Amanda Barrows decided not to talk to anyone about her 'curse' for a while until Hermione found more information. Hermione had written her mother (and her aunt, by proxy) a long scroll full of questions, and she'd begun scouring the library immediately for anything else. Professor Vector had offered to get Amanda a temporary room somewhere else in the castle until she decided what she wanted to do, but Amanda had declined. She didn't want anyone to know anything was up until they were sure.
Unfortunately, anything that dealt with changing people's bodies significantly was nearly always classified as Dark magic. Hermione delved into the books she had from Quirrell, but most of them were about rituals or potions, not informative texts.
Hermione was determined, though, and she would not be stopped.
"I think it would be very helpful, sir," she told Professor Lockhart, as he looked down at her fondly. "Studying the history of old fertility rituals of pureblooded families might help explain their poor birthrates now."
"Your ambition is heartening to see," Professor Lockhart told her, signing her form. He flashed her a grin. "Trying to save the world and barely a teen! You remind me of myself, Miss Granger."
Madame Pince was highly skeptical of the pass to the Restricted Section, but it had a verified teacher's signature, and she reluctantly let Hermione inside. Once Hermione got the hang of checking for curses and spells on the tomes before touching them and figuring out how the area was organized, she found a treasure trove, and she eagerly dove in.
As it turned out, there were spells to curse another's bloodline. There was a Dark curse that did nearly exactly what Hermione had made up on the spot, one that prevented a bloodline from ever having sons to carry on the family name. There was another blood curse that manifested in only the girls of every other generation, and another curse which could morph a part of person from one sex into the other, often with horrifying, half-finished results. There were even potions to cause recessive diseases in family lines as well, like the Gynomortician Potion, which caused all daughters born to die at the age of three.
Such curses and rituals had been developed by rivalling families centuries ago, Hermione discovered. Messing with a family's fertility was a sure way to cause them to falter and fail. It had gone out of style once Dark magic was more widely condemned and people were more widely concerned about magical birth rates, but the fact remained that such curses did, in fact, exist.
Hermione wasn't convinced Amanda was cursed, though. She was probably born into the wrong body, however it happened to muggles the same way. A curse would, however, provide a good explanation to Amanda's classmates. And the books with these rituals… though there wasn't anything directly saying how to, Hermione was certain that if she looked hard enough, she could find enough pieces to figure out how to transform a person's body from one sex into the other.
If Amanda's soul had ended up in the wrong body, it seemed like finding a way to get it into the right body was the only real course of action to choose.
Classes continued on as the weather grew nastier. As promised, Snape taught them all how to brew a contraception potion, a lesson that was one of the most tense and awkward Hermione had ever endured. Snape was usually terse during classes, but during that lesson, he breathed over shoulders with fire in his eyes, snapping at the slightest mistake. The entire class remained on guard and stiff the entire time, not saying a word, and it was only when Snape deemed Theo's and Hermione's as 'Acceptable' that Hermione managed to relax and watch the rest of the class.
It was interesting to watch how Snape went about this. His snapped instructions and nastiness resulted in people being very, very careful with their potions, and most of them ended up with the right result. He instructed each pair to bring a labeled vial of their potion up to his desk to be graded, and when it came time for people to begin cleaning up, Snape wasn't in the classroom, but in the storage room.
Hermione watched as students volunteered to clean up and took their cauldrons to the back, noting that nearly everyone who had offered from each pair was a girl. Lavender Brown even offered to take Harry and Ron's cauldron for them. As Hermione took her own cauldron to the back, she saw girls quickly but quietly filling up empty flasks with their potions and storing them in their bags. Lily Moon looked at Hermione when she approached, handing her half a dozen flasks without a word, and Hermione hid a grin and filled her flasks as Lily handed empty ones to Tracey and Daphne as well.
Hermione wondered if this had been planned by some of the girls since the Special Lecture. The Gryffindor girls all seemed well prepared and unstartled by this, and Hermione was bolstered to see them helping the Slytherins out without a word as well, united in this task. For that matter, the Slytherin girls didn't seem fazed by this secret plot either, and Hermione wondered if they too had empty flasks hidden on them in secret pockets.
McGonagall had warned them that they'd be learning this potion soon. Had that been a deliberate hint to be prepared and to take advantage of it when it came? Had Snape left the room purposefully to allow them to 'clean up' in an unorthodox matter?
