Disclaimer: All versions of Harry Potter may be obtained by applying linear transformations to JK Rowling's original Harry Potter.
A/N: For those of you who are following His Mother's Love, Chapter 8 is now up.
Chapter 44
Hermione was woken up on Friday by eight small feet running across her bed.
"Ahh! Crookshanks, Wendelin, stop it!"
Crookshanks was on the wild side as far as cats went, but it turned out he'd met his match in Lily Moon's insane calico, Wendelin. The two cats spent hours chasing each other around the dorm room, and the girls had to forcibly separate them to get them to calm down.
"Wendelin, come here!" Lily called.
The cats ran towards her and around and around her legs until she tripped and fell back on her bed. Her friend, Sally-Anne Perks, dove at Wendelin, but she evaded her, and Crookshanks just ran her over. Hermione thought that being half-kneazle, Crookshanks might be wired for a larger space, but she didn't know what Wendelin's excuse was.
Finally, Lily grabbed her wand from her bedside table and said "Immobulus," freezing her cat in place. Sometimes, the only way to get a cat to behave was magic.
"Tsk," Lily said as she picked the cat up. "It's a good thing you're fixed, Wendelin. If I let you breed with a cat like that, the kittens would tear up the whole castle."
"Come on, Crookshanks, you really need to slow down," Hermione said. She successfully got her own cat into her arms, but it was a struggle. She'd have to try to let him roam the tower a bit more. Hopefully that would help.
Friday was, unfortunately, just as eventful as Thursday. Professor McGonagall informed Hermione at breakfast that Malfoy had been found to be acting recklessly and had been given detention. However, she also warned Hermione to be careful about her use of magic and that Malfoy's father still might get involved. Malfoy himself was fuming, but Snape was positively vicious in Potions. Hermione wasn't sure if it was because of the Buckbeak incident, though, because Snape had been in a foul mood since the Welcome Feast.
It started out innocently enough, even a little interesting. "This year, I expect fewer errors from you in your brewing," Snape had said. "By now you should be able to make minor adjustments to your potions and recover from mistakes without the disasters I have had the misfortune to witness in previous years. In particular, corrections to stirring patterns can be made with simple formulae that can be found in your book, so I do want want to see any submissions ruined because one of you dunderheads misplaced a stir."
Hermione was happy to see the arithmantic aspects of potions coming out, but when Snape threatened to test Neville's (horribly botched) Shrinking Solution on his toad, Trevor, that was a step too far. It was terribly cruel and questionably legal, not to mention that it could kill Neville's beloved pet. At that, Hermione flat-out defied Snape to help Neville fix his potion. It cost her five points from Gryffindor, but it was worth it, and she would definitely be lodging a complaint against Snape when she got the chance.
Actually, maybe she should start keeping track of the punishments Snape gave out in class. Everyone knew he was biased, but no one ever had hard numbers. It might help her case.
"I don't get it. Why does Malfoy think I want revenge on Sirius Black?" Harry said as they left the class. (Malfoy had shifted gears from his dementor material and had started taunting Harry about Black for reasons as yet unclear.) "It's like everyone thinks I'm gonna do something stupid and go after him. I'm not that bad, am I?"
"Well, you do have your moments, Harry," Hermione replied cautiously, "but no, there's certainly no reason for you to go after Black." I hope.
Defence Against the Dark Arts was her only other class for the day, and even after he'd handled the dementor so expertly on the train, Hermione was wary of Professor Lupin. However, as she watched, he actually seemed to know what he was doing, tattered clothes notwithstanding. Made they'd got lucky this year. He jumped right into the practical lessons, banished Peeves with ease in the corridor, and led them to the staffroom (where Snape took the opportunity to bully Neville again; yes, something definitely needed to be done about him), and he introduced them to a boggart.
Boggarts were not listed in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which was pretty comprehensive for the British Isles, which meant they almost certainly weren't a type of beast, but rather a spirit. They were listed in The Essential Defence Against the Dark Arts, however. They were shapeshifters, and they took the form of whatever you feared most. That was a little disturbing to Hermione. She honestly wasn't sure what she feared most, and whatever it was, she wasn't sure she wanted it aired out in front of the class. She suspected a number of other people in the class wouldn't like it either, but Professor Lupin pressed ahead anyway.
