Hermione jumped at the sound of the doorbell, fought to suppress the immediate flare of nervousness. Taking a last breath in isolation, she set her book aside and stood up, quick tugged at her skirt to make sure her dress was sitting straight, and headed for the front door.

She wasn't entirely surprised Mum got there first, pulling open the door even as Hermione made it to the entryway. "Hello again, Lyra." Mum's greeting sounded oddly amused.

"Emma." Lyra still used the cool, polite pureblood voice with Mum, though she'd switched to using her first name at some point, Hermione wasn't sure when or why. She stepped inside a moment later, in a vest and skirt that would pass for muggle, thankfully — Hermione had suggested as much, but Lyra had a rather eccentric impression of what passed for an ordinary outfit for a muggle teenager. Her boots were familiar, the same mage-made knee-high leather ones she wore most days at school, but they were mundane-looking enough nobody should notice.

It could be her imagination, but Hermione thought Lyra might have put rather more effort into her appearance than usual. Her hair looked slightly shinier than it naturally did, suggesting some kind of charm, little plaits framing her face she normally didn't bother with, a large white-silver pin stuck through on top, Hermione couldn't quite make out the design from this angle. (Her jewelry was more understated in general than she sometimes wore at school, apparently realising the magical nobility's style was quite gaudy by muggle standards — her simple earrings and that big hair pin were probably real silver, but at least Hermione didn't see any gemstones anywhere.) It was very subtle, but she suspected Lyra's face was under rather more cosmetic charms than normal. Nothing so over the top as Lavender and her insipid friends used, it was honestly hard to tell for sure at all, she just seemed...cleaner and, well, prettier than normal. Slightly, if Hermione didn't spend so much time around her she probably wouldn't have noticed at all.

Also, for some reason, she was carrying in her arms a rather sizeable ceramic pot, filled with— "Lyra, what the hell."

Lyra blinked at her for a second, staring back over the purple flowers spilling out of the pot. "Er, did I do something wrong already? That didn't take very long..."

(Mum, looking very amused, quietly took her leave, disappearing in the direction of the kitchen.)

"No, it's not that, just— What's with the flower pot?"

"Oh, I was under the impression you were owed an apology for not inviting you to the World Cup. Which, okay, honestly it hadn't occurred to me, you obviously don't think much of quidditch and all the interesting stuff was politics, which you also don't care about, but."

Perfectly reasonable, she guessed — she wasn't actually wrong, about the quidditch and the politics. It wasn't really about that. It'd been becoming increasingly clear to her lately that she actually knew very little magical Britain, especially where...well, where the nobility wasn't concerned, the ordinary mages who weren't invited to Hogwarts. (Apparently Hogwarts mostly took the nobility and muggleborns, which was a weird combination, some old treaty obligation or something.) And then there were the thousands of guests from dozens of nations all over the world... If she had gone, the most interesting part of the whole thing probably would have been just wandering around the site taking in...well, everything.

If she were going to be annoyed about anything, it would be that it "honestly hadn't occurred" to Lyra to invite her, but by now she'd learned Lyra couldn't really help that sort of thing much of the time. There was no use fretting over it.

But that didn't entirely answer the question. "Okay, and...?"

"And according to Zee, apologies for minor slips like that often take the form of flowers and/or chocolates. I've hardly ever seen you eat chocolate at all, so." Lyra shrugged, the leaves and blossoms of her entirely unnecessary apology gift rustling a bit with the motion.

Despite herself, Hermione felt a reluctant smile pulling at her lips. Honestly, Lyra was just so silly sometimes. "So, Ms. Zabini didn't explain she meant cut flowers, not living potted plants."

Lyra's face scrunched in a confused frown. "Really? That seems...weirdly morbid. I mean, not that I'm not one to judge about being weirdly morbid, but..."

That was an odd thing to say, probably a magical culture thing. "Right, well." Hermione shuffled a little closer, slipping her arms around the pot. Lyra let go as soon as she had it, rolling her shoulders and shaking her wrists out a bit — not surprising, she'd probably been carrying it a while and it was sort of heavy. "I do appreciate the effort, but you really didn't have to. And I don't mean that in the humble, self-effacing way — for future reference, things like random gifts of flowers and/or chocolates are completely unnecessary. Sweet, yes, but, well—" Hermione couldn't quite help a little smirk. "—don't strain yourself, you know."

She still wasn't entirely certain what she expected from this whole...dating thing, but she did know she hadn't been expecting flowers and/or chocolates. After all, she had known what she was getting into when she'd asked out Lyra bloody Black. If silly inanities like flowers and/or chocolates were what she wanted, she wouldn't have bothered.

(Not that she was certain what she did want, but at least she knew it wasn't that.)

