Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Windwolf waited until the Stone Clan domana was out of sight before giving Law a bow. “Thank you. You have saved more than the lives of those who were celebrating here. If the oni had been able to attack unchecked, then war would have broken out between the elves and the humans.”

  The elf had no idea that he owed even more to her and Bare Snow. It was nice, though, to be thanked for part of it.

  “I have friends here,” Law said. “Someplace. Or at least, I did.” Usagi was the one Law was most worried about; she had been at Oktoberfest alone with five kids. Tiffani would have fled instantly. Ellen had a brother living nearby. Trixie was good at landing on her feet.

  “My people started to vacate this area minutes after you called with the news,” Jin Wong said. “Some stayed to fight, but those with children fled.”

  Relief nearly took Law to her knees. She breathed out and cautioned herself that just because everyone had been warned, didn’t mean everyone reached safety.

  * * *

  Tiffani’s fishing pool had been trampled. The water had drained to a mud puddle. The little gleaming fish lay scattered on the ground, long past saving. Law took the fact that they could find nothing of Trixie’s booth as a sign that the Changs had packed up and left long before the oni arrived. Ellen’s little house had been battened down with storm shutters and the charcoal grill drowned with water, so she’d beaten an orderly retreat.

  All the little stuffed bunnies sat abandoned at Usagi’s booth. Alarmingly, the cash box was still tucked under the counter, unlocked. Law picked it up, feeling sick with fear. Of course with five children to shepherd to safety, Usagi would have needed her hands free to fight or hold onto a kid. Had they gotten home safely? All Law could get on her cell phone was a Shutdown message of all connections busy. Everyone in Pittsburgh was trying to find out if their friends and family were safe.

  Bare Snow whimpered and picked up something from the ground. It was a rabbit hat that belonged to one of the kids.

  “I’m sure they got home safe,” Law said. “Let’s go check there.”

  * * *

  Dusk bled to night as they rode up Mount Washington on the incline. Part of Station Square burned unchecked. Lightning occasionally struck out of the clear sky. Sudden eruptions of flame would follow seconds later.

  Law picked her way down Usagi’s toy-strewn sidewalk to knock on the door. “Usagi! Usagi! Is anyone home?”

  There was the thunder of small feet. The door flung open and the entire herd of half-elves flung themselves at Bare Snow. The rabbit hats had been abandoned for a wide variety of wings.

  “We flew!” Moon Rabbit shouted as she scaled Bare Snow. “We flew! It was awesome!”

  The others hopped up and down and shrugged their shoulders to make their fake wings flutter. “We flew! We flew!”

  And then Usagi was hugging Law tightly. “Oh, I’ve been so worried about you two!”

  “Us?” Law hadn’t told Usagi anything about chasing after oni.

  “The tengu said you were the one that stumbled across the train while helping Duff look for Tinker’s cousin.”

  Duff? Oh! Alton’s little brother! He worked at the bakery with Hazel. Widget hadn’t been dragged off to do computer work for the bakery; she’d been hijacked by the Kryskills to hack into the city’s camera network.

  “Widget sent the tengu to get you to safety,” Law guessed.

  “They didn’t know how much time there was before the train arrived, so they just flew us straight up from Station Square.”

  “It was awesome!” Moon Rabbit cried.

  “Scarier than hell,” Usagi murmured. “At first I was angry, yanked away from all our work that way.” She glanced toward the wall of windows overlooking South Side. She had a clear view of the train wreck. “I remember when you brought me Widget. She was still shivering from trying to swim the river in the middle of winter. I was afraid to take her in. You kept begging me and I was thinking ‘you just don’t want to be saddled with her.’ ”

  That was true. Law didn’t want the girl underfoot; Law walked too much on the dangerous fringe to have someone like Widget trailing along. “Sorry about that.”