Hermione felt sick when Neville said that the thing that scared him most was Professor Snape. Her estimation of Snape fell even further, if it was possible. For a teacher to make himself into a student's worst fear was just plain wrong. And this was Neville, who—well, he'd never said, but she got the same feeling from him sometimes that she got from Harry—that he was haunted by some pretty nasty demons from his past. And yet, it was also intriguing. Neville had to face his worst fear twice a week in class and never said anything. Maybe he was more a Gryffindor than everyone thought.
Anyway, seeing the Boggart-Snape in Neville's grandmothers' clothes was some sweet payback. Hermione wished she'd had a camera.
The way to banish a boggart was to use the spell Riddikulus to turn it into something funny. In front of Dean Thomas, the boggart turned into a crawling, disembodied hand (he must have seen The Addams Family one too many times, Hermione thought), and with the application of Riddikulus, it was caught in a mousetrap. For Seamus Finnigan, it became a banshee, who lost her voice, for Ron, a giant spider, which he put on roller skates, and for Parvati, it was a mummy, which tripped over its own bandages.
The scariest part of the lesson for Hermione was when Padma faced the boggart, and it turned into a giant cobra. She started having flashbacks to facing the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. But it thankfully didn't last very long, as Padma cast Riddikulus…and the boggart transformed into a giant, very creepy-looking jack-in-the-box.
"Padma, that's not funny!" Lavender Brown cried.
"Can I change my fear to that, now?" asked Kevin Entwhistle.
Lupin didn't give Harry or Hermione a chance to face the boggart, which Hermione was relieved and disappointed about at the same time. It was probably intentional for Harry—Lupin probably thought the boggart would turn into Voldemort. She wasn't as sure about herself, but if he'd heard about her own exploits, it might have been for the same reason. Still, the exercise left everyone else in such high spirits that she thought it would have been nice to find out what her worst fear was.
And there was something else that troubled her: when Professor Lupin jumped between Harry and the boggart, it had changed into a silvery-white orb. She only saw it for a split second, but she was sure she had made out Oceanus Procellarum, Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis, and Mare Tranquilitatis. But why would Professor Lupin's worst fear be the Moon?
Hermione was practically bouncing with excitement when she came to the door of Professor Vector's classroom the next day. Over the past two years, she had learnt a lot of arithmancy, but this was the first time it was truly going to be on her level. With her maths skills leaving everybody else in class in the dust, she had never been pushed to work to her fullest potential in that class until now.
Once again, Professor Vector greeted her with a smile, any lingering concerns about the incident on Thursday apparently erased. "Hermione, hello. Please come in," she said.
"Hello, Professor." She entered the room, and Vector directed her to sit at a chair across the teacher's desk.
"It really is good to see you," Vector said. "I've been wanted to hear more about your summer. I take it Dobby worked out for you?"
"Oh, Dobby's been excellent. Well…he did nearly burn our house down his first day, but after that, we've barely had anything to complain about."
"Burn your house down?! How could he do something like that?"
It took a few minutes for Hermione to adequately explain a gas stove to her pureblood teacher for her to understand how Dobby went wrong that first day.
"I glad you're alright, then," Vector told her. "I didn't realise mixing the magical and muggle worlds could be so…well, combustible."
"Me either, but like I said, the rest of the summer was pretty good." Hermione gave her the highlights of her summer, especially her trip to France and also her visits with Harry and Ron. She also mentioned her crash courses in muggle science and history in addition to her maths studies.
"Well, it certainly sounds like you were busy," Vector told her. "I hope you remembered to relax from time to time." Really, it's like that girl never stops.
"Don't worry, ma'am. My parents made sure of that. It's just that I want to be able to pick them up fast if I decide to go to university after I graduate. I want to keep my options open. Oh, and I've also got my article in Magizoology Monthly coming out in a couple of weeks."
"Ah, that's right. It's good that you could do that. If you face down a basilisk and live, you deserve to get some recognition out of it. I look forward to it." Hermione giggled a little. "So," Vector continued, you said you were planning to start learning linear algebra. Did you go through with that?"
"Yes, ma'am. I have my book here." Hermione pulled a university-level textbook out of her bag and set it on the table, flipping it open. "I've got up through the chapter about using matrices as linear transformations on vector fields. I was just about to start in on studying vector spaces proper…" She trailed off and started giggling that much harder.
