Hermione was thrilled when she woke up.
She was disappointed, however, upon realizing she had woken up as an infant.
This mucked up her schedule pretty sorely.
Hermione highly valued her schedule.
She now, at least, had about three years to reschedule given she wouldn't have sufficient coordination to do much of anything until then.
She swore a blue streak in her mind given all she could force out of her pitiful vocal chords was a huffy whine.
Just brilliant.
Then she heard voices, spoken from a blurry human to a second equally blurry human. Hermione squinted, her infant vision bothering her already.
"Konbanwa. Samui desu ne."
That was decidedly not the Queen's English.
Oh bugger it all.
The two adults hardly heard the second, louder huffy whine as one passed the infant to the other.
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When Ginny first woke, she feared she had become a ghost — her limbs felt weak and jelly-like and weren't responding as they should.
She howled in frustration, which to Ginny also sounded suspiciously ghost-like.
It took two months of Ginny attempting to learn to be a ghost before Ginny realized she was not, in fact a ghost, but was instead, a fat ginger baby.
This was both reassuring and horrifying.
Ginny so hoped she wasn't the only one who had ended up a baby. She had been the baby her whole life.
At least, she mused, she was good at it.
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Luna knew she was a baby instantly and was, frankly, thrilled.
Luna had so enjoyed being a baby the first time, or so she had been told, and she fully anticipated enjoying this experience just as much.
Not only that, she thought she felt the tickle of Nargles at the edge of her consciousness which was reassuring.
If Nargles existed in this reality then anything could. The question was how quickly she could acquire enough bottle caps to fend them off.
Fortunately, Nargles respected babies which gave her a solid five years until she had to worry about it.
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The three witches had been reborn in a place called "Iwagakure," Hermione learned after a year close attention and language acquisition.
This was not the "Konohagakure" she was looking for, but it at least seemed potentially related by a common language, if suffixes could be trusted.
She also discovered, as her vision and hearing improved, that she was in the care of a poorly-run orphanage where more children died of famine and disease than were adopted.
There was a sort of magic, but Hermione either could not access it her usual way or her body simply wasn't mature enough to do so.
This was particularly frustrating given she had no way to find nor contact the other girls. She suspected they were safe, if she was, but what if they weren't?
Her early months were spent learning Japanese and worrying, in equal measures.
After about six months, she managed to both speak and stand, which was less impressive to the teenage orphanage staff than it should be. It was at this time she was incredibly relieved to find both Luna and Ginny in the same facility, though held in separate rooms. She was also pleased to see that their appearances had stayed the same.
In this world, people had all sorts of coloration that couldn't be found on Earth, and she had feared it would inhibit her search efforts, but no. Right there in a crib down the hall was a small baby with an orange fluff of hair and a sprinkle of freckles, and across the way was a sedate white-haired baby with big blue eyes and a knowing smile.
Hermione was equally thrilled to see Luna's development was similar to hers but Ginny's lagged. She still was unable to speak or fully understand what Hermione assumed was Japanese, so the two other girls babbled to her in English, which worked suffiently for now. Hermione did hope Ginny wouldn't become too reliant on it, however.
Hermione's next courses of action were: locate Konohagakure, where Harry hopefully still lived, return the use of her magic or learn the local methods, escape the orphanage which seemed a death trap, and survive long enough to find a way home with her friends where perhaps they could return it to the way it should it.
First, however, she would need to be able to eat solid foods and walk for longer than a minute.
Baby steps. Literally.
Hermione, at least, proved the most studious baby in Iwagakure and managed to functionally move (and teach her less-studious cohort) sufficiently enough to escape the Orphanage by 18 months.
The toddlers then used their abilities from a previous life to explore and survive.
Ginny's job was to find and create shelter, something significant for her effort to regrow her muscles. Their only option if they wanted to avoid the watchful eyes of adults and, presumably, a government who didn't think babies could live on their own, was to escape into the tall craggy mountains that surrounded the rock-themed town. Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, Ginny had grumped. It was nothing like her beloved forests of Hogwarts and she was increasingly worrying that there were no trees in this blasted universe.
Lunas job was to find food. Fortunately a lot of the flora was the same as her previous life, and Luna was an expert at Herbology. At night, she was also able to follow Moon Frogs to find safe dumpsters to dive in. Moon Frogs were, after all, experts at diving.
