Hermione pov
She looked at the beige ceiling of her room; there were no cracks or anything to count and distract herself with, which she had found was perfect for getting stuck in her head. Not that she wanted to do that, but she couldn't help herself, not with what had happened over the past few weeks.
She was lying on her bed in her favorite pajamas from a few years ago, feeling itchy and tight on her body. She knew she needed a new set, she just hadn't asked for one yet, and her parents were too busy to notice the small things.
A million thoughts were running through her head. Honestly, one day in her house after completing her third year at Hogwarts and she was already depressed, brilliant.
She had always prided herself on her mind; it was the one thing no one could truly take away from her. No matter how often she was insulted or bullied as a child — or as a teenager — she knew she was more intelligent than them.
No matter how often she was called a mudblood or deemed inferior by those around her for some stupid, backward, racist belief in the purity of blood, she proved them wrong.
The same applied to magic. Logically so. Magic was, after all, a force that could be studied, practiced, understood, and dissected. It was no wonder she did very well in it.
Okay, that sounded arrogant even in her head. She had learned better than to speak these thoughts aloud around others, lest she is found to be annoying or condescending. But even in her head, she felt slightly guilty for thinking like that. Sometimes at least, even if it was undeniably true, of course.
And yet, despite her knowledge and magical talent, she found herself in low spirits — or was it despondent? She couldn't remember the proper word to express her feelings right now.
She knew the magical world had problems. The blatant racism she faced at Hogwarts and the lack of interest in magic or what one could achieve with it by people born into that world (Ronald) was a clear sign of something being wrong. Even when she was thirteen and just entering the magical world, that stuck out to her as something bafflingly odd. Even now, being smarter, wiser, and much older — sixteen, almost seventeen, basically an adult! — she was still puzzled about the attitudes and behaviors of the people born and raised in the magical world.
However, it wasn't until this year that she realized just how deep the wrongness in the magical world reached and what that meant for her.
It all started when she learned about Azkaban. Oh, she had heard about the wizarding prison, but she hadn't studied it enough to realize precisely what kind of place it was. And the kind of beings that inhabited the area.
Dementors. Creatures that sucked prisoners' souls out of people's bodies and that absorbed the joy out of people around them. Leaving the body a depressed, empty husk with enough exposure.
'And they used them as torture devices for their prisoners.'
Hermione wasn't particularly distressed about the soul-eating thing at first. Until her third year, she hadn't even believed in souls. Her parents were never being particularly religious, and Hermione even less so.
Sure, she had found one book that mentioned that magic came from the soul. But that book used this assessment to say that muggles had no souls, and so deserved no rights. The same book also extolled the virtues of magical core theory, which was a blatantly wrong theory, disproven as early as the twelfth century, and even a second-year student could replicate the experiment that was used to dismantle that belief. So she hadn't given it much thought. 'Just another Lockhart, or so I had thought.'
But when she discovered that evidence of there being a sort of fundamental essence that made up people and granted them an afterlife actually existed, she found herself horrified that such beings were allowed to exist at all and were not hunted down and thrown into a failed time loop or something of the sort to get rid of them.
There was also the fact that wizards stuck people with offenses as minor as reading a banned book or stealing candy in prison with those things. There had to be extreme side effects to being subjected to such an environment. After all, she had a close encounter with them recently, and it was one of her life's most harrowing and terrible experiences. Maybe even the worst one.
Unfortunately for her faith in the state of the magical government, that was the least of her discoveries this year. The blatant corruption and disregard for the law she had seen from the Minister of Magic himself had made her opinion of the ministry nosedive.
'Or maybe the laws themselves were the problem... I need to study more about that.'
Sadly the leaders of the wizarding community were not the only people with whom Hermione had lost confidence. Dumbledore, the modern-day Merlin, they called him, had allowed and condoned — through inaction, if nothing else — the circumstances that made the whole Sirius Black debacle happen in the first place.