"Something amusing?" her professor asked.
"N-no, Professor, it's not—I mean—you must get those puns all the time, right?"
Vector smiled. "Just you wait till next year, Hermione. I'm perfectly capable of holding my own with the puns." Hermione raised an eyebrow with scepticism, but she said nothing. Meanwhile, Vector pulled out a small tome that seemed to be bound from a sheaf of notes. "Since you told me you were working on linear algebra, I went back and compiled all of my old notes on the subject. It's probably not as comprehensive because it's near the limit of what arithmancers typically use, but they're still a good reference. I thought we could start by comparing them with your textbook."
"Okay…" They started comparing; it was confusing for a while until they sorted out the different notations, but it quickly started to make sense. Even if they were presented in a different order, Vector was able to get a good understanding about what concepts Hermione's textbook was showing.
"Well, your book is definitely more thorough," she concluded. "You're probably better off continuing with that, and we'll use my notes for the magical side of things. Of course, I'll continue to help you out with the maths. Now, my goal for this independent study is to introduce you to arithmantic concepts that we won't be covering in class. You're probably not prepared to go too in-depth yet, but I can definitely give you a survey of where things stand in the field. For example, you've probably noticed that in class, we focus much more on the arithmancy of charms than of transfiguration. Do you have any idea why?"
"Hmm…" Hermione said. "I've been wondering about that, but I think I'm starting to understand why. Since transfiguration deals with transformations, while charms usually don't, it stands to reason that the spells tend to be described with linear algebra rather than the analytic equations we used last year."
"Precisely. We'll be describing some simple transfigurations this year in terms of matrices, but the why is largely beyond O.W.L.-level, so I wanted to show you how those simple spells are constructed in the more general context of linear transformations, which is a much more powerful tool for transfiguration spellcrafting."
Hermione followed along with interest. What little she had learnt of transfiguration spells seemed to make much more sense when described in this way—much more systematic. She could think of a few charms that would potentially fall under this field, too, like the Engorgement and Shrinking Charms, but she filed that thought away for later.
Most of all, though, she was glad for the one-on-one instruction. She was sure that she would learn the material that much better that way. She thanked Professor Vector again for letting her do it when she left for dinner.
Hermione found the tiny, elf-sized passages leading up from the Great Hall to be a little more cramped than last year. She measured with her hands and estimated that if she ended up as tall as her mum, she could still get through them with no trouble, though she wouldn't want to gain too much weight. The way Ron kept growing, on the other hand, it might become a tight spot for him. Of course, Ron and Harry didn't often come up here with her, anyway. She was the only one who really took an interest in the elves.
As she crawled, her thoughts wandered to what she was going to write to her parents tonight. It seemed things were never simple at Hogwarts…
Dear Mum and Dad,
My new classes are great so far. Hagrid's teaching Magical Creatures, and I got to pet a hippogriff. Draco Malfoy tried to sabotage him, but I stopped him with that jinx I invented. (Don't worry; I wasn't in any trouble.) I'm sure I'm really going to enjoy my independent study with Professor Vector, too. We're going to study the deeper maths behind transformation spells to start.
Oh, and one other thing. It turns out the Azkaban Guards aren't actually human. They're demons that literally make you feel clinically depressed just by standing near them. I don't know how Sirius Black ever got past those monsters, but it's a good thing they're only at the entrances to the grounds.
Love from Hermione
Yeah, there was always some complication around here. She doubted her parents would appreciate that news.
"Hello?" she called when she reached the elves' quarters. Several elves popped their heads out of their rooms, but she was dismayed to see that she wasn't mobbed by the excited little creatures like last year. They looked much warier now that she'd shown her true colours, so to speak. "Hello? Sonya? Dobby? Tilly? Are you here?"
"Sonya and Tilly are here, Miss Hermione Granger," the high pitched voice of her closest elf friend said. Sonya stepped forward along with her grandmother and greeted Hermione—not quite as warmly as she used to, but she at least wasn't afraid to approach her. She looked like she was trying to grow her hair out this year. Hermione thought that maybe she was trying to look more mature by elf standards—she knew Sonya had recently turned twenty—but the elf's hair was so scraggly that she thought it looked better cropped short.
"Hello, Sonya. Hello, Tilly. It's good to see you. Is Dobby around?"
