Hermione Granger and the Discovery

Chapter 6

Hermione Granger

A month into classes and I was getting bored again. Once you got past the "Magic is Real" learning curve, everything was just as easy as regular school. All in all, quite a disappointment. Daphne and Tracey were good friends, of course, but they simply lacked the malicious intelligence that I was truly looking for in a best friend. A quality that, logically, should be common in Slytherin, given its tendency to produce the darkest witches and wizards, but alas, it was not the case. Perhaps it was a trait that most of them gained with time, I had thought to myself pensively.

My boredom was temporarily remedied when I realized that my father's suggestion of schoolwide domination could still be achieved. Upon this realization, I immediately set to work. I had two loyal friends (followers) in Tracey and Daphne. Both had some semi-significant political clout that could be used to maneuver the other Slytherins, but for the other three houses, I would be on my own.

House politics were complicated. Slytherin was, without a doubt, the easiest to understand. Everything operated on tradition and family ties. If you came from a wealthy and well-respected family, you were almost guaranteed a good position within the social hierarchy. This, generally, made it difficult for people like me to rise through the ranks. However, I had made two well-connected friends and embodied the desirable qualities for Slytherin almost perfectly, except, of course, that I was a muggle-born. I had spread some whisperings of this to some of the upper years, who were generally more independent in their thoughts than the younger students.

My thought process was that every member of the house lacked at least one of the desired qualities. So, if my only transgression was being muggle-born, I wasn't all that bad when compared with the likes of Crabbe and Goyle (Malfoy's thugs). This complicated house matters somewhat. My sorting upset the carefully balanced system that was Slytherin. There were other muggle-born Slytherins, but they were few and far between. As far as I knew, I was the first one in at least a hundred years and, from what I'd heard, the last one had "mysteriously" disappeared.

As a result, I knew that my immediate action should be to gain more allies within Slytherin before looking outside of it. Pansy Parkinson, Salley Smith, and Milicent Bulstrode were out of the question. For one, it seemed that Pansy was also attempting to gain some level of control over our classmates. Secondly, none of them were particularly intelligent or had any redeeming qualities about them. And Finally, Pansy (the ringleader) was prejudiced to the extreme. She had been spoon-fed anti-muggle sentiments from the day she could understand them.

Draco Malfoy was also out of the question, as were his lackeys, Crabbe and Goyle (for obvious reasons). That left me with Blaize Zabini and Theodore Nott from her year. Of the two, Nott was currently my best bet. From what I had found, the Nott family judged, not on blood, but on potential, which shouldn't be an issue for me. I had already noticed Nott taking a mild interest in me, which could only be beneficial to my plans. Furthermore, the boy was intelligent and had a reputation for knowing more spells than anyone else under 4th year.

Zabini, on the other hand, was far more interesting. He was guarded, extremely so, and was constantly deflecting questions and dancing around conversations in odd roundabout ways. No one knew what he wanted, but everyone knew his mother. The "Black Widow," having married seven times, each of her husbands dying mysteriously and leaving her with their inheritances. As both one of the richest and most hated women in the UK, she was well known within the Slytherin house, and it was expected that her son would be just as cunning. Yes, Zabini was the perfect person to bounce ideas off of, but until I could secure his loyalty, he was worth nothing to me.

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Severus Snape

Severus sighed as he poured himself a glass of fire whiskey. Dumbledore had him constantly busy, whether it was watching Potter, watching Granger, checking on the Stone's defenses, or even just grading papers, he rarely had a moment to himself.