“Uh-oh,” Ginny muttered, as her ship materialized near Hermione’s house, and she flew towards it under stealth.
Hermione looked. “What-!?”
Hailey leaned forward to look too. “Something’s wrong,” she agreed.
Ginny parked the ship ten feet in the air, then opened the door without lowering the steps. “We’ll be jumping down and back up,” she answered. “It keeps the engines warm.”
“And protects against any idiots trying to shoot straight in or climb in while we’re away,” Hailey observed.
“Exactly,” Ginny said, and jumped from the ship.
Hailey and Hermione quickly followed, then Hermione led the way into the house, through the wide-open front door. “Mom?” she called. “Are you okay?”
There was no answer.
They searched the entire house… but didn’t find anything or anyone except ransacked and destroyed furniture. Interestingly, Hermione’s bedroom was secure, despite significant damage to the door and surrounding walls- then Hailey told her that was probably the work of the emerald necklace she’d given her for Christmas her second year at Hogwarts, which was enchanted to protect her and her personal spaces from harm.
“I found a business card,” Ginny announced suddenly, from downstairs.
Hermione walked downstairs to look at her. “A business card?”
“Half-under the hot water heater,” Ginny answered, then looked down at it. “Land Dots… with the government Mystery Investigation Department.”
Hailey raised an eyebrow. “Mystery Investigation Department? What’s that?”
Hermione took the business card. “Mystery investigation department?” she mirrored. “Weird. Why here, though?” She drew her wand, and pointed it at the phone. “Reparo!” She stowed her wand, and dialed the number on the card, before setting it on speakerphone.
They listened calmly as it rang four times… then the answering machine took over. “Hello, you’ve reached the office of Land Dots. Sorry I’m not available right now. If you feel like you’ve been wronged by my people, by all means, pay a visit to the facility and bring a bodyguard or two. God knows they’re bad enough. Otherwise, leave a message after the tone with your name, number, and probably complaint, and I’ll get back to you when I can.” It clicked, then a different voice came out of it. “We’re sorry, this mailbox is full. Please try again later.”
Then the line went dead.
Hermione took a deep breath, and let it out, before punching the ‘end call’ key. “Alright.”
“Sounds like Land Dots himself is a decent person,” Hailey observed, “being forced to work with a whole bunch of idiots.”
“Sounds like it,” Hermione agreed, then sighed. “Might as well visit, see if they, uh, ‘wronged’ Mom.”
Ginny rubbed her chin. “If we stop by Hogwarts real quick, I can upgrade this ship a little. Probably cannibalize an ME machine or two for parts.” She glanced at Hermione. “We can also give your body a more combat-oriented upgrade, if you want.”
“Yes, let’s do that,” Hermione nodded. “I’d rather avoid a fight if we can help it, but if they insist…” She shrugged. “I do not intend to lose.”
The receptionist at the Mystery Investigation Department Headquarters, which was disguised as an unmarked office building because the Department officially didn’t exist in an attempt to keep it away from the notice of its targets, looked up when the front door opened.
A single girl entered. She looked to be about thirteen, had bushy brown hair, and was looking around with what looked like curiosity before she started approaching the receptionist’s desk. She was wearing a bright yellow shirt and khaki pants, but there was a faint golden gleam to it when the light hit it just right, and her form was oddly bulky for her size- almost like she was wearing a bulletproof vest or something. The colors in her clothes contrasted strangely with the bright, sapphire blue gemstone necklace hanging around her neck.
The receptionist, Lavender Books, heaved a sigh. There was obviously more to this girl than met the eye- but she couldn’t tell what.
That was probably a good thing. Between her and the department head, Land Dots, the Department was in a sorry state. The current Prime Minister and accompanying cabinet had a fairly low opinion of the M.I.D, so the Department had faced budget cut after budget cut, and had been forced to lay off experienced personnel and hire new, inexperienced people. She and Dots both agreed that it seemed like a mafia had moved in in the meantime, but the budget had been cut so much that they’d have to get a significantly larger budget to be able to really do anything about it. The Ministry refused to believe them any time they sent in reports of illegal activities… such as the ransacking of the Granger home earlier that day.
On top of that, this girl was walking in literally minutes before closing time. She prayed that the girl wasn’t here for anything that would force her to stay late… And that the girl wasn’t alone. Why was a thirteen-year-old girl walking into an office building, anyways?
“Good evening,” she greeted. “We’ll be closing in a few minutes, but how can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the Mystery Investigation Department,” she stated firmly, confidently.
“You don’t have a bodyguard,” she observed.
“I don’t need one,” the girl answered, in the same confident, no-nonsense tone. “Is Mr. Land Dots available?”
