Louise couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster all the next day. While she crawled through the Internet, looking for some hint that someone had created a magic generator, Jillian worked on translating the Dufae Codex.
To their dismay, the first few pages of the codex were incomprehensible. The author seemed to be making shorthand notes with only the minimum explanations. It was only when she reached the sixth page that she found a solid piece of translatable text.
“Finally!” Jillian cried. “I should have just skipped ahead to this.”
“Another dead end. Literally.” Louise stared at the police report detailing the death of the scientist she’d been researching. Or at least, the police were assuming he’d been murdered, as they hadn’t found enough of him to verify it.
“This is what page six says.” Jillian scrolled back to read her translated text.
“My theories are correct and incorrect. Yes, because the landmasses are identical on both worlds, finding the mirror site of our most powerful fiutana was as simple as following a map. Yes, power does leak through fissures between worlds at sites of fiutana. It is impossible, however, to set up a reliable resonance to the Spell Stones, which leaves me woefully unprotected. Also the magic seems, for lack of a better word, dirty. Even fairly simple spells have unpredictable results. Three different sites have produced the same failures. If I’m to stay on Earth, I will have to find a way to purify the magic. If I fail, I will need to return home. I should plan carefully, though, before returning. Who can I trust with this? How do I protect those I love when I do not know who is friend and who is foe?”
It was a disquieting echo to Louise’s findings. “So the first five pages are test results?”
Jillian scrolled back through the original text. “Yeah, I think you’re right. He says here that ‘three different sites have produced the same failures.’ Each of these pages has mystery words that don’t repeat, and three words that do. I’m betting the repeated words are the locations, and the nonrepeating are the spells he’s measuring. The numbers under them indicate the variation in the results.”
“So this codex is a record of his experiments in magic.”
Jillian flicked the digital pages. “I wonder how many years he was here on Earth before he was killed. There are hundreds of pages here.”
Louise considered her own research. “If we could find one of these fissures, then we wouldn’t need a generator. The way he said ‘three different sites’ seems to indicate they’re fairly common. I wonder if he included a map.”
“I’ll check.” Jillian started to scan quickly through the pages.
Almost immediately, though, Louise realized the mistake in her logic. “Dufae was in France and he died in 1792. Windwolf didn’t colonize Westernlands until 1930. That’s the whole point of him being the viceroy; he was the only domana on the continent when Pittsburgh was first transported to Elfhome. Dufae’s map would only show the fiutana in Easternlands.”
“Yeah, but there could be fissures here in North America. If they were common in Europe, they’re probably common all over the world. If we figure out the conditions that form the fissures by studying Dufae’s European map, we might be able to predict where they would appear in the United States.”
“Dufae said the magic is dirty.”
“One.” Jillian held up a finger. “There are a thousand more pages to his codex.” She held up a second finger. “Two. He didn’t go back to Elfhome.”
“So he figured out how to clean the magic?”
“I’m figuring that’s what this is all about.” Jillian held up her tablet and showed off a sketch of some odd-looking device. “This is page twelve.”
* * *
Louise continued to wade through a flood of information on Leonardo’s hyperphase gate. Every time she thought she was getting close to an answer, the information trail would stop. The last one filled her with so much uneasiness that she got up to pace.
“What?” Jillian asked.
“I have a weird feeling,” Louise said. “Like we’re doing something bad.”
Jillian snorted. “We’re always doing something that other people think is bad. Everyone wants us to ‘be good,’ and what they really mean is ‘make it easy for them’ and has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Like talking in the library. If no one is trying to get work done, why is it still bad? Because Miss Jenkins believes in learned behavior instead of rational thought. What we should be taught is compassionate response.”
Louise growled as Jillian veered totally off subject. “That’s not the point. Besides I can’t blame them. Learned behavior is a fairly simple punishment-and-reward system. I wouldn’t even know how to start to teach compassionate response.”
“We’re not animals. They wonder what is wrong with our country, but isn’t it fairly obvious that if children are being treated like animals instead of rational beings, as adults they’ll respond like monkeys?”
