“Hermione, please,” Harry begs.
“N-No!” Hermione squeaks. “I- I can’t!” He’s trying to convince her to join in practice- and, she’s pretty sure, compete against him to find out who’s the better seeker.
“Come on, Hermione! You won the first match, and now you’re backing down? Please!”
“B- B- But!” she stutters. “I- I’m-!”
Harry groans, leaning against the wall. “You’re… afraid of heights or something, aren’t you?”
She nods silently.
“Well, that would explain why you didn’t move when that chaser spotted the snitch in that last game,” Fred Weasley states, stepping up next to harry. “But it kinda conflicts with diving at mach six at the end of the game!”
“You know what,” Lyra mutters, stepping closer. “I have an idea. Hey, Rainbow!”
The rainbow-haired racer zips up next to her. “Yes?”
Lyra whispers something in her ear.
Rainbow’s eyes gleam with anticipation, and she lets out an excited yell. “Yes! When can we get started?” She’s practically bouncing with eager energy.
“Oh no,” Hermione mutters.
“So, where’s Wood? This might take an entire practice session.”
“What?” Wood asks, stepping up behind the rest. It had been his idea to drag the backup seeker out as well; there’s no reason for her not to practice, after all.
Professor Sinistra pauses in the middle of a rare leisurely walk around the grounds, staring at the strange setup on the sweeping lawns.
Two massive telescopes, with very strange stands and absolutely no way for someone to look through them, are staring up into the evening sky. Two… glowing image things, with strange boards covered in buttons, are set up just behind them, with a couple of Equestrians behind each one.
“Fifty thousand,” one of them announces.
Then she steps closer. “What is… all this?” she asks, wandering closer.
One looks up- one of her favorite students, actually. Star Singer. “Oh, hi Professor! We’re helping Hermione get over her fear of heights.”
“Sixty thousand!” the other girl at the same image thing announces.
She blinks. “So… how are you doing that?”
Star Singer points up into the sky. “If you pull out your telescope, you might notice a little speck about a tenth of a degree due north of directly upwards.”
“Seventy thousand!”
She pulls out her telescope, and eventually finds the speck.
“Eighty thousand!”
“The little grey speck?” she asks. Then she blinks. “With the white flash?”
“Yep!”
“Is that Hermione?”
“Nah. That’s the helicopter. They can’t normally get to forty thousand feet, but this one’s magic augmented; that’s its maximum altitude.”
“Ninety thousand!”
“Then…” She looks at the girl that’s been continuously calling out larger and larger numbers.
Star Singer glances at her. “That’s Bonbon. We’ve got these computerized telescopes locked onto them by GPS and homing signal- you wouldn’t believe the amount of work it took to make that kind of thing work at Hogwarts.” She gestures towards a large, black crate of some kind, about as tall as a grown man and six feet wide, with three more lined up next to it. It’s about two feet deep.
“A hundred thousand!”
“In any case, one of them’s following Rainbow, the other Hermione. Rainbow’s still carrying Hermione at the moment- her job is to take Hermione as high as she possibly can, then dump her off the broom. At the moment at least, that’s pretty high.”
“Hundred ten thousand!”
“Would you like to watch with us?” She gestures towards the image things. “This is the live feed from these telescopes; they’re about thirty times more powerful than anything in the Astronomy tower.” She glances at the screen. “For every thousand feet up she goes, it adds about five point seven seconds of time to the drop.”
“Hundred twenty thousand!”
Sinistra blinks. “Ah, sure… What happens when she hits the ground?”
Star Singer shakes her head. “She won’t. That’s what we’re here for- and why we’re tracking her. We’ve got three entire teams on the ground and the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team waiting to catch her on the way down. Believe me when I say, she’s in no danger of encountering the ground at speed.” She glances up. “Not to mention, knowing how the papa tango interacted with her, she’d probably survive a landing at speed with little more than a sprained ankle or something.”
