Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “Well, the two kuesi at the Bronx Zoo had a baby, and they’ve named it Wembley.”

  “They did?” It had been the gift of the two kuesi that the twins were making fun of. It nearly seemed like a joke that of all the possible animals that the elves could give the humans, they had chosen two kuesi. The reason, though, was because most Elfhome animals required magic to function normally. Apparently the kuesi had been bred to be indifferent to the levels of magic around it.

  “He’s so cute!” Zahara cried and pulled up a video clip on her tablet.

  The video started with Nigel already onstage with Wembley. The baby kuesi looked vaguely like a very hairy elephant with nubs of tusks. Its trunk was in hyperactive overdrive and developed a fixation on exploring up and under the host’s dress. The first time the woman squealed and jumped. She spent much of the video circling Nigel with the trunk in chase while the man explained about how the kuesi had been used to build the first railroad on Elfhome. Nigel seemed torn between amusement and confusion to what could possibly be attracting the animal so strongly.

  “Do you have some peanuts hidden down there?” Nigel asked.

  The host glared at him for a moment, which unfortunately distracted her long enough for the trunk to find its target again. The video clip ended with the host squealing a second time.

  “That’s the shout-out?” Louise managed to say after she stopped laughing.

  “No, wait, it comes before. Let me see if I can find it.” Zahara went to a website that was labeled Lemon-Lime Love. “Ugh. No. No.” She changed sites to one called Jello Shots.

  Louise’s stomach flipped weirdly at the site names. “Oh, tell me that those aren’t what I think they are.”

  “Fan sites dedicated to your videos? Okay, I won’t tell you then. Here.”

  The clip was labeled “Nigel Reid is a Jello Shot!”

  The clips started with Nigel leading the baby kuesi out onto the stage. Despite being only a few months old, it was already as tall as the Scotsman. Its long hair was silky and unruly, making it look like a shambling mound of hair with a trunk.

  “Thank you for having me. This little fellow is a six-month-old Elfhome kuesi . . .”

  “Kuesi? I thought he was a wembley.” The host double-checked her teleprompter. “I thought . . . it looks like a wembley.”

  Nigel laughed. “Yes, everyone thinks so because of the video The Queen’s Parting Gift. The people at the zoo have gotten so tired of having people insist that the sign is wrong that they’ve named this little guy Wembley. But he really is a kuesi, which is a cousin to Earth’s woolly mammoth.”

  “Oh, he’s so cute,” the host said and then went wide-eyed as the beast beelined over to her and loomed above her. “And big!”

  “I asked the Bronx Zoo to borrow him because I hope to be working with Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo in the near future.”

  “Wow!” For a moment the host was more interested in the news than the animal standing beside her. “I love Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

  “Yes, they’re a wonderfully creative and knowledgeable production company.” Nigel dodged around gender, age, and number of people involved, probably because he didn’t know any of it.

  “How in the world did you make contact with—” Whatever she was going to ask was cut short by the kuesi fondling her under her dress. She jumped, squeaking loudly, and the clip ended.

  The comments under it exploded with speculations on what work he’d be doing with Lemon-Lime. The thread quickly grew ugly as the Jello Shot fans decided that Nigel was merely trying to capitalize on Lemon-Lime’s fame and that he was lying about the entire thing.

  “Holy shit,” Louise whispered as she realized that despite being posted just an hour before, there were twenty pages of comments already.

  “What are you doing with Nigel?” Zahara asked.

  Louise stared at her, full of horror. It had never occurred to her that anyone who knew the truth about them would connect them up to Nigel. “You can’t tell anyone about this! We’d get into so much trouble if our parents knew!”

  “They don’t know?”

  “No! They think the Internet is full of pedophiles, and we’re not allowed on any adult site until we’re at least fourteen.”

  “Wow. That’s like really fossil-age thinking.”

