Disclaimer: The answer is 42. The question is, what do you get when you multiply six by JK Rowling?

Chapter 7

The equation on the board read x = a/b - (b-c)/b.

"Now, given the rules of symbol manipulation, what is the simplest way to express the value of x?" Professor Vector asked. "Mr. Montague?"

The Slytherin boy thought for a moment. He was pretty bright, but like a majority of the the class, he had been mystified when the numbers vanished from the equations entirely. "A minus c divided by b?" he said uncertainly.

"No, Mr. Montague. Mr. Diggory?"

Cedric didn't look much better off. He scratched a few symbols on his parchment and said, "A minus b minus c divided by b."

"No, that's not it either…Miss Granger!"

"Huh? Oh—a minus b plus c over b," she said quickly, snapping out of her daze.

"Correct," Vector said. "Miss Granger, I'm aware you had Astronomy last night, but I do expect you to stay awake in my class."

"Yes, Professor," she said sheepishly. A few people snickered behind her, and even the other members of her study group looked torn between being amused at her embarrassment and amazed that she could correctly answer a question the rest of them could barely understand without missing a beat, even while she was half asleep.

Hermione had stopped bothering to raise her hand in Arithmancy class pretty quickly, at least when it came to the maths lessons. Sometimes, Professor Vector would call on her after a couple of her classmates had got a question wrong, and sometimes she would just work it out on the board. The trouble was that this wasn't how Hermione was used to doing things, and on Thursdays, it could be difficult to stay awake if she wasn't adequately engaged. The worst part, though, was it wasn't just Thursdays anymore. While the weekly two o'clock jaunts for Astronomy Class affected her worst, she was having trouble sleeping in general, staying up much later than she ought to reading every other night. It had started as an effort to try to learn more about the magical world so she could relate better, but it was fast turning into just a plain old bad habit.

While she was all but lost in thought, Professor Vector worked through the steps of simplifying the equation on the board to demonstrate her answer and then called on Alicia: "Miss Spinnet, would you care to solve this equation for b?"

"Um…" Alicia quickly, but very carefully, scribbled out the steps on her parchment, muttering to herself. "Um, a plus c divided by x plus 1?"

"Correct." Alicia looked quite pleased with herself, as did Hermione, seeing that that she had got the point across to at least one member of her study group. She had to stifle a laugh a moment later when someone asked if it was magic that made the numbers appear and disappear from the equations like that. It was odd the way some people thought about magic when they were raised with it.

It was a chilly, foggy autumn day, the kind of day that made one glad of the thick, woollen Hogwarts robes. Sitting out here in the Viaduct Courtyard, everything was quiet and still. Even the birds were eerily silent in the fog. The loudest sounds were the whisper of autumn leaves and the scratching of her mechanical pencil. Hermione gazed up at the exterior of the castle and carefully sketched what she saw. This would be her first sketch of the outside of the castle to send to her parents, and she could see a fair bit from here: the Entrance Hall, the Great Tower, the whole face of the West Wing, and several of the towers of the East Wing. But she paid particular attention to the Great Tower, the huge column that housed the Grand Staircase.

She had finished breakfast quickly that morning to get an early start exploring the space around largest and most complicated of Hogwarts's one hundred forty-two staircases. She started from the lowest part she could get to, the dungeon level, and worked her way up. There was a large set of doors on the dungeon level that indicated the staircase went lower, but they were locked. She hesitated there, about to head back up, but something stopped her. It wasn't like anyone else followed the rules around here. She approached the doors, checked to make sure no one was around, then discretely drew her wand and whispered, "Alohomora". The doors didn't budge. Oh well, it was worth a try, though it did make her wonder why the third-floor corridor wasn't protected by something stronger. Maybe someone had to feed the dog? She shuddered at the thought.