“Shut up or I’m going to fling poo at you!”
Jillian frowned as she realized that Louise was angry. “What’s wrong?”
“I—I don’t know. It’s just this weird feeling. Here, look. See this?” Louise pulled up the last data trail she’d followed. “It’s a micro blog post from three years ago.”
“The Dufae gate uses magic!!!” Jillian read. “You were right; someone figured it out.”
Louise impatiently waved her to wait. “The guy that posted this was an M.I.T. student by the name of Michael Kensbock. This is his posting history. He put out something on average every ten minutes. Two months later, his stream stops. This is his last post.”
The message said: “Eureka! I haz magic. Nobel iz mine! Party time!”
“He made one!” Jillian cried excitedly.
“Yes, right before he disappeared.” Louise pulled up the page that his family had put together in an attempt to find him. “He was at a bar with friends and went to the bathroom and never came back. Here’s the weird thing. Right after he disappeared, someone took down all his content. His vlogs, his e-mails—everything that could be erased—was. His micro blog posts are the only thing not erased, although I’m finding evidence that this service had undergone a massive virus attack at that time.”
“Maybe his disappearance didn’t have anything to do with the generator.”
“And his entire web presence erased?”
Jillian sighed and changed the subject. “Did you find a copy of the magic-generator thing?”
“It took some digging.” Louise pulled up the site. “I noticed that he liked to use a cartoon icon of himself. So I did a pattern-recognition search on the image and a few of the most basic spell symbols, assuming that he would need a spell to test the generator.”
“So you could hit anything that a normal search would miss?”
Louise nodded. “He obviously was going to publish the page to announce his work, but he didn’t want it found until he’d verified his findings, so he carefully didn’t use any words that would point a search at his page.”
The page had everything needed to create a generator with a high-end 3D printer. It looked simple: a molded plastic box with two power ports. One was a normal male 220 plug, which would indicate that the generator required power on the level of a clothes dryer. The second set of connectors was mere thin wires coated with plastic with flat tabs at the end. They didn’t look like anything that Louise knew, and they were identified as “magic connectors,” which normally would have made her giggle. There were complete schematics on building a matrix of parallel Casimir plates a few micrometers apart and detailed explanations of how the electricity was turned into magic. It was complicated, but Louise could understand it.
After building the generator and running careful studies on its output, he’d used it to cast a simple detection spell designed to map out ley lines.
“I’m worried,” Louise said. “This was his super-secret personal site he had stashed in the cloud. He had three public sites, but they’re all toast. Someone did a very good job of worming into even cache copies of his sites and making them unreadable.”
“Who knows what else he might have been doing that pissed someone off?”
“The thing is, he’s not the only one.” Louise flicked open windows of earlier dead ends. “Torbjorn Pettersen was a Norwegian who disappeared two years ago after publishing an article in Scientific American on field manipulation using quantum particles in an attempt to explain how Leonardo’s gate moved Pittsburgh to Elfhome. After him, there was a scientist named Lisa Sutterland who was doing similar work and was killed when someone tried to kidnap her six months later. Marcus Shipman published work on the gate, and he’s also missing. And Harry Russell. He went missing while he was under house arrest. He had a GPS microchip implanted on him as part of his punishment. Police should have been able to find him using that, but they couldn’t until two months ago. The chip turned up inside a fish in St. Louis.”
“As in the fish ate part of him? Eeewww!”
“That’s what they think. Everyone I’ve found that has come close to figuring out how Leonardo’s gate works has either disappeared mysteriously or been killed.”
“Well, we’re not going to tell anyone what we figure out. You were careful and made sure you couldn’t be traced?”
“Of course I was!” Louise said. “After the first two guys turned up missing, I went into silent-running mode.”
“Good. Let’s copy the source and then not hit this site again.”
They copied everything. Once they were safely isolated from the original site, they studied the plans.
