought at the back of his mind, still amazed at what he was doing. He'd been reading science fiction and fantasy books since he was seven and this sort of thing was a staple of more of them than he could count. Now he was actually doing it.
"Fifty seconds."
'Use the force, Michael,' he thought with a mental snicker, wishing some of his friends from school could have seen this. Back in his tabletop gaming days it would have really set them going. Rolling dice would have been fun, too. He wondered how much trouble you'd get in at a casino with telekinesis…
"One minute. You can stop."
With a sensation of relief, he allowed the orbiting fruit to fall back into the bowl they'd come from and relaxed, letting out a long breath. "That is harder than it looks," he gasped.
"You did very well, Daddy," Hermione told him with a broad smile as she made some notes. "That's ten seconds longer than last time. You're getting steadily better with practice."
"I'd hate to think I'd get worse with practice," he chuckled, wiping his brow with the tissue Helen handed him wordlessly. "That would just be embarrassing."
His daughter giggled a little. "True," she replied. "Mummy's improving even faster, though, so you can't slack off."
"Remarkable," Nancy, who had stopped in for a visit, said with a shake of her head. "That really is something to see. All I can do is make a feather twitch so far."
Hermione smiled at her. "It takes time like I said. I'm sure you'll pick it up though."
His mother smiled back. The girl had done the same exercises with her that she'd done for both Helen and Michael a couple of weeks afterwards, and it had resulted in much the same thing if somewhat more slowly. It seemed likely, Michael believed, that the younger you were when you started learning such a talent that the faster and better you'd develop it, like with so many other things. His daughter starting off so young and moreover, having come up with the whole thing by herself, quite probably meant she was always going to be far ahead of any adult that acquired the skill in later life.
"I'll keep practicing, Hermione, but I'm probably too old to learn something so extraordinary in the way you did," Nancy replied, echoing his own thoughts.
"Even old people can learn, Granny! Look at Daddy!" Hermione gave him a cheeky grin.
"Oi! I'll have you know, young lady, that I am neither old nor infirm," he responded with a mock glare at her as Helen snickered. Nancy was laughing too. He levitated an apple out of the bowl into his hand, somewhat unevenly, and bit into it with an expression of triumph while the other three grinned at him. "See? I can learn new things."
All the other apples flew into the air and proceeded to execute a complicated three dimensional dance, while Hermione met his eyes and giggled. He sighed. "Fine. You win. Again. But I shall have my revenge!"
"Eek!" The girl shuffled away on the carpet, obviously trying to stifle laughter. "I have angered the beast!"
Helen lost it completely at that point and fell about laughing, Nancy joining in a moment later. Michael sighed. "I have no respect in this household at all sometimes," he muttered, winking at his daughter who put the apples back and nodded gravely.
"Earned, respect is," she croaked in a rather good Yoda impression. "Learned, skills are."
"Foolish child." He pointed with his free hand. "Get the monopoly set out and you'll see real skill."
Hermione jumped to her feet with a smile and quickly retrieved the game from the cupboard under the television, setting it up on the coffee table. Twenty minutes later they were deeply involved in attempting to thrash each other at it, a family pursuit of long tradition and much viciousness. Added to in this case by all four of them pushing the pieces around without touching them, although his mother mostly seemed to be using her currently untrained telekinesis to cheat with the chance cards when no one was looking.
All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I think that's got it," Hermione said under her breath as she looked at the prototype circuit she'd spend a solid week carefully building from surplus components, veroboard, and a lot of wire. Surrounding it on her desk were half a dozen books and manuals, including a TTL 74 series data book, the thick yellow and blue tome a lucky find during their trip to London that time. She'd been reading up on logic circuits for a while now and could see some interesting possibilities there, both for her electronics projects and for inspiring H-field Operators.
This device was a fairly straightforward proof of concept, nothing preposterously complex but one of the more involved ones she'd designed, mostly, from scratch. It had taken quite a bit of research but she was fairly sure it would work.
