Hermione lay in bed thinking, and practicing her energy sense technique at the same time. Her revelation the day before had left her parents and her grandmother very confused indeed, and even after explaining things several times they had been no less so. She thought that was fair enough as it had come as something of a shock to her in the beginning, but she'd had over a year to get used to it. By now a lot of it was second nature to her to the point she'd nearly given the game away a couple of times by accidentally floating a mug across the kitchen or something like that. Which would have been embarrassing.
But now she was good enough at the entire process, especially after her breakthrough in energy amplifiers, that she thought it was time she told them. Even though they were all going around with bemused looks she still felt it had been the right thing to do, although for now she didn't think it was necessary to tell anyone else about it. Someday, possibly, but she still had a lot of work to do thinking the entire thing through and mastering every technique she could come up with.
She wondered if anyone else could do the same thing. She'd certainly never heard of it being proven although there was plenty of fiction based around the idea. So much that it suggested that possibly it was that well known because there were others like her, but clearly not enough that there was any real documentation on it. Perhaps they were just shy?
Or possibly she really had come up with something no one else ever had. That would be quite gratifying in a sense, discovering an entire new field of research and getting to invent the terms and experiments to characterize it. Like William Gilbert and his study of electricity and magnetism. Or Benjamin Franklin, for that matter, although she liked to think she would be somewhat more cautious than to fly a kite in a thunderstorm, for heaven's sake!
Remembering the high speed pencil, she flushed a little. A little more cautious, at least. Her father had been quite sharp with her when she'd admitted to that minor miscalculation, pointing out with a certain amount of asperity that it was a good thing it had gone upwards rather than right at her. It would certainly have been an embarrassing trip to the hospital in the best case, and it could have ended very badly in the worst…
She'd made a mental note to check her directional vectors extremely carefully in future. Just in case.
Once he'd calmed down, though, from the fright she'd given him, her father came up with all sorts of good ideas about things she could try. He'd been reading science fiction and fantasy since he was her age, after all, and apparently had always wanted to be able to do what she was now managing. She idly contemplated if she could teach other people how to do it? There didn't seem to be any obvious reason why not if she could just work out the best method… Something to think about later, certainly.
But now her notebook had a couple of dozen pages of ideas for new things to try, and she'd had a couple of brainwaves about her energy construct while she was explaining it to her parents. Talking about that sort of thing seemed to help her understand her own ideas better, and she'd made a lot of notes on improvements to the whole process that she hoped would significantly increase the effectiveness of it.
She could hardly wait until after school tomorrow. Trying some of those ideas out was something she was looking forward to, and she was going to show her parents her floating boulder trick. That should show them just what was possible like nothing else she could think of…
Rolling onto her side, she plumped up the pillow, then settled down again after a yawn. With her eyes shut she expanded her energy sense outwards, trying to push the limits as she did every night. Each time it went that little bit further, and told her that little bit more about what was around her. She could feel the tiny distortions and fluctuations in the field surrounding everything and contentedly assigned meanings to them all as she went, while watching the cats and foxes and other animals roam around in the gardens. Even into the woods as far as her boulder clearing, and over most of the cul-de-sac her house was in.
As she fell asleep, she was idly counting how many people she could sense, and trying to work out who they were.
"All right. I'm impressed." Michael shook his head in wonder as he watched the two dozen or so objects floating around his daughter's head in interlocking rings. There were a number of pencils, several apples, an empty glass, three tennis balls, Mr Boots the cat from next door who had wandered in as he was wont to do and was now looking rather bewildered, and a few coins. Hermione was sitting in the middle of this reading a book and grinning, giving a good impression of ignoring the impossibility of what she was doing. He knew her far too well though and she was definitely having fun.
The last week had nearly been enough time for them to get used to discovering that the girl had somehow worked out how to perform telekinesis in the first place, then added to that ridiculous breakthrough by inventing from first principles a method to hugely amplify the ability to a level that was frankly absurd. She'd taken them into the woods behind the house and demonstrated that she could yank about fifteen hundred tons of limestone out of the ground and float it in mid air like a helium balloon while making it look trivial and drinking a bottle of lemonade at the same time.