Hermione's job was to collect information — about the world, the magic system, and anything to do with one Harry James Potter. The first was easy, the second was reasonably easy as soon as she found a school to spy on, and the third was, so far, impossible. No one had seemed to heard of a Harry Potter and he appeared in no texts, unlike her previous world.
Hermione found out quickly that there was a war outside. That was mildly disappointing, but at least, she surmised, it was nowhere near as dire as the war she had escaped.
She did discover, however, Iwa seemed to be losing.
This was worrisome until she found out Iwa was, most definitely, the bad guy.
She decided this after learning that no women were allowed to go to traditional schooling save for important, noble "clan" children. This sounded nigglingly familiar to Hermione who had never much cared for people who were overly obsessed with blood.
"Vampires," she spat to herself upon watching a "civilian" girl being forcibly kicked out of a classroom after begging to learn.
Using her small size, she managed to watch at a window through lessons about everything from history to "chakra" usage.
She brought all of this information back to Luna and Ginny, huddled in their cave, and at night she'd train them by the light of a fire.
They learned, with time, Ginny had a lot of chakra compared to the two other girls, but she struggled to use it. Luna had a smaller amount, but seemingly complete control over it.
Hermione, however, despite her nearly perfect efforts — seemed to have almost no chakra.
"A civilian." She'd spat to herself, finally, before slapping herself in her mind. How dare she look down on herself for something so objectively acceptable. Plenty of people were civilians, just like muggles. They were just as worthwhile as everyone else.
Still, as Ginny stuck leaves to her entire body gleefully and Luna managed to blow them in a dancing cyclone, Hermione felt a bit miffed. The two other girls said Chakra felt nearly the same as magic, and they could apply many of their skills to utilizing it. Instead of spoken words and a wand, they had hand seals.
Hermione found sealing to be particularly interesting. If she couldn't coax any magic out of her, perhaps she could force it out as she had done with runes.
They hardly talked about sealing in the academy she continued to studiously spied on, but as she grew, she became large enough to steal scrolls from the school and library.
It was fortunate that hardly anyone paid attention to a wayward three-year-old.
As Hermione practiced sealing, Ginny found herself most interested in offensive ninjutsus, including weapons usage. She was desperate to retrain her body, and kunai and shiruken were more interesting to her at the moment than jelly-legs jinxed and Quaffles. Luna liked the texts on genjutsu — not only were they good for someone like her, with less magic but more control, but also they just seemed rather lovely. She also liked the pamphlets Hermione had tossed her way with a huff from the "Koinichi" classes. There were lessons on flowers and dancing. Luna loved both flowers and dancing. What a lovely world this was.
Then, one fateful afternoon, Hermione had managed to get her hands on a few sheets of chakra paper, left over from a classroom lesson.
When she brought it back, Ginny was thrilled. She had read all about the possibilities for elemental magic (well, Hermione had read them to her, Ginny still struggled with the whole reading thing. And speaking thing. But who cares when you have a Hermione?).
When Ginny channeled chakra into her paper, it crumbled like dirt.
"Hm, an earth affinity," Hermione intoned, thoughtfully, "thought it might be fire."
Ginny frowned. She had hoped it'd be fire, too. But then she lit up. Iwa was rock country, right? There were bloody rocks everywhere! The perfect place to learn about all the cool rock magic. "Jutsus," Hermione had corrected her again.
Yeah, yeah, Ginny thought to herself, sorting through scrolls. Rock magic was cool.
Luna's paper dripped with water, soaking through. She nodded, as if this was perfectly expected, then managed to collect the falling drops into a little ball using her chakra. "Lovely." She said. Hermione agreed, although a bit begrudging. She was becoming increasingly nervous about her own results.
Finally, Hermione pushed down her fears as she took hold of the last piece of paper. She desperately hoped it would do… something. Anything, really. She didn't know if she could bare it if it turned out she really was a squib after all.
Not that there's anything wrong with squibs. She reminded herself. It would just be awfully inconvenient.