Now she picked up her multimeter probes, turned the meter on and set it to continuity, then started testing the wiring while referring to a pile of hand drawn diagrams on A4 paper. The meter beeped happily as she checked each connection, once or twice not doing so and telling her which joint needed touching up. Overall she was pleased by the time she'd finished to find that she'd made only three actual errors, and one more wire had snapped where she must have accidentally tugged a little too hard on it at some point.
Satisfied, she set the meter to the voltage range, then connected a pair of wires with alligator clips on to the little bench power supply she'd built from a kit from Maplin a while ago. Turning it on, she made sure that the five volt power rail on each IC socket was correct, finally putting the probes down when she'd checked all of them.
"Good," the girl commented happily as she turned the power supply off again. A meow from behind her made her look over her shoulder at Mr Boots, who was lying on his back on the bed with his legs in the air watching her upside down, his whiskers curled forward. "You do realize this isn't your home, don't you?" she said with mild exasperation. "And I'm not going to feed you."
The cat waved his tail and merped. She shook her head in a fondly bemused way and turned back to the circuit. "Cats are such strange creatures." Opening her top drawer she pulled out flat black plastic box about six by nine inches in size, which she opened to reveal a number of DIP packaged integrated circuits. Most of them were logic chips of various types, largely surplus parts from Proops and the other shops. A few were bought from the local Maplin, and one or two had been salvaged from an old broken radio her grandmother had given her to take to pieces. All were sitting with their leads firmly pressed into the hard black foam that lined the box, a conductive material to protect them from static electricity.
Once again reading her notes, she selected each required chip in turn, carefully straightening the leads then pushing them into the sockets she'd soldered to the veroboard. The last one snapped into place, the 74LS154 being one of the larger chips, then she sat back. Inspecting the prototype one final time, she reconnected the power supply with the multimeter set to current inserted between supply and board, then held her breath and flipped the switch.
The needle jumped and settled down at a perfectly reasonable eighty five milliamps. No smoke made an appearance and no nasty crackling sounds happened. She smiled a little and picked up the logic probe she'd also built from a kit, carefully connected the power leads to the bench supply as well, and began poking the tip on IC leads to see what was going on. She nodded happily as she found that the oscillator was running, the ripple counter driven from it was counting correctly, and the binary to decimal decoders were doing the right thing too. All the switches made the right signals appear in the right places when she pressed each in turn.
"We're nearly there, Mr Boots," she remarked, putting the tool down and turning the circuit off. The cat lifted his head and peered at her at the sound of his name, making her reach over and stroke him. "All I need to do is make the HOP now. This one is really complicated, so you must be quiet while I think, all right?"
Giving him one last tickle, she picked up another notebook and flipped through it to the right part, then studied the diagram carefully for some time. The basic idea wasn't hard, but implementing it was a bit more involved than anything she'd done so far. It would be a good test of whether her ideas about how to make HOPs that connected together in a modular fashion, very similarly to how the logic chips in front of her worked, was viable or not.
She was certain that the basic concept was sound but unsure if she'd worked out the best way to do it yet. Hence the experimentation. Initial manual tests had shown promise but the full scope wouldn't really be tested until she got everything working together.
Hermione set to work, the immaterial energy construct growing steadily in front of her, only visible to someone through the energy sense. A more and more complex arrangement of little knots of H-field distortion appeared and connected together, forming a pattern that she'd have had a hard time to explain to someone without actually showing it to them. Words didn't really do it justice. She made sure that each part was stable before moving onto the next, duplicating elements where required as she'd found she could do after a lot of practice. It was much quicker than making each from scratch once she had something that worked. Linking them all together in a web of connections remarkably analogous to the electronic circuit in front of her, she finally finished.
"I think that's got it," she said to the cat, who was now sitting up and watching her with a feline look of mild indifference. "I hope. It looks good as far as I can see." The girl reached out and waved a hand through the not really there pattern of knots, not feeling a thing with her normal senses but easily able to detect it with the special one she'd spent so long training.
Picking up the circuit board, she smiled when the HOP array followed it precisely. That had worked as well, it was positionally linked to the prototype. So far so good. Now all it needed was the connections between the electronics and the H-field construct.