That had been a bit of a shock.
As was her saying that it was actually easy, and not anywhere near the upper limits of what she thought she could pull off. Since, as he understood it, her latest breakthrough had been an energy construct that allowed her to use preposterous amounts of whatever it was that was really doing the work without it requiring her to provide the power directly, she thought it could probably be scaled up to any level required with some work.
He was extremely curious to know what that source of energy really was. She said it was constantly surrounding everything, and seemed to be so large in extent that she could barely detect the drain on it from lifting that huge boulder, which implied some intriguing things. She also had said that it didn't seem to diminish the available energy at all.
In a way the part of the whole thing that was the most startling wasn't the raw power she demonstrated, but the sheer precision. She could write her name with a flying pencil in a manner that was indistinguishable from her normal handwriting, even with her eyes shut, or assemble one of her electronics kits with her arms folded and everything simply moving around as if self-propelled. It was eerie to watch her in action. Apparently she'd been practicing for more than a year before she told them about it, and was still improving even now.
All in all it was a level of telekinetic ability that a Jedi would have been astounded by. Michael smiled a little as he had, not for the first time, the thought. All she needed were the robes and a light saber…
"How are you coming along with the other ideas we discussed, Hermione?" he asked as he took a seat on her bed and watched her deposit all her objects in a line on her desk before turning around to face him. Mr Boots meowed, then jumped onto her pillow and curled up, apparently fine with his short flight.
"I think I've worked out a few methods to do some of them, Daddy," she replied. "I was concentrating on the lifting thing and the energy sensing for so long I didn't really consider other applications, but you're right, there are all sorts of things that should be possible with some changes to what I'm doing." She looked at the desk, then made one of the apples float up between them. "I've managed to do this so far, but I haven't tried it on a larger scale." Pointing at the apple, she flicked her finger, just for the dramatics he guessed by the expression on her face. The fruit separated into a dozen neat slices from top to bottom, all of these floating apart a little, as she motioned.
Reaching out after a moment's surprise he picked one of the pieces of apple out of the air, feeling a slight resistance which disappeared immediately, then inspected it closely. The cut was completely clean, like a razor sharp knife had been used. Popping it into his mouth he chewed as she grinned at him. "That'll save some time with the turkey at Christmas," he commented after swallowing, making her giggle. "Very neat. How did you do it?"
"I…" His daughter hesitated as she thought. "I suppose it's more or less that I made a telekinetic knife blade. It's a little hard to explain, but that's how it works. I pushed a very thin layer of telekinetic force through the apple in several directions and made it solid enough it cut everything in the way. Although 'solid' isn't quite accurate, it's more like everything on one side moved one way and everything on the other moved in the opposite direction. It works with stronger materials too, look." She picked up the glass and showed him as it neatly split right down the middle into two half-glasses, without any fracturing or splintering. His eyes widened a little as he carefully took one half from her and examined it. The cut, again, was completely clean and the edges looked razor sharp. He didn't touch it to find out.
"Extraordinary," Michael murmured, taking the other part from her and experimentally fitting them back together. The cut was so incredibly precise that the glass actually stuck, and when he held it up to the light he could barely make out a mark in the transparent material. Pulling the two halves apart again, which took a little effort, he shook his head in amazement.
"That's basically a mono-molecular cut, I think," he said. "The surfaces look perfectly optically flat. It would be very difficult to replicate that with a machine tool. Can you cut metal like that?"
"Yes." She showed him one of the forks from the kitchen, then made all the tines fall off.
"Your mother is not going to be pleased about that," he said causing her to look embarrassed.
"Sorry. I got carried away." Hermione smiled a little guiltily and put everything back on her desk. Smiling a bit, he sighed faintly.
