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“And Action!” *Clap* Quentin indicated the start of the first take with the clapperboard.
“You do realise that there is literally no point in using a clapperboard if you have nothing but one lame digital camera?” Penny nagged.
“Oh, come on! It’s much more fun with a clapperboard”, Quentin argued.
“It’s not supposed to be fun, this is serious”, Penny mumbled under his breath and turned around to Kady, who shook her head lightly. He sighed in response. “Okay, let’s start then.”
Penny turned back towards the camera, Kady took a few steps forward to stand beside him. A few feet to their left, Julia was sitting in the grass, surrounded by a few open books, and observed them.
Penny started casting. It was just a simple and easy spell. And one that was hard to spot and should therefore be easy to conceal, but it was better to start with something easy. They could work their way up to more intricate and especially to flashy spells later.
Quentin had the camera pointed at Penny, but watched the spell over the top of the camera, not filtered by a glass lens. He wanted to be able to see any differences between reality and video later.
The spell they had chosen was hard to see for non-magicians, but being students of magic, they had no problem following the faint, glowing symbols dancing in the air.
Suddenly a weak gust of wind blew over their heads and with it the smell of rain and ozone. A few moments later the wind calmed down and the smell started to fade again. Penny was breathing heavily, his arms hanging down his sides and sweat beads on his forehead. But he didn’t just look very exhausted, he was also steaming with anger and disappointment.
“This is a joke!”, he exclaimed, holding his hands at a distance to his body and eyeing them in disgust.
Kady put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. “It’s fine, Penny. You just need practice, that’s why Dean Fog wanted you to do this with us, isn’t it? You’re already doing a lot better than just a week ago, you’re making great progress!”
“Well, apparently not enough. I should already be back at the level I used to be at. Not struggling with something like this, something that’s beginner-level-easy. Quentin can do this!”
“Hey!” Quentin protested from behind the camera, but stopped himself before he could say anything else. He didn’t want to make Penny even angrier than he already was. Whether he had problems performing magic or not, that usually didn’t end well for Quentin.
“How about we just continue by trying the concealment spell now?” he suggested instead.
Kady stared at him as if he were completely mad to suggest that, despite Penny’s obvious frustration. Penny also looked a bit perplexed for a moment, but then he just sighed.
“Yeah, let’s do it. The sooner we’re done here the better. Kady, you’ll cast your spell around the two of us, then I’ll do the nature spell again.” He looked from Kady to Quentin and then to Julia, to see if everybody was ready, then turned back to Kady and nodded. “Let’s go.”
Kady took a deep breath and started chanting. Her hand movements started slow, but soon enough they were so fast it was almost impossible to follow. After a few more seconds the air around Kady and Penny started shimmering, but turned back to normal only a moment later, when Kady finished the spell.
This time when Penny started casting Quentin and Julia couldn’t see any symbols. However, the wind and the smell were still there. In the case of this spell, it wouldn’t be a problem, but with other spells even non-magicians would be able to tell that something strange was going on. Even if they couldn’t see anything. But that was something they would address later. Preventing them from seeing anything had a higher priority. Spells that could be seen from a distance were far more common than spells that could be smelled, heard or felt from a distance.
“This spell makes you look past any kind of magic that is being performed within the area of effect, doesn’t it?” Julia spoke up.
“Yeah, that’s right. You have a good eye”, Kady replied, looking impressed. Julia got up and walked over to Quentin. “Could you play the video?” He did what she asked and both of them curiously observed what was showing on screen.
Penny’s spell was a bit blurred, but you could clearly see that this was magic.
“Of course”, Julia mumbled. “The camera records everything in front of the lens objectively. A spell that makes you look into a slightly different direction so that you effectively don’t notice that there’s magic being performed right in front of you can’t actually move a camera. It only manages to keep it from fully focussing, but that’s not enough to really hide anything.” She looked into Kady’s eyes. “We’re going to need a spell that can hide something even if you’re looking directly at it.”
Julia and Kady started discussing various different approaches and variations of known concealment spells. Magicians had always had to hide and so there were a lot of powerful and effective spells, but modern technology and cameras in particular had only been around for the last 200 years. And videos and photographs had only begun to serve as proof for the existence or occurrence of something seemingly unexplainable in even more recent times.
Penny listened to Julia and Kady’s debate, throwing in a comment or idea from time to time and glancing at his hands like he was about to chop them off again. Meanwhile, Quentin went over both recordings multiple times, compared them with each other and with how it looked in reality and adjusted some of the camera’s settings. He was also trying to come up with a solution, but unlike Julia and Kady, he tended to think by himself.
Absentmindedly, he scrolled through the whole settings menu and then started flipping through old photos and videos, without really paying attention to what he was doing.
Julia, Kady and Penny’s discussion became less and less enthusiastic with every passing minute, until they decided to sit back down in the grass and only managed to come up with a new idea every other minute, which was usually quickly eliminated by one of the other two. Quentin was almost at the end of the camera roll, when he came across a video that simply wouldn’t start playing, no matter what he tried. Resigned and frustrated he deleted it after a few minutes of trying, when he suddenly got an idea.
“Uhm, guys?” he started shakily.
“What? Have you finally decided to help us after all?” Penny snapped at him.
“Hey, let him talk”, Julia chipped in.
Quentin nodded, more to himself than to any of the others, and continued. “Well, it’s just a thought, but…” he stopped for a second and looked nervously from one of his friends to the next. “…what if instead of trying to keep magic from showing on camera, we keep the camera from recording in the first place? Or mess with the recorded video afterwards, to corrupt the file in a way so it can’t be played?” For a moment everyone was completely silent and just stared at Quentin as if he had just told them he was an alien from Krypton.
All of a sudden Julia jumped to her feet, faster than Quentin’s eyes could follow, and shouted “This is brilliant! I will be right back.” With that she turned around and ran towards the library building.
“This could actually work”, Kady mumbled. “But it might also be a little suspicious if people realise that all their cameras only act up around this university.”
“I know. I didn’t think it would work as a permanent solution, but surely it will take a while until enough people trying to film around here come together and realise that there’s a pattern. Hopefully by then someone will have come up with another solution. It will at least buy us time, if nothing else.”
Quentin didn’t say it out loud, but he knew as well as the others that the one person whose help they could really use for this was Alice. And every day on which he could try talking to her was another opportunity to get through to her and maybe finally get the old Alice back. If they had enough time, maybe they could get her to help them.
No more than five minutes later Julia showed up with four weighty tomes that she dropped in the grass rather ungently.
“There are loads of spells to make things malfunction, we just need to find out how to make a spell work specifically on cameras and only when they are recording or right after recording.”
Being a knowledge student, naturally, Julia did most of the work herself, eager as she was to create a new spell. But only with some help from the others, and more than a few nudges to maybe read a chapter more carefully after she had discarded it too soon, did she finally manage to refine it enough that it could be used regularly and for an extended period of time over a wide area.
It was long past sunset when they were finally done, but they felt more full of energy than when they had started that morning. Julia and Quentin hurried to bring the books back to the library and all together they then started making their way to Fog’s office to show him what they had come up with. It might not be a masterpiece like the rest of the wardings around the school and it might not even be permanent solution. But even a temporary solution was still a solution and this was more than anyone would’ve expected from a couple of first year students.
They were proud of their achievement, and nobody would be able to take that away from them.