Wood Sprites

“Yes, they’re a wonderfully creative and knowledgeable production company.” Nigel dodged around gender, age, and number of people involved, probably because he didn’t know any of it.

“How in the world did you make contact with—” Whatever she was going to ask was cut short by the kuesi fondling her under her dress. She jumped, squeaking loudly, and the clip ended.

The comments under it exploded with speculations on what work he’d be doing with Lemon-Lime. The thread quickly grew ugly as the Jello Shot fans decided that Nigel was merely trying to capitalize on Lemon-Lime’s fame and that he was lying about the entire thing.

“Holy shit,” Louise whispered as she realized that despite being posted just an hour before, there were twenty pages of comments already.

“What are you doing with Nigel?” Zahara asked.

Louise stared at her, full of horror. It had never occurred to her that anyone who knew the truth about them would connect them up to Nigel. “You can’t tell anyone about this! We’d get into so much trouble if our parents knew!”

“They don’t know?”

“No! They think the Internet is full of pedophiles, and we’re not allowed on any adult site until we’re at least fourteen.”

“Wow. That’s like really fossil-age thinking.”

“My mom knew one person that got into trouble like that, so she’s super protective. If they found out that we’ve posted our videos online and are commenting on filmmaking sites and set up the YourStore—”

Louise stopped being able to talk, because she was completely breathless at the idea of how much trouble they’d be in. They’d be grounded for months without Internet, and they might never get their video equipment back.

“I won’t tell,” Zahara promised. “And I’ll tell everyone else not to say anything. But this was on television. Does anyone else know that you’re Lemon-Lime?”

Their Aunt Kitty had helped them pick the name, but she didn’t know about their videos. Also she didn’t watch morning shows. She wasn’t a morning person. Any time they did see her in the mornings, it was usually because she’d been up all night and hadn’t gone to bed yet. It was part of the reason she often babysat in emergencies.

“So what are you doing with Nigel Reid — that your parents know nothing about?”

It sounded horrible when Zahara said it that way.

“He wants to ask us questions about the gossamer call.”

Zahara’s eyes went wide. “But didn’t you just make that up as a joke?”

“Yes. I mean, no. We know there is a whistle for the gossamers, but we haven’t found any references to what it looks like or how it works.” Louise pulled at her hair at the sudden realization that they didn’t have anything concrete to tell Nigel. Her research had been detoured by everything else.

“So what are you going to do?”

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 host’s 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’s 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 them being elves, conceived after their male genetic donor was dead, and smarter than just about everyone else. .