All the wine in Mirkwood is missing and it's the day before the Feast. Everyone seems to want a taste of their own, but who is the clever culprit that absconded with the drinkables? It's up to this sister of Legolas and a group of wacky non-canonical characters to find out.
A/N: Thought I'd introduce some of the first characters I've ever made, who existed in early drafts of writing long before the Fadriel Chronicles started. And also there are some new characters…who might possibly just remind one of certain people from Marvel's Agents of s.h.i.e.l.d., but not to worry, I'm sure they'll be well done. ;)
Priority number one
Rauren Goldleaf stepped down the cold stone stairs leading the inner wine cellar of the Palace. Word had gotten out that there was a shortage of wine in the cellars, and since the annual Feast of the stars was the next night, that wasn't a good thing. She reached the bottom of the small flight of damp stairs and pushed open a creaky wooden door. She jumped back a little.
"Fitz, what are you doing here?" She asked the curly-haired Elf who was standing directly in front of her, looking rather surprised and a little worried. The Elf in question was in fact an orphan that Thranduil had brought up in his courts. Raised by men, he had already picked up their ways, and what you would call a heavy Scottish accent, which the Elves had called foreign and strange when they found him; kidnapped by thieves and left to starve at the edge of the forest. The family he grew up with had given him a name, which the Elves also thought was strange; Fitz. They thought it was short for a better name and that the mortals could not be so obviously simple, but when he told them it was Fitzgerald, they were horrified, and from that day on everyone called him Fitz. He stepped back himself, eying her as if he had to think fast.
"Uh, well checking on the wine of course, isn't that what we came down here for?" He said quickly, jumbling the words in his thick Scottish accent. Thranduil never trusted the servants, so he would constantly send his children to make sure the job was done right; and Rauren was his second-born daughter, so she of course, was assigned to this task.
"We?" She asked quizzically.
"Of-of course," He explained rapidly, as Simona stepped from the corner right behind him.
"Oh I knew it," Rauren sighed, with a bit of an eye-roll. Simona, one of the Palace Elves that had lived there most of her life, -moving there with her family from foreign parts when she was younger- had taken quite a liking to Fitz when they found him; in fact, she never left his side from that day on. Her clipped accent and her long, thick, curly, dark brown hair and Fitz with his own accent and curly light brown hair, and both of them with the same interests; it was just too perfect. They looked and sounded so meant for each-other that Rauren and her friends had given them a unit name, "FitzSimmon". Where one was the other could always be found. Everyone was surprised they weren't married yet. "Father didn't tell me he was sending you two to check on the wine problem."
"And why shouldn't he," Fitz retorted quickly, "The two of us are just as capable at findin' a drink as you are." He turned awkwardly away and strutted back to the wine barrels, Simona pausing for a moment, "As if we shouldn't be looking for it too!" she exclaimed, and then hurried after him. Rauren quickly descended the remaining stairs and walked decidedly behind them, arms crossed. Her name wasn't actually Rauren, at least it wasn't the name she was born with. Everyone in her group of friends seemed to have an odd nick-name here or there. Her birth name was Malolas, which followed the same pattern as her brother's name. Malolas was derived from the Sindarin words "Mallen" and "Lasse", which meant golden and leaf, and so like her brother she had an eppesse of the same exact kind in Westron. Fitz had taken to the custom, and so thinking back to his early years he concluded that "Rauren" was another translation of Goldleaf, from somewhere in his tribe's strange language. No-one was sure if that was really the case, or if Fitz had just made it up, but the name stuck like the others seemed to and now almost no-one called her Malolas anymore. She ducked under a low beam and kept in step with the two.
"What do you mean look for it? We don't even know if it's there or not! Or how much is missing!" She called ahead to Fitz, but Simona answered for him. She turned around to face Rauren and walked backwards, talking all the way.
"Well, it only makes logical sense that we were called here because there was a real problem, so there should be enough wine missing that we should be looking for some if not all of it!" She said cheerfully, matter-of-factly like Rauren should have already figured that out. She suspected that there was another reason Simona knew they should be looking for the wine already, though the explanation was almost always that Simon already knew the answer, a skilled Philosopher as she was. In fact both she and Fitz were Philosophers, trained in other regions, which is where Simona got her British accent, (at least you would call it that.)
