Floods 9 (2 page)

It is even harder to imagine that someone who was not only a witch or wizard, but a royal prince or princess too, would ever want to leave this paradise on earth, where magic rocks ooze blood that tastes like nectar and tiny chocolate-flavoured frogs leap
into your mouth to send your taste buds into a frenzy of sheer delight.

But this is exactly what happened. Even though it had only been a short time since the Floods had returned to Transylvania Waters as its rightful rulers, there are times when ruling a country that can only be described as Paradise
⁵
can get a little boring.

‘We hate to admit it,' said the Flood twins Prince Morbid and Prince Silent in the first week of the summer holidays, ‘because it sounds very ungrateful, but we're bored.'

‘Bored?' said Nerlin. ‘How on earth can you be bored? What about the magic rocks that ooze blood and the chocolate-flavoured frogs?'

‘Boring,' said Silent, who had begun talking once the family had gone to live in Transylvania Waters.

‘And what about school?' said Mordonna.

‘Love school,' said Morbid. ‘But there's eight weeks until the next term starts.'

‘What about summer camp?' said Mordonna. ‘That might be fun.'

‘You have to be kidding,' said Satanella. ‘Stuck in the middle of the country with a bunch of goody-goody human nerds, singing camp-fire songs and sleeping in tents? I'd rather eat my own feet.'

‘Ah, no,' said Mordonna. ‘Not human summer camp. Quicklime College
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Summer School. The brochure arrived this morning.'

‘What, stuck in the middle of the country with a bunch of junior wizards, singing camp-fire songs and sleeping in tents?' said the twins. ‘We've only got to look out of the window to see the country already, this place is full of it. And we hate singing.'

‘Yes, and as you know,' Merlinmary added, ‘camping is illegal in Transylvania Waters.'
⁷

‘No, no, it's nothing like that,' said Mordonna.
‘For a start it's in New York, no trees, no tents, no grass and all that nature stuff. Quicklime's Summer School is in a block of luxury apartments in Manhattan.'

‘No sleeping bags?'

‘King-size beds in every room,' said Mordonna.

‘No cooking lumps of flour and water on a stick in a bonfire?'
⁸

‘Luxury German kitchens on every floor, it says here,' said Mordonna, holding up the brochure. ‘With servants to clean for you. Servants who were trained by the finest British Butler School, it says.'

‘That sounds OK,' said Satanella, ‘but what are we supposed to do all day? I can't see rock climbing or traversing ravines or white water rafting happening much in New York.'

‘You will have many exciting opportunities to put all the things you have learnt at school into practice,' Mordonna read out.

‘Now that could have endless possibilities,' said Winchflat.

‘Winchflat, I think we need to talk about you and school,' said Mordonna. ‘I mean, you're married and have a daughter now. Don't you think it's time you left school?'

‘We'll talk about that when we get back from New York,' said Winchflat. ‘I've got some inventions I want to try and that will be the perfect place.'

Mordonna and Nerlin knew better than to ask Winchflat what the inventions were. Although they all spoke the same language, once Winchflat started explaining what one of his gadgets was and how it worked, it was as if he was talking Belgian and they came from Paraguay or Mars. They also knew that telling him to make sure none of his gadgets broke the law was pointless, because every one of his inventions was always fitted with a Change-The-Law-So-It's-All-Legal-Attachment that meant he
could get away with murder, not that murder was something he had ever considered. When you are a wizard with awesome powers like Winchflat, there are far more creative ways of dealing with evil people than murder.

So it was decided that apart from Valla, who was a bit busy doing government stuff, and baby Charlie Hulbert, who was busy just doing stuff,
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all the Flood children and Ffiona Hulbert would go to Quicklime College Summer School.

¹
booms = bored out of my skull.

²
A 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spyder is the most expensive car ever sold. In an auction someone paid US$10,976,000 for one. Nerlin has five of them, each one an exciting, yet intriguingly different, shade of red to go with whatever mood he is in that day. If he isn't in a red mood, another spell changes the car to the colour of his current mood.

³
It was the islands, not the little children, who were drifting over the playgrounds. Except, of course, on April the 18th, which is National Drifting Over Playgrounds Day, when everyone in Transylvania Waters floats about. And actually only sixteen of Mordonna's islands drift over the countryside as one of them has got stuck on the spire of Transylvania Waters's one and only church, St Clympna's.

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When some of these people were discovered to be left-handed they were deported to Belgium.

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Actually, there are lots of ways to describe Transylvania Waters, including ‘that weird place where all the witches and wizards live'.

