Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “Nigel got a visa for Elfhome?” Louise cried.

  “No,” Aunt Kitty said. “Apparently EIA is being a pain. They want NBC to commit to a full season before giving Nigel and his cameraman visas, and that’s all they’re willing to cover. Nigel will have to pull a full working crew from the affiliate in Pittsburgh.”

  Jillian tilted her head in confusion. “What are they doing for a pilot show if EIA won’t let Nigel on Elfhome?”

  “They’re going to film using animals and plants here on Earth,” Aunt Kitty said. “The kuesi at the Bronx Zoo. Some of the songbirds at the aviary at the Queens Zoo. And there’s a herd of Elfhome red elk at the Philadelphia Zoo.”

  “Oh, that’s going to be so lame!” the twins cried. Louise added, “The cool part of Elfhome is the forest and the elves and the weird monsters that need magic to survive.”

  Aunt Kitty nodded agreement. “Since they’re calling the series Chased by Monsters, I think that’s the general idea that they’re going for.”

  Louise squealed. “Oh, that sounds so cool! Nigel is perfect for it.” Although it did sound slightly dangerous, considering what had happened with the simple fire ants. “I hope he doesn’t get hurt doing it.”

  “So this Lemon-Lime video made Nigel more popular?” Jillian asked.

  “Yes,” Aunt Kitty said. “So some good came from these people stealing your name.”

  The twins were saved from having to come up with an answer by the waiter showing up with their drinks.

  That night, they built a full-scale model of American Museum of Natural History in virtual space. They deleted out the Alpha Centauri exhibit. They used the museum’s database and photos of the traveling exhibit at other museums around the world to create mock-ups of the display cases. The e-mails between employees showed where they planned to position the cases. Once they had the AMNH in June set up, the twins donned gaming goggles and considered the problem before them.

  The museum database listed Dufae’s box at two feet wide by two feet high by three feet long and weighing eighty-six pounds. Last week, the twins had used cardboard to create a mock-up and filled it with cans of foods. They only had twenty-seven cans, totaling thirty pounds. They could lift a smaller box filled with the cans, but the mock-up was too large and awkward. Their arms were too short to get leverage on its smooth surface. If they could barely shift the cardboard fake, they wouldn’t be able to budge the real box that was nearly three times heavier.

  Their only option was to set up a magic generator next to the box, open its spell lock with the keyword, and take out one or two of the nactka.

  “Third floor sucks.” Louise frowned at the ceiling of the gallery. “No skylights.”

  “Even if we came in through the roof, we’d have to get past two cameras.”

  They used color to represent the field of vision for the cameras, leaving the safe areas in stark black and white. In a glance, they could tell where they could walk without being picked up on monitors. Huge sections of the massive building were monochrome. Elephants could wonder through unnoticed as long as they kept to certain areas. Whoever had set up the museum’s security system, however, had done an excellent job covering access points like doorways, staircases, and elevators.

  They could hack into the monitoring system, but they couldn’t actually loop the video like they could on Tesla. Short of teleporting, there was no way to reach the gallery without being seen.

  Once they were actually in the hall, however, they could avoid the cameras. By the very nature of the area hosting traveling exhibits, the security hadn’t been tailor-designed for the display cases. The squat box was screened by taller items on all four sides; as long as they stayed under four feet and three inches, they’d be hidden. Since they were only four feet tall, they wouldn’t even have to duck. The Dance of Joy, however, was strictly out.

  “It’s going to be a popular exhibit.” Louise blew a raspberry as she realized that their Lemon-Lime videos had probably helped to create a massive desire to see real Elvish goods. “We won’t be able to open the box and ransack it with dozens of people milling around.”

  “We’re not going to be able to get up to the gallery unseen after hours.”

  “There’s the bathroom around the corner.” Louise pointed toward the restroom in the tower stairwell. “There were no cameras in them.”

  Jillian shifted the virtual world and grumbled at what she saw. “A mouse couldn’t sneak through here unseen.”

