All rights to Peter Jackson and New Line and Tolkien and whoever else. Just having a bit of fun here.
Helsinki blinked her eyes open rapidly, listening out for the nasty ringing for the oncall doctor. When she didn't hear it, she furrowed her brow and heaved herself up, feeling very odd indeed. Everything hurt, and by everything, she meant everything.
Even the crotch was feeling bruised.
There was a dense pain in her chest she knew to mean broken ribs, and numerous wet patches on her skin that made her clothes stick that suggested cuts. One oozed and stung above her left eye, and as she woke up she felt the skin protest at movement right up into her hairline. Helsinki held her hand up, intending to inspect her ribs slightly when she gets a good look at what should have been either the bleak walls of a hospital, or the scene of a car wreck.
The interior of a coffin would have been expected too.
The room around her was not a room, it was a forest glade, with long and lush grass and towering trees that rang with an orchestra of song birds and insects. Helsinki seldom sought out the peace of parks, and liked the bustle and filth of London City, so all she thought of the birds was that they were being too loud for this early in her day.
And then she thought that someone had drugged her and dumped her in a park, conveniently with her bag and clothes.
She scowled, twisting around to get a better look at her surroundings and forgot about her almost definitely broken ribs.
She swore, "Fuck!"
"Who is there?!" a voice replied, waveringly concerned. To Helsinki, she heard naught but gibberish.
"Hello?" she called. "I'm over here."
"Ah, there you are," said the voice, unaware that Helsinki still heard only foreign words. "Are you quite alright?"
Helsinki stared up at the man, who was short, finely dressed, and had a curly mop of hair that waved in the breeze that smelled of fresh grass and flowers.
Helsinki didn't like it.
The small man, who was well proportioned for being so short, repeated his strange sounding words. Helsinki blinked up at him, feeling like she was staring through cotton wool. Her eyelids sunk down, and she crumpled in on herself and the man lunged forward to help her. Helsinki's last movement was to clutch her bag to her chest, a blurry thought of 'what if the police find it?' passing through her hazy head.
The next time she awoke, Helsinki surged forward so fast she lost her balance and toppled sideways off of the bed that she'd been moved to. On the way down she saw her hands braced for landing and lost all focus on her goal and nearly brained herself on the wooden floor looking at the odd appendages. They were larger than her own, less spindly and fine and more like hams, she thought, wriggling them in front of her face. Whose hands they were, she wasn't sure, but they were very interestingly placed where her own should be.
The crash and thump of her journey out of bed had called her host, who charged nervously into the room like a rabbit trying to be brave. The small man let out a loud string of words, all gibberish to Helsinki, and approached firmly.
"You should have called, silly Dwarf," he scolded, knees quaking as he tried to heave the mass off of the floor.
To Helsinki, he might as well have been speaking Latvian for all she understood. So she just oggled him like one might look at a particularly interesting fish in a tank.
"Who the fuck are you?" she asked him.
The man frowned. "I'm sorry, master dwarf?"
Helsinki, despite knowing that the language barrier would not at all be solved by slower speech (discovered on a drunken trip to Sweden), decided to enunciate her words better. "Hoooo aaahhh-rrrrre yoooo?"
The small man cocked his head at her. "I'm sorry, I don't speak dwarvish," he said. Helsinki frowned at him and began ambling to her feet. She was even more sore now, and trembled like a newborn fawn when fully upright. She raised her hands awkwardly to try sign her way through the mess of a conversation, but was distracted once more by the odd pair of hands her wrists seemed to be attached to.
Her host noticed, and appeared concerned by her level of engagement with her hands, which Helsinki was now eyeballing from a distance and rotating with a mildly alarmed look in her eyes. She paused and looked at the hands to try and sign an introductory interrogation, but found herself now locked onto a pair of huge, hairy feet.
Her mouth dried and she licked at her lips with confusion as she looked at the feet that might match the hands she found attached to her arms. She was close to formulating some sort of sentence when her host shook his head, perhaps impatiently, and disturbed the curls that had concealed his ears.
Helsinki promptly felt the world tipping her off of the surface of itself and she reached out to grasp the bedpost and steady herself. Instead of keeping her upright, to her alarm and a degree of embarrassment, the bed began to slide across the polished floor with a hellish screech.
"Oh! No, no, no!" the small man cried out, hands flapping about. Helsinki reprised the hand that was attached to the arm that couldn't have been hers because it was too strong and now that she looked at it, it was also larger than her own.
Her legs gave out and she landed on her ass on the floor.
The small man with the insane feet and ears in need of cosmetic surgery knelt down to see her. "I'm very sorry for frightening you, master dwarf, but you must keep in mind that you are quite a bit stronger than me," he babbled. Helsinki stared at him, unnerved.
Where was she? What was this man saying? And what had happened to her hands?
