Hermione Granger woke with a start on the morning of her eleventh birthday, something that may have been caused by the cricket ball arcing towards her head. Instinctively, she snapped her head around and caught it in a small, slightly chubby hand with skin hardened by good, solid work.
"Well done, young padawan. Strong with you the Force is, mmmmm."
She laughed and threw the cricket ball back at her father hard. Ioan Granger had trained as a dentist during his university years before the promise of inner peace (and, Hermione understood, something to do with pretty Asian ladies that she'd understand about when she was older) had lured him into learning a breathtaking array of martial arts. Now one of the most respected practitioners of t'ai chi and Shotokai karate in Western Europe, he had started a family with his college sweetheart and raised their daughter in the traditions of his arts.
It was apparent from the first time she'd seen her father practice kata that the little girl with the mushroom cloud of mid-brown curls was in love with it. The fascination held for substantially longer than her usual ones did – it outlasted even ponies, to the silent joy of her decidedly urban parents – with one exception.
Magic.
That fascination had begun when, after a little hellion called Charity Barlow-Sykes had tormented her for a solid year, she had let forth a burst of gold-coloured sparks from her outstretched arm and teleported the girl onto the staffroom photocopier with gilded letters flying through the air reading a selection of extremely unladylike and unrepeatable oaths. It had grown steadily stronger with each incident – setting fire to her great-aunt's hair during a frightful family wedding, scaring the owner of an inner-city stable yard half to death with a display of brightly coloured sparks and shimmering intelligence, all sorts of madcap semi-adventures that would pass the time of any midlife-crisis-suffering schoolteacher in a Scottish greasy spoon. Specialness, her mother said, was an end in and of itself – it was worth all the jibes of the less fortunate to feel the pride of the people who knew better. Hermione was naturally bookish, and was said to have only three states of being; practicing her skills, reading, or near-dead from exhaustion from the combination of the two. More than once had the Grangers had to talk to her severely about how sleep was a good thing and the book/kata/interesting red sparkly thing she'd made appear would still be there when she woke up the next morning. Usually by that point it was, technically, already the next morning, so Hermione was usually able to browbeat them into at least another chapter.
But that was all in the past now; she was a whole eleven years old, officially a Big Girl, like Vivienne Stafford who chewed bubblegum and had a pet dog that lived in a handbag and mysterious black stuff around her eyes she said was called eyeliner but looked to adults like something else entirely and everything. Soon she'd be off to Big School – real big school, not like St Joseph The Unspeakably Violent's Primary School – and she'd have bubblegum of her own. And possibly the book on logic from that nice Mister Eli who was from America and was so fascinating. Either one would do, really, she thought to herself, although daring to hope for both might be pushing it.
Her parents never underestimated their child's ability to read, and the kitchen table's black Formica top creaked slightly under the weight of a leviathan accumulation of books. New teen author works, new fantasy, something about glittery vampires from her mum that Hermione hadn't had the heart to tell her she'd already read and found totally devoid of wit, charm or sophistication, practical spellwork for beginners, herbology, Essential Transfiguration by Arniphas Gallstone –
Wait, wait, back up a minute.
"Mum, Dad, this is... quite strange. You've got me all these books about magic... I do know it's not real. Same with unicorns and fairy tales and hedgehogs." An odd incident involving an impressionable five-year-old, the National Geographic channel's Adorable Woodland Life season and a dinner party anecdote Cora Granger would wheel out for years.
"So magic isn't real, then? Well, damn... that means Professor McGonagall's out of a job."
Hermione's right shoulder twitched slightly. "Professor McGonagall is... who exactly?"
"That," said a small tabby cat coming through the flap, "would be me." And then she folded up and out of herself into the shape of an imperious-looking elderly lady. Woman, Hermione thought, simply did not cut it. She had a tight silver bun rammed into place by a tall, wide-brimmed pointy hat, dark robes with a little splash of red trim, and a gaze that could bore into your soul if you were standing behind six feet of earthworks and had led a completely blameless life. The girl, who had heard about anatomy, did the only thing she thought appropriate at the time.
"Well, a simple Enervation Charm should bring her around in a minute," said Professor McGonagall after a few awkward moments of dead silence. "And to think, you thought I was one of those people... Muggle thing, what was it again?"
"A Jehovah's Witness?" Cora proffered.
"Indeed. Hermione Granger is a witch."