"Right, okay, good to know." Then she grinned, her charmed purple eyes almost sparkling. "Hi, by the way."

Hermione laughed. "Hi. Come on, let me set this down." She wavered for a moment on exactly where to put it, before deciding the kitchen would be best. (It had the most consistent sunlight of anywhere in the house, and the easiest access to water.) The downside was her parents would be in there right now, but that damage had already been done.

"So, where are we going, anyway? I assume somewhere muggle, but you didn't say anything more than that."

Both her parents were, indeed, in the kitchen, Mum sitting at the table with the paper and a cup of tea, Dad at the hob partway through frying something for dinner — Hermione hadn't bothered asking what, since she wouldn't be home anyway. "I thought we'd wander around Oxford for a bit," she said, setting the pot down on the counter, near the back window. "There are a couple museums down there, and we'd stop somewhere for dinner at some point, obviously." Hermione wasn't really clear on what people did on dates, exactly, but that seemed...reasonable.

Lyra made a face. "Museums like art museums? I mean, that's fine, I just don't really...get art, is all. Especially static art."

To be entirely honest, Hermione didn't either. Plenty of art looked pretty, she guessed, but it wasn't what she'd rather do with her eyes — she'd actually snuck a book on a daytrip in primary to an art museum so she could read instead. "I was thinking the Museum of Natural History, actually, and Pitt Rivers." Had the bonus of introducing Lyra to a fair bit of muggle science and history and culture she likely knew nothing about, and she was enough of a total nerd that she'd probably find it legitimately interesting.

"I have no idea what those are, but okay."

Mum cleared her throat, drawing their attention to her. "Check the time, Hermione."

What? Hermione frowned, glanced toward the microwave. "...Crap." She'd originally considered what exactly they would do on a date with the thought that they'd be going out around lunchtime, but Lyra was still spending most of her time in California, lunchtime was a bit early for her — plus political stuff going on, but Hermione knew little about that — so something in the evening had been more convenient for her. Hermione had, somehow, failed to take the change in schedule into account.

"Er...?"

"The Museum closed at five. I completely forgot."

"Oh, well..." Lyra trailed off, shrugged. "We can always go to Charing. There are still some interesting spots down Knockturn and Cinia we haven't been to yet."

"Yeah, but we'd have to get aging potions for that." Which wasn't necessarily a problem, Hermione would just need to change quick. Adding ten years to her age made her bra very uncomfortable, but it was manageable, she just needed a moment alone to resize the thing or arrange her outfit so she needn't wear one at all. She did have some practice now, with how much they'd snuck out to London over the last year.

"Cherri could grab those for me in, like, five seconds."

"Why do you need aging potions to go anywhere?" Dad asked, shooting them a suspicious look over his shoulder. "I mean, I'm assuming aging potions are what they sound like."

There was another thing Lyra probably shouldn't have said in front of her parents — not that Hermione was really keeping track anymore, it didn't actually seem to matter much. Mum, for her own inscrutable reasons, had clearly decided to latch onto the Blacks, and while Dad was more obviously dubious he'd decided to go along with it. Less enthusiastically, but they were both on board — largely so they could have some say on what went on in the magical world, which was an unsettling thought, Mum took over everything — so what was done was done. "Nothing like that, Knockturn is just, sort of, the bad part of town. Not, really dangerous or anything, we just had one close scrape with a hag once and Lyra took care of that fine."

Lyra nodded. "Knockturn isn't nearly as bad as its reputation, but the natives might try something if you look like an easy target. Just looking and acting like you belong there is usually enough, but not looking our age is a simple shortcut. I've been there more times than I can count and never had any trouble. Honestly, I was skipping around the place when I was seven and I was fine, but nobody's going to mess with me no matter how young I look. House of Black, and all that. The aging potions are just for Maïa's benefit."

At first, Hermione was just relieved Lyra seemed to realise they were trying to reassure her parents, wouldn't normally give her that much credit to go along with it. But then she was distracted by the rest — was that true? She'd assumed the aging potions were, just, part of Lyra's normal routine going to Charing, but it'd been to protect Hermione the whole time?

Huh. That was...weirdly responsible of her. Hermione wasn't sure what to think about that.

"Ooh, or we could go check out...whatever this magical settlement in the Bay Area is called, I've heard conflicting names. The magical culture in that area of California is a weird combination of Chinese and American influences, with some more recent borrowings from the West, it's fascinating. I haven't looked around near as much as I would have, been too busy. Other than getting my new wand, anyway, but I went all the way to the Lakes for that."

Okay, Hermione could temporarily overlook the suggestion that they, just, casually go to the opposite end of the world on their date to ask after that little aside. "You went to an American wandcrafter to get your new wand? Do American mages even use wands?" She'd been under the impression indigenous American solely used witchcraft. They were good at it, obviously — some of their wardcrafting was good enough mages from the Old World never did manage to crack them — but wands were generally considered a very eastern hemisphere thing. Pretty much everyone from Ireland to Singapore used them now, but...