"Oh, well then." Rauren said, following along without any further questions, when suddenly the group came to an abrupt halt. "What in the…"
"Where's the rum gone?!" Fitz squeaked out, obviously mystified and extremely upset by the room of completely bare shelves that stood gaping before them.
"Fitz, it's not rum," Simona rapidly corrected,
"I can call it that if I want to" Fitz said angrily, so obviously frustrated.
"No-no it's wine, you don't seem to be gettin' at what I'm sayin' here Fitz" Her voice was earnest, as if this was a life lesson he should have learned a while ago. "It's the proper title."
"Look, I don't care if it's the proper title, I can just use it in one instance if I want to!" As much as the two were together, unnecessary heated discussions seemed to always follow.
"My! What uncouth words you did pick up in that heathen land!" Her voice reached an irritated high, and she put her fists on her hips. "rum," She scoffed.
"Look, I've told ya before, it's not heathen, et was just en Esgaroth." He stuck his head out at her, his finger in an accusing state.
"Well how should I know if there isn't some dark corner where they perform rituals or something worse." She protested, not willing to lose one of their legendary arguments.
"Because you've never been there es why!" He shot back. They were almost nose-to-nose, the volume of their voices hiking up a notch every few seconds. Rauren saw this as the perfect opportunity to back away. Not that they would have noticed anyway, once they got into a scuffle, nothing could get them out….except maybe a Dragon…that had happened once. She was out the door and almost up the rest of the flight of stone stairs when she bumped right into Ramyen, another one of her friends.
"Well, this is a merry gathering isn't it?" She drawled sarcastically, stepping away from him and looking him over in a non-interested way. She and him didn't exactly get along completely, him being the Ward of the Dungeons, (everyone called him Ward) and her being kind-of a trouble maker, but right now Ramyen didn't look happy. He frowned and pointed back the way she had just come. "What are you doing down here, and is that FitzSimmon arguing?"
"Yeeeup." She responded, throwing an upward glance at him and investigating her fingernails. "Doesn't take a genius like yourself to figure that out." She added. Ward smirked,
"Sounds…normal, but I asked you a question." He pointed a finger at her. She raised an eyebrow and continued to stare at her un-interesting nails.
"Last time I checked, the Princess was supposed to get a little more respect around here." He rolled his eyes and withdrew his finger, standing back and crossing his arms.
"Very well, you still haven't answered my question, Your Highness." Now it was her turn to smile,
"You really wanna know don't you?" She kept him in suspense for the fun of it, but he was starting to push past her. "Well, Mr. Ward of the Dungeons-has-to-know-everything, I am on a mission here from my Father to check on some missing wine, which you wouldn't just happen to know anything about would you?" He looked surprised, mumbling under his breath 'now why didn't he send me?'….
"Aha!" Rauren exulted, "Missed out on a special mission did we?" She was enjoying the fact that he missed out on a task that she got, it made wine-checking all the more interesting. He blinked, pretending he was ignoring her.
"Did you say missing wine?!" He jumped and pushed past her, almost running down the steps.
'That I did," Rauren said lowly to Ward's retreating back, laughing to herself, "Let's find out why you care so much about it, Mr. has-to-be-in-all-the-action" But what she said to him was "Hey, wait for me!"
When she reached the bottom of the cellar again, she found Fitz Simon in the exact same state, did they ever run out of breath? Only what they were arguing about now had meandered off the path quite a ways-
"I do not smell," Fitz said loudly, lowering his head and sniffing jus to make sure,
"I didn't say that you did!" Simon returned,
"Yes you did! You said 'I was foul'"
"I was talkin' about your language! Will you never learn anything?"
"Well a didn't say anything that was foul in the first place, even if you didn't mean I smelled, which I doubt."
"Yes you did, you did Fitz you said something…like…oh, it was flumbudgeon, that was what you said! Now if that isn't foul I don't know what is, and I'm pretty sure you made that up!"