  Usagi laughed and hugged her harder. “I’m thanking you! You were right. I was wrong. She’s sweet and funny and smart and she saved all our lives today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Law hadn’t known it would turn out that way. She had only known that Widget needed help. She’d had no idea that Widget would someday be able to pay her back tenfold. She supposed that was the natural order. By lifting Widget up, Law had given her the power to help others. They were daisy-chained together; acts of goodwill looped back around. Law had saved Windwolf. He had protected her without even knowing how much he owed her. Tinker saved the tengu, and they in turn protected Usagi and her children. Around and around, kindness being paid forward until it returned.

  It was what Pittsburgh needed. What Elfhome needed; people helping one another without concern of clan or race or species.

  AFTERWORD

  Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

  Judging by the number of “Making of,” some people like to know how their favorite stories and movies and such come into being. Judging by a handful of reviews on Amazon, some people don’t. Apparently the people in the latter camp like to think that authors are godlike people that can spin out a vast complicated story arc across multiple books, writing millions of words about a cast of a thousand named characters, in one massive, preconceived plot that doesn’t need to be tweaked or improved upon.

  For those of you that enjoy such things, I’ve written down notes on the various stories. Why I wrote them, how I thought they were going to turn out, and how the plots were detoured to what you actually read.

  For the rest of you, skip this. Trust me; you don’t want to see behind the curtain.

  Stormsong

  I’m going to talk about all her sections as a whole. The very first one I wrote for her was her meeting Tinker. I don’t remember what inspired me to attempt it but I do remember that the story flowed. The scene came out with this amazingly strong voice. What surprised me most was that it was in first person and an attempt to rewrite it to third person failed.

  I loved the bit but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. The problem was that Stormsong doesn’t actually “meet” Tinker until the middle of the first novel, and at that point she blends into the crowd. I couldn’t extend the drabble into a story because it would go against canon; Tinker had no idea who Stormsong was and that couldn’t change.

  I wrote it after I’d finished Wolf Who Rules and have always wished I could have gone back and tweaked the novel to reflect the drabble. There is a slight but not glaring canon conflict that Stormsong doesn’t mention this meeting while talking to Windwolf after the fight with Impatience. This can be dismissed by the fact that Stormsong didn’t think it would be wise for Tinker to include her in her First Hand.

  I wanted to write more from Stormsong’s point of view, so I tackled her first meeting with Windwolf. Again, boom, the story flowed. Still there wasn’t enough plot there to be standalone. I didn’t have the time to invest into making it something bigger.

  By this time I was working on Elfhome and I vaguely salvaged parts of the first drabble during the chapter Panty Raid.

  The last bit I wrote for her was the journey to New York, written soon after I’d finished Wood Sprites. I thought about expanding this into a complete story but that way lies madness. Stormsong couldn’t find out more about the twins since she doesn’t mention them for three books. Nor could she find out that Sparrow was a traitor. Coming up with a true story that didn’t trip over those points would have been hair-pulling insanity.

  Little Horse

  Fans kept asking me to write something from Pony’s POV. I attempted to write something from after he met Tinker, but that didn’t work. He’s too on-camera during all the books. What ended up happening was simply a
retelling of what the readers already knew. I was bored silly trying to write it. Everything that was interesting was too short to be called a story.

  I decided to find a pivotal point in his life that didn’t include Tinker. Once I approached the story from that mindset, it was obvious that the story would be about him deciding to accompany Windwolf to the Westernlands. I wanted some trigger event so that when the moment came for Pony to choose, it wasn’t static “thinking” but an emotional response to some thrilling action.

  Originally I started with Pony kneeling in the dirt, happy that he’d won the fight, but worried about the Wyvern’s judgment. It became obvious that I needed to back up and show the cause of the fight: Clove and his weak eyes. The bonus to this was I actually showed the fight. Action is always a good thing.

  Lain

  I had written that Lain’s pivotal moment in her life after her accident was during the first Startup. The first scene flowed up to the point where Lain is shown the saurus. At that point, however, I lost the thread of the story.

  I made a lot of random stabs at it. In one version, Lain rescued a soldier that had been trapped by a steel spinner spider. In another, Lain set up elaborate quarantine systems. In a third, she was rescued by Windwolf and was healed by magic to the point she could walk with crutches. At some point I decided that I wanted her to be isolated and forced to realize that her brains were what mattered.

