With the first easiest term out of the way, and the boys worrying about what Fluffy was guarding, Hermione found herself in the library even more often than usual. Walking in one day, she found Madame Pince glaring at her and shoving a piece of paper into her hands. She glanced down, confused. The piece of parchment read:
'Name of Pupil: Hermione Granger
Length Overdue: 1 week
Title of Book Overdue: The History of Alchemy [Volume II]'
Hermione gasped. This hardly ever happened, and she ran out of the library to her dorm. She knew from experience that she had until the end of the day before the book started cursing her and releasing ink over everything. Reaching her dorm, she found the book under her bed, which was why she had forgotten about it. The shiny title glinted back at her and as she picked it up a couple of the pages fell out. Opening the book to put them back again, she remembered she had marked the interesting pages, and set to find a notepad to write down the interesting facts. She usually did this with textbooks so that she didn't have to keep going back to them.
She didn't even notice anything amiss when she started writing, "The only stone in existence belongs to Nicholas Flamel, the noted alchemist," and only remembered the significance later when Harry gave Neville a chocolate frog with Dumbledore on the front. Having written the name only hours before, Hermione ran up to the dorms again to retrieve the still-overdue book to show them all.
Leaving the boys, Hermione scurried back to the library to return the book. Madame Pince was nowhere to be seen, so she went to look for her. She heard Malfoy talking to his friends about learning curses in one section, and quickly moved on. Madame Pince was stacking shelves with her wand, and Hermione felt herself staring. Sometimes she forgot how useful magic was, and so found this use of a simple charm quite surprising. Feeling the young witches eyes on her, Madame Pince turned to look at her.
"Yes?" the witch said, gratingly.
"I've brought back an overdue book for you. I didn't want to leave it on the desk in case you couldn't find it, and – "
"Just give me the book," Madame Pince interrupted, grabbing it from her hands and setting it on a desk.
Hermione started to walk away until she felt the magic change around her, and turned around to see Madame Pince running diagnostic spells for the quality of the returned book. Recognising some of the spells as the ones used for removing excess ink, Hermione smiled as she recognised the care being taken of the books. She wondered whether the spells were easy to learn and could be used on homework to rid of excess ink. Hermione had found writing with a quill very difficult, and the first few pieces of homework had been quite illegible.
Leaving the library deep in her thoughts, Hermione didn't hear Malfoy behind her in the corridor until the pale yellow spell shot past her into the corridor beyond.
"Where are you going, Granger? Ran out of books to read in the library, have you?"
Hermione grimaced and walked a little faster. None of the spells he knew could do any harm, she was sure of it. Determined not to start anything all the same, she ducked behind a statue just around the corner. She watched Malfoy turn the corner and curse, running through a tapestry with Crabbe and Goyle following. At least she had managed to escape something else horrible.
With Malfoy gone, she let out a sigh of relief and looked at the statue. It had writing carved into it. Confused, Hermione realised it was a riddle. What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years? it said. Hermione smiled. Ever since she was young, her parents had been giving her riddles and cryptic crosswords to solve. Even though the crosswords were as yet beyond her, she had always had a logical mind, and this seemed simple to her. Touching the statue to make sure she didn't lose her balance, she knelt down to read the rest. What letter is invisible yet never out of sight?, MAMJJAS, and OTTFFSS were all carved into the stone, and another three were below it, though illegible. Hermione opened her bag to find her Standard Book of Spells book. Leafing through, she found 'Revelio' and kept casting it until each line was revealed from the stone. What letter is always discovered in the middle of a maze?, I am the center of gravity, hold a capital situation in Vienna, and as I am foremost in every victory, am allowed by all to be invaluable and What letter is like noon? revealed themselves. Sliding the strap of her back over her shoulder, she sat on the stone floor with her open notebook to write them down. At the bottom of the statue was a symbol Hermione didn't recognise, and she drew that in as well, closing the book and standing up. She couldn't solve them now, but there was no point sitting down getting cold or being late for supper.
McGongall was glaring at her. "I'm disgusted," she said. "Four students out of bed in one night. I've never heard of such a thing. You, Miss Granger, I thought you had more sense!"
