Chapter Ten
by Skysaber
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Hermione Jane felt like she was being carried along by an avalanche. Traffic was moving everywhere about the school, girls carrying wooden stakes, crosses or even silver bullets. There were even glasses of water being put unattended in every room, for a statement she'd made that water would freeze in a dementor's presence.
It was amazing, but on that off-the-cuff observation alone, the girls here had come up with a completely muggle Dementor Detector - if the water froze, beware of invisible wraiths.
However, just when Hermione Jane started feeling she had a handle on the dangers and trials of St. Trinians, an older girl in the hall came up to her, knocked her down, then shot her five times in the chest with a heavy caliber pistol.
It felt like getting kicked by a hippogriff, over and over. Yet rather than concern for her well-being, girls around her just continued on with what they were doing like it was all ordinary and accepted behavior.
"Stop that!" she yelled, covering her chest with her arms to try to soothe the bruises, noting that the girl standing above her was calmly reloading.
The fifth former simply chambered a round and started to take aim on her once again. "I thought you said you witches had charms to stop bullets. So far I'm not impressed."
"That's because I haven't GOT one!" Jane snapped back. "Do you think they teach spells that useful to kids my age? Not if they can help it! And I haven't been able to work around the restrictions yet!"
The older girl raised her pistol, yet remained in a ready stance. Shifting her cigar to the other side of her mouth without touching it with her hands, she asked, "So how come you're not dead?"
"I'm wearing best dragonhide," Jane answered without thinking, starting to gingerly rise up off the floor. "A sure defense against most weapons and spells."
THAT caught general interest, and traffic in the hall stopped to look at Hermione picking a bit of splashed lead off of her front, the former bullet as thin as a leaf and curved like a mushroom cap, then shaking off four others. The spent rounds fell with a tinkle at her feet while she absently fingered the five holes in her school uniform baring the dragonhide beneath, not really paying attention to her sudden audience.
The older girl kicked her down again. "Yeah?" she grinned. Then, holstering her pistol, she began to reach down for Hermione's buttons. "Well, let's see if that magic vest you've got can fit an older girl like me."
Realizing she was about to be robbed, Hermione apparated out of there at once.
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At that point even Hermione Jane was willing to call the St Trinians experiment a disaster and give it up as a bad deal. She moved over to join Ann at Cheltenham Ladies College and dove into her studies, determined to forget the bad experience and make up for the lost time.
That resolve would probably have lasted forever unchallenged. However, a week later a party of about thirty St Trinians girls showed up on the Cheltenham campus. Hermione Jane looked up from where she was having lunch with her sister and their friends, having heard a disturbance, only to see the crowd of ruffians approaching her and her sister - two of the Cheltenham campus monitors stuffed awkwardly into garbage cans from having tried to stop this intrusion. Out of the corner of her eye Jane noted Sharon Scott, the St Trinians Head Girl, in the lead.
One of the St Trinians girls in the back was carrying a bazooka.
Their Cheltenham friends melted away like rabbits on sighting hungry wolves as the rough crowd approached.
Despite several panicked looks from her sister, Hermione Jane calmly continued with her lunch as they approached, and the crowd of hooligans came to a halt on the other side of her table. Sharon Scott sat down opposite her, snagged one of her coffee cakes, tore off a chunk and started to eat, speaking with her mouth full, "Those guys in the funky uniforms made an attack on one of our outings the other day, kidnapping some St Trinians girls. Now its against our policy to allow attacks on us by outsiders to go unanswered, but that was about the time we realized we'd lost our information source."
Standing right behind her, one of the sixth formers hefted her assault rifle and stated, "The magical world is coming after us, so we need to know more about it, to strike back."
Stealing a milkshake, Sharon Scott took a long pull on it, and told the Hermiones, "So a few of our geeks hacked out your location from school records, and here we are to fetch you cause we need a native guide to the magical world if we're to get our own back." She put the milkshake down to lean forward over crossed arms. "So, Granger, we can either reveal your secrets, or you'll help us."
