A Late Bloomer
A Max Headroom/Harry Potter Crossover
CHAPTER ONE
Bryce Lynch was a very logical teenager.
To say he was brilliant was speaking very mildly. He had been in the upper ten percent of his classmates at the Academy of Computer Sciences in Islington, and at sixteen he was the most sensible employee at Network 23.
He believed in logical and rationality. And he was very happy to be working in a field where he was able to put these things to work for his benefit. The credits given to him in order to fund his research were also a plus in his mind.
He did not believe in fairy tales. Nor was he fond of poetry or anything which he considered fictional. It was a waste of his time as far as he was concerned. The closest he'd ever come to dealing with any such thing had been when he'd been forced to deal with Paddy Ashton's overly poetic diary. It would've saved them all a great deal of time, and possibly the man's life, if Paddy had just written down "Having nightmares. Afraid of possibly dying from it. Others already have." But instead he'd written about "night horses" and "shores of sleep". Quite useless drivel in Bryce's mind.
It was for these precise reasons that Bryce had never expected to discover, rather belatedly on his seventeenth birthday, that he was in fact a wizard.
Edison had insisted on throwing him a birthday party. Another frivolous thing in his opinion. But as he was the guest of honor, he had no choice but to make an appearance. Amongst other entertainments Edison had provided was a magician who spent the evening pulling a variety of items from a silk top hat.
"Nice one," Theora said as the magician drew a balloon from the hat.
"Even I could do better than that," Bryce muttered.
"Oh?" the magician had said, with a grin. "Let's see, then. Show us what you're made of. It's your party after all."
Edison was about to say something when Bryce reached into the hat, prepared to find it full of hidden objects.
Bryce felt nothing at first, then felt something fuzzy. He pulled his hand back, and with it came…
… a sleek and oddly colored Siamese kitten.
It was a beautiful creature. It's eyes were a pale blue and it was soft white with white points.
Bryce almost dropped the kitty in surprise, but caught himself at the last moment and held it close to himself, unsure why he felt what he could only think of as some kind of kinship with the animal.
"Wow!" Edison said.
The magician picked up the fallen hat and began looking it over. He certainly hadn't put that cat inside.
"Now where did you come from?" Bryce asked the kitten. "I know you weren't in that hat when I first examined it."
The kitten simply mewed as if she didn't care about anything other than being friends and being fed.