She began to lay out her plans. Magicals respected might, they respected power, and to change this world, she would need that. So she had spent her days searching for ways to make it happen. Spellcrafting could only go so far, as any idea she'd had had a counter spell. She was smart, but she was up against a society that had been studying magic for millennia, and as such, had come up with all the 'easy' ideas for power.
Worse, potions were…unstable at best. She could do many, many things with potions, as she'd thought in her early testing days, but other than healing, a potion's effects were random in far too many ways. What did luck mean? Or fame? Or even cheating death? Her research showed so many answers to those questions that she dismissed them all, not the least of which because how long a potion's effect lasted varied by too many factors to be predictable.
So, after using her spell for reading, something they were not at all shocked to learn she'd developed as it happened, she'd hit on the idea of how to use the quirk of magic she'd discovered. Her parents were curious, as she placed the trophies back on the shelf with the rest, why it wasn't studied like the rest of her prior ideas, and she had to stop for a moment, showing that she had thought of it, but was having to think of the right way to phrase her answer.
Finally, she simply said that magicals had no respect at all for muggles. They didn't think of them as anything other than pets at best, pests at worst. The fact that it was legal to dose a potential partner with love potions, and continue to do so to maintain the relationship, showed how little respect they had, as while that act was legal between them, magicals at least had some resistance to the effects that muggles simply didn't.
That brought her parents up short, and her mother had to confirm with her twice that such a thing was legal, and Hermione noted it was one of the things she was going to change. After all, there were many a story from the non-magical world that came out of men in power doing such things, and they were hated and reviled for it. The fact that magicals had no such qualms showed how far behind they were on matters of morality.
They wondered exactly how she planned on changing magical society, given her talk was mostly of combat, and while they believed in her, she was just one person. A brilliant person, the smartest one they knew, and destined to do big things. But this was…a lot. She had to admit, she agreed with them, and her plans at the moment were nebulous, she was preparing for what she knew might be needed, while hoping more gentle means could be found.
She explained to them the concept of Dark Lords. They were men and women who went against the world's morals, usually for selfish gain, sometimes perhaps not, it depended on who wrote those histories. But each one HAD changed the world in some way, with the most recent, Lord Voldermort who had fallen some ten years ago after a similarly long reign of terror, having helped to create the modern world.
His changes had been negative, of course, creating a society that was even more insular than what had been before, where witches and wizards barely interacted outside of family, and the only places to see more of their own kind were Diagon Alley and its side streets, the Ministry, and Hogsmead, a town built near Hogwarts for the sole purpose of being a purely magical community, as well as the school itself.
Before him, there had been small communities like Godric's Hollow dotting the country. Since him? There might be a few families that live close together, but for the most part every magical family lived alone, with even the children either simply building around what their parents did, or moving to small plots, isolating themselves, preventing anyone from organizing anything larger than a party, just how someone like Lord Voldemort wanted it.
When he died it made it even easier for those who had followed him, people who had been fearing their loss of power and relevance beforehand, to take full control once more. This was done by the simple fact that, unlike the muggle government, the only thing the Ministry for Magic had was a House of Lords like body, made up of inherited seats that decided laws by majority vote, and elected the Minister for Magic, with only one seat in the whole group being something one could earn.
That one seat, as it happened, was Chief Warlock, a post held, for as long as almost anyone could remember, by Albus Dumbledore, as it was a seat reserved for the strongest witch or wizard in all of the Isles. But even with so strong a man in that position for so long, it had slowly been stripped of all its powers over the decades, until now, in these last ten years, he had become barely able to stem the tide of terrible ideas and policies that the pure bloods wanted to enact.
Her parents, being quite fond of their modern system of governance, asked after their position below the Queen or even the Prime Minister, and Hermione shrugged. On paper, the Ministry for Magic would have to obey the Prime Minister's word, or something that passed the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Queen's word was even law to them, given their charter had not changed in some centuries.
In practice, the muggle governments knew little of how the magicals operated. She would be surprised if the current Prime Minister knew about the existence of magic at all. If he did it was only in a vague way, a single meeting, required by magical law to make themselves known to him, and then nothing else. Lest the muggle get ideas above his station and think that the magical community would be his to command.
