"It works!" Hermione caroled in excitement as she and Michael admired the shiny blue football-sized sphere that hung in the air over the kitchen table. "Finally!"
"Well done, Hermione," he said approvingly. Leaning forward he tapped the thing with the end of his teaspoon, then nodded. "Seems nice and solid and this time we can actually see it."
"That was a tricky one," she admitted, neatly writing up some notes, while glancing at something only she could see. "But I think I worked out the parameters I needed to. So I should be able to change the color like this…" She did something and the blue sphere turned purple, then red, then green, then faded away to crystal transparency. The end result looked like high quality and flawless glass. It developed a rainbow sheen, before going through a whole series of color changes again although remaining transparent.
"Very good," he commented with a smile. "I think that neatly answers the question of if you can make it opaque."
"I had to make it interact with light, which needed some extra work, but it's very flexible," Hermione replied, looking at the sphere then her notes and writing some more observations. "Actually, now that I say that, I wonder…" She got a far off expression for a few seconds as he stirred his coffee, then put the spoon in the sink behind him and watched her.
"Ooohh… Yes, that is interesting," she finally said quietly but with intent. "Interacting with light goes both ways, doesn't it? In fact, it's interacting with electromagnetic energy. Not specifically light…"
"Because light is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum," he responded, causing her to nod.
"Exactly. It's also radio waves and heat and x-rays and all sorts of other wavelengths." His daughter looked fascinated. "So I think it should be possible to make it produce that energy not just alter it on the way through."
He thought it over, then said a little worriedly, "Please don't make it emit X-rays or anything of a similar nature. It would be very… unsafe."
"For goodness sake, Daddy, I'm not an idiot," she snorted, making him smile a little. "I know that. I'll be careful. Let's see…" Staring at the sphere for a time, she seemed to be thinking hard. Eventually she turned the page in her notebook and started sketching out another HOP diagram as he watched with interest, getting a rough idea of what she intended. "This to set the wavelength, this to limit it to visible light, this controls the power, like so," she mumbled as she drew, occasionally referring back to previous pages, until eventually she stopped and inspected the result. "I think that's it. I can link it to the force field HOP here and here, and that should do it!"
"You're getting good at that, dear," he said with admiration. She looked pleased.
"All right then, let's see if it works," the girl said. Both of them watched the sphere as it changed color again back to the crystal-clear version, then started to glow. The light was a pale blue color to begin with, which brightened until it was easily the equal of the ceiling lamp. "It does! Brilliant!" Hermione looked very excited. "This opens up all sorts of possibilities! It's converting H-field energy to electromagnetic energy, which is incredible!"
Michael nodded to himself as he thought it over. He could see a lot of interesting applications for such a thing himself without even trying very hard. Hermione moved the globe of light closer to her and stared closely at it, prodding it with her pencil then making some notes. The color shifted several times, going through a rich deep red to a golden yellow then bright luminescent green until it settled down to something almost indistinguishable from sunlight. "It would make a good room light," he suggested with a chuckle. "All you need is a remote control for it and to make it small enough to fit in the lamps and we could save money when you leave them turned on."
She giggled, with a glance at him, then looked thoughtful. "Hmm… Now that's an interesting idea," she said in a low voice, turning to a blank page. "Some sort of control node that could be operated electrically? It's only basically doing what this does the other way around… I think that should be possible if I can work out the best method." His daughter wrote for a couple of minutes, then nodded. "I think I can do that. This proves that H-field to electromagnetism is possible, so logically it should be reversible, I think. If so, I can probably make a control HOP that can be driven by electronics. Or maybe by an optical signal? It's already interacting with electromagnetism already, isn't it, so extending that should work..." She chewed on the end of her pencil rubber for a moment, making his dentistry instincts wince, then wrote some more.
"If you can transfer energy both ways, I can see a lot of uses for that," he said as he considered the concept. "Heating, cooling, lighting… those are just the obvious ones. Power generation too, perhaps?"
