Morgoths Bane
Chapter 10: The Lifting of Veils
Disclaimer: I don't own anything save the odd original character and perhaps the plot. Actually, if you want to use this crossover idea, feel free as long as you contact me with the general idea and the assurance that it will be Mary-sue free, especially ones after Legolas: the poor guy's been through enough.
Summary: People only really believe things when they see them, and Rocko, Gimpy and Cal are in for a doozy! The veils separating the worlds are nudged open for a select few and Nitz and Jesse find that more than just their personal well being depended on their relationship… in too many ways to tell.
Star Wars EU spoilers ahead.
September 3rd, 2001: A Road, Upper Western NY State.
"Nitz, I think you've finally lost it on this one. Not that you haven't lost it before, but to lose it this much is a first for you." This was Rocko, who Nitz had just informed of their destination. I'll grant that what Parker had just said wasn't easily believable by anyone without an interest in classic fantasy literature, but, as the two peers sat in the back of the 1984 green Civic sedan, Nitz insisted it was true.
"I saw the place myself, and you guys saw how the guy and the horses disappeared back in May." He was getting a bit tired of having to constantly try to convince them, and the Force comparisons were running a bit long with Gimpy.
"Frankly Nitz, I'm not even sure what I saw. It's this turn, right Nitz?" Said Warsie asked. Gimpy had packed his stuff, ineffectual computer and all, despite the worries about strain on the tires.
"Yeah." Nitz just leaned back in the seat and hoped his friends wouldn't react too wildly when they arrived. Then he closed his eyes…
…And awoke to the sound of Rocko cursing profusely. They were idling in front of the great doors of the Willow Boulevard gate, the boys outside staring up at its height of 24 feet. He got out of the car and walked over to where his friends were standing. "Well Nitz, I gotta say... maybe you haven't lost it after all." Said Rocko, still looking up at the gate.
"I told you, didn't I?" He too looked up at the parapets, and then whistled loudly. Two heads looked over the edge in answer to the signal.
"Who go'eth there?" Called one of them in an overly poetic tone, probably to mask his strong Quenya accent. His companion looked at him strangely.
"Go'eth?" queried the second figure, before whacking the first in the head and letting forth a sting of Quenya that made Nitz blush despite himself. "Who are you and what do you want?" called the second while the first was still rubbing his head.
"Parker Walsh and friends! We're here to pick up Jesse and Jonah!" Nitz called up, to which the pair of heads receded, probably to confirm with their superiors.
After two minutes, the gate began rumbling open to reveal the street beyond. The heads returned, saying they could proceed. The young men got back into the car, Rocko and Gimpy looking abashed. They drove through the gate towards the inner wall, where the guys would see even more.
Inside Lindon Manner"I still don't see why you had to dye your hair again. I thought I heard you say that you thought that Parker liked your natural shade." Asked Ereinion Gil Galad to his daughter as they walked toward the front door. He had been surprised last year at her decision to dye her hair purple, but saw it simply as a way for her to carve out her own identity… or possibly to disappear into the college crowd.
"I have to keep up my image. People expect me to be kind of the same as last year." To this her father stated that her brother had done fine without any sort of image at all.
"This may surprise you father, but I couldn't afford to have an image in college. I was in a virtual state of hiding since October. Didn't you wonder why I asked for that legal advise over Batavia way?" Answered Jonah as he pulled up alongside. Their father had to concede that he had lost the discussion as they emerged onto what was charmingly referred to as "the porch".
The YardThe boxes were piled just beside the door, which opened to reveal a motor vehicle being exited by a number of human males, only two being at all comfortable in this situation. The first of these was obviously Nitz, sitting on the trunk. He waved at Jesse, although he came off as much less confident than he desired to be. Its one thing to rehearse all the confidant romantic gestures you desire to make in the privacy of ones home, but in public it's a little more difficult.
