The office sporting the number 516 was oddly located. It was stuck between conference rooms in a way that almost suggested it had been purposefully isolated. Harry half-expected to find a sober office with a computer, some papers and a bunch of books. Instead, he was faced with a very large room – it had probably also been intended for conferences at some point – with no chair. There was a small desk in a corner facing a window, a blackboard occupying a whole wall, covered in incomprehensible symbols, diagrams, letters from every alphabet – was that hebrew? They used the hebraic alphabet in physics? – with subscripts and exponents from every other. There were piles of books arranged randomly on the ground, and sheets of paper everywhere. On the ground, under the desk... Over and under the piles of books Three bins were already full of crumpled papers and empty pens.
The papers were more or less covered with more script, in every colour known to man. Even parts of the walls around the huge blackboard had chalk writings on them, as if she just hadn't bothered stopping her line when she ran out of space. Some parts of the blackboard – and one chunk of wall – had a large "DO NOT ERASE" warning written of them in unfriendly capital letters. There were more than one sheet of paper just stapled to the walls, and to the chock-full wall-sized library facing the blackboard from the other side of the room.
Hermione was on her knees, writing madly across five or six sheets of paper, cursing continuously.
"...Bugger the strigiformes! Fuck the Afroaves – no, you know what? Fuck all those ssstupid, stupid avian dinosaurs with their... their beaks and their f... fucking feathers and their fucking flying around like the world belongs to them!" as she shouted in exasperation, she straightened up, staring outraged at her blackboard, her furious eyes jumping from line to line "Twats! Who opened my wind- oh hello, Harry."
As she saw him, the white glow of rage in her pupils diminished, her expression softened from anger to awkwardness, and her hair seemed to settle in her hair band. Almost as if it had been electrified until then, and suddenly powered down.
"You're way scarier by day... If I had to guess, I'd say you need a break."
She sighed and looked at her wristwatch. "Probably... Wait a second."
She stomped to her desk, extracted her handbag from under it, took out her lipstick and wrote on the window before her desk.
To the cunt who opened this window:
You are a cunt.
As she undid her hair and prepared to attack them with a hairbrush lying on her desk, she narrowed her eyes, pointed to a tree not far away and said through the window:
"And you... I see you over there, looking at me. You are also a cunt."
Hearing the pure hatred in her tone, he suddenly understood how Americans felt about that particular word. She drew a few red arrows pointing to the window and left the door open as they exited, so that a person's gaze would be attracted to the insults from the corridor.
"So... I surmise your office is not normally in that state?"
She didn't blush like a maiden, but her expression didn't do a very good job at hiding her embarrassment.
"Well... Admittedly it can get pretty chaotic when I work on too many things at once... But at least I have a system, you know? I'm told it can be pretty overwhelming from the outside, but... No. Not to that extent."
The cafeteria wasn't far away. "Do you need to warm it up?" She asked, gesturing in the direction of a few microwave ovens, which he operated as she collected the cutlery and plates.
"I thought your work would require a computer"
She took an air of exaggerated pride "I don't need a computer: I am the computer!"
"She said, with pieces of her metaphorical hard drive still stuck to her shoe"
She checked her shoe soles and shot him a half-amused, half-annoyed glance "Also I can't use them"
ding, the oven chimed. Harry approached with his home-cooked meal and began to serve them. "How come?"
She shrugged "No computer has ever worked for more than a week under my supervision. The IT guy here was baffled. He's started kissing his pendant crucifix every time he sees me. I think at first it was a joke but now... Even the offices around mine have been affected. In the end they just stuffed me in a room with no computers around and I'm tacitly forbidden from touching anything with micro-electronics in it." She paused and looked at her plate, marvelling at the flavour she had absentmindedly tasted. "This is amazing..."
"Thank you."
"I'm serious, you should work in a way better restaurant than that."
"Thanks... erm... I've had a lot of practice... " During his upbringing – or lack thereof – necessity had taught him how to cook, but not how to take a compliment properly.
"But anyway... Is that why you were standing away from the microwaves?" She nodded. "That sounds like a pretty serious handicap in your line of work... How do you write your papers then? Or... plot graphs and... do big calculations; you really are a genius, aren't you?"
"In order, yes but so's being a woman, I write them by hand and have a student type them up, and yes, absolutely, I am a genius, thank you very much. How about you? How does a fine young man like yourself end up serving fish and chips to defenceless maidens in seedy alleyways in the dead of night?"
"I have a passion for cardiovascular disease. So it was either that or heart surgeon. In the end, I chose the less lucrative one: didn't seem right, making that much money on such a grave thing. Also – on a more mundane note – I was broke, so medical school was out of the question and I needed a job..." Something struck him "Hang on... Earlier you said... Did you say 'strigiformes'? when I came in? That's owls right?" Her anger flashed back on for a second, but she calmed herself more or less.
"Yes. An owl – of all things – entered through an open window, knocked down my books, messed my papers up, and I fortunately drove it off before it crapped on my desk."
"Huh... Did it... Did it leave a letter?"
She visibly didn't know what to make of the question "...Excuse me?"
"N-Never mind."
"No, I want to know. A letter for whom?"
"I don't know, it's just... I saw an owl on my windowsill a few days ago, and there was a letter on my bed... And I'm pretty sure my window had been closed when I left... And the letter was addressed to me, and it looked like it had been written with a quill– stop staring like I'm schizophrenic, please."
"Well, have you been checked? It could also be chronic hallucinatory psychosis."
"I do have a good memory..."
"People with CHP have good memory?"
