This was the longest speech I had ever heard Gilmore give. Usually he was too busy having a breakdown to get too many words out.
‘Maybe this is their way of coping with their grief?’ I suggested.
‘Grief!’ Gilmore snorted. ‘I have never seen happier elves. It’s indecent!’
In the middle of this tirade, I had managed to lose track of the elf with the fruit platter. I sighed in frustration and made my way to the market in the corner. Gilmore was instantly offended at how much the elves there were smiling and decided to scream at them.
‘Get back to work!’ he snapped at a young elf who was considering a toy train full of oranges. ‘Clean the factory and get rid of this ridiculous market. Stop these antics at once!’
The elf looked at Gilmore. ‘You sound like my mother,’ she said, sounding mildly surprised. ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing she would say. She hates it when I’m having too much fun. She thinks the only fun an elf should have is while making toys.’
‘Your mother sounds like a very sensible elf,’ Gilmore replied.
‘I don’t understand you old ones,’ she retorted. ‘Why can’t we just do what makes us happy? Making toys was your thing but it doesn’t have to be our thing. Why should we have to listen to you or Santa or anyone else?’
Gilmore looked too staggered to answer. I felt bad for the old elf and spoke on his behalf. ‘Isn’t that the whole point of being an elf?’ I asked. ‘Loving Christmas and pledging your undying allegiance to Santa?’
She turned to me. ‘You’re not an elf. You don’t know what it’s like for us. Everyone’s telling us what we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to live and even what’s supposed to make us happy. If we don’t do our jobs Christmas will be ruined—that’s what they all say.’
To my surprise, her words sounded familiar. How many times had I complained about being forced to put up with things just because I was Santa’s daughter? How many times had I wanted to lead a life other than the one that was forced upon me? Even this quest hadn’t been my idea! ‘Now Christmas is ruined anyway and it’s not our fault,’ the elf said cheerfully. ‘So we’re just doing what we’ve always wanted to do.’ She stalked off to the dance party at the other end of the factory with the toy train full of oranges.
Before I could think about what she had said, I noticed that the market was rapidly disappearing. All the fruits and vegetables were being carried over to the food counter where a smiling old elf stood behind the table. He was wearing light-up antlers like the ones Xander had and a T-shirt with the words ‘Rudolph for President’.
He took the products being offered to him and put together a series of odd meals that didn’t appear to have been entirely cooked. The drinks came out of the blender in weird shades of green and red and looked nothing like the hot chocolate I was used to.
However, it was not for nothing that I had survived Mom’s various cooking experiments. Next to her unidentifiable meals, this raw food looked delicious. Besides, the bearers of the ingredients looked perfectly happy with the food they got back from the chef.
My stomach growled impatiently as I walked over to the counter. I didn’t have too much trouble getting the chef’s attention since I was three times taller than anyone around me. I showed him my empty hands and looked at him dolefully. ‘We don’t have anything to give you,’ I said.
He smiled back at me and ducked down behind his counter. He resurfaced with some vegetables, tossed them into a saucepan full of water and five minutes later, handed me a still-strange-but-satisfyingly-cooked-looking dish.
‘Thank you!’ I said gratefully as I walked behind the counter. I sat down beside him to devour my meal after sharing some of it with Bean and Gilmore. Coral refused to even look at it, announcing, ‘Vegetables are for rabbits!’
‘You’re not from around here,’ the elf observed. ‘Run away from the North Pole to come join the fun, eh? Name’s Pepper and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.’
‘You happen to be talking to Santa’s daughter,’ Gilmore said huffily. ‘We’re looking for him and trying to save Christmas. The North Pole elves are still loyal to him, even if you seem to have deserted the cause.’
Pepper laughed. ‘We have nothing against your dad, love,’ he told me. ‘We’re just relieved that we’re finally allowed to have some fun.’
‘Isn’t Christmas fun?’ Bean asked.
‘You’re a post-elf, aren’t you?’ Pepper turned to her. ‘And here you are, farther from the North Pole than any of your co-workers could have ever dreamed. And it never would have happened had Santa been around.’
Bean turned red. ‘I’m not happy Santa is missing!’
‘But you are happy you’re on this adventure.’ Pepper’s eyes twinkled knowingly. ‘It’s not often that desk elves get a chance to explore the world beyond the Pole. You don’t like being told what to do any more than we do.’
Bean looked confused. I chewed my food thoughtfully. ‘At first, it sounded to me like everyone here thought Dad was a dictator and are thrilled now that he’s disappeared,’ I said. Pepper’s smile encouraged me to go on. ‘But you’re not against Dad, are you?’
‘None of us are,’ Pepper answered. ‘We just don’t like any authority that stops us from being free.’
‘You’re not prisoners,’ I said although I had started to understand what all these elves meant.
‘Not physically,’ Pepper agreed.‘But this elf here already thinks less of us just because we think differently from him. We don’t want to live the way he does and he assumes we’re traitors. It’ll be like that with all the other elves.’