"My name is Malfoy." Jane said without rising up from her seat at the lunch table. Bringing her eyes to bear on the St Trinians Head Girl, she declared, "You recall those purebloods I told you about? Well, I've been adopted into one of their leading families. Sure, it means being in an arranged marriage to an inbred toad some years down the line, but at least he'll be a wealthy toad. Also, I'm on the winning side now. I have no need to hide."
"Great," Sharon Scott was unperturbed. "So you have inside information on how to get our girls back."
Jane blinked. That was true. She cocked her head. "Why would I want to?"
"GAH!" Hermione Ann stopped trying to be subtle about motioning for her twin's attention and hauled down on her ear to whisper, "Do you know of anyone ELSE willing to take the fight to the bad wizards?"
Jane stopped and pondered that. No, she couldn't. The Death Eaters rampaged more or less unresisted throughout Britain. The muggles mostly couldn't do anything about them, and the magical world mostly wouldn't. True, there were small groups like James Potter and his friends, but she really didn't know if they were doing anything. That's not the sort of information that found itself in the rigidly censored magical newspaper, and they hadn't had a letter from him in a while.
Ann started motioning for her to accept the deal.
Jane thought about it, and she had a point. The St Trinians girls were capable of causing mass destruction, and all she really had to do was tell them where to go, sort of like a fire and forget missile.
But she'd hadn't attended weeks of that school for nothing. Hermione Jane calmly folded her arms upon the table and leaned forward, meeting the Head Girl's eyes. "Alright. The subject is now open for negotiations. What's in it for me?"
Sharon snapped her fingers, and the crowd behind her brought forward a girl trussed up in ropes, leaning her backwards over the table and raising a halberd above her neck. "How about we open the bidding with the head of the girl who offended you?"
Hermione Ann blinked in shock.
"Don't say they aren't in earnest, or don't mean it, because they are, and they do," Jane instructed her shocked sister. She sighed. "Alright, that's a good start. But if I take her head I'll take it live and still attached to the rest of her."
The glinting halberd withdrew.
"Out of curiosity, why?" Sharon swiped another coffee cake.
"I believe that's privileged information," Jane returned smoothly. In truth, saving the life of a person, at cost to yourself, when you hadn't put them in danger had magical power that a person could use to get the subject to do any one thing, and the Malfoy family had rites and rituals you could use to turn a Life Debt into all sorts of things. You could even turn a person into a House Elf, if you were so inclined. Although, truly, she was thinking of other uses.
And, by everything she knew of magic, this qualified as a Life Debt. Jane hadn't done anything with the intent of getting the older girl to shove her down or shoot her, or try to rob her. Yet that act had placed the girl's life in jeopardy. And forgiving her of a robbery/murder attempt and sparing her execution counted as a cost, actually. It was very well documented.
The Head Girl shrugged. "If that's the way you like it. Didn't know you were in to causing pain, but we've got people who could show you the ropes, if you know what I mean."
"I'll take it under advisement, but don't believe I'll be interested," Jane told her coolly.
Negotiations took a surprisingly short amount of time. None of the St Trinians girls had any wealth of any kind to offer, nor did she particularly want any favors, so she'd settled for fifty bottom swats owed to her by each girl fourth year and below, as they didn't truly have anything else to offer, and she was beginning to have ideas on how to use those.
Seeing as how it didn't cost her anything, Sharon Scott had agreed to those terms instantly.
"Why did you..?" Ann began after the St Trinians girls had left, leaving the mummified fifth former lying at Jane's feet still bound in ropes.
Jane cut her sister off. "Did you see how callously they offered her up? That could have been me bent backwards over that table, if I'd been the one to offend someone whose help they needed!" Jane hissed. "No, if I'm going to go back there, or have any dealings with them at all, I need a bodyguard who understands the dangers I'll be facing. And guess what? She's IT! I can use the Life Debt she now owes me to put her through a rite that will make her my devoted little lackey. I don't like it, but I'll need her unswerving loyalty, and this may well be the only way to get something like that from a person like her!"