Hermione grimaced. She had tried so hard to be the good student, to do the best she could. It turned out that the best was never good enough – there was friendship to be had as well, and friendship had landed her in trouble again. Worst of all, one of the few people who spoke to her now thought her senseless, and this was more than Hermione could bear. She closed her eyes to stop the tears coming down, knowing Malfoy would make fun of her.
She caught the words "Dangerous", "Detentions" and "Fifty points", from in front of her. Her first detention and it was being given by McGonagall. Hermione started as Harry spoke beside her.
"Fifty?!" he said.
"Fifty points each," said Professor McGonagall, breathing angrily.
At this, Hermione felt a surge of anger herself, and spoke out, "Professor, please-" but Harry interrupted, and she felt the tears well up in her throat again, stopping her speaking. All the horrible things that had happened to Hermione so far flashed in front of her eyes, and the burning in her throat intensified. She closed her eyes as they finished talking, and both felt and heard Harry and Neville leave to go back to the common room.
"Miss Granger, please stay." Hermione turned around, and Professor McGonagall continued. "I half expect such reckless behaviour from Mr Potter and Mr Malfoy, but never from you or Mr Longbottom. Leading Mr Malfoy astray in order to get him in trouble is a Slytherin trait, one I never want to see in you again, do you understand? You were placed in Gryffindor for a reason, Miss Granger, don't forget that or start lowering yourself to their standards; you're much better than that."
Hermione walked back to the common room silently and went straight up to her dormitory. She noticed her notepad on her bed, and looked at the riddles. She stared at the first one and read out loud, "What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?" She smiled after a few seconds. It was a simple riddle really – the answer being merely a letter of the alphabet rather than a something. The letter was M. Once in minute, twice in moment and was not used in a thousand years, Hermione knew that most riddles try to confused you by choice of wording. She smiled and wrote down 'M' next to it in her notepad.
What letter is invisible yet never out of sight' was a similar line, and Hermione split the word visible from invisible and crossed out the letters which were different between sight and visible. That means that it was 'I', due to the pun with eye and so she wrote that down too. The next was more difficult and it took her quite a while to work out that each letter pertained to a month. She wrote down the 'N' for November underneath that line. She recognised the sequence as the same style, and wrote down 'E' for Eight. What letter is always discovered in the middle of a maze? She couldn't think of any other words for maze until she remembered learning about the Minotaur in Greek Mythology. She wrote down "Labyrinth" and crossed off the letters from the edge one by one to find the one in the middle. She grinned and write 'R' next to the line. I am the center of gravity, hold a capital situation in Vienna, and as I am foremost in every victory, am allowed by all to be invaluable was the easiest, and she wrote down the letter 'V'. Hermione glared at the last one, What letter is like noon?
"Midday?" she said "Middle of the day, and which letter is like noon in that it is in the middle of day? A. Thank you very much," she said, grinning like a loon as she wrote it down. She blinked, confused, at the word Minerva written on her pad.
Running along the corridors as quietly as she could, Hermione found the statue again, and slid behind it. She took out her wand and started to draw the name 'Minerva' into the stone, underneath the strange symbol. As soon as she had finished, the lettering began to move, rearranging itself into words.
Nicely done. One more before I let you in, though. A little harder this time.
Hermione groaned as she realised it was settling into a set of five lines, and the letters started getting clearer. "Another blasted riddle," she said out loud, and the stone wrote a line above the riddle.
Indeed. Blasted or not, you still have to solve it.
Hermione stared at it as it disappeared. Clearly the stone could hear her and was waiting for her answer, so she read out the riddle quickly a couple of times. 'A slow, solemn square-dance of warriors feinting. One by one they fall, warriors fainting, thirty-two on sixty-four.' She sat and thought for a while. Thirty-two on Sixty-four clearly referred to some kind of half and half situation, and the two uses of the homophone fainting was interesting. She thought a little longer and grinned.
"A chess game," she said, confidant. "It's a chess game." The script started to move again, and Hermione read the single line.
Well done.