  “My mom knew one person that got into trouble like that, so she’s super protective. If they found out that we’ve posted our videos online and are commenting on filmmaking sites and set up the YourStore—”

  Louise stopped being able to talk, because she was completely breathless at the idea of how much trouble they’d be in. They’d be grounded for months without Internet, and they might never get their video equipment back.

  “I won’t tell,” Zahara promised. “And I’ll tell everyone else not to say anything. But this was on television. Does anyone else know that you’re Lemon-Lime?”

  Their Aunt Kitty had helped them pick the name, but she didn’t know about their videos. Also she didn’t watch morning shows. She wasn’t a morning person. Any time they did see her in the mornings, it was usually because she’d been up all night and hadn’t gone to bed yet. It was part of the reason she often babysat in emergencies.

  “So what are you doing with Nigel Reid—that your parents know nothing about?”

  It sounded horrible when Zahara said it that way.

  “He wants to ask us questions about the gossamer call.”

  Zahara’s eyes went wide. “But didn’t you just make that up as a joke?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. We know there is a whistle for the gossamers, but we haven’t found any references to what it looks like or how it works.” Louise pulled at her hair at the sudden realization that they didn’t have anything concrete to tell Nigel. Her research had been detoured by everything else.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Louise stared at Zahara as her mind raced. Was it possible that the codex had some information on it? Once they had a magic generator, they could experiment with any spells that the elves might have embedded into a whistle, but they didn’t have any gossamers to test them on. They could build a virtual simulator of a gossamer if they could find anything about their physiology. So far they hadn’t found any studies on the massive living airships. The fact that the creatures were translucent made all pictures of them blurry and difficult to figure out where the flying jellyfishlike animal ended and the sky began.

  “Louise?”

  “Um . . .”

  “You should at least thank him for the shout-out,” Zahara said.

  “You think so?”

  The bell rang for homeroom. There was a sudden and massive movement of bodies as everyone in the hall headed to their classroom.

  “My mom always thanks anyone that says something nice about her to the media.”

  Louise nearly protested that they weren’t on the same level as Zahara’s fashion-model mother, but then remembered the Today Show host’s reaction to the name Lemon-Lime. They might have been unaware of it, but apparently they were famous. “Okay, I’ll thank him.”

  * * *

  There were hundreds of messages under Nigel’s original post. The first was “Seriously? Nigel Reid? THE Lemon-Lime? I don’t know which one to disbelieve the most.” The second stated, “Dude, Lemon-Lime talks to no one. They’re like ghosts!” A random reply on the next page showed that the comments turned ugly as fans decided that the shout-out was just a way to steal Lemon-Lime’s fame.

  Louise winced. Poor Nigel. Zahara was right; for all the grief he was getting, he deserved a thank-you. She opened up a private message and gave it a subject line of “Thank you for the great shout-out.” After that, she didn’t know what to say.

  Famous people are all just normal people at their core, Zahara had said. It was certainly true for her and Jillian. Well, they were normal if one ignored them being elves, conceived after their male genetic donor was dead, and smarter than just about everyone else. . . .

  She sta
red at the blank screen for a while as the cursor blinked. They had nothing to give Nigel right now. All they had was a handful of observations that anyone could make. They should be sure before they told him anything, and that would take time. Meanwhile the poor man was going to get dragged through dirt. In public.

  If they released a Lemon-Lime video acknowledging Nigel, then they could clear his name. They had planned on doing filler anyhow.

  * * *

  “Oh, great idea!” Jillian reacted to the news with wide-eyed amazement. “A video reply will confirm we’re really Lemon-Lime. We could crank a filler out in a few hours.”

  By the end of homeroom, they had a short storyboard laid out. Normally, they did stop-motion with Barbie dolls on green screen; it gave their work a distinctive style. Unfortunately, they’d blown up their entire cast. Louise always thought they should acknowledge the accident by having Queen Soulful Ember blast the royal court to cinders. The addition of Nigel to the mix gave them the idea of changing who got vaporized. In the new video, the queen lets loose a series of blasts, aiming at one precious treasure after another. Her court barely manages to deflect her spells’ damage onto what seems to be unoccupied space. After the court leaves the area, however, ninja scientists rain out of their smoldering hiding spaces.

