The rest of the year continued on as it was want to do. Nothing happened that really made her take notice, as she received the highest possible grade in her singular class. Her own experiments came to a close as she gently began to return everything to as it was, retracting her still into the walls of the bathroom, and finally she closed the path between her dorm and the same, figuring it was best not to leave a question of why such a path might be in place if someone came snooping during the summer.
It was Ravenclaw that won the House Cup that year. Not unexpected, as they'd been trying harder and harder to win by the end. It was, however, the first time in a while that the Quidditch Cup was not paired with it, as the 'Boy Who Lived', having not been grounded from the game, despite Snape's protests to have done so, was able to take an amazing win, catching the Golden Snitch in less than a minute, ending the game before a single point could be scored.
With that in hand, the Great Hall was lively as one might expect, as the two victorious Houses celebrated. Sure, it should have been Gryffindor taking both of the top spots with that influx of points, but given Slythren had fallen from first to third place in the House Rankings, everyone saw it as good enough. She sighed, wondering why they accepted such things so easily, but didn't press, as she had something else on her mind.
Professor Quirrel had vanished. The stuttering man had, at some point about a week before the end of class, simply stopped showing up, and it was obvious something had happened. Oh, the other Professors and faculty maintained that the man had had some kind of family emergency, but she'd done a small bit of digging and discovered that he had never been seen to leave the grounds.
In fact, the last anyone saw of him was going into that Third Floor Corridor, the one she'd never braved herself, though she'd heard plenty of rumors. About how Hagrid's dragon was in there, or a three headed dog, or even a basilisk of all things. Like the Headmaster would allow such vicious creatures near the students. The cerberus was the most likely, given their nature as guards, but even then, it was just absurd to think he'd endanger anyone by keeping something like it on the grounds.
It didn't help that a body had been found somewhere on campus. Oh, no one else talked about that, but she'd been…well snooping after her time with the bathroom was done, and wandered by the school infirmary to find one of the beds occupied by a very body shaped object, under some kind of disillusionment charm, which kept her from making out the details. However, given the specific sort of charm used couldn't be applied to living things, it left very few other conclusions.
No one said anything about him dying, some even complimented him on being the first teacher in more than twenty years that had 'survived' the curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. She was unsure if that was a true thing, but she didn't care either, merely lamenting that a sounding board for her future endeavors had been taken from her, as she left the hall, and with the rest of the students, was loaded onto the train bound for London.
The trip felt shorter than the trip up, and she was inclined to believe it was, given they got back to Platform 9 & 3⁄4 with the sun still in the sky, compared to their arrival back during the tail end of summer. There was some difference in how long a day lasted between the two, but not that much, so likely as not, it was simply that the magic to keep people from finding the school via the train took it longer to pass through going in than coming out.
Regardless, she was delighted to see her parents again. Her mum had grown out her hair, just a bit in the ten months since she'd last seen her, and her father had even started on a beard of some description, the pair saying they'd felt it was time to 'embrace their youth' a bit after finding out fantasy and magic were real things in the world. She laughed at that, as they guided her to the car for the drive home.
It seemed her father had prepared for her arrival by devouring a dozen or more fantasy series over the past year, all so he could ask the kinds of magic she was learning, and compare it to what those without had dreamed up. She was happy to talk about it with him, becoming, if only for a few hours on the drive home, the young girl she seemed like, rather than the person she had determined herself to be.
It was a fun time, and she enjoyed it, but as they pulled in, she told them she had something to discuss with them in a tone they knew meant it. Neither of her parents were ones to treat her like a child, not after she'd been eight and shown she was more on the level of a teenager then. As such, they quickly shuffled themselves into her home, and with a sigh, knowing what she was bringing into this place might well taint it in her memory, she still crossed the threshold, and had them sit down.
She began by telling them she hadn't lied in a single one of her letters, keeping them abreast of most of the developments at school. She was, as she'd said in them, fine with being friendless, so long as the school itself was fine with having a loner within its student body, and unlike muggle…er non-magical schools, Hogwarts proved to be just as apathetic towards her as she was towards the rest of those she shared an age with.
They had hoped against hope that she might find someone within her school to talk to, but they'd known it wasn't as likely, especially with the 'separated by ages' most boarding schools got up to, more so with a place where magic was being studied they assumed. Still, she pointed out she'd made friends with a few teachers, the librarian even, and while she disagreed with his approach, she had nothing but respect for Headmaster Dumbledore.
