Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  He took a deep breath and breathed out, “Oh, thank gods, she didn’t go into the river.”

  “It’s a tengu,” Wraith Arrow, head of Windwolf’s bodyguards, said. “An oni spy. Their masters made them from crows; they like to flock together. If there’s one here in Pittsburgh, there’s more. There’s probably several watching us now, laughing at us.”

  “He appears to be drugging her.” The blue haired female was the only one of the elves that seemed familiar with the concept of “camera” and had explained it in detail while showing the video. She’d stopped it now on one of the frames and zoomed in on where the tengu held something white against Tinker’s face. “So she would stop struggling and be easier to carry.”

  The female advanced a dozen frames and then turned, holding up the camera to align it with the lay of the land. “He took her upriver.”

  “He probably was trying to get to the tree line.” The viceroy’s personal assistant, Sparrow, pointed out that the tengu was flying toward the closest edge of the forest without crossing the heavily populated section of Oakland. “Away from witnesses. From there he could have flown along the Rim and crossed back into the city where there’re few humans.”

  Windwolf looked to the blue-haired female. “Discord?”

  She looked, frustrated, down at the ground. “I don’t know. This.” She waved at the river. “This has always felt like a waste of time but short of racing blindly about, hoping for something to hit me, no. Nothing. Forgiveness.”

  “She’s alive,” Windwolf said. “That is what is important. And she is more useful to them alive.”

  The looks on older elves’ faces said that death might be more pleasant than being at the mercy of the oni.

  “The sooner we find her, the less damage they can wreak on her,” Sparrow said. “We can cover more ground if we split into several search parties.”

  * * *

  Having plowed through all three channels’ news crews, it was no surprise that Dmitri called moments later. Jane winced at her phone’s screen and glanced toward Mark’s cameraman to verify that Dmitri was probably watching her as well.

  “Hm?” Jane tried for innocent-sounding.

  “What are you doing?” Dmitri asked totally deadpan.

  “Omniscient,” Hal sang quietly.

  Jane snorted. Nothing supernatural about Dmitri’s ability when half the time they were beaming straight to the studio, just in case Hal managed to blow up the entire neighborhood. She explained about Hal filming Tinker’s kidnapping.

  “And you didn’t think to share this with our news crew?”

  “Her family had the right to know first,” Jane said.

  There was a long pause on the other side. “Jane, I know that you’re going to want to help but you of all people can’t.”

  “Why can’t I?” Jane tried to keep her voice neutral but it came out cold and hard.

  Dmitri sighed. “To make a long story short, because I said so. Do you really need the long story?”

  “Yes.” Her voice had gone colder and harder. Her father’s voice when he was truly angry. Hal was retreating, quickly.

  “I’ve tried several times to syndicate Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. I know that the American audience would love it, but every time I get close to closing a deal, everything suddenly goes south for no reason. Nigel and Taggart told me yesterday about the troubles they’ve had getting visas to come in to film, so I checked with the other stations. They both have run into similar news blackouts. This Chased by Monsters got past whatever gatekeepers are blocking us. We need for it to succeed because so far it’s going to be the only voice Pittsburgh has on Earth if the elves and the oni go to full-out war.”

  “You think there’s enough oni here to start a war?”

  “If the elves didn’t want news leaking out, they’d be creating roadblocks for us here in Pittsburgh. EIA Director Maynard was handpicked by the viceroy and he’s proved himself loyal. To keep you and Hal off American televisions, they’d simply keep you from filming. Everything we know about the oni suggests that they’re getting to Elfhome via Pittsburgh during Shutdown. If someone is blocking us at network level in New York, it’s the oni, not the elves.”

  “You really think the oni care if humans watch Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden?”

  “This is about politics, Jane. The number of troops sent to support a peacekeeping effort could be influenced by the fact that thirty percent of all Americans recognize the name Hal Rogers and know the faces of a handful of Pittsburgh homeowners.”

  In other words, whatever they could get out, in whatever form, was actually propaganda.

  “Tinker is not your baby sister. The elves will look for a thousand years if they have to. I need you to make sure Chased by Monsters is our voice on Earth. Nigel and Taggart only have visas for two months and then they have to take whatever they have and leave. If they don’t have enough footage for an entire season, the whole thing is canned. Do you understand?”