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If you want to find out all about Quicklime College, then read
The Floods 2: Playschool.
In fact, if you haven't read it, then put this book down and rush out and get it now so I don't have to keep repeating myself telling you who everyone is.

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The reason camping is illegal in Transylvania Waters is because they have the sense to realise that sleeping in a bag on lumpy ground under a thin bit of leaky canvas is not so much a holiday as a very cruel type of punishment.

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Which is what we had to do at Scout Camp. It has proved invaluable because I've lost count of the number of times I've been stranded somewhere with nothing but some flour, some water, a bonfire and a stick and wondered what to have for dinner. Without that training I would probably eat the stick.

⁹
Eating earth, filling his nappy and that sort of stuff.

The Quicklime College Summer School was held in a beautiful old apartment block right in the heart of Manhattan. Until the day before there had been a lot of extremely rich families living in the beautiful spacious apartments, but they had all decided very suddenly that they wanted to live in other places and every one of them had sold their apartments to the same property company who, by an amazing coincidence, just happened to have set up office on the ground floor of the building. They paid each owner quite a lot more than they had ever imagined their apartments were worth and found them all new places to live at bargain basement prices
and even moved their furniture for them with their own fleet of removal vans. So everyone was happy. That night a firm of Transylvania Waters interior decorators had completely remodelled the entire building, fitting it out with all the things a wizard summer school could ever need, from soundproof rooms to a five-star cafeteria. The penthouse suite on the top floor, which had wonderful views out across the city, was converted into one huge room where all the staff and students could meet.

When the students, staff and teachers had arrived from their various homes around the world, the Headmaster, Professor Throat, gathered them all together in the penthouse.

‘Look out there, boys and girls,' he said, pointing to the streets below. ‘That is the biggest bag of money in the world.'

Many of the staff and teachers from Quicklime College had come to the school too. The Cook was particularly excited at the opportunity to play with all the new hi-tech cooking gadgets that had been installed. Back at the school in Patagonia the latest
cooking implement was a wooden spoon that had once been used by King Henry VIII of England to dig the wax out of his ears. Sure, it gave the soup a unique flavour, but now the Cook could play with microwaves – she never lost the thrill of watching a hen's egg explode as she turned the power up to maximum.
¹⁰
She even had one of the latest steam ovens at her disposal, which proved wonderful for shrinking baggy knickers.

‘Excuse me, Headmaster,' said Aubergine Wealth, the economics teacher, ‘but I think you'll find that New York is only the second biggest bag. The biggest bag of money is called Switzerland.'
¹¹

‘Oh dear,' said the Headmaster. ‘Do you think
we should have set up Summer School there then? After all, as we pointed out in the Summer School brochure, our reason for being here is to screw up the banking systems and make as much money as we possibly can.'

‘Absolutely not, Headmaster,' said the Cook. ‘The food in Switzerland is really boring.'

Aubergine Wealth most certainly didn't want the school to be in Switzerland. That was where he had more of his immense fortune hidden away. The last thing he wanted was a bunch of junior wizards poking around in all those lovely Swiss banks.

‘Zee people are really boring too, sir,' said a small boy called Valter Varnish, the last of a very rare breed – Swiss Wizards. ‘Zis I know because I live zere.'

‘Fair enough,' said the Headmaster. ‘We'll start in New York, then.'

‘So what are we going to do, exactly?' said Betty. ‘I mean, Summer School usually involves all sorts of healthy activities like hiking and learning to tie useless knots.'

‘Both of which will be very useful here,' said the Headmaster. ‘We'll be hiking over the road to the Stock Exchange and tying the whole thing up in knots while we quietly take over. This may all seem new to you, but I'll hand over to Professor Wealth, who will explain that this is actually something we have been working on for quite some time.'

‘Indeed and thank you, Headmaster,' said Aubergine Wealth. ‘I'm sure most of you know that the world's financial markets are in a terrible state and it appeared to happen almost overnight. Well, of course, it didn't.'
¹²

‘The Summer School Project,' Aubergine continued, ‘is for every student to make as much money as they possibly can. Students can work in
groups or individually and pretty well anything is fair game – buy and sell, wheel and deal, and try to stay within the law though it's not essential. I think we all agree it sounds a lot more exciting than hiking through mud and weaving grass into comfortable bedding.'

‘When Mr Wealth says there are no rules,' said the Headmaster, ‘he only means as far as making money is concerned. All the standard Quicklime Rules, such as taking flying broomsticks home at weekends, apply here the same as they do at school. Though you are not encouraged to rob little old ladies.'

‘Unless they are nasty little old ladies, then you can take them for everything they've got,' said Aubergine.