Hermione took her next try at the trapdoor during the next Quidditch match. It was Ravenclaw versus Hufflepuff, and the entire school had poured out into the stadium to watch. Hermione had lingered behind in the Astronomy tower, watching them leave.
Carefully making sure the coast was clear, Hermione activated her music wand once again, cast a quiet Alohomora, and crept into the forbidden corridor.
Once again, the giant dog seemed to immediately grow sleepy while listening to the music, its six ears drooping as it fell against a wall and slid down into an enormous puddle of snoring Cerberus. Hermione had to shove one of the back legs off the trapdoor to open it this time, revealing once more the deep blackness that it contained.
Carefully affixing the enchanted leash she'd gotten from Hagrid to her grappling hook, Hermione very carefully prepared herself, tying it to a normal rope harness she'd rigged up around her middle. Unable to prolong it much longer, Hermione cast Lumos, and let herself fall.
The leash seemed to limit how fast the rope came out, for which Hermione was infinitely grateful, though she was still being careful, her hands skimming the rope and ready to halt it as soon as need be. The rope lowered her down and down and down and down, far past where Hermione had managed to reach before.
Finally, something came into view, and Hermione quickly stopped the leash from extending any further, before slowly lowering herself down little by little to examine what she saw.
It was a plant.
The floor seemed to be made of some kind of plant.
Hermione craned her neck further, before realizing she recognized it: it was Devil's Snare. There was some in the greenhouses, and they'd worked near it in Herbology class. Though it had an ominous name and would readily choke the life out of someone, she remembered that it was easily defeated by fire – something even a first year could create.
Now, more than ever, Hermione became sure that this was some sort of magical test.
She hesitated, looking up at her rope, and then looking down at the plant, before aiming her wand down.
"Incendio."
Fire leapt from her wand to the plants, which immediately curled away from the fire. Those caught in the flames writhed and withered into burnt husks, and Hermione carefully created a patch of burnt plants large enough for her to drop through.
There had to be another way out, Hermione hoped. If there was this plant floor, there had to be another door. A rope dropped through Devil's Snare would be destroyed, after the plants rebuilt themselves to fill in the damage done.
Biting her lip and clenching her eyes shut, Hermione let go of the rope.
There was only a moment of burnt plants hitting her face before she landed on a stone floor, and she toppled over, caught off-balance. When she stood, the Devil's snare was about 8 feet above her, spread across the area in a green canopy.
Hermione looked around. She seemed to be deep beneath the school now, in unused classrooms or dungeons from long, long ago. She was relieved to see two doors – one that was quiet and unassuming, and looked for the life of her like any other classroom door she might find, and one that glowed with a golden light, that had the sound of wings behind it.
Hermione headed towards the light and opened the door.
Dozens and dozens of tiny jeweled birds flew around lazily, with multicolored wings. It took Hermione a long moment to realize that they weren't birds – they were keys. And all of them were floating around on charmed wings. She noticed a few brooms leaning up against a far wall, and Hermione's heart sank.
Though she was certain it wouldn't work, Hermione tried the door on the other side of the room anyway. It was locked, and Alohomora did nothing to help.
Hermione examined the situation more carefully. The door was sturdy, with an old-fashioned silver handle on it and a hole for a key beneath the handle. There were nearly a hundred keys flying around, and she was clearly meant to catch one and use it to open the lock. But Hermione was well aware of her flying ability – without having a butterfly net to trap and catch all of the keys and try them one by one, there was no way she'd be able to catch keys with her bare hands.
Taking a deep breath to focus, Hermione considered her options.
First: she could try to catch the keys. She almost immediately dismissed this idea as silly – she'd never manage anything skillful on a broom.
Second: she could ignore the keys and try to destroy the door. It was wooden, and it might respond to Incendio. Hermione dismissed this idea too – if the lock was spelled to resist Alohomora, it was likely that the entire door was spelled to resist magic.
Third: she could try to catch the keys in an unorthodox way – summoning them, perhaps. If she could summon them to her, it'd be much easier, and she could shove the wrong ones into her bag until she found the right one, and then let them loose.
Hermione gnawed her lip uneasily. Though she'd read about the summoning charm, she hadn't yet managed it. It was a much higher-level spell than she knew how to cast right now, and to be honest, she didn't think her magical core was big enough to succeed at it yet.