“We’ll need a very high-end 3D printer,” Louise pointed out. “Our printer can’t build at the nanoscale level that this is going to need.”
“We could buy one.” Jillian pointed out that they now had money.
Louise snorted. “It would eat up a huge chunk of our funds, and how would we hide it? We couldn’t even carry it out of the foyer.”
Jillian sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Forget about it. There’s one in the technology annex to the art rooms that the high school kids use for Mr. Kessler’s robotics and computer-design classes.” Mr. Kessler taught their computer literacy class.
“We need to be careful to cover our tracks,” Louise stressed.
“We’ll be like ninjas.”
Their plan started to go wrong two blocks from school. They had intended to arrive early and go straight to the art rooms. As they stepped off the subway train, however, they literally ran into Iggy.
“Hi!” He grinned brightly as he patted Tesla’s head. “Today is the big day!”
They gazed at him, mystified for a full minute.
“The play meeting!” he cried. “Don’t tell me you went to that girly party and Elle sucked your brains out or something.”
They’d totally forgotten about the joint-class play meeting, even with Elle’s party. They’d spent all of Sunday researching magic.
“We have other things going on,” Jillian said.
“Finishing the newest video?” Iggy asked. “I saw the filler you put up on Friday.”
Strange how it was easier to lie to strangers than to people who might remotely be their friend. Could Iggy be considered that? Having gone through the process so few times—say never—Louise wasn’t totally sure of the steps. It seemed for something so important there should be some ritual—a declaration of intent or a solemn vow or at least a handshake. How could people keep track otherwise?
“Yes, another video,” Jillian lied, but added truthfully, “The girls at the party kept asking what the next one was about.”
“We—we had an accident in our studio,” Louise countered to explain why they weren’t going to be producing said video anytime soon.
Jillian made a face but after a moment of thought nodded. “We kind of burned it down.”
“Kind of?”
“Well, we blew it up first, and then it burned down,” Louise said.
Iggy giggled. “Blast it all?”
“Yeah, exactly!” Louise said. It felt good to admit that much of the truth. “So we’re trying to figure out how to finish the project.”
Louise started them toward the school. Jillian could keep Iggy distracted while she went to the art rooms alone. On Mondays, Mr. Kessler had hall duty on the first floor. Mr. Kessler unlocked the art rooms and left them open on the expectation that Miss Gray would arrive shortly. Since Miss Gray didn’t have a class until second period, though, she tended to arrive at school at the last possible moment. It was a habit that the twins were counting heavily on.
They stopped at the corner to wait for a walk light. Iggy seemed focused on petting Tesla, so Louise pulled out her tablet and activated her tracking program for their art teacher. Miss Gray was still at her apartment, running about in frantic circles as if she kept forgetting things in her bedroom as she tried to get out the door on time.
“You know Tesla’s not real.” Jillian kept Iggy’s attention as the walk light turned white and they started to cross.
“Doh!” Iggy laughed and then blushed and glanced around to see if any of the kids from their school were nearby before confessing, “I love stuffed animals.”
“And?” Louise couldn’t see how the two related.
“My parents don’t think boys should play with stuffed animals. They’re too girly because they’re too cute! Boy toys have to be fierce and strong. My parents won’t let me have any stuffed animals, but I can have robotic ones, because they’re robots.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jillian said.
“Welcome to my life.” Iggy patted Tesla’s head. The robot completely ignored it. “My mom won’t let me have any pets, either. She calls hamsters and guinea pigs ‘livestock,’ which is kind of funny because they got me this really cute ox.”
“Ox?”
“I’m a metal ox.” Iggy patted his chest. “I’m logical, positive, and filled with common sense, with all feet firmly planted on the ground.”
Iggy was several months older than they were, since they were Tigers, which came after Ox. Louise had never considered the accuracy of the Chinese Zodiac before, but it seemed like a good description of Iggy.
Jillian laughed. “All four feet firmly planted?”
Iggy grinned at the jibe. “We consider it being pragmatic. Others see it as obstinate.”
