Wood Sprites

15: Crowd Sourcing

Jillian was being Peter Pan when the bell rang, announcing the end of last period. She was standing on one of the art room tables, practicing lines of the first scene with Elle as Wendy. Louise paused at the doorway, wondering if Iggy was right, that Jillian could only stand on the table, bigger than life, because at that moment, she was Peter and not Jillian.

Zahara shook her head at the lines. “I’m just saying, if he showed up in some girl’s bedroom in Queens, she’s not going to be all ‘Boy, why are you crying.’ She’d be either hitting him with pepper spray or calling 911.”

“It’s a fantasy!” Elle cried. “What part of fairies and pixie dust are you missing? It’s not operating in our reality.”

“Obviously, the Darlings just moved from some little town in England to New York City.” Giselle held up one sheets of the backdrop graffiti that would be seen through the nursery window. “One of their parents has been assigned a menial government job at the British Embassy. Probably their father. He’s the government type. Their mother is either a daycare aide or works at a Build-A-Bear or something like that.”

“We’ve already changed the play to the point of breaking!” Elle waved her copy of the script. “It’s a classic. It’s like rewriting Shakespeare.”

“People are rewriting Shakespeare all the time,” Zahara said. “And making them newly arrived from some farm town kills the whole ‘not in Kansas’ angle we’re going for with the sets! Our audience will relate more to Wendy if she’s just a little freaked out about having some mental case show up in her bedroom.”

“Maybe Wendy is a mental case, too.” Mason was looking pointedly at Elle. “Or maybe she’s retarded.”

“Mason!” Miss Hamilton pointed at him and gave him “the look” that she used to control anyone that strayed over the line. As he ducked his head meekly, Miss Hamilton waved Jillian down off the table. “School is over. It’s time for all of us to go home. We will discuss making changes to the script tomorrow.”

“Next week we will also be working on choreographing the fight scenes.” Mr. Howe got a cheer. He cut it short by whistling sharply. “Only people who e-mail back signed permission slips this week will be allowed to participate. If your parents don’t reply to the e-mail, you will be given a non-fighting role. And we will be checking against signatures on file, since the chances that one of your parents will sue the hell out of us is too high.”

Jillian had hopped down off the table and hurried over to Louise. Her eyes were full of questions that she couldn’t ask in front of everyone. Louise nodded to the most obvious one; the print job was started. They wouldn’t find out until tomorrow night if the generator worked, and only if they managed to get it home unseen. Jillian grinned brightly and bounced in place.

Iggy fell into step with them going down the stairs to their lockers. He was still blushing and avoided Louise’s glance by focusing on Jillian. Strangely, Jillian shied slightly away from him, looking away.

“You are going to be able to get permission from your parents, right?” Iggy asked.

Jillian shook herself a little, as if putting back on a mask. She looked up, full of confidence. “Of course I will. Our mom wants us to participate in class projects.”

“Are you?” Louise asked Iggy. She had gotten the impression that his parents were very protective of him. Certainly it explained why he’d be worried that someone else’s parents would refuse.

“I’m fairly sure my dad will sign it. Hook is da man!” Iggy waved his left hand with his fingers still in braces.

“How much longer before your fingers heal?”

Iggy eyed his left hand. “We see my doctor next Saturday. The doctor said four weeks, maybe five, so I might get it off Saturday.” He seemed doubtful. “Knowing my mom, though, even if the doctor says they’re healed, she’ll want me to wear it another week or two, just to be sure.”

Which meant it had been more than four weeks since they’d found out about their siblings. It didn’t seem possible that much time had already gone by. They had less than two months now to find the mythical box with mysterious nactka.

They got their jackets. Iggy’s locker was four down from theirs. As Louise activated Tesla, Iggy drifted back to pet the toy’s head.

“Good boy, Tesla, keep them safe.” Iggy waved his broken hand and headed back toward the stairs. “See you next week.”

“’Bye!” Jillian called brightly. Louise forced herself to wave; that’s what friends did, wasn’t it?

Apparently the Chen family was still being paranoid after Iggy’s brush with violence; his sisters were waiting for him at the staircase so the family could go home together. His oldest sister was hunched as if carrying a great weight, head bowed, long bangs covering her face. As Iggy joined them, she looked up, and for one brief moment, she was as beautiful as Iggy claimed. Then she ducked her head as if withdrawing into a shell, vanishing from sight.

“Who were you just now?” Louise asked Jillian.

“What?”

“When you said good-bye, who were you? Peter Pan?”

“Oh, no, not Peter. He wouldn’t think to say good-bye. He isn’t much on hello, either. I kind of like that about him.”

Tesla tilted his head and said, “Squirrel,” in his little-boy Welsh voice. Both of them jumped with surprise.

“What the hell?” Jillian laughed. “I forgot he could talk! Why did he say that?”

Louise squeaked with surprise. “Oh, I completely forgot!”

“Squirrel,” Tesla said again.

“Alarm off!” Louise pulled out her tablet. “I linked him to the box search so he could wake us up if the result came in during the night.” A squeal of excitement leaked out as a flashing icon on her screen confirmed a positive hit. “We found it! Dufae’s box! We found it!”

