Wood Sprites (16 page)

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.

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.