Lost
Hermione Granger was lost.
It started when she started reading Magnus Malificient's Magicks of the Model.
Specifically, the part where he wrote that souls had the ability to meet outside of the realm of time and space.
Hermione's physics trained mind rebelled against such claims, even though she had spent years in the magical world and learnt the thinking that generated physics was not all powerful.
The problem, she would realize later, was that the conscious mind and human senses were woefully limited. The world was wilder and stranger than anything human consciousness made it out to be.
But at present, Hermione was proficient at dismissing things that didn't follow the stringent logic she had inherited from her muggle upbringing. And she would have let this go too, if Draco Malfoy, blast him, had not mocked her for it.
It went like this:
Professor Sinestra was lecturing about the use of arithmancy for making predictions. Since the subject was grounded in mathematical principles, and built up with the most stringent magic that could still be called magic, Hermione delighted in it.
But this particular day, the discussion turned to exceptions to Gamp's Hypothesis of Non-Conserved Effect, which suggested that there were events for which no predictions could be made with any confidence. So far, no one had been able to prove that such an event existed. And Hermione had proclaimed this with satisfaction, because things worked much better when you could predict what was about to happen.
Draco Malfoy had sneered though, “Clearly you’ve never heard of Model Meetings. Can't say I'm surprised, with your disadvantages.”
And the Slytherins surrounding him had guffawed like he was the funniest thing since Merlin's toe-nails.
Normally Hermione was proficient at ignoring Malfoy's digs on her heritage. But this time he had attacked her knowledge, which was her forte. And to make things worse, she had never heard of Model Meetings. She was saved from having to retort when the bell rang and everyone rushed to get lunch and spend some time in the sun, away from the stuffy arithmancy equations and classroom.
Hermione was fuming. She stopped by the Great Hall, grabbed a sandwich and apple from the closest table and went to the library to learn about Model Meetings. She was angry enough to eat surreptitiously in the library, something she normally considered sacrilege. But she didn't have much time and food was fuel for her brain to work and she was not a slob while eating like Ron was and she cast the impervious charm on the books she was looking at, so she would not get any crumbs on them.
So it began.
She was fuming- at the absurdity of being excluded from the wizarding world for 11 years, so she was 11 years late to start learning about a fundamental part of herself; fuming at people like Malfoy who had all the privilege in the world and not an ounce of common decency; fuming at the weird wizarding logic that had a way of being infuriatingly convoluted if you had not grown up learning about it; fuming at having missed the delicious smelling lasagna and having to make do with a dry sandwich and an apple. Also, her period had started this morning and her insides ached like someone was stamping on her gut.
She was angry and irritated and not as careful as she would normally have been.
And Magnus Malificient's Magicks of the Model was such an infuriating hogwash hilly-nilly logically inconsistent waste of parchment that she couldn't help but mock the meaningless spell he had written for initiating a Model Meeting. Even the Latin was inconsistent, for God's sake!
Unfortunately, she had her wand in hand, her emotions all fired up and the spell actually worked.