A couple days after she'd joined the project, Hermione had come to Director Payne's office and directly asked him why she was here. He'd seemed mostly amused by the question, which honestly had been rather irritating — she'd been being completely serious.
Hermione had been feeling rather out of sorts for a while, by the time the invitation came. Beth had already left to join the bloody Army a week previously — it was still slightly absurd to her that they were accepting actual fifteen-year-olds, but Hermione didn't make the rules. Ron had tried to join up with her, but they were at least requiring parental approval — Beth presumably only got through that hurdle due to her complicated legal status — and Mrs Weasley had refused to sign off on it. Instead, Ron was in...well, Hermione guessed it was a sort of militia, run by the Ministry — the Hit Wizards were training up a force to defend the islands, in case they were attacked while the majority of their fighters were overseas. Mrs Weasley hadn't been pleased with that idea either, but at least it was a domestic project, so Ron wouldn't be being sent to fight in a foreign country, like her husband and her adult children. Even Fred and George were gone, volunteering for some humanitarian relief group, Hermione didn't know the details...
Mum had been called up, Dad was very busy helping keep things in Oxford running, most of the adults in the Order were contributing in one way or another, either sent away overseas to fight or occupied with some project at home. And Hermione was left at Rock-on-Clyde, alone, with nothing to do. School would be cancelled until an as-yet-undetermined date in the future, so she wouldn't be going back to Hogwarts any time soon. She'd pop over to Oxford to help out now and then, spent a fair amount of her time back 'home' brewing potions for the clinic. It didn't seem very productive, but it was the only thing she could think of to occupy her time, she didn't know what else to do.
She just felt so helpless — people were dying out there, probably in the millions before all this was over, the entire modern world crumbling around her ears, and she was, just, floating directionlessly, no sense of what the hell she was supposed to do about it...
So the letter from the Department of Mysteries had been welcome, if completely unexpected. The aliens' physiology and technology, as well as magical and muggle governments collaborating side-by-side for the first time in centuries, had presented a wealth of magical and technological problems that needed solving. The governments of the world were cooperating to put together research institutions to try to come up with solutions — magical experts and scientists and engineers put in a room together, where they'd be given a problem, and as much information and resources as they needed to solve it. It was undoubtedly the largest public research and development project in history, spread out over countless institutions all over the world, and probably the first one to ever include both mages and muggles, at least since the beginning of Secrecy. Who knew what new discoveries and technologies would come out of the effort, at this point it was entirely impossible to predict. They might reverse-engineer the advanced alien technology, come up with some novel development by integrating magical and scientific principles, they could change the entire bloody world.
And, for some unfathomable reason, Hermione had been invited to participate.
She hadn't seriously considered it, when she'd gotten the letter — she'd just flooed over to Oxford to track down an associated office who might be able to tell her whether or not the invitation was legitimate, and impulsively agreed to join. The only hiccough had been tracking down her father to get his permission, since she was only sixteen and couldn't agree to the associated contract (to do with confidentiality and expenses and benefits and patents and the like) without him cosigning for her. A couple days later, she'd gotten a letter from the Commission with a reusable portkey — Hermione hadn't even realised those existed — which would bring her to and from her team's office space.
Somewhat to Hermione's surprise, the research team she'd been assigned to was actually based in the Netherlands, taking over a sizeable conference room and various offices and labs in the University of Groningen. The Netherlands was a rather small country, and had fared badly in the initial attack — the rough triangle formed by Amsterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam severely damaged in the bombing, Utrecht also hit several times (in passing, between Britain and the major cities of the Rhineland). They didn't have anything close to a proper death count yet, complicated by the scattered state of local institutions and the damage to transportation and communications infrastructure, but it was suspected that, including the injured lost in subsequent weeks and associated effects of so many people fleeing their homes, they might well lose one to three million people due to that first week alone — and the total population of the Netherlands had only been about fifteen million before the attack.
The devastation in the UK seemed quite bad enough, but the Dutch might have lost as much as a fifth of their entire population in the space of a few days — that was simply horrifying.
Of course, the Dutch government (both muggle and magical) had been in the affected area. The British governments had been somewhat fortunate in that most of their leadership had been away from the focus of the attack on their country, or could evacuate in relatively short order, but the Dutch had been far less lucky. The Dutch equivalent of the Ministry of Magic had been hit in the first bombing run, a large fraction of the officials there lost almost immediately — most of their equivalent to the Wizengamot had even been present at the time (in an emergency meeting to address the alien attack), and had also been killed, leaving the magical government in shambles. The muggle government had faired somewhat better, the evacuation of the Cabinet and the States General in the Hague at the time well underway by the time the attack came. Of course, the evacuation hadn't been finished yet, but a surprising number of people had managed to survive — there was a story floating around of the Second Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Housing, and a pack of people from the House of Representatives jumping out of the burning Binnenhof into the Hofvijver and swimming to safety — and most of the military leadership had survived, so the government had mostly managed to hold itself together in the crisis.
Though, in a freak fluke of bad luck, the Royal Family had been hit in transit. Queen Beatrix, her husband Prince Claus, their son (and heir to the throne) Prince Willem-Alexander, and Beatrix's mother (and former Queen) Princess Juliana had all died more or less instantly. The Queen's younger sons, Prince Friso and Prince Constantijn, had both been seriously injured in the attack — Friso had succumbed a week later, but Constantijn was still alive, though nowhere near recovered enough to even so much as leave the hospital. (He was technically King now, though it'd be a while before they'd be able to make it official.) Beatrix's younger sister Princess Margeriet had also been present, but her injuries had been relatively minor — despite the personal tragedy, she'd been making appearances at refugee camps and hospitals and the like, not even bothering to hide the bandages and the sling her arm had been in, Hermione assumed for morale reasons. (Hermione had actually spotted the Prince Consort walking around Oxford a couple times, sometimes with Princess Mary, presumably the same idea.) The government had mostly been relocated to Apeldoorn, but Constantijn was actually at the hospital here in Groningen, the area around the building thick enough with security and well-wishers it was practically unnavigable.
The Netherlands had fared worse in the initial attack than Britain had, but not as badly as it could have gone. Northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria had all had their governments devastated, and the death toll in the major metropolitan areas of Germany was absolutely sickening. But she guessed hey, it could be worse! wasn't really much consolation to a nation going through hell.
So, given how dire of straights the Dutch were in at the moment, the University of Groningen seemed like an odd pick — but Hermione had, perhaps, underestimated just how unimportant borders had become in the crisis. Civilians had fled whichever way seemed best to escape the aliens, security forces rather too occupied to bother preventing them from crossing where they technically weren't supposed to. In some places authorities had just waved refugees through, getting them away from the fighting. (In particular, Italian refugees had been summarily welcomed into Yugoslavia, France, and Switzerland, to help get as many people as far away from the fighting as possible.) There were several examples of even militaries crossing national borders without waiting for permission, scrambling to help fight off alien attacks — after all, allowing an attacker to establish a beachhead in a neighbouring country would just be bad strategy, regardless of whether their help had been asked for. Germany in particular had been simultaneously 'invaded' by multiple neighbouring militaries, both Communist and Liberal — the country was still largely disarmed due to the settlement after the War, and would have had a hard time hunting down the alien soldiers within their borders on their own — and there'd been a very tense moment between the (Communist) Greek army and (Liberal) Turks after the Greeks swept up to Istanbul without invitation to help in the evacuation, the standoff interrupted when another alien attack arrived, the two enemy militaries falling right into a side-by-side fight seemingly without a second thought. The two countries had been cooperating to deal with the refugees displaced by attacks on the cities in western Turkey, though not without occasional issues — Greco–Turkish relations were...difficult for a reason. Hermione thought they were doing pretty well, all things considered.
