Chapter 61 — Santa’s Call to Arms & Yuzuru, the Witchiest of Christmas Elves

‘Twas the night before Christmas, the end of all days, creeping death was upon us, and revenge was ablaze. Hear the frenzy of elven footsteps running! Running through every corner of the workshop, fragile fists pounding on doors, musical voices shouting, “Peter’s called a meeting! Get to Tchaikovsky’s bedroom! Now!”

All hands on deck! The misery of the aftermath had vanished. All the girls were excited to see the retaliation. The opera house filled with curious elves, and there in the center of the obliterated seats, where the hole once was, were Santa Claus, Peter, and the master elves, hunched over a large cherrywood desk. Maps were unscrolled. blueprints, inventories, and ledgers opened wide.

Peter looked up at the muttering pandemonium all around him, in every aisle and box seat of the ruined opera house. Elven eyes watched and waited in anticipation for his plan of attack to unfold, but he had no plan. The war room was arrested with silence.

Yuina, that nerdy computer addict, held out a pocketbook and ticka-tacka’d at the keys with one hand. “According to my computer,” she said. “The Holy Spirit is most likely to attack from above. It will have an aerial advantage over us.”

Peter looked at her computer and saw that it was, in fact, a pocket dictionary, but he didn’t want to embarrass her, so he just went with it.

“Okay. We have an enemy that can lift the entire workshop into space without warning. We don’t know how to kill it. We have no strategy, no way of defending ourselves, and the apocalypse is tomorrow. Nope. Wait.” He looked at his watch. “Tonight. So what do we have?”

Yuzuka, fiercesome eleven warrior, spoke up, “We’re five thousand elf warriors strong.”

The elves cheered and threw up their fists. One loud, feminine hurrah!

“Have any of you ever been in a fight before?” Peter asked.

There was silence all around. Some nervous shuffling. Elven eyes glanced around at each other to see who would speak up.

“Yuzuka can fight!” an elf shouted.

“So can Yumeka! She knows karate!” Someone held up the hand of the French maid elf.

“Okay,” Peter said. “So that’s two. What about weapons? Can we get an inventory check on weapons?”

A wooden crate thunked down over the maps. A blacksmith elf besmudged with soot and iron filings reached down into the giftwrap and lifted an M4 carbine assault rifle, a gun so deadly not even Americans are allowed to buy them. Land of the free, my ass! So much for the second amendment. She slapped a box magazine into the finely crafted instrument of death and grinned at Peter.

“We’ve got enough of these babies to supply every continent when the Great War Two breaks out,” she said with a cigar clinched between her teeth. “We’ve also got a couple thousand of these pneumatic multi-shot launchers. They’ll fire anything from wooden stakes to grenades—anything you can cram into the cylinder.”

Her welding helmet fell down over her face as she showed off a massive grenade launcher. She slapped its gargantuan revolver cylinder and gave it a good spin to show off the balance. These terrifying and snub nosed monstrosities are somehow legal to own in the US because they technically qualify as non-lethal riot control devices. So if you’re a twelve year old kid with a few grand to spare, go ahead and buy one today! No ID necessary!

“We’ve also got these FMG-148 javelins! Don’t ever use them indoors.” She threw down the grenade launcher and balanced the rocket launcher on her shoulder— a girthy pipe with a computer screen that masked her face. A giant convex lens magnified her eye as she laser targeted onto Peter’s face. “Very useful for taking down helicopters, airplanes, UAVs.”

The gunsmith dropped the javelin back into the crate and started counting on her fingers, “We’ve also got Strikers, KSGs, Kalashnikovs, MK-46s, Scar-Ls, P90s— those are great for running and gunning— and I don’t know why, but these old fashioned Lugers sure are popular. They’re like the Delorean of pistols.”

“Okay, so we’re good on guns and ammo,” Peter said. “But we don’t know if these weapons can kill angels or not.”

A hand shot up.

“What’s an angel?” an elf asked.

“The Holy Spirit is like an angel,” Peter said.

“What’s The Holy Spirit?” another elf asked.