With three large, interlocking squares of rises and landings, there were lots of different ways for the stairs to go, and some part or other of the Grand Staircase was always in constant motion. She had to stop at one point when the flight she was on changed to connect to the forbidden corridor on the third floor and wait for it to change back. That wasn't a mistake she was going to make again.

She counted the steps going up, making note of each room around the staircase, but as soon as she hit the eighth floor, above the entrance to Dumbledore's office, things started to turn strange. First, the complex interlocking and changing staircases shrank down to a single square. It was still twenty steps on a side, but it later narrowed to fifteen, then ten as she ascended. The rooms off the staircase were also smaller here, and most of them seemed to be unused, while the few that were seemed to be either storage for specialised items or contained unusual experiments, presumably of Dumbledore's, unless any of the other professors worked on such oddities as inside-out clocks and upside-down fountains up here.

On the seventeenth floor, the portraits started to look off. They looked fuzzy and distorted, as if they were copies of copies. The figures no longer spoke to her, and they moved in strange, jerky ways. Around the same time, the neat, cut stones of the walls became more and more irregular until they were little more than a rubble of rocks held together by mortar. A few floors later, the square staircase changed into a tighter spiral staircase, but the steps were crooked, and from counting the steps, she was sure she ought to be about fifty feet above the top of the tower by now. She couldn't see how much higher the stairs went because of how the tower tapered, but she kept seeing a floor or two above her, so she kept going.

There were still rooms up here, if one could call them that. They were all about eight feet wide and between eight and sixteen feet long. She made careful note of each one in her notebook, but she could barely describe them. They looked like random fragments of rooms from elsewhere in the castle: a classroom with only three desks in it, a bedroom with barely enough room for a single bed. Some rooms had copies of the odd experiments she had seen below, but they were broken copies. They might have gears that would jam or pipes that just circled and never attached to anything.

There were little windows, too, windows that appeared to look out from the correct height, well above the roof of the castle. But later, looking up at the tower from the courtyard, she saw something she had never noticed before—row upon row of little windows that grew ever smaller and closer together until she couldn't see them from this distance. It looked as if no matter how strange the castle became, its topology stayed the same: a window on the inside always matched up with a window on the outside. There was something comforting in that thought. At least the castle obeyed some rules.

Oh, but it was strange. As Hermione had climbed even higher, things became even more twisted. The portraits soon looked like moving modern art, and many of them weren't rectangular and were missing parts of their frames. Things started not to be made of the right materials: one stair step might be wood and another steel, and they were sometimes so crooked that she could barely climb them. A few were missing all together. The ever-lit torches that lit the stairs might be made of copper or clay instead of wood, but they still burned, at least the ones that didn't have their heads embedded in the wall. She even passed a suit of armour made of porcelain that had four arms. And there were doors made of glass, doors installed sideways, and doors so oddly shaped that it would be almost impossible to crawl through them. She started avoiding the shadowy corners, since she more than once found them home to overgrown spiders and other bugs, and in one case, a very large bat that thankfully flew down and away.

The tower continued to narrow so that the rooms became only about four feet wide, and by now they were filled with things that made no sense. Here there would be half of a desk, balancing impossibly on two legs; there, a chair with its legs installed upside-down, making it unusable; there again, a whole bed, but made entirely of leather and attached sideways to the wall because it was the only way it would fit. All three might be in the same room if it was long enough, and she was sure that the rooms had taken to changing whenever she turned her back.

Eventually, everything just seemed to melt together. She could feel the magic twisting around her. The stairs were still more or less usable, but everything else—wall, door, room, window, and furniture—all looked like a hodge podge, as if someone had taken bits of everything in the castle and thrown it all in a blender. To the extent that there were rooms, they looked more like closets.

She tried one door that looked like the door to a kitchen cupboard and inside a little cubby-hole found a small window and what she realised was supposed to be a bed. The mattress was the right thickness, but it was the size of an ottoman and had sheets made of very thin layers of stone. In place of a headboard was a fragment of a chair, correctly made of wood, but with its two legs tied into knots. One of the legs ended in a working hot water tap from which the water fell upwards and the other supported a bit of disembodied gear-work that appeared to be cut from portrait canvas and had splashes of colour flickering across it.