Of course, directly involving the mages could also complicate things — their governments had formed a century or two earlier than the modern borders in Europe were drawn, on somewhat different principles, reflecting linguistic and cultural divisions rather than whatever territory some king generations ago had managed to hold onto, so their national borders rarely corresponded to muggle ones. Magical Holland didn't include Limburg in the southeast, instead part of Germany, and the provinces in the northeast were instead part of Saxony, a country which didn't even exist on the muggle side. Corresponding to roughly the northern half of Germany, minus parts of Schleswig-Holstein and plus much of Pomerania (which was Polish on the muggle side), Saxony was one of the more economically and culturally important countries in the ICW, though with a rather complicated modern history. And by 'complicated', Hermione meant it was Grindelwald's home country, the first aristocratic government to be deposed by the Communalist Revolution — it had been occupied for a time in the aftermath of the war, only to be immediately taken back over by Communalists once the ICW pulled out and allowed self-governance to resume. (The ICW had maybe made a mistake when they'd decided to implement a democratic system, but the Communalists had so thoroughly divested and dispersed the old aristocracy that they hadn't had much choice in the matter.) The Communalists had a very similar ethos of international solidarity as muggle Communists — Communalists weren't properly Marxist, but they were similar enough Hermione could guess what they would do in a given situation more often than not — so when various muggle and magical authorities had started talking about organising a big cooperative research institution, the Saxons had immediately volunteered to help set it up. Muggle accommodations would be most convenient, for various reasons, but muggle Germany was in terrible shape and had their own problems to deal with, but Groningen — or Grins, as the Saxon mages called it — had gotten through the attack unscathed, and there happened to be a major university in the city.
So, Groningen it was.
Hermione had been to the Netherlands several times, though they'd normally never stayed for very long — her parents liked to travel, and depending on which airliner their flight was with they might need to pass through Amsterdam at some point. She had only a passing familiarity with the language, could say basic things like where the toilets were and do you speak English/French? and she hadn't really seen much of the country. And she wasn't seeing much of it now, either: her portkey brought her straight to a courtyard at the University, only a couple minutes' walk away from her destination. Over her first couple weeks with the programme, she did get around the campus and the immediate area, but she didn't see much beyond that. She wasn't here as a tourist, after all.
The research team had been set up in a building that, from the signage and materials and equipment around, seemed to house physics and chemistry departments. A sizeable conference room had been set aside for them, a bank of windows overlooking one of the University's green spaces, each of the members of the team granted their own office — commandeered from University staff, part of some kind of engineering programme. When Hermione had gotten here, her office — nothing special, maybe even smaller than her bedroom back home, just room for a writing desk, a very modern-looking computer in a corner, a sofa she suspected had frequently been used to nap on overnight, the walls thick with bookshelves — had still had the previous owner's personal effects scattered about, Hermione had carefully packed them away in case they came by to reclaim them. (A graduate student, she thought, she had no idea whether he was even still alive.) The computers still worked, the University powered by the same generators keeping the lights at the hospital on, they'd been given free access to the University's archives, and even offered time on the big computers in a basement somewhere if they had a model they wanted to run or something. (Though only on request, the power drain was too great to keep them running at all times.) The various labs scattered around the University were free for their use, if they wanted to test or build something, whatever materials they needed would be made available, a modest staff of assistants lingering around who could be asked to track down whatever information or equipment they wanted if it wasn't in easy reach. Food was even brought up to the offices on a regular schedule, all the periphery stuff taken care of, permitting them to focus entirely on their work.
Hermione had met the entire team by now, seventeen members including Payne, and... Physicists and engineers and alchemists and enchanters, all highly-qualified specialists in their respective fields. A selection of experts chosen from the region — the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, Germany — a spread of ages, leaning younger, very little grey hair in the room, but all credentialed and experienced.
And then there was just Hermione. The first morning meeting, seeing all the grown adults around the table, Hermione had felt extremely out of place.
For the most part, the members were free to work on whatever project they wished, within the scope of their team's remit. There were various other research teams out there, people with different specialities working on a selection of problems — there were teams working on quicker techniques to rebuild infrastructure and better accommodate refugees, other teams studying the aliens themselves, their physiology and their technology, other teams working on weapons development and/or building better defences against the aliens', and so forth and so on. The team Hermione had been put with was primarily focussed on two problems: energy, and communications. A fair number of power plants had been knocked out in that first week of bombing, distribution networks damaged in uncountable places, and most national energy grids were dependent on resources that were suddenly far less available than they'd been a couple months ago. Also, crossing wardlines did funny things to electrical currents, so the more open use of wards was also going to cause distribution issues — especially since they would want to use wards to better protect energy infrastructure going forward, that was a problem that would need a solution. An enchanter on their team (muggleborn) had already had a pre-existing concept of a generator that drew energy from ambient magic, which would at least solve the fuel problem, several people were working on scaling it up and picking away at the other problems on the list.
Communications were a somewhat more complicated problem...which also contained the energy problem — after all, modern communications technology required electricity to run. They'd lost contact with every single satellite in orbit, and a fair fraction of physical, wired networks were out as well. That possibility hadn't occurred to Hermione at first — a lot of cables were deep enough underground they were unlikely to be hit with anything short of a sustained, focussed bombardment, and they were hardly likely to hit the undersea cables — but, of course, those networks went through hubs, which often performed important routing functions, and those were above ground. It was difficult to tell whether a blackout was due to a critical hub being hit in the bombing, or simply having lost power, or if a cable had been damaged somewhere between here and there. There were teams of technicians scouring over areas where signals weren't getting through, but they were slowed down significantly by the destruction and chaos left behind by the bombing — set scattering again whenever one of the alien ships decided to swing by and lob a few more bombs at people, seemingly at random — the effort to restore the physical networks had seen very mixed success so far.
Wireless communications had their own problems. Cellular networks required the physical infrastructure to function, obviously — if a transceiver was damaged, or lost power, signal in that cell of the network would be lost until it could be restored. Even if power was available to charge the battery — and power was still pretty inconsistent most everywhere, so that was hardly guaranteed — phone service would still be extremely spotty. The old analog network had some advantages, since the lower frequency had a greater range and digital devices had a harder time holding a signal at the edge of it (due to the cliff effect, which was a new idea to Hermione), meaning there were fewer transceivers to be hit and better odds of finding one that was still connected to the greater network, but enough nodes on the network had been hit that even the old network was effectively blacked out. Various militaries were working at getting them back online in limited areas, but it was a work in progress. Plain, old-fashioned radios required much less physical infrastructure, so were far more reliable at the moment.
The problem with that was that magic and electromagnetic signals didn't mix. Magical and electromagnetic fields interacted with each other in odd ways — it wasn't precisely the same concept as wave interference, the maths were much more complicated, but the general result was that electronics went haywire (capacitors had a nasty tendency to explode), and radio signals were disrupted enough to quickly become unintelligible. And that was just from magic in the environment, wardlines tended to completely block radio signals (like a flawless Faraday cage), and some wards even bounced them. The latter was an interesting phenomenon — the signal didn't lose any strength or fidelity in the process, and in some cases was observed to grow stronger, Hermione had no idea where the energy was coming from — but it didn't really solve the problem. Especially since both the people who'd be sending out radio messages and the people they wanted to receive them were likely to be under wards.