  The second act was solely a shot of the Cathedral of Learning to symbolize the University of Pittsburgh. Jillian was writing the dialogue for the first section, but Louise had an inspiration for the middle section. She typed dialogue that would later need to be read in. The first male would say, “Good God, not again. And those were the last of the anthologists, archeologists, biologists, and botanists. What’s next on the list? Ah, entomologist. Yes, we do need to learn more Elvish. This dictionary we have sucks.”

  “I do not think that word means what you think it means,” some unseen male says with a slight Spanish accent.

  “Get me entomologists!”

  The third act was a shot of a crude box trap baited with ants. Nigel Reid and his cameraman stumble into the trap and ninjas hammer it shut and cover it with mailing stickers, addressing it to Elfhome. They could use sound bites from Nigel’s documentary on fire ants—painfully short to stay within fair use limits—specifically the discussion on the queen, since applying the factoids to Soulful Ember would be funny. Once Nigel was trapped inside the box with the ants, she could use a slightly muffled version of the section where he was cheerfully describing the pain of being stung. Repeatedly.

  Louise pulled old backgrounds from their home computer to build the needed sets. Giggling, Jillian told her between first and second period that the “precious treasures” would be various plot McGuffins from earlier videos. They could get around not showing the queen and her court and use only dialogue to progress the story. They spent the break between second and third period recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.

  After a great deal of consideration, Louise decided to insert one frame of the raw footage from their playhouse explosion as an Easter egg with each fire strike. The first would be subtitled, “We decided to experiment with special effects on the fire strike.” The second would state, “We blew up our studio.” The third would end with, “There will be a short hiatus in production until we manage to replace our equipment.”

  They had always operated on the assumption that they had at least one die-hard fan that liked finding the Easter eggs. They’d even given the fan a name: Harvey. It was weird to know that they had thousands of Harveys and one of them was sure to analyze the video frame by frame for Easter eggs. This hidden message would definitely be read. Maybe by hundreds of people.

  Louise was just adding various Foley effects, like hammering nails, out of the copyright-free archive when Jillian suddenly kicked her. She looked up, aware for the first time that the room had gone completely silent.

  “Louise!” Mr. Kessler, their computer literacy teacher, was bearing down on her.

  She blinked up at him, surprised. She and Jillian sat in the back of all their classes and rarely drew the attention of any of their teachers. Up to this moment, she wasn’t even sure that Mr. Kessler knew their names, since the few times he’d called on them, he addressed them as Twin One and Twin Two.

  “What are you doing?” He came to loom over her. He held out his hand for her tablet.

  As Louise hesitated, hands covering her screen, she saw Jillian quickly copy everything off her tablet. “I was just watching the new Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo video.”

  There was a murmur of excitement from the other kids in their class. She cringed slightly as she realized that Elle could and probably would fully explain how she had the new video. Then again, maybe Mr. Kessler was a fan.

  “That stupid tripe?” Mr. Kessler snapped his fingers, demanding her tablet immediately. “Those videos are nothing but a glorification of the rich and selfish elf royalty.”

  “They are not!” both Louise and Jillian cried.

  “It’s believed that there are fewer than ten thousand elves on the whole North American continent, and yet the queen lays claim to all of it. Nine point five four million square miles for just ten thousand selfish bastards. That’s over nine hundred square miles per elf. Alaska’s population density is less than two square miles per human.”

  “Mr. Kessler.” Elle waved her hand, making Louise shrink. When he didn’t acknowledge her, Elle pressed on without lowering her hand. “Mr. Kessler, you shouldn’t use the b-word in class. It’s very rude. And what you’re saying is very bigoted. Can we stay on topic?”