It certainly seemed like it, Hermione thought. The Gryffindors never would have been prepared like this otherwise.
Her suspicions that Snape had left the room on purpose were solidified when the couple of pairs who failed had their potions promptly had their potions Vanished and detention assigned, where they would be forced to "do it right or receive a failing grade". For other potions, students just received a failing grade – this was the only lesson where Snape had assigned detention to require a do-over of the potion to make sure they learned it right.
As nasty as Snape was acting in class, he really did seem to have their interests at heart.
Professor Lockhart, after covering the more classic witch trials, had decided to cover other witch persecutions by muggles, and to Hermione's delight, he launched into the French Affair of the Poisons. The material was new to the class and very interesting, and Lockhart was an engaging teacher, detailing the intrigue and mystery that had surrounded King Louis' court. Hermione happily poured all the detail she could into the subsequent essay assigned, remembering what Fleur had told her over the summer, the memories bringing a fond smile to her lips as she wrote, and she was thrilled to get extra credit for her details when her grade was returned.
The lesson took a turn for the odder, however, when Lockhart announced another practical activity.
"You will each be a person at court," he said, handing out small cards to them. "Three of you will be witches. You will have five minutes for discussion, and then the lights will go out. The witches will then poison someone, and when I put the lights back on, one of you will be dead."
"Not for real, though?" Goyle looked worried.
Lockhart grinned. "Not for real," he reassured him.
Both Crabbe and Goyle looked relieved. Hermione wondered what kind of twisted upbringing they must have had, to immediately presume they'd actually be poisoned.
"Between each 'night', you will have five minutes for discussion," Lockhart instructed. "If a majority of the people vote a person out, they are exiled. The Court's goal is to exile all the witches, while the witches' goal is to eliminate most of the Court."
It ended up being an interesting game, not entirely dissimilar to the one they'd played where the class had put witches to burn at the stake. The witches won some games, and the Court other times. Hermione got to be a witch once, and it was just as challenging to try and throw off blame and suspicion as it was to play a normal Court member trying to figure out who was to blame.
This activity, though, ended up being less about worrying about if you were a going to be 'caught' as a witch, and more about how to figure out who was deceiving the group. Some people would 'poison' anyone who accused them during the day, which made them rather obvious to figure out. Other witches focused more on taking out the players who were leading group discussions and trying to make logical deductions. It was interesting to watch people learn how to catch people in lies as the game went on, and it was funny to watch the Hufflepuffs get more and more indignant; the Slytherins in the class were miles better at deceiving each other, and the Hufflepuffs were largely terrible at telling a lie and frequently got caught.
Hermione wondered just what Lockhart was trying to teach them, though. The real affair of the poisons hadn't just been random kills, but killing specific people in power or people who the witches had relationships to. While some of the players in the game took the opportunity to take out classmates they didn't like, most people had done it strategically. She wondered, not for the first time, if Lockhart was trying to give them 'practical experience' with a complicated topic. Was this sort of game similar to what people had actually tried to do, when the Death Eaters had walked free among them at the end of the last war?
She paused, then, remembering that some Death Eaters did still walk free.
Hermione shuddered.
Midway through October, their Divination class was rocked by a terrible discovery – Lavender Brown's pet rabbit had died. Her mother had written her to tell her the sad news. This would have been utterly unremarkable, except Professor Trelawney had predicted the thing Lavender dreaded would to come to pass would happen on October 16. It was bizarre to see Lavender simultaneously upset over the loss of her pet while also enraptured and amazed by the professor, who seemed to accept the entire matter in stride, instead refocusing her efforts on the dire fate Harry Potter was going to face, how his future looked terrible, and how he was being stalked by the Grim, a death omen.
The matter prompted Hermione to interrupt Professor Vector to ask her a question one day during Arithmancy.
"I understand Arithmancy is much clearer and a logical way to evaluate the future," she said. "But it can't be denied that Divination works as well, somehow. How does Divination work?"
There was a murmur of agreement and interest from the class. Professor Vector gave her a pointed look.
"Shouldn't this be a question for your Divination teacher?" she said dryly.
"She just blames it all on the 'Inner Eye', professor," Harry volunteered, quick to chime in. "She doesn't actually explain anything, really."