Ann's eyes were round and yet she mastered herself quickly, to ask, "Why only her?"
Jane paused, levitating the bound girl, to listen to her sister before she popped out.
Ann gathered herself quickly to suggest, "I mean, any *one* bodyguard wouldn't do much to save you from a whole school load of enemies. And they've already proven they can find you out here, so running from them is not a good option. But if they are a threat, why should they have numbers on their side? How many lives have you saved as the Chief Medical Officer of that school?"
"Loads," Jane whispered, now surprised herself. If anything, the St Trinians girls had gone MORE overboard on the liquor and hard drugs since she'd been there with the sobriety charms and life-saving medical spells. At least until the drugs had run out.
Normally, in the magical world anyway, life debts didn't apply to healing others. Healers and aurors were paid to do their work, which short-circuited the whole life debt deal, which was why she hadn't thought to apply it to her case.
But she'd never been paid so much as a copper penny for doing her work as the Chief Medical Officer of St Trinians. Even her uniform was something she'd had to cobble together herself.
A good half of that school could well have died of overdose if she hadn't been there to keep curing them - and that HAD had a cost to her! Being outed as a witch was a very high cost indeed, by current magical standards.
So, currently, about half the school owed her life debts.
Hmm, that had intriguing possibilities.
On a whim, checking back in on the St Trinians infirmary revealed a week's backlog of injured and slowly dying girls. She even had to chase off a healthy one that had been about to set off a crate of dynamite between the heels of one of those slowly dying from a gut wound, gleefully setting the fuse while the poor injured girl watched her helplessly.
Raise those who owed her life debts by another thirty, as no one in there could've survived that bomb.
While she was there Kim Novak and Rachel Davis entered the nursery looking for Hermione Jane, having heard from the recently-healed students issuing forth that she was back. Entering, they saw her back was to them, with a baby cradled in her arms, and she was singing.
"Hush little baby, don't you cry
Momma's gunna bring you a butterfly..."
The two blondes stared at each other, each mouthing 'Momma?'
Tuning back into Hermione Jane, who was still singing, they heard:
"...Momma's gonna bring you a mockingbird
And if that mockingbird won't sing,
Momma's gunna bring you a diamond ring...
Forgetting what they'd originally come in for, the two girls backed out the way they came. Seeking out Sharon Scott, the Head Girl, they told her, "You know how they say you aren't truly a St Trinians girl until you've gotten pregnant, killed a man, drunk ten shots at one sitting, ran a scam or broke the house gambling?"
Sharon turned to the first-formers in her all-too-composed way. "Yes. As I recall your friend Hermione came close to fulfilling every requirement on her first day."
"You can drop the 'came close'," Kim told her in all seriousness.
Rachel nodded alongside her. "Yeah. Turns out she'd already delivered her kid before the first day of school. We just caught her now in the creche singing to her baby. So she really is the second first-former in the school's history to get every category on her first day."
Accepting this information with her usual cool, the Head Girl sauntered off.
From the other girls listening to this conversation, it was all over the school in an hour that Hermione Jane already had a child. Not that they cared of course. Most of the senior girls there had already been pregnant once or twice, and would never look at their child again after it was born, leaving it to the orphanages. Taking care of a baby was not a common part of their make-up. They were too selfish.
That was actually a big part of why the school got convinced so easily that anyone taking the time out to sing to a baby had to be its mother. Who else would care?
Jane of course heard the news about her supposedly being a mother. Actually she heard it in the form of congratulations on having achieved the slot of second girl to ever qualify as a St. Trinians girl in every category on her first day, which confused her quite a bit until the person elaborated that Jane had been caught singing to her child.
That led to Jane standing in the nursery considering the children there very hard. None of these babies were going to be cared for. Their mothers viewed them as a nuisance, and they would be shipped off to Social Services before long. A big batch of babies left here for there every year, just like someone carting off the garbage. Nobody there would want to adopt them because of the extensive damage caused to them in the womb by their drug-using, constantly drunk mothers.