"Well, sure, Americans use wands. Not natively, obviously, but they've adapted them in the centuries since contact. Partially, at least, they still practise their old stuff for things wizardry isn't really suited for." Lyra pulled her wand out of nothing — now that Hermione was paying attention, she saw it clearly wasn't the same one, the wood lighter, not quite as symmetrical or smoothly-polished as Ollivander's work, little spirals carved into the surface in a pattern Hermione couldn't make out from here. "Hornbeam and thunderbird," she said, wiggling the wand. "I met the thunderbird the feather came from, actually. And apparently I am an omniglot, because the thunderbird magic language thing completely ignored my occlumency and I accidentally copied the whole language in, like, ten seconds."

"You...speak thunderbird." As Hermione understood it, thunderbirds were, sort of, an American phoenix. They had nothing to do with fire at all, of course, but they were highly magical, long-lived birds with being-level intelligence — phoenixes and thunderbirds were, in fact, the only known beings with a totally non-humanoid body plan (unless they were counting acromantulae, which most people didn't) — and had a long history of interaction with human society, featuring prominently in early magical traditions and even religion, much as phoenixes had in Egypt and the Far East.

While both phoenixes and thunderbirds were generally understood to be at least as intelligent as humans (some writers even claimed they were more intelligent), communicating with them could be...difficult. They clearly couldn't use human languages, they simply hadn't the biology to pull it off. Some learned to cast illusions to "speak" that way, but few bothered. Instead, phoenixes...sort of projected feelings and images and impressions through the ambient magic around them, the meaning absorbed directly into people's heads through contact. Which was, just, bloody strange, but magic could be like that sometimes.

The point was, thunderbirds communicated more through magic than language. Hermione hadn't realised omniglottalism worked like that.

But apparently it did, because Lyra smirked at her, and then she was singing, a nonsense smattering of empty vowels, light and quick. And while Hermione suspected the "words" didn't actually mean anything, she still understood, somehow. Not that it was necessarily very clear — she saw (faintly, in her mind's eye) a little pond, clear and shimmering, a bird fluttering toward her over the surface (its exact shape didn't come through very well, just a blob of blue and black feathers), a sense of giddy fascination, its magic was pretty, sharp and intense and wild, and then a moment of dizzy nausea, then a white-hot migraine, suddenly feeling too full, and a sense of chagrin, apparently she did have the language thing, how could she not have known that, and—

The echo faded, and Lyra was standing in the kitchen, looking all too pleased with herself. All too pleased, because she'd gotten quite a reaction, Hermione and her parents all just blankly staring at her. (Apparently it worked on muggles too, despite them not being able to channel magic, which was interesting.) After a few seconds, Hermione found her voice again. "I had no idea humans could even learn to speak thunderbird."

Lyra shrugged. "Yes, well, omniglots are cheaters. Though, magical languages cause a weird sort of feedback loop — it's supposed to take a couple weeks at least to get all the way fluent, but my magic getting into their magic makes strange things happen. I get the magical part of it too...somehow. The same thing happened with Harry and Parseltongue earlier this month, and it made me an actual Parselmouth, can talk to snakes and everything, which people like Luna who just learned the language can't do. It's neat."

"...Okay, that's just fascinating. Isn't omniglottalism mediated through mind magic? Because, I thought Parseltongue was blood magic, it's hereditary. You could probably design a blood alchemy ritual to make someone a Parselmouth — you'd need the blood of a Parselmouth on hand, but it shouldn't be difficult — but is it even possible to just copy it with mind magic?"

"I don't know any better than you, Maïa. I thought it was impossible too. The thunderbird one could maybe be explained, since it's obviously some kind of mind or soul magic or something, but the Parseltongue, yeah, I got nothing."

"I would say we could look into it, but has anyone modeled how omniglottalism works?"

"Not really, no. Translation charms and such were developed out of experiments to try to figure it out, but they never actually did. Oh, hey! It might be possible to instantly give magical languages to people who aren't omniglots, if you inverted the determiners in a translation charm. And if the target was an omniglot who spoke the magical language in question, obviously. The intent to enforce comprehension might trigger that weird feedback loop thing — I'm pretty sure that's why it happens, the intent to enforce comprehension running into the intent to acquire comprehension, feeding into each other."

"Well, that's certainly possible, assuming none of the operators cancel out — which, since neither omnigottalism or Parseltongue and whatever thunderbirds do have been fully modeled, there would be no way of knowing until we, just, tried it. And I'm not really sure if it's a good idea to go experimenting with mind-mediated magics to induce interactions that haven't been modeled, that sounds like it could go very badly. Er, not to mention, if it's targeting you, your ridiculous instinctive occlumency would block it."