That only took another minute or so. When she was done, there were H-field sensors monitoring the state of a couple of dozen outputs on the PCB, two rows of wire wrap terminals each driving a HOP node. She took a deep breath.
"I hope this works or I'll have to start all over again," she remarked to Mr Boots, who meowed at her in apparent encouragement. Whether for her work or in request of some tuna she didn't know.
Hermione activated the main HOP power channel, then reached out and snapped the power switch to ON.
The little red LED came on to indicate power was flowing but nothing else visibly happened. However, to her H-field sense, the HOP array was now running. She started to grin before very gently pressing one of the four by four arrangement of push button switches on the bottom of her circuit.
Then she yipped in triumph as a foot off the desk a pinpoint of green light illuminated out of nowhere. It hung there in space as she gazed at it with a massive smile on her face.
"It works!" she shouted in glee.
Releasing the button, she watched the point of light winked out. Pressing another one got her a different illuminated point half an inch to the right. Absolutely exalted she pressed each button in turn, then several at once, before mashing the entire set of switches with her hand. All of them produced a corresponding point of light in a grid replicating the switch layout.
"That's rather good," her father's voice said from behind her, making her look over her shoulder to see him standing in the doorway to her bedroom. "Like a hologram."
"Exactly," she laughed, jumping up and spinning in a circle, before flopping on the bed and making next door's cat complain. "Hush, you, this is my room," she told him as she grinned at the ceiling.
Her father bent over the desk and inspected her work, then experimentally prodded one of the switches. When the floating green point of light came on, he cautiously poked it with a fingertip, then waved his hand through it when he didn't feel anything. "Very good indeed. How does it work?" he asked, playing with the switches some more.
"It's like a much more complicated version of the torches, Daddy," she explained, sitting up to look at him. "I built a keyboard scan circuit in a way, it's based on the sort of thing a computer uses, except simpler. It scans a matrix of switches and if any of them are pressed it generates a unique code. There's also an output scan circuit that's synchronized to the first one which takes that code and converts it back to a position in another matrix. Then the HOP array looks for those signals and generates a visible output in the correct position."
He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. After a moment, he asked, "You know more about this than I do, but isn't that overcomplicated? Do you need to take the switches and convert them into a code then back again just to make lights come on? Couldn't you use the switches to directly drive the lights?"
"Of course, but that's not quite what I was trying to do," Hermione replied happily. "The keyboard scan part is just to make a code that the other part can read. That's the interesting bit. Because if I could make it work properly, I can produce the code in a different way. What I was thinking about was using the output of a computer to drive it."
He looked at her, then back at the prototype on the bench, his eyebrows up a little. "So… you're half way to building a holographic monitor?"
"Yes!" She grinned. "It'll take a lot more work, and I need to learn more about how to design a circuit that can run fast enough, but this is a proof of concept. It shows I can interface a HOP to an electronic circuit, as well as a simple switch like the torches show. And that I can make a HOP array that does something much more complicated than any of the other ones I've made so far."
She pulled her legs up and sat cross legged on the bed while he sat in her chair, Mr Boots hopping onto her lap and curling up. Stroking the cat, she carried on excitedly, "There's all sorts of things I can think of now I've managed to make this work. I could probably do the entire thing as a HOP array in the end, but this is already brilliant. I still need to come up with a good method to go the other way, but I think I can, and that means interfacing electronics directly to the H-field should be possible." The girl almost bounced up and down where she was sitting, she was so excited at the prospects.
"You really are a very clever young woman at times," he smiled, shaking his head in wonder.
"I try," she giggled. "I think I need to learn more programming though. And I need a computer. We do a little at school with the BBC Masters in the computer room but they don't really let us play around on them, only do the set work which isn't very complicated."
"A pity my old BBC micro died a few years ago," her father remarked. "Just gave off a big bang and a lot of smoke. Shame, I had some good games for that thing."
"I remember," she replied. "I liked Planetoid."