None of these innocent children had any hope for a future at all.
That hurt.
But it wasn't... Jane stopped herself with a burst of inspiration. The magic world had the spells and potions to correct the otherwise incurable long-term damage from the drug and alcohol abuse in the womb. Social Services wouldn't care, as they viewed any shipment of newborns out of St. Trinians as automatically damaged in the worst of all possible ways, and rightly so in most cases. So even if she cured them, they still wouldn't have any future.
Unless she gave them one.
Hermione hooked up a laptop the geeks here at school had been teaching her how to use. She needed someplace big. Then, because her allowance was not without limits, hopefully also cheap, and with land. Something like a manor would be ideal, but those didn't usually...
No, she knew exactly how to find cheap manor houses. She began looking up immediately the previous campuses of St. Trinians. Every year they moved to a new one, and they didn't always burn them down behind them. Some were just on the verge of collapsing out of accumulated structural damage or evacuated in fear of unexploded bombs - both of which were fairly easy to handle with the right sort of charms.
Property values went down the toilet whenever St. Trinians relocated their school to an area, and it took years to recover. It turned out she could buy entire towns for a song.
That would cover space. Now she needed minders.
Some she could hire, but that made it no better than an orphanage if she used only hired help. What she really needed, what these children deserved, were parents, or the closest she could get to them.
Actually, what this inevitably brought to mind was the child dealer that sold her and her sister to the Malfoys. The purebloods were on the lookout to acquire more children, so long as they didn't have to have them themselves. The only wrinkle there was to be marketable the kids had to possess proven magical abilities. Everything else would be taken care of by the adoption rituals.
Hermione sat up, stunned over her next thought.
Magic was genetic, right? Passed down in families over generations?
Those magical adoption rituals overwrote one's genes with the new parents, right?
So who was to say a magical adoption COULDN'T give a child magic? If you chose the right parents, they'd pass on the right genes, wouldn't they? So that would mean the child would have the potential for magic imbued just the same as it changed their hair color, right? It was all determined by genetics, anyway, and those rituals overwrote the old genes with new family information. So if those new parents were magical...
...there was really no reason to suspect that it wouldn't give children magical abilities!
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A house elf stopped Hermione Tina on her way up the stairs to Lucius' office with Mr Stibbons in her hands, the snake wearing a bowler and tie now, flicking his tongue when the elf pulled her to a halt (with a carefully averted face). "Master no have time to play with you."
"Awww!"
Thinking about it, Tina bounced in place, turning about to head down stairs. "Well, I can always come back to play later."
The house elf forcibly gave her a nudge in the direction of the stairs. "Master say he no have time to play ever. Master say so long as mistress Cissy is playing time with children, he no bother. Now leave him alone!"
"Awww!"
Still, Hermione Tina skipped down the stairs giggling, despite this setback full of joy over her recent victory against Narcissa. Even if she'd been thwarted from petrifying Lucius, she'd still had a major win. In fact, her laughter could not be stopped as she recalled her conversation with her sisters earlier.
Even ANN couldn't stop snickering on being told of their adopted mother's fate!
Tina could recall it now, her normally straight-laced sister saying, "Oh, that was just too evil! But you should have used it as an opportunity to brainwash her instead."
"Actually, I wouldn't call that a *missed* opportunity," Jane had mused thoughtfully. "Since she is still down there, there's no reason why we can't start now. If anything, what you've done so far ought to put her in a state of distress, thus more vulnerable to brainwashing."
Tina had only had to think about it half a moment. "You're right. I'll go get some self-help tapes right now!"
"Don't forget some sermons from pastors whose ideals you like." Jane added. "If we're going to try to turn her around, from evil to good, well, religion is the only thing proven able to do that. And we'd best lay a strong foundation to start, if we're to do this at all. Better to aim for one of those churches who actually has a pastor who believes what he preaches."