"I'm sure I could talk Eris into relaxing it long enough, in service of spreading magical languages around. Especially if it's just with you, to see if we can get it to work, she likes you."

"Er..."

"I already did half the work on the translation charm at Zee's wedding, to help Harry speak French—"

"What? How did you pull that off?"

"Inverted a translation charm to get it to draw information from a third party, it was neat. Anyway, we'd just need to isolate the source referent string and flip it, then rebalance the rest of the charm so it will stay inverted. It'll be a bit more tricky than the arithmancy I did over antipasti, but I already did half the work."

"You did the arithmancy to invert a translation charm...at the dinner table...at Ms. Zabini's wedding reception."

"Sure. Don't lie, I know you would rather play with neat magic than suffer small talk."

"Well, okay, you're probably right about that, I was just thinking, if we set a downtap to draw away the interference, we could maybe prevent anything going catastrophically wrong, but it would have to be tuned to mind magic, and I'm not sure how we would—"

"Girls?" Hermione jumped at her mum's voice — she'd somehow forgotten her parents were there. Both of them were watching them with rather wary expressions, Dad somewhat more distracted by his cooking, Mum with an obvious shade of amusement. "Were you planning on actually leaving on your date at some point, or are you just going to stand in the kitchen talking magic theory all night?"

Hermione's face abruptly felt very warm.


It didn't take Hermione very long to realise she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

In the end, they did decide to go the opposite end of the planet on a date. Which, sure, sounded absurd, but exactly how the laws around international travel worked got very complicated once magic was involved. (Hermione had brought her papers just in case, but that was probably just paranoia.) Getting there was shockingly quick and simple, considering it was literally fourteen thousand kilometres, but magic was absurd like that.

The first step, Lyra side-alonged her — apparently Lyra had keyed herself through their anti-apparation wards, which Hermione hadn't realised but wasn't surprised by — straight to the portal room at Ancient House. Hermione had been to Ancient House, the oldest property of the House of Black on the Islands and long the heart of their family, a fair few times by now, though she'd only ever been to the portal room and the library (along with the neighbouring bedrooms and parlours where Cherri had stashed the rest of the Black collection that didn't fit in the one room). The portal room itself was simple and empty, granite tiles and wood panels, distinguished only by the metallic runes embedded into the walls and, much more recently, by sheets of silk hung like tapestries, glimmering with inlaid metal threads silver and gold.

Hermione still wasn't sure how the hell Lyra had gotten these things to work. She had gone over the modifications Lyra had made to the script — portals usually had to be anchored to the local ambient magic, but Lyra had gotten around that somehow, her mobile portals essentially floating on...an inverted dispersal ward? like the one she'd put around Hermione's house to fool the Ministry's magic sensors? Except, instead of neutralising the magic in the area and dispersing it into the surrounding ambient magic, it instead gathered ambient magic, and neutralised it into something the portal enchantment could use...she thought? maybe? Comparatively speaking, no matter how esoteric and novel it was, Hermione understood exploiting alchemy to tweak the balance of the enchantment and stop the sheets from bursting into flames far better — she couldn't actually do any alchemy herself, but it wasn't that conceptually strange. The enchanting work, on the other hand, that was ridiculous.

Especially ridiculous because Hermione hadn't even realised Lyra had been working on it at all, she'd just pulled a completed portal out of her pocket to move their little illicit library to Ancient House early in the spring, with absolutely no fanfare. She'd given Hermione her notes on it, but with how casual she was... Hermione wasn't certain she realised just how impressive these things were. She could probably use it as a Mastery project, she'd just have to write it up into something she could submit, and find some panel somewhere that would actually take her seriously.

It was still strange to think that Lyra could just go out and get what was essentially the equivalent of a postgraduate science degree if she felt like it.

Hermione was working on it, though! Since this sort of thing was Lyra's particular area of expertise, they did end up talking about runic magic rather a lot, and she had gotten a fair bit of practice in lately. Significant portions of the Black library were cursed — for some reason, Lyra never had given a reasonable explanation for that. Lyra had taught her the detection charms to figure out what was cursed and a couple analysis charms to determine what kind of curse it was (some only affected muggles, after all, so could safely be ignored), and she would often break curses for her if she asked and the book (or the curse) seemed interesting enough, sometimes she wouldn't, either uninterested in that particular book or distracted by one of the who knew how many projects she had going at all times. Hermione had read up a bit on basic cursebreaking over the last year — it was a NEWT topic, but Lyra had been demonstrating on the regular since September just how useful a skill it could be, so she'd been looking into it — and she had gotten to a point she could analyse complex enchantments and crack simple curses on her own.