So, she held the paper and she forced as much chakra through her fingers as she could. The feeling was familiar. She had done the same the first time she had managed a corporeal Patronus. But now her "magic" felt sluggish and weak. She continued to push, as if forcing the last squeeze out of a toothpaste tube. Her head felt light. Her vision was spotty – the paper crumpled slightly, though she suspected it was just her hands squeezing it too tightly.
She pushed harder, knowing it was a mistake. She could hear Luna and Ginny in her ear, saying something about stopping. But she wouldn't stop. She wouldn't give up magic. She wouldn't be the weak one anymore. She had to find Harry.
Why won't this stupid paper do any-
And then she collapsed.
The other two descended on her with chubby baby hands, panicked. Luna deduced after a moment too long that Hermione seemed physically fine and that all the symptoms pointed to chakra exhaustion.
"She didn't even have enough magic for that?" Ginny squirmed with the words. This wasn't good news. "I don't even think she managed to get an elemental ability."
"Affinity," Luna supplied, stooping down to pick up the dropped piece of paper. "And I'm afraid, you're mistaken, Ginevra."
"Still not my name." Ginny grumbled, but peered over at Luna's hands. "Ooh, what does that mean?"
Luna peered closely at the paper. It was crinkled, as if having taken a trip through an electric dryer. More importantly, around the imprints of Hermione's previously gripped hands shot branch-like burn marks.
"I'm not certain, Ginevra. But I think it could mean Hermione has some usable chakra after all."
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It was fortunate Luna was both the resident medical toddler and nutrition toddler, so it didn't take quite as long for her to concoct her own natural equivalent of a soldier pill, using the few medical scrolls they had lying around.
The information she could glean about them was limited, so she improvised.
What she could best identify is that they were incredibly nutrient dense and tasted very bad. That was something she could accomplish.
And she was proven victorious when moments after shoving the balled up muck into Hermione's mouth, Hermione's eyes pop opened and she sputtered the brown glob back up.
"Wicked, you fixed her!" Ginny whispered, standing over a coughing Hermione. "You're so good at this ninja stuff, Luna."
"Shinobi stuff." Luna corrected with a nod. She was good at it, wasn't she?
What neither girl knew was that the "soldier pill," if it really could be called that, had, in fact, not replenished Hermione's charka at all. She had simply been unconscious for several hours. It did, however, taste so bad that her body forced her awake to avoid being poisoned. This was, in it's own way, an equal success.
After a quick explanation of events from Luna and Ginny, Hermione deflated. Her baby lip pouting against her will.
"So, I guess I'll just be a hindrance now that it's proven I am a squib."
"Not at all, Granger Sensei," Luna supplied, along with her new favorite nickname. She handed her the paper Hermione had been feeding with chakra.
Hermione squinted at it before her eyes widened again, in recognition.
"Lightning." She whispered, looking up at them with a small grin. "I have a lightning affinity."
That was something she could work with. Still she had almost no chakra, it seemed, but almost none was not at all the same as none.
That was enough to spur Granger Senei into action.
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Over the subsequent year, the girls travelled through the outskirts of Iwa, continuously searching for safety and shelter. Ginny grew increasingly capable of finding caves they could take over until the spot became too risky or the weather turned against them.
She also trained nearly constantly. At first it was just her body. She didn't have the musculature yet to support the muscle growth she really wanted, but she could increase her speed and flexibility. She also worked on dexterity. Hermione would run through "katas" and "hand seals" with her from their stolen scrolls until she had memorized them on her own. She constructed obstacle courses from the rocky outcroppings that became increasingly intense the more she could utilize chakra to fortify her strength and speed, even learning to wobbly climb the rocks sideways using her chakra to stick. That was pretty much the coolest thing, if you asked Ginny.
She also worked on controlling her magic – er, Chakra. Whatever. She didn't have the control that Luna had over it, so she mostly focused on things that allowed her chakra to explode on its own. It reminded her of jinxes back at Hogwarts and the Burrow. She had always been smaller than her brothers, and so early on she gravitated toward the nastiest jinxes that didn't require as much academic knowledge but instead relied more heavily on raw spiritual power and emotions. She had both in spades, even when compared to her equally fiery brothers.
Her brothers… She thought with a pang.
She swiftly locked the memory away. She couldn't think about them. The best way to avoid thinking about them was to simply train. So she did. Again and again, every time a scruffy red head would pop up in her memory. Ginny trained a lot.
