Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  Mrs. Pondwater came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. “Zahara, it’s your turn for photographs.”

  “Come on.” Zahara hopped up. “You should try the makeup. It’s fun. And your parents will love the photos.”

  Their mother would. Considering everything they’d been doing behind their parents’ backs, it would probably be good to do something nice for them. Scooping up the kitten, Louise let Zahara lead her back downstairs.

  The makeup artist blinked at her in surprise. “Didn’t I . . . oh, wow, your sister didn’t tell me she had a twin! She had me make her up as an elf princess.”

  “She did?” Louise thought they were going to keep that secret.

  “I have a whole box of these cool ear prosthetics.” The makeup artist held up ear tips. “Elfhome parties are very popular.”

  Louise’s heart leapt in her chest and she blurted out, “Oh, yes, please,” before she even thought it out.

  “Your sister is so cute and funny.” The artist tilted Louise’s head and painted something cool onto her ear tips.

  “Yes, she is.” Louise felt the familiar uncomfortable twinge of envy. She couldn’t understand how it was that most people couldn’t tell them apart and yet it was always Jillian who was described as “cute.” What was it that made Jillian prettier? They had nearly the same hair—well, before Louise’s was burned off. Same shade of brown eyes. Same chin. “Can you make me just as cute?”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Louise looked like an elf. The makeup girl somehow made her eyes appear very almond-shaped. The elf ears peeked out between hair extensions braided with ribbons and little silk flowers and pinned cleverly into Louise’s blast-shortened hair. She was dressed in a lovely copper lamé ball gown and had her face and bare shoulders dusted with glitter.

  If she ignored how short she was, she looked completely like an elf.

  There was the small matter that everyone else was probably made up to be a princess or a mermaid. At least, Jillian was also an elf—wherever she was. Louise hadn’t seen her twin since they’d arrived. Still carrying the purring kitten, Louise went in search of Jillian.

  The rest of the party was down the hall, laughing and shrieking loudly. As Louise walked cautiously toward it, she realized she could hear Jillian’s voice slightly above the rest, quoting from their video, The Queen’s Pantaloons. Louise stopped at the doorway, surprised to find that Jillian was the center of attention. Obviously Jillian was using their fame to take over the party. Elle had a stone-hard smile locked into place even though her eyes stormed. All the other girls, though, were laughing as Jillian played the part of the clueless anthropologist, the extremely nearsighted Dr. Forthwright, the only non-ninja scientist from their videos.

  “Such fancy needlework.” Jillian held up a facial tissue that was standing in for a lacy pair of oddly shaped underwear. The scene was based on odd wording used in academic papers to describe the elves’ method of dealing with no elastic or zippers to create clothing. “What do you suppose it is? A table doily? A handkerchief? It has such wonderful perfume.”

  “The—the—the queen’s pantaloons!” Zahara was standing in as Hairbrush, who they often portrayed as a hapless victim of cultural misunderstandings. She always managed to say the worst possible thing and then react wildly to the resulting confusion.

  “Pantaloons,” Jillian muttered as she mimed typing the word into a translator. “Pantaloons. Pan-ta-loons. Pan. Ta. Loons.” She paused, eyeing the tissue that was standing in for the lace panties. “Canadian water bird? No, I think not. Forgiveness. What are pantaloons?”

  Zahara did a very good job of copying Hairbrush’s wild takes—that was half the humor of the scene. “Knickers. Drawers. Bloomers. Tanga.”

  “Hmm, tanga.” Jillian consulted the nonexistent translator again. “Currency of Tajikistan. Ah, I see: it’s money. What’s the exchange rate?”

  “Once per day?” Zahara sputtered out after a full minute of surprised and confused looks.

  Jillian tossed up the tissue and the room burst into squeals of excitement. One girl after another snatched the white tissue out of the air and quoted a ninja anthropologist line and then tossed it up again. Not all the quips were from The Queen’s Pantaloons, displaying a slightly scary range of knowledge.

  Elle’s smile started to tremble, and the anger in her eyes turned to hurt. It was her birthday party and she was about to cry.

  Louise darted forward, caught the tissue, and tossed it to Elle. “The queen! The queen!”

  Elle’s eyes went wide in surprise.

  Jillian quirked a frown at Louise but sketched an elaborate bow. “Queen Soulful Ember.”

  Elle’s eyes narrowed but she rose regal as a queen. “Hairbrush? Hairbrush? We have laws against mimes.”

  Zahara did a perfect triple take. “Mimes? We do?”

  “Surely we do. Frightening things: mimes. What will humans think up next? If we allow mimes, Kabuki is sure to follow.”

  “Kabuki?”

  Elle struck the first pose of the Noh play Tamura or Dance of the Ghost. Amazingly, she had the dance fairly well approximated. Anyone who hadn’t spent hours researching and re-creating the dance with Barbie dolls and CGI animation wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Why did Elle know the dance so well? Was she a closet fan or had she learned it merely because she knew all the other kids liked the video? The other girls supplied “music,” acting out the parts of the ninja anthropologist/musicians, drumming on side tables and pretending to be playing flutes.

