A Story Begins
Dan liked to invest. Casually. It was a great side income and with both him and his wife being dentists they could afford occasional losses. Yet it didn't hurt to stay updated. That's why Dan often bought finance journals, to the point where you could walk through their house and you were almost guaranteed to stumble upon at least two different copies of Finance Weekly. They cluttered coffee tables and took over an entire shelf in his home study, much to the complaints of his wife. Still, he continued. You should know where your money's going, after all.
Hermione was an exceptionally bright girl. At the tender age of three, she had already moved on from thin books with big pictures and only the occasional word thrown in, to something a little more challenging. And when she had, in her second year of primary school, found that she had devoured pretty much everything under six-hundred pages in the house, there weren't a lot of options left over. So, lonely and bored out of her mind, she picked up the next shiny, glossy magazine she found on the kitchen table.
In another world, that magazine had contained a lot of differently-colored cars and women in clothing that simply couldn't be comfortable. This would have led to several awkward questions being asked over the next couple weeks, culminating in a lecture over gender roles, sexism and feminism by her mother, who felt strongly about these issues. In the end, Hermione would have come out of the affair with a newly-won sense of what was right and what was wrong. Her burning will to fight against these injustices and prove all those who believed in them wrong would have shaped her future and that of the entire world.
In this world, Dan Granger had a different hobby.
So when a seven-year-old Hermione knocked on the door of Dan's study, clutching an outdated issue of the Economics and Finance Journal, Dan set her down on his lap and about explaining the economy to her.
Nothing is ever the same.
A/N: I know literally nothing about the stock market. Another thing I don't know about is pairings. We'll see who ends up with who in the end. Also, I love the idea that the reason Hermione adheres so closely to rules is that she has barely any moral compass.
I hope you enjoyed this first chapter.