Wood Sprites(67)

When they were little, she told them that she was their fairy godmother, appearing as if by magic with plastic glass slippers and costume ball gowns. Their first introduction to creating videos came on Aunt Kitty’s visits as they acted out fairy tales complete with original scores. Lately they had found themselves at fascinating places like behind the scenes of a Broadway musical production, or at a recording studio, or at the NBC television studios. Aunt Kitty would think that the twins were truly upset by the bombing if they resisted any adventure that she could cook up.

And if their parents thought they were emotionally troubled, there be no privacy for them until they’d “dealt with the trauma.”

“What should we try to test it?” Louise slipped out of her bed.

“The ley line mapping spell.” Jillian pulled out the package of transferable circuit paper they’d ordered online. The printer that could use the paper to print out digital circuits was hidden in the back of their closet. They were quickly running out of hiding spaces.

“It’s not going to find any ley lines.”

“Probably not, but we could be sitting on top of one of those fissures that Dufae talked about and never know it.”

“In Pittsburgh, weird things happen around ley lines, especially with machines. Metal conducts magic and it does nasty things to active spells.”

“It’s the one spell we know works with the generator. Kensbock used it to test his prototype.”

Which would be more comforting if he hadn’t vanished into thin air shortly afterwards. It had been his invention that caused his disappearance, not the spell he used.

Jillian continued on, getting the printer out of the closet. “We should make sure that our work environment is magic-free prior to any large scale experimentation.”

Jillian had a point and of all the spells they could cast, the mapping spell was probably the safest. Louise abandoned her reluctance with a sense of relief and growing excitement. They were going to cast their first spell!

Louise quickly copied the spell for printing while Jillian loaded the paper into the printer.

“Okay, hit it!” Jillian whispered with excitement.

Louise hit “print” and—the longest thirty seconds that Louise had ever experienced later—the spell printed out. “Okay, now we need to get the pastry board.”

Dufae had spent a page talking about building his spell casting room. He needed a stone surface to act as insulator. Dufae had bought several four-foot by twelve-foot slabs and laid them as a floor, complaining about the seams he needed to bridge on the larger spells. The twins had ordered a twenty-four by eighteen inch white marble pastry board that weighed a whopping thirty-six pounds. It had taken both of them to carry it upstairs and hide it between Jillian’s mattress and box spring.

Getting it back out was harder than Louise expected. Things at rest stayed at rest, especially with a twin-size mattress on top of it.

“If we just had a pulley and a rope…” Jillian whispered.

“…Mom would bitch at us for putting a hole in the ceiling!” Louise finished. “Wheel your chair over, we’ll use that.”

“We can just put it on the floor.”

“We need to plug the generator in.”

Jillian swore softly. “How long is the plug?”

Kensbock designed the generator with a stupidly short 220 plug. The only 220 outlet in the house was in the basement for the dryer. They had bought a step up and down voltage converter transformer. Unfortunately, it too had a short plug.

“We need to make this a battery-powered unit,” Louise whispered.

“Yes!” Jillian cried in agreement.

“Shhh!” If they got caught with evidence scattered all across their bedroom, they’d be so grounded.

Jillian slapped hands over her mouth.

They froze in place. Jillian’s eyes flicked right to left, a million miles per second as she thought up lies to cover what they were doing, just in case. After two minutes, it was obvious that they hadn’t been heard.

All told, it took them half an hour to get the pastry board within range of the plug, the protective sheet peeled off the printed circuit, the spell carefully positioned on the marble, and the transformer plugged in. After a great deal of consideration, because the magic generator didn’t have an on/off switch, they decided to connect the leads to the spell prior to plugging it in. Since Louise had more experience with the soldering iron from set making (still something their parents didn’t know), she connected the leads to the spell. She had noticed that some of Dufae’s spells were used for healing—how would they connect the leads to that spell without burning the patient? Obviously they would have to use something like clay or paste.