A/N: Insert extremely boring I-do-not-own-Harry-Potter disclaimer here: haeY, uoy ylbaborp daer taht a noillim semit!
Disclaimer: This is AU (students have returned to Hogwarts after the war) as well as Mature; Reader Discretion is advised
Chapter One: "Men Have Died From Time to Time..And Worms Have Eaten Them"
The knowledge that every single male in the room possessed a deep desire to shag her senselessly left Hermione in a deadlock of several conflicting emotions. Perhaps she had overlooked the consequences of her actions. Perhaps this was not the young witch's cup of tea and she should have just given up when she had the chance. Or, perhaps, with everything going on in Hogwarts these past few weeks, a fulminant retaliation was quite in order. The right path, whatever it may have been, was now as out of bounds as the Forbidden Forest. Steering herself back towards it was not entirely possible. She was here now. She would just have to make the best of it.
Hermione quivered, and felt a gush of heat radiating from her face as she feebly inched towards the cluster of 7th year students gaping at her. The sheer number of clumsy foot movements she had done in such a short distance was undeniably worthy of praise. Yet much rather than congratulate herself on her lack of balance, Hermione fervently bit down her lip in self-punishment and desperately prayed for the restoration of motor control.
Fumbling to get back onto her feet and too scared to think how much more attention a prolonged halt in motion would earn her, she managed to propel herself to the front of the room. Much to her displeasure, her peers continued their nerve-racking welcoming ritual, boring their eyes into her in shameless silence. The undue reticence of the ensemble made her suspect the entire room had been on the receiving end of a potent silencing charm, but she knew the real cause for their silence. It was bubbling vigorously in her stomach this very instant.
She set down the flask in her hand. An utter riot was transpiring in her mind as she felt the workings of the potion supervene. Her internal panic button hadn't simply been nudged on. It had been throttled down with full force and stomped on repeatedly until it was out of order. Her erratic heart rate and shallow breathing were just a few ramifications of the cataclysm. Most of her body parts had now either stopped working or had passed their respective speed limits. Her brain, being no exception, was now whizzing with undirected trains of thought.
The undivided attention of every single person in the room -before even opening her mouth- it was what she had willed for. It was what she wanted, what she needed, what she had went through all this trouble for. Then why was she so taken aback now that she had it? Why was she internally chanting a mantra of expletives now that she was finally here?
She gulped as she inhaled the fresh yet crisp autumn scents surrounding her. The fresh pine cones, the ground cinnamon and treacle tart helped to calm her slightly and revived her dormant Gryffindor courage. Stepping forward and putting on a weak smile, she let the words she had spent all day formulating, finally escape her mouth.
"As most of you probably already know, we are all here to prepare for the upcoming inter-school multi-disciplinary competition hosted by the Ministry of Magic."
She was grateful that every pair of eyes had now shifted away from her breasts and was now focusing on her face. Her fresh bout of confidence quickly faded though, as she spotted dozens of hands conveniently placed a few inches below their midsections. She quickly glanced away; gratified that none of the men in the room seemed to notice her face emulating the Gryffindor house colors.
"I am aware many of you did not choose to participate in such a competition, nor do you wish to take part in it. But as Dumbledore explained at the start of term feast, a magical quill has randomly selected a qualified list of students to represent Hogwarts."
The last statement was not entirely true. The only qualifications the students needed were a pulse and the genetic heredity of magic. The quill had merely scribbled down a list of 7th year war veterans. Any student enrolled in Hogwarts who hadn't been massacred by Voldemort or his death eating posy in the Second Wizarding War, was obliged to participate in the Ministry's community restoration plans. The competition was only a means to increase the productivity of a dwindling population of capable witches and wizards.
"You probably have many questions, and the heads of each of your houses will answer them all when you return to your respective common rooms. Before we can began practicing, however, I would like to use this class to introduce ourselves, and become familiar with one another."
Hermione cringed at the eagerness of several of her classmates at her last sentence. She was uncomfortable with how familiar some of her peers wanted to become with her. Harry, Ron, Neville, Dean, Ernie, Cormac, Blaise and a few more students Hermione did not yet recognize, sat up in their seats with roguish facial expressions, reacting to the erotic suggestion proposed by the voluptuous Playwizard-worthy bombshell standing before them.
The more manly grunts she heard, the more Hermione felt like running off to Romania, and living with the dragons. Anything was better than having to stand in front of a classroom full of randy teenagers all fantasizing about doing unmentionable things to her. She dreaded the inevitable disclosure of the subject she was assigned to teach to such a group. Thus, she hoped people had a lot of useless facts to share about themselves, enough to last a little over an hour.
"Would anyone like to volunteer first?" she instituted, hoping the masculine fangirling would come to an end.
Almost every hand went up. Jumping up and down in their seats, the boys looked like they thought whoever raised their arm the highest and waved it around the widest, would immediately win her affections. Hermione was instantly reminded of screeching bonobos. They weren't going to make this any easier for her, were they? It was better she realized this beforehand.