‘Because this isn’t what you’re meant to be doing!’ Gilmore replied exasperatedly. ‘If your factory stops production, it will tilt the balance.The children of an entire continent will go without toys and stop believing in Santa Claus. Don’t you see how disastrous those consequences would be?’
‘You can try running away from change but you can’t escape it,’ Pepper replied. ‘Throughout history, one way of life has always been replaced by another and the world has been better off. The Christmas traditions might change but the festival will remain. Are new traditions such a bad thing?’
He turned to me and smiled wistfully. ‘I hope you find your father. But things may not be as they once were. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.’
Pepper turned away from us, back to his counter and his culinary duties. I gathered together my elf entourage and proceeded to walk around the factory again.
‘What are we going to do?’ Bean asked in a small voice. Looking at her, I could see she was just as confused as I was. Both of us understood these elves far better than Coral or Gilmore did. The elves weren’t wrong; they were just very different from us. Which meant we had a problem we couldn’t solve.
‘What would Dad do?’ I wondered out loud.
‘He would let these fruitcakes do whatever they want,’ Coral answered. ‘Which would just go to show how absolutely useless he is.’
‘What would you do?’ Bean countered.
‘Declare war on these good-for-nothings and get them back to work!’ Coral thundered.
‘You would make a delightful little imaginary dictator.’ I rolled my eyes.
‘Pssst!’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘What?’ Bean looked back at me in confusion.
‘Over here!’ We looked around and spotted a young elf standing behind a decrepit door that led off to the left. He looked around furtively and motioned for us to follow him. We looked at each other, shrugged and made our way to the door.
By the time we got there, the elf was nowhere to be seen. We were starting to wonder if we were hallucinating when out popped his head from a door to the right. ‘Come on!’ he said impatiently. ‘I don’t have all day!’
We walked through the door and staggered back in astonishment. The large room looked a little worse for wear and the machines had definitely seen better days but the toys
scattered in a pile in the corner were brand new.
‘It’s another toy factory!’ Gilmore cried in delight. ‘We’re saved! I mean,’ he said, looking around at Coral, Bean and me, ‘we’re not completely doomed yet.’
Trust Gilmore to provide us with that little ray of sunshine.
8
The kind of elves who secretly rebel against the rebels:
1. Elves who firmly believed in the existing way of life and thought that any change would damage the elf community
2. Excited trainee elves who had grown up hearing Christmas stories and were thrilled at being able to officially participate in the festivities themselves, when the rebels put a stop to all work in the factory
3. Elves who quickly got bored of partying and wanted to get back to work
4. Elves who were petrified of Dad because they believed he had supernatural powers to punish them if they went astray
5. Elves who liked to sneak around and pretend to be spies
6. Elves who simply loved what they did and couldn’t imagine a life doing anything else
Here were elves who really wanted to work, even though some of their reasons were decidedly odd. Had we actually managed to catch a break on this luckless quest?
The elf we had followed took us around the dusty room, chattering non-stop about all that they had been up to. He pointed out the machines they had repaired and showed us the toys they had produced.
‘This room was where we made our toys when we first moved to California,’ he explained.
‘Moved from the North Pole?’ I asked.
‘From Nevada,’ the elf corrected me. ‘The first North American outpost was in Nevada. That’s where my family worked. But they had to relocate after all the alien conspiracy theories began to attract too many humans there.’
‘Alien conspiracy theories?’ I repeated, puzzled.
‘The factory was in a top-secret location,’ Bean answered. ‘But then there were some sightings of Santa’s sleigh which began rumours of UFOs and aliens. Don’t you pay attention in elf history class?’
‘UFOs and aliens.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Of course. Go on.’
‘That’s why we shifted one state over,’ the guide-elf continued. ‘All the machines in this room were brought over from Nevada. But the sea air didn’t seem to agree with them. One by one they all broke down and we had to build new machines. The chief elf at the time just thought it would be easier to let them remain here instead of figuring out a way to get rid of them.’
‘The sea air doesn’t seem to have agreed with the elves outside either,’ Gilmore muttered.
I looked at the group of counter-rebels inside the dilapidated room.They were a small group, roughly twenty elves or so. They ranged from young elves who looked like they were just out of school to ancient ones who looked like they should have retired already.
Compared to the crowd of rebel elves outside, the group looked even smaller. In spite of that, they had managed to make about half the toys we needed to keep the North American kids happy on Christmas morning. They had also managed to put a factory, which had been out of commission for decades, back to use.And they had managed to do all this without letting the other elves suspect a thing.
‘How did you do it?’ I asked in disbelief.
‘It involved a lot of sneaking around, worthy of James Bond at his best,’ smirked our guide-elf proudly.
‘We even had to bribe the rebels with party game ideas to distract them,’ added an old elf at the back of the group. ‘What did you think of my scheme of putting the toy machines outside to use?’
‘You have things all under control.’ Gilmore beamed at them. ‘We can move on to the next factory in peace.’ ‘Actually,’ our guide-elf coughed. ‘We patched up these machines as best we could but there’s only so much they could handle. They’ve all broken down again. We were hoping you could help us.’