“Hundred thirty thousand!”
“Ahh…” Professor Sinistra steps closer, looking at the screen; it’s showing two students from below, one carrying the other in a perfect vertical on the broom. The red-haired one appears to be unconscious. “Is she, ah, okay?”
“Hundred forty thousand! Looks like they’re nearing the broom’s maximum altitude.”
“Yep,” Star Singer nods. “She’ll be perfectly fine.”
“Isn’t… Isn’t it a bit hard to breathe that high up?”
Star Singer nods again. “Yep! As a matter of fact, they’re using supplemental oxygen in the helicopter. But whereas we can’t breathe that high up, Rainbow can- looks like she’s starting to breathe harder, though- and Hermione’s even stronger than she, so she’ll have absolutely no trouble.”
“Hundred fifty thousand!”
“Isn’t Hermione unconscious?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, that was the only way we could get her into the air.”
“So, you’re throwing her into the air, way high up, unconscious?”
“Drop performed, one hundred fifty six thousand two hundred ninety seven feet, estimated drop time fourteen and a half minutes, mark! Renervation confirmed!”
Star Singer glances at Bonbon, then back at Professor Sinistra. “We’re waking her up as we drop her, yeah.”
One of the girls at the other image-thing lets out a sudden cheer. “Rainboom! We have Rainboom!”
“Terminal velocity reached,” Bonbon announces calmly. “She’s… screaming in terror.”
“What…?” Professor Sinistra asks.
Star singer nods. “Yeah. Eventually, she’ll realize that screaming in terror gets boring after a while- and that she actually has the power to arrest her fall or get herself out of the air on her own, even without a broom.”
Bonbon sighs. “This might take a while.”
Hermione wakes up again, and sucks in a deep breath, tumbling over in the upper atmosphere- then her arms snap out, and she stabilizes herself, staring at the ground below.
She’s been falling for a good forty-five minutes. Well, not really; rather, she’s had three fifteen-minute falls, punctuated only by unconsciousness. And, she’s just been put to the very top once again. So high up Hogwarts Castle looks like a tiny model, the entire grounds no more than a quarter inch across. She glances up; she’s so high she can see the curvature of the earth.
She looks down, focuses on the grounds below. She can see Rainbow streaking down towards them, already a couple miles below her, leaving a sparkling rainbow contrail.
She can see the Quidditch team, floating casually off to the side, telescopes pointed.
She can see the helicopter, holding position, the occupants wearing oxygen masks and peering up at her through the whirling rotor.
She can see the giant telescopes, one pointed at her, one at Rainbow.
She can see the people on the ground around the computers, the rows and rows of… she thinks it’s some kind of supercomputer.
She can see them watching the screens. It looks like Star Singer is talking to Bonbon; and, as of this most recent drop, it seems Professor McGonagall has also come out to watch. And, even Dumbledore himself is walking out of the castle, looking curious!
She sighs. She’s still a bit worried about falling, but after falling for three quarters of an hour, she finds that screaming in terror becomes… well, more than a little boring.
So…
She sighs, and goes for her wand.
It’s not in her pocket.
She squints at the ground… There it is, on the desk next to Bonbon’s hand. They must’ve wanted to keep her from accidentally breaking it.
Well, that leaves her only one option, really.
She spreads her wings.
She lets out a grunt as they pull sharply upwards, arresting her downwards motion, instinctively shifting her into a glide.
She grins, and drives them downwards, blasting herself up even higher into the sky. As she goes, she glances back down, past the expanding ring of red energy, to the ground. It looks like Bonbon and Star Singer are cheering.
She blinks, looking at the expanding ring. They’d called that a sonic rainboom, hadn’t they?
She grins, giving her wings another couple strokes to gain altitude, before flipping end for end and making for the ground as fast as she can.
She builds speed, then-
WHAM.
She slams into the ground with a perfect three point landing, less than a second after directing herself downwards.
