Hermione found herself staring out windows whenever she passed them. How can I know my parents are really my parents? It was the question that was on her mind almost all the time. She was doing her work, or at least going through the motions, but did not trust herself to any tasks that required a great amount of focus, like the warding. It felt like some different version of her had done that, and she was grateful enough that no one had left the security of multiple Order bases to Schrodinger's orphan girl.

She tried thinking about it from another angle. Obviously, the doctors Granger would be immune to any kind of test to see if they had produced her, but were there biological parents who had been killed who would have fit the bill? She knew that she was supposed to have been born on the nineteenth of September in 1979, meaning she could not have been more than a matter of days old when she was rehomed, if, of course, she had been rehomed. The combination of the polyjuice variant and the Poultice of Permanence made for an extremely expensive cocktail, so the small quantities she had mentioned in her letter to Hannah were a matter of necessity; there were no toddlers with recently defined features that were getting rehomed, even if it would not make the false memories even more complicated.

As Diggle explained it, the primary reason for the false memories, the effort to convince the parents that the children were their biological children, as it was explained to him, was so that they would never abandon or abuse their child, even when he or she started to show signs of being different. A child coming out really different from either of the parents usually resulted in suspicions of infidelity, which was the leading cause of divorce.

"Really?" Hermione had asked in the middle of the explanation. "They cared that much about the muggles?"

"I did," he said. "I'm entirely willing to consider that whatever department came up with this program may have had other intentions, but you must understand, there is no circumstance where they would tell the wand wavers or the quill-twiddlers what they actually wanted to accomplish. In my mind, if the pretext is a good enough reason in itself, then I was well-intentioned in doing it."

She only sighed in response, at least before asking, to confirm, that he knew nothing about the Grangers. I already knew Ron's dad was a Ministry employee with nothing but good intentions. I never suspected that everyone who worked for a corrupt institution was corrupt, or if I did, I never stated it.

"No, it was a rather large office and the field leaders were quite insistent that we keep no record of which children were going where. I would not be surprised if my own memory is incomplete to that end."

"Does that not require you to convince a woman that she had been pregnant?"

"Yes, and her husband. Usually the neighbors as well, though sometimes we would find a pair of hermits out in the country. The trick of it, my dear, was making seed memories that were simple enough to not have any problems in and of themselves, and let their minds fill in the blanks."

Presently, she was staring out another window, though this one was without glass, and did not provide her with the same low-opacity reflection of her neutral expression. Her stilt-house in Belize would be considered a tropical paradise to anyone else, and perhaps she did not mind it herself, but in the past few days she had been waxing nostalgic for the stuffy townhouse in the London outskirts. Sighing deeply, she did not notice Professor McGonagall behind her.

"Miss Granger, your students are telling me you have not been answering their questions. Have they been disturbing you?"

"No, Professor," she said, shaking her head. "To be honest, I did not think I would be able to do more than read my lesson plan and go through the motions."

"Then perhaps Pomona is right. You need to be doing something different."

"I don't trust myself to do anything else, unless you have some repetitive tasks to carry out." The teacher summoned a treacle tart and she took it without asking who had made it. It's a taste of home, isn't it?

"I am afraid I have something more important to ask of you." She joined in staring out the window, the sea placid now. "As always, it is patently ridiculous that I am asking anything this serious of a minor. Perhaps a moment of normal conversation is in order."

"Normal- Professor, I don't quite-"

"Miss Abbott told me she ran into some muggle girls during her escape from the Ministry school. It was an entirely different sort of experience for her; and not an unpleasant one. She had the opportunity to act her age, after all. What you need, in my belief, is a break with a friend. I do not speak of her specifically; your relationship is entirely too complicated- don't think I don't know. I would prefer you visit Miss Chang."

"Professor, are you sure, with all that's going on-"

"The world may be on fire, Miss Granger, but it is too early to act like your hair is. Even in the darkest hours in history, wizards found a necessary sense of comradery from their brothers at the wand, and I'll be damned if it isn't the same for witches. Travel back to China and talk to your friend about something other than the central nature of magic."

"I can't just-"

"That's an order," the old Transfiguration teacher clarified. "I have been an educator for substantially longer than you, and I can tell when the class of one of my colleagues would be better served by a replacement whilst she recovers. If you are truly that concerned for your students, be aware that I have put standards in place for the teachers we have been training here, and they are more rigorous than you would have passed."

Hermione smiled in spite of herself, if only briefly. Well, that's the old Professor McGonagall we all know and love.

"I'll be back as soon as I can," she said. "Please don't be too surprised if the Ministerial authorities throw me in prison for not coming back when I was called." Now I just need to know what to bring. A few days earlier, she had asked if anyone in Belize got the Canadian Prophet, and she had read the whole thing, but had not memorized it. I'll need to do that, because I can't bring it with me.