She turned and saw the stone walls start to move to form a crack, and the crack kept getting larger. Hermione stood up, and the crack reached to a little taller than her small frame, and started widening. After a few minutes, the crack was large enough to walk through, and Hermione muttered "Lumos"to see where it led. She picked up her school bag and walked through, reaching another door. She was thankful to not see any writing on it, and she pushed the door open and gasped.
Inside was a circular room with a tall window on one side. The walls were totally covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, and in one end of the room was a dusty, comfy-looking chair, with a lamp on the table which had lit itself in her entrance. She stared at all the titles, like Advanced Transfiguration Volume XXI and ran her finger along all the leather bound tomes. Her mouth slightly agape, she realised that this room contained every transfiguration book possible in existence, far surpassing those in Flourish & Blotts.
She picked one out and started to read about the theory behind changing animals into inanimate objects. It mentioned things Hermione had never heard of before, such as the ways you can aid the transfiguration. She knew that the volume and tone used in a spell made a difference, but she had never heard of having to listen to magic from another living creature. It went on to remind the reader that every object had a magical signature, and that was what you were changing, not the shape itself. 'Mice are the easiest to transfigure,' it stated, 'for the magical signature of such a creature is quite strong and very malleable'. The book then listed a set of spells you could use to be able to see the magical signature of an object, and Hermione began to practice.
By the end of a few hours, Hermione had perfect the spell, and was able to read the magical signature of everything in the room. Most things had a significant green tinge to them, but Hermione couldn't find any reference to what the colours around objects meant. Some had thin strands of magic surrounding them, whereas others only had grey or black, typical markings. Engrossed in the book and all the new knowledge, Hermione neither heard the bell nor saw the time for supper. She didn't know that Professor McGonagall noticed her absence, and she certainly didn't know that she had placed alarms on the statue, to be alerted of anyone entering the room.
"I wonder," said Professor McGonagall, and kept eating.
Hermione suddenly looked at her watch as it started beeping, and Hermione was horrified to realise that it was her alarm to tell her she had ten minutes before curfew started. Grabbing her school bag and turning off the light, she left the room and shut the door, not thinking about the book she had left on the table, or the chair she had moved, or her notepad which she hadn't heard fall to the floor in her haste to leave.
Professor McGonagall had a problem. In returning from supper, she had discovered that whoever was in the room earlier was still in there now. Due to the privacy wards she had placed on the room herself, no one could enter without the express permission of whoever was in there already, and as she was in her private quarters, she just had to wait. She tried to remember where the second entryway was, but since she had been made a member of staff, there had been a link to the room and her private rooms.
McGonagall cursed herself for not thinking about a student coming across the room, but immediately retraced that thought. It had been safe enough in her school years from possible mischief makers, and not even the Weasley twins had found it. Even if they had, she smirked to herself, she remembered the enchantments she had set on the stone. The riddles would alter for each person who wished to enter, so that the passwords couldn't be passed on from person to person. The stone would also recognise the age of the person and change the riddles accordingly. That should have meant that the riddles were far too hard for anyone, and if they asked for help, it would be useless, because they would be answering different riddles.
It had worked for so long – what had changed now? She assumed that one of the Ravenclaw students had worked it out. Seeing as how the stone, wherever it was, only recognised age and not logic ability, there was bound to be a couple of students who would be above the rest of their year. Glancing at the wards to see that whoever had been there earlier was still in there, she set a timer on the wards so that she would know when the room had been vacated.
Marking essays was always a long task, but always so much longer when you had something to wait for. Professor McGonagall found herself checking the wards just in case she had missed them alerting her. Half annoyed and half pleased that someone was clever enough to break the passwords, she stopped marking to think. If someone had been in there for a while, presumably it was someone who was interested in Transfiguration, and was reading the books in there, rather than just studying.