"Never mind. We have plenty of forks. Although please don't do that to anything important. Like the house, or the car, or yourself. That is particularly important." He cast his eyes meaningfully upwards at the small hole in the ceiling that he hadn't patched over yet. Following his gaze she looked embarrassed and worried for a moment.
"Yes, Daddy. I'll be careful, I promise."
"Good." Getting up he leaned over and hugged her. "I don't want anything to happen to you."
The girl hugged him back. "I know."
Releasing her he straightened up. "I was wondering if you would be interested in a trip to London next month? I have to visit a dentistry supply company on Saturday the 28th to get some things for the practice we've ordered, and that will only take an hour at most. I was thinking that we could make a day of it, visit Foyle's and a couple of other bookshops, then wander around for a while. See the sights, perhaps visit some of the electronics shops on Edgware road, or Tottenham Court road too. There are lots of them around there, I've seen them when I've driven through in the past."
Hermione's eyes had become rather large and she was smiling widely. "That would be brilliant, Daddy! I've wanted to go to Cricklewood Electronics, and Proops too. They advertise in this magazine." She pulled a copy of Practical Electronics out of a drawer. He'd bought her a subscription to it, and Elektor, last year, and she read each issue cover to cover when they arrived. Flipping it open she pointed to a few advertisements for electronics supply companies, a remarkable number of which were indeed in that area of London.
"I think we could manage that, dear. We'll have to park somewhere near the dentistry supply company and take the tube, but we'll have most of the day available. I'd prefer not to spend all of it in an electronics shop if we can avoid that though." He smiled as she laughed.
"Will Mommy come?"
"No, she's got patients then, I'm afraid. It will just be the two of us." Ruffling her hair and making her squawk, he grinned. "I think it'll be fun."
"Stop that!" she said firmly, running her fingers through her hair. "It's bad enough without you messing it all up."
"Your hair is fine, dear. It adds character." Peering at her closely, he followed that with, "About four inches of it as far as I can tell."
The girl sighed, but she was still smiling. "Very funny."
"I thought so, yes." He headed back downstairs, somewhat amused by her huff of resigned acknowledgment. Teasing her was always fun.
It was one of the perks of fatherhood after all.
"Aha!" Hermione stared at the page in front of her, thinking hard. "I wonder if that would actually work? It should do…" She scribbled diagrams, checking her references several times because she really didn't want to get this wrong. Having assured herself that the basic implementation was most likely correct, although until she tried it she wouldn't know for sure if the concept was sound, she turned the page and drew out a final version of what she was thinking of now as an H-field OPerator, or HOP.
Mostly because the acronym made her giggle, it had to be said.
She'd cribbed a lot of the diagrammatic methods from electronic schematics, with changes to suit the medium she was working in. An awful lot of the theory seemed to map onto the mysterious field she was manipulating better than she'd expected, and the girl suspected that there was some link between electromagnetism and it underpinning the whole phenomenon. Unfortunately, although her understanding of both was steadily growing as she studied every book she could lay hands on covering relevant subjects, she was all too aware that there was a huge amount of information she simply hadn't encountered yet. It would take her quite a while to really get to grips with it all to the level she was fairly certain was required to properly exploit the energy field.
But she enjoyed a challenge and this one was about as challenging as it got. So that was fine from her point of view. And she was having enormous fun coming up with new things to try, as were her father and to a lesser extent her mother. The latter didn't quite have the knowledge of fiction that the former did but she was happy to encourage Hermione to learn all she could. As long as she took suitable common-sense precautions at least.
Flipping back a dozen pages, the girl checked her calculations one last time, then nodded to herself. It looked good, so the next stage was to, very cautiously, try it and see if it actually worked.
Looking around, she decided that her bedroom was probably not the optimal location, though, so it seemed sensible to go out to the clearing. That place had seen quite a few experiments so far, and only a couple more minor misfires to date. She grinned a little at the memory of one of them, which had been an attempt to use the energy constructs to create an audio transducer of a sort. It had worked a little too well. Once.
