Wood Sprites полностью

The twins glanced at each other. They’d never been able to find the answer until they got hold of the codex. How safe was it to explain to their classmate information that they shouldn’t have?

“They’re like batteries,” Jillian decided to tell them. “The beads store magic so that the sekasha can trigger the protective spells tattooed on their arms in areas where there is little or no magic. It only buys them a minute or two of time on Earth, but presumably they’d kill their attacker in that time.”

“Oh, so cool!” Claudia bounced. “We should go see them!”

“What?” the twins both cried.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome to meet a sekasha? I think they’re totally the coolest elves. Sword Strike is my favorite; he’s so dreamy!” Claudia cried and dropped her voice to say the catchphrase of the captain of the queen’s guards. “Sonai Domi.” She sighed deeply. “It’s so cool when he says that. You can tell that he loves her so much.”

“What does ‘sonai domi’ mean?” Elle asked. “And are they really lovers? Or did you make that all up?”

Okay, Elle was totally freaking Louise out. Elle sounded like she really wanted the answer to be “Yes, they’re in love.” Elle had to be a fan of the videos.

“We think they are.” Louise linked to their home computer and found the clip she wanted. “Normally we grab everything we can of a person talking and then build a phonetics library using their voice. After we write the script, we record Jillian reading it to get the timing and inflection that we want. We merge that with the right voice for the character to get natural sounding dialogue.”

“But the real sekasha almost never talk,” Jillian grumbled.

They had run hundreds of hours of video through an application that watched for lip movement, and only uncovered a handful of spoken words, most of them on the order of “yes” and “no.” The bodyguards stood in the background, faces set, silently vigilant.

The sekasha were, however, so omnipresent that the twins felt that they had to have at least one active character who was part of the holy warrior caste. Finally they found a voice sample. In a Pittsburgh television station’s news archive, they unearthed a video taken during the signing of the peace treaty between the humans and the elves. In a total of twenty-seven frames, Sword Strike’s expression changed to utter tenderness as he gazed down at his queen and murmured the two words in a deep, rich rumble. It felt extraordinary to witness the sudden transformation, as if they had accidently seen into the male’s soul.

Louise played the clip, first at normal speed, and then in slow motion.

“Wow,” Elle whispered. “They’re into each other.”

Louise broke the phrase down. “The ninjas have translated sonai to ‘kind’ and domi as ‘the female I’m beholden to.’ Literally it would mean ‘my kind lady,’ but we ran across some other places where elves used sonai and a more correct translation seems to be ‘have mercy.’ We’re fairly sure at this moment Sword Strike isn’t saying ‘my kind lady’ but ‘please don’t kick their butt.’ See, she starts off looking annoyed, and then blushes, and then looks a little embarrassed. It’s what started the whole ‘blast them all’ running joke.”

Claudia and Elle both giggled, which was good.

Jillian wasn’t completely happy that Louise was admitting that they weren’t perfect. She gave Louise a dark look, but explained the rest of their reasoning. “We wanted to use him as a character after that but no one ever caught him talking on video again, so we couldn’t get a full phonetic sampling. We couldn’t find any human voice that we liked in the free archives, so we decided we’d use the undoctored sound bite as his automatic response to anything going on.”

“It works well,” Elle said.

Claudia bounced again. “So, we can go see the elves. Right?”

Louise was glad that Elle seemed slightly horrified by the question as well.

“Going to see them would be bad.” Giselle came into the room and joined the conversation without so much as saying good morning. “The Jello Shots are going nuts. Some of them are pissed that Queen Soulful Ember and Sword Strike didn’t come to Earth, and the others are mad that Wraith Arrow isn’t here with Prince Yardstick because they ship the two together.”

“What?” Louise didn’t understand what “ship” meant. It sounded like they were two dolls in one package, but that didn’t make sense.

Giselle misunderstood the question. “Yeah, I know. Anyhow, all of the Jello Shots are talking about coming to see the elves. Not just the Jello Shots in New York City. California. Japan. England. China.”

They had fans in China?

“And Earth for Humans is all worked up, too,” Elle added. “It’s the only reason my mom sent me to school. She said that with elves in New York City, no one is going to even think about the undamaged art at the gallery.”