Ginny's favorite new spells were the earth ones. There were lots of scrolls on it here in Iwa and she learned to go underground, to cause little earthquakes, and to create rock spikes. She was working on making clones out of rocks, but that had proven a bit too advanced for her, at least, with her limited education (not that Hermione was a bad teacher). Her favorite spell was a mistake, though. She had tried to do a more advanced technique that would encase her body in an armored layer of rock. All she had managed, however, was to encase her own hands. She quickly discovered this could significantly aid her new hand-to-hand combat skills, particularly given her current lack of body weight and muscle strength. One punch encased in rock could cause spiderwebbing cracks through a small crag. She suspected an average human was quite a bit squishier than a crag, not that she'd had a chance to practice on one.
Much of Ginny's training went that way. Experimenting with new techniques, aided by her previous education. She might not be able to use her old spells, but she could use the skills. She knew that magic was largely driven by will and intent, and it seemed this new chakra magic was the same. She could will larger earth spikes. She could force her "chakra coils" to supply enough energy to accomplish even more advanced skills than her body should be allowed to manage. Her body may only be four, now, but her mind and spirit made up the difference.
She wasn't as strong as she had been, but she fully intended to get there as soon as possible.
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Luna had never much cared for hand-to-hand combat back in Britain and she had no intention of learning it here, much to Hermione and Ginny's ire.
"It's a basic skill in this world, Luna," Hermione had chastised as Luna ignored one of their daily "sparring" lessons.
"As is dancing," she would reply airly back, ignoring Hermione's automatic eye roll. "Would you like to join me instead?"
"Not bloodly likely." Ginny huffed, turning back to Hermione with a punch.
Hermione and Ginny might not appreciate the "koinichi" skills, but Luna saw so much potential in them.
She loved the Iwa dancing style. It flowed like water, and, supposedly, helped train her "spiritual" chakra. Who needed fighting when you could dance? Luna couldn't understand why Hermione and Ginny didn't see it her way. Oh well, to each her own.
She also didn't care for many of the jutsus in Hermione's texts. Clones? But there was truly only one of Luna, wasn't there? If there were too many, wouldn't she just get confused?
Transformations felt just the same. Luna never liked Polyjuice potion for that reason, as a witch. Why hide who you were? Seemed a bit silly, if you asked her.
The substitution technique was interesting, but she found it a bit too easy. The same could be said for tree climbing and water walking. She had learned both solidly in a week, and by the end of seven days could dance happily across a mountain stream without a single worry of falling in. She liked them, but they weren't much of a challenge, were they?
(Ginny disagreed, after months of training she still struggled to run on water without eventually tumbling in.)
Body flickering wasn't as easy, but it was close enough to apparating that it didn't take her long to pick it up. She couldn't flicker nearly as far as she could apparate, however, and for that she was disappointed. It felt like a shoddy replacement.
Something that felt far superior to her previous spells, however, came in the form of a dark colored scroll that Hermione had said had been hard to sneak out of the library, having been hidden in an adults-only section, or something of that sort. It reminded Luna of the restricted section at Hogwarts. Luna figured that meant it had to be pretty good. Everything she had fund in the restricted section had been wonderful, after all.
This scroll dealt with something called "Genjutsu"; or illusionary techniques. Luna thought they were wonderful. She also didn't like to think of them of them as strictly "illusion," however. They were real if you believed them, weren't they? So she felt like she truly was altering the world every time she cast one. She could become beasts she had known in her past life.
She would become a bogart and make you see the scariest things you could imagine.
She would become a basilisk and make you encounter your own death with only her eyes.
She would become a siren and sing songs that would hypnotize listeners into following her into the depths of the water where she could breathe, using a technique that reminded her of the bubble-headed charm, but they could not.
It was really quite lovely to become a magical creature.
Luna liked Genjutsu. For to create, you had to believe. And Luna really did believe everything she thought.
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Hermione had not been quite so lucky at first.
She was proud to say she had memorized and perfected the hand sign sequence for every spell, nearly, that the other girls learned. After all, she had to be able to correct their mistakes. But when the girls finally mastered them, they would create an earth spike or replace themselves with a log.
When Hermione did it, she felt a slight twitch in her chakra coils and nothing more.
It was thoroughly maddening.