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Dumbledore gazed kindly upon his new crowd of assembled servants. Oh, *they* didn't call themselves that, but it accurately described what they were. He was just careful not to call them that to their faces, lest they expect him to begin paying them.
No. It wouldn't do to have that happen. It would upset the natural order of things. They had to pay *him* for the privilege of carrying out his orders and dying for his cause.
It never occurred to the old wizard to wonder why they died so often. That a total lack of teamwork might have something to do with it never occurred to him. But Hermione could have given him several examples out of the future to demonstrate this.
Several thousand witches and wizards at the Quidditch Cup had faced a half dozen Death Eaters and it was several thousand cases of "What can I do all alone against six deadly opponents?" So the six were able to drive a couple thousand like a flock of dumb sheep.
Wizards don't do teams. They didn't think in those terms. Hermione Jane had thought about it a great deal (as she did all things Defense related) and in the end concluded it was a flaw of their narrow focused imaginations combined with a near total lack of team sports. Sure, there was Quidditch (and Quodpot in America) but those players represented a tiny portion of the magical population. And such a game with such a variety of specialized equipment and minimum magical power restrictions meant the majority of small children couldn't play even a limited version at home. Quidditch at school was more divisive than team-building since the competition also came from within the same school. An American muggle school would have a minimum of two team sports who compete with completely different schools, increasing the number of students who get experience playing on a team, as well as building school unity since the competition is not from within their own number. Wizards were loners. And they lacked the imagination to extrapolate the concept of teamwork from the pathetically few times they were forced to work together.
Even the Order of the Phoenix under Dumbledore was less a team and more a dangerous part-time job with co-workers you hated. Members like Snape and Dung kept them from feeling like their fellow Order members were people they could depend on. The absolute monarchy of Dumbledore told them they were not a team, they were unmarked followers. This was why the original Order was so ineffective. They had been a bunch of individuals loosely connected by a common desire, not a team who knew how to work well together.
In fact, the only teams of people working together seen in the magical world were Quidditch and Death Eaters. And the Death Eaters were far less cohesive than Quidditch teams. Even the Golden Trio and the DA were less teams and more Harry's followers.
This explained why a team of six children fought a dozen Death Eaters to a stand-still. The Death Eaters were used to dealing with 12-to-1 odds, even if there were a thousand 1s standing there together. The slightest amount of teamwork was the most potent defense the Death Eaters had ever seen.
Hermione would go on to add that the Aurors were like Keystone Cops for the most part. Their only demonstrable teamwork was to all do the wrong thing together. During the World Cup, instead of firing stunners at the Death Eaters, they fired them at the fleeing crowd, including foreign nationals.
But that wasn't the only story of the legendary incompetence of their police. England also had that famous court ruling against it, where a man was constantly being attacked in his own home and the police KNEW who was doing it and did nothing. The man's patience finally broke under the abuse and he killed the people when they attacked him again in his own home. The police arrested the man and tossed him in jail for murder. So the aurors really were not acting outside the norm for British law enforcement.
Contrast that with that bully in Texas who was assassinated and everyone claimed credit for it to keep the actual person safe (well, the police also felt that it really wasn't worth the effort and regarded the incident as a necessary homicide).
No, it was no wonder to *her* how Dumbledore's Order composed largely of housewives, thieves and unrepentant murderers had been ineffectual. You can't make a good sword or axe when you try to forge the blade half out of steel and half out of pig manure, and keep insisting the pig manure remain as 'it was making a vital contribution'.
An appalling act of stupidity, but you only had to look at Dumbledore see what he preferred. McGonagall was useful to him, but it was Snape he sheltered, trusted and confided in.
The *reason* he liked them was slightly less obvious, and never shared by Dumbledore to others: Dark Siders were willing to do things that Light Siders weren't. Sometimes you could get by on ignorance, sending a gentle half-giant to do your kidnappings because he trusts you implicitly. Other times, you just had to betray someone by whispering in the Dark Lord's ear, and the only messenger who could do the job properly was Dark himself.
