Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  It didn’t quite match the feel of the filler video, but everything from the zalituus horn to the olianuni marked it as one of their pieces. To write and record something else would take days. Louise wanted to get their reply video posted as quickly as possible.

  “Yes, let’s use it.” Louise ported in the song and started to fiddle with the video’s story beats to match up with the music. Because the battlefield scene had been punctuated with explosions as the new storyboard, it actually wasn’t as hard as she had thought to make the two mesh together.

  “What do we call this one?” Jillian asked. “Thank You for the Shout-Out?”

  There was a groaning outcry against the title from the kids around them.

  “It’s a Trap!” Ava suggested.

  “Where in the World is Nigel Reid?” Iggy said.

  “Missing Treasures,” Zahara shouted to be heard over the sudden loud flood of possible video titles.

  “Missing Treasures,” Louise repeated. There was a nice double meaning that the queen was missing her original targets, the various treasures, but also that Nigel Reid was going to go missing. “I like that.” Louise glanced to Jillian, who nodded. She quickly created a title screen. The only ending credits that they did were to claim copyright to everything in the video, from the art down to the music, and assigned them to Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. “We’re ready to load.”

  A cheer went up from the other kids. As the boring part of waiting for the video to upload wore on, the other kids scattered to get food and claim tables.

  Since they needed to hide their data trail while loading, normally they only loaded their videos to one site, Filmcraft. They never were staff pick, had more than a hundred comments, and never reached the thousand mark of “likes.” The low response was why they never thought they were widely popular. While Jillian uploaded the new video to Filmcraft, Louise did a search for The Queen’s Pantaloons. Where were all these people seeing their videos if not on Filmcraft? The search term brought back over two million hits. Filmcraft wasn’t even on the top page of results. The first hit was YouTube, a site that Jillian considered the ghetto of video sites and they never used and rarely visited. Unlike Filmcraft, YouTube listed the number of times the video was actually viewed. The number made her squeak.

  “What?” Jillian asked.

  “Five hundred million views!” Louise cried.

  “For what?”

  “The Queen’s Pantaloons!” Someone using the screen name of JelloShot01 had copied their video from Filmcraft. He had all their other videos, too. In the “recommended videos” on the side was Culotte de la Reine, which was their title translated into French. When she clicked on it, their video started to play with French subtitles.

  “You really didn’t know how famous you were?” Iggy asked.

  Dumbstruck, Louise shook her head. This explained all the money in the YourStore account. How much more could they make if they advertised? How did they go about advertising?

  Zahara returned with three sandwiches and drinks. “Here. I figured you’d want to see it uploaded.”

  “Thanks!” Louise wasn’t sure if she should offer money to Zahara. If the food was a gift, it would be kind of insulting to offer it. They had, however, all that money from YourStore. They weren’t the poorest kids in school anymore.

  Once it was uploaded, they posted a link at the Pittsburgh Forum under the heading “For Nigel from Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

  Louise had left her tablet on the JelloShot01 YouTube channel as they ate. Before lunch was over, Missing Treasures was added to his list and already had fifty thousand views. She stared at it in surprise and dismay. How had they missed that they were this famous?

  * * *

  Louise spent the rest of the day searching through the rough translation of the codex for some references to the gossamer call while watching the numbers soar on JelloShot01’s channel. Debate broke out on the fan website as to whether this was a real video or a fake created by Nigel. The doubters pointed to the odd posting time, insisting that Lemon-Lime was based on Elfhome and wouldn’t be able to upload during any period other than Shutdown. Others pointed out that if Nigel was working with Lemon-Lime, then he could have arranged for work visas for Pittsburghers. This triggered a spirited debate between people who thought the twins had to be elves and those who believed that they were Elfhome “natives”—Pittsburghers born after the first Startup.

  Fifty-three minutes after JelloShot01 copied their video, the first report of the frame-by-frame analysis hit the boards. Louise imagined that she could hear the massive wails of dismay as they discovered the hidden messages. Another twenty-eight minutes and their fans had decided that Lemon-Lime had sought Nigel out in order to raise money to replace their equipment. This completely ignored the fact that Nigel had posted a very public message seeking Lemon-Lime. Another theory surfaced after someone decided to take the video’s storyboard as gospel truth. Obviously, this new camp stated, Lemon-Lime was trying to warn Nigel that he was about to be tricked into a one-way trip to Elfhome. This was quickly refuted by fans that were also followers of Nigel’s work. Apparently Nigel had been fairly public in his attempts to get to Elfhome; the production company that handled his nature documentaries had been denied travel visas by the EIA for several years. His fans also pointed out that Nigel was in New York for the Today Show as part of his pitch to NBC to do a series on Elfhome. Nigel had reached out to Lemon-Lime before the April Shutdown. Lemon-Lime, they theorized, could have left Pittsburgh last month and joined Nigel in New York.