  Louise sighed. “Let’s start over. We need to be able to get inside, to the gallery unseen, and then open the box without any other visitors seeing us. Get the nactka. Lock the box again. Then get out, without being searched.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “What we need is a cloak of invisibility and a time-stop device.”

  “We do have a book of magical spells.” Jillian held up her tablet.

  * * *

  There was no time-stop spell, although the nactka suggested that the elves had one. What they did find, however, was a “light-bending” spell that was for all practical purposes the same thing as invisibility.

  And entirely too cool not to experiment with.

  Louise thought she’d walked into the wrong room on Monday. She jerked to a halt, momentarily disoriented. She didn’t recognize the room, but they had just been at their locker, so they had to be on the fifth-grade floor. She yawned deeply, sure that it was the lack of sleep that was making it hard to think. They’d stayed up every night since last Tuesday, playing with the magic generator and planning the two robberies.

  Jillian thumped into her back. “Ow! Lou! Why’d you stop?”

  Louise rocked back so she could check the number over the doorway. Yes, it was their classroom. All the art hung on the walls had been taken down, the desks had been rearranged, and there was something odd about the windows that she couldn’t put a finger on. What’s more, no one was in the room, despite the fact that the hall was crowded.

  Jillian didn’t notice the changes; she was focused on her tablet. She stepped around Louise and continued walking to where their seats used to be. “We should get something like a floor safe that’s fireproof . . . and . . . and put it in a cardboard box labeled ‘time capsule, do not open until 2050’ and put it into our closet. We could even draw a safe on the outside of the box. Or we can get something like this.”

  Jillian held up her tablet to show a bullet-shaped container made by the Smithsonian that had the words “Time Capsule” printed in large blue letters on it. There was a plaque to mark where the tube was buried.

  “What if Mom and Dad make us bury it?”

  Jillian made a face as she thought about it a moment. “That might work.”

  “How would you feel if your parents told you that they’d buried you in the backyard for twenty years? It would be worse than that cabbage-patch story Grandma Mayer used to tell us.”

  “Better than Nana.” She fell into their grandmother’s thick Jamaican accent. “We got you at Macy’s. It was a half-off sale; that’s why we got two.”

  “Forget about it. No burying the babies,” Louise stated firmly. “It’s just creepy.”

  Jillian blew a raspberry, reached where her desk should be, and stopped in surprise. “Where’s my desk?”

  “Over here.” Louise pointed to the desk beside her. The powers that be had decided that fifth-graders were all now big kids and had put desks for high school students in the room at the beginning of the year. After five minutes with their feet dangling, the twins had demanded that they be given desks for little kids. “Or over there.”

  “No. No. We sit together.” Jillian picked up the other small desk and moved it beside Louise. “Where is everyone?”

  It was weird that they were the only ones in the room. Now that she thought about it, all the hallways had been crowded as they climbed the stairs. “I think they’re too scared to come into the rooms.”

  “Really?”

  The twins had ru
shed to the classroom to get away from the noisy crowd. It seemed very wrong, though, that they were more scared of the other kids than a bomb. Maybe because they realized the odds for an ugly encounter with peers was a million times more likely than a second bomb.

  Claudia peered timidly into the room, saw that they rearranging the desk and hurried in. Normally she sat at the head of the first row but she claimed the desk beside Louise. “Did you hear? There’s elves at the Waldorf Astoria!”

  “Really?” the twins both shouted. “Which ones?”

  Claudia winced. “I can’t say the name. They only gave the Elvish name, and it was really long. It’s the female with really white hair and the blue triangle thing on her forehead.”

  “Saetato-fohaili-ba-taeli?” the twins cried.

  “Um, maybe,” Claudia said.

