It was a lazy Thursday, and Hermione did not have coins for the payphone. The boys had been bullying her again, hiding her things and dumping her backpack in a muddy puddle just outside school grounds. That horrible Amanda Worthby had started the laughing, when they shoved her into the mud while she desperately tried to save her books from being ruined. The drizzle that had been coming and going all summer had finally chased off the kids, leaving her alone, wet and crying.

She knew her things wouldn't survive the abuse from both the rain and the mud bath. Her precious books would be waterlogged again. Even the library book she had just loaned, remembered her with a shiver. It was her last chance, the librarian had told her. She would be banned from the library forever if she brought back another damaged book.

To add insult to injury, she did't have change. Her pocket money had just been "confiscated" by those savage beasts. Her parents would still be at their dentistry, counting on her to catch the bus out any problems. Now that her money was gone, taking it was no longer an option, as was a simple call to her mom to pick her up.

She shivered lightly, her white uniform blouse feeling heavy and cold and gross against her skin. Hermione walked to the lonely telephone booth covered in graffiti as always, and took the phone off the hook. With a single glance through the cracked glass, she started clicking the hook. Counting the clicks in her head, she rapidly "dialled" the dentistry number, praying for it to work. She never tried that outside her home, as getting caught switch-hooking would not look good on her record, right under "destroying public property", as her librarian would surely claim.

She was lucky, for a change. The old payphone was a keypad-locking model. After coins were inserted, it would unlock the keys for the user to dial the phone number. By bypassing the keypad, using the phone hook clicks to simulate keypad pulses, she could call home even without change in her pockets. When her mother's warm voice finally answered, she almost cried in relief.

The girl ended the call and searched for cover from the rain. Hermione waited for some while under an awning in front of the flower shop, wishing her mother would arrive shortly. She was really cold, her soaked shoes numbed her feet, and the wet shirt made her skin blossom with goosebumps. Her eyes stung with unshed tears, while her tall, bushy hair became sleek as it was drenched with rain water. It felt heavy on her head and clung to her face.

Hermione considered herself a good girl. She never raised her voice against the others, she would always do her homework and had perfect grades; she liked quiet, girly activities and kept to herself. Reading was her only true passion: she devoured books one after the other, expanding her knowledge at a brisk pace. She even liked sharing what she had learned, tutoring her classmates when prompted by a teacher. But the fact that she answered any question correctly, easely aced any test, and could handle a deep conversation with an adult made her classmates uncomfortable. They belittled her, called her names, spit on her things, ruined her possessions and even physically attacked her, shoving and pushing and manhandling her.

It was a truly sad affair. Hermione had no friends at all, and had been this way for her entire 12 years of life. The other kids thought she was annoying, she knew because they were truly forthcoming at informing it. For the longest time their scorn hurt her almost physically, but she wasn't a little girl anymore. She wouldn't cry because their words stung. There was a strength in her now, like the calloused hands of a laborer. By the time her 12th birthday dawned, Hermione had the callused heart of a bullying target veteran.

Her mother's BMW parked slowly in front of her, the driver window rolling down so her mother's bright brown eyes could sadly look at her.

"Come on in", urged Dr. Emma Granger, forcing a tiny smile through her lips. Hermione felt her heart clench in her chest at her expression. "Let's get you safe and warm, sweetie".

Hermione opened the door and got inside the car with a pained sigh, cradling her muddy backpack so it wouldn't stain the carpet. She kept her eyes averted and gazed out the window, refusing to meet her mother's eyes asa wave of shame rocked her petite body. Warm fingers tangled through her hair, Emma's understanding love sweeping in the girl's very bones, easily taking away the pain and the fear.

She felt truly safe in her mother's beautiful black car, even with muddy shoes. They travelled in silence, no words were needed to explain what had happened to her. The city outskirts came into view through the windshield, a tired smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. The suburbs of Crawley felt like home toHermione and the girl could feel her body finally relax. She closed her eyes, slumping into her seat, ignoring how wet the leather car seat would be after this.