  Mr. Kessler snorted and handed back Louise’s tablet. He’d deleted all her work and purged her cache. She gasped at the hours of work she might have lost. “I want you to solve the problem on the board, Louise.”

  She took a deep breath against the anger boiling in her. He had no right to delete work off her tablet. Yell at her, yes, but not destroy her work, much of which she’d done before his class started. They were only five minutes into class, too; it wasn’t like she’d spent a long time ignoring him.

  “Sometime soon.” He pointed at the board.

  She glanced to the front of the room. The wall screen had a quadratic equation. She locked her jaw against the first two things that wanted to come out. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, then you agree that this is a class and I am a teacher and if you were paying attention to me you would understand—”

  “I don’t understand why you’re asking me to solve that equation. This isn’t math class, and we’re not up to quadratic formulas yet. We’re still doing pre-algebra work.”

  “Yes, this is computer literacy class, and if you were listening, you would know—”

  “That x is negative four and one?”

  “Huh?” Obviously, he wasn’t expecting her to be able to solve the problem since he didn’t recognize the correct answer when she gave it.

  “You’re asking me to solve y equals x squared plus three x minus four. The solution is negative four and one.”

  He glanced at the board and then at her. “What?”

  Did he even know how to solve the problem himself?

  “Quadratic equations with two variables have countless solutions,” Louise explained because she suspected he didn’t know. “The answers create a continuous line in the shape of a parabola. The ‘correct’ answer to this equation is the two points where that parabola hits the x-axis: negative four and one. What I don’t understand is why you’re asking us to deal with an equation like this. Our class has just started to graph straight lines. How do you expect anyone to use a computer to calculate this if they don’t know how to check the result? They could get a nonsense answer like ‘forty-two’ and think it’s right.”

  He stared at her, slack-jawed, for a moment and then said angrily, “My point is that you should be paying attention to me.”

  “I will when you start teaching something I don’t already know.”

  He scanned the room, taking in the hostile stares of the other kids. “Fine.”
He went back to his desk, deleted the equation from the wall display and typed in a simple addition function. “Reed, can you set up a four-column, four-row spreadsheet that uses this to produce totals in the fourth row?”

  * * *

  At lunch, the entire fifth grade gathered around their table, worried that Kessler had deleted all their work.

  “We saved it.” Jillian pulled it up on her tablet and played what they had finished.

  “Wow!” Iggy said when it came to the end. “You did this all during class this morning?”

  “It’s only five minutes long, and we’re using a lot of old stuff,” Louise said. “Hopefully people won’t think that someone forged this since it’s all rehash.”

  “If we use the new song for Black Willow Wicker, the music would establish the video as one of ours.”

  Louise tugged at her hair as she considered the pros and cons. Their soundtracks were heavily influenced by the fusion music of garage bands in Pittsburgh. The groups combined guitar-heavy rock and roll with Elvish musicians playing traditional instruments. When the twins started writing their own songs three years ago, the fusion music was insanely hard to find. They had stumbled across a handful of tracks during a research raid on the Pittsburgh Internet during Shutdown. With their Aunt Kitty being a composer, they knew better than to use the songs without permission. To create their own version of it, though, they had to digitally recreate the off-world instruments. It had taken them months to dig up enough information and code it all in. Since then, fusion music had been discovered by the masses, unfortunately fueled by mass piracy and pale imitations. None of the groups based on Earth could match the twins’ music, because no one else had the right instruments.

  The new song for Black Willow Wicker had been written for the humorous battle between Queen Soulful Ember and an army of black willows protesting Hairbrush’s attempts at magical topiary that created a roving flock of boxwood penguins. (“They had to be flightless birds. Flying topiary would have been simply ridiculous.”) Louise used a series of bugle calls starting with reveille to mirror the trees’ strategies. It was bit of geek humor they didn’t expect Harvey to get.