The Istari

Narheda stood back, letting Mitikas deal with the enraged ferry personnel, who were yelling about their destroyed vessel. The older man did that with a thick bundle of cash money he placed in the hand of the portly man with the largest number of stripes on his jacket. The captain.
"That should cover it, I assume," Mitikas said gently and at the sight of the colourful plastic squares, the captain shut up as if someone had put a cork in his mouth. An almost funny experience, and in spite of everything, Narheda felt a smile tug at the corner of her lips at the scene.

"You always do that?" she asked of Mitikas when he returned to her and Luwan by the car. "Either shoot yourself trough or pay yourself through a dilemma? That sounds like a very expensive and hazardous way to go through life if you ask me."
"Yes, but more fun," the bearded man grinned before he turned serious. "However I know it's far from a regular way to manage your life these days. And no, I normally don't do it this way, however extraordinary circumstances like these demand extraordinary solutions. Therefore I guess I owe the two of you a bit of an explanation of my motif and to my extensive resources both when it comes to weaponry and money."
"To say the least, man," Luwan huffed as he folded up the collars of his jacket and churned his hands down his pockets since the spring breeze blowing across the river had turned chilly as the night closed in.

Mitikas turned his head and glanced down the waters towards the mighty Argonaths, this time of the day bathed in floodlight. Then he commenced.
"This trip takes about twenty minutes, so I should get time for the lengthier explanation. You might have guessed already, that I'm not only in this for altruistic reasons. As a matter of fact, I'm one of those who would make a large chunk of money if orc labour should become more expensive and less available."
"And why is that?" Luwan asked. He too was having his eyes glued to the Argonaths now, understandable since they were a remarkable sight. Even Narheda herself, who had seen them more or less her whole life was still impressed every time she saw them lit up like this. Impressed and proud.

"Because I'm a scientist too – in my own way. An inventor. That's how I know Professor Iusa Vinidad. She and I have been working together on a project called 'the automatic man' or shortened The Automan. A cybernetic worker made out of plastics and composites, and bestowed with an artificial brain. Her contribution was the research regarding how biological intelligence may be mimicked by artificial means."
"I've read about this," Narheda affirmed. "My fiance Darik subscribes to those magazines about advanced infomates and artificial brains and such novelties. They keep writing quite a bit about those tries at building artificial men. A bit of speculative science in my opinion, this AB business, then again I imagine that if someone will find a way to make an economic turnaround on these things, they might be built."

"AB?" Luwan asked.
"As in Artificial Brain," Narheda explained.
"Yes, and with the orcs out of the way, there'll sure be money in the AB business," Mitikas added. "And of course less money for those who are managing and deploying the orcs. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that they are doing what they can to stop us."
"So you're an engineer," Luwan said, taking his eyes off the lit statues. "I imagine you have someone behind you, to sponsor your research. Not to mention all the things you showed off with here today."
"No, the only one behind me is myself and my own accumulated wealth."

"Huh, inherited money then, I take it?" Narheda guessed.
"Not exactly. You see, I'm a very old man, way older than what my physical appearance might give away to an untrained eye. As a matter of fact my age in real years is a bit more than 4500 ones, however my biological age is that of a well-kept 45 year old. And if I don't get myself killed by Sarigiana or some of her ilk, I might well live to see my 10 000th birthday."

"That would make you a..." Narheda hesitated in awe as she raised her finger to point at the man standing opposite of her. "A... uh, an Istari."
"Yes, that's what we're generally called by the common population," Mitikas said. "Or were, when the knowledge of our existence was more common. Conversely we have many names for our kind. Like Quenya, Ithryn, Mayari or simply Sophians. Today not many of us are left, some have been killed, others died for other reasons and others in turn have left Middle Earth altogether. Among us still left on the planet, I guess we number to about fifteen or eighteen. Twenty the maximum. However I haven't heard from any of my brothers and sisters in centuries. In fact, the last time I met another Istari was about 300 years ago, during the Chelkarian Revolution."

As Mitikas finished there was a pause and the only thing heard for a while was the gush of water against the side of the ferry and the muted talks of the other passengers. Most of them had quit staring at Narheda and her friends now and gone back to minding their own business. This was Sarmaltar after all, where people's 'being-impressed-span' was rather short since they had seen it all already - or at least pretended they had.

"That explains a few things," Luwan finally said matter of factly. He seemed quite a bit lesser awed than Narheda by the fact that he was standing before a real life Istari. "Or rather, that explains a lot, including how you managed to take down all those people in Traven's office and also how to find us down in the garage. I mean we just smashed the head of that thug with the dagger and then ran for it. You did all the rest. Call me impressed!"
"So you're helping us because of your Automen?" Narheda asked. "But what do you need us for? Can't you just...? I mean, if you've been working with Professor Iusa, you ought to already have all the proofs needed when it comes to the existence of the Elven race?"