  “Fifty-six days, counting today, to do an entire season?”

  “You’re the only one that has any hope of doing this because you’re only one with the right experience with the kind of shit Elfhome can throw at a film crew. I need you focused.”

  “Fine.” She hung up on him just to salvage some pride. Fifty-six days. They would need to do approximately one episode every three days to meet the network’s minimum. “Taggart, Nigel! Set up! We’re doing a shoot here.”

  “Shoot what?” Taggart asked.

  “You want to do river sharks and jumpfish. There.” She pointed at the dead fish piled on the shore, the larger fishes cut open so their stomachs could be searched for the missing princess. “That’s the entire ecology of Elfhome rivers.”

  “We were hoping for living examples…” Nigel started.

  “We will get to those. Right now everything within miles is probably dead or stuffed. This is a once-in-a-lifetime shot. We’ll get this now. Now!” She shouted to get them moving.

  “Right.” Nigel clapped his hands and turned to Taggart, who was already filming. “Here we are with an unexpected bounty. In one place, a full selection of all the fish found in the rivers around Pittsburgh. This massive example here is known as a river shark. They are believed to have evolved from an ancestor similar to the fresh water sharks of the species ‘requiem’ on Earth. Like their cousins, these sharks have round eyes and their pectoral fins are completely behind the gill slits, which normally are five in number. While Earth cousins are normally found in warm seas and mouths of rivers, the Elfhome river sharks have slowly worked their way the entire length of the Mississippi and the Ohio, an amazing one thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one miles, to find their way to Pittsburgh.”

  Nigel crouched beside the shark that dwarfed him. “While the largest of Earth’s requiem sharks rival the Great Whites, Elfhome’s river sharks are remarkably larger. This one here is nearly five meters long. The record here in Pittsburgh is an unbelievable 6.4 meters. What do these massive creatures eat? Let’s see!”

  In a move rival to one of Hal’s, Nigel plunged his whole arm into the slit cut into the shark’s stomach. He jerked back his hand wrapped in the pulsing glowing mass of a water fairy. “What do we have here?”

  “Put it down!” Jane cried in warning.

  “I’m trying to,” Nigel said calmly, despite the wince of pain that flashed across his face.

  “That’s a water fairy.” Hal whipped out his ever-present expandable grab-stick. Joining Nigel in the frame, he used the tool to pry the gleaming mass from Nigel’s hand. “It’s a distant cousin of the cuttlefish that has been crossed with a jellyfish. This one is just a baby, but still a sturdy little critter, despite its appearance.”

  “How poisonous is it?” Taggart murmured as the water fairy was peeled free to expose a massive welt on Nigel’s hand.

  “Not very. Keep filming.” Jane headed to her truck for her first aid kit.

  “Dmitri wants to know if you gave me a chi
p yet.” Mark met her at the jersey wall. Chloe and Kimberly trailed in his wake, hoping to glean what they could. “What chip?”

  “This one.” She thrust the memory chip at him and kept going. Kimberly paused, unsure which of them were the hotter story.

  Chloe kept pace with Jane. “Jane Kryskill, you’re the camera woman of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden.”

  “Field Producer,” Jane growled her official title, which Chloe probably damn well knew.

  “You’re working with award-winning war correspondent Keaweaheulu Taggart.”

  Did everyone in Pittsburgh but Jane knew who the hell Taggart was? Keaweaheulu? What kind of name was that? It sounded nearly as bad as an untranslated elf name. Jane ignored Chloe and unlocked her truck. She needed to get back to Nigel before his hand swelled up to the size of a baseball mitt.

  “How is it that he’s here on Elfhome with footage of Princess Tinker being kidnapped? Did your network have foreknowledge of this? How did your network know to send an award-winning war correspondent this Shutdown?”

  The questions started to sound damning when left unanswered. It was almost lunch time, which meant Chloe might be broadcasting live, giving little opportunity for damage control by the channel managers.

