Chapter 13 – Galadriel gets a hardware upgrade.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of Tolkien's characters, obviously.
Lego update: the Mirkwood spiders have disappeared from the lego box and are, presumably, on the loose somewhere chez Annafan. Must remember to shut all the bedroom doors securely tonight.
Galadriel sat gazing lovingly at her new laptop. Much faster, more memory, much better software and a fabulous graphics card. Celeborn gazed less lovingly at the young woman on the other side of the room. She was actually an elf, if her ears were anything to go by, but like none he had ever seen. Her hair was jet black – not black like a raven's wing, but an artificial, uniform shade of black. Her eyelids were painted with dark grey powder, and her skin marked with various tattoos. She wore a most un-elven miniskirt and boots. And she was cross.
"So you're telling me that you created me, that my memories aren't real, they're just, like, 'the most tragic backstory evah,' and that now I've got you your new laptop, I'm just expected to go sit in a room till I fade away," the strange elf said. "Screw that!"
Celeborn looked over to his wife.
"She's got a point, you know. It's not as if she's someone else's 'literary' creation, here uninvited. You wrote this one into existence," he said.
"'This one' is a person, I'll have y'all know," said the young woman. "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said 'y'all'. It's like I'm some cliché version of a girl from the deep south. I think you've based my background on some kind of weird unholy mixture of Deliverance and Sweet Home, Alabama."
"That sounds about right," said Celeborn, who did not have a particularly high opinion of Galadriel's fanfic. "Though I think you might also owe quite a lot to Abs from NCIS."
"You mean I'm not even an original OC? I'm ripped off from somewhere else?," the woman yelled. "And I can't believe you actually called me 'Mary Sue'."
"It was meant to be ironic," said Galadriel, at last roused from her new-tech-love-in. "Clearly, you're actually an anti-Sue. And a pretty irritating one. You seem to be stepping rather beyond what I wrote for you."
"Hey, you're the one who's meant to be into reading up about literary theory, creativity, meta fanfic (like that's really a serious topic for intellectual discussion, yeah, right). You wanna read Cory Doctorow on writing characters being like running a simulator in your head – your subconscious starts to fill in bits that you didn't consciously come up with, and you feel like they've developed a life of their own. Well, I'm your mental simulator, made flesh and running off-line, and I don't want to be switched off. 'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.'"
"My Lady, I think she's winning this one," Celeborn chuckled.
"Anyhow, I think maybe we can work together. After all, with me around, you have a dogsbody already created and ready to go any time you need a hardware upgrade. Come on, think about what you could do with a bunch of raspberry pis, some high quality interconnnects, loaded with linux and a python interpreter. I'm talking parallel processing." Celeborn saw Galadriel's eyes take on a wistful, glassy, lustful look, and realised Mary Sue wasn't winning, she'd already won.
"And you'll have someone to talk techy stuff with, bounce ideas off. And I won't get under anyone's feet. Well, maybe Haldir's, a bit. Maybe not feet specifically, just getting under him in a kind of general way," she said with a suggestive grin. Celeborn realised that the situation was way out of Galadriel's control. But then again, if the last few months had taught him anything, it was that things had been pretty much out of control from the moment Galadriel had first switched on her i-pad.
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
Mary Sue was busy fixing rather elderly laptops together with state of the art interconnect cable. Having reseached DIY parallel computing, she and Galadriel had decided to go down the tried-and-tested route of linked PCs rather than raspberry pis. They had come to the conclusion that parallel computing was more than just a fun thing to have; after several days of trying to think about what forms of traffic analysis, hacking e-mails, police databases, tracking web traffic and the like would be most likely to throw up clues as to Legolas's whereabouts, they had realised they would need a lot of computing power to throw at the problem. So, as promised, Mary Sue had made a trip back to to her own world and returned with a rucksack full of second-hand laptops. As she worked, she tried out her new elven hearing in an attempt to eavesdrop on the row of spectacular proportions unfolding in the room next door but one.
A month or so earlier, before Gimli had set off back to the Haradwaith with his "prototypes" of the mysterious weapon, King Elessar had got the strong impression that there was something Elladan and Elrohir were not telling him. After much nagging, assisted by Queen Arwen, he eventually got the truth out of them; his dear friend Legolas had disappeared into another world through some black arts, and Galadriel had persuaded his foster brothers not to tell him of this fact. In the 90 or so years Aragorn had known the twins, he had never been this angry with them. His anger had not dwindled on the ride to Lothlorien (a journey which had startled and shocked his closest advisers, with the exception of Faramir; they could not comprehend why the King would suddenly up and leave as if he were still an itinerant ranger).
