I have officially reached my tenth chapter! Hurrah! This is big. This is important. This is wonderful! And next chapter we will celebrate with more plot-coffee and perhaps a big reveal that EVERYONE was expecting anyway! This probably isn't my best chapter, since it's mostly filler because I'm following movieverse mostly. Don't get me wrong, the books are great, but movieverse is more fun to parody because more people have seen it so there's more to make fun of.
Disclaimer: I don't own LOTR. I don't own Johnny Depp or Tim Burton, or Spalko, or NCIS.
As it turns out, The Plot was perfectly happy spawning sub-plots left and right and decided it would never tell them who was pregnant. Although Tauriel, being Tauriel, decided that once she was done with the whole slash business would find out for herself, because she hated being denied information. After all, The Plot was hyper after all of its coffee breaks and running on a limb and going off on all sorts of tangents.
And so it was that Tauriel took advantage of The Plot being incapacitated by a caffeine buzz and decided to take Eowyn with them to Isengard, which was a shockingly easy journey, given the plot-hole between Isengard and Helm's Deep, because authors never enjoy discussing the little in-betweens of the stories, and The Plot was no different.
So they arrived in Isengard with little hassle, a ragtag band of every race. Haldir had accompanied them for "political reasons," although Eowyn assumed smugly that he was accompanying a still slightly injured and very surly Colonel Spalko. Tagging along with the Fellowship as well were the Elrondian twins, Jenny, and Gibbs, all under the guise of "political reasons" with Haldir, although their motives had more to do with representing their underrepresented and butchered character arcs.
As they reached Isengard, Tauriel pretended to be surprised to see Merry and Pippin sitting in front of a supply house smoking weed while the river Isen flooded all around them.
"Would you like a drink?" Pippin asked them merrily. "We have tankards."
Tauriel's eyes glittered. She'd always been somewhat of a lightweight. But she knew by order of Thranduil's drinking parties that Legolas was too. And a plan was hatching in her mind- the first in quite a while.
She leaned over and whispered into Eowyn's ear, and the shieldmaiden's eyes lit mischievously. They exchanged a devious smirk as Merry and Pippin led them all into the storage area.
Indeed, there were tankards. There were all sorts of drinks in the shack. Tauriel couldn't help but wonder if the spirits were supposed to be there or if The Plot was trying to help her out. The group- which Tauriel supposed looked quite odd, even in the setting of Ents and Orthanc.
Pipping fetched two tankards of ale, and a good number of mugs, which Tauriel was as surprised to see as anyone. "I guess The Plot didn't want to wait until Meduseld for the drinking party," Eowyn muttered, dropping down at an old table. Despite her attitude, Tauriel could see the glee twinkling in her eyes at what they were about to do.
Tauriel herself never lifted a finger to touch the ale. But she made sure that Legolas- who was as much of a lightweight as he had been in Mirkwood, had plenty. Each time he took a sip, she poured a bit of her own into his tankard. The remaining members of the group were either too drunk to notice or glaring at the ceiling.
Spalko left after only a few minutes, having said nothing the entire time. Haldir rose to his feet to follow, offering apologies to the others. Apparently not all Elves were total lightweights. Perhaps it was simply the Mirkwood strain.
"What's wrong with her?" asked Tauriel. Watching the Guild's military leader stride away without looking back.
"It's the fan-ficcers again," Haldir replied. "She gets this way sometimes; it generally means she's fighting off another fanfiction personality imposed upon her by a bad writer running off teenage hormones. She controls the personalities most of the time, but they either fight back and force her to go off and brood for a while or they give her a migraine. Neither one is particularly pleasant, as you would imagine."
Tauriel cocked her head. "Are you sure she won't kill you?"
"If she didn't kill me when the plot forced us to snog, then she won't kill me now," Haldir said confidently, and he too left the storage house.
After an hour, the group had been thinned down to the highly drunk Elrondian twins, Aragorn, Legolas, Tauriel herself, and Eowyn. Both she and the Rohir had taken enough spirits that they wouldn't seem suspicious, but at least they could stand on their own two feet. The same could not be said of the other four. Elladan and Elrohir were stumbling and dancing on the table with barely contained glee, and Aragorn had taken to braiding Legolas's hair.
Their nerves still active enough to think straight, the two women ushered Elladan and Elrohir out of the storage room, shutting the door behind them and heaving a rock up against it.
"If we find them naked tomorrow, I'll consider it a success," Eowyn said with a grin.
"A scarring success, but a success nonetheless." Tauriel returned the smile, watching the twins stumble off arm-in-arm.