She and her parents had beaten a hasty retreat with ringing ears just in case someone investigated, but luckily it was muffled sufficiently by the trees that no one seemed to want to look into it. One of the neighbors had commented the next day about little layabouts setting off fireworks a month or so early, and couldn't they wait until the fifth, but that was it as far as reactions went. Subsequent attempts had been less… impressive.
Closing her notebook she got up and headed downstairs clutching it and a pencil. "Daddy? I think I've managed to come up with a new design. Can I go and test it?"
Her father, who was watching the news and shaking his head about some sort of criminal attack on the other side of London where several people were hurt, without any obvious reason for the whole sorry event, turned his head and looked at her. "Will this one be as loud as that other one was?" he asked with a mildly resigned look overlaying a certain amount of amused interest.
"No. I doubt it. Well…" Hermione thought for a moment then shook her head firmly. "No. It'll be perfectly safe."
"I've heard that before," he commented wryly, picking up the remote and turning the television off. Standing, he added, "I'll get my coat." She smiled and went to do the same, as it was quite chilly now that autumn was nearly here. Leaving a note for her mother about where they were when she got back from the shops, her father and she left the house and walked back into the woods.
Once they reached the clearing, Hermione reached out and sensed the area to make certain no one was nearby. She could feel some people playing golf more than half a mile away, and various others back in the houses behind them, but no one was anywhere near at the moment. "It's clear," she announced, pulling out her notebook and taking a seat on one of the old logs at the edge of the cleared area. Her father sat beside her and looked at the pages as she turned them, his face interested. She explained as she went, both because he was fascinated by the subject and often came up with good ideas to try, and since she found that explaining her workings to someone else regardless of whether they understood it fully sometimes helped her see the errors if she'd made any.
Even Mr Boots sometimes sat and purred at her while she told him how something was meant to work while she was trying to figure out why it didn't quite. Oddly enough that had helped more than a couple of times.
He was quite a smart kitty, she thought with a small smile.
"I think I see," her father said when she'd finished explaining. "It's a feedback system."
"Exactly. With any luck, once I start it running, the sense node here will keep the control signal in the correct range all by itself, and it will self adjust. This part will modify this part so it doesn't burn out after a while, it should more or less keep refreshing the construct as it goes." She nodded, as she tapped her pencil on parts of the diagram while she explained. "It's more or less an operational amplifier with a feedback network on the input driven by a portion of the output. Nothing really complicated but I'm quite pleased with it."
"Assuming it works, of course."
"Of course," she giggled. "I shall be quite disappointed if it doesn't."
He patted her shoulder encouragingly. "If it doesn't I'm sure you'll be able to fix it."
"Well, then," she said, pleased by his support, "I suppose all I have to do is try it."
"Proceed, Number One," he chuckled. "Engage."
"Really, Daddy?" She sighed loudly, making him grin. "All right, let's see what happens…"
"I'd start small just in case," he advised, watching her. Hermione nodded a little as she closed her eyes and started constructing one of the most complex energy patterns she'd so far tried. It was a lot easier now than it had been at the beginning of her experiments but it still wasn't quite at the point that she could consider it trivial, at least to do a new one like this. The basic power amplifier was something she'd done so much by this point that she could make one almost instantly, half asleep, though.
"Come on…" The young girl concentrated, watching with the sense that wasn't anything like any of the normal ones as the HOP grew, changed, and finally snapped into stability. "Got it!" She smiled broadly. "I think. It's not falling to pieces immediately, so that's good."
"But does it work, there's the question," he commented.
She nodded slowly, looking around the clearing, then settling on a lump of old mossy wood about the size of her head a few yards away. "I'll try that one," she said, pointing at it. Carefully targeting the log, she locked the power channel onto it, tweaked her pattern a little to set the parameter she wanted, checked them four times, and when she was satisfied that even if it went wrong it wouldn't go wrong in their direction, activated the thing with a tiny effort of will.