Rocko was amazed and quite literally too stunned to speak or even to swat at the mosquitoes buzzing about him, which was unusual in that he often had a boorish comment to throw out in an awkward space. He was currently examining the ears on a line of guards. They were doing the old "Buckingham" routine, standing perfectly still and impassive despite the slightly lessened skeeter barrage, but giving off the feeling that the 'annoying tourists' were one indiscretion away from having every bone in their body broken (1).
Gimpy was sitting in the Civics' driver's seat, clutching at the wheel with an expression of pure shock, his natural hate of all things Star Trek having instituted a shutdown after having just seen more pointy ears than at the average Pon Farr singles-only mixer. The lads knew he was all right because his eyes were still twitching. And Cal… was Cal: annoying, inexplicably attractive to females and having roughly the I.Q. of a RITZ cracker (2). "Hey, Guys! It's Jesse Lady Friend Guy!" He waved, leaning out the passenger side window. He was the second one comfortable here, mostly out of sheer air-headedness.
"Hey guys… sorry about all the extra muscle. People are still a little jittery around these parts from that May episode. I hope it doesn't make you guys nervous." This was probably the most apologetic Jesse had ever been in front of what she thought of as "the guys" (3), not least because they were seeing her in her natural habitat.
"What? Uh… not really, no." replied Rocko, just coming out of his daze. Jesse then hefted a box into the arms and preceded down the stairs, followed by her brother carrying his two crates, their father with another two, and finally Elladan and Elrohir lugging an unusually long case between them. When Jesse reached Nitz, he took her crate for to hoist up onto the car roof. She, however, chose to distract the lad from his manual labours by planting a kiss of affection upon his startled lips, for which he blushed while trying to keep the box steady.
"What's Gimpy doing here? I thought he would be out on his oil rig by now." Asked Jesse when their lips detached.
"It got bought out. Someone with more money than God paid its former owners 300 mil when they were going to give it away for a song." Nitz smiled humorously. "If I didn't know better, you'd think someone was coordinating this."
Rocko saw this scene, and was about to put the question to Jonah, but the brother stopped him short with a hand signal and a sage nod. Mr. Gambiani too nodded in response, although his face possessed quite a lewd grin to it. The faces of the twins, however, as they met the eye of Mr. Walsh were steady and quite bereft of smiles, theirs being the grim faces of those promising dismemberment to one that would besmirch their charges honour. Gimpy, just coming around, was getting nervous at all the attention. Cal was… not to call him an idiot, but sometimes the truth hurts.
Eventually, the roof of what the author likes to term Click-mobile had obtained the general feel of the Bodine truck (i.e. rickety and held together with rope) and the enlarged ensemble were off, through the town and back out the far east gate. As they headed out across the converted marshland, the guards on the walls stopped watching them, getting back to games of chance or chess, until only one set of eyes observed them. The white raven known as Chalk perched on the outer cornices, staring east without heeding the sun.
Something strange about that bird, I tell you.
Student Union, State U campus, Sept. 3rd, Lunchtime
Lunchtime on the campus of the State University of New York was a busy, noisy affair, which could really be said about campus cafeterias the world over. Gimpy had been dropped off first with is computer, his driving replaced by that of a lackey. Then Rocko had been deposited in front of the Alpha Alpha fraternity house in a rather abrupt fashion: dumped on his arse on the sidewalk with his boxes beside him. Then, arriving at State U, they (meaning Nitz, Cal and our resident pseudo-Numenorians) felt the need to sup before moving their boxes up to their new dorms. The lackey presumably parked the car safely.
This is the point when things began getting a bit strange.
First of all, the life form known only as Charity did a sudden rush for Jonah while he was in line to get some Cantonese stir-fry for Jesse to heap on her waffles. The two things that stopped him from becoming a smear on the linoleum were his quick reflexes on his arm and her wearing a good set of track shoes. He held out a very legal looking document.
"What is this?" asked Charity, slightly confused.
"A restraining order. By the authority of the State of New York, you have to stay at least 50 feet away from me at all times…" He read some of the finer print. "Except when in a separate room, story of a building or otherwise physically obstructed." He had to be firm with this girl, that no meant no!