  How to get her alone? It didn’t make sense with the setup I had in place that she would go into the forest alone. I didn’t want her to be stupid. I decided that I could bring in Yves to give him more airtime, show off some of their relationship and explain how the empire of evil reacted to the first Startup.

  Isolating her creates a new problem. The narrative becomes a monologue, which is difficult to keep tension high. Lain experiencing first contact with an elf also satisfied the idea that this was the first time elves and humans meet on Elfhome. I wanted Lain to have an actual conversation with the elf, so it limited who she could meet. I didn’t want it to be either Windwolf or Stormsong since she obviously meets both of them for the first time in the first two books. Using Lightning Strikes allowed me to expand on Blue Sky’s backstory and flesh out a character important to the series and yet never shown before.

  Yes, the story does end slightly abruptly but Lain has had her epiphany. The reader of the series is sure to realize that Lain manages to get to Pittsburgh while it’s cycling back and forth between Elfhome and Earth. Once there, she refuses to leave and sets up in her house on Observatory Hill.

  Wyvern

  This was the first short story I’d ever sold. It was written after Tinker was released. Russell Davis had e-mailed me and asked me to write something to include in a DAW anthology he was editing called Faerie Tales.

  I was in the middle of writing Wolf Who Rules. I didn’t want to try to fit the short story’s plot into the events of the main storyline (that insanity would come later). At first I thought I would do some first-contact stories with new characters. I started a few but they trickled off, not to be finished.

  I realized I needed a character that I was comfortable with to build the story around because I was on a tight deadline. I pulled out an old character who originally had been a space marine. What would a space marine be doing on Elfhome? I decided that she could be a big game hunter. The bigger the game, the better, so I decided that she would go one on one with a wyvern.

  I couldn’t get a handle on it until I stumbled upon the idea that her “native guide” would be a sekasha. I had been raised on Tarzan movies where the big game hunter was always a brave, tall white guy and the “native guide” was this fearful, weak and small male that ran away at first sign of trouble. As a kid, I didn’t realize how racist this was. Here was the chance to address that stance by making the two characters equal.

  Unfortunately I didn’t keep canon straight. Originally the female sekasha was Crow Song. In the books, however, I state that all of Windwolf’s Hands are in Pittsburgh, that he had only lost Hawk Scream and Lightning Strikes, and only Stormsong speaks English. I decided to change the female to be Stormsong as the easiest way to match up all the elements. Certainly the female acts like Stormsong in the story. (So sorry for any confusion I caused people who read this in its original form.)

  Bare Snow Falling on Fairywood

  Some stories are gifts from the muses. They just come. And sometimes they aren’t, and you need to build them from the ground up. And sometimes they’re a weird mix of both, stalling in some places and sprinting ahead in others.

  When I moved to Hawaii, I started to meet very memorable people. A new friend impressed me in the complexity of her life. Her father is a professional Bigfoot hunter. Her mother was Hawaiian Chinese Portuguese mix that could have sprung from the pages of Joy Luck Club. She’s an avid fisherman and into outdoor sports like snorkeling and kayaking, but she also loves to shop for clothes. Every time I talked to her, she had a story of great misadventure as she rushed out to save damsels in distress.

  One night I had a dream that my friend was on Elfhome. Yes, she would fit right in! But what would her story be?

  Fans had been asking about the Water Clan. I decided I would bring one to Pittsburgh; she would need a human defender in the face of all the technology. Still it wasn’t clicking.

  Around that time, Teddy the Porcupine videos were hitting my newsfeed regularly on Facebook. If you haven’t seen these, go, now, watch them. They’re a hoot.

  One day the muse hit me with “a lesbian, an elf, and a porcupine walk into a hardware store.” Boom. For some reason, adding a porcupine made all the difference in the world. Why? I don’t know. I wrote the hardware store scene but it didn’t have an inherent conflict in it that centered on Law. So I decided to back up. At Wollerton’s, Law and Bare Snow were already a couple. How did they meet?