They pulled over in the front of a wide two-story house in a high class neighbourhood. Not for the first time, Hermione thought what her classmates would say if they knew she was, to be frank, loaded. Between her parents' dentistry and her father's keen eye on the stock market, the Granger family was well off. And Hermione was the sole heir of their respectable-sized fortune. But the girl decided long ago her classmates weren't worthy enough to be privy of that information. She even had browbeat her parents to allow her to ride the bus to and from school. While she attended a private school, it wasn't even one of the county top ten, mainly because the Grangers wanted her daughter near them instead of attending a far-away elite school.

She dumped her destroyed bag on the porch, and left her soiled shoes at the entrance. Padding softly on the carpeted floor, the girl ran upstairs, opening her bedroom door and headedstraight inside her private bathroom. She already tossed her wet clothes in the hamper by the time her mother appeared and leaned on the doorframe.

"I think a good bath is in order", she said softly, as she passed her daughter and fiddled with the bathtub taps. "I always feel better after a warm soak".

Hermione nodded quietly, and waited beside Emma for the tub to fill, wearing only her panties. She felt a gentle hand against her back, rubbing in wide circles, comforting her more than any words could. It was times like these that made her feel that life was truly worth living. That, and bookstores.

For the longest time, books were her safe haven. Cracking open a thick tome, curling on the couch and losing herself in the pages, till the ink soaked through her brain, taking her away from her current situation and plunging the girl into new places. That was the main reason she loved history books. But the feeling of discovering something new, the pure understanding of a difficult concept, the vain moment when she could use her knowledge to solve a problem, these things made her feel more alive than any other experience in her short life.

But no book could teach her how to make friends and keep them. God knows she tried to find one. Her parents had said it would come naturally to her, when she found a kindred soul, but time had taught Hermione that kindred souls were nothing but a pipe dream. And after a couple of years, her very books had distanced her from the other kids. A truly sad affair, indeed.

The tub was finally full, and she stripped completely, slipping inside, feeling the almost too hot water work on her cold bones and her tensed muscles. Her mother kneeled behind her, taking the soft bushy curls of her daughter's hair in her hands, before slowly shampooing it, her fingers massaging Hermione's scalp in a way that made the girl close her eyes and sigh softly.

It was during the dinner when the dam finally burst. Daniel Granger, her father, took a bite of pasta, and gave her a small, warm smile, so full of pride and understanding that her silence broke. Fat, lava-hot tears ran down her face, and with a pained sob she pressed her closed fists to her eyes, trying to contain them. With a loud clang, her knife and fork dropped to the floor, and she started to bawl.

Like a baby. After, tucked between her parents in their bed, she felt ashamed about her outburst. She had never, never cried like that before, even when worst things had happened. Maybe it was the upcoming library expulsion that wrecked her so, but she really couldn't hold it in that time. It was cleansing somehow, like finally letting go of some heavy, cumbersome burden.

Hermione knew there would be a serious discussion the following day. Her parents would, again, discuss schooling alternatives, and would, again, call some friends to ask about elite schools for the gifted, and would, again, broach the subject of home schooling with tutors. But, that moment, feeling her father's strong arms and her mother's soft hands around her, all her problems were far away, and a peaceful sleep finally claimed her.

– | –

The bell rang at the wrong time. At first, Hermione though it was just an error, but the bell rang again, longer, and more insistent. Then the internal audio system wheezed alive, flaring and crackling over the words, calling every student to her respective class.

The girl wavered between the library doors, where she would pay a hefty sum (parent sent) to cover the destroyed book expenses and would ask, and beg, and probably plead, for the librarian to let her keep her library access. Slumping slightly, she turned back, giving up her mental fortitude to grovel at the librarian's feet. She kept her eyes down, treading fast, almost against the wall, so she wouldn't be noticed by her schoolmates.

She ducked inside the class, walking to her desk, dumping her plastic bag on the floor. It was against the school rules to use something different from a classic bookbag, but hers was in the trash bin at her house, unusable after being dunked in muddy water and the straps ripped off. Her mother had promised they would buy a new one for her the following day, even if Hermione thought it a waste of time and money. Like her last three bookbags.

A stern looking man entered the class instead of her regular teacher. His demeanour spoke of sourness, while his appearance reminded Hermione of a vampire: sickly pale skin, black greasy hair, like frozen tar, dead cold dark eyes, a hook-like nose over thin lips curled in a perpetual sneer; he was tall, thin and fully clad in black and grey clothing. His thick eyebrows raised just a little bit, as he took the class with a cold gaze.

