Chapter Text
Philomena Cunk stood on a hillock a distance away from the castle, pondering the vista. It might have been picturesque on a sunny day, but she had the feeling that the sun almost never touched this part of England, or Wales, or wherever she was. Instead, a persistent mizzle danced around, beading on her coat and making her hair somehow limp and frizzy at the same time. There was hardly anything magic about that.
She turned back to the camera she had set up. Usually she would have a camera crew with her to help, but the headmistress of the school was very strict in her instructions not to have anyone else with her. She hardly knew how to operate the camera, but her mate Paul told her it was as simple as turning it on and leaving it in the direction you wanted to film in. He had experience filming from when he was trying to film one of his LSD visions, but the colours he saw in his eyes tragically didn’t exist in the real world. That was why she was now so damp—it had taken her several attempts to make the recording light go on.
“I’m Philomena Cunk, and I’m here to give a secret exposé on one of the world’s oldest running schools. Confusingly, I don’t think they run about much at all. I mean, you can’t even see anyone running around now. Not even a jogger. I don’t think they should be able to call themselves that if there’s no one keeping up the running. But it also happens to be a secret school where teenage girls learn how to do magic.”
Philomena pressed the button again to stop the recording, and then hoisted the camera over her shoulder. A heavy clunk told her that the camera had taken a bid for freedom from the tripod and tumbled to the grass.
“Oh shit, oh shit. They told me not to drop the camera.”
She wiped some muck off the lens and looked at it carefully. “That’ll do.” It still turned on, so she shrugged and tried to fit it back onto the tripod. “Ahhh.” There was a latch that she hadn’t figured out before. Perhaps they were exaggerating when they said it would damage the camera to drop it. Maybe she’d drop it again just to exert dominance, like when you had to make yourself look big if you wanted to scare a bear away. Philomena didn’t think there would be bears around here, but maybe it was better to be safe than sorry.
When she usually shot things with the team, they would make her walk around in different locations while looking at the camera and saying words. Maybe something like that would make it look really professional like it did on the TV. She found another spot closer to the castle after a few minutes’ walk, and went through the whole pavlova of trying to set up the camera again. The word was pavlova, wasn’t it? Of course it was.
She took a deep breath and continued. “It’s hard to believe that magic really exists, but plenty of people believe in religion and the movies about that aren’t nearly as fun as the ones about magic. It’s been kept a secret for so long, but I’m going to be one of the first normal people to find out whether magical school is just as dull and pointless as a bog-standard British state school.
“What you can see behind me right now is a really old castle that people still live in because they can’t afford to make a new building. But who’s the king of the castle, and are they really a dirty rascal?”
That was really clever. Philomena dashed back to the camera, wiped the water droplets off the screen, and watched it back to make sure she’d captured it. There was a bit more sky in the shot than usual, but it was still usable. Right, now she just had to get one last bit to close off the introduction. The gatehouse of the school was still so far off. That would be a nice location if she could ever get there in the next few hours. She strode over, the camera’s recording light panning through the air as she swung it about, unaware that she had left it on. She checked her watch even though the hands had stopped moving after that time her mate Paul had borrowed it to go swimming in the Bermuda Triangle—she was probably late by this point. Just how big was a castle, anyway?
At last, she reached the small stone bridge leading up to the giant wooden doors. This time, she looked into the viewfinder and tried to get the picture less wonky, before taking her position and addressing the camera again. “Miss Cackle’s Academy was founded in the Early Middle Ages, which is when you’re getting on a bit in years but you still have to go to work even though you’re sick of it and daydream of strangling your co-workers. But that would be worse, because you’d go to jail and have to stay in the same place for years and years with the same people. Kind of like a school, really.”