The Half-Blood Princess
Prologue: Nighttime Excursion
First year Hermione Granger rapped her wand sharply above her head and muttered the charm taught to her when she was eight years old, effectively going invisible. She had just had her first ever start of the year feast down at the Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and now was slowly exiting one of the schools dormitories slipping out into the hallway.
The dormitory she exited was hers, Gryfindor, she was still shaking her head as to how she was sorted there when what she had devised, with her collaborators, what was probably one of the most cunning plans ever.
Hermione was on her way to meet on of the said collaborators but in order to reach him she had to make sure she was not seen or caught; students were not supposed to be out after hours, much less first years on their first night at Hogwarts.
When she reached the end of the Gryfindor dormitories hallway she turned not to the large staircase leading to the right down towards her final destination but to the left which led her up two flights of stairs and onto a corridor which held a tapestry depicting a man trying to teach trolls ballet, on the opposite side was a blank stretch of unremarkable wall in front of which Hermione now paced. Her contact had amazingly located this place just two weeks before she was due to arrive at the castle, were it not for this discovery she would have had much longer walk which would definitely not have been taking place on her first day.
On her third pass along the blank wall Hermione saw a door melt through the stone wall and materialize in front of her, she grinned triumphantly and seized the handle pulling the door open and slipping inside.
The room she found herself in was circular and brightly lit with torches containing a set of twelve doors each marked specifically with numbers 1 through 12. Hermione recognized these as numbers for each of the floors of the castle, she had had no idea that it contained twelve floors; Hogwarts, A History only stated nine. She knew that she needed to get to the lowest floor so she wrenched Door number 1 open and walked in.
The room now gave her a corridor with doors marked as EH and GH which Hermione took to mean 'Entrance Hall' and 'Great Hall', the door she was looking for though was located at the far end marked with a simple D which Hermione understood meant 'Dungeons'. She opened this door and encountered another corridor which held doors labeled HC, PR K and SC what she looked for though was the one labeled PMQ.
Hermione hesitated as she stood in front of the door, she knew who lay behind it and she was excited to see him, anxious in fact; it hadn't been a long time, but she couldn't help but feel apprehensive; the brief glimpse she had caught of him at dinner reminder her nothing of the deeply caring man she had grown to know, she knew he was playing a persona here but she was still scared that that persona would be what she would encounter when he opened up the door.
Biting her bottom lip though, Hermione made up her mind; the hat hadn't put her in Gryfindor for nothing so she raised her hand and knocked on the deep red oak door labeled with letters abbreviating; the Potions Masters Quarters.