As Hermione's gaze swept around the room in pursuit of a less enthusiastic volunteer, she took particular note of the female students present in the class. She recognized Lavender, Susan, Parvati and Pansy immediately but she blew out a puff of air as she realized that they all had harsh looks of envy towards her.
"Hmm, let's see", she muttered.
She had been hoping to start with a female but looking at their leery faces had put her off. Susan's spewed up version of the muggle born had even caused her to stagger backwards and let out an audible gasp. She quickly regained the air of diplomacy, nonetheless, and trailed her eyes away from Susan's before anyone suspected a thing. A baby-faced mousy witch fidgeting with her hair motioned to chip in and a beholden Hermione accepted the offer.
"How about you? Tell us a little about yourself?" she beckoned the petite girl to the front of the class, reassuring her with a genuine smile.
While waiting for the girl to take her place, she chanced a look back in Susan's direction, focusing on her thoughts more judicially this time. A particularly spiteful image of Hermione was centering Susan's thoughts. She was envisioning a limping girl with dull scruffy hair, some of which was ripped out of her oily scalp. The girl had black bats crawling out of her piggish nostrils and oozing green pustules emblazoning all visible skin. Coughing with furious impetuosity, Susan's Hermione was reminiscent of a modern day hag.
Susan clearly had a crush on somebody in the room, someone other than Hermione. Such aggression was not characteristic of the loyal Hufflepuff she knew. If Susan hadn't been as vindictive about it as she was, Hermione was sure she could muster up some empathy for her. Having the man of your dreams oogle at another woman in front of you was a feeling Hermione knew all too well.
"Bonjour, I am Eumilia Mihailovna and 'zis is my first year 'ere at Hogwarts." enunciated the girl who had volunteered to speak, seizing back Hermione's attention.
Eumelia spent a good fifteen minutes describing her life story in vivid detail. She had started off with the unentertaining bits like how many family members she had and what each of them looked , however, her narrative fully engrossed the occupants of the room. Eumelia's parents were Muggles who had initially been afraid of their young daughter's magical abilities, mistaking it for demonic possession instead of a congenital gift. After Eumelia received her Beauxbatons acceptance letter, her parents grew even edgier towards the realm of magic. To further embroil matter, the French family crossed paths with an extremist Anti-Muggle organization prior to a proper encounter with a Beauxbatons representative. Several family members were heinously slaughtered while the remaining Mihailovnas went into hiding and calcified prejudices they had for Les Sorcières.
When Eumelia had stopped talking, Hermione was at a loss for words. She didn't know what to think, much less what to say. It took quite some nerve to share such a story to a group of complete strangers -some who once expressed the same ideals as her family's perpetrators. There was just something about Eumelia that made Hermione unduly uneasy. Shaking it off as paranoia, Hermione prompted the next person in the row to speak. A slender boy with pointy features and sleek blonde hair; Malfoy.
Quite a contrast from the previous speaker, Malfoy incorporated some mystery into his presentation. Of course, Hermione was the only one to be mystified. It wasn't so much as what what he was saying that was mystifying. It were his thoughts or lack thereof that puzzled Hermione. He was the only person in the room she could not access, and now that she thought of it, he was the only male in the room to still look at her with unimpressed dismissiveness.
Hermione was greatly disappointed with this new development. She was looking forward to accessing some humiliating content to blackmail Draco with -maybe something along the lines of Draco using his Hand of Glory to tend to his urges or maybe the possession of a particularly embarrassing pair of drawers. She envisioned Draco preening around his family jewels in a striped green and silver man thong. It took all of her energy not to let out a snicker.
When Draco had exceeded her tolerance threshold for blood purity jabs, Hermione interrupted the self-acclaimed Slytherin Sex God in all his splendor, "Thank you, Draco. That will be all"
Draco grimaced but didn't say anything and Hermione cued the next speaker; Ernie.
Ernie grinned ostentatiously and stood up broad-shouldered. Exuding a manly stance to match his arrogance, he looked like a bodybuilder flexing his muscles right out of a Muggle infomercial. He clearly took being addressed by Hermione as the primal step to winning her affections.
Quickly seizing his chance to impress her, he began boasting about sleighing vampires and the describing the rather painful Wiz-Tat he was planning to get on his arm. Hermione held a forced smile on her face throughout the entire palaver. She wasn't really listening to Ernie and his ramblings. She was too busy seeing his thoughts.
While his mouth jabbered abstractedly on its own accord, Ernie's mind ruminated the envisionment of a very thin girl with a luscious blonde hair, blue eyes, and a shapely rear. The girl was wearing what appeared to be quite a slutty version of Hermione's uniform. Her fitted blouse was drenched with water, exposing ample amounts of skin barely hidden by thin white fabric. Her lacy bra,a vibrant color of pink, matched the soaking wet panties which could be seen under the girl's micro mini skirt.