"Well, Christmas is coming up very soon, so if you're good, you never know what Santa might bring you." Standing up, he looked amused as she rolled her eyes.
"Daddy, I knew it was you when I was five."
"No, it's Santa, honest. Everyone knows that."
She humphed at him but she was grinning.
"Anyway, dinner is ready, so wash up and come down."
"Alright," she replied, putting the cat that wasn't hers on the bed that was, where he complained but fell asleep again, then heading to the bathroom.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Are you sure this will work?" Helen looked askance at her husband and daughter who were fiddling around with her old dressmaker's dummy, which they'd set up in the middle of the garage. Again, the car was in the drive, and it was a horrible Saturday a week from Christmas, blowing like mad and not entirely certain if it wanted to snow or rain, so it was doing both. No one had left the house all day and had no intention of so doing. Luckily they were all more than capable of making their own entertainment, more so these days than in the past although it had never been a problem even then.
"It should do, Mummy," Hermione replied, nodding as she looked over to where Helen was sitting on a stool watching. The door to the kitchen was open and warm air was flowing into the garage, offsetting the usual somewhat chilly environment. At one point Helen would have made sure the door was closed as there was no point paying to heat the poorly insulated room, but since Michael and Hermione had first sorted out free water heating, then recently upgraded that to free heating as well, all courtesy of one of her HOPs, there was no real reason to be militant about it.
"I was thinking about how to make it safe to try self levitation, which does work, I've tried it without an amplifier, but it would be very dangerous if you lost your concentration or got distracted or hit a bird or something," the girl chattered away, making Helen smile. She was, as usual, very excited to be trying one of her ideas. Yet another notebook was rapidly filling up with observations and calculations, making the woman wonder how many she actually had now. Dozens, at least. "And if an amplifier was used it could really go horribly wrong. So I thought that we could design a sort of personal shield. A force field specifically designed to protect a person, like in Dune."
"And I suggested that it might be safer to try it on something inanimate before we risk using the same idea on a person," her husband added. She gave him a look, knowing full well that he was at least as excited as their daughter was about all this, his inner science fiction nerd coming to the fore yet again as it did every time Hermione managed to pull off another ridiculous trick. "Just in case she got her sums wrong."
Hermione put her hands on her hips. "I got the calculations right, I'm sure," she huffed.
"Just like you did when you made a supersonic pencil?" he teased.
"You're never going to let me forget that, are you?" the girl sighed. He shook his head as Helen hid a smile.
"No. It was a lesson you have to remember." He patted her hair affectionately. "Even you make mistakes, like all of us, and the fact that you can do some amazing things only means that a mistake could be that much worse. So keep it in mind and always check everything carefully."
Their daughter looked embarrassed as she always did when her little miscalculation was brought up, but nodded understanding. "Believe me, I won't forget that in a hurry," she said quietly, before turning back to her work. Helen met Michael's eyes and smiled slightly, her husband returning it.
Hopefully between Hermione's native wit and common sense, and their urging, they could keep the disasters few and far between.
"All right, I think that's got it," the girl announced half a minute later, as she squinted at something that wasn't really there in the usual sense of the word. Helen tried to use her own nascent H-field sense and was able to detect a surprisingly complex little matrix of energy hovering over the top of the dressmaker's form. She turned to them and took on her very small scientist air, straightening the sleeves of her lab coat.
Helen though it was hilarious but would never ever say that.
"There's a HOP array here," Hermione began, pointing at the construct. "It's got a standard power amplifier module, which connects through a feedback module to a force field one, which is set up to make a field surrounding the target about two inches away. There's also another very low powered field running all the time which is acting as a detector, and it will trigger if something goes through it moving faster than a certain level. When it does, it makes the main field turn on to block whatever it is." She pointed at different parts of the invisible array as she spoke, both parents studying what they could make out of it. Neither understood how it worked yet, but the explanation was clear enough.
"How fast does it react?" Helen asked curiously.
"Effectively instantly, I think," their daughter replied, her expression mildly pensive. "I can't quite think of how to properly test it, but as far as I can work out it shouldn't take more than microseconds at most. I haven't been able to detect any delays in the HOP speeds, they work immediately whenever I activate them. Certainly it's much faster than a person can notice."