No, they would not be changed by muggles. There were laws in place, international ones called the Statute of Secrecy, that out and out forbade the magical communities of any nation from reaching out to their muggle counterparts, beyond what was absolutely necessary, in fact. Trying to force them to change through those avenues would just bring the other magical communities down on their head.
The only way to invoke change was to change the Wizengamot, and that would require more effort than even taking down a Dark Lord in his prime, as they had the power of momentum on their side. Sure it was the momentum of a stationary object, but ask Sisyphus how easy it is to roll the boulder uphill when it simply doesn't want to move, and you'll understand sometimes momentum works for the immovable.
Still, it wasn't all doom and gloom. She'd been keeping her 'ear to the ground' as the saying went, and realized how…limited the magical community was in terms of spending power. Five-thousand galleons, the big gold coins they'd used to buy her school supplies with, was a fortune to them, which shocked her parents to hear, as they could technically have afforded that much, if not comfortably so.
Hermione nodded at that, laying out how the economy of the magical world was suffering a bit of stagnation. They knew nothing of banking, using as they did goblins for all such things. Possibly that was why they never realized the power of silver and gold in acting as conduits for magic. Or perhaps they did realize it, and just figured if they gave that to goblins they could keep them in their place, so as not to cause another war.
Regardless, their financial power, even of the oldest of old families, was barely a drop in the bucket compared to the muggle economy. They'd never heard of fractional reserve banking, or a mortgage as she'd found out in her research. Her father japed, that showed they weren't all evil then, which got a smile out of her, but as she noted, it also meant that their spending power was locked into those huge mansions so many of them had.
So, if it came down to it, she could simply outspend her enemies, but that wouldn't be enough. This was an old world power structure. If they saw her as a threat because of money, well then, they'd take her money. It was as simple as that. The Ministry would find some reason to fine her. Maybe some trumped up charge or the like, especially if she began to compete with them in some way.
She would also be competing with their nigh total control of the media in the magical world. Most of the magical governments, as she had found out, published their own paper. Those that claimed they didn't, like the Ministry for Magic, simply owned a controlling interest in the only publication that was accepted across most of their territory, in this case the Daily Prophet, which was seen as, at best, a rag, but still, the only paper they had.
Her mother was quite shocked by that, so Hermione admitted there were a few, smaller publications. She'd seen something called 'The Qubbler' at school a time or two, but looking into it, she'd seen its sales were measured in the dozen. Not dozens, just a dozen or so across the whole of the country. It was sold beside the Prophet, which saw sales in the thousands, as everyone wanted to keep up to date, even if they thought it was hogwash.
Her father joked that it was just like normal people then. No one trusted the BBC either half the time. Still, to know there was only one source of information, and it was controlled, if indirectly, by the government? It sounded like a recipe for a tyrant to come down and just take over. Why hadn't the Dark Lords, either this Voldemort person, or someone else, just stepped in and done it?
She had a few answers for that. For one thing, most magicals already lived a good life. A family of 12 could be housed without problem in a single home, expanded outwards without anyone the wiser. Better, since they tended to move away from the muggle communities, they controlled huge swathes of land outside the view of others, giving them even more insulation from any kind of change.
Their lifestyles were, if anything, above average for their nations, but not very far. Their magic allowed them to do many things simply by waving their wands, so water was not a problem, and power was, if anything, easier to come by as so many of their devices were powered by magic itself, down to a kind of lightbulb that worked on a similar principle to normal ones, but used magic instead of electricity to excite the wire.
Still, luxuries were almost unheard of for normal magicals to afford. Trips away from home weren't just rare, they were affairs for remembering for generations, and most jobs paid, at most, a few dozen galleons a year, sometimes up to a hundred for really profitable jobs, but otherwise the homes were poor by the standards of the muggle economy, leaving them vulnerable to that one slip up causing them to slide into poverty state.
Which, she smiled, brought her to her first and hopefully only needed line of attack on the magical world. She was going to hit it with a pocket book full to bursting, and reaching into her school truck, she pulled open a sealed drawer, revealing hundreds of vials of potions, gleaming in all the colors of the rainbow. Her parents, understanding only that they looked expensive, were awed, as Hermione began to lay out her plans for conquering the magical world, without ever firing a spell.