"What?!" Fitz exclaimed, jerking his head back and looking confused, "No no no," He put a finger up- "That's not foul, it's a real word, in a real context that you should have known about, it's just a foreign term that means bee, why didn't you get that?" He let his head fall back as he announced to the world with a laugh that strangely reminded Rauren of a mouse inhaling water "She didn't get that!"
Rauren cocked an eyebrow and settled into a comfortable stance as Fitz continued on his rampage.
"You studied the same as I did, flying insect." Simona looked flummoxed, waving an open hand in the air as if she was having him smell something.
"What? No! That's not what you said, you said somethin' else, and heaven knows you could have meant it another way-
"ENOUGH!" Ward yelled, stomping up and halting directly in front of them. Oh yeah, that's the other thing that stops them, Ward. Both Elves froze eyes wide as they realized they were in trouble with the temperamental Ramyen. Fitz looked like he had just been brainwashed and was trying to remember something,
"Now wot were we talkin' about?"
At an angry point from Ward, Fitz turned slowly around toward the empty shelves, his memory obviously returning, but not quite fast enough. He jumped, emitting a little scream that made Simona giggle.
"Where's the rum-"
"Fitz, we already went over this," Simona said gently, ignoring the improper word and laying her hand on his shoulder as he turned back. He looked as if when he found the culprit he would bring an axe to him. "Ward, what other priorities do we have on the list," He asked quickly. Ward rolled his eyes and began to count off on his fingers, "Priority one, the spiders, priority two-"
"No, this is priority one, the wine is priority one; nothing else." Fitz insisted.
"Ok then, where do we start?" Ward asked, clapping his hands together and rubbing them.
"The rest of the cellars." Fitz said, eyes wide with determination as he pushed past the rest of the group and up the stairs. Rauren followed close behind,
"Ok, I am not coming down these stairs again, everyone got it? So if any one of you left something behind, forget it.
"I didn't think we were that bad!" Simona said in a high-pitched voice with a hand raised to her chest. Were we really that bad Ward?"
"UGH."
Later that day Rauren Goldleaf sat on her bed, after an unsuccessful and mostly uneventful search of all the lower cellars, which only turned up a whole lot of dust and one old spider skeleton, which resulted in sending Fitz screaming out of the room. She rubbed her aching back, leaning onto the pillows and flipping a page of the book she was reading. She admired the afternoon light spilling through her room's balcony and onto the bed-covers when suddenly she heard a sound. It sort of sounded like her door was creaking open, and slowly closing the book so as not to warn the trespasser, she peeked sideways to find an eye in the crack between the door and the wall, scanning the room. Without warning she whipped her head around to find Simona rapidly re-closing the door which she had just peeked through. Rauren sat up straight.
"Simon? Simon you get back here right now." She had her ideas about what the Elf was doing sneaking a peek into her room…. On returning to her resting quarters she had overheard Ward behind her giving the next plans for the search, and she knew he was up to something. She stood from the bed, walking over to the door and throwing it open. Simona came slowly and undecidedly down the hall the way she came, from where she was making a silent getaway. She had a sheepish grin on her face, as if this was the first adventurous thing she had done in her life and she was girlishly excited about getting caught. "Simona," Rauren said warningly, "Why were you looking into my room just now?" Without giving her a chance to answer, she kept asking questions. "Did Ward send you? And more importantly is Fitz with you?" Her voice dropped to a whisper at the end of her sentence, and she stared into Simon's eyes; but all she would do was look nervously around as she continued down the hall as if something was supposed to jump out at her. "Never mind, I think I already know the answer to that question," Rauren said, and she promptly grabbed a hold of Simona's arm and pulled her into the room, shutting the door. Simona gasped and blinked, staring around at her surroundings as Rauren started the questions again. "Let me guess, Ward's plan was to check all the bedrooms to find the culprit because he obviously thinks someone stole the wine, and he sent you in here to do the dirty work."