He had allowed one of the people that trusted him and fought beside him to suffer torture worst than death for fourteen years. If that's what he did to his greatest allies, what would he do to her if he didn't like some of Hermione's ambitions?
She wanted to change the magical world for the better. Bring new ideas, and improve things. It was just so stupid that people like the Weasleys had magic — actual magic — and yet they were still poor. She had thought about it for a while and even asked Ron and the other Weasleys how their economic situation worked, and the answer was strange and nonsensical. Something about the Yaxley family owning a patent on the potion used in the lands near the burrow in the 17th century and how that forced them to pay most of the money they earned to that family.
Hermione didn't even understand why there even was money in the wizarding world at all. it wouldn't be hard to turn the magical world into a post-scarcity society like Star Trek.
They had the capabilities — she had read a book that explained the charms and techniques one needed to live off the land, and they could easily be repurposed to create infinite basic resources. The only obstacles were the Noble families and the Wizengamot. That and the lack of knowledge on how to run such a political system.
What if, for example, Dumbledore didn't like that idea? What if he threw Hermione in Azkaban for fourteen years for even trying? He had held political and social power for longer than Hermione's parents had been alive, and what had he done with it? Two laws were the culmination of his entire career. One that made it so that people with lycanthropy were not quite literally hunted down like animals and killed. And one to give a small money fund to Muggleborns when they entered the magical world to buy the bare essentials instead of going into debt to the ministry to pay for it if they didn't have the required amount of galleons.
They were both good things, obviously, but it was not nearly enough; it was less than the bare minimum. He could have entirely changed the ministry and improved the lives of so many people, but he hadn't. Why? Was it the noble families getting in his way? Why not take them out of the picture, then? Just make a weird prerequisite that excludes them from governing if they do this or the other.
They had a complete stranglehold on the economy and the lives of people around them, and as far as she had learned thus far, they gave nothing in exchange. They were nothing but leeches hoarding every Galleon and barely throwing some to people who worked for that money — like the Weasleys — why allow the wizarding world to reach this state? She didn't like any of the answers her brain came up with.
He had also taken away Hermione's time turner for doing exactly what he'd told her. So there was that too.
However, he wasn't the person Hermione had lost the most confidence for. Honestly, that person was herself.
She had always prided herself on being a good student. Talented. Brilliant. A genius, they called her. She didn't consider herself one; she genuinely worked hard to learn all she could and practiced her magic religiously; that was most of what her 'talent' was: hard work, a good work ethic, and an above-average memory.
But deep down, she had liked to be called that. It was the only thing Hermione truly excelled at. She was smart, she was good at magic, and she was good at learning things. That was it — her best quality. It certainly wasn't her social skills.
And then Harry had learned the Patronus charm and drove off over a hundred Dementors with one spell.
Harry had learned a spell that Aurors struggled with. And had used it the same way Dumbledore had done during that one disastrous quidditch match. It had stumped Hermione. Harry was not terrible at magic, but he didn't have anywhere near as much power to do something like that. Or so Hermione thought.
The thought stuck with her during the rest of her stay at school — less than a month, but still — and she spent that time looking for something very specific. She looked for student records. Specifically those of Dumbledore and Voldemort, aka Tom Riddle.
What she found there only made the ache in her chest worse.
Her talent? Her good grades? It was worth nothing compared to them. Each spell they learned faster than her. Each spell came out with more power than hers had even been described. They breathed and weaved magic. While she had to run herself ragged to match their results on a bad day.
And once that thought stuck in her head, it wasn't too hard to see it in Harry. Sure, he had trouble learning new spells, at least compared to her, but in reality, Harry was rather average in that regard.
The spells he did get though? They came out tremendously strong. Hermione's magical sensing abilities had always been terrible, so she hadn't noticed before. But during the last weeks of term, she had concentrated on his spells and even asked him for some demonstrations of the Patronus charm, which he, being a good friend, had given her.