  “Noh!” Zahara cried. “Your majesty, Noh!”

  “Are you telling your queen no?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But you just did!”

  “But . . . But . . . But . . .” Zahara did Hairbrush’s whimper as she once again found herself in verbal quicksand. “That is not Kabuki, it’s Noh.”

  A withering look from Elle, probably for Zahara’s part of stealing the spotlight during Elle’s party. “There is a strange female in the garden.” Elle pointed with the same circling flourish as the video, a subtle clue that the queen was on the verge of leveling everything with fire strikes. “We think she might be a mime. She’s moving her mouth but nothing is coming out. We can’t allow mimes; next thing you know we’ll be up to our armpits in all sorts of scary things. Clowns. Frenchmen.”

  “Oh! Oh! Her! No! I—I—I mean to say she isn’t a mime, your majesty. She merely swallowed the gossamer call.”

  Elle did a perfect comedic pause, hands cocked like a gunfighter’s, fingers twitching, as the other girls screamed with laughter. She finally broke her silence only when the laugh died to excited giggles. “What?”

  “The gossamer call. It generates a sound audible only to gossamers . . . and mimes.”

  Elle let her hands flutter up, fingers twitching madly, and the girls all shrieked with laughter. “Blast it all!”

  Mrs. Pondwater came in, clapping her hands for attention. “Jillian. Louise. You’re the last girls for photographs. The photographer is waiting for you.”

  They allowed themselves to be shooed to the formal living room, where a thronelike chair had been set before a smoky-gray backdrop. The photographer eyed them with surprise.

  “Elves? Are you sure you two are at the right party?”

  Jillian waved off the comment. “We’re just killing time until the next Shutdown. Then we’re heading to Elfhome.”

  Louise shivered as the words raised the hair on the back of her neck.

  Louise couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster all the next day. While she crawled through the Internet, looking for some hint that someone had created a magic generator, Jillian worked on translating the Dufae Codex.

  To their dismay, the first few pages of the codex were incomprehensible. The author seemed to be making shorthand notes with only the minimum explanations. It was only when she reached the sixth page that she found a solid piece of translatable text.

  “F
inally!” Jillian cried. “I should have just skipped ahead to this.”

  “Another dead end. Literally.” Louise stared at the police report detailing the death of the scientist she’d been researching. Or at least, the police were assuming he’d been murdered, as they hadn’t found enough of him to verify it.

  “This is what page six says.” Jillian scrolled back to read her translated text.

  “My theories are correct and incorrect. Yes, because the landmasses are identical on both worlds, finding the mirror site of our most powerful fiutana was as simple as following a map. Yes, power does leak through fissures between worlds at sites of fiutana. It is impossible, however, to set up a reliable resonance to the Spell Stones, which leaves me woefully unprotected. Also the magic seems, for lack of a better word, dirty. Even fairly simple spells have unpredictable results. Three different sites have produced the same failures. If I’m to stay on Earth, I will have to find a way to purify the magic. If I fail, I will need to return home. I should plan carefully, though, before returning. Who can I trust with this? How do I protect those I love when I do not know who is friend and who is foe?”

  It was a disquieting echo to Louise’s findings. “So the first five pages are test results?”

  Jillian scrolled back through the original text. “Yeah, I think you’re right. He says here that ‘three different sites have produced the same failures.’ Each of these pages has mystery words that don’t repeat, and three words that do. I’m betting the repeated words are the locations, and the nonrepeating are the spells he’s measuring. The numbers under them indicate the variation in the results.”

  “So this codex is a record of his experiments in magic.”

  Jillian flicked the digital pages. “I wonder how many years he was here on Earth before he was killed. There are hundreds of pages here.”

  Louise considered her own research. “If we could find one of these fissures, then we wouldn’t need a generator. The way he said ‘three different sites’ seems to indicate they’re fairly common. I wonder if he included a map.”

  “I’ll check.” Jillian started to scan quickly through the pages.

  Almost immediately, though, Louise realized the mistake in her logic. “Dufae was in France and he died in 1792. Windwolf didn’t colonize Westernlands until 1930. That’s the whole point of him being the viceroy; he was the only domana on the continent when Pittsburgh was first transported to Elfhome. Dufae’s map would only show the fiutana in Easternlands.”

  “Yeah, but there could be fissures here in North America. If they were common in Europe, they’re probably common all over the world. If we figure out the conditions that form the fissures by studying Dufae’s European map, we might be able to predict where they would appear in the United States.”

  “Dufae said the magic is dirty.”

  “One.” Jillian held up a finger. “There are a thousand more pages to his codex.” She held up a second finger. “Two. He didn’t go back to Elfhome.”

  “So he figured out how to clean the magic?”

  “I’m figuring that’s what this is all about.” Jillian held up her tablet and showed off a sketch of some odd-looking device. “This is page twelve.”

  * * *

  Louise continued to wade through a flood of information on Leonardo’s hyperphase gate. Every time she thought she was getting close to an answer, the information trail would stop. The last one filled her with so much uneasiness that she got up to pace.

  “What?” Jillian asked.

  “I have a weird feeling,” Louise said. “Like we’re doing something bad.”

