Disclaimer: Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings belong to their respective owners who are not me.
Update 10/09/10: Fixed some flow/grammar issues.
Hermione cornered Harry as he escaped from Thursday detention, wearing her Determined Look, several weeks after the first test of her experimental runic array. Seeing her Look, Harry dragged her into the closest alcove and resigned himself to another lecture on "The Benefits of Cross Universe Training in the Efforts Against Voldemort, Also I Need More Material for my Dissertation."
As a rule, Harry and Ron liked to name and categorize her rants. They made good money selling the recordings to a small self-help books company.
"Hermione, please." He tried to head her off early today. "I have two more weeks of scrubbing the trophy room with Filch, and Dumbledore and Snape are watching me like hawks trying to figure out why I was out of bounds after curfew with Gryffindor's sword. You already know I refuse to pull anyone else into our fight, so why can't you just drop it?"
"Well what if I send us, then?"
"...Huh."
"That's what I though. Be at the Room of Requirement tomorrow night at eight. We will have all weekend should anything... untoward happen. Ron has already agreed, so don't think you can convince him to bail with you." She nodded to emphasize her point, and began walking back to the stairs, before whirling and fixing Harry in his tracks with a fiery glare. "Do try not to get caught with the sword again, if you please. If I am to finish the write up for this project sometime this century, I need your input and your impressions of the people we meet and the effectiveness of the different arrays we try." With a few pokes to his chest for emphasis, she was off again.
"Since when did I agree to multiple trips?"
Aragorn considered the ominous sky, the empty riverbanks, and his sense of paranoia. He quickly debated between hiding in a cave and sprinting back to the main buildings of Rivendell for shelter, but decided that if his (paranoid) sense for danger was prickling, staying near the river would be best. He continued walking the banks, scanning for shelter and keeping his unwanted guest sense (which was also paranoid) on full alert.
Thus, when the sky ripped open and three screaming balls of flame fell out of the gaping maw of darkness, Aragorn was only slightly surprised.
A second ripping sound heralded the arrival of a strange assortment of items: namely a large golden chalice, a dirty silver locket, a diamond encrusted diadem, and a demonic snake, all drenched in an aura of pure evil. Being an intelligent sort, Aragorn killed the snake and started edging towards the three figures that had emerged from the river, oblivious to his presence.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Honestly, the only difference between 'portal of fire' and 'safe passage' is the position of the dash-see, here, it should be at thirty seven degrees, not forty one-"
"Spare us the technicalities, Mione. The point is, we're here safe and together, we can continue your experiment, and we can go home in a few hours."
"Harry?" The redhead, having spent the last few moments gaping in horror, was pointing just beside Aragorn's hastily chosen hiding spot at the dead snake and pile of antiques, resting innocently beside the icy water. The girl turned and gasped, moving from apologetic to delighted faster than the eye could see.
"The horcruxes! They're here! Harry, your scar must have pulled them across as well..."
A smile started unfurling across the face of the scrawny one. It quickly passed from happy to maniacal, once again setting off Aragorn's (paranoid) sense of danger, and the young man pulled a wickedly sharp sword from nowhere, charging to the bank and hacking at the artifacts.
The cold dread he hadn't noticed until it disappeared left Aragorn, fleeing with the screaming, shadowy specters released from the strange items.
"Well that was disgustingly convenient." The two young men, he noticed with detachment, seemed to be a bit on the dull side. The confused looks had yet to leave their faces, even as the girl explained whatever it was she was explaining. Great Valar her voice could send one into a coma... He shook himself out of his stupor as well as he could, and stumbled into plain view.
"Who are you? What has brought you to this land?" Even if he hadn't planned on bringing the strangers directly to Elrond, the sheepish and guilty looks passing between the three would have convinced him by activating his sense of worry (unsurprisingly, also a paranoid sense).
Hermione had been missing for hours. Harry eventually found her, huddled in the corner of an immense library surrounded by scrolls and books of all sizes. Her eyes were bloodshot as she squinted at the minuscule and unfamiliar print of the new universe, switching scrolls in a frenzy trying to learn as much as possible about any subject she could find.
"Mione you need to eat." Harry spoke quietly so he wouldn't startle her into hexing his knees and elbows to bend backwards again.
"But there's so much here!"
"Don't you have the ability to return whenever, or did I just imagine you creating an entire discipline of magical travel?" He gazed around with a blank expression, looking over the epic tapestries on the wall and a plinth with several metallic shards without actually noticing them. "Really, we just got here. And, you need to take a break because they asked us to show up to some council-meeting thing tomorrow to discuss our 'fortuitous arrival on the eve of greatest need' or something official and nonsense like that."
Taking a last, longing look at her books, Hermione left to help Harry tear Ron away from his new friends. An unsurprising friendship, she believed, having seen the group of them scarfing down lunch. She shuddered in remembrance, and tried to ignore the physics involved in these small Hobbit creatures eating more than their body weight every meal.