‘This girl is Santa’s daughter,’ Coral, who had been silent until then, said contemptuously. ‘So she is as useless as he was.’ I glared at him, more offended by the fact that he spoke of Dad in the past tense.
‘Oh no!’ Gilmore looked like he was going to start freaking again. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘You’ve handled the news about Dad going missing exceedingly well,’ I observed. ‘You kept working even though you didn’t have to.’
‘We don’t want Christmas to be cancelled!’ a young elf replied earnestly. ‘We love Christmas! We love Santa!’ Her answer met with murmurs of approval from the crowd that surrounded me.
‘Why don’t you just say that to those elves outside?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you think we’ve tried, girl?’ the elderly elf demanded.‘When I told them they were being disrespectful to Christmas traditions, they just laughed and called me a relic of times gone by. They won’t let us anywhere near the machines.’
‘They think we’ve been brainwashed by the past,’ our guide-elf butted in. ‘They think that we only want to work because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. They’re convinced that they’re doing us a favour by “setting us free from the shackles of society”.’
‘They were going to destroy the toy machines before I suggested they could use them in their parties,’ added the elf who had spoken earlier.
‘It was a stroke of luck that we managed to repair these machines,’ said a tall elf gloomily. ‘But it looks like our luck has all run out.’
‘Maybe not,’ I murmured, the glimmer of a plan forming in my head. ‘Christmas Eve is a week away. Do you think that’s enough time to make and deliver the rest of the toys, if you regained control of the factory?’
‘Of course,’ our guide-elf snorted. ‘There may be only twenty of us but we’re quick on our hands and feet.’
‘We’ll work all day and night if we have to!’ exclaimed the earnest youngling. All the other elves nodded eagerly.
‘Storm the factory!’ Coral declared. ‘Capture those blithering idiots and throw them out! That was my plan from the start.’
‘There aren’t enough of us to take the factory by force,’ Gilmore interjected. ‘Even if we succeeded, the other elves would just destroy the machines like they had threatened to in the first place.’
‘We could sneak in when they’re asleep and work then,’ one of the elves suggested.
‘They’ve completely transformed those machines.’ Gilmore shook his head disagreeably. ‘They would notice if the machines had been used recently.’
‘We could put things back in place before they wake up,’ our guide-elf offered.
‘You still don’t have enough time!’ Gilmore proclaimed irritably. ‘You’re low on elfpower. You will only be able to work when they’re sleeping. What if some of those elves are awake when you want to work? What if they suspect your plan?’
‘Can you stop finding problems all the time and offer some solutions for once?’ Bean snapped at him. ‘I think working on the sly sounds like the best idea.’ The elves around us agreed with her.
It was time to take matters into my own hands. ‘Gilmore’s right, there isn’t enough time,’ I said curtly. ‘We’re going out there to speak to them. Come on!’ I clapped my hands and motioned for everyone to follow me.
The startled elves began to protest but I was having none of it. I ushered them out of the door and instructed them to follow me. We marched into the main factory room and I confidently made my way into the middle of the party.
‘I need to talk to Storm,’ I declared loudly to make myself heard over all the merrymaking. ‘Take me to your leader.’ (It’s the sort of thing an alien would say when he lands on earth for the very first time, which was a perfect way to describe how I felt among all these elves.)
My announcement could only be heard by the elves who stood near me. But the sight of me leading a group of elves took everyone by surprise.
A startled Storm walked towards me. All the other elves stopped what they were doing and stood around us. I spotted Pepper in t
he crowd who raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
‘I was wondering where you had gone,’ Storm said. ‘But what are you doing with them?’ He looked over at my troop.
‘There’s a bit of a problem.’ I looked down at Storm. ‘These elves want to work. I would like you to let them.’
A few elves snickered while Storm smiled up at me. ‘I see they’ve tried to talk you into it,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. We’re trying to make them happy.’
‘Making toys and delivering them to children will make them very happy.’ I smiled back sweetly.
‘Oh, just lock them all up until Christmas is over,’ an elf called out. His friends laughed. My elves looked around defiantly.
‘I’ll cut you a deal,’ I said. ‘As Santa’s daughter, you have my word that you will be allowed to do what you want if you let them do what they want.’ All the elves, including the ones who were with me, broke out in furious whispers.
‘We’re not as selfish as that, love,’ Pepper called out. ‘We can’t bear seeing them work while we don’t. We want them to have some fun too.’
‘You’re such a hypocrite!’ I turned to look at Pepper. ‘You assumed that Gilmore considered you inferior because you thought differently from him. You’re doing exactly the same thing with these elves, all of you! You assume they’re not happy just because things that make them happy are things you don’t value.’
‘What?’ Pepper looked gobsmacked. ‘That’s not what I—’
‘We don’t think less of them,’ another elf protested. ‘Don’t you think they’ll be happier relaxing instead of toiling all day and night just because that’s what they’ve been taught to do?’
‘And who are you to judge that?’ I retorted. ‘All of you just want to be left alone and allowed to do what you want. Why can’t you let them do the same?’
When Santa Went Missing Page 4