She was pretty good at it, actually.

She'd been concerned, before, that so much of magical skill seemed to be based on performative talent, the speed and grace and precision of direct spellwork. And while Hermione was good at that sort of thing, she wasn't great at it — her only significant advantage was in being able to learn a lot of spells quickly, and actually understanding the theory behind them, but sometimes that just wasn't enough. She was well aware that Harry proved himself the better spellcaster every time he actually put effort into it, and he hardly even seemed to know what he was doing when he did, he just...did it. (Which was so not fair, Hermione actually had to work to get results like that, talented lucky bastard.) Hermione was well aware that, when it came to wizardry, she was mediocre, and would fall behind quickly as her peers further developed.

But witchcraft? Hermione was starting to realise that was a completely different story. It was becoming quite clear that the more methodical, cerebral sort of magic was just were her talents lay. The logic behind witchcraft could be fuzzy and...poetic at times, but that made perfect sense — the meaning was defined and the intent directed by the human mind, and anyone who'd studied anything about psychology at all realised consciousness was a tangled mess of associations and biases conscious and unconscious all wrapped up in each other. It only made sense magic that exploited human language and human action would be just as symbolic and metaphorical as the human experience itself.

Potions were peculiar looked at too literally, seeming random and just surreal at times, but there was a metaphorical sort of logic to it, one that could be decoded with a little bit of thought. Ritual, though she'd only read about them so far, seemed much the same, just on a larger scale. (Lyra had once pointed out that potions were essentially just a special class of low ritual, and everything had suddenly made a whole lot more sense.)

Piecing together bits of symbolic meaning to pick apart how an enchantment operated, or even designing new ones of her own? Once she understood the mechanics of how it worked, it was easy. No more complicated than learning a new language, really. In a way, warding and enchanting (and cursebreaking) were rather like an odd combination of maths, poetry, and just holding a conversation, once she understood the symbols and the patterns the basics of how it worked had fallen right into place.

Which wasn't to say she was nearly as good at it as Lyra was. Lyra had far more experience with this stuff than she did, had intuition developed from repetition for things Hermione was still learning for the first time. But she was learning, and learning quickly. If nothing else, spending so much time around Lyra was going to turn her into one hell of an enchantress, whether she wanted to be or not.

(And she did want to, runic magic was bloody fascinating.)

But that she didn't entirely understand how these bloody portals worked didn't mean she couldn't use them just fine. A moment to find the one with a little slip of paper reading "America — Zee's flat" pinned to it, a quick charm to activate the script and a few seconds to wait for it to charge, and she was walking through a swirl of colour and motion, and she was in California. Because magic was just neat like that.

On the way out of the spacious, luxurious flat, they bumped into both Harry and Sirius Black, which were both awkward for their own reasons. Harry was clearly quite uncomfortable with the fact that she and Lyra were dating now — which was hypocritical of him, what with...whatever was going on with Blaise sodding Zabini, he had no right to talk — and while he didn't actually say anything about it, he kept giving them strange, uneasy looks. Sirius Black was equally terrible, but not because he clearly disapproved and was trying to keep his mouth shut about it, no, if anything the loud, flamboyant man seemed to think it was hilarious, just joking and teasing, a brilliant grin on his face that looked eerily familiar (apparently it was just a Black thing), an eager light in his eyes, as though Lyra Black and Hermione Granger going out on a date made his bloody day.

(Did he know, about where Lyra had come from? It would explain some of the subtext, and he called her Bella...)

Which was, just, offensive — she didn't at all like the suggestion that the two of them together was something to laugh about — Hermione had to fight to hold her tongue. She had never met Sirius Black before, not really, and it probably wouldn't make a great first impression to yell at him for being...such a dick. Not that he was making a good impression either, but... Well, what with the vassalage thing, she was unsettlingly aware of the fact that Sirius was technically kind of sort of her Lord now (or would be soon, anyway), and he probably couldn't help it, she was certain a decade in Azkaban must have exacerbated his baseline Black insanity, he was Harry's godfather (which was a huge deal in magical culture, Sirius was essentially his father now), and he was practically the only family that Harry or Lyra had (save for her sisters, but that was complicated), and it was just...

Uncomfortable, it was seriously bloody uncomfortable. As far as she was concerned, they could not get out of there quickly enough.

Thankfully, Lyra didn't seem to appreciate it either. Which, that was somewhat reassuring, that Lyra didn't think it was something to joke around about. If not for the same reasons — she seemed more confused and exasperated than anything — but it was something, at least.