Once she compared herself, It was fairly clear that she was weaker. Much weaker. Almost pathetically so. She wasn't jealous, at least not in the normal sense. The realization and subsequent acceptance of this fact didn't make her angry or bitter. It left her numb.
She remembered how the teachers had talked about her and him specifically. They always said she was 'Smart' and 'Talented'. But they never said she was powerful or might become a great witch/wizard one day. Not like they had talked about him.
And it was power that changed things. It was power that allowed people to control their fate. That lesson stuck the most in her head from reading about wizarding and even muggle history. Without power, ideals and beliefs are nothing but wind. Sure, she could discuss and debate issues, but at the end of the day, it was force, power, and action that changed things.
She could almost see it now — her future. A middle Manager in the Ministry who was told by everyone she was brilliant but not cut out for real politics. Her greatest accomplishment? Being Harry Potter's fucking friend.
That is if she ever was allowed in the Ministry at all. She was, after all, a mudblood without magical power to back her up. She understood the context of the insult better now that she had understood her place.
And not only that, but there was also a war coming. Because Voldemort's supporters were mostly still alive and in power, and Voldemort himself was still alive. Thanks, Dumbledore. So much for always giving second chances. Who would give her a second chance when she and her parents died?
In a way, she was thankful that Harry had shown her the difference between them. It had shattered her delusions of being some great figure of change or power—someone that could and would change things for the better. Even her fantasies of the future only saw her as a washed-up Minister, just like Fudge these days. She hated being so clearly shown how stupid and delusional she had been.
She would either die in the upcoming war, become a nobody in the ministry, or become a shop clerk. Such was the fate of the smartest witch in her generation. A title that now felt more mocking than encouraging.
Could she accept that fate? She had to. It was the way of things in the wizarding world. You either had a good last name, pedigree, exceedingly large amounts of money, or power. Otherwise, you were nothing.
But she didn't want to accept her fate.
'I wanted to be more. I wanted to make things better, to shine and reach the stars. To boldly go where no one has ever gone before.'
Hermione looked out of her window and reached out with her hand to the only star visible outside her window in London's night sky as if her hand could ever reach a place so far away.
The tears in her eyes were not enough to block her vision of the lonely star. And while her voice would never reach anyone else, she still said the words in her mind aloud.
"Please, I just want to be more." Her voice felt small and broken in her ears.
Something inside her flared at that. It wasn't her magic, and she could barely feel it. But she knew subconsciously what was happening.
A Spark had been ignited.
She felt herself being thrown away from her bed, reaching and moving to a strange place filled with colors.
Blue. Black. White. Red. Green.
The colors ran into her and changed her. She couldn't fight it, even if she wanted to. And so, she was plain Hermione one moment, and the next, she was more.
She could see through the colors and impossible shapes the area produced now. And behind her, she saw a place. She couldn't describe the form even if she had a thousand years and a hundred libraries' worth of books to write in the attempt. But she knew that it was her home, her world. It intertwined with several other worlds. No, Planes. But she was moving away from it and couldn't control her movement.
Even through her panic about being thrown into a strange place, she still looked around as she moved away from her world/plane and saw other worlds, some worlds with different combinations and densities of colors.
She knew with certainty that she could reach them. All she had to do was will herself into them, and she would be there. In another world, another place — One that might be different — One that she could change. But she was moving away and lacked the strength or willpower to change directions.
She appeared in an extremely foul-smelling alley. a group of sketchy people with tattoos and wearing strange clothes right beside her. Giant colorful buildings surrounded by thick clouds of smog could be seen in the distance.
The men saw her sudden appearance, and she didn't like the looks she was given. Not at all.
The spark inside her was exhausted. She knew that it needed to recharge to be properly used again.
She didn't care. She didn't even have her wand and was in another world. She needed to get out now.
So she reached that spark inside her and willed herself to that strange place again. The 'place' was much less clear this time. But she could still make out her world in the distance, filled with colors and intertwined with other worlds. She mentally stepped towards it, and then-
She appeared in her bed again. This time, standing on her mattress and sheets instead of lying down. The spark inside her felt sore, like she had pulled a muscle.