"Precisely." Simona replied matter-of-factly and without hesitation, giving off that wherever her loyalties lay, they certainly weren't with Ramyen. She looked insecure for a moment at giving her secret away so passingly, then grinned briefly, and placing her hands on Rauren's her face got deadly serious. "Yes, Fitz is with me, he's waiting out in the hall." She giggled quietly, as if they were two girls telling secrets at a slumber party. "I was supposed to be the distraction while Fitz ran an alcohol detecting scan on your closet!" (Fitz got some weird magical material from Thranduil.) She continued to ramble, "But it seems I've failed mission one!" She threw her eyes up to the ceiling in an "oh, silly me" way, and now it was Rauren's turn to laugh. However loud it was Fitz must have heard her, because a sudden scuttling sound came from behind the door at the next moment. Simona turned to Rauren again. "Oh, I guess Fitz was with me! Now he seems to have vacated the premises!" Both girls laughed like no-one was there to hear them, grabbing each other's sides so they didn't fall on the floor. Rauren had formulated a plan in that short time, surprisingly enough.
"If Ward is planning on sneaking into everyone's rooms because he doesn't have enough people skills to trust anyone he knows, it sounds to me like he needs a taste of his proverbial medicine." She said, walking to the door and peeking out, and leaving Simona in fits of laughter.
"Proverbial medicine….ohhh! that was a good one," She bent over, a maniacal grin on her reddening face.
"Ok, it wasn't that good" Rauren said, and proceeded to pull Simona down the hall with her again.
The reason for her sudden move was that she heard Ward walk right down the hall, thus evacuating his room for free investigating.
"Do you realize that none of us have ever actually been in Ward's room before?" Rauren asked Simona as they hurried down the hall, being as quiet as Elfly possible.
"You know, I hadn't really thought about it before, but we haven't! How odd," Simona said. "I wonder if he has any secrets he's keeping from us in there."
"Now you're talking my language," Rauren heartily responded as she looked for the right door on the lowest level, ah, there it was, conveniently hanging open. Through her 3,000 odd years in Las-Galen, she had become known as somewhat of a troublemaker, a prier-into, if you will, and that kind of person especially got on Ward's nerves.
"Maybe he has an experiment he's working on," they approached the door.
"Simona, I think you and Fitz are the only ones who would hide an experiment from us,
"Well don't you do it too?"
"Uh, no."
"How strange, and I thought all of us did it."
"Not to my knowledge," They were through the doorway and no-one was around, so they started to sift through some piled paper on his desk.
"No wine here," Rauren commented.
"Ooh, maybe he has a pink colored bedspread or something he doesn't want us to see," Simon suggested gleefully, but a disappointing dull blue cover showed itself. She meandered over and looked at the label. "Second Age, 12…6..4, well at least it's a relic." She mused.
"Uh, Simona, I think you're getting a little off track here…"
"Oh right, wine, got to find the wine." She stepped precariously over a pile of used clothes and was about to open the closet when-
"What are you doing in my room?" Came a loud accusing question from Ward, who was followed by Fitz into the room. Simona jumped, but Rauren kept her cool, feeling behind her with her hand to a newly found hidden flap under Ramyen's small table.
"Just looking for…a pen… yeah, I was thinking of writing a book, and there are so darn few pens around here!" But before Ward could classify it as a lame excuse and kick her out, her hand grabbed hold of something, two somethings actually. "Aha!" She held up two Dorwinian brand wine bottles, -one half empty- and waved them in front of Ward's angry face. "What do we have here? And you were the one sending FitzSimmon in on a mission to investigate me." Ward was furious, all the more because it was Rauren who had found them out.
"Hey," he grabbed the bottles back. "One of those was from Galion, and it's not like I was going to send FitzSimmon all the way in, as you seem to have invited yourself to do."
"Hey, that still doesn't explain the other bottle," she jiggled it- "Which miraculously seems brand-new, like it was in the new shipment that went missing. And it seems your performing ferret went after a different carrot." She smirked and jerked a thumb at Simona, who then looked offended.
"Me, a ferret? I hardly think-"
"And just why didn't ya tell me you were spiritin' away the rum behind my back?" Fitz interrupted.
"Would every-one just STOP?!" Ward yelled, which of course, had the normal effect of complete silence.
"I'd still like to see what's in your closet," Rauren whispered to herself.