  Jillian snorted. “We’re always doing something that other people think is bad. Everyone wants us to ‘be good,’ and what they really mean is ‘make it easy for them’ and has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Like talking in the library. If no one is trying to get work done, why is it still bad? Because Miss Jenkins believes in learned behavior instead of rational thought. What we should be taught is compassionate response.”

  Louise growled as Jillian veered totally off subject. “That’s not the point. Besides I can’t blame them. Learned behavior is a fairly simple punishment-and-reward system. I wouldn’t even know how to start to teach compassionate response.”

  “We’re not animals. They wonder what is wrong with our country, but isn’t it fairly obvious that if children are being treated like animals instead of rational beings, as adults they’ll respond like monkeys?”

  “Shut up or I’m going to fling poo at you!”

  Jillian frowned as she realized that Louise was angry. “What’s wrong?”

  “I—I don’t know. It’s just this weird feeling. Here, look. See this?” Louise pulled up the last data trail she’d followed. “It’s a micro blog post from three years ago.”

  “The Dufae gate uses magic!!!” Jillian read. “You were right; someone figured it out.”

  Louise impatiently waved her to wait. “The guy that posted this was an M.I.T. student by the name of Michael Kensbock. This is his posting history. He put out something on average every ten minutes. Two months later, his stream stops. This is his last post.”

  The message said: “Eureka! I haz magic. Nobel iz mine! Party time!”

  “He made one!” Jillian cried excitedly.

  “Yes, right before he disappeared.” Louise pulled up the page that his family had put together in an attempt to find him. “He was at a bar with friends and went to the bathroom and never came back. Here’s the weird thing. Right after he disappeared, someone took down all his content. His vlogs, his e-mails—everything that could be erased—was. His micro blog posts are the only thing not erased, although I’m finding evidence that this service had undergone a massive virus attack at that time.”

  “Maybe his disappearance didn’t have anything to do with the generator.”

  “And his entire web presence erased?”

  Jillian sighed and changed the subject. “Did you find a copy of the magic-generator thing?”

  “It took some digging.” Louise pulled up the site. “I noticed that he liked to use a cartoon icon of himself. So I did a pattern-recognition search on the image and a few of the most basic spell symbols, assuming that he would need a spell to test the generator.”

  “So you could hit anything that a normal search would miss?”

  Louise nodded. “He obviously was going to publish the page to announce his work, but he didn’t want it found until he’d verified his findings, so he carefully didn’t use any words that would point a search at his page.”

  The page had everything needed to create a generator with a high-end 3D printer. It looked simple: a molded plastic box with two power ports. One was a normal male 220 plug, which would indicate that the generator required power on the level of a clothes dryer. The second set of connectors was mere thin wires coated with plastic with flat tabs at the end. They didn’t look like anything that Louise knew, and they were identified as “magic connectors,” which normally would have made her giggle. There were complete schematics on building a matrix of parallel Casimir plates a few micrometers apart and detailed explanations of how the electricity was turned into magic. It was complicated, but Louise could understand it.

  After building the generator and running careful studies on its output, he’d used it to cast a simple detection spell designed to map out ley lines.

  “I’m worried,” Louise said. “This was his super-secret personal site he had stashed in the cloud. He had three public sites, but they’re all toast. Someone did a very good job of worming into even cache copies of his sites and making them unreadable.”

  “Who knows what else he might have been doing that pissed someone off?”

  “The thing is, he’s not the only one.” Louise flicked open windows of earlier dead ends. “Torbjorn Pettersen was a Norwegian who disappeared two years ago after publishing an article in Scientific American on field manipulation using quantum particles in an attempt to explain how Leonardo’
s gate moved Pittsburgh to Elfhome. After him, there was a scientist named Lisa Sutterland who was doing similar work and was killed when someone tried to kidnap her six months later. Marcus Shipman published work on the gate, and he’s also missing. And Harry Russell. He went missing while he was under house arrest. He had a GPS microchip implanted on him as part of his punishment. Police should have been able to find him using that, but they couldn’t until two months ago. The chip turned up inside a fish in St. Louis.”

  “As in the fish ate part of him? Eeewww!”

  “That’s what they think. Everyone I’ve found that has come close to figuring out how Leonardo’s gate works has either disappeared mysteriously or been killed.”

  “Well, we’re not going to tell anyone what we figure out. You were careful and made sure you couldn’t be traced?”

  “Of course I was!” Louise said. “After the first two guys turned up missing, I went into silent-running mode.”

  “Good. Let’s copy the source and then not hit this site again.”

  They copied everything. Once they were safely isolated from the original site, they studied the plans.

  “We’ll need a very high-end 3D printer,” Louise pointed out. “Our printer can’t build at the nanoscale level that this is going to need.”

  “We could buy one.” Jillian pointed out that they now had money.

  Louise snorted. “It would eat up a huge chunk of our funds, and how would we hide it? We couldn’t even carry it out of the foyer.”

  Jillian sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Forget about it. There’s one in the technology annex to the art rooms that the high school kids use for Mr. Kessler’s robotics and computer-design classes.” Mr. Kessler taught their computer literacy class.