The door opened a little, and the headmistress peeked inside, her eyes widening when she saw the strange man. She gave him a nervous smile.

"Ah! Professor Snape, you are here already", spoke in a somewhat forced cheery tone. "Good, good! I really thought you had gotten lost when you disappeared…".

She trailed off when his dark eyes bored into hers, gulping so loudly even Hermione could hear. To her surprise, none of her classmates smirked or laughed at that. She really couldn't judge them, since she was as scared of the man as everyone else.

The headmistress coughed a little, before she fully entered the class and stood beside the man. She took care not to touch him, while addressing the kids.

"Professor Snape is a teacher at an elite school for the gifted. How it's called, again?".

"Hogwarts", whispered Professor Snape, his silky, low voice carried easily through the whole class. Hermione shivered a little, as there was something dark and dangerous in that voice, like a untold malice hiding behind every syllable.

"Yes, hem, yes! Hogwarts!", the headmistress was really struggling to keep her cheery demeanour, that was for sure. "So, Professor Snape has come today to offer you all a scholarship at Hogwarts. Of course, as this elite school is only for the truly gifted, we will carry a little surprise test right now. If you may, sir".

The man opened a black suitcase he was carrying, taking a pile of paper from it. He started to move, walking swiftly between the rows of desks, dumping some sheets on each. Slow in the uptake, the headmistress hovered a little bit more at the front, before snapping out of it and followed behind the Professor, distributing a thin strip of light green paper.

"These are your answer sheets. Since Hogwarts is applying this same test at all the schools around here, they graciously have lent us a machine to compute all the results automatically. All the questions have four answers under them, only one is correct. On this answer sheet you'll fill the circle with the correct answers' letter, like this".

She raised one of the answer sheets, and pointed the first row with her well-manicured finger. There were four circles aligned, each with a letter inside. The first three were "abc", but the last one, instead of a "d", was completely painted inside, covering the letter.

"You need to wholly fill the circle, using your pen, so the letter doesn't show. Use black or blue ink only. There will be no replacing of smudged, ripped or wrongly filled answer sheets. Take heed you do it properly, as this is your only chance to get a scholarship to Hogwarts".

Hermione received her green strip of paper and gave it a once over. There were 60 numbered rows of circles, below a square where she needed to write her name, age, address and home phone number. Fishing a blue pen from the plastic bag at her feet, she got on it.

After filling her personal information, she flipped over the question sheets, and started to read. Darting her eyes over the first page, she was filled with a sense of wonder.

Maths, geography, geopolitics, physics and even ancient literature and languages were spread in the questions, sometimes with two or three subjects in the same paragraph. It really was a test to find gifted students. Not only that, but the third sheet had a kind of I.Q. test, with small geometric drawings for her to find some sense of. The second sheet had answers in three languages: French, German and Latin.

She got cracking on it after Professor Snape whispered they could start. She had two hours to complete the test, and she made good use of them. The first page was challenging, but the language test was pure struggle. She rapidly caught on that they weren't testing her for foreign language knowledge, but her logical skills applied to the written word. After giving her some tips about grammar and word meaning, the questions asked her to infer word usage or positioning, and to draw parallels between different languages and her own. Whatever and wherever Hogwarts was, Hermione knew right then she wanted in.

After almost 40 minutes spent on the language test, she started the I.Q. one. Had she not been so mentally tired at that moment, she would have noticed the test's layout was intentional. Finding logical patterns between shapes was difficult, but doing it while exhausted was almost impossible. She felt a headache looming in, and her shirt was glued to her back. She hadn't raised her head since the test had begun, but if she had, Hermione would have seen that most of her classmates had already given up. Most of them were simply scribbling away at the test margins, or filling the answer sheet at random, without even glancing at the questions. Only two other students were really giving their all in the test.

Hermione finished the last question with a sigh. She rubbed her hands in her skirt, as her palms were sweaty. She took the answer sheet and started to fill it, slowly painting each correct circle. It was painstakingly boring, but the mindless repetition was soothing after getting her head in overdrive. With a silly snicker, she thought she could almost smell her classmates fried brains.