Honestly, Hermione wasn't sure that problem was solvable. Other people on the team were looking into work-arounds, perhaps designing wards to specifically allow certain EM bands through — impossible to do without reducing effectiveness, she suspected (the most effective wards were even often visually opaque, included an element to project a seamless illusion of whatever was on the other side so as not to blind the occupants) — or simply mass-producing magical radios to replace the muggle version entirely — the problem with that being that magical radio were solely unidirectional broadcasts — or designing a kind of repeater that would transform EM signals into a magical analog that would get through wards — so far, it sounded like that was possible, but prohibitively complex — a variety of other ideas tossed around, at this point just brainstorming possibilities. One idea Hermione had overheard involved adding an element to the wards that would, itself, function as an antenna, capturing any EM signals that hit it and reproducing them somewhere in a form the occupants would be able to interpret. Not a bad idea, on the surface, but it wouldn't work at all on wards that inexplicably bounced signals...and also there were serious issues with the reproducing them somewhere in a form occupants can interpret part — that seemingly simple engineering problem actually required multiple steps to get from A to B, and would practically have to be invented from scratch.
None of the ideas she'd heard seemed particularly promising to Hermione. She suspected defensive wards and radio-based communications were fundamentally incompatible — it was possible she was missing something, but it seemed to her like they would have to pick one. Not that Hermione had participated in these discussions much, she didn't feel like she...
The team members were free to chip away at whatever project as they liked, they only had a very loose schedule here. There was a meeting in the morning, often over a light breakfast, usually simple pastries with butter and preserves — they'd had coffee for the first week, but they'd soon switched to tea grown in magical greenhouses within Britain or France or Germany, apparently the University's supply of coffee had run dry already — where they'd start off with a military attaché of some kind, never the same person more than a few days in a row and representing a random smattering of European countries, reading them in on the important news that had come in over the last day or so. Payne would follow that with his understanding of where they currently stood with the problems assigned to them, turning it over to the team for updates. They'd quickly spiral off on discussion of one project or another, until Payne decided they had a good enough of a picture of what was going on around here, and sent them off to get to work on it. There would then be a second meeting in the evening, where what breakthroughs or lack thereof they'd had over the course of the day would be discussed — this second meeting was normally rather shorter than the first, just checking in with everyone before most of the support staff went home for the night.
Between the morning and evening meetings they were more or less left to their own devices. So far, Hermione had spent the vast majority of those hours reading voraciously — she didn't know what she was doing here, she was terribly under-qualified, tearing through whatever materials she could find in subjects that seemed like they might be relevant. Over the course of the first couple weeks, she gave herself a quick-and-dirty education in wardcrafting and geomancy — getting into the latter had had half-formed glimmers of implications for materials science dancing in her head, but that was a distraction, she tried to ignore it — she'd briefly looked into how magical radios worked before realising within a single afternoon that it wouldn't be useful, had before long thoroughly buried herself in materials on optics and network infrastructure and particle physics and electrical engineering and computer science. Hermione had a general understanding of how modern technology worked, yes, probably better than most muggle(born)s her age, but she didn't understand the fundamentals well enough to be much help here at all, she needed to catch up, and now.
Hermione had come to the conclusion that wards and radios would simply never mix within the first week. She wasn't an expert in wardcrafting, of course, but it didn't take very long to see that the fundamentals of how photons worked would preclude any of the workarounds she'd heard people talking about. It wasn't a complicated concept, honestly. She had a feeling the mages didn't understand the science and the muggles didn't understand the magic well enough to put that together.
More often than not, Hermione didn't actually leave the University after the evening meeting — most of the support staff cleared out, yes, but people on the research team weren't obligated to leave for the night. Hermione's impression was that a bit over half of her colleagues (a word which felt very strange and inappropriate to use) would stay here overnight, given the importance of what they were trying to accomplish here...and also some of them didn't have homes to go back to, lost in the bombings. There were few nights Hermione didn't end up sleeping in her office, went from the evening meeting straight back to her reading, she needed to catch up, often it was well after midnight before she surrendered to the eye strain and passed out on the sofa. She'd discovered the pillow and blanket on her second night here, so, she was pretty sure she wasn't the first person to use this office sofa as a bed.
The first night she'd stayed over, she'd gone back to Rock-on-Clyde in the morning to pick up a couple things — hygiene stuff, mostly, a couple changes of clothes — to find a panicky Mrs Weasley talking with a couple Order people (Hermione only recognised Professor Lupin) about how they would...find Hermione. Oops. She suffered a suffocating hug and some lecturing, promised to send word back to the Order that she was alright at least once a day. In her defence, she was very preoccupied, it hadn't occurred to her — also, Mrs Weasley wasn't her mother, there was really no need for her to hover so much. When she'd dropped by Oxford one day to see Dad, told him about the incident, his only comment had been to remind her to eat something occasionally...
(Dad was very proud that she'd been recruited by the Commission, apparently he'd been bragging about it to coworkers at the hospital and the clinic and random Party people, but he was also aware of how obsessive she could get sometimes — he hadn't forgotten about her near breakdown in year three of primary, or running herself ragged for the first couple months of her first year and...pretty much all of her third year at Hogwarts. He'd said things about pacing herself, but that was easy for him to say, he wasn't a teenage girl surrounded by qualified experts in their fields, she was so far behind...)
Hermione was practically consumed tearing through whatever science and enchanting materials might seem useful, day after day filled with diagrammes and equations and countless pages, dancing in the blackness whenever she closed her eyes. As focussed as she was on catching up, only the occasional distraction managed to worm its way through. Since Hermione was working with the Commission now, letters sent by the British Forces Post Office were starting to find her in Groningen — there must have been some kind of handshake between the Commission and the BFPO at some point, they knew where she was now. She got a letter now and then from her mother (some of which she carried on to Dad), but they were mostly pretty innocuous. Someone somewhere had decided that a qualified doctor would be more useful supporting relief efforts in India, so she was well away from the fighting, the worst she dealt with the occasional panicky crowd. Things were kind of a mess in India at the moment, tens of millions of people displaced by the bombings and the invasion, but Mum wasn't in imminent danger, at least.
Beth's letters tended to be more concerning.
፠
C1.000167 Tpr. Elizabeth HA Potter (HLCCP)
2 SCFRS C.9
UNCDD GOMA, DRC 2063
Hermione,
It's been a little bit since I could send anything, I know, but I'm still alive.
Like, nearly a week ago now, I think (time is getting weird, is it still September?) we moved out of Goma to the middle of fucking nowhere. I think the place is called the Ituri rainforest, after the big river going through here. It is far too warm, and far too humid, and there are so many bugs, Hermione. Honestly, at this point, I think the bugs are more likely to kill me than the aliens, I've started putting up palings just to keep them off me when I'm trying to sleep. Some of the plants are cool though, lots of flowers and shite, and the trees are fucking huge, and have you seen an okapi before? Funny-looking things.
Oh shit, that's what they're called in Kiswahili, I have no idea what the English name is. Oh well.
Yeah, I speak Swahili now, add that to the list. I'm picking up a good bit of Balendru too — never fucking heard of Balendru before, I don't even know what the language is called in English, being an omniglot is bloody wild sometimes.