This was clearly the charms test, Hermione thought. The summoning charm was a charm, so that might be the answer the tester was looking for. That seemed unfair, though, when everything else was something even a first year could manage. But maybe that was the reason for the brooms – everyone received flying lessons as a first year, after all.
Looking at the door, a fourth idea slowly formed in her mind.
Fourth: she could try to pick the lock on the door.
The more she thought about it, the more it seemed to have merit. Hermione turned the logic over in her mind, examining the idea.
1. The door and lock were enchanted to resist spells.
2. Because the door was enchanted to resist spells, the key would need to physically open the door. Meaning, the key wouldn't just be a magical trigger – the act of turning the key would open the door.
3. If the door's lock needed to be physically opened, a lock pick would work just as well, as it would physically unlock the door.
The only thing was the door might be protected against lock picks somehow, with some kind of shield spell or ward. Hermione bit her lip. She doubted that would be the case – lock picks were such a Muggle thing, after all, and any such spell would probably prevented a key from working too. But it was still possible.
Well… it was worth a try?
Digging in her explorer's kit, Hermione withdrew the set of lock picks her father had sent her.
The kit came with five different little tools, and a small paper describing what each one did. The back of the paper had incredibly poor drawings of how to pick a lock, and Hermione found herself disregarding it and relying on what she'd read in a crime novel once as a child – pushing the wrench slightly to the side to put tension on the lock, and carefully using the little squiggly bit to feel for and push the pins up one by one.
It was frustrating, as she was guessing what she was doing. The door and the lock were old, and the pins were big and heavy. But when Hermione felt the first pin click, there was a rush of success, and the next pin came faster, and then the next, and then the next.
By the time the final pin clicked into place, Hermione was grinning proudly. She'd managed to use Muggle technology to get around a magical puzzle, and she was feeling quite smug, if she did say so herself. The doorknob yielded as she tried it once more, and she strolled through to see what was next.
Her eyes widened at the giant chessboard, and her face fell.
Hermione hated chess.
Chess was something that super-villains played dramatically in movies, or what heroes and generals used as a painfully obvious visual metaphor. In the real world, chess was a frustrating game that Hermione despised.
At a young age, Hermione had wanted to be good at chess. It was a skill that seemed to be a prerequisite to being a smart person – all intelligent people enjoyed playing chess and playing it well. Hermione's parents had taught her the rules, and she'd been entered in a Youth Chess League, where once a week, children would play chess against one another for points.
It was the one thing she'd failed at – badly. She had lost nearly every game.
Humiliated, Hermione had read the strategy books. She learned different moves, different ways of getting checkmate, different tricks and traps. She even went to a chess training camp for a week one summer, trying to learn, trying to get better.
It was to no avail. The week she lost to a boy three years her junior, she had quit chess, and she never looked back.
Hermione's mind just didn't work for chess. She could see strategies and ideas, but she would focus on one, and then scramble to regroup when her opponent ruined that one. She wasn't able to hold onto many different possibilities at once while still holding onto strict rules. Hermione did best when carrying out a set plan, and then thinking on the fly and thinking out of the box when any disruptions occurred. You couldn't do that in chess – there were very firm rules about what could and could not be done – and as a result, Hermione was a very poor player indeed.
Hermione walked around the chessboard grimly. The enormous white pieces moved to block her path as she tried to get past them, and it became clear that she was expected to become one of the black pieces and play.
Was she supposed to play and win? Or just play her way across the board? Hermione was moderately sure she could manage the latter, but if it were the former? She was in trouble.
With a scowl, Hermione cast a last glance back, memorizing the layout of the room, before slamming the door behind her, storming back through the key room, slamming that door, and investigating the dark, unassuming door on the other side of the Devil's Snare area.
It was unlocked. Still frustrated, Hermione pulled it open and stepped through.
The world seemed to tilt on an axis, and Hermione screamed as she fell through what felt like dimensions of spinning doors, before she landed with a splat right outside the forbidden corridor, as if the ceiling itself had spit her out.
With a groan, she stood, rubbed her back, and reluctantly went back into the forbidden corridor to gather up her things. She couldn't just leave her music wand or leash there for anyone else to find. Besides, she'd need them again once she figured out how to get past the stupid chess death trap – and she would figure out a way, she swore.
One way or another, she'd make it past that board.