“So your robotic ox.” Louise measured possible ranges of sizes with her outstretched hands. “How—how big is it?”
“Bonk is just a little thing.” He demonstrated with his hands barely a foot apart. “He’s so cute!”
“Bonk?” Jillian said as they hit the door. Louise prepared to slip away as her twin held Iggy’s interest.
“He has depth-perception issues or something.” Iggy illustrated by tapping his palm against his forehead. “He makes this noise when he runs into things head-first. When he does it he makes this sound kind of like ‘baa’ crossed with ‘moo.’ I think they may have given him some goat programming.”
“Baaamoo?” Jillian attempted as Louise started her feint toward the girls’ bathroom to explain why she was walking away unannounced.
“No, not like that.” Iggy made a very cute “booonnnk” noise.
“Louise! Jillian!” Zahara came bursting through the door and spotted them in the hallway. “I’m so excited I could barely sleep. I didn’t tell you, but I want to be a pirate!”
“Shiver me timbers!” Iggy cried. “Are ye three sheets to the wind?”
“Arrr, ye scurvy dog!” Zahara cried back. “Are ye blind in both eyes? I be a corsair out of Barbados and the greatest pirate queen that ever sailed the seven seas!”
Jillian’s eyes widened and she glanced to Louise for help, completely destroying any chance that Louise could slip away. “There’s—there’s no pirate queen in Peter Pan.”
Zahara laughed. “I know, but there should be. Maybe we can rewrite parts of it.”
Jillian’s eyes went a little wider. “They won’t let us rewrite it. Not after what happened in second grade.”
“No, not you two.” Zahara grinned, her nose wrinkling with delight. “All of us.”
* * *
The morning set the pattern for the day. As hard as Louise tried, she couldn’t find a single chance to slip away unnoticed. At recess they played jump rope with Zahara. Even at lunch, where they normally sat alone, they ended up with Iggy, Zahara, and a handful of boys from Iggy’s class, all talking in pirate. By then, it was obvious to Louise that they would have to wait until the play meeting was over and forgotten before staging the raid on the art-room printer.
Jillian was not taking the delay well. She was doing a good job covering it, but inwardly she was obviously seething. “Why can’t they leave us alone?” she muttered darkly as they were herded from the lunchroom back to the fifth-grade floor.
“We’ll just do it later. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is the one day Miss Gray comes in early.”
“Then Wednesday. Or even next week. We need to find a spell that will help save the babies first.”
Jillian glared at her as Louise coded open their joint locker.
“What?” Louise whispered as Elle stopped beside them to get things out of her locker.
“I want to learn everything, not just what we need for them.” Jillian used vague terms so Elle wouldn’t understand what they were talking about.
Elle snorted, guessing wrong that they were discussing their next class. “The way you butcher French, you’ll be lucky to know enough to pass the tests.”
She yanked out her tablet and flounced away.
Louise bumped Jillian, who was about to shout something after Elle. “We’re about to yank the rug out from under her in public.” Zahara wasn’t the only girl speaking in pirate at lunch. If all the boys and at least two other girls besides the twins voted for Peter Pan, they were going to win. “Let her score points. Besides, we’re the ones screwing around in class pretending not to understand. It’s karma if people don’t know how fluent we are.”
Jillian muttered some very rude French that wasn’t in any textbook.
“We’re going to have to learn more Elvish.” Louise tried distracting her. “Dufae uses a lot of words we don’t know. We can use an online translator to get the basic gist, but we can’t trust it to be accurate. Everything we’ve read said that magic is as exacting as chemistry. We need to be sure we’re translating things right or it’s going to end like the flour experiment did—and we’re running out of places to safely blow up.”
Jillian harrumphed at the knowledge that they weren’t as fluent in Elvish as they were in French. “We planned that explosion.”
Louise made sure no one was nearby before whispering, “We planned an explosion, but not that one. If we screw up a magic spell, God knows what might happen.”