She didn't know what had happened to her, but she had been changed. She had become more than she ever could have been before.
Something bubbled up from deep within herself and up in her throat, and she laughed.
She could change her fate now.
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Hermione pov
It took Hermione several minutes to come down from whatever it was that happened to her. Like what her parents had told her taking psychedelic drugs was like. Panic bubbled in her mind as she realized what had happened.
'I did magic outside of school! I am going to get expelled!'
She ignored the strange sensations and impressions she was getting, put on the slippers beside her bed, and ran outside of her room and outside her house, uncaring about the dirt she was surely leaving on the soles of her favorite slippers. The night sky was still the same as it had been before whatever had happened to her. But there seemed to be no owls coming to tell her that she was expelled like Harry had mentioned happened to him before the second year. No letters about her apparating in front of her, either.
She was confused for the first few minutes but eventually calmed down and realized no letter was coming. Probably, hopefully, at least.
After completely calming down, she went back inside her house, closed the door as quietly as she could — it was a miracle that her parents were not awake and yelling at her right now — and sat on one of the couches. Finally, she decided to pay attention to all the strange sensations she was feeling that weren't going away.
As if they realized that Hermione would finally pay attention to them, all the sensations came to her in force.
She could feel…herself? Her magic. She knew that feeling; it was the same she got every time she used magic to cast spells; full-body magical proprioception was the technical name of the sensation, though most people just called it 'feeling their magic.' This time, she felt her magic, but the sense was much more precise and stronger than ever before.
Instead of a blob of magic running through her, she could feel it in extreme detail now. The way her magic flowed through her body, pouring into her from a place deep within her. The way it touched every part of her, her bones, her blood, her muscles, and her brain. It interacted with her body in ways she found both fascinating and perplexing. And it was growing in power. She knew that like she knew how to breathe. Her magic felt more like a muscle now, like a hand she could move if she wanted to rather than a vaguely incorporeal river that had to be directed.
The closest to what she was feeling was the sensation she got when she ran too much, and her heart pumped away crazily, and she could feel it on her chest. Like that, but her whole body and without any discomfort. A warm flowing energy that pooled and moved through her body in strange ways.
It wasn't just in her body either. It went a little beyond her, forming a sort of aura she couldn't see around her.
As if that thought was enough to awaken another sensation, it felt like she suddenly developed a double vision. But it wasn't disorienting. And the two distinct visual sensations quickly merged due to a subconscious jerk of the magic in her head.
She could now see her magic, at least in her hand and the rest of what she could see of herself while sitting down. It was a brilliant, translucent navy blue that clung to her body like a very, very thin silk glove. Except for the parts where her clothes touched it, it overlapped there.
With barely a flex of her will, she dismissed the 'magic vision,' and she could see herself again without the light show. But she knew the aura was still there. She could feel it. Just like she could feel how her magic flowed through her body.
It was a very emotional and intimate sensation. Like a hug that never stopped and reached every part of her body. Like the warmth of a fire on a freezing day. Hermione found she rather liked the sensation. Compared with her regular magical sensing capabilities, it was like she had been blind before and could finally see.
And she could 'see' more than just her body.
Just like how she could feel magic in her body, she could also feel the magic around her. It wasn't exactly a visual sensation, it was bizarre, and it didn't overlap with any of Hermione's normal senses, a sort of three-dimensional map of the magic around her that she just 'saw' in her head rather than seeing with her eyes, plus a plethora of other sensations associated with her that she couldn't parse out. Her trunk upstairs with her magical things glowed in her mind's eye. Her room and the rest of the house also glowed very slightly. Even her parents had a little bit of magic flowing through them. But there was also another presence.
The magic of the place she was in. It was different to the normal magic she could feel in the environment that was like a very, very thin fog. This magic was playful, like it had a mind of its own, sending impressions directly to Hermione's senses, and it was knowledge and cunning. It was the magic of the Land.