She filled the 59th question and allowed herself a tired smile. Just four more minutes left, Professor Snape warned, and she shuffled her papers to get the last answer.

But there was none.

With a start, almost as if waking up, she glanced over the question page, and saw she had put a "d" on the last one. The same "d" she had just finished painting on the 59th row. Panicking slightly, Hermione revised her answer sheet from the top, and felt her heart sunk.

In her tired state, she had filled two answers in the third question. The correct answer, "d", and an "a" that should be in the fifth row. Mindlessly, she had just rolled over with it, filling the sixth answer in the fifth row, the seventh in the sixth and so on. Now she had no answer for the last row, and her entire test was nulled.

Any chance of going to this marvellous school that made such challenging test crashed and burned. She felt tired, and more than tired of crying. So she held her tears inside, and gave up. Without even filling the correct answer at the last row, she put her things back at the plastic bag, and silently handed the answer sheet to the headmistress, when it was time to do so.

A commotion at the door made her raise her head, and Hermione saw two teachers arriving with a rolling cart topped with a huge computer like machine. It seemed as if someone had taken a photocopier and mashed it together with a Windows box, topping everything with a green-tinted screen monitor.

After some shuffling with the answer sheets, Professor Snape used a ruler to cut the top part of each strip from the bottom. He gave the headmistress a pointed look, and she coughed again.

"Yes! Ahn, yes! The computing process will happen right now. Each answer sheet has a special code printed at the top and at the bottom. Professor Snape is separating your personal information from your answers…"

And he was efficient. His hands were a blur, cutting each sheet using the ruler as a guide. The two piles grew steadily, and he even could pile them almost perfectly. In less than a minute he was finished, and used his hands to straighten the answers pile.

"Now, Professor Snape will feed the machine with your answers", he unceremonially dumped the answer pile inside an opening at the top of the photocopier half. One of the teachers turned the machine on, black cables trailing on the floor and through the open door, disappearing outside the class. Hermione raised herself a little in her seat, interested at the procedure. Some of her classmates were standing to have a better look.

The green tinted screen came to live, flashing rows and rows of white letters on the vomit-green background. Hermione guessed this was the Operation System starting. Suddenly, a low clank was heard, and the answer pile moved a little, and one of the sheets was sucked into the machine, like her mother's printer would do with blank paper, back at the Dentistry.

A bluish light showed through a crack at the top, the same as a photocopier would do when you don't press down the lid during a copy. The screen showed a number in big letters, followed by and "OK!".

It took almost fifteen minutes, and most of the class lost interest on it during the first three. Even Hermione was a little bored with the repeating pattern of each sheet being swallowed by the machine, the clanking and glowing lighting happening, then some numbers appeared and finally the ok signal.

When the last one was processed, the screen flashed with a long stream of text rapidly rolling upwards, and then became still once again. The teachers turned the machine off and started to pull it back outside, while Professor Snape recovered the personal information cards and put them in his suitcase. The headmistress hemmed.

"The answers are now digitally…", her tongue rolled strangely at the new word. "Digitally stored on our school network. Coming Monday morning they will be sent to Hogwarts for screening. If you are lucky, someone from their staff will contact you during the next week".

The headmistress thanked Professor Snape and showed him the door, while announcing classes would restart shortly. Hermione perked up at that new information. She knew the school network was a primitive thing yet, and most of the archives still need to be converted and inputted into the system. For now, even their report cards were still typed on a typewriter. Even with her father's growing interest for technology and computing, their Dentistry still used handwritten or typed cards to store information, instead the complex computer system. And her test result was floating somewhere in the intranet at that moment.

She ignored the class and went straight to the library. This time she had no need for mental fortitude. She unashamedly grovelled and bribed the librarian to lift her banishment. It took all her considerate allowance, and three new copies of the destroyed book from the day before, bought by her mother just before entering the school, for Hermione to keep her pass.

Then Hermione asked about the computer. Somewhat mollified buy the girl's money, books and tears, the grumpy old lady just gave her a really stern warning about what would happen to the girl's buttocks if she broke the computer, and left Hermione to her own devices.

And her own devices were far from innocent.