  I made a few stabs at their first meeting being a totally random event. The very first attempt, Law left home on her eighteenth birthday and meets Bare Snow squatting out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, the story centered on Law, but lacked conflict.

  In a different story, I’d played with the idea that Tooloo had tapped a hapless pawn and sent them off to do impossible things. Originally the pawn had been sent to Onihida to free Impatience from the oni. I realized that the story wouldn’t be placed in Pittsburgh, would require massive world-building and wouldn’t be a short story. I abandoned this project.

  What if Tooloo called Law and arranged for her to save Bare Snow? Tooloo is quietly blocking the Skin Clan right and left. The fact that Bare Snow is Water Clan finally became vital to the story. If she’s found in the wrong place, her presence could trigger the restart of the clan war. I wrote out Tooloo calling Law in the middle of fishing and had Law go off to find Bare Snow. Her location was a natural extension of canon: Windwolf had been attacked in Fairywood and gone on foot to Tinker’s salvage yard. If you wanted to start a clan war, putting a Water Clan elf in Fairywood was a logical way of doing it.

  Originally Bare Snow had been a normal, innocent female. I got as far as Widget hacking the DMV when I realized that wouldn’t work. As a trigger to a clan war, there had to be more of a reason to suspect that she was behind the ambush. Also a normal person wouldn’t chase after bad guys. Law had a history of going toe-to-toe with guys stalking women but her taking on an entire horde of bad guys didn’t make sense. It needed to make sense that Bare Snow couldn’t go to the Wind Clan with the news that Windwolf was going to be attacked. There was also the oddity of Bare Snow coming to Pittsburgh all by herself with no promise of joining a household.

  At some point I remembered that I had set up that Windwolf’s grandfather, Howling, had been assassinated. What if Bare Snow’s family were the assassins? What if the Skin Clan had been behind it? At that point, it all worked. I rewrote the scenes so that Bare Snow was now a well-trained assassin whose mother had a price on her head.

  But what was the story really about? The emotional heart of a
n action story is very difficult to figure out sometimes. For a long time, it eluded me. I nearly reached the end before I knew what it was. From Law’s name to her profession to her choice of pet, I had gone with extremely quirky choices. (And yes, some of that reflected the inspiration.) Unconsciously I’d been having Law pick out things that were logical and wonderful for her, but that people around her hated. The heart of the story was staring me in the face.

  Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden

  Sometimes it’s hard to remember what triggered a story. I vaguely remember talking to June Drexler Robertson about wanting to do a story in Pittsburgh that didn’t center on Tinker that dealt with the day-to-day life of humans trying to cope with magic and monsters.

  I think if I had to list the very, very root of it, it was the scene in Tinker when Oilcan and Tinker are warning Ryan of the dangers of Elfhome’s native life. They mentioned a list of safety rules posted at the observatory’s dorms. (Don’t leave doors open, report any strange animal no matter how cute and harmless it seemed, don’t go into the swamp without a flamethrower…) At some point later I tried to sit down and write out those safety rules. It wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be but it had promise of growing.

  I don’t remember how it went from “normal Pittsburghers” to a DYI TV show but I recall giggling madly. For some reason, the first thing I thought of was Alton Brown in a pith helmet. I allowed him to go a little manic, influenced by MythBusters, and freed from the constraints of “Don’t try this at home.” (Okay, so maybe a little Bob Ross too with “and a happy little tree lives here…and it’s trying to eat you.”)

  Having gone off the deep end with Hal, I needed someone to balance him. Someone behind the scenes, calm to his manic, careful to his blithe enthusiasm, and heavily armed. I decided that Jane would be the opposite of everything that was Tinker. Tall, blond, intelligent but not a genius, liked to settle her problems with her fists, and had the world’s most plain first name. (The last name of Kryskill comes from the family that actually built Hyeholde Restaurant.) She’d have a large, sprawling family: grandparents, mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins. She would even have a pet: a big, well-trained guard dog.