"We're ready to hear you out, miss," Richard said curtly.
"Er..." The false Hermione laced her fingers together. "I chose all the elective subjects. In order to attend them, Professor McGonagall gave me an artefact."
Richie was brimming with scepticism. He knew for a fact that the real Hermione had chosen only two electives. With all the time she spent studying the school curriculum, she simply didn't have enough free time to learn everything under the sun.
Meanwhile, the counterfeit Granger continued:
"A Time-Turner... You can use it to travel backwards in time. I went to Divination first."
Richard gave a meaningful hum. He remembered perfectly well that Hermione hadn't been at Divination. And the notion that anyone would give a pupil a time machine just so she could attend lessons... even by wizarding standards, that was far too insane and unbelievable.
"Then I went back in time and attended Ancient Runes," the false Granger continued.
This time it was Padma who snorted.
"You weren't there!" she declared.
"I was!" the false Hermione insisted. More calmly, she added, "I think I might have made a mistake while using the Time-Turner, and it threw me into a different time where we haven't met yet." She looked at Richie, making it clear whose acquaintance she meant.
"Nonsense!" Richard declared. "For a start, I've been friends with the real Hermione ever since our first journey on the Hogwarts Express. And we'd already met several years before we even started at Hogwarts."
This statement left the false Hermione utterly bewildered. It seemed impossible to feign such complete astonishment—or else a performance like this required an almost superhuman level of acting talent. Richard even began to doubt whether he was right.
"But..." Hermione's double said helplessly. "That can't be... I really have never seen you before in my life. Maybe something's wrong with the Time-Turner?"
It was as though all the air had gone out of Hermione at once. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes, her shoulders slumped, and her lips began to tremble treacherously.
"Richie, what if she really is Hermione?" Patil asked doubtfully. "Maybe she's just not our Hermione..."
"Not ours, you say..."
Grosvenor began considering the various ways in which a duplicate of a person might come into existence. He temporarily discarded magical possibilities such as Polyjuice Potion and Metamorphmagus abilities, along with plastic surgery. In the end, he settled on quantum physics.
"Hmm... If we assume that you really do have a time machine, I can think of several theoretical possibilities. One of them fits your story."
Hermione wiped away her tears and raised her tear-streaked face.
"What happened to me?" she asked hopefully.
"A couple of years ago, I came across a paper by David Deutsch on the consistency of quantum theory in spacetimes with closed timelike curves."
"Huh?" Hermione's double stared at Richard with enormous, glazed eyes.
"Richie, you mean whether time travel is theoretically possible?" Padma asked.
"Precisely," Grosvenor continued. "Deutsch showed that the closed timelike curve model could contain internal inconsistencies, since it would lead to such peculiar phenomena as the discrimination of non-orthogonal quantum states and the distinction between proper and improper mixtures."
Richard recognised the look in the fake Hermione's eyes. Harry Potter stared into space with exactly the same glazed expression whenever Richie began venturing into the wilds of quantum physics.
"Richie, can you say that in English?" Padma asked.
"In English," Grosvenor said with a smirk, "travelling backwards in time within a single universe is impossible."
"But I did travel through time!" Hermione's double objected.
"If we assume you're telling the truth," Richard began, "then your time machine must work as follows: a wormhole is created, transporting the time machine and its operator from the future into the past, except that it doesn't return them to their original universe, but to a parallel one. In other words, a wormhole-based time machine acts as a bridge between simultaneous parallel universes. But in your case, something went wrong, and you were transported into a parallel universe with a different course of events."
Patil nodded and commented with an air of understanding:
"The butterfly effect."
Hermione stared at the Ravenclaw pupil with enormous eyes.
"Padma, did you actually understand any of that?"
"Of course," Patil replied condescendingly. "Richie explained it perfectly clearly, unlike the physics tutor my sister and I have. There are several parallel universes where time flows at the same rate and events unfold in exactly the same way. A time machine sends a person into the past of a parallel world where the same events are taking place. But if something happens in one of those worlds that changes the course of history, the time traveller will notice the differences and realise they've ended up in a different world. Otherwise, there'd be no way to tell, and the traveller would believe they were travelling through time in their own world. Their counterpart, in turn, would use the time machine at the appropriate moment and travel to another world, while the time traveller takes their place."
"How did you understand all that?" she asked, staring at Padma.
Patil proudly raised her chin and replied with dignity:
"Unlike my empty-headed sister, the Sorting Hat had good reason to put me in Ravenclaw!"
"But you... Richie, was it?" Hermione turned her gaze to Richard. "How does a thirteen-year-old boy know so much about time travel?"
"Are you joking?!" Patil answered for Richard, her tone ironic. "Richie won the Nobel Prize last year, and this year he launched a rocket to Mars using engines based on particle-accelerator technology. I watched the broadcast on television—his rocket reached Mars in just four hours. He's a genius, a multimillionaire and an aristocrat. Why wouldn't he know quantum physics?"
Shock spread across Granger's face. Her jaw practically dropped onto the desk, while her eyes could have rivalled those of a hypnotoad in size.
"The Nobel Prize?" she whispered incredulously.
"It happened," Richard acknowledged with a nod. "At the award ceremony, I made a rather unfortunate joke about the Higgs boson..."
"So does that mean..." Hermione whispered in astonishment, "I've travelled into another world several times?"
"Assuming you're not a spy," Richard said, narrowing his eyes.
"N-no..." the shocked Granger replied quietly. "I swear I'm not a spy. I'm Hermione Granger, a third-year Gryffindor student at Hogwarts."
Richie lowered his cane. He had no qualms about doing so, since he possessed more effective weapons.
Hermione thought she caught a red gleam in the boy's pupils behind the lenses of his glasses.
"Magic can do anything, but I still have my doubts..." Grosvenor said.
"I don't believe it," Hermione said quietly. "It can't be... You're playing a trick on me!"
"We are?" Patil asked in surprise. "I don't recall ever having a fondness for practical jokes. You're the one who turned up here looking exactly like our friend, who is currently in the hospital wing."
The conversation was interrupted by the door opening. Michael Corner entered the classroom, accompanied by Minerva McGonagall and Septima Vector—a stern-looking, tall woman with straight black hair who appeared to be around forty.
(End of Chapter)
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