  It was an elf, only not one of the twins’ favorites. The female’s English name was Sparrow, the correct translation being Lifted Sparrow by Wind. The twins had called the character based on her “Jerked” but never had a reason to mention that in any of their videos, so she remained nameless to their fans. Sparrow was the viceroy’s husepavua, which literally meant “loaned voice,” so the twins had her carry around a megaphone, through which she shouted any order that Windwolf gave her. The few times the twins had raided EIA records, Sparrow seemed to act as an ambassador, meeting with Director Maynard and Pittsburgh city officials in Windwolf’s place. Normally if there was video of some Elfhome diplomatic event, the cameras would stay focused on Windwolf. Which wasn’t all that surprising—he was the viceroy, looked like a teen idol and had a rabid fan following of girls from ages nine through ninety.

  If only it had been Windwolf instead of Sparrow. However, with madmen blowing up buildings, Louise was glad the viceroy was still safe on Elfhome.

  Louise squeaked in realization that it was the worst possible time for the elves to venture to New York City. “Why on Earth is she here? Now?”

  Claudia blinked in surprise. “You haven’t heard? There’s this really awesome exhibit of Elvish artifacts found all over the world. It’s coming to New York in a few days. The UN decided that since humans have broken part of the treaty by logging the quarantine zone, the elves could reclaim any part of the exhibit that is culturally important to them.”

  “What?” Louise and Jillian both cried. They hadn’t planned for elves seeing the exhibit. Sparrow would know Dufae’s box was a chest and that it could be opened. At least the female elf couldn’t open it, not on Earth without magic, and not on Elfhome without the key phrase to the spell lock.

  “The elves will probably lie and claim everything in the exhibit.” Elle hovered at the door for a minute, trying not to look scared and failing. Then with a deep breath, she marched across the room to the twins. She gave Jillian an odd measuring look, like she wanted something from Jillian but knew she couldn’t get it from her, and then hugged Louise tightly.

  Louise squeaked in surprise and then realized that Elle was trembling. The girl was really, really scared. Taking pity on Elle, Louise hugged her back. “There, there.” She repeated the nonsense her father always said at times like this. She understood now why; what the hell was she supposed to say? It was the first time Louise had ever hugged anyone outside her family. Elle seemed to be all fragile bones under her porcelain white skin. She smelled totally different than Jillian; if pink had a scent, Elle was delicately sprinkled with it.

  Jillian gave Louise a confused look for hugging Elle. “No, they’re elves. They won’t lie; it’s shameful to them to be deceitful. It goes against their sense of honor. They wouldn’t say something was culturally important if it wasn’t.”

  Which was the twins’ only comfort in the face of the news.

  “Bad form?” Elle quoted Peter Pan’s criticism of Hook when he cheated. “There will always be villains that break the rules. Only children are naïve enough to believe that.”

  “Honor isn’t about other people, it’s about what you want to be,” Louise said. “A hero does the good and noble thing. The villain allows fear or envy or selfishness to let him ignore what is right. If you can recognize the difference, then you’re choosing to be one or the other. Which do you want to be? The villain or the hero?”

  “Oh!” Claudia cried as she remembered something else. “And Sae-Saetoto . . .”

  “Sparrow.” Jillian saved Claudia from butchering the rest of the female’s name. Really, how much harder was Saetato than Claudia?

  “Sparrow brought sekasha with her. Five of them!”

  The twins squealed in excitement. “Which ones? Which ones?”

  “Wraith Arrow.” Claudia ticked names off on her fingers. “Skybolt. Zephyr Blade. The blue-haired one.”

  “Stormsong?” The twins squealed for one of their favorites. Apparently at some point, Stormsong had had a stalker with an artist’s eye. The twins had found hauntingly beautiful pictures of Stormsong doing unlikely things like skateboarding. The photographs had been on an abandoned website; it wasn’t clear if the stalker had died of old age or come to a violent end for pissing off the female warrior elf.

  “I think Killing Frost,” Claudia continued. “Or it could have been Tempest Knife. You know a lot of them look like twins.”