"As I remember it, yes. So either they do or they just remember that they do." She smiled at his Carrollian logic; he continued "I'll show you the letter if you want. It was quite mysterious... Shall we go get naked and experiment?"
She stood up "Let's. But first, tea."
Harry was sitting on a lab bench, topless, with a bunch of sensors glued to his torso, arms and head. There was a bunch of balls sitting in a basket next no him. They were made out of a semi-transparent plastic which looked like frosted glass, and seemed to have something shiny at their core. Harry was kind of cold, but his cup of tea warmed his hands pleasantly. Hermione seemed to be arguing with one of her student because she shouldn't be in the room where the data acquisition apparatus was: it was full of computers... The room in question was behind a window pane, and he couldn't hear everything, but she didn't seem to trust him to perform the measurement properly. He could probably use those balls to juggle while waiting... He'd do it over the bench, so that if Hermione spoke to him, he wouldn't drop them from too high. They didn't seem to be very close to an agreement anyway.
He laid down his mug and grabbed a few balls, closed his eyes and started. He was wrong: before long, they'd stop talking. He thought they had just started the acquisition and left. So that was the experiment, then? She'd probably send her student in to stop the acquisition and print the results when the experiment was over... As his concentration expanded, he perceived more and more of his environment. There was a videocamera filming him from behind the glass... Hermione was waiting in the hallway. The sensors did get in the way a bit, but he managed around them. Soon, he was even throwing in advanced moves; he included some contact juggling, making a ball roll across his arms or torso before throwing it back up, balancing another on his forehead, and letting it roll down to catch it between his cheek and shoulder. Hermione was periodically checking a mechanical stopwatch; she had gotten pretty far, so her presence wouldn't interfere with the experiment. He felt no one was watching, so he let himself go a bit. He stood up and started to use his full body. He remembered his legs didn't have any sensors, and the camera was still watching... So he sat back down. He wondered if he was supposed to continue for that long. The student was approaching. He entered the room, and Harry didn't interrupt himself.
"Hmm... so, apparently this is exactly what Dr Granger wants to study..." He had an Indian accent, "Do you need anything, Harry?"
"No, just... Should I stay seated?"
"You can move around, but keep the juggling to your upper body as much as you can."
"Oh. I used my feet a few time already."
"It's okay if it's only a few times."
"Cool. Then I'm okay."
He had kept his concentration and eyes closed for the whole exchange. Even though his moves had gotten simpler while he talked. He heard Hermione click on her stopwatch when the student left. So that was part of it? She'd noticed her uniquely deleterious influence on his juggling too, then... He wouldn't have thought it warranted such a fuss... But, if he had to guess, she'd probably walk in after a similar duration. He had a while to show off a bit, for the camera. Then, just as he guessed, she entered the room and spoke:
"Hello, Harry. So... Are you going to–"
Everything crumbled. He missed all five catches, and all five balls dropped to the ground. It was pretty noisy.
"… drop everything again. Yes."
He opened his eyes, she gestured to her student in the computer room as she clicked on her stopwatch one last time. The printer began whirring soon after, and Harry started his inquiry into what had just happened.
"So... you're working on juggling in the end... As it applies to human-machine interactions?"
"Right... no. I'll tell you as soon as I got the results. It might just be nothing. A fool's errand... so I didn't want to..." she lifted her gaze from her notebook, where she was still scribbling unreadable lines. "Well I didn't want to sound like a nut-job without proof, but after your owl story I feel pretty confident."
"Do you need another data point?"
She considered it.
"Nah, I think this one'll do, improvised though it may have been. If worst comes to worst we can discuss starting over; for now you can get dressed if you like."
She collected her papers and they got back to the hell-scape of her office. As he followed her in the corridors, she was coursing through the results. Looking at long tables of numbers followed by graphs, and trajectories, and commenting them colourfully under her breath.
"Bollocks... Complete and utter bollocks. Pffh- What? Now that's just not even close... Come on! Who'd believe that? Okay so it looks like that, but –" She flipped a page, and looked at a graph "And again, good sir, to that I can only respond 'bollocks'! Now, that's just insulting..."
They had walked to her desk, and she violently laid her pile of papers on it. Harry opened his mouth, but before he had a chance to speak, she shot an accusatory finger to a trajectory.
"See this? This should be a near perfect parabola. It's not even close, it's skewed, and the acceleration is nowhere near constant. It spikes at... 12.54 metres per second per second, and the lowest value is – that's just ridiculous – 5.6 metres per second squared Mr – What's your surname?"
"Evans, but if you'll just–"
"5.6 metres per second squared, Mr Evans. Do you know what it means?" She was scolding him for something now, apparently.
"...I don't. But I think you should-"
"I should nothing Mr. Evans." He felt like a teacher had caught him cheating on a test. She pointed to another graph "Also, see that? That's – not– possible!" Her finger tapped the pile of paper with each word for emphasis as she reached for a pen and scribbled around the graph "With our equipment, it should be like that, at the very most. See? Nowhere close! Now. What it means, Mr Evans, is that you don't know how to juggle at all."
"Certainly, but would you – wait what?"
"You don't know how to juggle Mr. Evans. What you're doing is not juggling; it's telekinesis."
Harry didn't know what to respond to that. There was a long pause. In the end he thought that, if nothing else, he at least had to point out the other weird thing. He approached the desk.
"Excuse me, do you mind?"
"What?" she still sounded inexplicably annoyed at him as he brushed past her, lifted her printouts, and extracted something from under them to show it to her.
It was a yellowish parchment envelope, on which what could only be a quill had written in beautiful calligraphy "to Dr. Hermione Granger".