Anyway, yeah, I just got your last letter today, I've been out of contact for a little bit. My team — excuse me, troop (who cares) — were sent out into the bloody rainforest to scout out the place and set up the camp before more people could come in after us, the post caught up to us just now. I have the feeling that's going to happen sometimes, they're going to be sending us way out in front like this a lot, I might go in and out of contact unexpectedly. I didn't really have much warning this time, I don't think it'll be any different next time.
There hasn't been any fighting here yet, just checking out the area and interviewing our local guide, a bloke called— I just realised I'm not sure how to spell his name. Keffisa? Kèpfisa? Dunno. The rest of his village fled when the aliens turned up, but he stuck around to keep an eye on them, brave little bastard. I was wondering, by the way, is "pygmy" a slur? That's the word everyone here uses — in English and French, the Kiswahili word is different, but I don't think that one's very nice either — but it kind of gives me a funny feeling. Kèpfisa here is Efé (I think you'd spell it), but I think that's a particular, like, clan group or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, he's managed to get pretty close to the alien camp without getting caught, he has way more information about them than you might expect. Like I said, brave little bastard.
I was totally right, by the way: the aliens landed in the tropics so they can grow shite. The camp near here is a farm of sorts, pulling water from the river into big grids of irrigated whatever. Some of the plants are already pretty big, despite not being here that long, but they're expanding out further along the river and into the forest every day. And this isn't the only camp either, we've been hearing about other sites dotted all over the place in the occupied parts of the Congo. You'd think you'd put them closer together, instead of spread out so randomly, but the way this one is spreading out, I think they're like seeds, the points they're spreading out from, they're probably all meant to be one big thing down the line.
The weird thing is, most of the workers are prisoners. Like, they have their own people too — without all the scars and tattoos and bone breaks and whatever, and Kèpfisa thinks they have some kind of skin condition? But a lot of them are humans, captured from around Kisangani, we think. The really freaky part is that the aliens have them under some kind of mind control? According to Nkulu — that's the Congolese army rep with our group here, Antione Nkulu — the aliens stick some little thing under your skin, looks like a seed, and it gets in your blood and rewrites your brain? It sounds seriously creepy, what the fuck. Especially since nobody knows how to fix it? Nkulu says they have people working on it, but the mages are as stumped as the muggle doctors. And they go crazy violent when you try to get them away from the aliens, they'll end up just hurting themselves trying to break out.
We have orders not to bother trying to take the prisoners alive. I hate it, but if what Nkulu is saying is true, I don't think there's really anything we can do about it? You're doing science shite now, have you heard anything about that? If they can come up with a fix for that quickly, that'd be great, because I really don't want to have to blow up innocent people. I'll do it if I have to, but it sucks.
Anyway, we think the aliens don't know we're here now, but there aren't many soldiers over there. So the plan is to hit the farm camp, and set up a bunch of traps, when the reinforcements show up wait for the traps to go up and then pounce on them while they're still dealing with that. We still have people coming in, but we should be ready to go in a couple days I think. I wouldn't worry about that fight coming up, I think we have a pretty good shot of knocking them all out before they can even do anything about it.
So that's what I'm up to, how's everyone doing back in Britain? Some people are saying there are still bombings going on, but we don't get a lot of news in the middle of the fucking jungle. I would say tell me about your science junk, but I won't understand any of it anyway, sometimes I don't know why a bloody genius like you bothers with a dunce like me.
Joking, Hermione, just saying.
Still alive,
Beth
፠
Beth must know that telling her not to worry was very silly — of course she was going to worry about it, she was going into battle against alien invaders. Honestly...
The day she got the letter, she took a couple hours that afternoon to look into this mind control method Beth had mentioned. Hermione's group wasn't working on any projects directly to do with the aliens' technology, but there were other groups out there who were — contacting them could be relatively difficult, but all of them were regularly putting out notes on their progress for other teams and people outside of the Commission to have available. She wasn't certain where to go to find the data she wanted herself, but she just asked one of the support staff people, he came back an hour later with a stack of papers and floppy discs.
Unfortunately, most of the actual useful information was on the discs — it was relatively simple to translate the digital data on a floppy disc into a format that could be relayed by radio, easier to transmit information in that form than to physically move papers around — it took a bit of bumbling with the computer before she started finding what she was looking for. (Hermione hadn't spent a lot of time around computers before.) The information was, of course, very technical, but the man who'd brought her all this had helpfully included a pair of texts on neurology and haematology she could use as references. Her parents did have a lot of medical materials in their library at home, Hermione had perused them out of curiosity and/or boredom more times than she could count — she understood some of it, but it was very dense, it was helpful to have the texts at hand.
It took a couple hours to pick through the data on the discs enough to get a general understanding of what was going on, which was completely horrifying. The blood chemistry of affected persons was significantly altered — electrolytes and hormone levels all way off, certain free proteins that suggested mass die-offs of cells going on somewhere, showing early signals of possible liver and kidney failure — and they'd found compounds in the cerebrospinal fluid that they couldn't even identify. Exotic proteins, it seemed, as well as small amounts of what they suspected was the same stone-like substance used in a lot of the alien's construction, the growths on the more reptilian ones. Their theory was that whatever process they were using on captives was similar to the one the reptilian aliens all underwent, but less refined, still tweaking it to work with human physiology. They now suspected that the reptilian aliens were some kind of subject people under the humanoid ones — their different equipment and battlefield deployment had suggested as much, but this was only more evidence.
Because this process did, apparently, rewrite the victim's brain. They theorised brain chemistry was being affected, yes, but it also seemed like the structure was affected as well. Scans (both muggle and magical) had show signs of...little filaments of some kind of material spreading through the victim's brain, branching like a complex root network — and it was conductive, directly interfering with the brain's natural electrical signals. With the technology available to them, it was hard to interpret exactly how it worked — people simply didn't understand how the brain worked well enough to figure out the finer details — but it seemed like it was...well, some kind of mind control, as Beth had put it. Theoretically, they could transmit feelings and thoughts and images directly into the victim's brain through these filaments, essentially stealing their free will away at a physiological level. And the longer someone was in captivity, the more severe the effects got, until the larger structures of the brain started to shift, neurons reshaping themselves to parallel the alien parasite growing inside their skull, and...
There was no coming back from that. Neither medical doctors nor magical healers knew how to shape the brain like that — once that damage was done, there was no returning the person to normal. Even if they could get those filaments out without causing massive brain damage, there was no returning the brain to what it had been. It was, simply, irreversible.
Hermione told Beth as much in her return letter that evening, her heart in her throat the whole time. All the while, trying not to imagine how much worse this war was going to get before it was finally over.
(She couldn't help the terrible feeling that the aliens would, inevitably, enslave and murder them all. Hardly for the first time, that night she barely slept, nightmares.)
The only pause in her research binges, trying to catch up, was when she finally remembered to eat something, or when one of the twice-daily meetings came up. Hermione hardly spoke in the meetings, feeling extremely out of place — the rapid-fire conversation bouncing around between the actual real adults, scientists and enchanters and whatever else, the details often highly technical, far too much of it going over her head. She understood the general idea, almost always, but the particulars could be— She had so much catching up to do. When a thought did occur to her, she kept it to herself, not sure if... Well, she couldn't help the feeling that she might be missing something, that any comment she made would immediately be torn apart for the oblivious idiocy that it was, the curious looks she got from 'her colleagues' sometimes replaced with scorn, what was this little girl even doing here...
It was very unsettling, honestly. Perhaps at some point during primary school, Hermione had grown accustomed to almost always being the smartest person in the room — being the least knowledgeable person in this room, expected to work together to solve very important problems, was extremely uncomfortable.