From the view out the window, it looked like she was well over four hundred feet in the air, twice the height of the entire castle. There weren't any torches at that height, thankfully. Who knew what would happen if they got thrown in the magical blender? The only light came from windows that cut past the "rooms" directly into the staircase

After looking at the odd bed-thing, she heard a noise up ahead, a high-pitched chirping like a bird song. She moved up toward the noise, but when she did, a mouse the size of an Irish terrier leapt out of one of the cubby-holes, took one look at her, squealed like a pig, and bolted up the stairs.

Hermione ran screaming all the way back down the tower. It was only by a miracle that she didn't trip on any crooked or missing stairs. She was done. There was no top of the tower; she was sure about it now. It just kept climbing higher and higher and got smaller and smaller until it dissolved into atoms and pure magic, and she was sure she would be eaten by a giant cockroach long before then. She didn't stop until she had run down the three hundred feet of steps back to the seventh floor—where she very nearly collided with Albus Dumbledore as he was exiting his office.

She hadn't had cause to meet the headmaster in person, yet, and this was not the way she wanted to do it. This was the Chief Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, and Defeater of Grindelwald for Pete's sake, and here she was, sweating, unkempt, scared out of her wits, and so out of breath that she found herself slumping against the wall to keep her feet.

But Albus Dumbledore only looked concerned at the state of his young student. "Miss Granger?" he asked. "What ever is the matter?"

"I—I was…up there…and there was a…" Hermione tried to articulate between breaths, pointing upward.

The Headmaster's face became more worried. "Up in the tower? How high up did you go?"

"Way—way above the top—sir," she stammered. "There was a…big mouse—big mouse!" She held her hands a couple of feet apart to indicate the size.

"Oh dear, that high? Miss Granger, I think you'd better go see Madam Pomfrey for a Calming Draught. And in the future, you should not venture any higher than the top of the tower ought to be without the help of a professor."

She nodded profusely. "Yes, sir."

"However," Dumbledore said with a smile, "it is rare to see such curiosity about the castle from the students." His eyes twinkled a bit as he continued, "Five points to Gryffindor for your initiative."

Hermione's mouth hung open for a minute until she came to her senses and squeaked, "Thank you, Professor," before dashing off toward the Hospital Wing.

That hadn't exactly been the best way to start the day.

After Madam Pomfrey had given her a Calming Draught—and some lunch, given the time, she headed out to the relative safety of the outside of the castle for a nice, normal afternoon alone sketching whatever she could see. That seemed to be the way things ended up on the weekends. Hermione wasn't ashamed of liking her peace and quiet, but it did feel a bit isolating at times. No one was likely to be out here on a Saturday—out on the Training Grounds, maybe, but not here, overlooking the lake.

"Hermione?"

Her head snapped in the direction of the sound. "Dean? What are you doing out here?"

Dean Thomas was strolling toward her across the courtyard. "I was gonna draw some pictures of the castle for my folks," he said.

"Really? That's what I'm doing."

"Oh? I didn't know you were an artist, too."

"I'm not," she said quickly. "I just know enough geometry to manage with buildings."

He sat down on the bench next to her. "Alright, then, let's see what you've got."

She slowly turned over her sketchbook to show him, nervous about having her work analysed by an actual artist.

"Hmm…it's not bad," Dean said. "Shading needs some work, and I don't know if you were really going for the fine detail like the ivy and stuff." He flipped back to the previous pages. "What's this?"

Hermione snatched the sketchbook back defensively. "I was trying to map out the Grand Staircase," she said. "It…didn't go well."

"Oh, sorry."