  “Our network knew nothing about the kidnapping until it happened. By dumb luck, Hal Rogers happened to witness it and get footage. Surely, all your viewers know Hal and his dumb luck. Taggart is not here as a war correspondent.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “Trying to get eaten!” Jane turned to face Chloe square on. “Taggart is here is with world-famous naturalist Nigel Reid to film a network show called Chased by Monsters. They want to film Nigel coming face to face with Elfhome wildlife and hopefully surviving the experience.” She let her sarcasm drip through since most Pittsburghers were slightly disdainful of newcomers. “If any of Channel 5’s viewers hear of any monsters in the Pittsburgh area—other than reporter Chloe Polanski—please let us know.”

  * * *

  They ended up drinking Iron City Beer and eating blackened river shark and grilled water fairy in the Neighborhood of Make Believe.

  “I didn’t realize you could eat water fairy.” Jane had been dubious as Taggart carefully grilled the skewered pieces over the charcoal grill in the studio’s parking lot. She wouldn’t let him feed any to Chesty until he’d proved it wasn’t fatal by eating some of the tentacles.

  “Both cuttlefish and jellyfish are common street food in East Asia.” He waved his beer to take in the surrounding sets of fanciful puppet houses. “Can’t believe I’m drinking beer in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. It almost feels blasphemous. King Friday’s Castle. The Museum-Go-Round. The Platypus Mound.”

  “The Platypus family was why I become a biologist.” Nigel was eating left-handed as his right was still swollen from the water fairy sting. “Dr. Bill Platypus and Elsie Jean and little Ornithorhynchus Anatinus.”

  “I thought her name was Ana,” Jane said.

  “It was Ana for short. Her full name was an in-joke. It’s the Latin scientific name for platypus. I identified with them at first because they were Scottish, like me, and then because they were so not like anyone else.” He pulled up his pants legs to show off the fact that both his legs were artificial. “Like me. I wanted to know everything about platypuses. And then to understand how unique they are, you have to understand the rest of the animal kingdom. One thing led to another and, voila, Dr. Nigel.”

  “The only egg-laying venomous mammal on Earth,” Hal said. “God knows what the hell their cousin is like here on Elfhome. Can you imagine?”

  “Have the elves even been to Australia?” Taggart asked.

  “Not that we can tell.” Jane tapped on the table beside her tablet to draw their attention back to why they were at the studio in the first place. “Focus. We need to figure out what we’re shooting tomorrow. I’ve got all the monster tips that were sent to the station. We take the most mobile first, any warg or saurus sightings, if there’s any. Then work down by mobility.”

  Taggart lifted his eyebrows in question to what she meant.

  “Black willow and will-o-wisps are slow moving and will be in the same general area for a couple of days. Last on our list will be completely stationary creatures. Steel spinners. Strangle vines.”

  “They’re also most common.” Hal read off his lot of the tips. “Strangle vine. Strangle vine. Spinners.”

  “Loch Ness?” Nigel said. “Elfhome has a Nessie?”

  The viewer had spotted “something huge in the river” from the I-79 Bridge. “What the hell was he doing down there?”

  “What do you mean?” Taggart asked.

  “Oh, I-79 is practically a road to nowhere since it’s right on the Rim. Oh, it was right after Startup. He was coming home.”

  “A Loch Ness sounds promising,” Nigel said.

  Jane shook her head. “No. He probably saw two sharks close together or just one really big shark. We don’t need more sharks for now. Besides, anything in the river is going to be hard to find and bloody dangerous since we’d have to beg, borrow, or steal a boat.”

  “That would be fun,” Hal said.

  “No!” Jane snapped. “We’ll do spiders before river monsters that may or may not be there.”

  “Gossamer?” Taggart said.

  “What?” Jane held out her hand for the tip. The caller pointed out that no one had ever been able to coax the elves into a close look at their living airship. “Now that has merit. I’ll see if Dmitri can get us onto the viceroy’s gossamer.”

  “I can call the homeowner from this morning,” Hal offered. “He and his boss owe us.”

  “The viceroy owes us,” Taggart said.

