Wood Sprites(51)
Louise stared at Zahara as her mind raced. Was it possible that the Codex had some information on it? Once they had a magic generator, they could experiment with any spells that the elves might have embedded into a whistle, but they didn’t have any gossamers to test them on. They could build a virtual simulator of a gossamer if they could find anything about their physiology. So far they hadn’t found any studies on the massive living airships. The fact that the creatures were translucent made all pictures of them blurry and difficult to figure out where the flying jellyfishlike animal ended and the sky began.
“Louise?”
“Um…”
“You should at least thank him for the shout-out,” Zahara said.
“You think so?”
The bell rang for homeroom. There was a sudden and massive movement of bodies as everyone in the hall headed to their classroom.
“My mom always thanks anyone that says something nice about her to the media.”
Louise nearly protested that they weren’t on the same level as Zahara’s fashion-model mother, but then remembered the Today Show’s host reaction to the name “Lemon-Lime.” They might have been unaware of it, but apparently they were famous. “Okay, I’ll thank him.”
* * *
There were hundreds of messages under Nigel’s original post. The first was “Seriously? Nigel Reid? The Lemon-Lime? I don’t know which one to disbelieve the most.” The second stated “Dude, Lemon-Lime talks to no one. They’re like ghosts!” A random reply on the next page showed that the comments turned ugly as fans decided that the shout-out was just a way to steal Lemon-Lime fame.
Louise winced. Poor Nigel. Zahara was right, for all the grief he was getting, he deserved a thank you. She opened up a private message and gave it a subject line of “Thank you for the great shout-out.” After that, she didn’t know what to say.
Famous people are all just normal people at their core, Zahara had said. It was certainly true for her and Jillian. Well, they were normal if one ignored the being elves, conceived after their male genetic donor was dead, and smarter than just about everyone else.…
She stared at the blank screen for a while as the cursor blinked. They had nothing to give Nigel right now. All they had was a handful of observations that anyone could make. They should be sure before they told him anything, and that would take time. Meanwhile the poor man was going to get dragged through the dirt. In public.
If they released a Lemon-Lime video acknowledging Nigel, then they could clear his name. They had planned on doing filler anyhow.
* * *
“Oh, great idea!” Jillian reacted to the news with wide eyes amazement. “A video reply will confirm we’re really Lemon-Lime. We could crank a filler out in a few hours.”
By the end of homeroom, they had a short storyboard laid out. Normally, they did stop-motion with Barbie dolls on green screen; it gave their work a distinctive style. Unfortunately they’d blown up all their entire cast. Louise always thought they should acknowledge the accident by having Queen Soulful Ember blast the royal court to cinders. The addition of Nigel to the mix gave them the idea of changing who got vaporized. In the new video, the queen lets loose a series of blasts, aiming at one precious treasure after another. Her court barely manages to deflect her spells’ damage onto what seemed to be unoccupied space. After the court leaves the area, however, ninja scientists rain out of their smoldering hiding spaces.
Second act was solely a shot of the Cathedral of Learning to symbolize the University of Pittsburgh. Jillian was writing the dialogue for the first section, but Louise had an inspiration for the middle section. She typed dialogue that would later need to be read in. The first male would say, “Good God, not again. And those were the last of the anthologists, archeologists, biologists, and botanists. What’s next on the list? Ah, entomologist. Yes, we do need to learn more Elvish. This dictionary we have sucks.”
“I do not think that word means what you think it means,” some unseen male says with a slight Spanish accent.
“Get me entomologists!”
The third act was a shot of a crude box trap baited with ants. Nigel Reid and his cameraman stumble into the trap and ninjas hammer it shut and cover it with mailing stickers, addressing it to Elfhome. They could use sound bites from Nigel’s documentary on fire ants—painfully short to stay within fair use limits—specifically the discussion on the queen, since applying the factoids to Soulful Ember would be funny. Once Nigel was trapped inside the box with the ants, she could use a slightly muffled version of the section where he was cheerfully describing the pain of being stung. Repeatedly.