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Aunt Chuddy was my favorite aunt, so even though I was in the hospital having just come off a ventilator, I answered the phone. I knew it was her because I’d programmed the ringtone with a few bars from Maurice Ravel’s musical duet between yowling cats. The ringtone was to remind me never to visit her, no matter how strongly she insisted. “Septimus, you’ve got to come,” was the first thing she said. To everyone else but me, she was Professor Amelia Chudwick, or Dean Chudwick. For the past twenty years she had ruled over Huffington Technical Academy, a preparatory