“There’s a reason we’re not more fluent,” Jillian said vaguely as Giselle opened up her locker on the other side of theirs. “Nicadae.”
Someone in Pittsburgh had mistranslated the phrase to “hello” without realizing that the elves were actually saying “Nice day” in butchered English. All in all, the official dictionaries were a joke, consisting of only a few thousand words of Low Elvish and pidgin commonly used in day-to-day transactions in Pittsburgh. “Nicadae” and its like were viral; all the dictionaries had the same mistake. If there was a more accurate dictionary, it had been hidden by a scientist with mad ninja skills. “We’ve never tried the University of Pittsburgh.”
“That’s because it’s only on Earth one day of the month, and that was Friday.” Jillian slammed shut their locker, and the twins headed down the hallway since their French class was about to start.
Louise groaned as she realized Jillian was right. They’d spent all Friday searching Pittsburgh’s limited Internet for a trace of Alexander and had gone to bed after midnight, frazzled and worried. They would have to wait until next Shutdown before they could hack the university’s computers.
Jillian stopped as something occurred to her and her eyes went wide.
“What?” Louise asked.
“Do you think . . . ?” Jillian threw up her hand and wriggled her fingers.
“Blast it all!” someone cried from down the hall.
Louise grabbed Jillian’s wrist and pulled her hands down. “People watch us now!” she whispered fiercely.
Jillian rolled her eyes. “Forget about it! What about us? Do you think we can?”
Could they? Were they like the queen and able to wreak havoc with a wave of the hand? The idea was thrilling, but seeing the gleam in Jillian’s eyes, Louise caught hold of her excitement and attempted to drown it under logic.
“The ninjas haven’t figured out how they do that.” Louise pointed out that the more humans understood how magic worked, the more they didn’t understand how members of Elfhome royalty created wildly powerful effects. Earth scientists were still writing papers with conflicting theories even after twenty-eight years of covertly studying the elves. Their stumbling block was the amount of energy that a noble domana-caste elf could channel. Written spells obeyed Einstein’s physics: energy output could be calculated in proportion to available magic. Of course there was the problem that the scientists hadn’t come to agreement on the nature of magic. Unlike Earth, Elfhome had an ambient magical field. It seemed pervasive as magnetism or gravity, but it was fluid in that it flowed like water, creating streams of power called ley lines. A written spell was fueled by local magic and could deplete the area of power, just like fire would use up all available oxygen in a closed system.
While the scientists couldn’t explain the source of magic, they could measure it. Windwolf had been recorded discharging energy on par with a nuclear reactor for over an hour. No human knew how he channeled so much power, and the elves refused to explain. Scientists could only secretly video the elves and attempt to figure it out.
“The ninjas are stupid.” Jillian waved away her point, doing the flourish that Queen Soulful Ember made right before she started to throw fireballs. “Since all elves use written spells on a daily basis, the ninjas are still not sure if the gesture-based spells are limited to the domana-caste or not.”
“Just because we haven’t seen a dragon, doesn’t mean dragons don’t exist.” Louise stated the logic of why the scientists were reluctant to commit to a theory.
“It’s obvious that it’s just the domana! Metal interferes with magic, so anyone who can cast spells with their hands couldn’t wear rings or bracelets. There’s not a single photo of Windwolf wearing jewelry, but all the other elves of Pittsburgh do.”
“That’s hardly empirical evidence.” Louise stated as they walked into their classroom. Everyone was still standing around talking because their French teacher, Mr. Newton, hadn’t arrived.
“I love it when Queen Soulful Ember loses it.” Giselle butted in as if they weren’t having a private conversation. Apparently she’d listened to them the whole way from their lockers. Giselle’s comment made everyone turn and look at them. As Louise wished she could go invisible, the other students joined in.
“Blast it all!” Claudia cried, hands over her head, fingers wriggling. “And then boom! How does she do it?”
“Yes, how do they do it?” Elle obviously didn’t think they knew. “Or did you just make all that up?”
“We didn’t make it up,” Jillian cried.