Sitting in that room, listening to all the qualified, experienced experts discussing one matter or another, was the most useless Hermione had ever felt in her life.
So, it only took a couple days of that feeling before Hermione had surrendered, gone to Payne's office to ask what the hell she was doing here (only somewhat more politely than that sounded). The Director's office was really no different than Hermione's or any of the others she'd seen so far — the personal touches from the previous occupant had already been entirely removed, the walls bare and the shelves emptied, the greatest intrusion of colour the window overlooking the grassy alley between this building and the library nextdoor. A computer, somewhat newer-looking than Hermione's, had been set up on a table pushed against a wall — haphazard-looking enough she assumed it hadn't been there before — the rest of the table and the desk scattered with binders and loose papers and books and stacks and stacks of floppy discs, the shelves partially refilled with whatever documentation crammed into place seemingly at random. Payne himself was a scrawny, long-faced man of maybe forty, forty-five, lines sketched across his face but hair still a solid rich brown, kept short in a careless tousled mess. Oddly enough, he tended to wear denims and tee shirts, occasionally topped with a zip-up jumper against the North Sea autumn chill. Hermione would often see him walking around barefoot — apparently, relaxing into his reading he would take off his shoes, and he didn't bother putting them back on if he had to leave his office for anything.
His accent was clearly American — not from the South, but not from New England either, probably the Midwest or the Pacific coast — but before this he'd been living in Germany for some years. He'd had an administrative position at a German university, she'd forgotten which...
When Hermione found him, he was typing at the computer — from the glimpse she got over his shoulder, writing some kind of report to send up the chain. (Hermione wasn't entirely sure how the higher-order organisation of the Commission worked, but she knew there was someone, somewhere, keeping an eye on the whole project.) When he heard her coming, he swivelled around in his chair, pulling off his reading glasses, ah, Miss Granger, what can I help you with? No one giving you trouble, I hope...
She'd started hesitantly, before...kind of venting at him about it all, honestly. She, just— She didn't know what she was doing here, everyone else was— She was so far behind, she didn't know what having someone like Hermione here was supposed to accomplish, and she felt a little, well. Blowing up on him was kind of embarrassing in retrospect, honestly.
But the whole time she was ranting, the Director had just calmly watched her, idly chewing on the end of his spectacle frames, silently. When her rant finally petered out, an edge of self-consciousness starting to trickle in, Payne had said, "You're here to learn, Hermione."
That answer was so far outside of what she'd expected, she'd ended up just blinking dumbly at him for several seconds. "...What? What do you mean, learn?"
"Mm, it's pretty simple really, when you think about it. You are a promising student, of course — it's not everyone the British Department of whatever the hell they call it up there will give a personal time machine so they can take more classes than humanly possible."
Hermione had felt a tingle of warmth on her cheeks, because, well, that really was very silly, when he put it like that. "The Department of Mysteries."
Payne had rolled his eyes. "Of course it is — damn wizards are such dramatic bastards sometimes." He was a muggle himself, of course, he hadn't known anything of magic before the start of the invasion. Not that Hermione disagreed, necessarily. "As I was saying, no, we don't really expect any special brilliance from you, you probably will contribute less to whatever comes out of this effort than most. Though, hard to say, you might be surprised. They say old dogs don't learn new tricks, and there is something to that. Neuroplasticity and somesuch — your parents are medical doctors, I hear, I suspect you're familiar."
"Ah, the basic principle, yes." He was referring to activity-dependent plasticity, she thought — as a person went through life and experienced the world around them, the brain would prioritise certain connections over others, forming new ones and letting old ones die, changing the very structure of the brain at a microscopic level. It's the very fundamental process through which memory and learning worked, basically. While the process didn't stop after a person reached adulthood — the brain would continue to reshape itself so long as it continued to operate — it did slow down and lessen in scope with age, the brain developing deepest and most quickly in childhood and gradually tapering off over the course of a person's life. So, old dogs could learn new tricks, it just took more effort.
"Right, well, we might have an impressive collection of nerds gathered together here, but— I don't know how much familiarity you have with academia, but the more time someone spends in a specific field, the more they begin to see everything else in terms of their particular expertise. When all you've got is a hammer, you know. Occasionally you'll see a physicist or a mathematician comment on some matter in the social sciences and, well, I've read some papers, let me tell you, never goes over well. The arguments I've heard, it's entertaining as an outside observer sometimes, but it does not look like fun for the people in them.
"The point being, we've got my sort, who don't know the first damn thing about magic, and approach every problem in scientific terms; and then we have their sort, who don't know the first damn thing about modern technology, and approach every problem in magical terms. And then we've got you, with a foot in both worlds, but not so far down the road in any field to get fitted for academic blinders yet. Not to say I expect you'll be sweeping in and solving everyone's problems for them, no, but maybe you'll give them a little nudge now and then, point out something they've overlooked. Little things, but sometimes the little things can make a difference in projects like these. History tends to remember the big figures, the names on the papers everyone reads, but they tend to forget about the grad student who quietly cleaned up the data, or the less well-known figure who refined an observation into an actually useful form a few years later, or the wife of the famous, respected, big-name scientist pointing out over drinks one night that he's missing something blindingly obvious. Just because you won't come up with the big, brilliant idea yourself, and likely won't be remembered for your work here, doesn't mean it won't make a difference.
"But all that is only a maybe," Payne had said, with a careless shrug. "If you do help a little here and there, that's good; if you don't contribute much, that's also fine. That's not the real reason you're here. Normal people and mages have been isolated from each other for hundreds of years, since before the Industrial Revolution proper — we're not used to working together. And new technologies always come out of a crisis, especially with as much effort as we're consciously putting into developing them. But this will be more than, say, the first computers coming out of the Second World War, but an entire new approach to engineering, our modern technology and their magic, working together making something new.
"I'm not sure how many even recognise the significance of the work we're doing here. If this all goes well, we won't just have a few new technologies to show for it, but a whole new kind of technology, something this world has never seen before, something new — and who knows where that will lead, in the years and decades to come. It's very exciting, honestly," he'd admitted, with an edge of a smile, "would that it had come without a crisis as horrible as this to motivate it, but." He'd shrugged. "But since we're all old dogs, with our old tricks, the true potential of what we're working with might not occur to us at first glance. We only see the problems and solutions we're used to seeing, after all. Hammers and nails.
"That's why you're here, Hermione. Not to solve the great problems of our time, but to see how they're solved, to understand the new technology that will come out of the Commission from its very fundamentals, backwards and forwards. There's one of you in each of the Commission's research teams, a young, promising student — recruitment prioritising muggleborns and squibs, with a foot in each world — who are here, primarily, to learn. Your more experienced colleagues may make the first insights, and make those first steps; your job, yours and the others of your generation, will be to make the second steps, to take what we develop here further than we old bastards can imagine. And to teach the rest of your peers, and the generation after you, with the insight and deep understanding afforded by having been here to see these new technologies at their very inception. I guess you could say we're trying to set a speed record on Industrial Revolutions — we simply don't have the time to bumble around and let it develop naturally.
"So, I'm not asking you to come up with some brilliant new solution all on your own. I'm asking you to learn, Hermione. If that sets your mind at ease at all."