These strange new people made absolutely zero sense to Ron Weasley. They knew where they were going and what they wanted to do, and for unknown reasons wanted to simply walk to-Morder? Murdor? Whatever. Why didn't they apparate? Or take a portkey? That Gandorf fellow was a wizard-there must have been something useful he could accomplish. Unless he was related to that poncy git Lockhart, but even then he might own trained attack fairies?
"I wish I knew how to create portkeys," he heard Hermione say wistfully, and began to wonder why he knew something she didn't.
...Oh yeah. Muggleborn.
"I can make one," he added proudly. Harry blinked at him, surprised. Hermione blinked at him, confused and surprised.
"Oh yeah," she nodded to Harry, comprehension dawning. "Pureblood."
The assorted stuffed shirts found a tapestry showing the destination (More Door?) for reference, and handed Ron a length of rope to enchant. Taking a deep breath, he quickly enchanted the silky gray rope into a portkey that would deposit passengers on what looked like a bridge of death over a pit of lava.
Ron snickered internally, watching Hermione smack her forehead in frustration. She would have learned to make portkeys under pressure as well if she had grown up with Fred and George. Actually, it was a well-guarded family secret that Percy's accidental magic apparition attempts to escape the terrors ended with a splinched sense of humor and a month in St. Mungo's trying to return said humor. Needless to say, a solution was never found.
In an effort to prepare for the eventual encounters with Death Eaters, Harry decided it was high time to continue training with the Sword of Gryffindor. The curious elves had examined the blade and claimed it was strengthened by the poison of a magical snake, and should be impervious to several forms of normal destruction (his thoughts on the sword? Twice damned basilisk got it's karmatic comeuppance for trying to eat the Chosen One for dinner, being the method of destruction for its master's soul pieces).
It was to this end that he sought out the severely paranoid man who found the trio a few days before, seeing as he was one of the few in the midst of combat training instead of frantic preparations for a trip to "the most inhospitable realm in Middle Earth." The two became friends after a fashion, Aragorn pumping him for information on dangerous beasts and how to incapacitate them and Harry receiving survival training that would be especially useful if he was ever forced to spend a year in hiding by camping cross country.
The day before the Destruction of Evil Stuff That Should Be Gotten Rid Of Squad (as Ron had dubbed them) planned to port to Mordor and destroy the disturbingly heavy golden ring, Harry found himself explaining to Aragorn the nature of ghosts and unfinished business.
"You gotta let them go one day. Otherwise they just hover around, and can't be arsed to help you and usually just end up getting you in trouble by inviting you to parties or becoming your history teacher. Oh, and the perverts haunt the bathrooms." Aragorn was rather disturbed at this information; ghost parties did seem rather troublesome. As soon as this ring debacle ended, he decided to take a trip to a certain mountain to release some particular spirits who may or may not be tied to his family. Just in case.
With a rather anticlimactic end to a dark lord and his only horcrux, Harry, Ron, and Hermione decided to bid farewell to Middle Earth. That is to say, Harry and Ron agreed, and muscled Hermione out of the library before she realized what was happening. In return, she agreed not to send them home in a matchbox, but only if they copied as many library books as they could while she prepared.
It was with a quiet sense of amusement that Harry said goodbye to Aragorn, realizing now after several eaves being dropped on the dignitaries in residence that the paranoid man was the heir to a great king and would likely be put on the throne within the week. If they could find him, Aragorn would be forced to spend the rest of his life being watched by everyone in the room and hating it. However, Harry also knew about Aragorn's plans to disappear and visit a haunted mountain, and all this information was his because being a hero gave one certain rights to be nosy. After all, how ELSE did anyone discover ominous plots?
Hermione was dangerously excited, such that her magic had begun sparking in little blue flares. The endless possibilities of her new rune design were incredible, and just thinking about all of the new universes to explore sent several extra-strength blue sparks leaping from her arms. So many libraries, so little time, so many accolades for newly discovered branches of magic...
With uncharacteristically solemn looks, Ron and the hobbits regarded each other. The bond forged between them as they ate their way through half of Lord Elrond's acquired provisions was strong, and none would ever forget the sheer amount of food his brother had demolished. With a nod, Ron handed over his last few chocolate frogs in honor of their accomplishments, and the hobbits passed a large crate into his waiting levitation charm. Pleased with the trade, he sent a silent thanks to Merlin for his newly discovered favorite food.
Hermione activated the rune array marked painstakingly into the riverbank, and the three stepped through the metal door that appeared. With a flash, Middle Earth was returned to its original state of separation from the Universe of Illogical Wizard Types.
A jaunt to an alternate universe, combined with time compression on the trip home to hide the Golden Trio's two week disappearance left Harry, Ron, and Hermione starving but not in flames on the floor of the Room of Requirement, ten minutes after they left. Storing Hermione's new library in the tower, a trip to the kitchens was decided on in short order. As they ducked prefects, Filch, and Snape, Harry and Hermione tried in vain to guess what was in the crate Ron had yet to let out of his sight.
"Fine Ron, I give up. What's in the box?" Well, Harry had been guessing. Hermione just wanted to refuel and return to her reading, and possibly convince Harry to go on another universe hop in a month or so.
"Delicious mushrooms of course!"