"If you do get arrested, Miss Granger, I can guarantee that your internment will be factored into our expectations for your return."

She saw no reason to delay once she got some food in her, so she went ahead and drew the teleportation wards in blue light. Taking a last lunch in the New World, she decided to send a letter to her friend rather than actually going right away, because there might be some circumstance that prevented her from having guests. It felt about as good as promised to write about normal things, though she mostly talked about her work and some of her more pleasant memories since they had last seen each other. She neglected to mention that she had been advised to talk to someone, primarily because she did not want her friend to feel like a stress reliever.

There was no way to know when or if she would receive a response, but she felt better upon sending the letter. Since it had been recommended that she take something of a break, she went out to talk to the locals, firstly a group of girls a few years older than herself. They had not been her students; in her understanding each of them were on track to become teachers themselves.

"Oh, you're Hermione, right?" one asked. "The kids are saying you never let them call you Professor Granger or anything like that. How do you maintain respect when they see you as an equal?" The direct nature of the question caught her off-guard. She was having to remind herself that Latin American witches were somewhat less likely to keep each other at arm's length than British ones.

"I prefer that they see me as an equal," she said. "I'm younger than many of my students, and if I can teach them, then soon enough they will be as skilled and knowledgeable as I am. If I cannot teach them, then I should not be in this position. I really have no basis to act like I am more deserving of respect than any of them-"

"You've had students disrespect you, though, right?"

"Yes. Initially, it was hard to see why I had to rein in that behavior, but they were not just hurting themselves; they were ruining my credibility among the other students as well. I started throwing them out of class whenever they were disrespectful, and I got the more attentive and interested students to support me."

"Interesting. Do you have the chance to speak with the locals often?" She reminded herself that many of the people she had erroneously labeled 'locals' were actually witches and wizards from Belmopan, and while they were locals in the sense that they were from Belize as opposed to Britain, they tended to use the word to refer to the nearby villagers. It would be one thing if we had a proper school and not a random collection of stick buildings.

"No, not really," she said. "I would hope they have not been talking about me."

"They notice you and some of the other Brits, but they're more concerned about the dark village."

"Is that a village with dark wizards in it?" she asked. "I haven't heard about it."

"You haven't heard about it because barely anyone's heard about it," one of the witches said, shrugging. "They call it the dark village because no one's managed to find it yet."

"I had heard things like that existed in the muggle world," she said, remembering not to call it the normal world. "Wouldn't wizards be able to find most places that other wizards hid, though?"

"That depends on a lot, like how badly you want to find them and how badly they don't want to be found. These people seem really determined, and they don't take up that much space. Most of the villagers seem to think it's a lost tribe. They don't recognize the protection spells they've managed to distinguish."

"Well, I can't help but be interested in that."

"You'll be the first in a while. The Garinagu have a 'leave well enough alone' attitude and have advised people from outside their village to stay away from it, and most people do. My mother remembers some people came here from Florida who came here to investigate the village for reasons they wouldn't explain to anyone, but they left without saying anything about what they found, so most people thought they were unsuccessful."

"That's what I would think too," she said. "After all, the only reason they would come here is if they had some paramount reason for investigating the dark village, and if they found it, they would certainly not stop until they uncovered all the secrets, and then it would no longer be a dark village." The older witch answered her with only a look of momentary incredulity before shrugging. They asked normal questions about growing up in the United Kingdom before a reason to depart came up and they left her alone again.

They almost certainly found it, which is what she suspected. She just doesn't have any proof, and she probably couldn't say why they left without saying anything.

Taking out her wand, she found the Garifuna village and started casting basic detection spells once she was past it. Generally, old wards were easy enough to discover; really the only problem overcoming ancient magic was that the knowledge might have been forgotten entirely, but what she was seeing indicated it was only a hundred years old or something to that effect. The magic was typical of British colonialism, she supposed, since it relied on Ancient Egyptian characters almost exclusively; apparently there were more books on that than on other ancient written languages in the nineteenth century and there was a pervasive philosophy that only one warding script was really necessary.

There was something oddly relaxing about trying to unravel the secrets of the wards, possibly because it was basically in no way connected to her mission with the Order. She would have liked to think it meant Professor McGonagall had overestimated the effect of learning about how her parents might not really be her parents, which was something she really wanted to think because she had always wanted there to be no biological explanation for not only magic, but love. She would have wanted to be entirely neutral upon being told that she had been adopted. The trouble was how it made so much sense.

In the same way that the fact men and women developed feelings for each other alongside the necessity of reproduction, there was the disturbing possibility that the attachment parents had with their children was not entirely coincidental. She knew there was no way that mothers and fathers chose each other at random, because the traits that primarily stood out to them, empathy and patience in young women, and strength and courage in young men, were the kinds of features that were desirable for the opposite sort of parent to have.

