Louise pulled old backgrounds from their home computer to build the needed sets. Giggling, Jillian told her between first and second period that the “precious treasures” would be various plot McGuffins from earlier videos. They could get around not showing the queen and her court and use only dialogue to progress the story. They spent the break between second and third period recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.
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 the various Foley effects like the 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 even knew their names since the few times he’d called on them, he’d 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 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 that 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.”