Energy flowed from the ambient field through her construct to the log, and it lifted silently into the air to hang four feet off the ground. So far, so good. Next, she turned the feedback on, and they watched as the log promptly started oscillating up and down like it was possessed.
"Oh dear…" She stared at the dancing wood, bits of moss coming off it as it moved. "I think the gain is a bit too high."
"It's certainly lively," her father pointed out with a grin. "Can you turn it down a little?"
"Yes," she responded, tweaking one section of the construct. The log immediately sped up until it was a blur and emitted a low hum. "Oops," she added with embarrassment, hastily tweaking it back. "Wrong way."
Her father was stifling a laugh, making her give him an arch look, but he contained himself enough not to let it out. Modifying the relevant parameter the other direction, she watched as the jumping up and down slowed more and more, ended up as a slight bobbing motion, until it finally damped out completely. The log was now sitting there absolutely solidly without any motion at all. This was nothing that she couldn't already do, of course, but right now she wasn't doing anything. It was entirely working on its own, and if her calculations were accurate, should continue to do so indefinitely or until turned off.
Hermione grinned in triumph. "Yes! I did it!"
"Excellent work, dear." Her father clapped. "How stable is it if you add some weight?"
She frowned, thinking for a moment. "Now it's tuned it should stay like that and compensate for changes," she replied after contemplating the construct.
He got up and went over to it, putting his hands on it with a certain amount of tentativeness, then with more assurance when it didn't bite him. Pushing down, he nodded. "It seems solid enough." Experimentally pushing sideways, he nodded again. "Doesn't want to move in any direction."
"I've got it set to hold that position," Hermione explained. "It's adjusting for changes in any direction. I think I can…" She tweaked another part of the construct and then laughed as her father fell over when the log suddenly stopped resisting him, sliding sideways through the air. "Whoops. Sorry, Daddy."
"That's all right, dear, but warn me next time, will you?" he said as he sat up, brushing leaves off his jacket. He seemed amused if anything. Getting to his feet he prodded the log, then pushed it around a little, nodding. "Very impressive indeed."
"I'll try something bigger," she said, lowering the log back to the ground. He moved behind her and watched as one of the rocks in the middle of the clearing gradually lifted upwards, then settled down a yard clear of the ground as she locked it off. "That works so well!" she squealed in joy.
"You certainly seem to have cracked that particular problem," he agreed as he sat beside her again. "Will it work with other techniques?"
"It should do, I think," Hermione nodded. "It's something that can be added on to anything else, as far as I can see. So I should be able to make almost any other thing I work out how to do self powered. I don't know how long it really will run for but I think it will do it more or less forever." Curiously she checked to see how much it was affecting the energy field and came to the conclusion it essentially wasn't, or if it was the drain was so small it was almost not there at all. Again, it was also being replenished immediately from wherever the energy originated.
"Well done indeed, Hermione. You've earned your dinner today." He grinned at her as she stuck her tongue out at him. "My little Jedi is learning all sorts of new things."
"Oh, Daddy, you are silly sometimes," she giggled. He jumped to his feet, plucked a four foot long branch off the ground, and started swinging it around while making the appropriate sound effects, which caused her to fall off the log laughing her head off then pick another one up and do likewise.
Father and daughter fought a pitched wooden light-saber battle until they were laughing too hard to continue, while the rock patiently hovered fifty feet away as if that was where it had always been.
"Well, that certainly did something, but it's not quite there yet," Michael said as he watched the tennis ball drop to the floor of the garage following a slightly strange trajectory. The car was parked on the drive and the door was down, giving them some space that was protected from the current vigorous and rather cold rain outside.
Helen came through from the kitchen and handed him a mug of hot chocolate, putting Hermione's one down next to her as their daughter frowned at the whiteboard he'd screwed to the wall above the small workbench there. She was tapping one of the markers on her chin as she thought, and he was keeping his expression blank while wondering how long it would be before she noticed she'd left the cap off. Lots of little blue spots covered the lower part of her face, which made Helen stare, then turn away trying not to laugh.