The two of them sat mostly in silence as they sketched, neither one wanting to say much after that, although Dean gave her a few drawing tips. She felt uncomfortable about snapping at him, but she wasn't ready to talk to anyone about her little adventure just yet. When she thought she was more or less done, she gave him a somewhat awkward goodbye and headed back inside.

"Today, we will begin our first unit on untransfiguration," Professor McGonagall began. "Because transfiguration can be quite error-prone, it is vital to know how to reverse a transformation. This is a complex art in itself, which requires a mastery of a number of different spell tools, depending on whether the transfiguration is permanent or not, how much you know about the original form, and whether there are any other spells applied, especially form-locking spells.

"Now, for many temporary transfigurations, like most of what you've been doing so far, a simple Finite Incantatem will suffice, but this will not work on stronger or more permanent transfigurations, and at the same time, it will cancel many other charms and spells that you may not want to. So we will begin with the most general untransfiguration spell for when the original form of the object is known, Reparifarge, so that you will be able to reverse your own work if you make a mistake."

Professor McGonagall looked pointedly at Hermione at the next part, as she often did when explaining the more esoteric points of her subject. "Reparifarge is approximately the arithmantic inverse of the general free transfiguration spell, which makes it effective at reversing a wide range of transfigurations, but not as powerful. And just as free transfiguration requires one to hold the target form clearly in mind, the inverse spell, Reparifarge, requires one to hold the original form clearly in mind."

Hermione was surprised to find she didn't know that bit. Numerology and Grammatica spoke much more about charms and jinxes than about transfiguration, something she considered a bit of an oversight. She knew the principle, of course, even if she didn't know the breakdown for that particular spell: take a reciprocal of the arithmantic elements and build the spell from the first few algebraic terms—probably just the first two terms. She suspected that a spell this low level would only be a first order approximation.

She eagerly wrote down in her notes Professor McGonagall's explanation and a few of her own speculations and questions based on it. As usual, she was the first to get the new spell to work, successfully untransfiguring her oak leaf back into a quill. She tried to help Harry Potter with his spell, since she'd wound up sitting next to him, but she didn't think he seemed too interested in her help.

"Miss Granger," McGonagall called to her after class was over.

"Yes, Professor?"

"The Headmaster informed me about your little excursion in the Upper Levels."

"Oh…" she said nervously.

"While I admire your perseverance in exploring the castle, I agree with him that you should be more careful. Magic can be unpredictable at times. If things start to turn strange…well, stranger than usual, it's best to turn back sooner rather than later."

"Yes, Professor," she said, slightly downcast, and left the room.

Hermione wandered the grounds for a while to find a good vantage point from which to sketch the back side of the West Wing. Heading out from the Clock Tower, past the little practice stone circle that the advanced students used once in a while, she headed down the path toward the groundskeeper's hut. It was down at a lower elevation than she would have liked, but it would do.

She was nearly there when the huge groundskeeper himself stepped out from behind a pile of pumpkins that were somehow as super-sized as he was.

"Well, 'ello, there," he called out jovially. "I weren't expectin' company today."

"Hello, Mr. Hagrid," Hermione replied timidly.

"Aw, yeh can jus' call me Hagrid…'Fraid I don't quite remember yer name, though," he said.

"It's Hermione, sir. Hermione Granger."

"Well, good ter meet yeh, Hermione," Hagrid said. "And what are yeh up ter out here today?"

"I'm…drawing a picture of the castle for my parents. This looked like a good place to do it, if that's alright."

"Well, o' course it is. It's got a nice view, don' it? Come on, make yerself at home."

"Thank you…Hagrid." Hermione sat on the large front porch of the hut and took out her notebook.

"It's nice havin' company out here," Hagrid mused. "I don't see too many o' the younger students. Of course, Harry Potter and his friend, Ron, come by every so often. Yeh know them?"

Hermione resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Yeah…we've met," she said. You couldn't escape knowing all about Harry Potter, as much as the boy tried himself. It made her feel a little sorry for him, when she wasn't busy being annoyed at him and Ron.