"Oh, that part's easy, I worked out how to make electricity from this ages ago," she said without looking up from her notes. "We just make a version of the lifting HOP that produces rotary motion rather than linear motion, and use it to turn a generator. I can probably come up with a way to directly produce electricity with some more effort but that would certainly work."
Michael looked at her with his eyebrows up, then nodded slowly. "Yes, I suspect it would. So you've invented perpetual motion then?"
She grinned at him for a second before going back to her writing. "Not really, it's not making energy from nothing, it's just pulling it from somewhere else. The H-field is providing the power in the end. It's perfectly sensible applied psionic technology not magic or something."
Laughing, he took another sip of coffee, then replied, "We shall have to get you a white coat if you're going to properly be a scientist. It's traditional after all." His daughter seemed amused but he suspected that if he did get her a suitably sized lab coat she'd be wearing it all the time…
Putting her pencil down, Hermione turned her attention back to her sphere of light and frowned at it. It shrank until it was about two inches in diameter, at which point she nodded in satisfaction. "There. It will fit into my desk lamp now."
The glow went out and she plucked the sphere of force out of the air, holding it up and admiring the thing. He was highly impressed that she'd managed to pretty much produce a physical object out of nothing, although at the same time it wasn't really a physical object, it was just putting up a good show. Which was rather mindbending if he was honest with himself.
Apparently one could become accustomed to the most bizarre occurrences if they happened often enough, he reflected.
She tossed it into the air and grinned when it silently vanished again. He whistled softly to himself. "You have the makings of a very good stage magic act there."
"I think I can do better than a stage act, Daddy," she replied calmly. "I have a lot of ideas."
"So do I, my girl, so do I." They shared a moment of glee, then he finished his coffee and pulled out his own notebook. "Would you like to hear some of them?"
"Of course I would," she replied with a broad smile. "It's fun."
Father and daughter were deep in conversation when Helen came back from visiting a friend two hours later and the kitchen table was covered in notes, drawings, and books. She shook her head at the mess, put the kettle on, and sat down to see what had them so excited.
Hermione pondered deeply, her mind awhirl with ideas. After serious consideration of the options, she finally nodded. "I would like the chocolate raspberry, please."
Her mother handed her a bowl of the requested flavor with a smile and put the remainder into the freezer, then all of them went into the living room and sat down. Tasting her treat, the girl smiled. "This is really really nice," she enthused.
"It's certainly better than most ice cream I've had," her mother replied as she tried her mint choc chip. "I think we might be going there again."
"That place has managed to get a good reputation in only six months," her father agreed, happily eating his rum and raisin. "However, this will mean brushing extra well tonight, Hermione."
"I know, Daddy," she laughed. They sat and enjoyed the ice cream, the fire crackling in the grate as it had been lit earlier due to the increasingly cold weather outside. Tonight was the first time it had really become chilly enough to warrant the effort. When she'd finished she put the bowl on the coffee table, turned slightly, and leaned on her mother who put her arm over her shoulders. The older woman reached around and pulled the fluffy blanket off the back of the sofa and spread it over both of them, Hermione helping, until they were warm and snug.
Her father watched with a smile. "Tea?" he queried, getting up and retrieving all three bowls.
"Yes, please," both Granger women chorused, before sharing a smile. "That would be lovely," her mother added.
"Back in a bit," he replied, nodding and vanishing into the kitchen.
Feeling warm and safe, Hermione gazed at the fireplace, her mother slowly running her fingers through her hair and doing the same. After a while, the older woman asked, "How was school today, sweetie?"
"A little boring as usual, but not too bad," Hermione replied with a faint sigh. "Martha Trent was being difficult again. I ignored her, even though I wanted to tell her she's an idiot."
"I do wish the school would be a little more observant at times," her mother muttered. "I've heard from several other parents that there are more cases of bullying there than is ideal. You're not the only one having trouble."
"I know," the girl said quietly. "I try not to let it affect me. It's hard sometimes. I wish they'd just stop, or ignore me for that matter. I haven't done anything to them."