"Dobby," Sonya said with an edge, "is cleaning, miss. He should be back soon."
"Ah. So how have you been doing?"
"Sonya is being well, miss. It is good to be seeing you, miss. We was not sure if you was coming back."
"Neither was I, but I convinced my parents to try it for another year. It took half the summer, but I did it."
"We knows," Tilly said. "Dobby has been saying it. He is liking his…job very much, miss, and is glad he can keep it."
"Is you wanting to play cards, miss?" Sonya asked, pulling her little, elf-sized Exploding Snap deck from a pocket on her belt.
"Oh, sure, I could go for a game."
"If you is having any gobstones, miss…"
Hermione giggled slightly. "No, thank you, Sonya…I only take bets I can win." Even after two years, Sonya was still trying to get her to wager gobstones on their Exploding Snap games, Tilly was still giving her disgruntled looks, and Hermione was still turning her down. It was ironic, she thought. Sonya didn't approve of Dobby being paid, and yet Tilly looked even more disapproving of her gambling than that (though most of the other elves didn't). A strange thing, elf culture.
The game was in full swing by the time Dobby walked into the Elves' Common Room in his small children's clothes, looking a little grimy and tired after a long day's cleaning, but when he spotted Hermione, he was as bright-eyed and excitable as ever: "Miss Hermione! Miss Hermione! Is you needing Dobby?"
"Just visiting, Dobby. I wanted to see how you were settling in." She glanced around. She hadn't missed how most of the other elves stiffened when Dobby walked in, and the mothers pulled their children a little closer. He was getting worse stares than Harry had got his first year. "Do you want us to deal you in?"
"Um, Dobby will play, Miss Hermione, by Dobby is not so sure he should be betting with Sonya anymore."
"Sonya!" Hermione spun around to glare at the younger elf, but she just smirked at her.
"Sonya has won some good gobstones from Dobby."
"You cheeky little…You've gotta be careful with Sonya, Dobby. There's a reason I never play for keeps with her." And she thinks Dobby is the crazy one. "Go on, Sonya, deal him in. No betting today."
"Yes, Miss Hermione Granger."
"So, Dobby, what have you been doing here?" Hermione asked when the game resumed.
"Dobby is to clean the boys' toilets in the dorms, miss."
"They've got you on toilet duty?"
"Dobby is being new, miss," Sonya said with a hint of smugness. "Head Elf Flory is not letting just any elf work in the kitchens."
A plausible explanation, Hermione thought. It was probably even true, but even so, she suspected that there were other jobs Dobby could have done that were being overlooked. And as a former family elf, Dobby was qualified for just about every job. Typical discrimination—there ought to be a law. Hermione shook her head at her own silliness. Technically speaking, she was thinking about anti-discrimination laws to protect the free workers from the slaves. Her world was mad.
The foursome continued to get stares as the game went on, and Hermione could hear what sounded like snide whispers behind her back. Oh yes, bullies could be found everywhere, even amongst a species as submissive as the elves. It didn't help that Dobby stood out like a sore thumb. Wearing clothes like that with all the other elves in tea towels, Hermione started to think that Dobby must look to them like a very flamboyant cross-dresser. In fact, that was literally true, she realised. In elf culture, wearing human clothes was cross-species-dressing.
Well, there was plenty of time to deal with that. After a few more rounds of the game, Hermione brought up her other reason for coming up here today: "Hey, Sonya, last spring you promised to show me that last secret room on the seventh floor."
Sonya jumped to her feet with a grin. "Oh, yes, Miss Hermione Granger," she squeaked. "We can be going now if you likes."
"That would be great. Dobby, you should probably come, too."
"Yes, Miss Hermione."
"D-Dobby?" Sonya squeaked, grumbling a little.
"Well, he might need to find it sometime."
"Sonnitt," Tilly jumped in softly, "you knows Dobby will needs to know all the rooms."
"Oh, of course," Sonya replied reluctantly. "Please be following Sonya."
Hermione had spent most of her Sunday wandering the castle checking for any new or disappeared rooms. She figured she'd better do it now before she got too much homework. So all she needed was the last room. Sonya quickly led her and Dobby up to the seventh floor corridor with the tapestry of dancing trolls.
"This is being the last secret room, miss," she said. "It is being extra special."