  This triggered a furious reexamination of Nigel’s appearance on the NBC morning show and the phrase “hope to be working.” Some stated that this and the video indicated that Lemon-Lime hadn’t agreed to anything. Others claimed that the “hope” meant that Nigel hadn’t locked in the NBC backing yet, and Lemon-Lime was only defending Nigel from the backlash of his shout-out. Yet another group suggested that NBC was waffling on their decision, and Lemon-Lime’s video was an attempt to sway the network by adding their fanbase to Nigel’s.

  “Wow, they really overthink everything.” Louise closed the window on the seemingly endless debate. “They’re making it all more complicated than it really was.”

  “Maybe,” Jillian said. “We had no idea if it was really Nigel Reid trying to make contact with us and we don’t know why he’s in New York and we didn’t expect such a huge shout-out from him. Face it, we didn’t even know we were famous, and from what I can tell, we’re up there with blockbuster movie stars. Some of what the fans are saying might be right.”

  Louise didn’t want to believe that Nigel had used them. He always seemed so genuinely nice on camera. She wanted it to honestly be what it be appeared to be—Nigel had only contacted them to learn something interesting to him. She had to admit that she could be wrong.

  “Do you know what really sucks?” Jillian sighed. “If we could go public, then everything would work out. We could sign a movie deal with some big studio and use the money to save the babies.”

  Louise’s stomach sunk at the idea of so many people focused on them. “No one is going to offer us a deal. Even if they did, as soon as the studios found out we’re nine-year-olds, they’d back out.”

  “I don’t know,” Jillian said. “People in Hollywood make some pretty crazy decisions.”

  “We’re still minors. We can’t sign contracts on our own. Mom and Dad would have to agree to anything, and you know what they’ll say.”

  “That we should have as normal a childhood as possible,” Jillian growled with frustration. “Alexander was so lucky. Her grandfather didn’t make her be normal.”

  “He must know what it was like, growing up and being like us. Mom and Dad are doing the best they can, but they can’t know how boring it is to try to keep at everyone else’s speed.”

  “This might be the perfect way to nail a Hollywood deal, and it’s going to just slip away. Everyone loves us now, but how long is that going to last? A year? Two? It’s not
going to last until we’re eighteen.”

  Louise liked doing the videos, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to do them another eight years. Hollywood was Jillian’s dream. If Louise had a dream that included Hollywood, it’d be doing nature documentaries like Nigel. “Well, maybe not The Adventures of Queen Soulful Ember, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come up with something just as cool.”

  Jillian harrumphed. Being a Hollywood director had been her dream for years. It had to be hard to see the possibility dangle within reach and yet know that she couldn’t claim it. She probably didn’t realize, though, that it made Louise feel so small and unsure beside her. Louise didn’t know what she wanted to be when they got old enough to do anything and everything. She did know she didn’t want to be in front of a camera, having everyone watch her, and she didn’t want to be behind the camera, having to tell everyone what to do. And that knowledge made her feel even smaller.

  Hating how she felt, she focused back on searching the codex for information on the gossamer call. There was nothing on gossamers. Not on how they were controlled. Not on how they were created. She flipped through the book, pausing here and there to study the spells traced on the pages. So much to learn, so little time.

  They knew that the gossamers were called with whistles. The domana triggered their magic with different words. Every written spell had an activation phrase. Sound seemed to be a basic part of magic. Each domana spell required a different finger position. Using motions and words, the elves operated their bodies like a human did a computer, selecting a spell and running it. No, not like a computer, like an instrument. The finger positions were like the fingering of a flute or guitar. The domana were producing a unique chord with each new gesture and word. Given two hands, ten fingers, two joints on the thumb, three joints on the other fingers, there was a staggering number of possible finger positions.

  The written spells in the codex required phrases to trigger them. The phrases worked much like spell locks in that the main function was to keep the spell from activating until the caster wished it to activate. That each spell required a different phrase, though, seemed to indicate that there was more to it than a simple key turning in a lock. Perhaps the sound set up important resonance within the spell components. . . .

  So much they didn’t know. Louise sighed and focused on what she did know.

  The elves didn’t have slides or valves on their instruments. A whistle with multiple tones then would be fixed and played like a flute or boatswain’s call. The samples of gossamer calls they could find had featured only four tones that they’d already mapped out sine waves for. One was in the high ultrasonic range, but the others stepped down the hertz range to something audible to humans. It seemed to indicate that the gossamer’s hearing was similar to whales and open-water species of dolphins. The Earth sea mammals used low-pitched tones in the seventy-five hertz range to communicate because those sounds traveled farther. They used frequencies in the one hundred to hundred-fifty kilohertz range for echolocation. Humans could only hear up to twenty kilohertz, so it would explain why three of the tones were audible. The twins had noticed that “turn” commands used the ultrasonic tone while the other three sounds triggered “docking” and “wait” activities. Obviously the elves were using instinctual behavior for their commands.

  The question remained whether the commands were actually spells printed on the whistle itself or were like the domana-caste, genetically keyed within the gossamer. Considering the limited tones of the whistle and the wide range of words used as commands for both written spells and domana spell-casting, it seemed likely that it was the latter. If that was the case, then the “magic” of the whistle was that it needed to cross great distances in order to trigger the gossamer’s genetically coded spells. Dufae actually discussed in length how the magic “jumped” distances via resonance, which allowed the domana-caste to channel the massive amounts of power from a distant location to where they needed it. He also took great care in determining the exact distance between the mouth and the hands to trigger the domana spells.