"But… I was going to come with you to your castle in the sky, and we were going to live happily ever after with the fairies and the clouds and the…" These were clearly the ramblings of a crazy person, so Jonah decided to intercede and sooth her nerves.
"Look. Charity, I'm not sure where you got this "castle in the sky" nonsense from, but I live less than 10 miles from here, firmly on the ground. Its nothing but farmland carved out of marsh for miles around. The mosquitoes are so thick in the summer that we have to raise wasps, spiders and dragonflies just to keep their numbers down, and the wind so harsh in winter that the icicles form sideways. And I'm not that great of a catch either… I'm a complete coward most of the time. Most of last year I was running and hiding!" He failed to mention that she was the reason for this, and that his shattered nerves had healed over, but a little white lie wouldn't do any harm if it got her off his back and back on the path to something approaching sanity… or a mental hospital.
Seeing her disappointment at his rebuff, he decided that trying to cheer her up wouldn't do any harm. "Hey, it's not the end of the world. There's a whole ocean of other fish out there, all of them ripe for the catching. Any one of them could be your future vict… I mean, boyfriend. I say: go at it, and make that one YOURS!" It worked: Charity walked off, head held high, and Jonah wondered how his mother would react if she had seen that. 'Probably berate me for going into the motivational speaking racket.'
He eventually got the stir-fry, and took it back to his sister, who indeed put it on her waffles. "Well, you're finally out of dodge bro. What do you intend on doing now?" Asked Jesse as she began eating.
"Some of this, some of that: I was thinking of raising catfish in the south drainage ponds and taking up fencing. Nothing big." Replied her brother in the manner of a young, wannabe aristocrat. He began raising his BLT on toast to his mouth, but then he saw another girl approaching. "And who is this bonnie lass with the flaming hair then?" He asked in his best faux-Irish brouge.
The girl was Kimmy Burton, coming to the table with her own tray. "Hey Nitz, Jesse, Cal… I don't think I know you."
"Jonah Kingson, Jesse's brother. I was in hiding most of last year from the Blonde Tornado." Jonah cocked his thumb back towards Charity. "And you must be the 'Crimson Distraction' my sister was always ranting about."
"Well, yes." Said Kimmy, her eyes slightly avoiding Jesse. "But, on the other hand, it's nice that you two found each other."
"Yeah." Nitz decided it was time to get to the bottom of something that had been bugging him for months. "Listen, Kimmy. Remember when you said that you lost six hundred bucks over that screw-week fiasco? What exactly did you mean by that?"
Kimmy looked furtively from side to side, and then leaned in conspiratorially. "Are you sure that you two are together, like, for real?"
"YES! We've met each other's parents, we've been through a bit of a crisis together…" Just for a bit of fun, Jesse wiped her mouth with a napkin and suddenly kissed her beau on the cheek. "As well as that."
"Okay then… have any of you ever been involved in a betting pool?" After giving their respective answers (4) she proceeded to tell them a tale of intrigue and medium height adventure.
The tale started almost a year ago, when some enterprising soul, whose name is lost to the mists of time, had noticed the unusual predicament between Kimmy, Jesse and Nitz, and, in secret, had created a betting pool with 3 simple conditions:
1. Which female would Mr. Walsh hook up with?
2. When would they hook up?
3. How far would they have gone within the first three days of their relationship?
The majority of the bets had relied on the unnatural drive For Kimmy Burton that Nitz had appeared to possess. A few, however, saw that Jesse desired Parker almost as fiercely and much more truly (5) than Parker desired the redhead, and bet some money on that off chance. As the months rolled by and the romantic pendulum went nowhere, people began dropping out in large numbers, even more so when Kimmy herself found out about this pool, and declared that she thought Nitz was a good friend but not much else.
She was running the thing by the winter term.
Things went on, with Kimmy screwing up her bet all by herself. It seemed that the bookies were getting impatient. Not a lot of betters were left in the pool, and the pot was getting huge.