It was Blue. just like those colors she had felt reach into her not too long ago.
She could feel it reaching out to her. The magic — no, Mana — knew her. It had seen her grow up in this house. It had seen her intellect blossom, and it wanted to be with her, it wanted to help her. All she had to do was reach out, and they would never be apart again until the end.
And so Hermione, almost unconsciously, reached out. It was enough for the Land. The Blue Mana flowed into her. To a place deeper than her magic. To her center, that place from where she could feel her magic flowing into her. The same place she had felt that spark of possibility ignite.
Taking in the Mana changed her. She felt smarter. She felt healthier. Stronger, faster. More capable. She didn't know exactly how she knew the changes she was going through and what they were; she just knew.
And her magic? It had grown stronger. She could tell as only someone with a sense of their magic like herself could tell. It deepened; it fed upon the Blue Mana and grew in power and capability. The slow constant growth she had felt before spiked in speed for just a second, and she swelled with power instantly. It quickly started growing slowly again — but still faster than before taking in the Mana — and it just kept being fed by the blue Mana, basking in the colorful essence to nourish itself.
She stood up from the couch, and her steps felt lighter, like she had suddenly lost 10 kilograms. She activated her 'magic vision' again and saw her aura had grown larger. Instead of a barely there paper-thin glove, it was now as thick as a shirt. The color had changed too, now a much lighter blue.
All these experiences were a bit too much for the sixteen-year-old girl, and she quickly found herself tired. She returned to her room on the house's second floor and went to bed. She was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.
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Hermione's Diary of Impossibly Strange Occurrences and Experiments.
H.D.I.S.O.E
Day 1
After I woke up from the strangest daylight of my life, I found that I had not dreamt everything that happened the night before, especially going to another world thing; there were strange fluids on the bottom of my pajamas. I had to bin the whole thing along with my sheets.
I spent the rest of the day feeling out my magic and helping around the house, too distracted to experiment with my new powers(!?)
Day 2
Today I picked up my wand from my desk for the first time. The connection is lesser than before.
Adjacently, I can also see my aura and magic while looking at myself in a mirror.
My parents don't have an aura of magic.
Day 3
I decided to go for a run and test the physical changes the Blue Mana gave me. Along with the extent of the range of my 'magic sense.' Which turns out to be precisely fifty meters.
The findings on my physical changes are here:
- I could run for five minutes without getting tired.
- I could do five whole pullups on a bar at the children's playground, five more than I thought myself ever capable of despite the mild body-enhancing capabilities of magic.
- The physical enhancements I have now don't seem to work on a physical level, meaning my body didn't actually change, demonstrated by my arms almost falling out after finishing the pull-ups and my lungs burning after running. I still felt like I could do more, to keep going. But I had a suspicion my body would be devastated if I tried.
I need to keep investigating this phenomenon. As such I will not exercise for the rest of the summer so that my data is as accurate as possible. No other reason.
Day 4
I did not do much reading the previous days; too distracted. Today that changed, and I can certainly say that my memory retention and learning capabilities have been improved. I usually take ten to twelve hours — depending on the content — to read a three-hundred-page non-fiction book twice to get the information in my head.
This time it took me three hours. And I only had to read it once. To both understand the information and memorize it.
Day 6
I can use the blue Mana. It came as a surprise, and it panicked me for the whole fifth day. No Aurors came to my house, and I was not expelled either. Maybe the ministry can't detect internal magic? Something to think about...
These are my discoveries:
- I can use the blue Mana to speed up my thought process and learn faster. By probing the blue Mana while thinking about the speed at which I was reading a book, I was able to read a four-hundred-and-sixty-three-page book in an hour. And I remember everything I read perfectly.
- Blue Mana takes around six hours to recharge fully, and it takes five minutes to start to slowly trickle in after I stopped using it.
- There are no adverse effects in using Mana; the enhancements, whether physical, mental, or magical, were not diminished while the Mana was not available.