Eowyn's expression turned abruptly. "What do you think will happen?" she asked, looking at the Elf. "I mean, you're a Tenth Walker. You have to accompany the Fellowship on the Paths of the Dead."
"Do I?"
"I have never met a more pathetic matchmaking case than Aragorn and Legolas. And I have been setting up people to avoid love triangles of my own for many fics. I once had the task of pairing Eomer with Haldir, which was not only unpleasant for me, but for the both of them. But otherwise I was going to wind up in a love triangle with Haldir, and that was even worse. You will have to accompany those two if you ever want them to hook up."
Tauriel sighed. "I was hoping you wouldn't say that."
"I wish I could go on the Paths of the Dead. But I don't want to miss my moment of glory." She smiled a bit, undoubtedly thinking about her ride to the Battle of the Pelennor and the slaying of the Witch-King.
"What if you don't get it?"
Eowyn lifted her chin. "I will. I always do. If The Plot tries to stop me I'll call in a Leroy Jethro Gibbs cameo."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"You know Gibbs can be persuasive. And dangerous."
"Eowyn-" Tauriel began to speak, but was cut off by a high-pitched scream and a crash. Eowyn jolted.
"That sounded like a Mary Sue," she said with a shudder.
"A dead one."
They shared a horrified look. "Do you think the purists caught up with me?" whispered Tauriel, drawing her weapon and bransishing it in the cold air. Eowyn considered this.
"I doubt they would be concerned with you in a place like Isengard, where the films certainly do not follow the books. They would probably be protesting the theatrical release here. I mean I don't blame them for protesting, but they can get violent."
"I know," Tauriel informed her bluntly. "Try being a movieverse OC in a film that people are already criticizing for not following the book." She glanced around, but there was nothing moving as far as the eye could see.
Another crash echoed from whatever was left of a forest around Isengard. There were small trees cropping up here and there that the orcs had not pulled down. Without a second thought, Tauriel raced toward the source of the noise, not sure what she was about to run into. There was a faint daredevil hope in her mind that wanted the purists to show up so that she could prove she wasn't just another Mary Sue. But the rest of her was terrified of the Tolkien purists and their rallies.
With Eowyn right behind her, she wove between the trees. What she found on the other side was not nearly what she expected.
Tim Burtonized Theoden was staring down Irina Spalko, who brandished her sword like a lifeline.
"I will not go "emo" on this quest," she hissed at Theoden. "I do not brood." Beside her, Haldir rolled his eyes a bit, careful not to let Spalko catch wind of it. At their feet lay a shattered computer.
"I swear to you I'm not the one who wrote that!" Theoden shouted. "I am unaware of what the device even does." He had a hand on his own sword and his Johnny Depp face was worried and brooding. But then, it was always worried and brooding.
A twig snapped under Eowyn's foot, and Spalko whirled around like a startled cat. "Do you have anything to do with this travesty?" she growled, nudging the computer with her boot. Eowyn's eyes widened, but she said nothing.
"Where did you find it?" Tauriel demanded. A laptop in Middle Earth was uncommon. Only Galadriel possessed a computer, as far as Tauriel knew, and it was embedded in her mirror. The Valar disliked Apple products.
"I found it with a bad parodyist." Spalko kicked it farther away from her. "Writing the fic that has been giving me a headache since Helm's Deep. We disposed of the parodyist quickly."
Tauriel didn't want to know what had become of the writer.
"That's my laptop!" Eowyn burst out. "It was stolen a couple of fics ago!" Something occurred to her. "And my own fics were on it."
Spalko turned back to Theoden. "And what were you doing out at this time of night?"
"Well, I was-"
"Forget it." Something seemed to have caught her mind, and it was clearly plaguing her thoughts like a dose of bad Farawyn smut. "I don't want to know."
Tauriel bent over and took the laptop. "I'll see if I can restore this."
"Don't," Spalko insisted. "There are travesties on that computer that I don't want to read."
The Elf glared at her. "You don't have to read it. I just want to restore it. There could be something on here. Information, of sorts."
Something, perhaps, to better the schemes she was already hatching in her mind.
Will we ever find out what's on the laptop? Is it a key to one of the many pathetic sub-plots going on right now? Will a reviewer inform me of who has fallen pregnant as a result of the requisite Mary Sue trope of being pregnant in the middle of the freaking story at the most inconvenient time possible (Hint: This is fanfic guys. It can be male or female. Or Legolas.) Okay, I'm done asking dumb questions now. Review to protest bags of air in the Lays industry.