"And what speed does the hazard have to hit the trigger?" Michael asked.
Hermione shrugged. "Whatever speed I set it for. It took me a while to design a method to detect motion but it turned out to be quite simple in the end when I thought about it the right way. I can make it so sensitive it will go off it you blow on it, or so insensitive you'd probably have to hit it with a bullet or something."
"Would it actually stop a bullet?"
"Oh, certainly, the amount of energy needed to break it would be enormous," Hermione replied confidently. "That part I'm sure of now."
"Hmm. Not bad. Let's see what happens, then," Michael remarked, picking up the same broom he'd used when they'd first been experimenting with force fields.
"Poke it gently and I'll see how it reacts," their daughter instructed. He held the broom out and prodded the dummy in the chest, making it rock slightly. "Good. Harder, please?"
Again, he tapped it. She asked for steadily increasing hits, until she nodded. "That should do it. I think I've got a good calibration for it now. Hold on, I'll just tweak this like this…" Hermione concentrated for a second or two. "There. It should turn on if you hit it a bit harder than that last one."
Michael examined the dressmaker's form, then pulled the broom back and swung it, hard enough that if he'd hit someone with it they'd have had a bruise. The moment the end of the wooden pole got within a foot of the surface, a glassy translucent shield formed around it roughly a couple of inches off the thing, following the contours. He was unable to stop the swing in time and winced as the broom handle clattered against the force field.
Everyone stared in amazement, even Hermione. "Wow," she said under her breath. "That was amazing!"
Michael pulled the broom away and the effect disappeared instantly. "Wow indeed," he mumbled, grinning like an idiot. Helen's eyes were wide. "Best special effect I've ever seen."
"I can make it invisible but I wanted to be able to see it properly," Hermione said, smiling broadly. "It works!"
"Hang on, let's try something else," her father commented, leaning the broom against the wall and picking up a sledge hammer he'd bought a couple of weeks ago. Hefting it, he swung the thing as hard as he could at the center of their test object, the result being identical to the broom handle as the head of the hammer stopped dead, recoiling a little and making him grunt. The form barely moved behind the glimmering shield, which again vanished once he lowered the hammer. "Ow." He rested the tool on the floor and flexed his hands.
"Where did all the energy go?" Helen asked, memories of long ago physics lessons in school tweaking at her thoughts. "The form hardly moved, and the hammer didn't bounce as much as it should have."
"I think it mostly got transferred back into the H-field, Mummy," Hermione replied after thinking about it for a moment. "It did the opposite of what the light emitter does. That converts a tiny amount of the H-field into electromagnetic energy, or transfers it from somewhere, I haven't worked that out properly yet, and this turns kinetic energy back into something the H-field can absorb. It's how telekinesis seems to work. It doesn't lift something like putting your hand under it, it acts on the entire object you're targeting." She waved a hand at their test subject. "So, in theory, if you had that on and fell off a building, it would stop you at the ground but not squish you against the inside. Which would be bad."
"Doesn't that break about half the rules of physics?" she queried. Hermione frowned.
"Yes. I think, according to what the books say. But I also think that those rules are missing something I don't understand. Because this obviously works, and as far as I can see if theory tells you one thing and the universe shows you you're wrong, it wins."
"You have a point, dear," Michael agreed, picking the hammer up and returning it to the corner of the garage. "Well, I'd say that was a successful test. Another one for the win column."
Hermione looked pleased. "Yes. And it gives me even more ideas for variations on the concept." She looked at him. "Do you want to try it?"
He smiled back at her. "Obviously." With a giggle she nodded.
"All right. Stand there, I'll just make you one." Helen watched as another complex construct quickly took shape, marveling at the surety with which their daughter did something that should have been impossible but clearly wasn't. "There," the girl said a few seconds later. "That should do it. I'll turn it on and…" Michael looked at her, then Helen.
"I didn't feel anything," he reported.