But Hagrid seemed to like them, like many people. "Good blokes, those two," he rambled on. "Course, I had ter pick up Harry from his relatives this summer. Phew—nastiest bunch o' muggles I ever met."

"Really?" she squeaked. That was news to her.

"Oh, yeah. You shoulda heard what they were sayin' about his parents and about Dumbledore. They hadn't even told him what'd happened to his parents."

Hermione quietly stopped sketching. That didn't sound like the Harry Potter she knew—usually looking happy, doing okay in classes, nice enough most of the time, but annoyingly not afraid to get into trouble, especially around Malfoy, although it might explain why he never talked about his family, when Ron and everybody else did—even Hermione herself, if you asked her.

As if on cue, Hagrid said, "Mind yeh, most muggles are pretty decent folks. Yer parents are muggles, aren't they?"

"Mm hmm, they're dentists," she said absently as she started drawing again.

"Dentists? What's that?"

Did nobody in the magical world know what a dentist was? "They're like healers, except they only work on teeth."

"Huh, funny how they do things out there."

Hermione found it was strangely pleasant talking to someone who had no idea who she was, about nothing in particular. In every school she attended, her reputation as a maths whiz ran ahead of her within a few days, but Hagrid didn't seem to be in the loop, or perhaps he just didn't remember. That wouldn't surprise her.

"So yeh've been spendin' yer Saturdays explorin' the castle on yer own?" Hagrid said as she explained what she'd been doing.

"More or less. It's hard when some parts of the castle don't make normal sense—at least by muggle standards. But I've been through most of the parts that students are allowed in by now."

"Hmm…" he said, impressed. "Must get lonely, though, don't it?"

Hermione froze up. The truth was that she was getting lonely on these excursions. She hardly ever saw anyone out here—Dean once in a while, but they never had much to say to each other—which was a little odd, considering he was muggle-raised. And so much of the rest of the time, she was in schoolwork mode and didn't really have much occasion to talk to people. She was starting to see the pattern, but this yet one more thing she wasn't sure how to talk to anyone about, including her parents.

"It can be…" she admitted. "I see Dean Thomas out here drawing sometimes, but there's not many people interested in this kind of thing. I think I've got most of the drawings I want done, though."

"Well, don't worry. I'm sure you'll find some good friends in there. Always a pretty good lot, the students, most o' them."

"Yeah…sure…" She kept sketching, not letting Hagrid see her face.

As she was putting the finishing touches on her drawing, something struck her—something she couldn't believe she'd never noticed before. "Hagrid?" she asked.

"Yeah?"

"What's above the Great Hall?"

"What's above where?"

"Look." She pointed up at the castle. "Above the Great Hall, there's three rows of windows and three small towers. I'm sure they're not visible on the inside. They must be above the enchanted ceiling. Do you know what's up there?"

Hagrid stroked his wild beard in thought. "Hmm…can't say I do. Never paid much attention ter that before. Don't think anyone ever goes up there."

Was it just her, or were there a lot of things about Hogwarts that nobody ever paid attention to? Then again, the castle was a thousand years old, and Hagrid was only the groundskeeper. Maybe one of the professors would know.

Nope. Nobody really did pay attention to what the castle looked like. Professor Vector said she'd never thought about what was above the Great Hall and had never heard of anyone using that space. Professor Binns was sadly useless, as usual, as was, more surprisingly, Hogwarts, A History. And she didn't feel comfortable asking Professor McGonagall after the Grand Staircase fiasco—which was silly, she thought. It was a perfectly reasonable question. It was just the way everyone else seemed to ignore it that made her feel like it was taboo or something. And Professor McGonagall just didn't seem to be the one to approach for that.

In a normal school, this wouldn't have been a difficult question. But then again, in a normal school, a lot of things that had already happened to her this year wouldn't have happened. And the students were no help, either. Of her study group, Cedric was the only one who had even noticed the rows of little windows. She'd tried the prefects all the way up to seventh year, too, and none of them knew what was up there either, much less how to get there.