The blonde-haired heartthrob was none other than Hermione Granger. Fortunately, the image looked nothing like her actual self. Having somebody thinking about her curves-albeit in warped up proportions-draped in such minimal fabric was not an idyllic sight. It was soothing to think that the woman Ernie was fantasizing about was his own ideal woman, and that ideal woman looked far different from Hermione herself.
At the same time, having such an effect on the boy also gave her a strangely pleasant feeling. She did not want people to see her as the magical equivalent of a porn star, but then again, they didn't really see HER like that. They merely saw a subjective ideal female form and associated it with her. Anyhow, her intentions were good. The potion had given her the power to make the boys kiss her feet, but she wasn't exercising this power. Instead, she was exuding responsible had done this for them.
The potion Hermione had ingested mere moments before entering the classroom had given her the ability to magically navigate through the layers of a person's mind dealing with their conscious sexual thoughts and experiences. It had given her the proficiency in optical scrutiny of the innermost urges of whomever she chose. These urges did not necessarily have to be sexual in nature, but the predominance of them were.
Excluding heterosexual women and homosexual men, the potion she had crafted affected the onlookers as well. She took on the physical form of their ideal Hermione. So in someone's mind, she sprouted a bodacious bosom and in someone else's she sported a narrower waist.
Although she was able to tinker around other people's heads and au fait with their desires,she was far from an induced Veela Legimens. All potions had their limitations and the limitation with this one was that it had made Hermione irresistible but only in one's mind. It had her omnipotent, but only in relation to persistent longings.
As Hermione returned to her senses from her trailing thoughts, she realized that Ernie had been droning on and on in his efforts to impress her. Politely cutting him off, she told Harry, who took great strain in maintaining eye contact, to introduce himself to the rest of the prompted to speak, he mumbled a little bit about Quidditch and a good deal about Ginny something which made Dean groan a little bit, while sinking back in his chair. After about a good 5 minutes or so he was cut off by Cormac McLaggen, complained that Harry did not really need a lengthy description because everyone already knew who he was.
The day continued as so, each person speaking for a couple of minutes and Hermione watching them think as they spoke. Hermione was happy that Harry really admired his girlfriend, because his ideal woman resembled a mixture between an older version of Ginny and a younger version of Molly Weasley. Hermione liked to think it was Ginny, that Harry was fantasizing about,and not her mother.
When it came to their innermost sexual desires,though, most boys were just plain depraved. Even the ones she thought were pure and chaste turned out to have filthy imaginations. Ron literally had such a dirty imagination, Hermione was too ashamed to see his thoughts a second time around. Either he was attracted to mutant werewolves or he liked his girls covered with more hair than skin. Whichever of the two, this was one case where "knowledge is empowerment" did not apply.
By the time the person at the back of the class had finished speaking, Hermione surmised that if there was ever a NEWTS awarded for Erotic Fantasies of Young Witches and Wizards; Hermione would irrefutably receive an 'O'. In the past half an hour she had visually traveled to the limits of imaginative insanity and beyond, perhaps to where no young wizard had gone before.
Out of the 452 uses of powdered bicorn horns, Hermione had discovered a 453rd in today's class. It was also considered the necromantic equivalent of Viagra. Seamus had graciously provided that particular piece of information whilst mentally conjuring up various unattempted positions of the Krum-a Sutra with his favorite Bulgarian Quidditch player.
It was surprising just how creative Hermione's classmates were when it came to the discipline of sex. Such a pity it was that all this creativity wasn't conserved for more pressing issues - classwork being one of them. The aggregation of all this creativity in one room had made her bite back her tongue from screaming in shock, disgust, amusement or a mixture of the later every few minutes or so.
The hardest squeal to contain was brought about by Neville Longbottom. The poor bloke had seemed to have retained a misguided procedure of baby-making and was led to believe that babies could be conjured up from a series of complex spells which he longed to master. Hermione wanted to help her misinformed friend, though she wasn't sure if she would ever overcome the awkwardness of suggesting that a different type of wand was required for acquiring offspring.
For now all Hermione wanted to do was return to her dormitory,wrap her body around a warm woolen blanket, and isolate herself from the rest of the world with the help of her trusty pillow. Everything else, well, it would just have to wait until tomorrow -even the bit about wondering why Draco whispered "plaid not stripped" in Hermione's ear before his grand exit.
A/N: Usually people just skip over the tidbits at the end, but if you have managed to stay awake till the very end, you have a little time, some patience, and a bit to say, please give me some feedback? Thank You =)
To my wonderful beta reader/guru PenandPaper83: You're just like Oliver Wood, honey… You're a keeper! :P (I owe this all to you)
To DeathEaterInVegas: I just had to be a creeper again, you deserve it. Thank you for all your suggestions and support.
To Divergent-Slytherin-Victor and shlackvuck, Thank you so much for following my story. Everytime I got an email from fanfiction, I was literally happy-dancing ^.^