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The silence in the living room was absolute, broken only by the sharp, collective intake of breath from her parents. Daniel and Jean Granger stared, utterly frozen, their faces a perfect portrait of shock. The half-eaten biscuits, the financial papers, the comfortable Saturday morning—all of it was forgotten, eclipsed by the two small, impossible words that had just left their daughter's mouth.
"Hermione Jean Granger," her father finally managed, his voice a strained whisper. "What did you just say?"
For a single, terrifying second, the world tilted. The shock of her own discovery, the violent shattering of her reality, had caused a critical error. She had let the mask drop. A flicker of genuine, soul-deep panic threatened to surface—the fear of a survivor whose cover has been blown.
Then, instinct took over. The cold, analytical mind snapped back into place, seizing control with brutal efficiency. She blinked, her expression shifting from one of stunned horror to one of pained confusion. She brought a hand to her temple, her small fingers pressing against it as if trying to ward off a sudden, sharp pain.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice quiet but eerily steady. "That was…unexpected." She took a slow breath, tapping a prospectus on the table. "I was running the numbers... and I saw something very concerning."
Her father frowned, confused. "Concerning? Hermione, these are some of the fastest-growing companies in the world."
"Exactly," she said, her tone certain, her expression stabilizing rapidly to match the situation. "They're growing too fast. Their market value isn't connected to their actual profits or tangible assets. It's based on speculation—on a promise of future technology. It's a classic speculative bubble. And bubbles, they always burst."
The deflection was instantaneous and perfect. It was a lie wrapped in the absolute truth of her memories, presented not as a vision, but as a cold, hard, data-driven conclusion. She wasn't their precognitive daughter; she was their genius analyst daughter, applying historical models to current data with an impossible degree of certainty.
The shift in their expressions was immediate. The shock and anger vanished, replaced by a wave of pure, stunned awe and a deep, chilling fear. Her father sank back into his chair, the color draining from his face. This wasn't a strange, mystical even the could dismiss; it was a logical argument he couldn't refute, coming from his genius nine-year-old.
"A bubble?" he stammered, looking from her to the papers and back again. "You're saying this entire sector is a bubble?" Hermione gave a slow, deliberate nod. "It's not that they won't grow," she said, her voice regaining some of its steady, analytical tone. "They will. Massively. But the way the market is moving now, with all the speculation around this new 'internet'… it's building towards a collapse. In ten, maybe fifteen years, the bubble will burst. The wipeout will be catastrophic. The numbers… I saw a potential loss of trillions from the market. It was…overwhelming. We can invest. We can ride this wave all the way to the top. But we have to have an exit strategy. We have to get out before it all comes crashing down."
"Oh, sweetie," her mother was by her side in an instant, but this time she offering a comforting hug. She was looking at her daughter as if she were a fragile, beautiful, and terrifying piece of crystal. "To bethinking about things like that… it must be exhausting."
Hermione leaned into the embrace, a calculated move that felt surprisingly grounding. "It's just numbers, Mum," she mumbled into her mother's shoulder. "I'm just… processing."
"No more today," her father said, his voice now firm, sweeping the prospectuses off the table and into a neat pile. "No more numbers. No more patterns. You go upstairs and rest. We'll talk about this… later. Much later."
She nodded, allowing them to fuss over her, to guide her to her room, their love and worry a thick, protective blanket that she was, for the first time, using as a shield. Later that evening, the house was quiet.
She waited until she heard the soft click of her parents' bedroom door closing before she moved. She slid off her bed, the earlier performance of a pained, exhausted child melting away, replaced by a grim, weary resolve. She closed the curtains, the thick fabric blocking out the last of the evening light. She locked her door.
This was now a war room, and the security of the perimeter was paramount. She stood in the center of the room, rubbing her temples, not out of feigned pain, but from the very real, crushing weight of the new reality.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and raised a hand. Her magic answered, not with a flash or a bang, but with a quiet, solemn hum. Threads of indigo and violet light flowed from her fingertips, weaving together in the air before her. It wasn't a simple illusion; it was a three-dimensional, holographic blueprint of a future that no longer existed as she knew.
Her original timeline. It stretched across her room, a glowing, intricate web of cause and effect. At its core were the primary objectives: six pulsing nodes of sickly, corrupted light representing the Horcruxes. Branching from them were the necessary acquisitions. A line connected the Diary to a spectral image of a Basilisk, its fangs dripping with glowing venom. Another linked the Hufflepuff Cup to a detailed, rotating schematic of Gringotts' lower vaults.
A separate, parallel layer of the timeline detailed Strategic Assets. A shimmering node hovered over Hogwarts, labeled "Room of Requirement: Secure Base/Workshop." Another pulsed in the first year, an image of the Philosopher's Stone, noted not for immortality, but as a "Unique Alchemical Power Source: Acquire and study." The Marauder's Map was there, a web of glowing footprints, labeled "Real-time Castle Intelligence." A spectral Time-Turner spun silently, marked as "High-Value Tactical Asset."
Another layer detailed long-term power plays. A glowing line traced the ownership of the Elder Wand, from Dumbledore to its future inheritors, a path she had intended to intercept. A node over the Ministry of Magic highlighted the Department of Mysteries, with a single, grim annotation: "Prophecy: A Variable to be Controlled or Destroyed." Even Grimmauld Place was on the map, not as a headquarters, but as the "Black Family Library: A Primary Source for Forbidden Knowledge."
It was a beautiful plan. Meticulous. Efficient. A multi-layered strategy for the systematic dismantling of a Dark Lord and the consolidation of absolute magical power. It would have worked.
She sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of a life she would never lead. With one last, lingering look at the future she had so carefully crafted, she flexed her will.
With a flex of her will, the timeline imploded in on itself, the intricate web shattering like glass and scattering into a million fading motes of colourful, shiny shards before vanishing into the darkness.
She turned and went over to her koala. She let herself fall into it; a practiced habit, its immense size enough to cushion her fall and catch her perfectly.
A momentary weariness from her first life settled back onto her shoulders, not as a crushing weight of despair, but as a familiar, heavy cloak. She sighed and closed her eyes, letting her mind run free.
And it did. Even without her conscious input or effort, plans were being made and unmade in an instant. New characters, new variables, long-lost movie events, forgotten, barely-known-but-no-less-dangerous comic book knowledge—all of it came flooding back, blending together in the chaotic cesspool of this new, well, cosmic-level mess.
The brief holiday from a world of constant, high-stakes threats was over. The game had changed, the board was infinitely larger, but the rules of survival remained the same. She took a slow, steadying breath, the faint scent of synthetic fur a strange, mundane anchor in a moment of cosmic realignment. Then, she pushed herself up from the plush toy, her expression no longer grim, but one of determination.
She stood once more in the center of her room and raised a hand. Her magic, that cold, familiar companion, answered her call instantly. The faint, pearlescent fog swirled into existence, coiling around her fingers like a living thing, ready to give form to her thoughts.
The time for planning for a new, infinitely more complex war had arrived.
With stakes infinitely higher than ever before.