They rode home, heads together over her tablet as Tesla stood guard. Luckily their subway car was blissfully empty. Louise’s spider had found a dozen photographs taken of Dufae’s chest. It matched her CGI sketch perfectly. The pictures were dated from last year. The text explained that the chest had been discovered in the basement of the Louvre. It was labeled “unidentified block of unknown wood with possible Elvish runes,” with a side note that said it had been donated to the museum in 1897.

On that site there was nothing else about the chest, but there were hundreds of other photographs of objects found around the world at various museum and private collections. The common denominator was that they were all suspected of being from Elfhome prior to the first Startup.

“We were right that it must have been common for the elves to travel to Earth,” Louise said.

“But it doesn’t explain why they stopped,” Jillian said impatiently. She pulled out her tablet and started to follow trails of data. “Okay, where is the box now?”

“All these objects are part of a crowd-sourcing project. Oh! The irony!”

“What?”

“All these objects are linked to Dr. Forthwright,” Louise said.

“Forthwright? Our character?”

“No, the woman we based him on.” They’d changed the woman’s name to hide the fact that they’d raided her personal computer three years ago. Because they often played Forthwright opposite to Prince Yardstick and Director Maynard of the EIA, it felt weirdly sexist to keep the one non-ninja scientist female since they had made the character both extremely nearsighted and often clueless. It was like they were saying somehow that women shouldn’t be intelligent. They’d changed the sex as well as the name of the anthropologist. “Dr. Cassie Banks.”

“Okay, that’s a weird coincidence.”

“Dr. Banks has a sister that works at the Smithsonian. While doing inventory on objects in storage, her sister found a vase labeled ‘Jefferson’s Chinese Vase’ with what appeared to be Elvish runes. She sent photos of the vase to Dr. Banks, who recognized the mark. It’s a stamp that elves use to identify the clan and household who made the item.”

“Jefferson’s Chinese Vase?” Jillian said.

“Maybe they thought the Elvish Runes looked like Chinese characters.”

“They don’t look anything like Chinese!”

“The vase was last cataloged in 1912. They didn’t have the Internet and translation software.”

“It’s the Smithsonian!”

Louise chased data to answer the question instead of theorizing. “They’ve since verified that it did belong to Thomas Jefferson. It was anonymously donated to the Smithsonian in 1898 by someone claiming that his grandfather had stolen it during the Civil War when the Confederates seized Monticello. At the time, they had no way to establish authenticity, so they left it in storage.”

Jillian growled and focused back on her tablet. “But what about the box?”

“All the photos are part of a crowd-sourcing project Dr. Banks started with curators from around the world. They searched their museum storage facilities for buried Elfhome artifacts. Oh! The porcelain vase was thought to be Chinese because of its age. The method of creating porcelain wasn’t introduced to Europe until 1712—”

“What about the box?” Jillian cried. “I don’t care about the freaking vase!”

“I’m looking!” Louise scanned ahead faster. “All the pieces were gathered into one exhibit, and it’s touring! Currently it’s in, oh God, Australia!”

“You’ve got to be kidding! Paris is at least just on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Louise found the exhibition site and then a list of dates and cities that it expected to hit. “It’s coming to New York!”

“Oh, boy, is it ever.” Jillian tilted her tablet so show an article titled Secret Treasures Opening at American Museum of Natural History on June Fourteenth! Sign Petition Now! “This site is run by Earth for Humans, the same group that’s holding the protests against the expansion of the quarantine zone around Pittsburgh. The exhibit has their panties in a knot.”

“June fourteenth! That barely gives us any time. We need to save the babies before the end of June.”

The box had been given the name “Louvre morceau de bois” and careful noninvasive investigations had concluded that the box was solid Elfhome ironwood. The runes were being considered magical in nature, but so far the type of spell hadn’t been determined.

Jillian started to bounce in her seat. “Oh, Lou, this is so cool! They have no idea what it is! They don’t know it opens! The nactka are still inside.”

Louise shook her head, fighting the excitement. “We don’t know that.”

“Even if they identified the runes as a spell lock, the only way to open it is with the keywords. We have the password but they don’t, so they’re not going to get it open.”

“They could cut it open.”

“They think it’s a block of wood! Besides, they’re museum people. They preserve stuff, not smash it open to see what’s inside. What’s even better: they don’t know what’s in the box. We open it up, take everything out, and seal it again and they’ll never know we took anything.”

“Are you serious? Steal from a museum?”

“It belongs to us! The French might be all ‘finders, keepers,’ but they murdered Dufae. He wasn’t a French noble. He wasn’t even human! They killed him just the same. They have no right to this box.”

It all seemed morally clear until she imagined sneaking into the museum like a cat burglar, dressed all in black, to weave through laser-guided security systems and knock out guards. It got all weirdly murky ethicswise, but the idea was scary exciting. How would they knock out guards? Some kind of gas? Where would they get something like that? At their father’s clinic?

Louise found herself laughing with the giddy joy flooding her. They were going to be able to save their siblings! She struggled to contain her giggles; they had so much to do in so little time! “We need to find out everything we can on the American Museum of Natural History.”