  “They’re not twins,” Louise said. The ninjas had attempted to build family trees for the elves in Pittsburgh and were dismayed to discover that while the elves were all part of the Wind Clan, not one was actually related to another. None of Windwolf’s bodyguards were even cousins to one another. But Louise had to admit that they did look like brothers. The Wind Clan sekasha were tall, strongly built without being muscle-bound, black-haired, blue-eyed, and model handsome. They were also all the same exact height except for the blue-haired Stormsong and the youngest of the sekasha, Louise’s personal favorite, Pony.

  Jillian was already checking her tablet for news stories. “Of course they don’t name the bodyguards. Come on. Pictures. Pictures. Yes!”

  Louise took out her tablet as Jillian linked the story. The elves had been photographed at the train station, unloading. There was something surreal about seeing them up against the familiar landscape of New York City. “That’s Bladebite, not Skybolt, and Tempest Knife.”

  “How can you tell?” Claudia asked.

  Louise frowned at the male, trying to pinpoint the differences. “Bladebite is wider across the shoulders. His features are squarer. He keeps his hair shorter, so the beads the sekasha braid into their hair are more noticeable.”

  “What are the beads for?” Elle sounded honestly curious, not like before, when she didn’t expect them to know and thought she was setting up a trap.

  The twins glanced at each other. They’d never been able to find the answer until they got hold of the codex. How safe was it to explain to their classmate information that they shouldn’t have?

  “They’re like batteries,” Jillian decided to tell them. “The beads store magic so that the sekasha can trigger the protective spells tattooed on their arms in areas where there is little or no magic. It only buys them a minute or two of time on Earth, but presumably they’d kill their attacker in that time.”

  “Oh, so cool!” Claudia bounced. “We should go see them!”

  “What?” the twins both cried.

  “Wouldn’t it be awesome to meet a sekasha? I think they’re totally the coolest elves. Sword Strike is my favorite; he’s so dreamy!” Claudia cried and dropped her voice to say the catchphrase of the captain of the queen’s guards. “Sonai Domi.” She sighed deeply. “It’s so cool when he says that. You can tell that he loves her so much.”

  “What does ‘sonai domi’ mean?” Elle asked. “And are they really lovers? Or did you make that all up?”

  Okay, Elle was totally freaking Louise out. Elle sounded like she really wanted the answer to be “Yes, they’re in love.” Elle had to be a fan of the videos.

  “We think they are.” Louise linked to their home computer and found the clip she wanted. “Normall
y we grab everything we can of a person talking and then build a phonetics library using their voice. After we write the script, we record Jillian reading it to get the timing and inflection that we want. We merge that with the right voice for the character to get natural sounding dialogue.”

  “But the real sekasha almost never talk,” Jillian grumbled.

  They had run hundreds of hours of video through an application that watched for lip movement, and only uncovered a handful of spoken words, most of them on the order of “yes” and “no.” The bodyguards stood in the background, faces set, silently vigilant.

  The sekasha were, however, so omnipresent that the twins felt that they had to have at least one active character who was part of the holy warrior caste. Finally they found a voice sample. In a Pittsburgh television station’s news archive, they unearthed a video taken during the signing of the peace treaty between the humans and the elves. In a total of twenty-seven frames, Sword Strike’s expression changed to utter tenderness as he gazed down at his queen and murmured the two words in a deep, rich rumble. It felt extraordinary to witness the sudden transformation, as if they had accidently seen into the male’s soul.

  Louise played the clip, first at normal speed, and then in slow motion.

  “Wow,” Elle whispered. “They’re into each other.”

  Louise broke the phrase down. “The ninjas have translated sonai to ‘kind’ and domi as ‘the female I’m beholden to.’ Literally it would mean ‘my kind lady,’ but we ran across some other places where elves used sonai and a more correct translation seems to be ‘have mercy.’ We’re fairly sure at this moment Sword Strike isn’t saying ‘my kind lady’ but ‘please don’t kick their butt.’ See, she starts off looking annoyed, and then blushes, and then looks a little embarrassed. It’s what started the whole ‘blast them all’ running joke.”