"Not exactly," the Istari admitted and scratched his beard. "What Iusa and I have are theories. Thoughts and speculations. No valid testimonies that the elves were real, living, breathing and walking the ground of Middle Earth. For proofs like that we would need people like you. People who could actually locate and present real evidence of species with human and humanoid DNA. Hard facts."
"Like our skeletons?" Narheda asked and Mitikas nodded his head.

"Head on spot. Proofs which even the man in the street may believe in. Not just legends and fairytales. Oh - I personally remember the elves of course, from back in the old days, an amazing specie. But who would believe me? I'd have to prove I'm an Istari first of all – which is nearly impossible, since very few today really know what an Istari is. The only way to substantiate that would be measuring certain genetic differences in the DNA. Besides, I'm not really interested in doing that. Not with the way the world looks today, I'd be thrown into a lab and poked both here and there. No thanks," he ended drily.

"What were they like?" Narheda asked.
"Who, the elves?"
"Exactly."
"And what happened to them?" Luwan added.

"There used to be millions of them, living in a crescent surrounding the human lands, and intermingling with humans now and then, for trade and for cultural exchange," Mitikas began. "But it all ended back in the 25th century, with the Two Plagues. Those two maladies took almost 80 percent of the elves. The percentages who survived did so because they had enough human genes within them to provide them with an immune defense against mutated viruses like the ones causing the plagues. Half-bloods of various kinds. Almost all the pure blooded elves died. That was the start of the demise of the specie, although it took a bit more than another 400 years before they were completely gone. Either extinct or assimilated into humanity."

"How sad," Narheda said and glanced down at her hands.
"That's the course of the nature," Luwan replied. "The survival of the fittest. The Elves, I imagine died because of being less adaptable to mutating viruses."
"I remember when I was little," Narheda said, looking up again and facing the Harnendorite. "My grandmother read me a fairytale of the Elves, how they had built a huge, golden rocket and taken off in the space. Found themselves another home at some planet far away from the Middle Earth."

"Yes, people love to make up similar stories," Mitikas said. "Makes it a bit easier to cope with reality than facing the fact that a presumed lost race became extinct. Especially a sentient one, like the Elves. Back in the old days, people made up stories that the Elves had sailed across the ocean to the islands in the west to dwell there. Similar to your rocket story, Narheda. Whereas other simply blamed our kind for the disappearance of the elves, told that we could have saved them if we had kept our viruses to usselves – however that should've been impossible, since you cannot stop people from traveling and interacting."

"We have a story too, where I come from," Luwan said and smirked. "And that's if you have pointy ears, you're descended from the Elves." To hit home his point he slid the hands out of the pockets and mockingly pulled at the edges of his own, very round ears.
"Oh my!" Narheda almost started to titter, as the very idea made her think of her friend Arenti. That girl sure had the pointiest of ears; they looked like they could slice through hats. Arenti had always said she hated them, and talked about operating them, but never gotten around.
"Now, that is true more or less," Mitikas confirmed. "However it's a rare trait since it's genetically non-dominant and the carriers of the gene which alters the orb of the ear are few and far between. So I guess most people believe it's just another rare fluke. Thus the memory of the pointy-eared elves has faded into a legend. Then again, not all elves had those ears. Most of them did, perhaps 70 or 80 percent, but far from everyone."

"What other differences were there?" Narheda wanted to know. "I mean could you tell an Elf from a human just by looking at it?"
"Most of the time you could," Mitikas said. "Elves tended to be taller, often around 7 to 8 feet for women and 7.5 to 8.5 for men. They were also more slender in stature, since they had a generally thinner but denser bone structure and lesser bodily fat, then almost all of them were fair skinned and their hair colours ranged from platinum blond to dark brown. No redheads. And the men lacked facial hair. The women had smaller, flatter breasts. All in all, the general elf look was a bit more androgynous than the human, due to a lesser variation between the genders."

"Oh," he then cut himself off as he looked up. "We're almost here now." Sure thing, they were rapidly nearing the landing on the Eastern riverside. At that moment Narheda became anxious, what if the bad guys had intercepted them and were waiting for them at the quay? Then she realized there was not a chance to accomplish such a thing. The quickest way to make it across the Anduin using the land way would be to drive up to the Dúnedan Bridge, cross it and then down here, which took way more than twenty minutes. Besides, this time of day, there were always traffic jams and queues around that area, so if their foes tried such a thing, they could if possibly have made it up on the bridge by now and would be sitting there in a queue cursing at the bumper of the vehicle in front of them. She almost laughed at the thought.

Not to mention that the police had probably been the ones to drag that bitch Sarigiana out of the water, and their appearance on the scene would definitely have halted the bad guys quite a bit from acquiring anything of consequence.

"Can we still make it to the Speaker's Corner?" Luwan asked.
"Yes, that should be possible," Mitikas said and glanced at his neckwatch. "Two more hours until it airs, and the drive up there takes one of them the longest."