It was all for The Greater Good, in the end.
"And now my friends," Dumbledore raised his hands high and wide as though preaching, all of the while thinking 'saps, the lot of them', "We are privileged this evening to embark together on a great undertaking! Under cover of the recent confusion, a band of vigilantes composed largely of bigoted halfbloods and muggleborns resentful of their lack of high standing have begun calling themselves the Order of The Pheonix, after their desire to see our world go down in flames, to be replaced by one of their own devising. Toward this aim they have begun assassinating purebloods..."
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'This was not,' Hermione Jane reflected to herself as she was breaking into the mansion of a Death Eater where a revel was about to be held that evening, leading a following of some two hundred St Trinians girls, nearly the entire population of the school that wasn't already a prisoner inside, 'what I expected of an English educational experience.'
Of course, she had to admit, it was pretty much exactly what she had set out to St Trinians to find. So the blame lay on herself for that one.
The assembled warrior maidens of St Trinians were armed with an assortment of weapons: everything from the traditional hockey sticks and other sports equipment to assault rifles and high yield bombs of home made explosives.
That crate of TNT from this morning had made a reappearance. They were also carrying jerry cans of gasoline in spite of her having told them it wouldn't do any good. She'd even let the St Trinians girls burn her at the stake just to prove how effective a Freezing Flame charm could be. It had tickled. Oddly enough, now Hermione had an insight into why Wendelin the Weird had liked it so much.
Frankly, she could do with being burned at the stake a few more times herself. It was fun.
But back to the invasion at hand.
As proved by Crabbe and Goyle, Death Eaters were not always devilishly clever, evil masterminds. Heck, from what Tina had seen those times there had been guests at family dinners, the majority of the purebloods ranked as barely competent!
That was what caused the few examples like Lucius and Bellatrix to stand out so much. It was also what made Fudge electable, as he wasn't terribly different from the vast bulk of purebloods at large.
Still, a large number of Death Eaters being incompetent nut-jobs made this assault easy, or at least possible. Hermione was no warding expert, or at least not yet, although she could see the value in that job and resolved to become one in the future. She certainly was no curse breaker. So a set of ultra-paranoid, thickly layered, built-up-over generations wards like over the Malfoy home would have stopped this invasion cold.
Luckily, that's not what the St Trinians girls had to face here where the revel was being prepared. It was a manor, purebloods lived there, and there were wards. Those three facts were the only similarities between this place and the Malfoy estate. It was just the difference between trying to break into Norad versus trying to shoplift at the local mini-mart. None of the warding was done to the quality the Malfoys demanded, and half of it conflicted with the other half. Plus, none of the wards were of the same 'last forever, Egyptian tomb curses' level of protection the Malfoys paid for, and what this place had had not been maintained.
You could literally walk an army through the holes in these wards, which was what Hermione Jane was doing. The property gate had multiple layers of nasty, 'blast em' style protections on it, kept current and very deadly, and the anti-apparation and anti-flying wards worked fine, because that's what those inside noticed. But a bunch of muggle girls standing ladders up against the outer wall and climbing on over? If they ever had a protection against such a thing it had worn out and expired long ago.
Which was good, because the sum total of Hermione's curse-breaking skills amounted to a book she'd just acquired on detecting the presence of wards.
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Author's Notes:
ANYONE who operates completely undetected and unopposed can accomplish great damage WHATEVER the enemy! And the better your information, the greater that damage can be.
Traveling through time gave Hermione great information, and she has been privileged to operate under the radar of the current opposing forces so far. So her achievements to date are completely out of proportion to her ability.
Yes, she is a good witch, but not one so talented as to turn the entire magical world on its head by herself, yet. She's no Dumbledore. And, sadly, inevitably she must lose some of her advantages as circumstances alter to invalidate much of her future knowledge, as well as at some point she's going to get discovered, that's going to make quite a change itself.
Hidden, a submarine can accomplish great destruction. Once discovered, however, it is a target for those things that hunt it.