And then they just...walked around the nearby magical settlement. Not that that was a bad thing, certainly not — Hermione realised her exposure to the magical world in general was still rather minimal, and she knew almost nothing about the Americans at all. Well, she knew the Federation, the equivalent to the ICW over here, sponsored Miskatonic in a relationship very similar to the Ministry and the Department of Mysteries, but she knew very little about the magical nations over here, she meant. Not that very many people in Europe were that familiar with the Americans — there had been an enormous and seriously bloody war to force the natives to comply with the Statute of Secrecy back in the 17th Century, and to this day many people over here were still deeply bitter about it.

The American Federation was, in fact, openly anti-Statutarian. It made any dealings with the Americans in an official capacity...complicated.

She hadn't really known what to expect, but the bustling magical town Lyra brought her to still came as a surprise. It was just... If she had to guess, she had an unconscious assumption that it would seem...well, Western. After all, before she'd known about magic, "America" to her had meant the United States and all the other modern countries over here, all of which had either been extensively colonised or directly founded by Europeans (or both) — as much as some Americans might like to claim some unique identity, the culture over here had always struck her as inextricably European in character. Canadians were sometimes very English (or French), Americans, in the sense of people from the United States, felt very German to her, though with more than a bit of stereotypical French self-righteousness, the rest of the continent had a lot of Spain or Greece or even Ireland in them (which was odd, she couldn't put her finger on why she got that impression). The details might vary, but it was all very familiar in the broad strokes, like the same furniture painted in slightly different colours.

This, however, was completely unfamiliar.

For one thing, it was very green. The town seemed to be somewhat more spread out than Hermione was used to, buildings marked off by twisting rivers of trees and plants of all shapes and sizes, occasionally split with a narrow band of fresh water gently flowing toward the bay. Hermione had been baffled at first, but eventually realised these bands of green were mostly composed of edible plants, vegetables and grains and fruits — they were gardens, in the less modern suburban sense of the word, the town apparently grew their own food inside the town itself. Which...she supposed that would be more efficient, if they had the space for it. If nothing else, they didn't have to worry about transportation and storage and such nearly as much.

Reflexively, Hermione started picking over the logistical problems such a strategy might present, before realising most of them would be trivial to solve with magic on hand. Obviously.

There were denser spots, of course, markets and larger housing blocks, these areas of the town much more colourful, a rainbow of paints and ceramics, beaded curtains blowing in the breeze off the sea. There were hints of Far Eastern influence here and there — most obviously, Hermione noticed Chinese signage in a few places, but some of the decoration also felt vaguely Asian, in a way subtle enough she couldn't quite put her finger on what gave her that impression — but the overbearing feeling was one completely foreign. The architecture was rather...odd, much more open than she would expect, with a lot of curving lines and foyers and seating areas unenclosed by solid walls. The market especially, everything from sizeable, professional-looking shops to scrappy little booths, most only had three walls (only two at the corners), some didn't even have ceilings — the ones that did usually had another shop, just, perched on top of it, which, the building materials were rather flimsy-looking wood, in some case the thin ceilings held up with a handful of simple stakes, leaving the whole haphazard structure looking very precarious, there had to be all kinds of enchantments on these things just holding it up.

It looked very dangerous to the muggle eye, like a stiff breeze would bring the whole thing crumbling under its own weight, but it certainly felt sturdy enough. They dropped in on a bookstore in one of these market blocks — Hermione only half-understood Lyra asking for directions, apparently she'd picked up some Spanish over the summer — which had required going up two flights of stairs, then picking through a couple halls to find the place, deep in the middle of the thing. (It seemed the building had accumulated store by store, the lower down and closer to the centre the older it was.) They had left little hallways between the places, and those were...interesting. There were drawings and such all over the walls, some of which looked orderly enough to be official but much of it was obviously graffiti, bushes and vines and flowers occasionally sprouting here and there — those had to be placed intentionally and with some magical tricks, there simply wasn't room for their roots — something worked into the ceiling that glowed a mild, pleasant blue, illuminating things will enough in the absence of sunlight, but softly, nowhere glaring.

The bookstore itself was very pretty — the bare wood of the structure and the shelves and such coated in layers of cloth in moody blacks and reds, the soft blue light just intense enough to comfortably read without straining the eyes, a soft sort of calm she only found in her parents' library or their dorm after Lyra had split off their half — but something of a disappointment, in the end. See, it was surprisingly large, they had quite a lot of books spread across dozens and dozens of shelves, but very, very few of them were in languages she could read. Most of them, Hermione couldn't even read the script they were in. The greatest fraction of their selection were in a smattering of native languages, their written form completely new to her, or in Chinese; a smaller section were written in the alphabet she was most familiar with, a roughly even mix of English and Spanish, with a small smattering of French and German and Latin.