"Sometimes it's not what you do, it's who you are, I'm afraid," her mother responded softly. "You're terribly intelligent and you probably worry them because they don't understand you. It will get better. Children can be horribly unkind when they meet someone they find unusual."
"Adults can be like that too, unfortunately," her father said as he came back into the room carrying a tray, having apparently overheard the comment. He put it on the low table near then and handed each a mug of tea, before taking his own and sitting down again. "Luckily it's less common. With any luck people grow out of that sort of behavior as they get older."
Hermione nodded slightly. She was aware of that, and that she probably prodded certain other children's particular buttons, but there was nothing she could really do about it except live with it and hope they'd get bored sooner or later. Or at least nothing that wouldn't lead to trouble.
Her mother pulled her closer in a sideways hug. "Try not to let it bother you. Only another year or so and you'll be in secondary school, and there's every chance that those children will either be somewhere else, or find something to do other than being annoying."
"I hope so," Hermione grumbled. "It's very irritating."
She drank some tea and gazed at the flickering flames, idly watching them with the energy sense as well as her eyes. It was a fascinating sight as she was now sensitive enough to the minute fluctuations in the field caused by everything around her that she could watch the wood being consumed almost from the inside. There was a companionable silence for a while, her father picking up a book and turning to his page, while her mother seemed lost in her own thoughts.
The girl almost jumped when the older woman asked, "Have you had any more breakthroughs in physical impossibilities in the last few days, sweetie? You've been awfully quiet for a day or two. Normally we've come to expect at least one bizarre discovery before breakfast." She was smiling at her daughter, making Hermione giggle.
"I've been working on a way to make electricity and the H-field interact more directly," she admitted. "Daddy gave me the idea, and I've been thinking about it quite a lot."
"Did you have any luck?" her father asked with interest.
"Actually, yes I did," she replied happily. "It's not quite finished, but it works. Hang on, I'll get it." She hastily finished the last of the tea, put the mug back on the tray, and flipped the blanket back to stand up. Dashing up to her room she rummaged around in her desk until she found what she was after, took it back downstairs, and got under the blanket again. Holding up what she'd retrieved, she watched them look at it.
"A torch?" her mother queried, a little puzzled by her tone.
"Yes." Hermione handed the blue plastic-cased device to her, the older woman taking it and turning it over in her hands. It was a cheap one, that they had several of in the house for power cuts or going in the garden in the dark. "It's lighter than usual," her mother commented while Hermione and her father watched. "Does it even have any batteries in?"
"Only a little double A cell now."
Curiously, her mother flicked the switch, then exclaimed when a ridiculously powerful bright white beam came out of the lens and put a circle on the ceiling. "Goodness, that's bright! How does that work, Hermione? It's not like a normal bulb at all, the color's all wrong."
"You made a small version of that sphere from the other day, didn't you?" her father put in, a look of understanding and approval on his face. She nodded.
"I did, it's about the size of a pea." Taking the torch back, she turned it off, then quickly disassembled it into the component parts. She showed them the quarter-inch diameter transparent sphere of solid force, which was mounted in a little wire frame she'd twisted up from some thin copper wire and fashioned into something that was soldered to the base of a normal torch bulb, the glass of which she'd broken away with pliers. "This is the result of a new HOP that generates it, runs the light system, and monitors these terminals for the presence of a voltage," she explained, pointing to the relevant sections. "The two wires touch it on either side, see? And there's a sense block that is looking to see a voltage across them. No current flows because it's not a normal electrical circuit, it's much more like the gate of a perfect FET with infinite impedance."
Opening the battery compartment she pulled out a single cell battery holder which she'd wired into the original contacts. "It only needs a little battery since it's not really doing much, and why make it any heavier? All the power for the light is from the V-field, all this is doing is letting you use a basic switch to turn it on."
Both her parents examined her invention, seeming quite startled with the simplicity. "And because it doesn't take any electricity worth speaking of from the battery that should last for a long time?" her father asked.
"Probably as long as it would as if it was in the package," she replied with a smile. "Years, at least. I can come up with a method to even eliminate the need for a battery at all with some more work, that's the part I'm thinking about right now, but this works really well already."
