Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling, and Worm belongs to Wildbow, but other than that, the Arithmancer Series belongs to me!

Introduction

Okay, I've been sitting on this for a while. This is the first chapter of a crossover—or rather a recursive crossover—between the Arithmancer-Verse and Worm, which I started writing off and on about two years ago. For those of you who don't know, Worm (sometimes known as Parahumans) is an epic web serial written by John C. McCrae aka Wildbow. Basically, it's a superhero story that reconstructs all the comic book tropes in a realistic setting. It's very dark, but it's amazingly well-written, and I highly recommend it.

This story is a crossover in which Arithmancer!Hermione is dropped into Brockton Bay in the Worm-Verse by an interdimensional Portkey accident in the summer of 2010. Superpowered hijinks ensue with all your favourite characters.

The main thing you should know about this story is that I might actually write this one. That's far from guaranteed, but, well, I started writing it because I've seen so few really good Worm/Harry Potter crossovers, and I thought this idea would mesh well. I have about 30,000 words of this written, and I would be interested in continuing it (although co-authoring is still on the table). But at the same time, I get the feeling that a lot of my readers are tired of the Arithmancer-Verse and would rather move on, which is perfectly understandable.

So instead of just tossing this out there and leaving it, I decided to post the first chapter or two here to gauge the reaction. If the reaction is good, I'll consider putting up the full version. I want to assure you that even if I do, I am still committed to weekly (I hope) updates on Animagus at War. And I make no promises for "completing" Salem beyond an arc-by-arc basis, but it would be fun to try.

Just some minor bookkeeping notes: this story is "canon"-compliant to the Arithmancer Series up through Chapter 18 of Annals of Arithmancy. It's canon for Worm up to about a year before the story start. I did make one small change, though: canon for Worm is that popular Internet sites like Google and Facebook exist in Earth Bet. However, the butterflies of the Worm-Verse (including Mark Zuckerberg never being born) are such that this would not be the case, and I have reflected that here.

Salem: Portus 1.1

June 2010

Hermione Granger landed in a heap with a scream, her tools clattering around her.

"What the hell?" she said to herself.

This was not supposed to happen. The runes weren't even completed yet. She couldn't guess how they'd been activated. Now, she'd have to get back to Seneca Lake to figure out what happened. She grabbed her wand and her handbag and staggered to her feet, then registered where she had landed: a giant, red 'H' marked on concrete.

"A helipad?" she said.

"Freeze!"

Her head snapped up. Two men in SWAT gear had guns trained on her. She raised her wand on instinct. Behind them, she saw a city skyline, she was on a roof.

"Drop your weapon!"

The shout came from behind her. She spun around to see two more men in SWAT gear and an even more surprising sight: the ocean.

"This isn't Springfield. Where am I?" she said.

"I said, drop your weapon!" the lead cop shouted.

Hermione's mind raced. To a muggle, a wand would look more like a drumstick than anything else. For the police to recognise it for a weapon, they would have to know about magic. But then, they should know her. She was famous in the magical world.

Not pointing directly at any of them, she said, "Who are you with? If you know what this is, you should know who I am."

"Drop your weapon now, or we will shoot!" They started advancing.

She only had a split second to think. She didn't know where she was, and talking wasn't working. She hadn't even fully processed her situation when she Apparated away the only place she could: ten thousand feet straight up.

Her ears popped painfully, and the air rushed around her as she began to fall. She couldn't afford to take too long. She was falling right back towards that SWAT team, whoever they were. She twisted in the air and spotted an identifiable hill at the outskirts of the city. She Apparated in midair about a thousand feet above it, then magically slowed her descent in a practised move so that her impact when she hit the ground was jarring, but not crippling or worse.

Hermione pushed herself to her feet again and looked around. A muggle couple, not far away, were staring and already reaching for their phones. No one else around.

"Confundus!" she cast. "I was here the whole time."

The young couple blinked a few times, looked down at their phones, confused, and then put them away. Phew, that was a second crisis averted. Her clothes wouldn't look too out of place, so she should be fine there. Hermione looked around and took stock, taking a deep breath. She was still in North America, by the policeman's accent. Probably still in New England from the weather (balmy for June) and time of day (late afternoon). She was in a coastal city, fairly large, but not New York or Boston—eastward-facing from the position of the Sun. Nothing rang a bell.