“Uh- No, actually, he had an important meeting to go to. He should be getting back in a few minutes.”
“And you close in a few minutes?” the girl asked, raising an eyebrow.
She checked the clock again. “Uh- Yes. Depending on what you need with him, he may be able to take care of it today.”
The girl gazed at her. It felt like she was being judged. “Is Emma Granger here?”
She blinked. “Uh… Lemme check.” She turned to her computer, and started searching the database. The name didn’t show up in the employee database, so she winced, and started searching the other databases. She wasn’t supposed to, by the rules, but she and Dots had agreed that she should since so many people had been dragged in against their will without authorization.
There, she found it.
“Uhh… Looks like she was taken in for questioning this morning,” she muttered. “Doesn’t say what for, the idiots never fill it out properly. It says she’s in cell three.”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “Why?” she demanded.
She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Can I visit her?” It was worded as a question, but her tone made it a demand.
She winced. “I… I can forward your request to the floor manager, but I can’t guarantee he’ll allow it.” She paused. “And are you sure you don’t need a bodyguard?”
The girl smiled. “I’m sure,” she said. “If anyone, it’s the idiot that attacks me that needs a bodyguard.”
When combined with the girl’s tone, what Lavender heard was more on the end of ‘I am my own bodyguard’.
She shivered. The girl was clearly fairly deadly- or at least, believed she was. Was the bulk of her clothing in fact a bulletproof vest or the like? “Alright, I’ll send it in,” she muttered. “What’s your name?”
“Hermione Granger,” she answered calmly. “How many others in the building right now would be… worried about my safety?”
“Uh-!” she stopped, double-checking the occupancy lists. “None, I think. Unless you count… she’s your mom, right? Anyways, it’s just me and Dots. Everyone else is…” She shivered.
Hermione nodded calmly, then waited until she’d sent the message to the floor manager. “Something tells me you might want to leave the building in a hurry,” she informed her calmly.
“Wha-!?”
It only took about two minutes after the receptionist- Lavender Books, according to the nameplate on her desk- sent the message before a bunch of men in black suits with black ties, black glasses, black hats, and black assault rifles appeared out of doors on either side of the room. It was an oddly fitting name for the receptionist, considering the book she’d been reading when Hermione had entered and the lavender dye job she’d done on her normally brown hair- it was showing at the roots.
“Hermione Granger?” a particularly thuggish-looking businessman asked.
“That’s me,” Hermione answered, scanning them with her eyes. The assault rifles they carried were nothing to the Tempered Astrium Weave clothing she wore, let alone the Forged Astrium armor underneath, or her Tempered Astrium hull underneath that… though they could damage her skin’s surface matrix. Not that that was particularly hard to fix.
Once she took off Hailey’s latest protective necklace, of course. Until she did, their bullets would simply stop short of her, rendering her armor or lack thereof moot.
“This way,” he demanded, and the rest of his men started to herd her towards a door.
“Okay,” she conceded calmly, and followed. She needed them to think she was cooperating… until after she had transferred the necklace to her mother, so they couldn’t possibly hurt her to get at Hermione.
They walked for a couple of minutes, down twisting passages. They didn’t seem to be going into the basement- though Hailey’s sensor analysis had indicated that there wasn’t a basement, so she wasn’t all that worried.
“Someone’s coming out,” Hailey suddenly informed her, over the Obelisk network. “Looks like the receptionist.”
“She was helpful,” Hermione answered promptly. “Let her go. Nobody else in the building will care, except Land Dots himself- and he’s not here, though he’s supposed to arrive any time now.”
“Got it,” Ginny answered her. “We’ll keep an eye out.”
Then the goons led Hermione into a hallway with iron bars on either side- cells. They were separated by brick walls, and seemed to be numbered from one to nine on one side, then eleven to nineteen on the other.
The lead goon opened the door to a cell- cell four- and pointed in. “Get in there,” he barked.
She stopped even with cells three and thirteen. Her onboard sensor scan matched Hailey’s from Ginny’s ship outside, and indicated that there was only one lifesign in any of these cells: Cell three, her mother, which she had just visually confirmed.
“Move it,” one of the goons behind her barked.
She raised her hand to her chest, and tugged the sapphire necklace off, causing the clasp to burst apart with very little resistance.
She then flung it casually to the side, straight into cell three.
The necklace shot from her hand like it had been fired from a cannon- and even corrected its own path to slip through the bars and strike her mother square on the chest. When it did, the chain instantly wrapped around her neck, with the clasp closing securely.
Her mother, who had been curled up in the corner, let out a shriek of surprise and looked at it, before looking up. “H-Hermione!” she gasped.