"How hard can a force field be?" Hermione muttered under her breath, sounding somewhat aggrieved. "It's a straight forward enough concept…" She made a few notes on the board, stared at them, wiped a couple out with her thumb, and corrected the drawing she'd been working on for nearly two hours.
"It's an entirely fictional concept, dear," he pointed out agreeably before taking a drink of the mint flavored hot chocolate. "But it'll be very neat if you can manage to pull it off."
She glanced at him, smiled, noticed the hot chocolate nearby, and put the pen down to pick the mug up instead. "Thank you, Mommy."
"You're welcome, sweetie. You two have been out here for ages, are you sure you're warm enough?" Helen replied, both hands around her own mug.
"It's fine, thank you," the girl said, smiling. "Just a little chilly. I can probably work out a way around that in the end too."
"Saving on the heating bill would be a good idea, so I'm in favor of that myself," Michael chuckled.
"I'll put it on the list," Hermione replied with a giggle. "But right now I want to get this to work."
He picked up another tennis ball from the plastic container full of them, and lobbed it underhand towards where a line of masking tape on the concrete floor marked the location of his daughter's experimental force barrier. The ball slowed markedly as it passed over the tape, but still continued forward, dropping to the floor in a quick arc and bouncing a few times. A dozen more lay around where it stopped. "Definitely having an effect. Can you… I don't know, turn the wick up or something like that?"
She shook her head slowly, looking between the balls and the whiteboard. "It's not quite like that. Putting more power into it won't really make it harder, it will just increase the area, I think. No, I'm missing something and it's annoying me. If I could just…" She trailed off, her face showing concentration, while Michael and his wife sipped chocolate and waited patiently. Both of them had faith that their little impossibility would succeed sooner or later.
"That's it!" Hermione suddenly shouted, making them jump. "Of course! It needs a fourth term, and that means I need to…" She scribbled rapidly on the whiteboard, erasing a large part of the original work and filling in several new parts to replace it. "I need to invert this vector, and that will change this bit here like this, and then this one here should be ever so slightly different like so… Yes! I see, it's so obvious when you look at it correctly."
She seemed terribly excited, he thought with amusement, as she worked. It was wonderful to see her so passionate about something.
After a few minutes she'd completely redrawn her diagram, which ended up visibly simpler than the one that had grown and grown from previous experiments, although it was still quite complex. He could follow enough of it from her explanations over the last few weeks to get the gist of the thing, although his knowledge of both mathematics and electronics wasn't really good enough to really understand it to her level. He thought he should probably borrow some of her books and read up on the subjects if he was going to keep helping her, as it would be nice to be able to follow along. Although he was under no misconceptions of his own ability. Hermione was in a class of her own intellectually.
Finishing, she stepped back and admired the result of her work.
"You think that will do the job?" he asked.
"I do," she replied, whirling around and grinning happily. "Let's see what it does." She got the slightly distant expression they were used to now as she did whatever it was she actually did to manipulate the energies involved in her psionic work. After about thirty seconds, she smiled again. "It's stable. I think it's working."
He looked hard at the tape on the floor and the space above it. "I can't see anything."
"It's there, though. Try one of the balls," she suggested. He picked up another tennis ball and repeated the toss as he'd done many times before. This time the result was quite different; The ball hit something completely invisible with a distinct thwok sound and rebounded slightly, bouncing off the floor and rolling to a halt next to his feet.
"Huh," he said, astounded despite himself, as Helen stared and Hermione looked exceptionally satisfied. "That is indeed a thing. How curious." Picking up a broom that was leaning against the wall near the main door, he spun it in his hand to put the handle forwards and cautiously waved it around in the vicinity of the tape. The wooden pole clacked off what felt for all the world like a solid object. Prodding around he traced the edges, finding that it was a roughly five foot diameter circle with the lower edge just off the concrete.
"I made it thick enough that it wouldn't cut things," Hermione explained as he tapped the edges a few times. "I think if I made it too thin it would be like the knife technique, which would be very dangerous since you can't see it."