Returning to her focus on the wards; Hermione managed to get through a few of them without being detected, and her occlumency was plenty strong not to be swayed by the mental suggestion. When she came to something she could not just bypass with a Chinese blocking ward arrangement, she considered removing it entirely, but that would definitely notify anyone watching the ward structure. In all the Order bases that she had personally secured, she had run through it several times herself to make sure she had the structure in working order.

Deciding to see if she could determine the structure from what she had passed so far, it seemed the basic design philosophy was suggest, block, notify, block, and then harm, but if her diagnostic spells were not being misled in anyway, there was another suggestion after that. Well, they wouldn't need nearly this many wards to keep out the normal people. The first suggestion is for them, the second is for wizards. The idea that the inhabitants of the dark village would give another suggestion after someone with a wand had managed to get past everything else intrigued her.

Once she identified all the wards it was easy enough to get past them, though the detection ward was a bit unfamiliar. Even if it fell out of favor for good reason, the fact that I have never heard it before means that I need to identify all the runes to make any progress on it without setting it off.

When she was through all of the wards, including the vision ward, which she understood to obstruct light, she realized she it was no native village she was invading, and by the ward structure, if a wizard passed through all the wards without trying to remove any of them, it would do little more than notify the inhabitants. She found herself wishing the invisibility cloaks were ready, but that had been left to the Burmese who were helping them, since apparently they knew what to do with the Demiguise hair to make cloaks.

What stood before her was a veritable city. She could tell it was wizarding or at least pre-automobile from the architecture, though some of the design resembled more of what she had seen in the muggle world, even in her home. This could be a British city from colonial times that was sealed off when the muggles left. Creeping up to the nearest building, she had a feeling that she needed to investigate without being caught. If they've managed to hide themselves this well, we need to figure out how they do it. The target for Order bases was that fifty percent of them would be entirely secret, and we're reasonably certain that various Ministries already know about the simple majority of them.

Seeing a girl her age pass by a window in a frilly, ostentatious dress, she almost wanted to hit herself over the head when it crossed her mind that she could knock the witch out and disguise herself in her clothes. That certainly wouldn't help anything- if they're hiding, that means they're neutral, and we're not to force people into the war. Looking around as if for a second opinion to consult, she thought more about it. It won't do any harm if I just borrow a dress, and I'm being stupid for thinking I needed to strip her to accomplish that; she most likely possesses quite a few.

Opening the sitting room window, she hit the witch with a stunner from behind and looked around for traces of anyone else being in the residence. There's only one cup of tea on the table; that's a good sign. It was a ground floor home, so she found the bedroom with a wardrobe just down the hallway. Picking out a mostly white dress, because quite a few of the dresses in the wardrobe were white- it seemed least likely to be missed, she wished Cho could be with her as she dressed, putting her own clothes in an expanded bag. She may have no idea how witches dressed in the colonial days, but at least she could help me with the makeup.

Getting the dress on, she learned a spell from an open book and two or three attempts to French Braid her hair, then went downstairs again, finding the unfortunate witch was still asleep. At least the accent should be manageable, though the diction should be more antiquated. Having no idea of their culture, she realized that the best course of action was to remain silent and figure things out from context. It won't even remotely work if I try to talk to people; they'll be able to figure out I'm not one of them almost instantly unless I feign amnesia.

Stepping out of the house, she wished she had more of an appreciation for architecture as she walked into the city proper, checking for wards. She saw people walking around, guessing they were not to surprised to see her, and at the very least it seemed that in their isolated world they had not developed any ridiculous walks or mannerisms. A wan smile came and went from her face along with the whimsical notion that she was channeling Hannah. If only I could channel Ron and figure out what was wrong with him.

Not for the first time, she wished she could talk to a friend.

What am I even doing here? This isn't really a vacation, and what am I accomplishing? What was the mission? Have I just been acting out of stress?

Deciding there was still something to be gained, and she could escape any time, since there was nothing blocking the Chinese teleportation ward, the optimal approach would be to find some children and hang out with them. She doubted the same approach would work for a wizard, even one her age, but there was no sense not taking advantage of it. She found a group of younger girls, who most likely would not know how adults normally acted, at least not as well as adults themselves.

"Why, hello, ma'am, what is your name?" one of them asked.

"I am Hermione. I seem to have... taken a tumble," she said. "I admit not all my memories are in order."

"Oh, not to worry; we'll have you whistling Dixie like the best of them," a little witch said. It must be a purely magical settlement for them to have their wands out. "What do you remember? What time of year is it now, by the Celtic calendar?"

"Ivy," she said, remembering it was after her birthday. "It's the very beginning of Ivy, I believe."

"Κολλήσει" one incanted, freezing her in place. The Ravenclaw might have been able to appreciate the lesser known Greek spell if her mind had not been running a mile a minute.

"Silly carpet-bagger, every witch knows not to wear white after Vine. You've got some 'splainin' to do."