The Curio Shop Carib0u Chapter Text
Hermione returned to school Wednesday, brimming with confidence. Perhaps for that reason, perhaps not, she got an additional five classmates, all girls, who asked her about her birthday and gave her belated well-wishes. Now that she was an official - what? Magical Girl? Witch? Heroine? She realized she needed to be even more organized and effective than she'd been planning to be.
She asked about all assignments carefully, made full use of the playtime breaks, and figured out how to cut corners and save time while keeping her marks good.
On the advice of a book she found in the library, she began writing her assignments freeform for a while - no more than fifteen minutes at a time. She would plan from the start how many pages her assignments would be and work towards filling that with meaningful content. Even though she spent fifteen minutes or more editing each assignment, the total time it took went down from her efforts before the change, and they were vastly improved.
She was already a solid music student, and when she had art classes she'd supplemented the teacher's instructions with books that took her through the basics. She discovered that moving her whole body when drawing, and not using a pen-holding grip on her pencil or charcoal, gave her a very pleasant line.
In maths, she stopped fretting and simply did lots and lots of extra problems, swiftly. If they were doing the even-numbered exercises, she did the odd, and vice versa. She dashed through the tests extremely fast and did all the extra credit problems. Then she'd go over the test again with a calm mind, answering any she'd skipped and correcting any mistakes.
All of this was how she planned to study going forward, but starting it in primary had amazing results. She realised that, had she not had so little confidence, she might have been one of those prodigies who end up in college before they are into their teens. But I am about to go to magic school, so there! She thought, consoling herself with that fact.
She still had very little wind, compared to the more athletic students, but she dived into football during the playtime break nonetheless. She played cheerfully, not minding being roughed up or winded.
Unfortunately, that day marked the start of the doll experiment. Not a half-hour after play break, Hermione became visibly faint in her last class of the day. She brushed it off, and told the teacher and the school nurse it was a common thing for her, but she'd been hiding it before now. She was anaemic, she told them, but also needed to build up her stamina. So she was exercising in the mornings and during play breaks.
The nurse was concerned, and told Hermione she needed a doctor's slip to continue playing pick-up football with the other children. Like all setbacks since the start of the year, Hermione determined she'd find a way to turn that to her advantage. She told the nurse and teacher she wasn't very good at football, anyway, so she'd practice dribbling the ball a few hours a day until she got the slip, so she could enjoy it more when she returned. That did not at all match the character of the Hermione Granger they were familiar with, but they found her pluck very endearing, and wished her well. Meanwhile, she decided to switch her XBX walks out for longer runs every morning.
All of this should have given Hermione plenty of free time at school, but it didn't, really. First of all, she was being more social with the children in her year. Her posture was better, she wasn't rounding her shoulders with excessive books, and she dressed more smartly, and kept her hair in a neater ponytail. There were, after all, a couple of Jamaican girls at the school whose hair was as naturally bushy as hers, and their pony-tails poofed out like hers; no one gave them any grief, so Hermione didn't anticipate any, and consequently, she didn't get any.
Everyone knew Hermione had advanced a grade. Most of the students in her year weren't sure if she was ten or eleven, so she wasn't teased about boys, a great relief. She was gradually admitting that she wanted to meet Harry Potter before she started even thinking about "ordinary" boys.
At any rate, she no longer regarded talking with others during lunch as wasted time. A worse problem was that she wanted to pay attention in class enough to keep her marks up, yet work on her many projects at the same time. However, when she tried that, she was caught out several times not paying attention when she needed to answer a question. She took to using loose-leaf paper to take her class notes, resting on the left side of the notebook she made her lists and plans in. She would write for a minute, then take class notes for a minute, and so on.
She was worried her reputation would change; actually, the teachers assumed she was growing up, and attributed her spaciness and newfound interest in sport to hormones and puberty. Switching her attention back and forth was quite difficult, and she fretted about possibly looking to purchase some sort of vibrating alarm she could set.
