MidReal Story
Dreams of Magic
Scenario: Hermione Granger is born a Muggle just like her parents and never gets her Hogwarts letter at all and goes to a Muggle school instead of Hogwarts
Create my version of this story
I was a Muggle.
I didn’t know it at the time, of course.
I was just a little girl who liked to read and learn and ask questions.
I was a little girl who loved her parents and her home and her life.
I was a little girl who had no idea that there was something missing from her life, something that she wouldn’t even know about until she was eleven years old.
It wasn’t until I was eleven that I found out about the magical world, the world of witches and wizards, the world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
It wasn’t until I was eleven that I found out that my parents were dentists because they were Muggles, not because they were dentists.
It wasn’t until I was eleven that I found out that my life had been a lie, or at least a half-truth.
But even before I knew about magic, I knew that there was something different about me.
I knew that I was different from the other kids in my class, different from the other kids in my school, different from the other kids in my town.
I didn’t think that I was better than them, not at first, but I was different, and I knew it.
I knew it from the time I was three years old, and I read my first real book.
It was a children’s book, of course, but it was a real book, with a real story to tell.
And it was the first of many.
By the time I went to school at age four, I had read more books than most adults read in a lifetime.
I don’t remember much about that first day of school—for me, it was just another day in a life that was filled with days of learning and reading and asking questions.
I do remember that I was happy to be there, happy to be around other kids, other people who liked to learn as much as I did.
I remember that it wasn’t long before I realized that I was different from them too.
My mother told me later that my teachers were very impressed by me from the beginning.
They said that I was a “precocious child,” which means that I learned things more quickly than other kids my age.
I would soon find out that I was more than just precocious; I was gifted.
That’s what they called it when children were smarter than almost everyone else in the world.
Of course, being gifted wasn’t always easy.
It could be lonely at times, especially for little girls who were happier reading books than playing with dolls or dressing up in pretty clothes.
Not that I didn’t like playing with dolls or dressing up—I did.
But I liked reading books more, and I would always choose them over the other things.
My parents encouraged me to do whatever made me happy, as long as it didn’t hurt me or anyone else.
They loved me just the way that I was, just as I loved them.
I loved my parents very much, and I knew they loved me too.
They weren’t always able to help me with my schoolwork (it was way too easy for them), but they were always there to help me figure out anything else that I wanted to learn about.
They took me to the library every week so that I could read new books and discover new things.
They bought me supplies when I wanted to try out new projects and experiments at home.
In short, they supported me in every way possible.
But not all of my projects were successful, and some of them ended badly.
When I was six years old, we were talking about the difference between chemistry and alchemy in one of my classes at school.
My teacher said that alchemy was an ancient form of chemistry, with an emphasis on magical elements and properties.
The idea of combining chemistry and magic intrigued me, so after school that day, I went home and asked if we could perform some “magic” experiments on our own.
My parents were both amused and horrified by the idea, but eventually they agreed on the condition that we stick to basic chemicals and simple reactions.
So we set up a makeshift lab in our basement and started conducting experiments using common household ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide.
I quickly discovered that mixing these chemicals together could produce minor explosions and colorful reactions—both of which delighted me to no end but gave my parents cause for concern.
The first time I set something on fire, it was a complete accident.
The mixture of two chemicals reacted much faster and more violently than I had expected, and I couldn’t get away in time before the flame caught on my mother’s eyebrow and singed it off entirely, leaving behind a smoky trail of burnt hair and skin.
Needless to say, my parents were not thrilled about this development, and my father spent over an hour trying to reason with them while I sat quietly in a corner, listening to their conversation and wondering if I would be grounded for life.
In the end, my mother agreed to let me continue with my experiments, but only if I promised to follow certain safety precautions and allow her to supervise every one of them from now on, while my father watched from a safe distance and waited in the wings as our designated mediator.
Of course, I agreed, just grateful that my parents hadn’t forbidden me from ever doing science again.
So we continued our experiments, and I continued to ask questions, and my parents continued to support me in every way they could, which I loved them for all the more, even though it must have been difficult for them at times.
I was a very curious child, you see.
I wanted to know everything about everything, all the time, about everything and anything that interested me at any given moment, which was pretty much everything I ever came across in life, from science and history to literature and language, and everything in between, in no particular order, all at once, all together, all the time.
So when I came home one day at the age of seven and told my parents that I had just created a new theory on black holes during recess and couldn’t wait till summer vacation so that I could spend all my time doing research on it instead of doing homework on boring stuff like long division, it was just another Tuesday night in the Granger household for them.
They looked at me and then at each other and then back at me again like I had just told them I was secretly a unicorn who could talk to fairies and were trying to figure out how best to break it to me that I wasn’t really a unicorn after all and they weren’t really my parents but two Muggles who had found me abandoned on their doorstep with a letter pinned to my blanket announcing the arrival of a long-lost magical princess who had been born under a blood moon on the eve of Halloween and was destined to save us all from eternal darkness, because as far as they knew, no one in our family tree had ever been interested in astronomy before except for Mr.
“Are you sure it’s a new theory?”
my mother asked, while my father nodded along enthusiastically and pointed at the ceiling.
“Because I remember reading something about black holes in one of your books.”
“It’s not the same theory,” I said.
“Then what is your theory?”
my father asked, beaming with pride.
I’m still working on the details,” I said.
“Okay, then keep working on them,” my father said.
So I did just that, and by dinnertime the next day, I had already come up with three new theories on black holes and was so excited about them that I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my parents all about them and another four new theories on the origins of the universe, just because.
This time, they weren’t quite as surprised and were actually able to follow along with what I was saying for once, probably because they had done some research on their own while I was at school and were now much better equipped to handle the topic than before.
My father even tried to engage me in a discussion on quantum mechanics while he was making dinner and asked me if I thought string theory was a thing or not, which was nice.
By the time I was ten years old, I had exhausted all the material available at our local library and had moved on to things I didn’t understand yet but hoped would make more sense if I read them again later, when I was older and smarter and able to comprehend their real meaning for the first time.
My parents were very proud of me and did their best to support me in every way they could, which again, I loved them for all the more, even though it must have been difficult for them at times.
I went to a public school in our district and loved all my teachers equally, even though they were all terrible and didn’t take me seriously at all, which disappointed me greatly.
But instead of complaining about them like some of my classmates did, I just did all their assignments for them in addition to my own and handed them in anonymously so as not to hurt their feelings, which worked out pretty well for everyone involved.
