The mice finished their lap with Pink winning.
“Joy made us racing scarfs.” Nikola showed off his blue muffler. “Mine is Wind Clan blue!”
“Mine’s wonderful amazing pink!” Pink cried. “I want goggles too! Just like Tinker and Oilcan!”
It took Louise a moment to recognize the nicknames of their sister and cousin. It also made Louise realize that she’d been thinking of all of the babies as Nikola Tesla when only one of them was a boy. The three girls still were unnamed.
“Have you thought about names?” Louise asked.
“I want to be Jawbreaker,” Red Gingham stated.
“Jawbreaker?” Louise echoed, mystified.
“It’s Joy’s favorite candy,” Jawbreaker explained.
“Maybe…” Louise hesitated in suggesting “Candy” as a name. It was one of those weak sexist female names that always appalled her mother. “Girls should have names that allow them to be a Supreme Court judge if they wanted. Sissy and Candy would have an uphill battle just because of their names.” Still, Candy had to be better than Jawbreaker…right?
“I want to be Chuck Norris,” Pink announced as Louise struggled on the whole “strong name” issue.
“Chuck Norris is a boy,” Nikola pointed out.
“I can be a boy if I want to be,” Pink stated firmly and then turned to Louise. “You get to pick your gender? Don’t you?”
Before Louise could answer, Green Velvet squeaked, “I want to be Jawbreaker too.”
“No! I said it first!” Red Gingham cried.
They collapsed into a ball of squirming fur as they wrestled for use of the name.
“Careful!” Louise caught them in her cupped hands before they could roll off the edge of the bed. “Hey, no fighting.”
They were so tiny and light. The two of them barely weighed anything at all as they squirmed about, all soft rabbit fur and plastic bones. They felt so fragile that it took her breath away. She could crush them by accident.
This isn’t really them, she reassured herself, they’re still safe within Tesla.
“What’s wrong with names like Jane Goodall, Dian Flossy or Rachel Carson?”
“We want names like Tinker and Oilcan!” the babies squeaked in chorus. “They’re so cool! You should see them race! They’re awesome!”
“Race?” Louise wondered if she was mistaken about the whole “awake” thing.
* * *
Sometime during the night, the babies had visited the Jello Shot forum and discovered a vast treasure trove of pictures and video of Alexander. All of them had to do with hoverbike racing. The still shots were all after winning a race, covered with mud except where goggles protected her eyes, grinning triumphantly. In many of the photos, Orville was within arm’s reach, smiling just as brilliantly.
The Jello Shot people were divided in several camps. The haters were disappointed that Alexander didn’t look like the Valkyrie from The Queen’s Salvage. What did Prince Yardstick see in such a short, dirty wild thing? With so many beautiful female elves to choose from, why had he married her?
The romantics decided that the blonde in the video was a clear reference to Disney’s Cinderella and that Lemon-Lime had merely presented an iconic princess with a Pittsburgh twist. Clearly the masses weren’t ready for the truth, which was “Love is indeed blind.”
A growing number of fans, however, were entranced by Alexander. They wanted to know everything about her, hence the unearthed videos. The sources were Pittsburghers in college, people that had studied at the University of Pittsburgh, and the small but rabid niche fandom of hoverbike racing.
The Jello Shots had found an amateur documentary made during last year’s blistering hot summer. The filmmaker was Charles Wyatt, a grad student attending the University of Pittsburgh for history. Apparently it was his only effort at making a documentary and it showed. All the scenes were horribly framed, badly scripted and lacked anything in terms of editing. At least he had a rich, deep voice. He saw the hoverbike as the first integration of elf magic and human machine. It might turn out to be like the Jacquard loom, which could be “programmed” via paper tape, arguably the great-grandfather of the modern computer. “A chance to record history as it’s being made by the people actually making it,” Wyatt announced at the start of the video. He conceived of the documentary with only a few months left on Elfhome to film it. Almost immediately, he ran into an unexpected reluctance of those involved to talk to anyone with a camera.
Wyatt started with the president of a company that made hoverbikes.
The man laughed and shook his head. “I don’t really know how they work. I could rebuild the gearbox for the spell chain blindfolded, but explain how it actually makes the bikes move forward? No.”