"Good thinking," Helen said as she watched with amazement. "We don't want any accidents."
"How solid is it?" he wondered, poking the center of the invisible field very hard with the end of the broom, which resulted in a sensation like he'd slammed it into the floor.
"Very, I think," Hermione replied slowly. "I'm not entirely certain how much force it can stand but it's probably much more than you can get by hitting it."
Putting the broom back, he cast about for something else, then settled on the ice hammer he'd bought years ago when he was trying climbing before he decided it was too much work for a hobby. Taking it off the wall where it was hanging on a couple of nails, he walked closer to the marker tape, then gently tapped the force field to make sure where it was. When he was lined up properly he brought his arm back and gave it a good solid thump, which made the hammer ring as if he'd hit rock. "Ouch," he muttered, his hand suddenly aching slightly as he hadn't braced properly.
Shifting his grip a bit he turned the hammer around so the pick end was forward, took up a different stance, and swung again as hard as he could manage. The clang this time was loud enough that Helen put her fingers in her ears, and when he checked the sharp tip of the pick, it was noticeably blunted. "I think that probably proves it works," he said a little too loudly over the ringing in his ears. His hand was aching again. Putting the hammer back he shook his head and waited for the tinnitus to subside. "Short of buying a sledgehammer and really giving it a thrashing, or borrowing a shotgun, I can't think of any way to properly test it past that."
"I could drop an enormous boulder on it," his daughter suggested with a small smirk.
"That might be a little obvious after the fact," he retorted, laughing. "Let's leave that for another day, shall we?" Reaching out he poked the force-field with his forefinger, then ran his hand over it. He couldn't see anything at all, but it felt like slick glass to the touch. "Absolutely amazing. I wonder how strong it really is? And can you make it pass some things, like air, and not others? Or opaque for that matter?"
Hermione shrugged. "I'm not sure but I'll think about it. I'm just pleased that I got it to work at all right now."
He smiled at her. "You did a very good job, dear. Genuinely extremely impressive."
"I still find this all somewhat bizarre," Helen sighed. "But I can't deny you seem to have a gift for it, whatever it is."
"Psionics, Mommy. I told you. Daddy's books tell us all about it." Hermione gave her a mischievous look, causing Michael to chortle.
"His fictional books tell you all manner of ideas that are made up as you very well know, Hermione," Helen replied with a long-suffering sigh. Michael bounced another tennis ball off the invisible shield and raised an eyebrow at his wife. "Although I will admit that fictional may not mean what I always assumed it did," she added with a smile. "Psionics, then. You're sure you don't want to call it magic?"
"Do I look like a witch, Mommy?" Hermione gestured at herself, then the whiteboard. "I am a scientist."
"A mad one?" Michael asked with a grin.
"No. Just a happy one, and I think a hungry one right now," Hermione giggled. "Science is hard work."
"Well, I think it's probably time for dinner, then," Helen announced, collecting the empty mugs. "Shall we order Chinese food? We haven't had that for ages."
"A capital idea, dear." Michael nodded, as did Hermione, who seemed pleased by the suggestion. "I'll find the menu. The place on White Road?"
"They're the best one," Helen agreed. They all headed back into the house. In the kitchen Michael looked at his daughter as a thought struck him.
"You'd better get rid of that thing, I don't want to drive the car into it," he commented, pointing back into the garage. Hermione smiled and nodded.
"I already did."
"You definitely need to come up with some way to make them visible," he went on, rummaging through the kitchen drawer for the stack of menus, and finally finding the right one. "Invisible barriers are a trip hazard."
She laughed before they started discussing what everyone wanted. Shortly an order had been phoned in, and he was on his way to collect it, ruminating on how oddly life seemed to be working recently. Not that he wasn't enjoying it, of course, but he did rather wonder if any other parents had quite the same sort of oddity going on in their children's lives as he did at the moment.