- My magical growth slowed down without the blue Mana. Normally, magic only grows in power when casting spells, and now my magic is growing constantly. Without the Mana, it's slower, though. The growth was slower when the Mana was low and gradually got faster as it recharged.
- The effects on the recharge rate of blue Mana due to being in an extremely panicked and fearful state due to losing said blue Mana have not been recorded or properly studied yet. I doubt its efficacy.
Day 8
Using blue Mana to learn faster is the best thing that ever happened to me. It's brilliant! That's all for now.
Day 10
I found four new Mana lands.
Day 11
On the tenth day, I found four new Mana lands. This occurred when we(my parents and me) went to my grandmother's yearly cemetery visitation. We got there by car, and I could feel three distinct Mana lands on the way. One white, one blue, and one red. The last one was the cemetery, which was black.
Due to emotional constraints, I could not contact the lands.
Hermione pov
They had visited Hermione's grandmother's grave on Saturday. So she had to wait until Monday for her parents to go to work to search for the Mana lands. She still doesn't know where she got that name. More of the weird subconscious knowledge I got after the whole 'Spark in my soul' and ending up in another world that stinks.''
She was dressed in a magenta hooded sweatshirt and dark blue jeans. She also took her wand with her — safely hidden in her sweatshirt's pocket — in case of emergencies.
She frowned when she touched the wand; she could tell that her wand didn't like her that much anymore. The magic flowed poorly and erratically through the wood, night and day compared to the sensation she felt at thirteen when she first touched it. It made her a little sad if she was honest. Like she had sacrificed a dear friend to obtain the new abilities she had.
Hermione went out of the house, ensuring she had her keys and wallet, and then took the bus toward the Kensal Green cemetery. A fairly expensive place to be buried, but her grandmother had apparently paid for it years before dying.
The day was hot and so extremely humid that it made it hard to breathe. There was no one on the street despite it being nearly 10. The area around her was mostly carefully cut grass and large houses. So it wasn't a surprise that there was no one here. Most people that lived here had to work at this time, and it was still too early for people her age to go out and about.
She had felt some people move outside the house after the 'awakening' of her new powers a couple of times. What she had felt from her parents was not a fluke. She could even feel it now, someone was sleeping in the house a little way away from hers, and her sensations became stronger the nearer she got to her neighbor's house. Perfectly ordinary people, with magic flowing through them.
Oh, it was very small, and it didn't touch their brains at all. But it was there. And if muggles had a little bit of magic, and what her observation of where her magic seemed to come from — a place deep within her that she could barely feel and would not even notice it was there without her Mana and the small still and sore spark inside her, her Soul — that meant logically, that muggles did have souls after all. It was interesting how some magical tomes could be so wrong about certain things and so correct about others. It was probably because they were mostly written by madmen from hundreds of years ago.
There was a bus stop around a fifteen-minute walk outside her house, near the park Hermione had tested her body. She got there and had the place to herself, people here didn't take buses, and there were barely any to take because there was only one bus stop in her neighborhood, and it was pretty on the edge of it.
She felt a little too restless to sit down on the bench, so she just walked back and forth. She hadn't ever taken a bus before so when a bus stopped there, she had to ask the driver for directions. Thankfully, this bus passed near the cemetery, so she just got in after handing the driver a pound note. The driver looked at her weirdly but didn't say anything.
Before even getting near the cemetery, she exited the bus on a busy street. The bus driver tried to tell her to stop, but she made an excuse and got out. There was a government building near her. She didn't know exactly what they did there. But it was pulsating with White Mana.
The strange instincts that gave Hermione knowledge about the correct names of the things she was feeling told her that white Mana was an energy of order and healing. Much like blue was an energy of knowledge and intellect.
She got near it and sat on a bench, trying to get the Mana to do something as it had done in her house.
And immediately felt the rejection. The land thought Hermione was much too rowdy and poorly dressed. A teenager. The land hated those.
She immediately knew what to do, so she followed her instincts, thought about all the times she had followed the rules and listened to her teachers and parents. The land reluctantly took in her impressions, scrutinized them, and gave in.