"Amazing," her mother breathed in awe. "That's very good work, Hermione. And it would be very useful too. I'm forever finding that the batteries have run down at the most awkward moment."
"I can do this to all the other torches too, if you'd like," the girl offered as she reassembled the device, then turned it back on. "I can change the color and brightness if this is wrong, but right now I haven't designed a good method to do that without directly changing the HOP parameters."
"Perhaps make it a little more yellow," her father suggested after considering the comment for a moment. "That's so white it's almost painful, and it's quite unusual. If we used it outside people would start asking questions."
"True," she nodded, tweaking the HOP a little and causing it to produce a warmer illumination. Stopping when it looked roughly like the big floodlight over the front driveway, she added, "How's that?"
"Perfect. It looks just like a very bright normal torch. If anyone asks we can just say it's a new type of bulb." Her father grinned at her. "Really excellent job, dear. And the first practical application of your ideas that anyone can use."
"I've got all sorts of other ideas too," she replied, turning the torch off and putting it down. "But for some of them I need to learn some more things. Like making a water heater or something like that."
"Now that could be useful," her mother commented. "It's quite expensive heating the house." She hugged Hermione again. "I'm very proud of how clever you are."
"I rather enjoy it too," the girl giggled, causing them both to laugh.
After a couple of minutes, during which her father played with the torch and seemed fascinated by it, even taking it apart again to inspect the innards once more, she spoke. "Er… I've been thinking…"
"We do somewhat expect that, dear," her father chuckled, screwing the lens back on the torch and putting it on the table. "It's a habit with you."
Hermione folded her arms and gave him a stern look. He raised his hands protectively. "She's doing that thing again, Helen."
"Stop making silly jokes, then," his wife advised with a mild sigh.
"Where's the fun in that?"
"Have you quite finished?" Hermione asked.
He looked slyly at her. "For now. Continue, by all means. You were thinking. About what this time?"
She fiddled with her hair and glanced at both of them in turn. "About perhaps seeing if I could sort of… teach you to do what I can do?"
Both her parents stared at her, then each other. "Do you think you actually can?" her mother asked slowly, sounding puzzled, while somewhat curious too.
With a small shrug Hermione replied, "Honestly, I'm not really sure. I can't see any specific reason I couldn't, I have to admit. I don't know why I can do what I can, but surely I can't be the only one who can ever do it? Perhaps other people are able to, or possibly everyone is able to but they just don't know how. After all I missed it for years and worked it out almost accidentally…"
"And you do have a very unusual mind, it has to be said," her father remarked when she trailed off. "Very few people are as smart as you are, my little scientific impossibility. You might have noticed something that other people did but never thought much of, and instead of putting it down as an accident, actually stuck with it long enough to find out that it was a real thing." He looked thoughtful as she nodded and shrugged simultaneously. "It's true enough that a lot of the important breakthroughs in science have been when people least expected them, but someone was sufficiently curious to investigate and sufficiently persistent to succeed."
"What was it that Isaac Asimov said? Something like 'The most exciting phrase to hear in science which heralds new discoveries is not Eureka! but That's funny…'" Hermione nodded as her father smiled. "That's certainly what I thought when that apple core flew away."
"Something along those lines, yes. And he's right. I've read quite a few stories about completely serendipitous discoveries that ended up becoming very important, and sometimes entirely new fields of discovery. Radioactivity, for example."
He fell silent in thought, while Hermione and her mother watched him. Her mother also looked intrigued and pensive at the same time. Eventually he looked up from where he'd been staring at his folded hands and asked, "How do you propose to try this?"
"That's the tricky part," she was forced to confess. "I'm not really completely sure. In my case I knew I was doing something peculiar because I saw it happen right in front of me. It was connected to being angry or frustrated at first, and I managed to get into that state on purpose once I figured that out. But I didn't want to have to always be upset to do it, because that's silly, so I kept trying until I was able to get the same result and not be angry. It was a lot of work."
