Wood Sprites(39)

“Pantaloons,” Jillian muttered as she mimed typing the word into a translator. “Pantaloons. Pan-ta-loons. Pan. Ta. Loons.” She paused, eyeing the tissue that was standing in for the lace panties. “Canadian water bird? No, I think not. Forgiveness. What are pantaloons?”

Zahara did a very good job of copying Hairbrush’s wild takes—that was half the humor of the scene. “Knickers. Drawers. Bloomers. Tanga.”

“Hmm, tanga.” Jillian consulted the nonexistent translator again. “Currency of Tajikistan. Ah, I see: it’s money. What’s the exchange rate?”

“Once per day?” Zahara sputtered out after a full minute of surprised and confused looks.

Jillian tossed up the tissue and the room burst into squeals of excitement. One girl after another snatched the white tissue out of the air and quoted a ninja anthropologist line from the video and then tossed it up again. Not all the quips were from The Queen’s Pantaloons, displaying a slightly scary range of knowledge.

Elle’s smile started to tremble and the anger in her eyes turned to hurt. It was her birthday party and she was about to cry.

Louise darted forward, caught the tissue and tossed at to Elle. “The queen! The queen!”

Elle’s eyes went wide in surprise.

Jillian quirked a frown at Louise but sketched an elaborate bow. “Queen Soulful Ember.”

Elle’s eyes narrowed but she rose regal as a queen. “Hairbrush? Hairbrush? We have laws against mimes.”

Zahara did a perfect triple take. “Mimes? We do?”

“Surely we do. Frightening things: mimes. What will humans think up next? If we allow mimes, kabuki is sure to follow.”

“Kabuki?”

Elle struck the first pose of Noh play Tamura or Dance of the Ghost. Amazingly, she had the dance fairly well approximated. Anyone that hadn’t spent hours researching and recreating the dance with Barbie dolls and CGI animation wouldn’t know the difference. Why did Elle know the dance so well? Was she a closet fan or had she learned it merely because she knew all the other kids liked the video? The other girls supplied “music” as the ninja anthropologist/musicians, drumming on side tables and pretending to be playing flutes.

“Noh!” Zahara cried. “Your majesty, Noh!”

“Are you telling your queen no?”

“Of course not!”

“But you just did!”

“But… But… But.…” Zahara did Hairbrush’s whimper as she once again found herself in verbal quicksand. “That is not kabuki, it’s Noh.”

A withering look from Elle, probably for Zahara’s part of stealing the spotlight during Elle’s party. “There is a strange female in the garden.” Elle pointed with the same circling flourish as the video, a subtle clue that the queen was on the verge of leveling everything with fire strikes. “We think she might be a mime. She’s moving her mouth but nothing coming out. We can’t allow mimes; next thing we’ll know we’ll be up to our armpits in all sorts of scary things. Mimes. Clowns. Frenchmen.”

“Oh! Oh! Her! No! I—I—I mean to say ‘she isn’t a mime,’ your majesty. She merely swallowed the gossamer call.”

Elle did a perfect comedic pause, hands cocked like a gunfighters, fingers twitching, as the other girls screamed with laughter. She finally broke her silence only when the laugh died to excited giggles. “What?”

“The gossamer call. It generates a sound audible only to gossamers…and mimes.”

Elle let her hands flutter up, fingers twitching madly and the girls all shrieked with laughter. “Blast it all!”

Mrs. Pondwater came in, clapping her hands for attention. “Jillian. Louise. You’re the last girls for photographs. The photographer is waiting for you.”

They allowed themselves to be shooed to the formal living room where a thronelike chair had been set before a smoky-gray backdrop. The photographer eyed them with surprise.

“Elves? Are you sure you two are at the right party?”

Jillian waved off the comment. “We’re just killing time until the next Shutdown, then we’re heading to Elfhome.”

Louise shivered as the words raised the hair on the back of her neck.





11: RECIPE FOR DISASTER


Louise couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster all the next day. While she crawled through the Internet, looking for some hint that someone had created a magic generator, Jillian worked on translating the Dufae Codex.

To their dismay, the first few pages of the Codex were incomprehensible. The author seemed to be making shorthand notes with only the minimum explanations. They didn’t know the meanings of most of the words even though they spelled them out completely. Jillian ran them through online translation software without success. It was only when she reached the sixth page did she find a solid piece of translatable text.