"So, let me get this straight…" Jesse was… angry, shocked and scandalized, and yet the edge to her voice indicated that her raw rage was more than the sum of its parts. "My and Nitzs' personal lives have basically been one giant peepshow for a couple of cowardly voyeurs and would-be high-rollers. And the only reason you were spared this was because you took over this racket and got out Scot-free. How many people were in on this thing?" Jesse pointed her fork gangster-style at Kimmy; and Nitz was half ready to believe that she was about to make Kimmy an offer she literally could not refuse.
"Well, about twenty five or thirty…" Kimmy began, and Nitz breathed a sigh of relative relief. That relief, however, was extremely short lived as Kimmy added the crucial modifier. "…Thousand people, which, assuming an average wager of about 100 dollars per person comes to a cool two or three mil in the pot."
Her audience was, to put it bluntly, shell-shocked, and gaped open mouthed at the speaker. Eventually, Jonah managed to squeak something out. "Two… or three… million dollars?" What he was thinking was that this wasn't just a bunch of bored and vicarious college kids betting for something to do… well, it was, but it had reached the scale of organized near-crime; a gambling venture of Mafioso proportions.
And this cheerful little carrot-top was the Don and didn't even realize it.
Nitz, coming to and wanting some way to vent his emotions, suddenly climbed up on an empty portion of the tabletop. "OKAY YOU GUYS! I KNOW YOU'VE BEEN BETTING ON THE OUTCOME OF MY PERSONAL LIFE, SO THOSE WHO DID CAN JUST STOP HERE AND ADMIT IT!" The crowd, inexplicably, went silent… a thoughtful, guilty silence in fact.
"It's no use, Nitz," said Kimmy, standing up. "They'll only fess up when I give the closing signal." It was then that Kimmy let loose a loud yodel composed of seeming random syllables that dazzled in its sheer bizarreness (6).
Nine hundred and fifty heads snapped in their direction.
So Nitz asked again, much more politely this time. The vast majority of these raised their hands, some sheepishly and some proudly. And then, seemingly in the background, a voice shouted out "Well, when did you guys hook up?" The thing was, though, that it didn't seem to come from one particular person
This time Jesse took up the call. "It was May 17th … we just hung out, we talked, and… okay we flirted like a couple of dumb teenagers a few times. Nothing more, nothing less." Why she was saying this escaped her, it felt that things had to happen to move happenings along… plus, it was really the only way to get them of their backs.
Somewhere at the far end of the Union, a young woman with frizzy black hair developed a slightly mad smile, froze, and fell sideways in her seat.
Somewhat Earlier…Tekerson Technical Institute, a grey building of cinder block and plaster, was abuzz with activity.
G-Prime was back.
Klaxons sounded, the sounds of feet rushing filled the corridors as people hurried to the loading docks. Rows of nerds and computer geeks were lined on either side of one of the doors and, although missing the armour and uniforms of the Imperial navy, appeared very similar to the Vader arrival scene in Return of the Jedi. Downcast were their eyes, not out of any sort of shame, but out of grief.
Chewbacca… was dead. Killed in the New Jedi Order books by having a celestial body come down on top of him during the Vong conflict. This had been taken in these halls as a sign that the EU was treading atmosphere like a crippled star cruiser.
And two years on, the hert hadn't faded. And then came the rumours of another upcoming death.
The corrugated steel door finally began ascending, causing the nerds to stand to attention. Mump, Gimpy's squat, red haired lieutenant, approached the rising, rumbling entry point. To describe the situation as nervous would be an understatement of criminal measure: Gimpy was still aggravated about losing access to his hardware. It'd never worked right since that cowardly female launched her attack, and his new treachery had frayed nerves even more.
As G-Prime marched down the avenue created by his minions, Mump trailed alongside. "The men are ready to launch the attack as soon as you're ready sir. You just say the word, and Del Rey's mainframe will be…"
Gimpy whirled on his second-in-command, releasing pent-up frustration. "You know that my set-up is this close to being junked. Without it, even with my skills, our impact would be minimal." Gimpy looked over to where his possessions were being wheeled in. He turned back to Mump. "If this treachery is to be avenged, my hardware needs to be in top working order. Alert the engineers… we're going in!" As Gimpy and Mump marched into the halls, they passed a young, blue haired woman obscured by the ranks.