"Must be extra secret, too," Hermione said. "I can't see anything."
Sonya giggled: "It is, miss. We elves calls it the Come and Go Room, because it comes and goes, and it is also being called the Room of Requirement, because it becomes what you requires."
"It becomes what you requires—er, require?" she said in surprise. "Kind of like up in the Great Tower, but more controlled?"
The elf shrugged her shoulders: "Sonya supposes so, miss."
Hermione remembered her excursions with Ginny up above the sixteenth floor. They'd gone there a couple more times before school let out when the redheaded girl had been in danger of a breakdown and needed to talk it out. It was always hard to get that high up in the Great Tower and find a reasonably-arranged room. "Well, file that under 'would've been nice to know that before'. How does it work?"
"You is needing to walk past the tapestry three times whilst thinking about what you needs, miss."
"Okay, simple enough." Hermione backed up and paced by the dancing trolls. I need a private room to talk, she thought. I need a private room to talk. I need a private room to talk.
On the third pass, an ornate, polished door appeared in the wall opposite the tapestry. Hermione grabbed the brass handle, not knowing at all what to expect, and opened it. On the other side was exactly what she wanted, even if she hadn't fully articulated it—a miniature common room like the ones she had sought out in the upper floors, but more fully realised: a sofa with a side table and a lamp, a study table with four chairs, and a working fireplace with a fire already started, all decorated in Gryffindor red and gold. This was much better than climbing to those scrambled heights, and she could probably of other uses for the room before long.
"This is being very great magic, Miss Hermione," Dobby said with wide eyes.
"Sonya, this is brilliant," she said. "How many people know about this?"
"The elves all knows, Miss Hermione Granger, but Sonya is not sure if anybody else does, even Professor Dumbledore. We elves use it to store things. Many students and teachers hides things here, or hides themselves, but very few ever finds it again, miss."
Hermione laughed and took a seat on the sofa. She patted the cushions next to her, and Sonya and Dobby hopped up. "And the purebloods all say house elves are beneath them," she said with a grin. "Thank you so much for helping me with my map, Sonya."
"You is most welcome, Miss Hermione Granger. Sonya is happy to help a friend of elves."
Hermione pulled out her map and wrote how to get into the room. "So then this really is a complete map of the castle, now?"
Sonya laughed at that: "Oh, Miss Hermione Granger…Hogwarts is always having more secrets."
It figured, she thought. The elves never knew about the Chamber of Secrets. What if the other Founders had made secret spaces of their own? What if this room and the Great Tower were two of them? What if they weren't? There was bound to be plenty that was beyond Sonya's knowledge.
They sat and chatted for a while, then Hermione checked the time and said, "It's almost dinner time. We should go. Sonya, it was good to see you. I'd like to talk to Dobby in private for a minute, please."
A faint scowl crossed Sonya's face, but she said, "Yes, Miss Hermione Granger. Sonya will being seeing you later." She left the room, leaving Hermione and Dobby alone.
"Dobby," Hermione said, kneeling down to face him eye to eye, "how are the other elves treating you here?"
Dobby's ears drooped, and his whole body seemed to slump a bit. "They is not so nice to Dobby. Dobby has told Miss Hermione that it is a great disgrace for an elf to be dismissed, and they is not liking that Dobby likes being free. But they is still much better than…than Dobby's old masters," he whispered.
Hermione nodded sadly. "I was afraid of that. It might take them a long time to come to terms with you. Sonya and Tilly still seem to like me, though. I'll keep working on them to work on the other elves to be nice to you."
"Thank you, Miss Hermione."
Fred and George examined a very special sheaf of parchment as they wandered the school. It was a splendid piece of charms work, no doubt about it, but today, it was acting a little funny.
"Say, have you seen Hermione on here lately, Fred?" George asked.
Fred thumbed through the pages. "No, I haven't. I thought I saw her climbing the stairs in the East Wing a while back, but she's not there now. That's not near one of the places she told us about that isn't on the map, is it?"
"No, it's not. I wonder where she went."
"Hope she's not in any tr—Oh, wait, there she is." Fred pointed to an out of the way section of the seventh floor.
"Oh, yeah. That's weird. It's like she just appeared there."
"Yeah, weird…Well, better keep going. These pranks aren't gonna prank themselves, you know."