And unfair. She whined in her head, not for the first time, after watching Luna construct an entire mirage that Hermione wasn't able to dispel despite fully knowing it was a mirage.
Plus, she had no greater body strength nor stamina here than she had in her past life. Certainly the greater practice with Ginny had put her in better shape than she had been as a child before, but it was clear that Ginny's biology (the same as her last body) was far superior for hand-to-hand combat than Hermione's was. Hermione's legs were shorter than Ginny's, her muscles less responsive to growth, her lungs hungrier for oxygen.
She could fight, but not well enough to rely on it.
Instead she turned back to her tried and true method: runes - or, well, seals. She used both, frankly. At first she strictly worked only on seals, hoping if she constructed one with enough efficiency then she could supply her piddly amount of chakra to activate it.
Learning a whole new way of creating runes (seals, she corrected herself, again) had been difficult, but difficult in a way Hermione had always enjoyed. It was academically challenging. That was something that she could happily spend her time investing in. While Luna danced and Ginny ran, Hermione read .
Finally she created a small explosion tag. With the maximum amount of chakra she could supply without knocking herself out, she managed to set it off.
The two other girls had looked at her as if she'd just transformed into a phoenix and did the Macarena, and then they burst into cheers.
That was the turning point for Hermione.
She began experimenting and learned her runes worked as well as seals and, often, required less chakra. Perhaps it was because she understood them better that she could construct them with greater strength and efficiency. Perhaps it was because they would utilize more of her "spirit" than "physical" chakra. Perhaps it was all psychosomatic.
Regardless, Hermione was happy.
Her first plan was to find a way to increase her own chakra. Early efforts were insufficient. It was like energy; it couldn't me manifested out of nothing. She needed to generate it or supply it from elsewhere.
She had read it was dangerous to steal chakra from nature, and without further research, she didn't want to attempt it.
After much goading from Ginny, who claimed she had enough to spare, Hermione did siphon a bit of Ginny's chakra off into a collection seal that utilized magnetic forces between Hermione's own chakra and Ginny's. But the effort had seemed to hurt the redhead, zapping her with light stings, despite her denials, and Hermione vowed not to try it again unless it was on an enemy.
Due to her lack of power, her work was slow. Every day she could only activate a handful of seals, and only with adequate rest between. Anything beyond a simple seal of rune, however, was an impossibility.
In the end, Hermione had low proficiency in Taijutsu – significant knowledge of it, but low aptitude and interest. Zero capability with Ninjutsu and Genjutsu, despite a large amount of memorization and technical awareness.
Her seals practice, as a result, took up all the time she had when not teaching, stealing, or surviving.
The only problem was that seal scrolls were even more uncommon than Luna's coveted Genjutsu scrolls. Runes had to supply the difference. And though Hermione wished she had her books from Hogwarts, still, her mind was a veritable library on its own after her ten years of intensive education in runes.
Hermione's opus, for her toddlerhood, was a book of seals and runes. She had made it herself, repurposing a leather jacket she had stolen from the village, tools she'd manufactured out of rock with Ginny's help, and empty scrolls cut into paper. Page after page was covered in small seals each labeled in a way only Hermione knew how to navigate. Some contained food and clothing. Others were basic seals she'd read about like exploding seals and water seals. Some were runes from a past life that could store memories like a pensieve or improve hearing like extendable ears. Hermione catalogued every combination she could think of, amounting to hundreds of pages that she could flip through with practiced ease. It was a deceptively small arsenal of three decades as Hogwarts' top witch and a budding sealing master.
Ginny thought it was an awfully nerdy way of doing "ninja magic," but Ginny, Hermione reminded herself, could be a right twit when she wanted.
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For more than two years the girls managed to live and train in the wilderness of Iwa, all over its mountainous crags. It was reminiscent of the last years of their life, skirting though both muggle and wizarding London while trying to hide the targets on their backs.
This life, however, was both easier and harder. It may have been harder to get food and shelter, but at least no one was looking for them. And in the rare event someone did find them, they typically didn't care about a few little homeless runts.
The people of Iwa, the girls agreed, did not seem particularly nice, but they also didn't seem particularly nosey. It was a welcome fact for the time being.
That is, until someone discovered them who was both meaner and nosier than they could have worried about.