(A/N: Please allow me to introduce us: We are Roses on Raindrops and –Hey you in the back! Eyes on me!– we are "ladies" of wealth and taste…sort of. I'm Sangrita, "the creative one" and "the mad one", respectively, and I'm getting sick of talking. So fasten your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy collab!)

People -and by people I mean my best friends- absolutely love knocking on my door, ringing my cell phone, entering my room or going through my stuff at the exact moment that I wish they wouldn't. I can't explain why. Maybe they get some sick sort of charge out of it? I have no idea, but I wish it would stop, and the current knocking at my door was really irritating me.

Severely.

I mean the kind of irritation that, if irritation had a physical form, I would choke it slowly to death while wearing a pleasantly enthused smile.

What's so bad about a friend knocking on your door? You tell me, after you've just settled yourself down, kneeling in about twelve different silky robes behind a low table with a pot of tea, a ridiculously elaborate wig on your head, outrageously dramatic geisha makeup that you've just put on and a CD of Japanese music to get you in what so many performers call "The Zone".

And then your caring friend knocks at the door. Your caring friend that you knew was going to be around sooner or later, anyway, but that's beside the point. Your caring friend knocks at the door and you know you're going to have to somehow manage to make your legs work again after being knelt on, try to avoid slipping on the many layers of silk you've somehow fit around yourself, return to a standing position without knocking over the insanely low table and go answer the door without the ridiculous wig falling off.

Yeah.

"Rita! What's taking you so long! You're the one who asked me to come over here, so I came and now you can't even answer the door?!"

Against my better judgment, I opened the door. I'm so courteous it kills me, sometimes.

"Oh my God. What are you doing now?" My friend Jesse demanded, looking up and down my geisha costume with the sort of look that said she didn't know whether to laugh or slap me with my own fan.

"Well, I was getting ready to start working on this role I'm learning, but I figured I might as well come answer the door since The Jess was standing out there, and everything."

"Working on a role?"

"Madama Butterfly."

She nodded, being used to it, and figured that as long as I didn't get too into the role, like falling for a much older Naval officer, marrying him, having his child and killing myself all for the sake of art, I should be fine.

"But of course, you're not going to work on that role now that I'm here are you?"

I shook my head, mimicking one of the "false alarms" from the movie Labyrinth: "Oh, no, no, no, of course not! We're going to do Sangrita-and-Jesse type things. I'll just be dressed as a geisha the whole time."

Jesse just shook her head and followed me back inside. "If that's what makes you happy. Where's everyone?"

I shrugged. "My parents are at work, my sister's at a friend's and I've just been hanging around all day doing opera-type stuff and college-type stuff."

Jesse and I are both eighteen, both slightly insane and have a shared passion for Labyrinth and the Lord of the Rings. When the two of us shared the same space for any given amount of time, unusual stuff was said and done, and objects had a habit of disappearing, breaking, or being "improved upon, not to mention the startling amounts of slash fic that somehow cropped up.

And yet my parents still loved her. Strange.

"I hope you know how important our friendship is to me, now, Jesse, because I really need to learn this role and quickly."

"Is that a coffin in the living room?"

~*~*~*~*

"Gandalf," said Legolas quietly, "I believe that there is something amiss."

The wizard looked about him at the other members of the Fellowship, all of them carrying on more or less normally (Merry and Pippin and occasionally Boromir and Aragorn contributing to the "less" part), no one seeming to worry about a thing.

"Amiss, Master Elf? How amiss?"

The Elf only shrugged, narrowing his blue eyes in an attempt to concentrate on what exactly was hanging around at the back of his mind. Whatever it was, it wasn't something he was going to hit upon right away. He would wait for it to come to him.

"Not amiss, exactly," the prince amended. "More like something out of the ordinary. Something unnatural, but it hasn't happened…yet."

~*~*~*~*

Jesse was looking at me with an expression that seemed to be trying to make up its mind whether to say "I demand an explanation and I demand it now" or "OK, Sangrita's cracked, that's all there is to it, and I really don't want to know."

Guess which one won out?

"Hey…is that a coffin?"

I nodded, feeling that damn wig slide forward a little, and attacked it with a few more bobby pins. "Yeah…that is definitely a coffin, and it is definitely in my living room."

She narrowed her hazel eyes at me, while I just shrugged innocently. This was an old routine.

"Why is there a coffin in your living room?"

"Oh, well, that's easy to explain!" I assured her cheerfully, a bit more of my unnamed accent slipping forward in my voice. Don't ask how I ended up with it, either. No one in my family has one. Must be all that work in theatre. It sort of resembles Pippin's voice…but there's also something a little more American, and sometimes French. Don't know why; probably never will. Like most accents, though, it tends to invade my speech when I'm excited or upset, or just not paying too much attention.

"The coffin's in my living room because in addition to Butterfly, I'm in rehearsals for an operatic version of the Vampire Lestat. I'm playing Armand, and–"

"Wait a minute? Armand?"

"Yeah. Armand."

"That's a guy's name."

"So?"

She put her head to one side, again "assessing" me...something she's been doing for years with little success.

"Last I checked, you only fell for tenors…you fail miserably to sing that low."

I clapped a melodramatic hand to my forehead, wrapping an arm about her shoulders as I did.

"Armand, my good lady, is a 400-year-old vampire made when he was a young boy. Not much taller than I am, red-haired and pretty like me, and sung by a soprano or a mezzo. Anyway, the coffin's here because we need a few of them for the show."

I liked having the coffin there. Jesse, on the other hand, just thought I was crazy.

"You're crazy. I knew it all along!"

"Oh come on," I said, rolling my eyes. "It's not that bad. Vampires have to have coffins. It's practically a prerequisite with the Vampire Homeowners Association! There's a lot of room. See?"

I climbed in, lying down in traditional vampire fashion with my arms crossed over my chest (attack of the killer barely-legal geisha vampires!) and smiled up at her as innocently as I could.

"You're crazy!"

"Oh, just get in for a minute! Pleeeeeeeeease?"

She hesitated for a moment, then gave in. No one can resist the chance to climb in a coffin…especially when said person is also a fan of Interview With the Vampire. Score about a million for Sangrita's forces of corruption!

"See is it that bad?" I tried to reassure her.

SLAM.

"Well, it is now that the lid's shut!"

I gave her my best derisive stare, which didn't really have the desired affect because she couldn't see me that well in the dark. I tried to reach up and push the lid open, but dropped back to the bottom of the thing when I felt a weird sort of sensation like the floor was dropping out from beneath me.

"Oh, shit…"

"Rita! What the heck is happening?" I heard Jesse screaming painfully close to my ear.

"Ow! Shut up! I don't know what's happening!"

"When we get out of this, I'm going to–!"

I never found out what it was that she was going to do, because we both felt the coffin slam down again, and nearly killed each other in the process of getting out.

I'm sure that when we did get out it was pretty amusing, because our eyes were probably just was wide as those of the nine people looking back at us.

"I do not believe this," I said slowly. "What about the operas?!"

"Rita, dear," Jesse said in a "soothing" tone. "We. Are. In. Middle. Freaking. Earth. Don't worry about the operas."

"But I was going to sing Cio-Cio-San and Armand! And I'm in Middle Earth in a freaking turn of the century geisha costume!"

(A/N: Hey, Jesse…see if you can top THAT!)