However, she then told them of the troll attack. They listened with rapt attention, hanging on her every word as she described the thing, a dark creature that was supposed to be a threat to even a grown witch if they were unprepared, and given she'd been not only underaged, but crying her eyes out in the bathroom, it was probably the worst position she could have been in to go up against it.
And she'd won. The thing was no match for her, once her brain got working. She didn't regale them with the details of it, merely telling them the thing had died to her magic. She assured her father that trolls, such as they were, were not really more than slightly smart animals, so she felt no reason to feel ashamed of doing it in with her power, and they accepted that, even though he wondered if she'd gotten a drop from it, like in a video game.
She saw he was trying to lighten the mood, and even smiled at him before assuring him magic didn't work that way, though she might have wished it were so. But she moved on to what had happened afterward, and while they might have been worried about the troll, the fact that she was alive said it had turned out okay. Hearing a teacher of all things had disrespected their little girl, however, was enough for her father to ask if Snape might need some dental work done…painful drilling specifically.
She was grateful for his protective instincts, but pointed out that Snape was a symptom of a large problem. Magical society, not just in the Isles, but ALL of it, the world over was…off. It still had the old ideas of blood, disproven just by her being the best student in her year, the only one able to handle a trial made up of every class, when no one else in the whole school could do even three at once.
Worse though was their need to blame and punish people. It didn't matter how or why. The troll? She had been punished for killing it, so there had been, as far as she could tell, no investigation into how it had gotten into the castle beyond 'through the dungeons'. This despite the fact that trolls of its kind were not native to the area. No one had even asked her about it, despite her being the only one to face it alive, and them still not knowing how she'd killed it.
Then came the moment with Hagrid. She hadn't known him well, beyond his place at the school, and that the Boy Who Lived often went to his hut during his off days, probably because they knew each other somehow. But the dragon incident. He'd been doing something wrong, to be fair, but it wasn't even half the same as the one who'd given the bloody egg to the half-giant. Yet, they found someone to punish for the incident, and so they decided not to bother going further with the investigation.
The fact that the Boy Who Lived, Harry Potter, had been punished for, effectively, defending himself was the last straw for her mother, who said a word that made her own swear about the dragon egg be forgotten. Her mother, as she found out, had had bullies in her school days, and to see them not only get away with it relatively unscathed, but for their victims to be punished? That was beyond the pale.
Her parents did ask her if she wished to continue at all with such things happening. After all, it wasn't too late for her to transfer to a muggle school and be part of that society. It had issues, to be fair, some of the same, but at least those were getting better. She was adamant, however, that they were only getting better because someone was trying to make them better, and if she left, then who would try to change the magical world to be a place of Good, and not just Law?
They told her how proud they were of their little girl, hugging her, and then asked the one question she'd been waiting for. How could they help? That caused Hermione to smile, just a twinkle of a tear in her eye from how happy she was as she began to lay out the things she'd already discovered, from her reading spell, to what it had shown her, to her own experiments over the latter half of the school year
She impressed them with a few talks on the 'physics' of magic, how they applied ideas into the real world by the will of the caster. She'd even, briefly, dabbled in broomsticks, seeing that they were Aristotelian in their physics somehow, even though for the riders Newton was still king, which might be the reason why the Quidditch game was so hard to play as their bodies and their equipment were operating under two very different rulesets.
It was as she finished that, that she brought up that magic had one more odd quirk to it that seemed less studied than it should be. Namely its interaction with technology, something she'd not been able to test directly, sadly. Still, knowing that she'd been able to at least set up a few tests, and with a smirk, she brought down an old pair of trophies, silver ones, she'd won in a set of maths and science competitions that she demonstrated.
Without a word, a twist of the wand, or anything else to shape her magic, she placed both hands on the trophies and just focused, feeling the energy in her body flow into them. Suddenly, there was a humming noise, and the air filled with the smell of ozone. Before, with a burst of light, the two trophies had lightning dancing between them, like tesla coils. They weren't big sparks, but they were visible, and even audible with a crackle.
When she was done, she wasn't too tired, as the trophies had done most of the work, but still, she sat down in her chair, as she laid out what she'd discovered. That magic had a field effect, like electromagnetism. And with that knowledge in hand, she intended to reshape the magical world, a declaration that should have sounded sinister, but her parents just nodded along, waiting for her to continue.