Wood Sprites

“It’s the price of having us at a private school.” Louise checked the back of the card and winced. Between the barcode and copyright information was the price. It was more than a few dollars. This required work. “You should see the website of the party planners for this. It’s going to be a dress-up tea party like we’re a bunch of first-graders. There’s going to be roses on every table, real china and silver candelabras, and people dressed up like the characters from the movie.”

“And silk ball gowns and crowns for us to wear,” Jillian added.

“And a hair stylist and someone to do our nails,” Louise finished.

Their mother visibly melted. “Oh! That’s sounds so wonderful. You’re going to be so cute!”

“Mom!” they both cried.

Their mother sighed, shaking her head. “I swear, you two were never little girls. It’s like I gave birth to teenagers.”

As they headed for the checkout counter, Louise looked at the card in her hand. She half-expected it to be some odd joke card. It was surprisingly elegant. It took her a second to register that it read “Happy Birthday to Our Sister.”

“She turns eighteen on May first,” Jillian whispered. “Shutdown is next week and then again on May eighteenth. So if we want to get it to her anywhere close to ‘on time,’ we have to mail it today. Postage to Elfhome is going to take all our savings, so Mom needs to buy the card.”

Louise went breathless with the idea. They were actually sending their older sister a birthday card. She’d open up the envelope and be so surprised. There was no way she could know about them, since their parents had stolen their embryos. Would she be just as excited as they were? Would she want to see them? At eighteen, she would be free to travel back and forth between Elfhome and Earth.

It was thrilling to think they might actually get to see their sister someday, maybe even someday soon, because of the card. Still, Louise couldn’t help feeling as if the birthday card was a terrible idea.

9: Lemon-Lime-Flavored Fame

Iggy was blown away by the video when they showed it to him. “This is awesome. I can’t believe you did this. But that’s Gage. And Mason.” He named their classmates as they appeared. The Lost Boys reached the Jolly Roger and there was a pan-over to show the pirates.

“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 in 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 tattered black with just hints of gold. Iggy 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 had made to seem moonlit by manipulating the color spectrum and lighting. 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’s got 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.