"I didn't think you would," Hermione replied, studying an area of space just above his head. "But it's working."
"I suppose you'd better test that then," he told her, folding his arms.
She grinned, then grabbed the broom and swung it at his ribs.
Half an hour later Helen shook her head and went into the house to watch the news, leaving the pair to their light saber battle with a broom and a mop, clacks of wood on force fields following her inside.
"I sometimes think I've got two children," she said to herself, highly amused.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Happy New Year, Hermione," her mother said, turning to her as they watched the celebrations on television. Hermione hugged her, her father on her other side putting her arm over her shoulder.
"Thank you for letting me stay up to watch," the girl replied before yawning widely. "It was fun. And dinner was lovely."
"Agreed," her father said, leaning back to reach over and pick up his champagne flute. He tapped it against her mother's one, and Hermione's which was filled with sparkling apple juice. "I hope 1990 will be as interesting as 1989 was."
"Probably more so," her mother commented wryly, shaking her head a little. "I can't see it being less involved."
"Life does seem to have become rather more unusual recently," her father chortled. "It's certainly fun though."
"However, I think it's time a certain young woman was in bed," her mother put in. "It's gone midnight now and you need your sleep or you'll be a mess tomorrow."
Hermione yawned even more vigorously and couldn't really deny that. "I'll see you in the morning," she told her parents, as she got up from the sofa and rubbed her eyes, floating the empty glass back to the table while she did this. "Good night."
"Night, Hermione," they echoed. She trudged out of the room and up the stairs, feeling very tired but happy, brushed and flossed carefully, and stumbled into her bedroom. Getting into her pajamas and sliding under the duvet, she smiled at the shiny new BBC Master 128K home computer that was sitting on her desk, a Christmas present she was extremely grateful for, then turned the light out with a flick of telekinesis on the switch even as she closed her eyes.
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KillerFish
Grumpy Owl, Bird Lawyer
But it's not a proper lightsaber mop fight unless you get a broken rib!
- Location
- Sydney
The way Hermione described what might be a wand suggests its not a independant magical device but rather a pure amplifier for the wizards magic hence why it looks incomplete.
Considering Hermione mention that unaided flight would be dangerous. Possibly that why wizards use brooms rather than just a spell? Its fairly difficult for a wizard to keep up the spell when distracted or tired so they keep falling and getting injured which was interpreted as flight spells being a bad idea. Hence they switched to magic items and teach this as common knowledge?
Also I wonder are wizards actually tougher or do all brooms have kinetic barrier to reduce impacts to a more reasonable speed?
Considering Hermione mention that unaided flight would be dangerous. Possibly that why wizards use brooms rather than just a spell? Its fairly difficult for a wizard to keep up the spell when distracted or tired so they keep falling and getting injured which was interpreted as flight spells being a bad idea. Hence they switched to magic items and teach this as common knowledge?
Also I wonder are wizards actually tougher or do all brooms have kinetic barrier to reduce impacts to a more reasonable speed?
From an act-utilitarian perspective, certainly it's better to kill the one. Dumbledore had his act-utilitarian period (they called it the Greater Good), but he is not one by the the time Voldemort rolls around. In general, people---and that includes Dumbledore---tend to view failing to act resulting in some negative consequence to be a lesser crime than acting resulting in the same consequence. In particular, it's a common view that choosing to act assumes responsibility for indirect consequences of the act, whereas choosing not to act does not.
Also, to quote another famous fictional wizard, "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
I am quite certain that Dumbledore
As for why he rode a broom, why not a whim? Perhaps the actual matter in the letter wasn't particularly urgent, so Dumbledore thought that he would go on a nice broom ride, in order to teach a lesson to whomever was bothering him, while doing a bit of stargazing. It's the sort of thing a grand old wizard in a pointy hat would do.
So, if you choose to interpret Dumbledore as senile or malicious or what have you, that's your decision for your fic, but given the sort of magic, planning, speech, and sacrifices we see from Dumbledore throughout the books---even at his very worst, sickened, exhausted, at death's door---I don't think canon gives you a good case for any of these flaws.