"So you've said," he nodded. "I'm amazed you stuck at it that long."
"I really, really wanted to see if I could do it," she smiled. "And I could. Look what happened after that!"
"True, very true," he chortled. "You do keep surprising us. So do you have any idea about how to proceed?"
"A couple, yes," she replied, "But I'm not certain they'll work. I suppose the only way to find out is to try it."
"What do you think, Helen?" he asked her mother.
"I think it would be something I'd like to try at least," the older woman replied with a smile. "If Hermione thinks she can teach us, I'm game. Although I doubt I could ever be anything like as good at all this as she is, I don't have that much of a head for numbers at the best of times. Certainly not to her level."
Hermione waved a hand. "You don't need to know all the details to start with it, that comes later. It took me quite a long time to realize how I could use electronic theory to work with the field. Originally I was just pushing with my mind, more or less, and that worked quite nicely. I can lift the entire car into the air and keep it there for ages now, even without a HOP amplifying things. And the energy sense is all down to my ability too, I haven't done much with that yet other than practicing a lot with it."
"All right, then, dear. I think we're both up for it. How do you want to begin?"
Tapping her chin with a finger, Hermione considered the question carefully. "Perhaps…" she began a little cautiously. "Perhaps we could start with me making something that uses quite a lot of H-field energy, and then you see if you can feel anything? Once you notice it, which took me quite a long time, it's fairly obvious. Or it was to me at least. It was noticing it to begin with that was the tricky part, it's so faint most of the time. But I can easily make it much stronger in a small area by using an amplifier, that's the whole point of them."
"Worth a shot," he agreed. "As far as I've seen so far it's not dangerous?"
"Not unless you use it to do something dangerous as far as I can think," she replied thoughtfully. "We're constantly surrounded by it right now, and it doesn't seem to do anything unless you want it to other than exist."
"Fine. You may begin when ready." He chuckled as she giggled, her mother smiling at her and stroking her hair.
"I'll make an amplifier and link a force field to it so you can see where it is, but not a solid one, only one that is visible." She was working even as she spoke, quickly assembling a new version of a HOP from elements she was very familiar with due to all the experimentation. It quickly resulted in an apple-sized translucent blue orb hanging over the coffee table. Both her parents contemplated it curiously. "And now I'll set up a feedback loop so it's pulling quite a lot from the field and putting it back again, just going around and around," she went on, doing that too. To her energy sense the thing she'd made was like a particularly solid knot in the field. Leaning forward she waved her finger through it, then nodded.
"That should do," she said happily. The sensation of touching it was, at least to her, quite apparent and was a bit like running warm water over your finger. It wasn't painful in the least but it stood out nicely. Making another one identical to the first, she moved one towards her father and the other to her mother, plopping both within easy arm's reach of them. "There we go. See if you can feel anything from those."
Somewhat tentatively her mother reached out and slowly touched her floating sphere, pulling her fingers back as soon as she did, then trying again with more assurance. "It's…" she began, looking a little confused. "I'm not sure if I'm actually feeling anything or if it's all in my head."
Hermione's father was waving his hand through his own globe, an odd expression on his face. "I know what you mean. How much is wishful thinking and how much is real? I could swear I'm feeling something but I can't put words to it for the life of me."
Hermione watched them for a couple of minutes, wondering if this would work at all, or if she was going to have to try something else. Or if it was even possible in the first place. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on sensing them by the distortions in the field, and found almost to her surprise that there was an apparent effect whenever they touched the spheres. The knots in the field that represented the HOPs she'd made were very clearly, albeit very slightly, altering a tiny amount as the distortions that a living person produced intersected them. That was encouraging at least although it wasn't proof of anything useful yet.
She made a mental note of some possible applications of the concept for other purposes, then went back to observing.
Yes, there was definitely some interaction between the concentrated field density of her HOPs and her parents. Looking very carefully, she could almost make out an incredibly faint network of something inside them, which after some thought she decided might actually be their nervous systems. Which was an incredible thing, assuming she was right. It looked plausible since there was a larger amount of whatever it was that looked like a spine, and more still concentrated where their heads should be.