  Louise flipped back to that section of the codex. Since Dufae was cut off from the Spell Stones, he had developed a set of spells to help him carry out his experiments. The twins needed a whistle that could hit all four tones with a magical spell that could amplify the reach of the instrument.

  An hour later, she thought she knew how to build a gossamer call. They wouldn’t even need to use the school’s printer. Of course, until they got a working generator, there’d be no way to test it.

  The next day they started the set construction during the joint stagecraft class. Louise had designed the sets so they broke down into many intricate pieces when they were dissembled, requiring three-dimensional models for each part to be understandable. The Darling nursery in a ghetto of New York City. The Neverland forest with trees that umbrella-opened and the Lost Boys’ houses tucked under the roots of the trees. The mermaids’ lagoon where “the ocean” would shimmer blue via a series of holographic projectors. And then, as a grand piece of design, the massive Jolly Roger pirate ship with three masts and rigging, which, of course, had to stay hidden in the wings until the fourth act.

  Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton reviewed the designs as they gathered in the art room while Louise’s heart hammered in her chest.

  “This is ambitious,” Miss Hamilton said.

  “Are you sure we can get all this work done?” Mr. Howe asked. “We have less than eight weeks now before the show, and we won’t have access to the stage until the end of this month.”

  “These are the time schedules I’ve got worked out for the construction.” Louise pulled up the lists. This was the first year that they would use the large auditorium. Every class put on a play; the productions were set up so each class had private use of the stage for only a month. Since the sixth-graders were currently erecting their sets and doing dress rehearsals, their class wouldn’t have access to the stage until that play was over. “As long as we get the materials on time and have access to the machines like the printer. The big one in the annex.”

  “What do you need that for?” Mr. Howe asked. “Do you even know how to program it? Normally only seniors work with that for the advanced robotics and science labs.”

  Louise pointed out the magic-generator doubles. “These projectors are usually very expensive because they’re very versatile, but if we use the printer to create them with limited functions, we could do the same thing for just a few dollars.”

  “And yes, we know how to program them,” Jillian said.

  “Why do we even need these?” Miss Hamilton asked.

  “The lagoon is supposed to be a bunch of rocks in the water. It’s basically a protected swimming cove. The mermaids are supposed to be slipping in and out of the water. The script calls for Peter and Wendy to attempt to capture a mermaid. She slips from their grasp and swims away.”

  “There’s no explanation on how this is supposed to be staged.” Jillian took up the narrative. “We think Barrie meant for the mermaids to enter and exit via trapdoors, but those were banned in New York schools before we were born.”

  Mr. Howe frowned, looking off vaguely as if he was considering time. “It really wasn’t that long ago—was it?”

  “It was,” Miss Hamilton murmured. “So you’re going to get around needing to have the mermaid just ‘disappear’ by projecting her?”

  “Her and three other mermaids in these alcoves.” Louise pointed them out. “Instead of them being stuck in a fairly seated position, we can pre-record part of their performances and splice them in, kind of integrating film and live action.”

  “This is just a fifth-grade play,” Miss Hamilton said.

  “We’re within budget and time.” Jillian gave her a carefully innocent smile. “And this is the Perelman School for the Gifted in New York City, not a public school in Detroit. It will be a play that will make parents feel like the money they spend on their kids’ education is justified.”

 
Louise thought Jillian was laying it on too thick and bumped her slightly. Jillian continued to smile brightly at their teachers and bumped her back.

  Louise tried to detour the conversation. “These projectors will allow us to basically hand-wave most of the set for the mermaids’ lagoon. We can do a ‘painted’ backdrop of rocky cliffs, kind of what they did for the movie.” She pulled up a print from the Disney cartoon and a photograph of a Hawaiian cliff for comparison. “See, the real cliff has a black rock and the blues of the water as its primary colors. Disney went with a more purple color scheme; I think to suggest a woman’s boudoir. Don’t think we should go that direction.”

  “No,” Mr. Howe said.

  “Definitely not,” Miss Hamilton said.

  Louise closed the Disney print and centered the photograph. “So what I was thinking is blowing up this photo and printing it out on a color printer on the largest sheets of paper our printers can handle. I think eleven by seventeen inches is the largest. This is the cost of the paper, ink, and adhesive.”

  “And mount them on . . . ?”

  “We do both the nursery and the lagoon as a series of panels that lock together to make a full-size wall. The nursery backdrop will be on one side and the lagoon cliff would be on the other. Panels can be flipped as they’re raised and lowered. This is the break-out of their cost, and here’s the model rendering showing them being raised and lowered.”

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Mr. Howe said.

  Louise nodded, heart still hammering. She knew that she needed to be completely thorough with all of the set design or the teachers would feel as if they would have to watch over every little detail.

  The teachers conferred in murmurs and then nodded in agreement.