Disclaimer: If I owned the Harry Potter verse and its characters, would I be writing FANfiction? No, I'd be too busy diving in a swimming pool filled with hundred dollar bills—I mean (cough) giving money to charity.

Author's Note: This story starts from the perspective of an original character who had the misfortune (in her mind) to find herself in the body of one Hermione Granger, age 12. It may get much weirder, as I am toying with the idea of an awkward, Lolita-esque unrequited or unresolved romance with Professor Severus Snape. She's certainly impressed by him at first glance. You have been warned.

Sectumsempra: Cut Off, Forever

Chapter the First:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

I hear the insistent buzzing of my roommate's alarm early one morning, jolting me uncomfortably from a pleasant dream into the sluggish irritability of too-early-to-wake, too-late-to-go-back-to-sleep.

"Shut it off, Darcy…" I mumble, "goddamn…"

There's a gasp from my right, and I open my eyes blearily to see, not Darcy, but a young girl, about twelve, with brown eyes and a scandalized expression on her face. As my eyes open wider, I find also that this is NOT my dorm at Westmoreland. It's a dorm alright, but no one in it is anything close to university age. What the hell? How did I end up at a boarding school?

And the buzzing sound was not an alarm, as I had thought. It's some sort of mechanical top, spinning and whirring and glowing red on a bedside table. A voice from the other side of me says something puzzled about a "Sneakoscope" going off, whatever the hell that is, but I ignore this and pull myself up out of bed to observe my surroundings. Definitely not Westmoreland. I'm in a sumptuous fourposter bed with—ha!—scarlet bedcurtains. Never thought I'd sleep in a bed with curtains. There's a trunk at the foot of the bed I'm in. I look curiously at it, but someone interrupts me.

"What's wrong with your Sneakoscope, Hermione? It looks like it's been jinxed or something." This from a dark-haired girl at the far end of the room who looks like she might be of Indian heritage, and also looks to be around twelve years old.

"Eh?" I mutter, not understanding any of what she just said, especially not the "Hermione" bit. Is that supposed to be my name or something?

Turns out, after I wake up a bit more and start asking some probing questions that I can tell really throw the other girls for a loop, it is supposed to be my name. Apparently, I'm twelve-or-so-year-old Hermione (I have a look in the mirror, and yes, I do look about twelve—that's quite a shock; you don't go switching bodies just every day, now do you?); I'm at a place called Hogwarts; I have some sort of security device called a Sneakoscope that spins like a top and whirs when there's Danger Afoot; and I…do magic? As in, regularly?

(I wonder for a bit if Hermione—whoever she is—has been feeding these girls a bunch of nonsense about magic in order to scare them or impress them or something, but their nonchalance about the whole idea makes me second guess this thought. Plus I seem to be another person suddenly, and magic would certainly explain that. I used to be twenty one, a student at Westmoreland University majoring in aerospace engineering, and named Marianna Wilkinson. Apparently not anymore. Maybe I died in my sleep and was reincarnated into the body of a twelve year old.)

Still absorbing all this while trying to conceal my shock form the other girls, I rifle through the contents of the trunk by my bed, which I assume is mine (Hermione's I mean), and pull out some…long black robes. Okay. Guess I'll wear these. The other girls don't seem to find it out of the ordinary, so I figure I'm safe.

There's a door at the end of the room; I walk through it, and down the long, spiraling staircase beyond. (Was I in a tower of some kind?) It leads out into a large room full of barely smoldering fireplaces and overstuffed armchairs. The place seems creepily deserted to me (still early, I guess), so I explore onward.

At the opposite end of this room, in turn, is another doorway of sorts. (This boarding school, or whatever it is, is turning into a regular maze! It's kind of trippy. Wonder if it's a magical boarding school?) Anyway, there's this opening a few feet up from the floor, and when I push on the door or whatever's blocking it, it swings outward to reveal an echoey stone corridor.

Suddenly I'm hit by a draft of cold air and shiver. I turn around to go back inside for more covering (maybe Hermione has a jacket or something), but I find that the "door" I just came through is actually a painting of an immense woman in pink satin. She's snoring! Apparently, the people in the paintings here can move! At any rate, this one can.

I attempt to pull the painting out from the wall just like I pushed it out from the inside, but to no avail. The frame won't budge and the fat old dame keeps snoring on. Grumbling to myself, I sink down against the wall beside the painting and tuck my knobbly knees close up to my chin for warmth.

I sit there, unmoving, until morning. After about the first five minutes, I fall into a light doze and have unsettling dreams about what I must now call my "former" life.