The white Mana flowed into Hermione, right beside the blue Mana, inside a part of Hermione deeper than even her magic. Her soul.
Then came the changes. Again, she felt herself getting stronger, her body filled with more energy and her breath lighter curiously. She didn't feel smarter than before, like how she had felt after taking in the blue Mana, but she knew instinctively that her body was now more resistant to damage in general. The 10:00 am sun no longer bothered her skin, and the wet humidity in the air was no longer as cloying, as if she had caught a nice cool breeze on a suffocatingly hot day.
Her magic also had a jump in strength. Which then settled down. But it grew faster than before when she only had a small bit of blue Mana. This Land was larger than the one at her house, after all.
She felt thrilled at this discovery. She could get new Mana and of different colors too!
In her excitement, Hermione went to the bus stop she had been dropped at and boarded a new bus towards the cemetery. She had to wait for a little while because the first bus that stopped was not the one that passed near the cemetery. This time the bus driver gave her several fifty pence coins back to her. She suddenly felt foolish. Maybe the first bus driver thought she was giving him extra money for the help?.
She didn't have to get off the bus for the blue Mana. It was a library — not one Hermione had ever gone to before — but she only had to send an impression of her love for books from her seat on the bus, and she had a nice new bit of blue Mana. Giving her similar changes to what she had received the first time she took in a blue Mana connection, slightly weaker thought. This Mana was not as strong as the one in her house, and the side effects showed. That's very strange, I feel like this library should have more mana.
She was so excited by the easy acquisition that she got off the bus with easy steps when she felt the red Mana near and didn't realize the place she was walking towards until she looked at it. It was a bar. A pub, one of those places that served alcohol and had dancing, Hermione didn't know the exact name.
Slightly embarrassed by walking towards a place a minor shouldn't be, she moved a little away and found a place to stand while looking as normal as possible.
This time, when she reached out, she was rejected. Again.
She did the same thing she had done with the government building. Red was the color of emotions, of actions. So she sent impressions of times she had felt great emotion or done things impulsively. It didn't care. Fighting a troll? She was just scared. Traveling through time to screw with the government? Peer pressure. On and on it went.
That is until she got frustrated by her lack of progress and sent the red land a memory of her punching Draco Malfoy. That did the trick.
It was so effective that the Mana didn't even examine the memory like the white one had. It just gave in, and right afterward, Hermione felt red Mana flowing and settling inside her.
She was getting used to the feeling of her magic growing in power. Same with the side effects of making her body stronger too. The red Mana, however, gave her body a much more substantial boost than the others. She felt quick and agile, strong and tough. The sensation she had felt the first time she took a dot of Mana, the one where she felt like she had lost 10 kilograms, came back with a vengeance. She felt light on her feet and ready to run a mile, and she felt like she needed to do it now. It was insane.
She took a couple of moments to gather herself and took a bus to the cemetery before she did something stupid like walking into the bar and demanding a pint or something like that. It seemed the colors had different effects on her mind. She already knew that, with them changing the color of her aura and all that. But having such a clear piece of evidence, like wanting to go to a pub and start a fight or something for nothing, was a very obvious change from her usual self.
It took over an hour to get to the cemetery by bus. Hermione forgot how long it had taken by car, and bringing a book had completely slipped her mind, probably because her parents had forbidden her from bringing one last Saturday for their previous visit. So she was mainly bored during the trip.
Once she got to the cemetery, she walked up to it and told the guard(a different one this time) that she was here to visit her grandmother. She had to give her name and house phone number to be written down on a piece of paper the guard had before he let her through.
Walking through the cemetery towards the grave she had seen several times before, she felt the Black Mana around her. It was much stronger than the other lands she had felt so far.
Black Mana is all about power. About ruthlessness and self-serving goals. She got that the first time she felt the color on Saturday. She wasn't in any mood to experiment then, though.