  Not that their video had led to Tinker being found. Jane had checked for updates on the search all day. The EIA confirmed rumors that Windwolf had sent word to his cousin, the queen, requesting for royal troops to help find his bride. The Pittsburgh Police were asking for people to avoid known deserted areas. The updates accounted for everyone involved except the oni. It made it seem as if everyone in Pittsburgh was battling an invisible giant.

  Jane put the gossamer tip aside. “Okay, that goes near the top, pending permission from the elves to tour the viceroy’s airship.”

  “Oh, I can try out my call,” Nigel said.

  “Your what?” Hal asked.

  “Gossamer call.” Nigel got a shy, embarrassed grin. “We’ve spent the three years of waiting for visas on researching everything known on Elfhome. The oddest thing was that the most comprehensive videos on Elfhome are a series of animated shorts by a strangely secretive production company known as Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

  “Actually their name is the only thing anyone knows about them,” Taggart added.

  “Animated?” Jane wondered if she had heard them wrong.

  The grin got even shyer. “The videos use a fairly crude method, blending modeling and CGI work, but they’re hysterical. Each is about ten minutes of pure farce but the storylines interlock creating a very detailed world. The thing is, if you check their facts, they’re spot on.”

  “What you can check,” Taggart said.

  Nigel nodded. “Which loops us back to the idea that all information about Elfhome is being strictly limited. One of their videos mentioned a gossamer call and indicated that it was ultrasonic in nature.”

  “What exactly is a gossamer call?”

  “What they’d discovered was if you analyze video tapes of the gossamers arriving and leaving Pittsburgh, you can isolate the ultrasonic commands that the elves use to control the living airships. They’ve also pieced together information that any creature bioengineered with magic—such as wargs—have similar ‘call commands’ embedded at an instinctual level.”

  A month ago, Jane wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but then the undeniable evidence had surfaced that the elves could manipulate DNA at fantastic levels via magic. “They had enough information to build one of these call
s?”

  Nigel’s grin went from shy to incandescent. “I can’t wait to try it out.”

  Jane made a note to herself to steal Nigel’s gossamer call before they toured the viceroy’s airship.

  “Oh! Oh!” Hal cried. “A saurus!”

  Secretly she was hoping that they wouldn’t get any tips on saurus sightings. With Hal, the filming was fairly simple: find it; kill it. They would pad the footage with how to tell if a saurus was in the area, the type of guns needed to successfully drop the big lizard, the dangers of bringing too small of a gun to the fight, the merits of such tactics as shooting from second story windows or tree stands and any other bullshit they could think of.

  Nigel and Taggart, though, probably wanted to do something stupid like film the saurus without trying to kill it first. Things could get messy fast.

  “Where was the saurus spotted?” Jane hoped the location was near the Rim where the T-Rex’s Elfhome cousin might wander back off radar.

  “Dormont,” Hal said.

  “Dormont?” Jane said. “That’s nearly downtown!”

  “It says Dormont,” Hal read. “Sleepy Hollow Road. Where old Mount Lebanon golf course used to be.”

  Jane took his tablet to read it. The tip had been sent by “Beef4U.” The name sounded slightly pornographic and juvenile. Was it a joke? “That’s Castle Shannon.”

  “Another castle?” Taggart asked.

  “It’s a town,” Jane said.

  “Was a town,” Hal muttered.

  She pulled up a map to double check her memory. “Yes, for some reason the early settlers in this area all wanted castles. Castle Shannon was a farm that grew into a town.”

  “Pittsburgh never lets go of the past,” Hal continued to mutter. “You get directions by what used to be there. Castle Shannon is mostly empty row houses.”

  Nigel sprang to his feet. “We go now?”

  “No!” Jane cried. “It’s already dark.”

  “It would be very atmospheric,” Nigel started for the door.

  “Sit!” Jane barked and pointed at the chair he just vacated.

  He wavered and glanced to Taggart.

  “You’re hurt. I’m drunk.” Either Taggart was a lightweight or exaggerating, as he was only on his third beer. Jane always kept count of other people’s drink so she knew when to shut them off. She had thought Taggart would be good for at least four beers before hitting “drunk.” “Hal is on pain killers. It’s dark out. And there’s a fucking war brewing. Jane is right. We finish setting up a shooting schedule, get another good night’s sleep and start out at dawn.”