but will you let me have it, Imaginary?
Once upon a time, a lonely and ferociously intelligent little girl decided to use her strange, still-emerging powers to obtain an imaginary friend, and so she ended up summoning a demon, to share in her intellectual pursuits and attend her tea-parties. Over time, she would be drawn further into the conflict between the angels and the demons, between the King of Kings and the Fallen Host. And also between Good and Evil; but those lines would not always be as clear-cut as they might seem.
After all, in many universes, the Leader of the Light, companion to a genuine phoenix, would knowingly condemn a baby to ten ‘dark and difficult years’ as a magical child in the guardianship of magic-hating muggles. A hardened Death Eater who betrayed her cousin to his death in the name of a cause would forsake that same cause in the hope of saving her son’s life. A young mother, herself recently fatherless, would go into battle at her husband’s side, leaving her son alone but for his widowed grandmother. A bitter man, aged before his time, belittled and berated a particular child at every opportunity, and watched over that child zealously, saving his life on multiple occasions while destroying his self-esteem and love of learning. Ethics are complicated. So are people. And so, too, are demons. Perhaps only angels are straightforward. They, after all, lack free will.
In this particular timeline (and several others), one Hermione Jean Granger, aged eight, obtained muggle books on witchcraft and demonology; performed a variety of experiments to test her powers, observing noticeable differences between the test plants and the control plants; made her own magic wand from oak and ivy; and eventually summoned one Duke Crocell.
For this to have happened, several other conversations had to take place. Hermione needed to have had her mother tell her that magic can do anything, and what matters is hard work, determination, and research; she needed to have had her father suggest angels might disapprove of a family of atheists, and demons might be more advisable, as long as they were nice demons; she needed to have her new nanny, Emily, soothe her frustrations by explaining that magic might be more like music than science, with room for improvisation. Hermione would almost always choose Crocell to summon, due to the love of mathematics he shared with her much-missed former nanny Julia.
Miss Lauren, the librarian, was always a little wary of allowing a small child to plunge quite so deeply into section 133.4, and how she dealt with that wariness caused the timeline to branch again. Sometimes, seeing the large stack of books on such an unsuitable topic, she asked Emily whether she was sure it was all right, and then let it be. Sometimes she managed to convince Emily that it would be irresponsible to let Hermione get quite so wrapped up in the occult, although that didn’t end particularly well: Hermione would still summon demons, but her relationship with Emily, never strong, would be even more tenuous, and her relationship with Miss Lauren would deteriorate; the bitterness, disillusionment and isolation would facilitate and hasten her gravitation towards the darker end of Dark Arts. Sometimes, though, Miss Lauren would suggest complementary reading. Whether any of the resulting timelines should definitively be considered the best of all possible worlds was questionable; but certainly Hermione was never expelled from Hogwarts in any of them, nor was Pansy Parkinson killed before sitting her OWLS, nor would Harry Potter be quite so staunchly on the side of Light. Sometimes, Albus Dumbledore publicly lost any claim he might have to be the mentor of the official Icon of the Light; sometimes, it was only the back-up candidate who eluded him; in the universes with two back-up candidates, he generally lost both, and sometimes all three, though the manner of the loss would vary.
As well as her Witchcraft and Demonology books, Hermione went home with several fictional works covering deals with supernatural entities, ranging from the Faustus story to the Monkey’s Paw, a history book on Victorian and post-Victorian Spiritualism with its mixture of sincere believers and scam artists, and another book cheerfully entitled ‘Theology for Teenagers’. She read everything, and thought about it, and discussed some topics with her parents and with Emily, and went back to the library for more reading. Her conversation with Crocell went rather differently than it might otherwise have done as a result.