“I said move it,” the goon barked, poking her with his gun.
She turned to look at him, and swatted his gun aside with so much force that it shattered. “Why, though?” she asked- and unleashed a reddish purple bolt of energy from inside her sleeve… which vaporized his head instantly.
The other goons froze for about a second, stunned by the sudden gore- but in that single second, she’d already unleashed six more shots- three forwards, three backwards, all aimed with the help of her onboard sensors.
The last few sprayed bullets- but the few that hit her bounced harmlessly off her armor. The one that would have hit her mother, who was now standing in the corner of her cell with her hands over her mouth in shock, stopped in midair about a foot before it reached her, then fell to the ground.
Overall, the whole fight lasted three seconds.
She drew her wand. “Alohomora.” She stowed it again as her mother’s cell door burst open, then stepped inside. “Hi mom,” she greeted, hugging her.
“H-H-Hermione,” her mom said slowly, staring at the carnage. “What…?”
Hermione looked, and took a deep breath, despite her lack of lungs. She might be using a combat-oriented Astrium body, mounted with far more than just the two weapons she’d used, but she still had a conscience. “They had it coming,” she informed her mother. “Nobody hurts my family. C’mon, let’s get out of here. That necklace is tougher than any armor- they won’t be able to hurt us.”
“Alright, yes, I know, it’s an emergency,” Land Dots said, into his phone. “I’ll be there in just a-!” He pulled over, right away, after rounding the corner.
An alien spaceship was floating over the parking lot for his workplace. It was very beautiful, with a heavy dose of pearly white hull marked with elegant golden streaks and odd, glowing blue highlights that might be the reactionless drive it seemed to be using to stay airborne…
Oh, and the reddish purple beams of undiluted death and destruction that it was firing into the building.
“Uhh,” he muttered. “I know I said I’d be there, but I think I’ll wait until the spaceship stops blowing the place up.”
“... What?” the minister that was calling him back to the office said, sounding utterly confused.
He sighed. He’d already been on his way back to the office after that ‘absolutely critical’ yet utterly boring meeting he’d been required to attend, when the top-secret Minister of Mysteries had called him up to tell him a very, very important person had just showed up at the department headquarters and he needed him to meet with them immediately. The Minister of Mysteries was probably the only person in the entire government that thought the Department was of any use, and had always worked closely with Dots.
“I just came around the corner, and the first thing I see,” he told the Minister, “is an alien spaceship floating over the parking lot, firing beams of death and destruction into the building.”
“Uhh… Should we call the Department of Defense?”
He paused. “Um… Maybe? It just stop- Oh. No, it just finished knocking the whole building down.” He watched quietly as the entire building collapsed… and the spaceship descended to pick someone up by the entrance, before vanishing into nothingness as it started to fly away.
“Well crap. At least all our files are electronic. Any idea why?”
He paused. “Well, it just picked someone up from the parking lot before flying away and turning invisible, so I think I have an idea.”
“Oh. So do I.”
“And something tells me they’re exactly the same,” he observed.
Then they both spoke at once. “Emma Granger.”
“It’s a good thing you weren’t there,” the Minister sighed. “Any other survivors?”
“Um…” He scanned the parking lot. “Looks like the receptionist’s parking space is empty.”
“Oh good, that’s everyone that doesn’t suck, right?”
“Everyone we don’t think is part of the mafia,” he agreed. “So, ahh, who was this important person?”
There was silence for about five seconds.
“Hermione Granger.”
“I think we owe her an apology,” he observed calmly. “I wonder where she got the spaceship, though?”
“Uh, so you know, we’re going to be keeping this strictly off of her legal records. Frankly, she did our job for us.”
“As expected, then.” He paused. “And we now know what happens if we kidnap the family of any of the people that regularly enter the hidden areas.”
Emma Granger hugged her daughter, who had removed the gleaming golden armor from under her clothes during the flight back home, as they stepped slowly down the steps out of the spaceship they’d rescued her with. She glanced sideways at the massive… laser cannons attached to the hull just under the nose, and shivered, before she looked up at the house.
Dan was standing in the ruined door, staring open-mouthed at them and the clearly visible ship; Hailey- who was apparently the pilot, while Ginny ran the weapons and Hermione raided the building- had dropped stealth as they came in for a landing, so she could properly see the ship as they left. She could see his car sitting on the driveway, somewhat towards the end.
“Hi dad!” Hermione cried, waving. Interestingly, she hadn’t removed whatever weapons she’d used in the fight, but they also weren’t visible on her body. Perhaps they were a part of the armor? She had only ever seen those bolts come out from inside her sleeve, but had no clue what from.