No, it really didn't. If anything, that thought was even more intimidating than sitting in the room with all 'her colleagues' talking over her head. The idea was just...too big, what the Director was talking about. No, I don't expect you to invent "a whole new kind of technology", I just expect you to use it to change the world after we do that part — no pressure, don't worry about it, Hermione! Just, honestly, Hermione found the whole talk overwhelming, spent the next half hour sitting dazed at her desk...
When she paused to think about it, Hermione felt she'd gotten in far too deep over her head, drowning, it was all she could do to scramble to keep up. She could hardly sleep, huddled up in her office with textbook after paper after paper after textbook, pouring through data compiled on dozens and dozens of floppy discs, the numbers on the screen and the words on paper burning into her retinas...
She needed to catch up, she couldn't slow down, she was so far behind...
Payne had probably been trying to reassure her, that she didn't need to worry so much about not contributing as much as the specialists on the team, but she thought that talk might have had the opposite effect. Having been selected to be one of the inaugural experts of a Fourth Industrial Revolution was a hell of a responsibility to put on someone's shoulders!
Beth, as always, was very skilled at bringing her down to earth — after a couple weeks of panic, a letter from her was very sobering, despite the fact that she definitely wasn't doing it on purpose.
፠
C1.000167 Tpr. Elizabeth HA Potter (HLCCP)
2 SCFRS C.9
UNCDD DUNGU, DRC 2032
Hermione,
So, the Ituri rainforest is gone. You read that right, it doesn't exist anymore.
Our little ambush went off pretty much as planned. There were some fighters at the farm, but it wasn't difficult to down them, we had them well outnumbered and they didn't see us coming. Inside of those buildings were some more of those weird people with the tentacles on their heads and their hands replaced with some weird crab-looking thing — we think they're their scientists or engineers or something? Dunno. Apparently they're not completely useless in a fight, one of them tossed these little poison darts at Andy before going down. Some kind of neurotoxin, Bill thinks, he and one of the local mages (didn't catch her name) managed to stop it from spreading without too much trouble, though his face is still a little numb on that side.
The prisoners pretty much went mad as soon as we showed up, running at us screaming and swinging random tools or sticks, trying to hit us with rocks or even bare hands. Completely crazy, and they looked like they were in a lot of pain, we think the aliens sent some kind of signal with their weird mind control stuff? Whatever. We kind of just had to kill them all, which sucked. Fighting aliens is fine, but I don't like killing people, especially these poor bastards, it's miserable.
If there really is no way to reverse it, I guess we don't have any other choice. It still sucks.
Anyway, once all the aliens (and prisoners) were dead, Bill and a couple helpers quick set up the runestones for our trap, and we pulled back out of the little camp. Reinforcements from Isiro flew in a couple minutes later, a few transports and a bunch of soldiers — mostly the dinosaur-looking ones. Bill triggered the trap, and BOOM, those fuckers were dead. We went through the camp just to make sure, but we got all of them, and the vehicles were wrecked too.
Bill doesn't look it, but he's kind of a scary son of a bitch, you know? I guess that runes shite can be really useful, if you put your mind to it.
The bombing started while we were still on the way back to camp. We lost some people, but only a few, on the rush to get back under the wards — Bill's work held up long enough for us to set up our emergency portkeys, and then we were out of there, back to Goma. Once everyone got sorted, we were told one of the spaceships, the big one that looks kind of like a conch shell or something? Yeah, apparently the ambush cheesed them off bad, because the big ship sidled up over Africa and levelled the entire fucking rainforest. The bombing went on for a couple hours, but now it's just gone. I'm in Dungu right now, which is like a hundred kilometres away, I think? You can see a wall of smoke to the south, just
I hope Kèpfisa got out, he didn't come with us, but I kind of doubt it.
Fuck these bastards, that's all.
We were moved to Dungu today — or near Dungu, it's a tiny town and the military people outnumber the locals by a lot. My group, lots of British and Soviets and the like, are meeting up with the big buildup in Ethiopia around here, Arabs and such. There's a lot of fucking people here now, gotta be thousands of soldiers, and it's super fucking noisy, tanks and shite are loud.
I'm bloody tired, long day, but I thought I'd get a letter out. We'll be starting the attack on Isiro soon, and from there pushing on to Kisangani, I don't know how long it'll be until I can write again. Full-on war stuff starting up in a couple days, I'm gonna be busy. So, sorry if I don't have much to say about your last letter, I'm just too tired for friend-like feelings talk right now.
I'm sure it's fine, you're bloody brilliant, Hermione. You worry too much.
Anyway, I'm going to go hand this off and get to sleep. Try not to let your usual self-confidence stuff bother you too much and do some science over there — you bloody nerd.
Still alive,
Beth
፠
There was nothing like an entire bloody rainforest being burned to the ground and your best friend nearly being killed by space aliens to get your priorities straight.
The same day she'd gotten that letter from Beth she was sitting at the evening meeting — slumped silently in her chair, the adults around her chattering away — still dazed with...something like shock, she guessed. She wasn't as worried about Mum, honestly — India had more need of qualified medical personnel than soldiers, according to her letters she'd spent far more time in clinics and operating rooms than anything directly military-related. But Beth being out there, could be fighting at any moment, was, just, unnerving. Usually, when Beth was getting into some crazy danger, Hermione was around, helping however she could, or at least knowing what was happening. Sitting here, thousands of kilometres away, while her best friend was fighting in a war was an odd sort of torture, the uncertain dread killing her more than anything...
She wished she knew what was happening at least. Communications across that sort of distance were still very spotty, Hermione didn't have direct access to the radio equipment necessary, they didn't get news until days afterward...
(Beth could have died in the time it'd taken her letter to get here, and Hermione would have no idea, probably not for weeks.)
Hermione barely heard the conversation going on around her, her thoughts continually drawn back to the burning of the Ituri rainforest. Once she'd heard Beth was being sent there, she'd read up a little on the region, though she had actually heard of it before — there'd been some anthropological studies of the people living there, some concerns had been raised about how they were faring in the political unrest of the decolonisation period. It was likely that entire cultural groups had already been extinguished, due to the aliens choosing to land nearby, taking who knows how many hostages. The forest being bombed meant the survivors would never be able to return, an entire way of life permanently destroyed, it could be generations before the region was recovered enough to support them again, if ever...
An entire people, multiple entire peoples — the region was very diverse, a mix of sedentary and nomadic tribes representing a complex tapestry of languages and religions and cultural traditions packed into a relatively small geographical area — gone forever, just, completely wiped out only in the span of a month, a month and a half. And they had been isolated enough that what scholarship existed of them was far from complete, there was much about the peoples there that they didn't know...and now they never would. Entire cultures, just, gone, forever.
For some reason, it occurred to her that the Ituri rainforest was also home to...perhaps half of the okapi in existence? She wasn't sure. They were already considered endangered, and most of the rest of their range was also occupied by the aliens, the war proceeding, they were probably doomed to extinction now...
(Like so many others, it seemed. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon were equally diverse and equally endangered as the people of the Congo, the landings in India and Indochina no less potentially disastrous...)
From the sound of Beth's letter, they hadn't had any warning before the bombs started to fall — and they should have had warning, someone should have seen the ship coming. But Goma couldn't have radioed a warning to them, the wards around their camp... They might have personal radios to help coordinate their different groups on the ground, but Hermione wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't bothered to bring the long-range equipment along at all. They couldn't send or receive anything through the wards, after all. They would need to set the equipment up outside of the wards, and they were trying to remain concealed, that would have defeated the point...