Hermione sighed softly. Perhaps it was time she took more drastic action. She'd rather not go there, but she had to admit it probably would work—

"Hey, Hermione," someone interrupted her thoughts.

"Huh? Oh, hi, Parvati," she said, seeing her roommate sit beside her on the sofa in the Common Room.

"So I haven't seen you much lately. Where do you go all the time?"

"The library, mostly…I like to get my homework done early…and then read for a while."

"Well, I guess that's good if you can. You should come and hang out with me and Lavender sometimes, though."

"Oh, what do you do together?"

"You know, just talk. Or we could do your hair," Parvati offered.

Hermione slumped back on the sofa and sighed loudly. She'd never had a single female friend who hadn't offered to do that at least once. She didn't particularly like her bushy hair, but she didn't have time to get it under control every morning. Or, if she was brutally honest, she rarely wanted to take the time, like other girls did.

"Sorry. Just talk, then?" Parvati backed off.

"I don't know. I've never been good at that either…what do normal girls talk about, anyway?"

"Mm…boys, Quidditch stars, family, other girls, whatever's in Witch Weekly, how much we hate our teachers—"

"I like most of my teachers," Hermione protested. "Besides, we have all but one of the same ones."

"Well, there's other things. Listen, how about I loan you my copy of Witch Weekly? Then you'll at least know what's going on."

"Uh, sure, thanks," she said unenthusiastically.

"Great…"

She tried reading Parvati's copy of Witch Weekly that evening. She really did. But she gave up halfway through. She just couldn't slog through all of those gossip columns. It didn't help that she didn't even know who Gwenog Jones was, much less why she should care about her correspondence with Kirley Duke of the Weird Sisters. She didn't care for that in the muggle world, and here was no different.

What did she talk about with her friends back at home—besides school, anyway? Books? Movies? Sure, there was a fair bit of that, but most people in the magical world didn't even know who Tolkien was, let alone Arthur Clarke, and they'd certainly never seen a muggle film, any more than she'd seen a magical play. Relationships? Well, they were starting to in secondary school, but she'd been out of her element there, too.

Honestly, Hermione liked maths, science, science fiction, fantasy, chess, classical music, history—she could find other girls like that in the muggle world, but at Hogwarts—at best, she was in the wrong house for that. When it came down to it, she just had to admit that she had almost nothing in common with Lavender or Parvati. And Lily and Sally-Anne weren't much better. They mostly just hung out with each other, and she rarely saw them outside of class since they were both even more morning people than she was. She was starting to wonder if the Sorting Hat had been right not to put her in Ravenclaw.

Meanwhile, her lingering problem of figuring out what was above the Great Hall was still tugging at her mind, and she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that she had only one useful resource left.

Well, this was it, she thought. This was her last, best hope for solving the mystery. It was risky, but if she was a Gryffindor, she might as well put it to some use.

"Hello, Fred, George," she said uneasily when she caught the Weasley Twins in the Common Room.

"Why, hello, Miss Granger. What can we do for you?" one of the red-haired boys said—probably Fred. She was starting to notice that Fred was the more outgoing of the two and more often the first to speak.

"Ah, you two know a lot about the castle, right?"

"Do we know a lot about the castle, Fred?" the second twin said, laughing.

"I'd say we know a fair bit, George. Trying to find a way to sneak out, are we?"

"No! I was just wondering if you could tell me what's above the Great Hall."

They stared at her in confusion. "Come again?" George said.

"There are three rows of little windows above the Great Hall. I was wondering what's up there. Even Professor Vector didn't know."

Now the twins stared at each other. "I never noticed that," George said.

"Me neither," Fred replied. "I've never seen them mentioned…anywhere."

"Do you think we should check with, uh…" George lowered his voice.