He walked out to meet them. “What… What happened? Why are you coming out of a spaceship?”
“Because it’s what was convenient,” Hailey answered, descending behind them. She raised her wand. “Reparo.”
In an instant, the broken windows jumped back together. The door sprang back onto the hinges, completely undamaged. The flowerbeds sprang back together- everything jumped back together.
Hermione looked at her. “That wasn’t the only spell you did, was it?”
Hailey chuckled. “Of course not, a house is much too large for that spell. Oh, hello, Philomena. How’s it been?” A large, scarlet and gold bird had just appeared in a burst of flames and landed on her shoulder.
Land Dots had been driving back home for about five minutes when his phone rang. He immediately punched the call accept button on his steering wheel. “Hello?” he asked. Unfortunately, his car wasn’t new enough to tell him who was calling, and actually looking at his phone to find out wouldn’t be safe.
“Oh, Mr. Dots, you’re alive!”
He chuckled. “I could say the same, Mrs. Books.” He paused. “Did you happen to see why the spaceship was destroying the building?”
There was silence for a few seconds.
“Hermione Granger came in a few minutes before,” she muttered. “She knew who we were, and insisted she didn’t need a bodyguard- she seemed too bulky for her size, so I assumed she was wearing a bullet-proof vest or something. Then she told me that ‘something told her’ it’d be a good idea to leave the building in a hurry, and allowed the thugs to herd her deeper into the building. Next thing I know, I’m just reaching the parking lot exit when there’s this big explosion behind me- and there’s the spaceship, ripping open the windows with reckless abandon. No idea where it came from.”
“She must have been working with someone,” he muttered. “I arrived in time to witness the latter half of the destruction- the whole building has collapsed. Anyways, I saw it picking someone up by the entrance before it left.”
“Hermione. And her mother, Emma, I’m certain. I checked, there were no other prisoners in the building at the time.”
“She was lucky,” he muttered. “Emma, that is. As near as I’ve been able to tell, everyone else they dragged in was tortured and eventually killed.”
Later that evening, when Dan Granger turned on the news in time to catch the last report, Hermione was in the room.
“And finally,” the newscaster announced, “an alien invasion was apparently deterred by lack of resistance earlier today.”
Hermione let out a snort of laughter. “Alien invasion, huh?”
The newscaster showed a poor-quality video taken from a window in a nearby building. “The aliens swooped down over southern London today, fired on what appears to be a random office building, abducted some survivors from the wreckage, and left.”
Hermione laughed outright.
Emma, walking into the room, blinked. “Wait, is that-?” she began.
“Investigators have found particularly large amounts of steel in the wreckage, with at least one piece looking like a cell door, so it may not have been the simple office building it looked like.” He showed a picture of the door, half-buried in the concrete debris. “And now, over to Jim McGuffin with the weather. Going to be any more showers of aliens tonight, Jim?”
“Well I don’t know about that, Ted,” the weatherman began, but his voice was quickly drowned out by the laughter between Hermione and Emma.
“What?” Dan asked.
“That was us,” Hermione said, pointing at the TV. “The alien invasion. That wasn’t aliens, that was us. And the people it ‘abducted’ was me and Mom.”
“Th-That’s dangerous,” he stuttered, staring at her.
“Well yeah. But Mom had been kidnapped while I was out visiting Ginny’s family, and it would’ve been more dangerous to leave her there. So we made a rescue.”
“What about you?”
“Have you forgotten about this, Dad?” Hermione asked, taking her head off her neck and holding it in her lap. “I’m basically unkillable.” She put her head back on. “On top of that, I was wearing armor- and that necklace I gave Mom,” she gestured towards the sapphire necklace Emma was still wearing, “projects a magical force field that would protect her from even an atom bomb. Mind, my armor would have withstood an atom bomb too, even if my extremeties wouldn’t have- but it’s a good thing we didn’t have to deal with any atom bombs. Just bullets, and those… I mean, I suppose they could damage the surface matrix for my skin, but that’d really only be a brief dent as my auto repair system took over.”
“What about those guns you were using?” Emma asked. “Were they in the armor?”
“Guns?” Hermione asked. “Oh.” She held up an arm, and a small but vicious-looking… rod of sorts burst out of her forearm, pointing down her arm and past her hand. “You mean these weapons.”
Both of them stared, and she folded it again. “Er… Yeah. Ginny also helped me upgrade to a more… combat-oriented mechanical body.” She sighed. “I killed twenty-two people earlier today,” she muttered. “It still doesn’t really feel real, though. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because Ginny got eighty or so, and neither she nor Hailey were in any way bothered by it?” She sighed, leaning back. “I hope I’m not becoming a heartless killer.”