Perhaps they should distribute magical radios anyway. The prohibitive element of magical radio was that the format was unidirectional. It required equipment of significant scale and complexity to send a broadcast out any real distance, projected in...sort of the equivalent of a carrier wave, pushed out into the ambient magical environment — projecting that carrier required a deep contact with the ambient magic, each broadcasting station needed to be specially tuned to the geomantic properties of the region, the particulars obligating the station to be completely immobile, rooted into a single location, like proper wards. (The mechanics also limited the range of the broadcast, though how far it would reach depended very much on the geomancy involved.) The receivers were mobile, and while they couldn't reply to any message they got, the signal would get through wards just fine...well, most wards, anyway, as long as they avoided isolating certain registers it was fine. They wouldn't solve the problem of establishing two-way communications, of course, but they might still be useful to get out emergency messages, keep people informed of critical developments...
Beth's evacuation of Ituri had been far too close. They could hopefully prevent something like that from happening again.
Hermione had been thinking about it, for weeks now (pages and equations dancing behind her eyes), and she didn't think the problem was solvable. They could have modern communications, or they could have wards — they had to pick one. Radio transmissions would be bounced or blocked at the wardline, even wired signals would be scrambled crossing the line without special shielding. Magical defences, shields and wards, were simply better than mundane armour and fortification, especially when it came to resisting their peculiar lava-bombs and for concealment, they definitely didn't want to give up wards. But magical radio wasn't nearly as versatile, and the problem of projecting the magical carrier was far too complex, Hermione wasn't sure that problem was solvable either. They had to pick one or the other, and Hermione was certain that they definitely didn't want to give up the use of wards — not to mention, high-intensity combat magic would scramble radio transmissions in the area anyway...
No, that problem wasn't solvable. They had to do something else. Something else...
The scramble to leave had been on such short notice, Beth had forgotten the enchanted mirror Sirius had given her — Sirius had called one day, one of the Potter elves had brought the mirror to Hermione. She didn't know how to get it to Beth, not sure if it would get through the post, and none of the elves were directly bound to Beth, so they couldn't find her...would probably have to wait until Beth visited home to hand it to her in person (Hermione had no illusions that she'd be coming back permanently any time soon, it would only be a visit), and who knew how long that would be before that happened...
When Hermione had first encountered the mirror, Beth showing it to her about a year ago now — Sirius had given it to her after their first summer together, to keep in touch while she was at school — she'd been completely fascinated. She'd been familiar with owl post and floo calls by then, but they'd seemed so terribly impractical, she'd had no idea there was something so...well, convenient. Better than modern telephones, really, since it came complete with perfectly-reproduced visuals — Hermione was familiar with the concept of video conferencing, but the technology was still in its temperamental infancy at this point. Her immediate thought, first observing a call between Beth and Sirius, was why the hell this magic wasn't way more common.
After a few days of research, trawling through the library before finally finding something useful, turned out to be pretty simple: the enchanting was rather complicated, resulting in prices for finished products that were far too high for wide-spread implementation. Also, the magic only worked between paired devices, each device limited to contact with a single other device. It was possible to link multiple devices together on the same circuit, increasing the number of people who could be on the same call, but if you wanted to call multiple people in separate calls, you needed a separate device for each person — which, of course, only further increased the relative cost, compared against telephones, not to mention the logistical problem of needing to keep track of multiple devices. It was possible to make notebooks that were bound by a similar principle, what was written in one appearing in the other and vice versa, Hermione had experimented with making her own out of curiosity. And she had thoughts of giving some to her parents and her friends, quicker than owl post, and she didn't need to make copies of her own letters to remember what she'd written...
The magic was quite modern, an adaptation of the Protean Charm — itself a relatively new enchantment (not a charm, the naming of things was so terribly inconsistent sometimes), only dating to around the Renaissance. The Protean 'Charm' was a means by which objects could be tied together, what was done to one also being done to another, but far more limited in scope: the 'Charm' produced a "master" or "primary" object, which projected any changes made to it onto a "client" or "secondary"; the "secondary" would resist any changes that brought it out of alignment with the "primary", but the "secondary" would not project any changes done to it onto the "primary", it only worked one way. The trick with the mirrors and the notebooks was, essentially, to create a loop, each object both "primary" and "secondary", mutually bound to each other. After a few decades fiddling with it, the enchantment had been streamlined, instead of the objects being bound to each other the effect mediated through a single 'key rune' — any design that could be carved or drawn into the enchantment, unique to the objects so bound — so several objects could be bound to each other, despite that not being at all how Protean Charms worked. It was approaching very close to old, esoteric witchcraft at this point, old sympathetic ritual — as I do to this thing, let it be done to this other thing — but mediated through modern enchanting, far more reliable and reproducible...
Unlike magical radio, the Protean Charm didn't have a maximum range — as long as the objects could 'find' each other, the magic would function, with no loss of signal strength. Exactly what that meant was a complicated concept, weird geomancy stuff. To oversimplify the idea somewhat, the objects required some medium for the information to be communicated through — that medium was ambient magic. There were natural discontinuities in ambient magic, but they were relatively rare — the harshest deserts, marine dead spots, outer bloody space, that sort of thing. (Life generated ambient magic; as long as there was life, in sufficient density, so there would be ambient magic.) The signal might occasionally be interrupted when there were significant fluctuations in ambient magic, powerful storms or volcanic eruptions or the like, but other than that...
Hermione had never heard of this enchantment being used for solely audio before, without including video, but there was no reason it couldn't be done...
Turning the dial on an older radio, at her grandmother's house, feeling the faintest click, an image in her head, the gears of a clock ticking along...
"That's it." It might take some work to manufacture enough to distribute to everyone who needed them, but that was an easier problem to solve than it might seem — entire sectors of the economy had basically ground to a halt overnight, they had a lot of idle hands to do enchanting. As Hermione had learned recently, it was possible for muggles to do witchcraft: the only difference between mages and muggles was that mages could channel magic and muggles couldn't, so anything that didn't require the user to actively channel magic was open to muggles too. To properly enchant, all the user needed to do was focus closely on what they were doing, the meaning of the symbols and how they came together to make the enchantment — it was intense labour, yes, surprisingly so, but muggles were perfectly capable of it. They'd already begun recruiting muggles to help make potions and enchanted building materials and personal equipment (heat-resistant armour in particular), this enchantment would be more complicated than those projects, would require more thorough instruction, but she didn't see why it shouldn't be possible.
(Though Hermione hadn't stopped being annoyed by the revelation that muggles could actually do witchcraft, her introductory magic theory textbooks had lied to her...)
An eager thrill bubbling up her chest, her face splitting with a grin, "The mirrors. I've got it, that's it." Of course, the chatter was still going on around her, she'd only attracted a couple curious glances her way. Without really thinking about it, her skin practically humming with pleasure — she'd always loved puzzles, that feeling of ha, I solved it! — she raised her voice, "Hey, I have an idea! Hey, everyone! Hold up..."
It wasn't until the room abruptly dropped silent, eyes turning toward her, that Hermione realised she'd stood up...and had also been shouting there for a second. Oh, er...
In the sea of confused and uncertain faces, the Director just seemed amused — lounging back in his chair, bare feet crossed up on the corner of the table (which just seemed so improper), smirking to himself. "Well, let's hear it, Miss Granger. What's this idea of yours?"
"Um..." Suddenly very self-conscious, Hermione fidgeted, cleared her throat. "Well. Wards disrupt electromagnetic signals at the boundary, right, preventing the effective use of radio communications — due to the fundamental mechanics of their operation, I know some of you are trying to find ways around that, but I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it can work, definitionally. We need to pick one or the other, but we definitely don't want to give up wards."