Professor Vector rolled her eyes and sighed, before she went to the chalk board and picked up a piece of chalk.
"In Arithmancy, the primary way of figuring out what is to come is through the use of prediction trees," she said, drawing what looked like a small tournament bracket backwards on the chalkboard. "We use equations at each fulcrum to determine the odds of which branch being more likely."
She flicked her wand at the chalk, and next to the prediction tree, several pieces of chalk began to draw many little lines, like veins, which scattered around randomly, criss-crossing each other and going apart again.
"Divination does not look at one circumstance very well," she said. "You can make an Arithmantic equation for anything, but Divination is not as good at handling specifics. What Divination tends to look for is set moments of time in the future where something big will happen. These events carry a heavier temporal and magical weight to them – Fate, if you will – that allows them to be seen by some people before they occur." She pointed out several points where multiple little veins had crossed over at the same point. "These moments are what Divination seeks – generally, when something dramatic occurs that has a lot of emotional impact."
"Like a pet dying?" Harry asked.
Professor Vector tilted her head. "Perhaps. Is that what happened in Divination?"
Harry explained about Lavender and her rabbit, and Professor Vector's lips began to curl.
"Let me show you something," she said. She waved her hand and the board was erased.
"If we were to handle this with Arithmancy, it would be a simple prediction tree: 'is the rabbit going to die?'," she said, drawing it out, "with possible answers of 'yes' or 'no'. We would use Arithmantic Queries to find out information about the age of the rabbit, the presence of predators nearby, and other such things, and we would get our estimate."
She fixed the class with a look. "Now – I will point out a rabbit dying is not exactly a dramatic moment in time. Rabbits especially are particularly frail – they can literally be scared to death. So this is not the type of event I would expect to have the particular drama or emotional impact that most Fated events have."
"However, if your teacher predicted this beforehand…"
Professor Vector drew a line on the board, followed by a circle, then the line continued on the other side. She then drew many other lines connecting to the circle.
"By predicting this, it became a dramatic event," Professor Vector said. "If Professor Trelawney had not predicted it, would anyone except Lavender have cared about the death of her pet?" Vector didn't pause for someone to respond to her question. "No. No one would have. But by predicting it, it became a point of drama and emotion for multiple people, as it solidified their belief in Divination and your teacher's powers."
"So wait, by predicting an event, she made the event happen?" Draco objected. "That doesn't seem right!"
"That seems suspiciously self-fulfilling," Theo agreed, eyes narrowed.
Professor Vector shrugged.
"In Arithmancy, an Arithmancer is careful to account for as many variables as possible to an equation, including oneself," she said. "In Divination? All that the Seer is looking for are points of temporal build-up, regardless of what makes such points in time have such energy."
Hermione wondered about Luna's prophecy. Whatever Luna had prophesized her to do was clearly a big deal, to have so much temporal energy, but had it only had such temporal energy because Luna had predicted it?
"Regardless, Divination is often unclear and imprecise," Professor Vector finished. "You'll note Professor Trelawney did not predict what would happen on October 16th for Lavender, only that something would."
Harry was cheered after the lesson.
"If all Trelawney can tell me is that I'll face some big doom at some point in the future, that's to be expected, isn't it?" he said. "We all suspect Voldemort's going to come back after me at some point, and that's probably got whatever 'temporal weight' attached to it, right?"
"I would imagine," Hermione said. She made a noise of frustration. "Oh, I wish I could skip ahead and learn everything already! Can you imagine how helpful it would be if we could use Arithmancy to predict when he would return?"
"If that's possible, wouldn't Dumbledore have already done it?" Harry frowned.
Hermione shrugged. "Dumbledore was the Transfiguration teacher, not Arithmancy. It's possible he doesn't know how. He doesn't know everything."
The idea seemed to startle Harry.
"You don't think he'd ask Vector for help?" Harry asked. "Or the Arithmancers at the Ministry?"
"Maybe he has." Hermione said. "I imagine there's a lot of variables involved, though – and he probably didn't have one of them until quite recently."
She tapped his scar lightly, and Harry swallowed hard.
"Right," he said. He sounded determined. "I guess we'll just have to stay ready, then."
Hermione didn't think they were anywhere near ready to deal with something like Voldemort's return, but Harry's determination and courage was inspiring, and she didn't want to take that from him.