Lying on her bed, propped up on the pillows, Hermione read the latest textbook with great interest. She'd managed to make her way through three different books on semiconductor design so far, and although she knew she had a long way to go, was getting quite a decent grasp on the basics if she did say so. It had led her to some fascinating ideas for designing HOPs, and so far she'd filled two entire notebooks with them. Some of the ideas would have to wait until she worked out the details of less complex ones, since they were built up from those assembled into much more complicated sequences. It really was like designing a printed circuit board, she reflected, and she could see that in time it would end up being closer to an integrated circuit.
She wondered what the best name for a psionic chip would be? A psip? No, that was ridiculous. Hermione smiled to herself. Names were something that was for later, she first had to actually design the things, and that would take a lot of work and reading and thinking. And probably years of time before she could do some of the really complicated things her father and she had come up with during one of their brainstorming sessions over a wide array of books on many subjects.
All in all, Hermione was very happy, and thoroughly enjoying herself. The annoyance of school was bearable since she could come home and do interesting things that didn't require interacting with her peers, who were mostly just irritating when they weren't either actively hostile, or utterly indifferent.
She preferred the latter to be honest, it was less painful.
Sometimes she wondered if she'd ever meet someone her own age who wasn't so annoying, but it wasn't a topic she was going to waste any time on considering that she had other things to get on with.
Turning the page as she finished the chapter, she looked at the heading for the next one. "Optical semiconductor techniques," she murmured. "That might be useful." Hearing a scratching sound at the window she looked up, then shook her head when she saw a small furry face peering in at her from the windowsill. "You don't live here you silly cat," she exclaimed to Mr Boots, who didn't seem to care since it was very wet and cold outside. Opening the window with a casual telekinetic operation of the handle, she added, "Fine, you can come in, but don't leave muddy paw prints all over my… What did I just say, Mr Boots?"
The girl sighed as the cat padded across her desk, a trail of wet footprints behind him, then sat on the end and stared at her before starting to lick himself dry. She closed the window again and floated the cat off the desk to the end of her bed, something that he took in stride. Apparently he was used to it by now and seemed if anything to enjoy the sensation. "You really are a nuisance sometimes," she said fondly, patting his damp head. "Silly kitty. Mrs Johnson will be wondering where you are."
He didn't seem fussed about that, merely stretching out across her bed and looking pleased with himself as his fur dried off on her duvet. Going back to her reading, she finished the chapter, made a few notes on things to consider later, and wriggled under the covers. "Don't shout in the middle of the night and want to be let out," she warned the cat. "I want to get a good night's sleep. Daddy says it's important. You go to sleep too."
Turning out the light as the cat meowed at her then rolled over to dry the other side, she spent a while extending her senses again as usual in the dark. At one point she thought she detected something unusual at the edge of her range, a little knot in the field that was almost, but not quite, like one of her HOPs. Only done wrong. But it almost instantly vanished and after looking around for it for a while she decided she must have mistaken a bird or something for it, falling asleep shortly afterwards.
It was still some time before dawn when Hermione woke after a very odd dream with an insight that had been eluding her for weeks now. "Ahhhh…" she breathed, suddenly sure she had a solution to the problem of how she could move one of her HOP constructs around with her. It was simply a matter of looking at the coordinate system differently, making it relative to her rather than relative to everything else.
She sat up, disturbing the cat which had remained on her bed all night and causing him to sleepily and noisily complain. "Hush, Mr Boots, this is important," she said quietly as she pulled her notebook and pencil off the desk into her hand, then started writing rapidly to get the idea down before she forgot something.
It hadn't happened yet, but she was careful.
Once she'd sketched out the idea to her satisfaction, she quickly formed a standard basic amplifier HOP and pegged it to her own position, before experimentally sliding out of bed and walking around the room. Sure enough, it remained exactly where she'd created it, relative to her head, which was exactly what she'd been trying to do for some considerable time.
Exulting in her success, she hopped back into her warm bed and snuggled down into the covers, leaving the construct in place so she could see if it faded with time. Seconds later she was asleep again with a smile on her face.