Frowning at her, Möller — a master wardcrafter, from Saxony — a bit of a German-sounding accent on his French, said, "Yes, Granger, that's about the shape of it. Were you approaching a point?"
"Yes, um. It seems to me, it'd be more practical to, instead of trying to find a way to get modern radios to work through wards, to just use something we already know works. Are any of you familiar with the Rossini–Costa Method?"
The muggles weren't, of course, bemusement crossing around the room; on the other hand, surprise flicked over the faces of the magical experts, rearing back in their chairs or glancing at each other. "I didn't even think of that," said Planche — one of the younger experts around the table, meaning he was still a couple decades older than Hermione, an enchanter from Antwerp (which was part of magical Holland). "You're thinking we can design an equivalent of radio entirely on magical principles, circumventing the problem entirely." Without waiting for a response, Planche began explaining the concept of the Protean Charm and the Rossini–Costa Method and communication mirrors — addressed to the Director, but for the benefit of all the muggles in the room — after a couple minutes Hermione realising she was still standing, plopped back down into her chair, her face warm. "But there's one problem I can think of off the top of my head," Planche said, finally turning back to Hermione. "These enchantments are paired, or bonded in a series — such a device may still be useful, yes, but they would be far less versatile than a muggle radio, without the ability to tune to different frequencies. Unless we expect people to carry a separate device for each line of communication, it's possible they could be made small enough that would be doable..."
Someone else muttered something about that sounding extremely impractical, but not loud enough to be speaking to the whole group, Hermione spoke over her. "Um, I thought of that, actually. I'm not an expert, I've only done a little fiddling with enchantment but, um, would it be possible to, sort of, put the key rune on the face of a gear, you know? And the user could turn a dial, like on a radio..."
She trailed off, Planche was shaking his head. "No, that would interrupt the plane of the enchantment, breaking the string. Perhaps you could, theoretically, but the enchanter would need to include that function in their image of the magic, which would be prohibitively complex. Perhaps it would be feasible to—"
"Oh wait!" Hermione blurted out, stiffening in her chair. "I got it! You don't use a key rune, you use a reservoir stone — you script the enchantment around a referent instead of a key, turning the dial bringing different reservoir stones into alignment. That also solves the problem of needing to come up with unique key runes, you can put any image into the reservoir stone, as long as you have a unique image for each frequency, you can get way more variety in that than a small-scale physical design, it's perfect!"
Planche's eyes had widened as she rambled on, a little bit of muttering from other mages around the table. A second later he jumped to his feet, yanked a few blank sheets of paper to himself, beckoning Hermione across the table with a hand. "Get over here, Granger, let's see what we got. Um, Gwen and Marcel, could use your eye too. Give us a minute to sketch this out quick," he said to the Director, a pencil already in his hand dividing out the major sections of the script.
The conversation went on around them as Hermione, Planche, Ceinwen Smethwyck, and Marcel Dupuy crowded around the papers, coming up with an outline of an enchantment. Planche started just with shorthand for the Rossini–Costa Method, but then Smethwyck — a British enchanter, Hermione had only seen her in passing (though she was aware the Smethwycks were a noble, pureblood, Light family) — crossed out parts of it, reaching under Planche's arm to draw in the specific glyphs necessary to alter the enchantment to project solely audio (the symbols in Egyptian). It took a little more work to figure out how to design the script for the referent, Smethwyck and Planche muttering back and forth, while Dupuy (a French alchemist with additional expertise in geomancy) scrawled out a series of equations elsewhere, occasionally glancing at the enchanting work — Hermione couldn't interpret all of it, but she thought he was outlining the specifications of the reservoir stone necessary to interface with the enchantment, as well as the ideal format for the image.
Some of that was over Hermione's head — she was just a student, and an occasional hobbyist — so she worked on drawing a diagramme of the gear system necessary to connect the dial on the outside with the functional parts on the inside. Reservoir stones could be sensitive, subject to interference from external magic, so they wouldn't want the person directly manipulating the wheel with the stones, instead turning a dial that came to a little axle here, connected to the centre of the gear with the stones. And they'd want to lock the reservoir stones precisely in place, so, we'd have a lever here, just behind the stones, which would add a bit of resistance the user would be able to feel, and hold the gear in place. Oh, um, depending on how miniaturised this was, they'd also need to be concerned with the images in the stones interfering with each other (not to mention the action of the enchantment), so they'd need an insulator...thin sheets of silver, perhaps — goblin silver, if they'd agree to help supply the project. Um, two discs, against the wheel like this (with a hole for the rod in one of them), a segment cut out to free the reservoir stone currently in use...and also thin strips between the stones... Actually, they should make a whole wheel around the stones, better insulation, silver on all sides when not in use, the one segment allowing access to the desired reservoir — maybe overkill, but they'd want to reduce the likelihood of the image being corrupted, this had the best chance of preserving it for as long as possible. There that would—
"Oh wait, we need some way for them to identify which channel they're on. Could that information be on the reservoirs too?"
"No," Dupuy said, from past Planche and Smethwyck. "You would need some referent to interpret the complex image used in place of a key rune into something the user would understand, which would be prohibitively complex. And you can't store multiple images on a single reservoir."
Smethwyck snapped her fingers. "So we use a second reservoir." She draw a hard line blocking off the main enchantment, which Planche was still poking over, making an occasional edit. Starting with a star inside a ring with an arrow leading off — shorthand for a standard referent script around a reservoir stone — she started an enchantment, Egyptian glyphs, um...
"Oh! A visual projection, I get it." Hermione drew a second gear on the rod, a quick arrow pointing back at her more detailed drawing of her wheel of reservoir stones — it'd be basically the same thing, except these stones would simply hold an image of a label or something, whatever they wanted to call each channel, which could be projected somewhere the user would see it. Slightly complex, figuring out the mechanism in a way that would fit the wheels and both enchantments without bumping into each other might be a little difficult, but that should work. "Hmm, images fade over time, and, we'll want some way to reprogramme the keys, if the owner has new people they need to talk to..."
"Got it, we can make a catalyst for that, like this." Planche drew his own hard line, started scrawling off an enchantment, a couple equations defining reservoir stones...
After fifteen, twenty minutes or so, they had a sprawling mess of sketches and enchantments — in a mix of shorthand and proper script, Egyptian and Akkadian — alchemical and geomantic arithmancy, some of which went right over her head. The four of them scanned over it for a moment, making an occasional annotation here and there, but it...looked fine to Hermione. She wasn't an expert, but...
"Director," Planche called, voice raised to cut through the chatter in the room. "I think we've got it."
Payne just nodded. "Do you need magic to use it? And can it be mass-produced?"
"No, and yes."
"You'll need magic to programme it," Hermione clarified, just to be perfectly honest about the practicality of the thing, "but every other step of the manufacture can be done without magic. And you don't need magic to use it, no."
There was some chatter around the table, excited — they had been working on this for weeks, actually having something to show for it was exciting. Payne just smiled, pointed at the door out. "Go get me a prototype, then."
Despite the abruptness of the Director's dismissal, walking out of the conference room — their papers bundled up in Planche's arms, verbally compiling a list of all the supplies they would need — Hermione couldn't keep a smile off her face, her steps feeling light and bouncy. She'd solved it.
(For perhaps the first time since that day in London, Hermione didn't feel completely useless.)