“Hooo!” Iggy shouted and stabbed the pause icon, stopping the camera on their version of him as Captain Hook. They had taken his suggestion of Captain Jack Sparrow and gone that direction with trinkets braided in among dreadlocks and a five-o’clock shadow shading into a goatee. Instead of the red of Hook’s traditional costume—based on a reference in the book that he fancied himself an officer in the British navy—they went with a tattered black with just hints of gold. He made a dark and exotic pirate captain. “Oh! That’s awesome! That is so awesome! How did you do that? Are your parents like movie people? Did they help you?”
“Seriously?” Louise thought everyone their age could edit video.
“Yes!”
She explained how they had used a rendering application to turn the photographs into skins for CGI models that could then be edited. “The stock running animation is fairly wooden if you spend a lot of frames showing it, so we move the camera angle a lot.” She backed the video up to illustrate how they used just a few frames of the computer-generated movement intermixed with close-ups of the Lost Boys and shots of tropical rain forest that they played with the color spectrum and lighting to make seem moonlit. She let it play through to the sword fight.
“So cool. But how do you know how to do all this?” Iggy asked as the video ended.
“We make videos all the time.” She pointed at their production company logo that she had put at the end out of habit.
“Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?” Iggy cried.
“It’s a production company name.” Louise showed him how their names made up the word JEl-Lo. “Jillian Eloise and Louise. Lemon-Lime because there’s two of us.
Iggy stood staring at her with his mouth open for a minute and then he dissolved into laughter. “What I meant was ‘You’re Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?’ My sister has one of your posters above her bed. The ‘blast it all’ one.”
They had designed character sketches for their series. In their videos, Queen Soulful Ember had a quick temper that led to her blowing up everything that annoyed her. “Blast it all” was her catchphrase and often triggered extreme reactions from her bodyguards and servants as they tried—politely—to keep her from reducing everything to cinders. Queen Soulful Ember’s character sketch for posters and whatnot showed her mostly buried under guards with only her madly twitching fingers visible and the words of her catchphrase flaming overhead.
The twins planned to use the artwork to make money off their videos. They’d tried to set up a store using an online retailer that would use their uploaded art to create customized items, everything from posters to coffee cups. For a small percentage of the profit, YourStore would handle everything from creating the goods to mailing them out to customers. The twins had gotten all the artwork in place and the prices set. The last step, however, required that they provide bank account information. Their parents wouldn’t let the twins use their account, citing everything from possible identity thief to tax reporting. The same reasons also applied for the twins setting up an account for themselves with an adult co-signer. Their parents didn’t want to be held liable for some financial mess that YourStore might suck them into.
Since the twins couldn’t collect income, they’d assumed that the store never went live. Had the store been selling their stuff all this time?
“A Queen Soulful Ember poster?” Louise asked. “A Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo brand from YourStore?”
“Yes! You’re famous!” Iggy laughed. “Don’t tell me that you don’t socialize online either.”
“We hang out at Sundance and Vimeo and Vicker.”
He cocked one eyebrow in puzzlement. “What are those?”
“Filmmaker sites.” They maintained gender- and age-neutral identities on the sites, posting so that no one would track the messages back to them. It was mostly because their parents were sure that they would be cyberstalked by dirty old men. Louise doubted that anyone would be interested in them, but the secrecy kept their parents from discovering their activities on questionable sites.
“So you’re totally unaware that there are kids in this school that can quote all of The Queen’s Pantaloons?”
“All of it?”
“They totally mess up the timing of the jokes, but yeah.”
* * *
The news went through the fifth grade like a virus, visibly moving from kid to kid. The students that had been told they were Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo stared at the twins as if they had suddenly become conjoined. Which would have been totally annoying if it weren’t for the state of their finances.