Louise didn’t want to draw even more attention to them, but Jillian wouldn’t back down now. “All we had to do was study videos of the elves casting spells frame by frame. They do a two-step command sequence. It’s kind of like selecting a toolbar on a computer screen and then selecting an app to run.”
Or at least, that’s what they’d observed. They hadn’t been able to find any scientific studies on the subject, even though it seemed obvious.
Jillian demonstrated the finger positions on the first command. “It’s the combination of both the position of the hand and a spoken word.” She held her right hand within an inch of her mouth. The queen always used the same first command, but Windwolf varied between two, depending on which type of spell he was about to cast, Fire or Wind.
As Jillian spoke the Fire command, Louise explained the rest.
“After the queen activates ‘the toolbar,’ she changes her hand position and uses another command word to choose which spell she’s actually going to cast from the toolbar. Each spell has a different hand position and word.”
By measuring the effects, the twins had determined that the caster then used additional hand movements to enter the spell’s area of effect in terms of direction and distance from the caster, and the amount of damage they wanted to inflict. Jillian demonstrated the queen casting a flame strike directly on top of Elle strong enough to probably reduce the entire school to ashes.
Louise turned her startled laugh into a cough. “We needed to analyze the spell-casting so we could draw it. We wanted to get it right.”
Elle looked confused. “It would have been easier to just make it up. Nobody would know.”
“We would know,” Jillian said.
“Finding out how they do it is half the fun,” Louise said.
“Être assis.” Their French teacher, Mr. Newton, commanded as he walked into the classroom. He waved at their chairs in case any of them still didn’t understand the phrase. And thus started yet another period where Louise hadn’t been able to slip away to the art room.
* * *
The play meeting was the last period of the day. They filed into the auditorium to find that the other fifth-grade class was already sitting in the front row.
With broad shoulders, square jaw, and a buzz cut, Mr. Howe looked exactly like what he was: a retired Marine master sergeant. He stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, eyeing the twins’ class as if they were unruly invaders. Miss Hamilton was laughing as usual as she gently but firmly herded them in.
She saluted Mr. Howe. “Class 501, reporting for duty, sir!”
Mr. Howe grinned and returned the salute. “Thank you, Miss Hamilton. All right, listen up, today’s mission is the joint fifth-grade class play. Today, we’re going to vote on a play . . .”
Elle’s hand shot up. “I think we should do The Little Mermaid this year. MTI has a junior version of the script for middle school students. The cast has been enlarged to ensure parts for an entire class, and all the music has been simplified so it’s easier for kids to sing. Not that that would be a problem for me, since I take voice lessons. We can get a director’s show kit from MTI that has budgets, press releases, sample programs, cue sheets, glossary, and audition sides.”
“We would call that jumping the gun, Elle,” Mr. Howe said coldly. “I haven’t finished.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Howe. I just wanted to point out that we could get everything we needed already polished and tested.”
Louise realized that everyone was looking at her and Jillian. They hadn’t prepared a pitch for the teachers. Nor did she have any clue where to find press releases or sample programs. Every other year, teachers took care of getting what was needed after the class voted. Under the stare of their classmates, Louise put up her hand.
“Yes, Louise?” Miss Hamilton said.
“I have a play, too—when we get to nominating.”
Miss Hamilton turned to Mr. Howe. “I think we should jump to nominating, since Elle has opened the floor. We can cover the changes to how we’re doing the play this year after the vote.”
Mr. Howe considered and linked his tablet to the theater’s screen. “Okay, we have The Little Mermaid as play number one.” He wrote the title in small letters on the far left. “Louise, what’s your play?”
“Peter Pan.”
Mr. Howe grunted slightly as if surprised by the choice. He wrote it close beside The Little Mermaid. “And who else has an idea for a play?”
There was silence as everyone waited.
“Anyone?” Mr. Howe eyed his class as if disappointed that none of his students had a suggestion. “Iggy? I thought you had a play you wanted to do.”