When she thought about it, this did make sense. The Europeans and the Asians had worked together to coerce the Americans into accepting the Statute, the former operating out of the east coast and the latter the west — there were enclaves of significant European influence in New England, but they'd never gotten as far as California. As part of the deal made at the end of the war, the Americans retained control over their lands and their people, but they did remain open to refugees from both the West and the East, mages who for whatever reason would rather make a new life for themselves in a foreign land than remain in their home countries. (Miskatonic was the most infamous example, originally founded by European mages who'd defected to the Americans during the war.) So, unlike on the muggle side, native culture was still dominant, hence the completely unfamiliar writing, but there would be a large Asian minority in the west, hence the Chinese characters. Obviously, the vast majority of their muggleborns these days would be English or Spanish speakers, so they had some books in these languages, but true muggleborns were a very small percentage of the magical population, and in this environment it only made sense they would have to learn the local tongue if they wanted to integrate, so they had little need to keep books in English around.

Hermione was quite grateful magical Britain actually spoke English — it hadn't occurred to her until just now, but that hadn't necessarily been a given. Most of the British purebloods were descendants of old Celtic clans that had lived on the islands since long before the Germanic tribes that had eventually become the English had arrived, and she knew from History class they had been slower to adopt the new language and customs than muggle history suggested. Hell, the official language, the one used in the Wizengamot and the Ministry, had been...not the Welsh she knew but a language closely related to it all the way up until 1764, when they'd finally adopted English. Many mages still spoke Welsh and Irish at home, they just used English as the common language. With how bloody stubborn purebloods were, she really was quite fortunate she hadn't had to learn a new language on top of everything else.

In the end, Hermione did buy something, an overview of American warding techniques that was actually in English. But it was still rather disappointing.

Now, they were sitting in a restaurant of some kind. It wasn't quite the sort of thing Hermione was familiar with — it was sort of a buffet thing, she guessed? Though that wasn't quite right. They were outside (right in front of a sizeable building, where she assumed they would retreat if it weren't quite so nice at the moment), seated at a large, curving table, surrounded by Americans. They didn't order food — which was fortunate, since it was altogether likely Hermione and the servers wouldn't share a language — but just wandered over to a nearby (open-air) kitchen, a couple tables, raw fruits and vegetables and a variety of dishes that were largely unfamiliar laid out waiting. Patrons could make requests directly of the cooks, apparently, but they didn't appear to speak English, so Hermione hadn't bothered. Lyra did ask a few questions for both of them, awkwardly poking at the native language, just asking what things were.

It wasn't a bad place, exactly. She meant, it was sort of noisy, but the food was fine, foreign but flavourful and interesting. (The drink Lyra had ended up pouring for her after a brief discussion was very good, sharp and tangy with a subtle hint of honey, but she also suspected it was alcoholic, so she was trying not to have too much.) And, well, yes, noisy, with people pressing in on all sides, but they weren't getting too close, at least, and Lyra had cast a paling to cut it down a bit.

She didn't silence them entirely, though — as they sat eating and talking, Lyra would occasionally trail off, staring off toward one conversation or another. As Hermione understood it, she was trying to relax her god-given occlumency so she could properly pick up languages. She'd been born an omniglot, but... Hermione would say it was unfortunate that what Eris had done to her head blocked it off, but she was certain Lyra valued being immune to the imperius more than not having to struggle to cheat at languages. Whatever she was trying was a new trick, reverse-engineering what Harry had down to accidentally give her Parseltongue, and she still wasn't very good at it yet. Hence getting distracted.

(Omniglottalism really was quite fascinating, when she thought about it. Apparently, if it were working properly, Lyra should be slowly absorbing the local language just by sitting nearby while it was being used. That was just... How did that work, even?)

It was in one of these silences, Lyra blankly staring at strangers, that Hermione realised she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

She'd thought she was, before...sort of. But she was starting to wonder if she understood what she wanted, what other people meant with this sort of thing, nearly as well as she thought they had. She meant...what was different about today than...any other time they'd... They'd run off to Hogsmeade and London several times, and...

What exactly made this a date?

Not that she... She meant, she wasn't disappointed, or annoyed, or anything, she just... She was just confused, she guessed. She'd thought she'd feel different, or that it would be different, and...when she thought about it, that was a kind of silly assumption. It wasn't like she'd expected Lyra to be particularly...romantic, or whatever, and to be completely honest Hermione didn't think she'd know what to do with herself if she were.

She didn't think she'd known what she was getting into, when she'd decided they were dating now. She'd thought things would be different, and...well, really, she didn't know why. Why should things change much at all?

Honestly, she wasn't sure she wanted it to. She liked their relationship the way it was, for the most part — Lyra could be a bit more forthcoming about things, but she'd been getting gradually better about that for a while now, it was a work in progress.

