“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?”