Chapter One
Hermione Granger was seven years old when she made the educated decisions that not only were witches far superior to simpering princesses, but that she was, indeed, one of them.
In her study of the fairy tales her parents read with her, things like Cinderella, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, she found that she was not satisfied by the lives these princesses seemed to have; the first had started off by being abused and neglected by her entire family, and had never rebelled against them or done anything of her own accord to openly defy them. She had let them treat her awfully, until one day a 'fairy godmother' with a magic wand (an aspect that served only to convince Hermione that the character was more of a witch than a fairy), had appeared to sort out her problems for her by making her physically attractive enough to make a prince fall in love with and save her, one who after spending an entire evening dancing with her, failed to ask her name or remember anything about the 'beautiful' appearance that had supposedly attracted him to her.
Hermione easily found several faults with that first story. To begin with, the supposed main character, Cinderella, was portrayed as pathetic and having no real personality or character traits other than being kind, meek and beautiful. Whilst Hermione liked to believe that, if given the chance, she would certainly be kind to those around her, she had no illusions over the fact that she was neither pretty, nor meek. In fact, her fellow students often bullied her over her buck-teeth and big hair, not to mention her 'big mouth that she never seemed to be able to keep shut in class'.
But even more than the princess' character, Hermione disapproved of the fact that she was just hoping to be saved by a man, albeit a prince, and from the sound of the story, a pretty dimwitted one too, if the only way he could think to find her was by making every single woman in his kingdom try on a shoe.
She found that she reacted very similarly to the second fairy tale, probably because it seemed to have a very similar plot line: a princess was in trouble because she was being abused by her step-mother, a witch, and so ran away to a cottage in the woods with seven men, where the only way she could prove herself useful was not through any sort of intellect, but rather her proficiency at cooking and cleaning (it apparently seemed that, as a woman, if you were not either evil, magical, or married to a wealthy man, than the only thing you were needed for involved saucepans and mops). That, however was not the end of the story, because the princess just had to naively fall into some sort of life-threatening trap, otherwise some random prince wouldn't be able to save her from it, would he?
It was therefore an easy and quick decision for Hermione to treat princesses in general with disdain, and to gain respect for the witches, though many of them -fairy godmothers not withstanding- were portrayed as evil. Despite that, it seemed clear to the seven year old, that being a witch meant that you were a lot less likely to have to rely on a man (or anybody for that matter), and that you seemed to have the right to be powerful, if alone and hated.
Hermione decided she didn't mind the compromise. At school, she was already very much alone, and though she knew her parents loved her, she had started feeling distant to them long ago (at least for someone who had been alive for less than a decade), even more so since she had discovered, and made the decision to hide, that she seemed to be able to do things that logically made a very small amount of sense to her. She didn't know how she could do them, only that she could.
As for being hated, the girl could not remember a time she had not been bullied, either for her looks, her bookishness, or some other petty grievance entirely. It had only seemed to get worse when what she had cautiously dubbed as her magic started to fight back against them for her.
It had been scary then, at the beginning, when she wasn't sure what was happening, before she had so painstakingly started to learn how to control it; bit by bit molding it into what she wanted it to do, so that it would not surface uncontrollably every time she was emotional but only when she wanted to change, create or break something.
Admittedly, that was another reason Hermione decided she would rather be a witch than a princess: she already seemed to be one. And that was how, at seven years of age, Hermione Granger discovered she was a witch, began to learn (do a somewhat limited extent) how to control her magic, and came to what she decided was the obvious conclusion that having these powers was certainly a good thing.