[Ding! Successful Transmigration!]
[System activated...]
[Host successfully transmigrated into the Harry Potter movie world.]
[Newbie Mission: Grow up healthy until age 11 and enroll at Hogwarts successfully.]
[Mission Reward: Intelligence +10]
A mechanical voice rang through Kevin's head like a dial tone from nowhere. Everything was white noise and blur. He couldn't form a single thought. He just flailed — tiny arms, tiny legs, mouth gaping wide.
The next second —
"Wah! Wah! Wah!"
On a dark street somewhere in England, outside the iron gate of an orphanage, a baby's cries split the night.
Eleven years flew by.
One early morning at the orphanage, eleven-year-old Kevin Croft hauled himself out of bed the same way he did every day — not because anyone made him, but because he'd decided, at some point around age five, that idleness was a disease he refused to catch. He jogged slow laps around the grounds, the damp grass cold under his trainers, the sky still more grey than blue. Two kilometres, maybe three. Nothing heroic. Just the habit.
He finished his last lap and slowed to a walk, breathing easy, when the director's voice drifted out from the kitchen window.
"Kevin! Breakfast's ready. Come wash up and eat."
Director Aldric Hope was a kind old man — a bit odd-looking, if Kevin was honest. He favoured long black-and-white robes and a worn hat, which gave him the air of a very relaxed clergyman who'd long since stopped caring what anyone thought. He had no family that Kevin knew of, ran the orphanage with quiet competence, and had, without ever making a fuss about it, been the closest thing to a father Kevin had ever known.
"Got it, Grandpa Director!"
Kevin jogged back inside.
In the bathroom mirror, an eleven-year-old looked back at him. Sharp dark fringe, black eyes, a face that still had the soft roundness of childhood clinging to it despite his best efforts to look serious. He studied his reflection for a moment — same face every morning, and yet sometimes it still struck him strange. This was his life now. Had been for eleven years.
He'd arrived with nothing. No parents, no address, no last name. Just a cloth tag around a newborn's neck: Kevin on the front, July 11, 1980 on the back. Director Hope had looked at it, looked at the squalling infant, and apparently decided that was sufficient. Kevin it was. No surname necessary, the Director said. Solid name. Stands on its own.
Kevin had eventually given himself one — Croft. It felt right. Grounded.
He remembered everything from before, which was its own particular flavour of strange. In his previous life, a friend had got him hooked on the Harry Potter films. He'd demolished the first six in a single weekend — they were older films by that point, technically dated, and they'd cut half the plot and all the good character moments — and he'd been queuing up the seventh when, with no drama and no warning, he'd simply died.
Then: white light, a mechanical voice, and a baby's lungs straining against English night air.
The System had introduced itself immediately. He'd lain in his cot in the orphanage nursery, staring at the ceiling, processing the situation with the limited cognitive tools available to a newborn.
Right, he'd thought, approximately. Harry Potter world. Orphanage. Alone. Fine.
He'd spent his first few years getting control of his limbs and learning to talk, which turned out to be harder than it looked and more embarrassing than he'd anticipated. Then he'd started reading. Director Hope's office was stacked floor to ceiling with books — strange ones, old ones, some in languages Kevin couldn't identify, all of which the Director seemed perfectly comfortable with and never thought to explain.
Kevin read everything.
Magic hadn't shown itself early. He'd poked around inside himself, looking for that hum of power he knew had to be in there somewhere — felt something, occasionally, like pressure behind his sternum — but it wouldn't come when called. Sealed, somehow. Waiting.
He'd stopped chasing it eventually. Magic would come when it came. In the meantime: read more books. Run more laps. Build a body and a mind worth having before Hogwarts handed him a wand. Preparation wasn't a substitute for talent, but it was insurance against being caught flat-footed, and Kevin had a very strong aversion to being caught flat-footed.
He and Director Hope had gone into town sometimes — errands, shopping, the slow rhythm of 1990s English village life. Kevin had watched it all, catalogued it, filed it away. Ordinary. Quietly pleasant. Nothing yet.
