One Book to Rule Them All
The ring and Gandalf mysteriously vanish. In their place? Twilight the hated and Stoker the Great. Sequel to A Touch of Sanity.
Frodo looked at the rapidly bulging envelope. It only contained a small ring, what was making it grow to such size? Maybe Gandalf could explain it. He'd seen him coming up the path a moment ago, before his eye caught this strange phenomenon. He waited a moment for Gandalf's stick to rap on the door. It didn't. Instead, several seconds later than he had expected, a normal knock came without the somewhat harder sound of wood on wood. Frodo opened the door in any case, although more wearily than he would have in other circumstances, and a strangely garbed man who was very much not Gandalf entered. He wore a long black coat made of a thick, durable fabric, a strange hat with some type of stick stuck into a fold on its left side, black trousers, and a loose fitting shirt both the design and fabric of were foreign to Frodo. The man looked like none who had ever passed through the shire before. He looked about him, confused. He was not used to dealing with hobbits. Eventually he looked down and sighted his fun sized host.
"Oh, it's a midget. Sorry to intrude sir, but do you have any idea where the hell this is? I'd figure it out myself, but first of all I don't know the area, second of all my sense of direction sucks."
The hobbit was, needless to say, somewhat flustered. He decided that the best thing to do was tell this confused man in his odd garb where he was, offer to give him directions back to where he came from, and hope that he left. Before he could bring himself to open his mouth, however, the man was staring wide eyed at the envelope. He glanced at a nearby red book which the hobbit kept open perpetually to record his uncles exploits in, then turned back to the envelope and marched determinedly towards it, bumping his head on the low ceiling several times but appearing unphased by it.
He grasped the envelope furiously and ripped it open, pulling out a manuscript. He fumbled it, almost as though burned and quickly threw it into the fire. Frodo, understandably surprised to see an odd book of some variety with hand writing the likes of which he had never seen nor heard of in the envelope which was supposed to hold his uncles old magic ring and seeing an oddly dressed human from off the streets of Hobbitton throw it into his fire, took a moment to respond. When he did, he strode up to the man and said "See here my good fellow, you cannot simply come running into a hobbit's hole and begin burning things! Where will you draw the line, pray tell? At full blown arson? I demand that you leave immediately!" The man, crouched over the fire watching the book burn, or rather, not burn, had heard nothing of this, and merely muttered to himself "It isn't burning, why isn't it burning?" He stared at the accursed book for another 30 seconds while the hobbit continued to berate him, but then seemed to come to a realization and drew up from the fire and said, the volume of his voice gradually increasing "No, no, no, no, no, this can't be right." After this initial shock, his voice quieted back down some, but retained it's air of panic "If that's there, and won't burn, then it has to be…no, No, NO, I WON'T ALLOW IT TO CORRUPT TOLKEIN!" He shouted this last bit, momentarily frightening the hobbit off his back.
He grabbed a pair of fire tongs and pulled the unscathed manuscript out. He stuffed it into his coat furiously, clearly revolted by it. Frodo started to open his mouth again, but the man cut him off. "That….thing, is a horror from another world, the same that I come from. It's been dragging down my world's intelligence for 5 years. 5 goddamn years and they haven't realized it's a travesty yet. 3 sequels, a rewrite, terrible movies, all they did was make it worse. It's the worst written, crappy, manipulative, appalling, ridiculous, 1 dimensional, pointless, sparkly vampire ridden, Dracula hating, creepy, stalker glorifying pile of orc shit ever written in all history."The man, who the reader has either deduced is Stoker, has not read my previous story, or has received an IQ score below 60, shook his head momentarily here, attempting to calm himself down from the near yell he'd escalated to "I, moments ago, was in the middle of a mission to destroy it, and found that it had a far more nefarious purpose! It was intended to brainwash a large portion of the population and galvanize those upon whom it failed to do so to make them more easily recognizable. It was meant to prepare the world for a hostile takeover! I destroyed their world shifting machine and stopped them, and somehow ended up here. Presumably radiation from the explosion. Anyway, I'm here, that accursed…whatever it was I said a second ago is here, and I refuse to allow it to corrupt your world." Frodo stared at him in awe "And your Sauron may wind up trying to use it" Here, Frodo was glad to return to a subject he had a remote amount of knowledge in with "But stories tell of Sauron's fall, long, long ago" Stoker laughed hysterically. "I forgot how sheltered you hobbits are. Sauron is the terror of the entire east at the moment." Frodo shook off his shock to ask "But what does this book do? What has it to do with anything?" Stoker replied "It doesn't have anything to do with it per se, but it seems to have replaced the magical evil ring he made that held most of his power. Originally, if you destroyed that, Sauron died for some odd reason. Presumably, the same applies here." Frodo pondered for a moment, before saying "But why this book? Why replace it at all?" Stoker returned "Let me read you an excerpt, that should show you why this book must die.
" "Isabella." He pronounced my full name carefully, then playfully ruffled my hair with his free hand. A shock ran through my body at his casual touch. "Bella, I couldn't live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don't know how it's tortured me." He looked down, ashamed again. "The thought of you, still, white, cold . . . to never see you blush scarlet again, to never see that flash of intuition in your eyes when you see through my pretenses . . . it would be unendurable." He lifted his glorious agonized eyes to mine. "You are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever."
My head was spinning at the rapid change in direction our conversation had taken. From the cheerful topic of my impending demise, we were suddenly declaring ourselves. He waited, and even though I looked down to study our hands between us, I knew his golden eyes were on me.
"You already know how I feel, of course," I finally said, "I'm here . . . which, roughly translated, means I would rather die than stay away from you." I frowned. "I'm an idiot." "
Frodo screamed "NO MORE! NO MORE! I understand. It must be destroyed. How shall we do it?" Stoker answered "Well, the only way to destroy the ring was to throw it into mount doom. Since this didn't burn in your fire, presumably the same rule applies. Which means we're going on a road trip. Through lava. And death. And orcs. And we have a slim chance of survival, although you pulled it off originally. However, I can't quite believe that the book and I are the only new elements. Of course, we have the advantage that I know everything that's supposed to happen. Then again, what are the chances of that being relevant?"