She folds her wings, rising to her feet, as she watches the massive shockwave of brilliant red energy blasting out from her landing point for a second, how all the Agents’ shields over the computer equipment and telescopes are sparking and flashing, panicked cries coming from the Agents behind them. She watches as Dumbledore conjures himself a shining silver shield- which shatters like tinfoil against the onslaught of the shockwave, tossing him backwards; he waves his wand to arrest his own fall.
She glances sideways, to where numerous windows of the Castle are shattering under the influence of the same shockwave, then down, at the crater she’s standing in.
… Or, depression. She’s fairly sure it wasn’t here a moment ago; in a circle around her, about six feet across, the ground has been pounded downwards in a bowl shape almost a foot deep… yet the grass is undamaged.
The last of the shockwave seems to dissipate, then Bonbon charges out from behind the computers, holding her hand up. “Nice job, Hermione!”
Hermione steps out of the depression, raising her hand for the high five. “Uh, thanks?”
“Vertical dive, peaked mach eight hundred forty-seven! Excellent job!” Bonbon slaps her hand.
“Wait,” she asks, her eyes going wide. “Mach eight hundred forty seven!?”
“Yep!”
She glances at the ground, then back up at Bonbon. “And I survived that?”
“Yep! Rainboom magic, gotta love it. I’ve never seen one that powerful- but the Rainboom renders you basically indestructible for the duration.”
A rainbow missile suddenly collides with the ground next to her, unleashing a small shockwave of rainbow-colored energy. Bonbon ignores it; it only makes her hair blow in the wind.
Rainbow rises from her broom-assisted landing. “No fair!” she demands. “I can only ever manage a thirty-foot landing discharge, even in Equestria!”
Hermione blinks at her. “Uh, okay?”
Rainbow folds her arms, dropping Hermione’s Nimbus Two Thousand on the ground. “That was a three thousand-foot discharge!”
“Uh, okay?”
Bonbon snickers. “When you land in the middle of a Rainboom, all of the active energy- kinetic, magical, etcetera- is converted into magical energy and released in a shockwave called the landing discharge. The size of that discharge is proportional to the amount of energy involved- and since you were going at mach eight hundred thirty or so when you hit the ground, Rainbow’s paltry two and a half just couldn’t compare.” Grin. “Especially with the exponential relationship between velocity and energy requirement.”
“Though it does beg the question,” Moondancer asks, trotting forwards from behind the computers. “Hermione, where in the world did you get a hundred thousand times as much power as Rainbow?”
Hermione blinks, and speaks in tandem with Rainbow. “What?”
What?
9691836
What what?
9691858
Hermione's massive power surge
9691873
That... actually wasn't a surge, it was normal execution of the power she already has...
In my headcanon, her British magic and her Equestrian magic are combining to amplify each other, making something far greater than the sum of its parts. Add that to how, if you read the various clues I left, she ascended in the aftermath of the first Quidditch match... and her power levels are truly off the charts, making her capable of some pretty impossible feats. The landing discharge was simply the magical release of the kinetic energy she'd accumulated during that dive.
Mach 847 = 953153 feet per second = 0.000969074 light speed
9691957
= ~warp 0.1.
Yeah, I've got plans for that.
9691986
It would be ~warp 0.001, so not even Impulse (full impulse = warp 0.25 = 74,770 kps)
Just checked.
Mach 847 ~= 290.5 kps
And at that speed, she could go around the Earth in under 140 SECONDS!
9691992
Actually...
At 0.001c, it is warp 0.1. Commercial jetliners cruise at approximately mach 0.8, or approximately warp 0.01.
That's because it's a warp factor, on a cubic scale. Take the factor, cube it, you get how fast you're going, in C.
Yeah, that's even going to confuse a few of my characters, whenever it comes up... Don't worry, Hermione explains it to them- she is, after all, the only one with instinctive knowledge of where to find XYZ topic in the library...