Hermione opened her eyes to double check, seeing that what she was sensing and what she was seeing appeared to match up quite accurately. So she might well be right in her supposition. Closing her eyes once more she watched the effect the field knots had, and smiled a little as she realized that there was a very small but real flickering, for want of a better word, in what she was looking at every time the knots of concentrated H-field energy interacted with her parents. So given that this was indeed real, did it then follow that they could learn to control that interaction?
Curiously, she quickly made another sphere, put it in front of her, and reached out for it while intently watching her own field distortion. She had been aware for some time that she left a rather larger 'imprint' in the field, which seemed to be the result of her telekinetic abilities, or possibly the cause of them, assuming it wasn't both, but hadn't spent much time carefully studying it for a while. Now, though, she saw much the same thing happening in her case, as every time she felt the field knot pass through her fingers, she could clearly see a change in the way the field itself interacted with her body.
Looking between herself and her father, she compared the effect, coming to the conclusion that while it was similar in nature it was much, much stronger in her case than it was in his. That followed from what she'd learned and deduced about how the whole thing worked.
"I can see some sort of connection coming and going," she announced, opening her eyes and watching her mother slowly run her fingers through the sphere in front of her. "It's absolutely certainly a real effect."
"I still can't be sure I'm actually feeling anything or if I'm just imagining it," her mother commented.
Thinking for a moment, Hermione slowly said, "Try closing your eyes, both of you. Keep them closed." Her parents exchanged glances, then obediently followed her instructions. "Good. Now hold out your hands."
Both adults put their hands out in front of them. She carefully moved the HOP globes out of the way, while keeping an eye and an internal sense on both, then slid them back through her parent's hands. Repeating the process a couple of times, she asked, "Can you feel anything?"
Her father frowned, then replied in a baffled voice, "I… think so. It's strange, it's a little like…"
"A ball of fur that's tickling you from the inside?" her mother put in, sounding confused but a little excited too.
"That's not a bad description, Helen. Odd, but close. How strange."
"What about now?" Hermione asked as she moved both spheres away.
"Um…" Her mother's face scrunched up. "It… might be gone?"
The girl added some more energy and moved the orbs again, this time through their upper arms. "Ooh! Oh, that was very odd," her mother almost squeaked. "I'm sure I felt something then."
Her father rubbed his arm where the sphere had passed, his eyes still shut. "I certainly did. It was quite disconcerting I have to admit."
Hermione smiled widely. Stage one was working. She'd proven to her own satisfaction that someone else could detect the field if it was sufficiently concentrated. That was a good start. Now, the big question was going to be, could they actually learn to manipulate it?
She was going to have a lot of work ahead of her, she thought as she kept moving the spheres around, eventually making them invisible and letting her parents open their eyes and guess where the things were. Slowly reducing the density of the HOP knots would be the first step, to see if they could learn to become more sensitive with practice.
As it turned out even from one evening's work, it looked like that might well happen. Both her parents found the entire experience strange but rewarding, and Hermione had nearly two dozen pages of notes and ideas to try next time.
She was going to keep at it until either it proved to be impossible, or she succeeded. Because she didn't like to fail, aside from anything else…
Two weeks later, her mother gaped in shock as she made a crow's feather Hermione had found in the garden twitch on the table after nearly ten minutes of glaring at it with a gaze like a basilisk in a bad mood. "Did I just…?" she gasped in complete surprise.
Hermione was grinning like an idiot. "You did just, yes, Mommy. Well done." She pulled her notebook out of the pocket of her nice white lab coat and flipped it open. "I'm making a note here; Great success."
Sternly pointing at her father with her pen, she added firmly, "Stop slacking. You're next."
He saluted her smartly with a grin, replied, "Yes, Miss," and sat down where his wife had just been as she moved to the side, looking stunned and delighted.
Satisfied that things were going well, Hermione leaned forward and watched intently.
This was both fun and educational, in her view, and well worth the work.
And she had a lot of ideas to try now that this seemed to be getting results.