The clock on the wall chimed for half past the hour, and McGonagall hoped that whoever it was would realise it was close to curfew. The wards went off only ten minutes from curfew, and McGonagall smiled. Obviously a student, worried about being late for curfew meant at least that she could knock out the thought of staff finding out about her enchanted room. Walking into the room, she noticed a notepad on the floor, clearly forgotten, and she picked it up. There were only the riddles and scribbled answers in it, the rest of the pages were blank. There wasn't even a name inside. She put it back on the table, on top of the book that lay there. The Theory Behind Animal Transfiguration stared back at her, and McGonagall groaned. It was a book on the extended recommended reading list for every year in the school, one she put there certain that no-one ever used the reading lists. She instead decided to set up a few more wards, to tell her as soon as someone entered the room, and she looked through the books to see if any had been taken. None of them were missing, and she felt a certain amount of frustration towards this clearly very careful student. She would find out who it was by the end of the year if it was the last thing she did.
A month or so later, exams started, and Hermione had even more things to concentrate on. Harry and Ron were convinced that they needed to confront Voldemort on their own, but Hermione was more intrigued by the room she had found. She didn't know why it was there, or why it was created in the first place, and she certainly didn't know about any of the alarm wards that were on the outside. Every time she carved the word Minerva and stated 'it's still a chess game,' waiting for the stone wall to move, a small globe of light appeared next to Professor McGonagall wherever she was.
Hermione found that the room was much better than the library to study in, as it was quieter and had better seats. The day of her Transfiguration exam found Hermione in the room again, and looking at her watch, she realised that she had only a few moments until her Transfiguration end of year exam, and she re-read over her notes of spells and extra things to remember.
Little did Hermione know of Professor McGonagall's plan to discover the visitor to her room. She reasoned that someone actually reading the extended reading list would do particularly well in such a task. The only thing for it, after watching all the students carefully to no avail, was to set an animal to object task for exams. Surely someone who knew better ways of doing a task, who knew it would give better results, wouldn't resist showing knowledge in an exam.
Hermione joined the line outside the Transfiguration classroom where the exam was taking place. The students went in individually and came out a few moments later, all looking thankful it was over. Hermione bit her lip, worried. She wondered what the exam entailed, and opened the door. She walked towards Professor McGonagall, who asked her to stand in front of a large desk.
Professor McGonagall reached into a bag and brought out a mouse, looking tired. Her cunning plan of getting all students to do the same task wasn't quite working how she hoped. Clearly whoever it was was keen to stay kidden, and now, with Hermione as the last student, McGonagall was just annoyed.
Hermione bit her lip as she looked at the mouse. Animal transfiguration couldn't possibly be the whole exam could it? Showing off the diagnostic spells would be an obvious sign that she had found the room, and she wasn't sure if she should have been in there in the first place. However, it would guarantee that she would do well, and this was the final exam after all.
McGonagall watched as Hermione looked up at her, and picked up the mouse in her left hand. She turned it to face her and lifted her wand to the fur of the mouse. She muttered a few of the diagnostic spells nervously, and the strands revealed themselves to her. Hermione focussed on turning the mouse into a snuffbox, imagining a pattern that would appeal to the Professor, and again muttered the spell. The mouse turned into a snuffbox, and as Hermione checked it for whiskers. Professor McGonagall was staring at her intently.
"Very sophisticated use of revealing spells, Miss Granger – very impressive," she said, smiling as she wrote something down in her notebook. "A logical mind can be very useful - many think it useless but don't forget how useful it can be." and with that she sent Hermione away.
Professor McGonagall sat down in the chair behind her desk, staring at the wall opposite. Miss Granger. She shouldn't be surprised really, she knew that there must have been a reason for the behaviour of the second book she had given Hermione at Christmas. When she was wrapping the book about Quidditch, the unmarked leather book had leapt from the shelf and had refused to be put back until McGonagall threatened it with being wrapped up and sent with the other book. If books could be smug, this one certainly had been, and McGonagall had sighed, and wrapped that one up too. The main difference between books in the magical world and those in the muggle was that muggle books didn't have minds of their own. They didn't decide when to move on, or who would need them most, they simply sat in shelves until they were read. This book was definitely magical, and it had been very happy at being sent off to Miss Granger.
"She's not old enough for you, yet, you should know that," McGonagall had said, but the book had seemed to give off the feeling that it knew more than she did. Since the exam, she was beginning to rethink her evaluation of Miss Granger. Professor McGonagall sighed again and stood up, wondering how long it was until the end of term. It had been a long year, and she was looking forward to the summer holidays.