"Yes, I think we should. Miss Granger, could you give us a few minutes while we check our…sources?"

"Uh, sure."

"Come on, George, let's go." They dashed up the staircase to their dorm room.

Hermione wondered what that was all about. If she found out those two had had a map this whole time, she would…well, she wasn't sure what she would do yet, but she'd at least reconsider her stance of not antagonising them.

Up in their room, Fred and George quickly made sure there was no one inside, shut the door, and took out their most prized possession: the Marauder's Map.

The Marauder's Map was one of the most impressive bits of charms work they had ever seen. They'd filched it from Filch in their first year—from his "Confiscated and Highly Dangerous" file, no less. At first, they'd thought it was just a piece of parchment charmed to make snarky comments at people, but, apparently sensing the presence of a couple of pranksters, it had led them on until they'd discovered the pass phrase: "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

They spoke the pass phrase now, and the map came to life, drawing in the names of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs, those great unknown patrons of magical mischief-makers.

It was a complicated piece of work. The map unfolded to about three feet wide, and even then, the little dots that represented the occupants of the castle were barely bigger than periods. At meal times, the Great Hall was just a jumbled mess of names in between long rows of dots.

But it was surprisingly easy to use. The map was laid out like a book, with the West Wing on the left-hand page and the East Wing on the right-hand page. The front cover showed the title and a stylised representation of the grounds. The first spread was the dungeons, with some cutaways for the storage rooms under the dungeons. The next was the ground floor, then the first floor, and so on, up to the seventh floor. Finally, the ninth spread and the back cover were covered in dozens of little circles—cross sections of all the towers all the way up to the top of the Astronomy Tower.

Finding a person in all those pages could be difficult, but finding a place should have been easy. Yet even though they checked all the levels just to be sure, they found their memories were accurate: the building that housed the Great Hall was only drawn on the spread for the ground floor.

"Huh, that is odd," Fred said. "I know I've seen those windows, but they're not on the map."

"I know…" said George. "Maybe the Marauders never went up there."

"Blasphemy!" his twin exclaimed. "Burn the blasphemer!"

"It would make sense, though," George laughed. "Not much reason to go there if no one ever uses it. And if even some of the professors don't know—"

"—they really might not have thought about it. Wow…"

"I think that girl's really going places."

"Oh, yes, brother. Merlin help us all if she ever turns that mind of hers to pranking. Any ideas how to get up there, now?"

"Well, there must be a door off the Great Hall or the Entrance Hall somewhere, but I wouldn't know where to look. You?"

"Haven't the foggiest…but I know someone who might."

Both twins broke into wicked grins. "Mischief managed."

Hermione was waiting in the chair where they'd left her when the Weasley Twins ran back down the stairs.

"You have us at a loss, Miss Granger," one of them said.

"Even we do not know what is above the Great Hall—"

"—something we thought was impossible."

"Oh, alright then," Hermione said, disappointed.

"You seem to have quite the knack for finding out things, though," the second twin said. She gave an equivocal nod. She thought that was far more down to everyone else's lack of curiosity.

"If you should discover what is up there—"

"—We do hope you'll let us know."

"It's a rare treat to meet anyone who can compete with us on this sort of thing."

"Thanks," she said. "I'll, uh, I'll keep that in mind."

She was glad when they left her alone after that. She could appreciate the compliment, but she still didn't want their reputations rubbing off on her.

As for searching for a way into the unknown space, she could try checking for doors in that part of the castle that led up, but it wouldn't be easy. She had the rest of the castle pretty well mapped out now and had been in all the other towers that weren't off limits, but that was mostly from asking the older students how to get places. There were so many hidden doors and doors that were really "walls just pretending" in Hogwarts that it would be hard to find a new place that nobody knew about. And in the meantime, with her mapping efforts, she hadn't kept up with her calculus studies as well as she'd intended, not to mention trying to get to know her fellow students. Maybe it was time that she took a break from her exploring, she thought.