It was connected strongly to death too. It makes sense that it would be in a cemetery.
Normally she would be leery of anything 'dark' related. But she could feel the Mana itself. And it wasn't anything like dark magic.
Hermione had used a dark spell once, it was a dark cutting curse that made it hard to heal what it cut. The spell didn't corrupt her, made her evil or anything like that but it required a certain mindset. Wanting to hurt something permanently. There was a small amount of anger or rage required to cast it. She had thought it was a anormal permanent cutting charm when she first tried it.
The black mana didn't feel like that. It was just power. I didn't seek to corrupt her. It didn't even care about her and required no strong violent emotion to access. It was just another color like blue and white.
She tried to give impressions to the Land, but it didn't react to her prodding. She tried sending memories of her grandmother's funeral, the dementors, the times she had come close to death.
It wasn't enough. The Land didn't care. It wasn't suffering or pain that it wanted from her. The black Mana was not here for some petty, stupid reason like pain, anguish, or other idiotic notions. Death and suffering were its domain, yes. But it demanded more from those who sought its power. It would never allow itself to be wielded by a pitiful being wallowing in misery.
She felt stumped for a couple of minutes and found herself right in front of the small grave of her grandmother, surrounded by other similarly small graves. There were no ghosts here; she had read that wizarding cemeteries had many of them. She wished that her grandmother had been a witch and her ghost was here. To have someone she could talk to about what had been happening to her with no fear of reprisal. Her grandmother had been the only person who had shown true care and interest in her when she was little, and she would be able to advise her correctly or at least point out some issues she hadn't been able to foresee.
All the people in her life would freak out or try to control her if they knew what she could do now either by telling her to be more cautious, through emotional manipulation to coerce her actions, or even legal reprisal if she told the wrong person. Someone that could travel to another world was a resource to be used and abused to its maximum potential. And the Department of Mysteries was not where she wanted to end up in any capacity other than maybe a researcher.
Her parents were no better. They never had time for her; if they had tried to raise Hermione, she wouldn't have been so obsessed with books. An escape from reality was all the books had been when she was little and had no one there to care for her. A fantasy where the lonely girl sitting down with books all alone every day for years was whisked away to a world of magic and wonder.
It turned out that the real thing was even worse than the mundane world. And now she had nothing and no one she could confide in. Even her beloved books were nothing but tools to further her knowledge and power. Lest she is found wanting and ends up in the hospital wing by a straight shot of a Slytherin Hitler's youth wand.
Even her friends didn't care too much for her. The other students called them the golden trio. In reality, it was more like Hermione was friends with the Ronald and Harry duo. They just tolerated her, her personality too abrasive to make any new friends or even form deeper relationships with the ones she already had. They would shun her without a second thought if they could see what passed through her head most days.
She knew what she had to do to get the Mana; she wasn't stupid. But she was also scared about that part of herself. The part that she didn't particularly like or think about too much.
And yet, it was that part of her that had given her this new ability. That took her away from her predestined path of mediocrity. It was wallowing in that despair and her lack of power, a shattering of her dreams, and her secret lust for being a powerful being that gave her the capability to truly achieve her dreams.
So she sent the Land impressions of her ambitions. Of how she would change the world if given a chance. Of how she would make things better. Of how good it sometimes felt to hex back when she was attacked in the corridors by the 'pureblood' racist idiots.
Her secret, shameful desires to break the rules and study dark magic. Make sure no one ever took Hermione Granger for granted. The allure she felt for that power over herself, her destiny, and that of others. To turn her pain into power.
And then, the black Mana flowed into her.
It went smoother than the white and red Mana. Not quite as fast as the Blue one thought, to Hermione's secret relief.
The changes were immediately noticeable to her. Her magic had grown in strength, massively so. More than it had with all the other connections of Mana combined. Her body also grew stronger, more than even the Red Mana had given her; her mind felt more capable (smarter, really) and stronger too. The Mana itself had reinforced her mind and made her will more powerful.
And yet, she felt out of breath almost