"No, there will be NO peeking in other people's personal closets, now get out! All of you! And for spiriting wine away behind your friends back, let's go take a look at Fitz's room shall we?" And everyone, because Ward looked so mean and because it seemed particularly appealing to find out just what was in Fitz's room, everyone left and went down the hall; and no-one besides Rauren ever wondered what was in Ward's closet again.
Ward was still huffing and puffing about "Can't a Warden get some wine from his own cellar occasionally," and "no-one told me it was against the law to grab one bottle of drink." And everyone knew that he was really upset that Thranduil's daughter had found those two measly bottles of wine. But that of course was nothing when they arrived at Fitz's room, which Simona preceded to have to pry a lock off of his door. No one heard Fitz's feeble yells of "don't go in!" and "I might have chemicals in there," or "a man's stuff is his own!" But everyone stood gaping at the entire closet full of wine that was stowed in Fitz's room.
"Woah," Rauren said as Ward practically kicked the door off Fitz's poor stuffed closet. "So that's why you were down cellar today." Fitz just whined, Simona mumbled
"didn't know you had that much," Rauren just stared, and Ward had a satisfied smirk on his face.
"See what I mean about spiriting away wine? Or…rum…in this instance." He glared at Fitz, who backed slowly near a corner. "This should explain your missing wine, this little weasel." He approached Fitz, putting a finger on his chest, as if making it clear that Fitz was the only wine-stealer in the room. "All that time, you were coming down to the cellar for a little bit more, only someone caught you this time."
"Hey, hey, hey." Fitz backed all the way into the corner, his hands up in a defensive mode, "Wot did you just say yourself about needin' a little drink from time to time, right?" he squeaked. Simona intruded in the conversation to remind him of something he surely should have known already.
"Fitz, that's not a little drink, that's, why that's enough for you for a year!"
"I may be a lettle bet of a hoarder." Fitz apologized.
"Well I've had enough of people who take behind other peoples backs, then send everyone looking for it when they have it all the time, who even help me spy on someone we know is innocent-"
"Woo, points for me" Rauren intercepted-
"-when you had it the whole time."
"Uh, guys," Rauren said. Fitz got a word in edgewise and yelped
"The only reason I was so worried is because someone else took the rest that I was goin' for!"
"Uh, GUYS."
"Yes?"
"Yes?"
"What es it?"
"Only half of the wine is here." Everyone looked like they were going to faint.
"You….you mean someone else took the rest of the wine?" Simona sounded like she didn't believe it was possible.
"Yes, does it look like his little closet could hold that much?" Rauren answered,
"Well…no….as a matter of fact it doesn't…" She turned her head sideways.
"Well!" Ward said loudly enough to interrupt everyone, rubbing his hands together and looking around, "I say it's time to give up on looking and request a new shipment of wine," So they all went to Thranduil and did just that. And in all the following confusion over where on Middle-earth the rest of the wine went, and all the following investigations of people's rooms; closets and all, and all the arguments that followed over whether Fitz was a weasel and Simon was ferret; a few –or more- Dwarves and one small Hobbit were missed, and never seen again around those parts for quite a while.
In the end Rauren Goldleaf, sister of Legolas and daughter of Thranduil fancied to say,
"And in the end it shall not be known, who drank the wine."
…Or shall it?
Fili and Kili clinked their bottles together merrily, quickly guzzling the good Elvish wine. Kili swallowed and wiped his mouth with a sleeve, then turned to where Thorin sat on a rock.
"Uncle, this was the best idea you ever had."
The End.
...and no one ever found out what was in Ward's closet…
Author's note: I thought I would try my hand at humor and short stories, but since I am seemingly incapable of writing a short story, whether I succeeded on the humor part or not is up to you. Please guys; I need your feedback on meh stuff here.(I'll even except hate-mail. not.) All you have to do is type what you thought in the little box below, tis that easy. And if you're an agents of s.h.i.e.l.d. fan, I'm sure you recognized someone in there, so please tell me if I did them right, ok? And they might show up in the next one, IF you review telling me you liked them and IF it ever decides to come off my slow fingers. Your humble fan and writer,
-Raurenkili
...look what good a job I did...and I didn't even include Legolas!... :) [Review below.]