Wood Sprites

The new song for Black Willow Wicker had been written for the humorous battle between Queen Soulful Ember and an army of black willows protesting Hairbrush’s attempts at magical topiary that created a roving flock of boxwood penguins. (“They had to be flightless birds. Flying topiary would have been simply ridiculous.”) Louise used a series of bugle calls starting with reveille to mirror the trees’ strategies. It was bit of geek humor they didn’t expect Harvey to get.

It didn’t quite match the feel of the filler video, but everything from the zalituus horn to the olianuni marked it as one of their pieces. To write and record something else would take days. Louise wanted to get their reply video posted as quickly as possible.

“Yes, let’s use it.” Louise ported in the song and started to fiddle with the video’s story beats to match up with the music. Because the battlefield scene had been punctuated with explosions as the new storyboard, it actually wasn’t as hard as she had thought to make the two mesh together.

“What do we call this one?” Jillian asked. “Thank You for the Shout-Out?”

There was a groaning outcry against the title from the kids around them.

“It’s a Trap!” Ava suggested.

“Where in the World is Nigel Reid?” Iggy said.

“Missing Treasures,” Zahara shouted to be heard over the sudden loud flood of possible video titles.

“Missing Treasures,” Louise repeated. There was a nice double meaning that the queen was missing her original targets, the various treasures, but also that Nigel Reid was going to go missing. “I like that.” Louise glanced to Jillian, who nodded. She quickly created a title screen. The only ending credits that they did were to claim copyright to everything in the video, from the art down to the music, and assigned them to Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. “We’re ready to load.”

A cheer went up from the other kids. As the boring part of waiting for the video to upload wore on, the other kids scattered to get food and claim tables.

Since they needed to hide their data trail while loading, normally they only loaded their videos to one site, Filmcraft. They never were staff pick, had more than a hundred comments, and never reached the thousand mark of “likes.” The low response was why they never thought they were widely popular. While Jillian uploaded the new video to Filmcraft, Louise did a search for The Queen’s Pantaloons. Where were all these people seeing their videos if not on Filmcraft? The search term brought back over two million hits. Filmcraft wasn’t even on the top page of results. The first hit was YouTube, a site that Jillian considered the ghetto of video sites and they never used and rarely visited. Unlike Filmcraft, YouTube listed the number of times the video was actually viewed. The number made her squeak.

“What?” Jillian asked.

“Five hundred million views!” Louise cried.

“For what?”

“The Queen’s Pantaloons!” Someone using the screen name of JelloShot01 had copied their video from Filmcraft. He had all their other videos, too. In the “recommended videos” on the side was Culotte de la Reine, which was their title translated into French. When she clicked on it, their video started to play with French subtitles.

“You really didn’t know how famous you were?” Iggy asked.

Dumbstruck, Louise shook her head. This explained all the money in the YourStore account. How much more could they make if they advertised? How did they go about advertising?

Zahara returned with three sandwiches and drinks. “Here. I figured you’d want to see it uploaded.”

“Thanks!” Louise wasn’t sure if she should offer money to Zahara. If the food was a gift, it would be kind of insulting to offer it. They had, however, all that money from YourStore. They weren’t the poorest kids in school anymore.

Once it was uploaded, they posted a link at the Pittsburgh Forum under the heading “For Nigel from Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

Louise had left her tablet on the JelloShot01 YouTube channel as they ate. Before lunch was over, Missing Treasures was added to his list and already had fifty thousand views. She stared at it in surprise and dismay. How had they missed that they were this famous?

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