“I want to be Captain Hook!” Iggy stated firmly.
There was a sudden chorus of “Arrrrr” and “Aye, matey!” from Iggy’s class.
“Lost Boys live forever!” one of the boys in the twins’ class shouted.
Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton exchanged looks.
“So some of you already discussed this?” Miss Hamilton said.
“We want to do Peter Pan,” Zahara said.
“The Little Mermaid,” Elle and Giselle cried.
“Let’s vote. All for The Little Mermaid?”
All the other girls except Zahara and Nina from Mr. Howe’s class put up their hands. It was a depressing show of hands. Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton both counted, and once they were sure, Mr. Howe wrote the total on the board.
“Hands up: Who wants to do Peter Pan?”
They counted and then counted again.
“All right. It’s Peter Pan.”
A cheer went up, and Elle visibly struggled not to pout. Somehow, though, Louise felt like they hadn’t won.
“Settle down. We have lots to go over yet. Louise, do you have a scene and cast list for the play?”
“I do.” Jillian raised her hand but started to talk before either teacher called on her. “There are five acts, the first and last are both in the nursery, so we would need to build four sets. For the nursery, we only need three beds and a window. It can be very Our Town-like. The second set is the forest of Neverland, the third is the mermaid lagoon, and the fourth is Hook’s pirate ship.”
“I think it would be cool if we did a Kansas/Oz comparison between the real world and the fantasy world.” Louise defaulted to set design. “Do the nursery in grays or neutrals. The original set design had details that stressed how poor the Darlings were and outside the window were treetops to give the impression of skyline seen from an attic room. We could modernize it by having a brick wall as backdrop with graffiti and maybe use a flickering light and sound to make it seem like trains are passing by.”
“So the forest of Neverland would be colorful?” Jillian asked.
“Yeah, we could do flowering trees and different shades of green for foliage of trees.”
“Sounds costly,” Jillian complained.
“The biggest challenge would actually be scene changes. They need to be quick and easy while still giving visual depth to the stage. What we might be able to do is build out something that opens and shuts like umbrellas.”
“We could get yards of fabric in different shades of green,” Zahara said. “Everyone could cut a couple dozen leaves for homework, and then, on stagecraft days, we could staple them to the umbrella rigging.”
“Girls!” Mr. Howe held up a hand for silence. “I’m glad you’re jumping in with both feet, because this is exactly how this year’s play is different from other years. The class play is a yearly exercise on working together as a team. Unlike earlier years, where your teachers would set work schedules, assign projects, and oversee the work, you will now be responsible for all of it.”
“Mr. Howe and I will simply be advisors to help you find solutions when you can’t find a way to deal with a problem by yourself,” Miss Hamilton said.
“This year, you will pick out a director, a stage manager, a costume designer, a props director, as well as assign who will get what roles.” Mr. Howe opened a new window on his tablet and wrote down “Peter Pan” and started a list of jobs.
Louise took a deep breath as their future was suddenly unveiled. As Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo, she and Jillian would be the best candidates for most of the responsibilities. The play took up nearly three months of daily work, both at school and at home. Jillian already had sold the idea of her starring as Peter, who appeared in every scene.
But their siblings were going to be disposed of in three months. They should be focusing all their time and energy on the babies. They had to make a magic generator, translate the Dufae Codex, and experiment with spells.
“I want to be Captain Hook!” Iggy put up his hand.
“Aye!” the pirates shouted.
“Captain Iggy Hook!” the Lost Boys cried.
They all cheered as Mr. Howe started the cast list with “Captain Hook: Iggy.”
“If we’re doing Peter Pan, I want to be Wendy!” Elle cried, and her friends clapped when Mr. Howe, hearing no objection, wrote it down.
“Jillian’s going to be Peter!” Zahara said.
“And the director!” Iggy added. “Louise can be stage manager.”
There was another cheer, and their names went up on the screen.
Louise sank into her chair, trying to keep dismay off her face. This was the worst thing that could happen.