Hermione's dad had a true love for computers, but it was unrequited. Simply, while he could buy them and even install them, he couldn't for his life use them. Not that Daniel Granger hadn't tried. He even had taken a beginner's computer course. He had all the books. To no avail, obviously.

But the books where there, the computers where there, and Hermione found all of them truly interesting. To think an inquisitive mind like hers would want to know how they worked was no stretch. And Hermione did know how to use a computer. Also, she knew how to disassemble and assemble it back together. Amongst other things.

Like her trick with phone dialling, Hermione soon found out that the knowledge about how things worked could be used to her advantage. Knowing telephone line frequencies and circuits could allow someone to hook-switch, bypassing the need to pay for the phone call. She also knew how to use a small whistle at the right tone to make international calls for free. When she started learning about computers at age 8, she soon found out how easily it was to break into another computer from distance, using wired cables. She could make the study room computer control the living room computer using just some commands. It was almost a game for her.

The library computer was an old DOS box, instead of one of the newer Windows PCs. While lacking the graphical interface, it wasn't a real necessity for what Hermione had in mind. No, the true value of this computer was the black cable hooked at its rear, connecting it to the school's internal network.

Hermione started the BASIC interpreter, and cooked up a little program to break into the network and scan it to find the server. From there, it would connect to it and list it's contents.

She screened the multitude of folders and files stored in the server. She was surprised to find they had started to store student's report cards in it. Maybe they would distribute a printed one this year, instead of typing it.

The girl then found what she was looking for. One of the folders was named HG, and she almost had skipped it, before looking at the creation date. Sometime during the previous night, the folder had been created, and the last modification to it was just half an hour ago.

Hermione entered it and found text files, with numbers instead of names. She closed her eyes and pictured her answer sheet in her mind. The same numbers at the top and at the bottom. She opened her eyes and accessed the file named "40295483".

It was really simple, and she thanked God for it. Had it been it obscured by some kind of cryptography, she wouldn't be able to alter it using just the library computer tools. But each line started with a number, followed by an uppercase letter, no spaces.

She saw the third line was empty. This made a sense to her, as that was the question she had mistakenly painted two circles. Taking a peek over her shoulder, Hermione confirmed she was alone, before she started to shift the answers around. Picturing the test in her mind, she reviewed each answer, before correctly completing the third one. She saved it, deleted her breaking in tracks from the logs and disconnected.

After wiping the computer for any trace of her invasion, Hermione ducked out the library, feeling cheerful for the first time that day. The plastic bag she carried in her hands holding her books and school supplies even stopped bothering her.

Maybe, just maybe, Hermione would have a chance at a new school, where the tests where challenging; where people would recognize her for what she was; where she would find a kindred soul; and where the teachers were just gullible enough for her trick to go unnoticed.

She was right about all of these assumptions, except the last one.

I know most don't read Author's Notes, but I ask you to spend just a minute on this.

*** UPDATE ***

This chapter has been beta'd by the awesome Chiseplushie, and then I went and changed back some things :9 So, if you still find some error, the blame is on me. The corrections are grammatically only, no changes to the plot.

English is not my mother language. I'm a Brazilian guy with barely no knowledge on formal English, most of what I know comes from books, songs and video-games. So I would like to ask anybody who has a good grasp of English and who wants to improve this story to become my Beta! Please, PM me if you're interested!

This is my first ever fanfic in English, so expect some gross mistakes. Also, I'm still trying out the pacing of the story, if you found it too boring or slow, or the language to childish, please let me know in the reviews!

I promise to answer each review in the following chapter, and a new chapter every week or so, as writing in English comes to me more slowly than when I'm writing fanfic in Portuguese.

Also, just to get some info about this story: this a strictly non-magical AU world, where Hogwarts is quite unlike from J.K.'s world. So, expect differences in settings, classes, personalities and history facts. This is also a quite strictly Harry/Hermione story, even if it will develop quite slowly at first, as they are (respectively) 11 and 12.

This story also follows J.K.'s pattern of "one book = one school year". This is why I called it a Series. I still don't know if I want to write 7 or just 5 books, but I have a lot of story to tell, and as this is the most AU world I've ever wrote in yet, probably I'll stick with the 7 book format.

The Deadly Series is just starting. Let me know what you found out about it so far in the reviews and till the next chapter!