Yes, that's the warp scale that Star Trek used, before the Next Generation switched to a system that doesn't even have an equation to calculate with. Plus, Next Generation's scale tops off at 10 being infinite speed... I don't like that. I'd rather reach warp 19.9 instead of 9.99, or 58.4 instead of 9.9999. The speed difference is rather more visible... and doesn't consist of slapping more nines onto the number. (And yes, those are actual values from the Next Generation)
9691992
Something tells me that our little alicorn will be visiting the moon for the science.
9692121
That is distinctly possible, yes.
9692000
Which makes no sense since in ToS Nomad, a probe Kirk's Enterprise picked up, modified the engines to where they were going Warp 11. It almost blew up the ship. But they did go that fast then.
Superhero landing! It really hard on your knees. Totally impractical, they all do it.
9692224
Exactly.
That's one of the reasons I stick with the standard cubic scale. Need to hit infinite speed? Sure, just juice your ship up to warp ∞... and good luck getting there.
9692226
(video by Because Science that discusses just that)
... Yeah.
9692000
That cubic bit always got me confused. However, 1/4 light speed has always been full impulse, because that is the top speed one can travel without having to account for time dilation and other such physics issues, the things that Warp speed gets around.
9692303
Which of course, also doesn't make sense... because that's also below the point at which you need constant power to maintain velocity. That point is pretty close to lightspeed in and of itself, where you start needing a warp bubble to be able to even reach that speed (rather than simply to negate the time dilation effect at that speed).
... Star Trek engines make no sense.
In any case, that 0.25c 'Full Impulse' would be 0.63 on the warp scale. (Well, technically, 0.62996052494743658238360530363911..., but just because my calculator spits out a zillion digits for the cube root of 0.25 doesn't mean we have to use them all)
I imagine that, in a more realistic universe than Star Trek (with relation to the impulse engines and conservation of momentum while operating under impulse power, at least), any warp physicist would switch systems when talking about sublight velocities: Beyond lightspeed, it's warp 1, 2, etc., on the cubic scale; below, it's the exact speed: Forty meters per second, thirty kilometers per second, point eight cee. Meaning, no matter the accuracy, they'd never actually say "warp point one" or "warp point six three"... only ever "two nine zero kilometers per second" and "point two five cee"/"maximum subwarp velocity".
9692318
Of course they don't. The show's writers wanted to tell a story. They didn't let a thing like 'real world physics' get in their way.
Later that day, they had been punished with detention until next year and a hundred points from everyone
Uh, I have a question. How did everone else survive what amounts to a thermonuclear impact?
Seriously, given that the average mass of an eleven year old girl is 36.9 kg according to google and she was going Mach 847 which is 74770 km/s, as stated above by fetch, or 7.477E+7 m/s, her kinetic energy was 1.03E+17 J. Let’s see... the crater or “displacement” was a foot deep so that means she accelerated 9.171E+15 m/s^2 over 8.153E-9 seconds which means she impacted the ground with a force of 3.38E+17 Newtons or 80.8 Megatons, which is the force of a rather large nuclear bomb.
Unless I screwed up the math somewhere.
9691986
Just.. just how!? That amount of energy is.. insane! I mean.. does Equestrian Magic obey any rules at all? Or does it all run on Hand-Wave-ium energy?
9692917
It is worth note that, when talking about explosive yield and saying "x tons", what we actually mean is "equivalent to x tons of TNT"... 1 ton of TNT contains about 4.184 gigajoules of explosive power (or, 4.184*10^9). Divide the two, and you get, assuming all her kinetic energy was released as explosive energy, you get 2.46*10^7 tons- or 24.6 megatons.
Which is way high for conventional explosives; Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 10 and 15 kilotons, respectively.