Hermione was starting to think that she was just...weird. Like, sitting here watching Lyra stare into space attempting to magically absorb a new language, she was getting the strange feeling that... Well, she thought that if she had a choice between, like, the normal person romance...whatever, that kind of relationship, or someone who was brilliant and interesting that she could talk about and experiment with magic with, and occasionally snog when she felt like, she'd probably pick the latter. And she didn't know how to feel about that.

She remembered how it'd felt, that day, when she'd just out and kissed Lyra, because she'd written a book for her, and... She didn't think that was an entirely normal thing to be, like, this person is absolutely beautiful and I need to be kissing them right now, that was just sort of strange. And, honestly, most of the times she got random...er, affectionate urges, she guessed was a way to say it, most of the time she felt like that was because Lyra had just said or done something completely brilliant, and...

Well, Hermione was quickly coming to the conclusion that she had no idea what she was doing, and that she was a very, very strange person. But she was okay with that. Mostly.

Lyra had been out of it for a while this time, so Hermione (forcing down a sudden flare of awkwardness, because stop it) reached under the table, found Lyra's hand in her lap, slipped her fingers through hers. Lyra started slightly, turned to blink at her. "Yeah?"

"I suppose the cheating at languages isn't going well? You checked out for a while there."

"Oh, er, no, not really." For a second, Lyra stared at her, eyes slightly narrowed, apparently considering something. Then she shrugged, turning back to her food — and pointedly not extricating her hand from Hermione's. (At least, Hermione felt it was pointed, but she could be imagining...whatever she even thought she meant by that.) "It hasn't been going so well in general, because Eris doesn't do anything by halves and mind magic is hard, but it doesn't help that American languages are also just...really bloody weird. I mean, they just... Verbs. That's all I have to say on the matter, verbs."

Hermione felt her lips twitch. "Maybe starting with something more familiar would have been easier."

"Well, maybe, but if it were too familiar I might not even notice it happening, and that's not helpful at all. Though I suppose it couldn't go too badly — it's not like I can catastrophically fuck it up and make myself intangible, or anything like that."

"How did that even happen, anyway? I mean, I doubt you were trying to do that on purpose."

"No, I wasn't trying to— Well, I guess that's debatable, actually, I don't know if the obscurity thing would also make me intangible or not. But anyway, it's this thing Eris does, to make herself imperceptible while manifesting on this plane...which, now that I think about it, is really weird — you'd think she could, just, un-manifest and project her voice and then re-manifest...but apparently that hadn't even occurred to her? Which is kind of weird, but okay. Oh, wait, that was sarcasm."

"Focus, Lyra. This is a shadow magic thing, right?"

"Yeah, isn't that obvious? I...did give you that treatise Other Bella did on shadow magic, right, that's general enough I think you can extrapolate most of the principles."

"I never did get all the way through that. Oh, don't give me that look — you handed it over in the middle of exam season, I was busy!" Which was only half the reason she'd put it off. It was just... It was one thing, reading the results of experiments that never should have been done in the Arthra because, well, whether she read about them or not would have absolutely no impact on whether researchers at Miskatonic continued their work. (And the vast majority of the research they did wasn't nearly as bad as British propaganda suggested, anyway.) It was quite another to realise that you were starting to think of one of the most violent war criminals in modern history as a respectable, academic-minded magical theorist.

"You didn't need to be busy, you could have not revised at all and you would have gotten Os in everything."

"That isn't the point."

"Because I'm totally right, and you know it."

"Shut up, Lyra. But anyway, do you think there's anything available on the topic that's not so...dense? I mean, I doubt I'll ever be able to shadow-walk myself, but there's enchanting you can do with shadow magic, and at the very least I'll be able to understand what's going on when you talk about it."

"There might be something in the Black library. I know Ptolemy did a survey of old Egyptian shadow magic...but you don't read Greek, so—"

"Wait, Ptolemy of Heliopolis? Do you have a copy of his classification of ritual magics?"

"Oh! Yeah, probably. That one would definitely be in Greek, though, I'd have to translate it — it'd take some work, you don't want translation errors when dealing with ritual magic. But I'll look into it. Why?"

"I was just wondering, I'd read a bit about elemental interactions in weatherworking, and I was thinking that..."


Oh, poor Hermione, thinking she's much weirder than she actually is — imagine, being physically attracted to someone because they've just done something you find seriously impressive! And they've done it specifically for you! (Honestly, that girl...)

Wandering around talking about magical theory sounds like a perfectly legitimate date to me. Though my first date with Lysandra also involved wandering around talking about magical theory, so I may be biased. —Leigha

And in our case, it was even worse, because we were talking about magic theory in fanfiction. At least for Lyra and Hermione, magic is actually real. Such nerds, we are.

Anyway, Hermione is awkward and adorable, one more summer scene to go, woo. —Lysandra