She thought back to her encounter on the rooftop and finally understood what she had thought odd about the police officers (well, aside from everything). On their uniforms, where they should have said POLICE or SWAT, they read PRT ENE. Some kind of military police unit, she wondered? That might explain how they knew to take her wand for a weapon. Either way, something was definitely up there. And she'd left a bunch of her notes and tools back on that rooftop, hadn't she? She needed to inform MACUSA to Obliviate them if they needed to. If she knew how to find them.

Right now, Hermione was in some kind of park or lookout point. She was lucky there was only one muggle couple there. She couldn't Apparate without knowing where she was, so she'd have to go the muggle route. She took a stab in the dark.

"Excuse me," she called to the muggles. "I've got all turned around here. Can you tell me how to get back to the bus station?"

To her relief, they didn't look confused and probably just took her for a tourist. "Sure," the man said. "Back down that trail, and left at the fork. It's right next to the park shelter. Hey, you'll want to go now to get back to where you're staying before dark. This is a rough city at night."

"Er, right. I will. Thank you," she said.

She started off down the trail. She checked her phone as she walked. No signal. Figured. She found the bus stop in a few minutes, and from looking at the bus schedule, she managed to work out that she was in a place called Brockton Bay, but she couldn't find the state. She had no idea where that was. She didn't remember any city with that name big enough to be this one. Maybe it was the name of a suburb or neighbourhood?

She had some privacy, now, so she could at least check her map. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the Geomancer's Map. That certainly wouldn't fail her. It was some of her best work: an entire printed world atlas squeezed down into a single piece of parchment with charms to calculate the global ley line network with mathematical precision.

She opened up the Map and activated it. The world map appeared, but there were no ley lines.

"Um…"

She checked the runes. They seemed to be working. She pulled up the code layer. Yes, they were working, but it wasn't picking up the ley lines.

"But that's impossible!" she gasped. The Map was tied into the global ley line network. Even in the remotest part of Antarctica, it should pick up its location relative to the ley lines. The only way it couldn't connect was…

"Unplottable city?" she said to herself. No, even in Unplottable areas, it would pick up the local lines unless the area wasn't tied into the global network, which would make it closed to Portkeys as well. She wouldn't have been able to get in.

"Fideliused city?" The power requirements would be astronomical, but it was theoretically possible. But that had the same problem: how had she got here at all?

A handful of wild theories, each more improbable than the last, flitted through her mind. She still didn't know where she was, and without knowing that, she couldn't find her way back to MACUSA. George must be worried by now. They'd be looking, certainly. It was possible to come out in the wrong place with a Portkey, but you had to come out somewhere (albeit not necessarily in one piece). But would they think to trace the path all the way to the ocean? If she'd even managed to stay on the ley line, which seemed unlikely. No, she couldn't rely on them.

Well, the bus would be there in a few minutes. For now, secrecy was more important than speed. She could wait.

When the bus arrived, she checked the price and counted out the two dollars and ten cents fare.

"Hey!" the driver stopped her. "Exact change only."

Hermione looked up at him. "This is exact change," she said.

"No, it ain't."

She held it out on her palm so he could see: "It's two dollars and ten cents."

The driver leaned forward and squinted. "Greenbacks?" he said. "It's the twenty-first century, in case you haven't noticed."

What? "What are you talking about?" she asked.

"What, you didn't look up American money before you came here?" he growled, noticing her accent. "We use dollar coins here."

"Huh? Since when?"

"Uh, the past ten years," he said in a stupid tone.

What the bloody hell? "Did I fall through a wormhole or something?"

"Look, your Highness, if you don't have the change—" he said impatiently.

"Hold on, what about quarters? Do you take quarters?" she snapped at his disrespect.

"What, are you stupid or something?"

Hermione was so frustrated that she seriously considered transfiguring the exact change, but she restrained herself. A dollar and eighty-three cents American. That was all she had in change. She was so close, but it didn't matter anyway. She had bigger problems. "Never mind," she said, and she stepped off the bus.

Something was very wrong here. First the unfamiliar location, then no detectable ley lines, and now dollar coins? A sick feeling was beginning to build up in the pit of her stomach. What if she really had fallen through a wormhole?

It was time to give up on muggle means. It was getting late, and she had no muggle transportation. She pulled out her Firebolt Classic from her magical handbag. She didn't much care for it, but it was faster and easier to handle at high speeds than her flying robe. She Disillusioned herself and took to the air. She really had no idea where she was going. All she knew was that she needed to find a public library to get to a computer and actually find out what was going on.