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- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
To make it clear, I don't really think he was actively malicious. I DO think he was foolish, in over his head, overworked, and past his prime. And made some extremely questionable decisions all down the line.
But we shall see how things work out...
But we shall see how things work out...
It occurs to me that using electronics to interface with the H Field is a good idea to try with the energy-sense amplification idea she's been considering. It would mean that if something goes wrong the electronics gets fried instead of her brain.
Typo:
Because he's not a wizard. Wizards don't know how to teach magic to non-wizards; Hermione has figured out how to teach "psionics" to normal people.
Typo:
"thought"
I've got to wonder if by now Hermione's room looks a little... off, since she can use telekinesis to turn things on and off and reach things on high shelves, so she doesn't need to be able to reach the switches on anything, and she's got enough power and control that the pile of books reaching to the ceiling is a perfectly cromulent filing system.
Another thought is if Hermione has been learning to passively observe the world around her; is she magically good at dodge ball if she's not carefully making sure she isn't? =)
Another thought is if Hermione has been learning to passively observe the world around her; is she magically good at dodge ball if she's not carefully making sure she isn't? =)
Or a fuse and/or surge protector, perhaps. I've considered in the past that to be a good reason for magic users in many settings to use things like wands and staves (it's usually not explained after all); just think all the scenes in various works where the wizard loses a fight or control of a spell and their staff or wand breaks or catches on fire. As if it somehow took the brunt of them being overwhelmed.
It's much better for your staff to be reduced to splinters than your head.
- Location
- Here
Because he couldn't when he was 11.
And Ninja'd.
- Location
- Planet Earth
Another fantastic chapter, looking forward to more.
Now she needs to make the shield able to detect intent, or whether the force/object/substance would harm the person. So that fluids like acid, things like heat/fire, or spells/wards can be protected against as well...
Hope Hermione figures out a means of using HOP's to communicate before Hogwarts. So she and her parents/family can keep in touch.
Also still hoping her mind is protected/enhanced. Like meditation, mind palaces, speed reading, perfect recall, memory enhancement/eidetic memory, Mind shields, things like that... Maybe her personal shield will grow to be able to protect people from magic, and in that manner protect them from legillimency?
Now this story has got me curious if this H-Field is magic or not... I hope it is, that Hermione will learn to be able to do all the various magical things, likely better than they were intended/designed. Maybe even start doing the "impossible", like making matter from energy(permanently), making/transfiguring anything(including Gold and food), Transmuting materials, maybe even figuring out immortality, or at least agelessness/health. Maybe she will copy/duplicate the philosopher's stone, since I'd imaging it being in her "range" when/if she is at Hogwarts. Can see her reading books in the library from her bed in her dorm.
Curious if/when they will get the attention of, and possibly start working with, the United Kingdom's government.
Now she needs to make the shield able to detect intent, or whether the force/object/substance would harm the person. So that fluids like acid, things like heat/fire, or spells/wards can be protected against as well...
Hope Hermione figures out a means of using HOP's to communicate before Hogwarts. So she and her parents/family can keep in touch.
Also still hoping her mind is protected/enhanced. Like meditation, mind palaces, speed reading, perfect recall, memory enhancement/eidetic memory, Mind shields, things like that... Maybe her personal shield will grow to be able to protect people from magic, and in that manner protect them from legillimency?
Now this story has got me curious if this H-Field is magic or not... I hope it is, that Hermione will learn to be able to do all the various magical things, likely better than they were intended/designed. Maybe even start doing the "impossible", like making matter from energy(permanently), making/transfiguring anything(including Gold and food), Transmuting materials, maybe even figuring out immortality, or at least agelessness/health. Maybe she will copy/duplicate the philosopher's stone, since I'd imaging it being in her "range" when/if she is at Hogwarts. Can see her reading books in the library from her bed in her dorm.
Curious if/when they will get the attention of, and possibly start working with, the United Kingdom's government.
- Location
- canada
lol Hermione's mom and dad, receiving Hogwarts letters same time as her
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