Until today.
July 11th, 1991. His official eleventh birthday. Hogwarts age.
"Kevin! Breakfast!"
"Coming!"
After eating, Kevin retreated to the Director's office as usual and pulled a book from the shelf. He was halfway through a dense volume on early medieval herbalism — not directly useful, he suspected, but he'd started it and he'd finish it — when a sharp tap at the window made him look up.
An owl.
Tawny, bright-eyed, holding a yellow envelope in its beak with considerable self-importance.
Kevin stared at it for a moment. Then a grin broke across his face — the real kind, not the polite kind he kept ready for adults.
Birthday number eleven.
He crossed the room in three strides, threw open the window, and the owl swept in and landed on the desk with a proprietary air, dropping the envelope neatly in front of him. Kevin gave it a brief pat — soft feathers, warm — before picking up the letter.
Wax seal. A lion, a snake, a badger, an eagle.
He already knew what it was. He'd always known what it was going to be. But knowing and seeing were different things, and for just a second he stood there with the letter in his hand and let the reality of it settle.
Hogwarts.
He broke the seal and read it anyway — properly, not skimming. Invitation confirmed. A professor would visit this evening.
He let the owl back out the window and went to find Director Hope.
The old man's eyebrows climbed steadily toward his hat as Kevin explained. By the end he was nodding slowly, with the expression of someone for whom this news was surprising but not, perhaps, entirely incomprehensible.
"I'll be here when she arrives," he said simply.
Kevin spent the morning reading, the afternoon running. After dinner he skipped his evening jog and sat quietly in the entrance hall instead, waiting. Director Hope settled into the chair beside him, and they talked — about magic, mostly, the Director asking careful questions and Kevin answering as though this were all perfectly normal, which, he supposed, it increasingly was.
Eight o'clock. A knock at the gate.
Director Hope went to answer it. Kevin hung back in the hallway, watching through the gap. A tall woman stepped into the lamplight — composed, sharp-eyed, impeccably upright, her dark robes arranged with the precision of someone who had never once been careless in her life.
Professor McGonagall.
Something lurched in Kevin's chest — not quite nostalgia, not quite awe. Something in between. She'd been pixels on a screen once. Now she was standing twelve feet away, solid and real, and the gap between those two facts was dizzying.
He composed himself before she could see it on his face.
"Good evening, Mr. Kevin." She walked in with Director Hope, her eyes finding Kevin at once, measuring him in a single glance.
"Good evening, Professor." He nodded, easy and unhurried.
McGonagall studied him — the stillness, the composure, the complete absence of the fidgeting and wide-eyed panic she probably saw in most first encounters with magical reality. Something in her expression softened. Just slightly.
Orphanage children came in every variety. Restless ones, angry ones, frightened ones who flinched at loud sounds. Every once in a while, one who watched the world rather than reacting to it.
"You've read this morning's letter," she said. "You know why I'm here, and something of what Hogwarts is. I'd like to explain it properly, all the same — for your benefit and for Mr. Hope's."
They followed the Director into his office. Three chairs. A lamp burning low on the desk. McGonagall sat straight-backed and began to speak, laying out the history of Hogwarts, the structure of magical education, the shape of the wizarding world — all of it calm and precise and delivered as plain fact.
Kevin knew it already. Every name, every broad stroke. He'd watched it all on screen years ago in a life that no longer existed.
But watching a film and sitting across from Minerva McGonagall while she explained it to you in person were not the same experience at all.
He listened. Really listened — as though he were hearing it fresh, as though there were no foreknowledge behind his eyes, just a boy on the edge of something enormous. Because that, he realised, was actually true. He was on the edge of something enormous. He knew the outline. He didn't know what it would feel like to be inside it.
That was the thing about adventure, he supposed. You could read all the books you liked. At some point, you still had to walk through the door.
Kevin Croft was ready to walk through the door.
---
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