It took a couple of disillusioned stops at bus stops to find a map that showed a library, but she made it there eventually. Brockton Bay didn't look like a very nice place, on the whole. Some parts were well-maintained, but just a few blocks over were run-down neighbourhoods covered in graffiti, including a higher than average number of swastikas. She touched down in an alley near the library and cancelled the Disillusionment Charm before going in. The library itself was fairly nice—an old, classical building that looked more than a little like an art museum, but she didn't stop to admire the artwork and instead went straight to the computers.

That was where things got even weirder.

Hermione wasn't as tech-savvy as the average muggle her age, but she knew her way around a computer. She didn't recognise the OS. That was a bad sign. The System button told her it was something called Microsoft Mosaic V. She didn't see any web browser she recognised. After clicking around a bit, she found a program called Compass Rose that turned out to be a browser. The default search engine was MSN, even though she thought that was supposed to be Bing now. She typed in "google" out of habit.

The top result was: Did you mean: googol?

No. She tried again: "www dot google dot com."

That turned out to be a porn site.

"Bloody hell!" She clicked away fast and tried searching for "search."

At least that did what she wanted, but the names were all different from what she knew.

"The Oracle…Sherlock…Oracle Image Search…Ask…WebRunner…" The Oracle came up more than the others, so she guessed that was the biggest search engine. It would do. She searched for Brockton Bay.

A map came up, and several news stories. Brockton Bay was in New Hampshire. She was a hundred miles off course, and the coastline didn't look right. Hermione surreptitiously reached in her handbag for her paper map of the United States. Most muggles probably wouldn't bother with one these days, but for a witch, paper maps were important, even with her magical map on hand.

No, that coastline definitely wasn't right. A great divot was carved out of this world's New Hampshire such that Portsmouth would be underwater here. This was definitely not her world. Wormhole or something else, she wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Her hands were shaking. Tears began to well in her eyes. How had she got here? Could she figure out how to get home? What was George thinking right now? And God, the kids! As far as they knew, she would have just disappeared when the stone circle activated—which it shouldn't have been able to. They were probably worried sick already, and she had no idea how to reach them—

Stop it! Occlumency! she chastised herself. She couldn't afford to break down now. Her best chance of getting home was to think rationally and understand as much as she could. She clamped down on her emotions and tried to focus on the problem at hand.

She was still on the verge of hyperventilating, and she could tell she was starting to attract attention. She darted to the toilets so she could catch her breath without letting anything slip to the muggles. Leaning on the counter for support, she fumbled with the sink with still-trembling hands and splashed some cold water on her face. "I can do this," she whispered to herself. "I've got out of worse scrapes than this. I'm Hermione Jean Granger—I'm Lady Archimedes, and if anyone can figure out interdimensional travel—" She stopped when she heard how arrogant that sounded when she said it out loud. She glanced in the mirror. The water on her face made her look more tear-stricken than she was. She quickly dried it. "You can cry after you understand where you are," she told her reflection, and she almost believed it.

Hermione drew a deep breath and took stock. She had a few options she could try to send a message, even if they were long shots. She called for Dobby, but he didn't come. She tried her communication mirror, but George, Emmy, and Robin didn't appear. She checked that she was alone, and she collected herself and concentrated…"Expecto Nuntium." All those years of practice killing dementors paid off, and her Messenger Patronus appeared before her, but the silvery otter simply shook its head when she tried to send it to her family. It couldn't find them across dimensions—at least that was what she told herself. She didn't want to think about the alternative. She kept it active anyway, basking in its soothing light.

A few minutes of Patronus exposure cleared her head enough to go back out into the library and figure out what kind of world she'd landed in. She started by looking up the dollar bill thing just so she wouldn't be caught be surprise. Apparently, they stopped printing them in 1999. With dismay, she realised her larger bills would be no good either. The designs were different, and the signatures would be wrong. It explained why her mobile phone had no signal, too. The networks and encoding were different. Her mobile carrier might not even exist in this world. She had no money, no communications, and no valid ID. Great. But hey, she'd been a fugitive hiding out in the woods once. This wouldn't stop her.

Forgetting her immediate circumstances, she began Googling—searching—major historical events. Was everything different in this world or just recent times? World War II? Same. Moon landing? Same. Berlin wall? Different. Several years later, in fact. Hmm…Margaret Thatcher? Elected at the same time, voted out several years earlier than in her world. This world's history apparently diverged sometime in the early 1980s. Except that Brockton Bay and its geography were completely different. That didn't add up at all.

Finally, she looked up that odd lettering on the police uniforms: PRT ENE. They had a website. PRT, it seemed, stood for "Parahuman Response Team." Parahuman? Parahuman meant…

"Oh, bugger me!"

Superheroes. Supervillains.

She was in a comic book.