“It’s the thing that’s coming to kill us,” Santa said.

“Oh!”

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“Do we have any magic weapons?”

Peter was met with silence. The elves twisted their faces in confused grimaces.

“You mean like a magic gun?”

“Like a magic staff, a magic ring, or something,” Peter said.

“Magic doesn’t work like that,” Santa said. “Magic isn’t something you can just turn on and off, or cast with special words. Magic just can’t be controlled.”

“You’re wrong!” a little voice shouted from the back of the room. “Everything you said was wrong! Move it!”

Santa and Peter looked out into the elven crowd and watched as a pointy witch hat fought through the sea of golden heads to reach the master planners. Before he was arrested and hanged for impersonating a naval officer, Captain Cornelius Crunchington III once said, ‘Dress for the job you desire, not the job you have.’ So even though she spent her working hours at the vacuum form press melting plastic into Nintendo Gameboys and Sega Game Gears and Capcom Game Slaves, she did not dress as a toy maker, or a cookie baker, or a reindeer trainer, nor any other profession among the elves. Rather, she dressed as though her dream job were to wait tables at an alchemy and astrology themed maid cafe. An impish Drosselmeyer who may tantalize incel wizards by waving a wand over a $30 parfait and casting, ‘Double, double toil and trouble, paypigs burn and coomers crumble.’ She hammered a grimoire of dust and leather down onto the table.

“What’s that?” an elf asked.

“It’s a book, you dumbass!” the witch shouted. “You know what books are!”

“Go away, Yuzuru! And take your books with you!” an elf shouted.

“Don’t listen to her, Peter! She’s crazy!” The other elves agreed with that assessment.

The witch Yuzuru tipped the brim of her ginormous hat up to look Peter in the eyes, and then she unfolded her grimoire to a crusty page.

“Magic can be controlled!” she said. “In fact, it was once common knowledge! But the thing is, a thousand years ago our culture didn’t have a written alphabet. All knowledge was passed down orally, and everyone forgot. So five hundred years ago I invented an alphabet and began writing down all our histories and stories, like the Two Minute War between Týr and a grove of apple trees, or the time Loki and Heimdallr transformed into seals while fighting over Brísingamen.”

“I don’t remember that happening,” Santa said.

“That’s why you have to write it down!” Yuzuru said. “So you don’t forget!”

Peter looked at the pages and the writing didn’t resemble any language at all. It looked like a special needs kid held a fountain pen upside down in her fist and furiously carved random scribbles as fast as she could. There was more ink than there was page.

“Could you give us a demonstration?” Peter asked.

“A demonstration?” Yuzuru’s face went white as cotton. She tore through the book frantically, saying “Uhhhh…” The page flipping slowed, went back and forth a few times, and then she traced her finger down to a single line. “Okay, this should work.”

Yuzuru took off her hat and fished deep inside its pointy pocket. Into her clinched fist she whispered a flurry of words from the book— an ancient language where every syllable contained unfathomable power over the fabric of reality— forgotten words far too dangerous for the mind of us mere mortals— false cognates and diphthongs of a surreal moonlight world, crowned with gnostic pronunciation. Listen carefully in awe of Yuzuru’s spell: “Please work, please work, please work, please work, please…” And then she tossed a fine sparkling glitter overhead. The magic dust did not fall, but solidified into five glowing claymores suspended overhead. The audience oohed and ahhed and clapped. A curious elf reached out to poke at one of the ethereal swords and Yuzuru shouted, “Are you insane?! Don’t touch it, you fool! Do you have any idea how extremely dangerous this is?”

Yuzuru cleared her throat and requested someone give her a target. Master hunter Yuzuka looked down and spotted a harmless penguin waddling by, so she picked it up and prepared to launch that little tuxedoed fucker into the air when Peter shook his head and reminded her of their promise to the Penguin Queen. A more expendable target was located in the form of a Tickle-Me Elmo and hurled into the opera house’s vaulted ceiling. Yuzuru’s five claymores of phantasmic light bolted forth and skewered the muppet into a red fuzzy pin cushion. When Elmo landed, he would never be tickled again.