She headed straight home to rest, but promised herself she'd check on the shop at least once a week. Her father had put the box with the three dolls from the shop on her bed, and she decided it was time to unpack them. Genius, as usual, was the note-taker, and today Shy had turned the pages. Plain and Clumsy woke from their nap, and all four dolls eyed the new arrivals with curiosity. Shy, the most sensitive, said there was something hidden on the box lid. She guided Hermione in cutting a section of the lid out, and the girl put the rectangle of pasteboard in her book bag. Genius told her she should bring it out on her next trip to Diagon Alley and say " Aparecium " while waving her wand from right to left, then left to right in a wavy motion. Hermione believed it was impossible to trace magic in such a thick cluster of wizards and witches.
The straitjacket on the doll she named "Looney" seemed somehow cruel to Hermione, When she took it off, she was surprised to see she was holding a small crystal ball in her hands. It was filled with what looked like thin white smoke or vapour. She placed it carefully on the nearest bookshelf. The round ball reminded her of her new physical project. "Don't let me forget, girls, I have to ask Dad for his old football so I can practice with it before dinner," she said. And at that exact moment, the smoke in the ball turned thick and red. That's curious, she thought.
Well, no time like the present, she decided. She went downstairs, then came up with her father to hunt through her parents' closet for his old football. She brought it to her room, and happened to notice that the smoke in the crystal ball had gone clear again. "Did any of you notice when this thing went clear?" she asked. Genius, of course, had actually been studying it., "About the time you asked your father for the ball, I think," was her distracted reply.
Hermione was excited. This was quite possibly the silent alarm she'd been needing. To test it, she put the ball where she could see it out of the corner of her eye. She opened the first book to where she'd left off in it, and said, aloud, "Remind me in thirty seconds to stop reading and look up."
Sure enough, a half-minute later the ball went red. When she looked up, it went clear. It was quite promising, but true to her commitment, Hermione put it back on the shelf and changed into joggers and a pullover. Because there was no traffic where they lived, she decided she'd dribble the ball the entire way on her mile walk. She was ruthless with herself, correcting every mistake, yet forcing herself to look away from the ball and her feet to train herself to sense where it was. It took her half an hour to cover the mile this way, but that took her almost into dinner. She wiped herself off with soap and water before she changed back into her school clothes for dinner.
She told her parents over dinner that one of the dolls from the curio shop had been holding a reminding alarm in its hands. As they discussed it, they agreed the curio shop seemed to be not so much mocking Hermione as teasing and challenging her. Mrs Granger was a little put out by the fact that the doll Hermione nicknamed "Bucky" had vaguely Oriental features, an unpleasant reminder of American (and even British) illustrations of her grandparents' era. Hermione decided that was simply one more dig at her sensibilities.
Genius was looking over all three dolls, and she was eager to learn what she'd found out. Hermione couldn't shake the fear that if her parents learned she had a stable of magical servants created by her, they'd be a little afraid of her. She resolved to break it to them gradually, starting with admitting the dolls still moved on their own, and even did simple tasks.
After dinner, Genius told Herrmione what she'd learned. The new dolls weren't lively like her own were. They had magic inside, but no interest in serving Hermione, or even befriending her. They were content to lie in their box, doing nothing. When Hermione wondered aloud how she'd be able to figure out why the curio shop gave her these strange dolls, hers went away to confer in whispers.
"Somehow, Mistress," Clumsy began, "You must read the message that was on the lid."
"Which means," Plain continued, "You will probably need to wait for the weekend so you won't be found doing magic."
It was annoying, but she was right. It really irked Hermione when she couldn't make progress. Especially on solving a mystery.
But then Hermione decided to try another experiment. She put her wand away so she wouldn't be touching it, and changed into her pyjamas. She was afraid to make wand movements with her hand, or even pronounce the spell out loud. Aparecium, she thought, clutching the piece of pasteboard to her side. She began to worry she'd tear it, so she rested it over her heart and clenched her hands to her sides as she willed the message to reveal itself. Aparecium. Aparecium. Aparecium! She visualised waving a wand across the piece of lid. Right to left. Back right with a wavy motion. Aparecium. Aparecium. Aparecium!
Finally, the lid began to glow. Hermione was so exhausted she wasn't sure she wasn't asleep and dreaming already. As she slipped away, she thought she read:
"If you want someone to help YOU, you must first help THEM."