She smiled.
Back at State U, after lunch
Dunmore Hall was quite a respectable domicile… in that it was in better shape than Chilton Hall was even before that incident in May in which 20 students had been killed and another 40 sent to hospital. No graffiti on the hallway walls coupled with the fact that the plaster on said walls was in very good shape, a full kitchenette was positioned on each floor and there being a superior plumbing system in place made this building a very popular living space for those sophomores who got signed early enough. The one drawback was an aging furnace that failed for days at a time once every year or so.
Security was still wary of all comings and goings, so it took a little bit to actually get into the dorm. Once in, Jonah, Jesse and Nitz proceeded to the fourth floor, where their rooms were located. The two men folk would be roommates, apparently for reasons of familiarity and convenience, but Jonah had also promised Elrond's sons that he would keep tabs on his sister's relationship to make sure things remained 'proper'. Carrying their boxes in or under their arms or on a hand truck, they first approached the men's dorm.
"Well, here we are Nitz. It would be best if we got settled as soon as possible." Jonah said as he wiggled a hand free from carrying to turn the doorknob. Opening the door, he found a room nicer than Nitzs' old room in Chilton, but still very utilitarian: A desk, two beds, some drawers and a corner closet. Overall, it was nice. He just hoped that Nitz locked the door regularly… unlike his old roommate.
"Okay… yeah." Replied Nitz, who was carrying his boxes under his arms. He turned to Jesse. "So… I'll see you later then. I hope you have a better roommate this year."
"You too." She had spied Jonah testing the desk for dust. " This time tomorrow?" That would be the scheduled time for a big announcement in the auditorium by the University President, although she made it sound like a date request… but whatever.
"Sure." Nitz tried to kiss his lady-friend on the cheek, but at that moment, Jonah grabbed him by the back of the shirt and pulled him into their room. Jesse chuckled at this, and then proceeded looking for her room.
She found Room 859 a little way down and across the hall. Leaning the hand truck against the wall, she knocked on the door. A young woman with frizzy black hair and fair skin answered it. This was Louise Birch: life long resident of Staten Island, part-time anti-horse slaughter activist and student of the Faculties of Sciences and Literature.
She was also a very new millionaire.
"So, you're my new roommate…Kingson is it?" Asked Louise as Jesse wheeled through the door.
"Yeah, I am. And the name's Jesse." She held out her hand in friendship.
Louise took it. "Louise Birch, Louise will do, but frankly, never call me 'Lou' under any circumstances. I work weekends, so if you want to play any loud music, invite your guy over or trash your side of the room… try to do it then." Louise thought that laying some ground rules early on would save a lot of trouble later.
"So… you know about me and Nitz?" Asked Jesse tentatively. But why wouldn't she? It was a very good chance that she had bet more than ten dollars on the circumstance.
"Well, it is practically old news that you were the only one pursuing him during his 'stupid period'. And the finally tally was very surprising." Well, for her at least, and profitable too.
"Hey, he may have been dense as a rock, but he was by no means stupid." Jesse rebutted, adding to herself that social clumsiness had been a worthy substitute.
"Well, sorry then. By the way, do you need help unpacking?" asked Louise.
Jesse agreed, and so they began putting things in order. One thing never displaced was a betting slip under Louise's mattress claiming the winning wager.
No one ever quite remembered who started the bet in the first place.
1. Twice or thrice for the particularly long ones
2. Unsalted
3. Not counting her own group, which began as an attempt to develop a collage personality before blooming into true camaraderie and friendship
4. Jesse had once bet on a hockey game on TV, while Cal had wagered on… something of a far more private nature
5. Kimmy was far too flowery for her own good
6. If any Canadian readers are old enough to remember the YTV special "The Grogs First Santa Claus Parade", you'll know what I mean