"Forgive me, I have been quite rude. My name is Bilbo Baggins, you are staying in my Hobbit Hole. I found you out on the road behind my house and brought you back here. You've got some nasty cuts I'm afraid," he said, now beginning to notice the complete lack of understanding in Helsinki's eyes. There was panic, but instead of even a note of comprehension, he found only blankness.
He pointed to himself, thinking that he would have to figure out how to get the clearly confused dwarf back to his own people. How he even got to the Hobbiton was beyond Bilbo's reckoning, Dwarves seldom came through the Shire, let alone appear to have been attacked and knocked out on the side of a fairly well travelled path. "My name is Bilbo Baggins," he said, tapping his chest and reiterating, "Bilbo Baggins."
A dreg of understanding flickered in the doctor's face. "Bell-boo Bah-geens," she repeated.
"Bill-boh Bag-gins," he said again.
"Bilbo Baggins," said Helsinki, thinking that the name was beyond anything that she'd ever heard before.
"That's it! And you are?" he nodded and pointed at Helsinki, who got the message pretty quick.
"Doctor Helsinki Alphecca," she answered seamlessly.
Now Bilbo looked confused. "Dok-tor Helsinghi Alfeka?"
Helsinki smiled and winced at the pull of the cut on her face, and remembered to locate her bag. "Hell-sink-ee Alf-ekk-ahh," she pronounced clearly.
"Your name is Helsinki Alphecca?" Bilbo said, and while the woman only understood two words said in the sentence, they had been said correctly and so she nodded.
"My bag?" she queried next, miming holding a bag in her hand. Bilbo smiled and said a jumble of words she didn't understand, but pointed out her bag sitting on a lovely armchair with sun-faded upholstery.
She once more forgot to be careful and launched to her feet with ungainly skill. She managed to grasp the bag before she landed on her front again. Her host offered her a hand and helped her to her feet, feeling very curious about his houseguest. Bilbo lead her out of the guest room and into the hall, where he pointed out the sitting room and motioned to being in there with a multitude of gestures. He then opened a door nearby and showed the dwarf the washroom.
Helsinki did not know what the fuck she was looking at. Some sort of old laundry tub, or perhaps it was a sex thing, she did not know, only that she didn't fancy doing some strangers washing. There was a wooden sort of vanity and clay type basin too, and what could have been a toilet (she wasn't planning on using it in case it wasn't a toilet and she shit on something she shouldn't have) as well as a mirror that was framed in a lovely carved wooden scene.
Her host pushed at her back, urging her to go inside. She looked over her shoulder and patted her hair out of the way, as it seemed to have gotten loose from the bun she thought it was in, and grown thicker if the cloud of blonde over collar was anything to go by.
Bilbo stared back at her and prodded her forward again, pointing to the towels and then the toilet contraption. Helsinki decided that she would amuse him and go inside as he pleased. Bilbo then shut the door.
The maybe-bathroom was fairly large, with a domed ceiling and a little round window with blurred glass embedded in the far wall. Carefully, and feeling like a nosy sneak, Helsinki investigated the room to the best of her ability with the hands that she had been saddled with until further notice. She put her bag on the vanity and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she held up a lump of yellow tinted wax. Experimentally she dug her fingers in and sound it quite soft for a heavy brick, and it smooshed over her fingers with the scent of honey.
She put it back in the dish that she found it resting in.
In the mirror, was something Helsinki thought might have been her if she had lived a million years ago and liked caves. Gone was the angular face and arched eyebrows, and the slim silhouette, and in its place was someone far shorter and squatter than herself. Her blonde hair, usually meticulously kept in careful curls was now a flurry of golden springs that fanned out from her face like a lion's mane. Her eyebrows were heavier, and her green eyes larger and more walnut shaped than before which was good because her lower brow might have concealed them completely had they not grown larger. Much like her nose had, into a stronger and larger and pointer thing, no longer smallish and button like.
She had also grown a neck beard.
Helsinki sat down and patted herself over, tears beginning to trickle down her face -
And into the godforsaken neck beard! Helsinki let out a frustrated yell.
Bilbo was out in the living room, glancing worriedly at the silence from his bathroom. His guest was weak and disoriented. He wasn't certain the dwarf was a he, but had once heard that dwarf women were rare and decided to play it safe; besides it wasn't even as though the dwarf understood him. He assumed it was due to the nasty head injury he'd wiped clean. It looked like it might need stitches but Bilbo was hardly capable of stitching a wound closed. He could barely darn socks, if he was honest.
He'd been paying Tulip down the road to do his for years now. Best kept secret in the Shire.
The hobbit wasn't sure who to contact about a lost dwarf, but he had heard that there was a wizard passing through, one with a familiar name. He would try to contact them and see if they would help the dwarf find his way home. Bilbo was certainly far too out of his depth to try himself. He would have to ask around as inconspicuously as possible, and keep the bewildered dwarf indoors until further notice.
There was a sudden yell in that odd language from the bathroom.
He sighed and stood up. He should make some tea.
Drop us a line if you like!