Thus, since all the kinetic energy was converted into magical energy when she landed, to be released in shockwave... Well, magical energy is known to pass through quite a lot of stuff, so it won't have leveled Hogwarts. It's also working in a high-magical-density area, meaning the blast will be more contained, and may self-disperse at a far higher rate. Rainbow did note that her landing discharge was just over a half a mile across... and she did observe castle windows shattering under the onslaught, despite the castle's no doubt extremely high magical resistance. I mean, Dumbledore's shield shattered like tinfoil...
Thus, it can be assumed that the effective blast- physically speaking- was far less than the heavy-grade thermonuclear weapon the energy values suggest. The amount of damage done by a magical blast of that scale, though... Well, really depends on the magic, and what it's supposed to do.
9693109
Yes, it is absolutely insane.
In my headcanon, the Equestrian magic is produced and stored within their form; it's also used from the same place. Hermione... thanks to a symbiotic relationship between her British and Equestrian magics, she's even stronger than Tirek when he had all the Alicorn magics.
Which means yes, she has an absolutely insane power level.
9692679
That is... distinctly possible.
Though detention and the like really isn't part of my game plan for the (already written) rest of the year, but...
It's not like I don't gloss over the rest of the year anyways, AND suggest a massive point deficit.
9693149
Alright, thanks for correcting me, I didn’t know how explosive force was expressed.
But now I have another question. What happens to all that magical energy? I know that you said that it disperses, but does that mean that until that happens, Hogwarts becomes an extremely high magic zone? Or does the blast itself cause the dispersal?
On second thought, it’s probably the latter since increasing the ambient magical energy would probably cause wand casting to go a bit haywire and I don’t think you want the CMC leveling Hogwarts... yet.
But then that begs the question, how far does it get dispersed? Does it expand the high magical energy... “zone”, I suppose, of Hogwarts or does it count as Equestrian magic? Would Equestrian magic displace the local magic or layer on top of it?
Or are these questions going to be answered in-story and I should stop rambling?
9693229
It probably found its way into the planetary magical field and just... disappeared. Ridden that to disperse across the entire planet, where it becomes so small an increase in energy levels around the planet that it's largely unnoticeable.
Hermione is far too friendly. If that had been me they'd done that to, I would have gotten my wand and started hexing everyone in sight! Not stopping until somebody stunned me or my arm got tired!
9839655
No doubt she got her comeuppance... or otherwise is plotting for it, yes. She's a bit too smart to pit herself against that many skilled Agents without any kind of preparation; had she gone berserk, she might have gotten one or two spells off, both likely either misses or blocked, before getting blown down herself.
9691944
wait, by 'clues you left' and 'aftermath of the first Quidditch match', are you referring to the glowing and disappearing act? did fluttershy ascend too? she did that first.
That’s four times faster than the Juno space probe. At those speeds, she would have the kinetic energy equivalent of about 6 tons of TNT exploding.
However, since she was actively flying through an atmosphere, that number just went up a couple orders of magnitude higher because of drag.
Keep in mind, the heating from air resistant goes up by the velocity cubed.
First off. How is she still alive and not pancaked from slamming into the thicker atmosphere.
Secondly. Are they trying to get detected by mundane military?!! If my estimates are right, that shockwave would be comparable to a small nuke or worse going off! The Cold War hasn’t ended yet and both the Americans and the Soviets have devised technologies to detect explosions like that. From SPACE.
How were they planning to hide a shockwave that’s at an altitude where even the SR71 would struggle to fly at?! No amount of stealth is going to hide this stunt!
9934850
This is a good point...
Hmm. The current story position is around a year in the future from this point, and there's way too much done for me to come back and insert that kind of events... so I can probably blow it off as the Ministry doing their job, keeping muggles from noticing magic...
But of course, the Ministry is no more knowledgeable when it comes to computers than your average great-great-great-great-grandmother that died before they were invented. So eventually, somebody finds the computer records, gets curious... and probably either tanks or black sedans, possibly even a Helicarrier (not decided on which just yet), would, ah... stop by. Thanks!