Mary Sue could hear him shouting in a most un-regal manner at Lady Galadriel, apparently incandescent with rage. As usual, Celeborn was playing the diplomat and trying to calm him down sufficiently for them to be able to discuss the situation in a more constructive way. However, so far his efforts were failing, because Galadriel had just confessed that the arts which had sent Legolas into another world were not some mysterious black arts of some unknown enemy, but in fact her own botched attempt to set up a bridgehead into the other world before the dangers it posed became too well developed. The situation was only defused by the arrival of Arwen. (Her departure had shocked the King's advisers even more than Aragorn's. Faramir had begun to think they were at risk of spontaneously combusting with disapproval, which made him smile; careening out of the citadel gates at a mad gallop to rush to her husband's aid was just the sort of thing his own wife would do).
At last Aragorn calmed down enough to allow Galadriel to tell him her tale. The invasion of Sues he already knew of. But she explained in far more detail about the world from which they came, and its technological powers. She explained that the "gun" (for this, apparently, was the name of the weapon) that Gimli had copied was but one of the least of the weapons there. And she explained, as best she could, about the i-pad. In addition to tracking down Suethors and disabling them, she had been using it to research other means of travel between the worlds. She had discovered a group who were making far more systematic efforts to move people between worlds. So far she knew of three facts concerning them: they had captured an orc; in turn they had (apparently accidentally) had one of their own people transported to Middle Earth; and finally the name - "Brunwasser Corporation."
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
"Okay, I think our best bet is to use your story as our starting point," said Mary Sue. "Did you write any more of it after Legolas disappeared? You know, to try to patch up the mess you'd made?"
"Very perceptive of you," Galadriel answered in surprise.
"Well, of course I know how you think, because in a way I'm just an offshoot of you. So where did this story go next?"
"I only wrote a short chapter, just to say that Legolas had been found by people who took him in, and a healer cleansed and stitched his arrow wound, then he recovered. By good fortune, one of the people who found him was a learned man who was versed in the arts which would predestine him (eventually) to unearth the secret of travel between worlds. It got read by one person in Bilbao who said she thought it was a bit short on descriptive detail and characterisation." The Lady of Lorien sounded slightly miffed.
"Yeah, yeah. I don't really care about your reviews, I just want to get a handle on whether we have any details we can use to try to triangulate his position."
"Well, I did say he'd ended up in a city called Oxford, because that was where Tolkien lived. It seemed appropriate, somehow," Galadriel said.
"That's something solid at last. Let's try hacking into the Oxfordshire police database. We'll also cross-reference against Brunwasser Corp. And also, since what I've unearthed about Brunwasser so far suggests they're major defence contractors, I'll hack into the Pentagon while I'm at it. That last one should be the easy part; news reports suggest that just about every IT literate teenager in the developed world has had a crack at it at some point, and a fair few have succeeded. The trick is doing it without ending up in Gitmo. And I think I'm pretty much beyond the reach of Homeland Security in Lorien."
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
It took Galadriel and Mary Sue a couple of days to get anywhere, days which Aragorn and Arwen spent wandering the woods in anxious anticipation, and Haldir spent revelling in the fact that Mary Sue's attention was safely elsewhere. Eventually the geek and her companion reported back (AN: It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide which one is the geek and which the companion).
"We think we've traced him, and he's alright," said Mary Sue. "Brunwasser was the key. They have someone in MI5 pulling the local police's strings."
"MI6? Police?" asked Celeborn.
"Spies, and, um, sort of like soldiers who deal with crimes committed within the country. They got the police doing a door-to-door search for someone seen on the canal towpath. Two women were seen helping an injured 'man' along on the relevant date – claimed it was the boyfriend, uh, mellethron, of one of the women. But I've checked the boyfriend's internet activity, and he was online gaming at the time his girlfriend (who, incidentally, is a 'healer') was seen helping this man along the towpath. So we've got a mystery arrival at the right time, people telling porkies to the pigs..."
"What does that mean?" asked Aragorn.
"Telling lies to the police. Who, incidentally, don't seem very bright, as they've apparently bought the two women's story without checking further. We think he's staying with the other woman, because her weekly grocery bill has doubled since the date in question, and recently, someone called Lech Zielony has got a bank card, registered to her address. But again, checking police records, it looks like the passport is a stolen one (so much for anti-money-laundering checks). Would a likeness of someone young, pale-complexioned, with longish blond hair do for Legolas?"
"That would indeed be a good likeness," said Aragorn.
"Like Haldir, but prettier," added Arwen, with a wicked glint in her eye.
"You know what? I'm going to redouble my efforts to find him," said Mary Sue. "Oh, and Galadriel..."
"'My Lady'," said Celeborn, pointedly.
"Gladdy," said Mary Sue, even more pointedly, "Are you sure you're getting the genders of the personal pronouns right in Basque? Only, the woman Legolas is staying with is a quantum cosmologist. I think your 'learned man' is in fact a 'learned woman'."
Credit where credit's due:
'She has the most tragic backstory ever.' - soldier, speaking about Colhoun in Wreck It, Ralph.
'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that' – 2001, a Space Odyssey. (Though I think the actual dialogue is a bit more complicated – it's one of those great misquotes like 'Elementary, my dear Watson," that's taken on a life of its own).
Cory Doctorow, "Where Characters come from." - online article in
Thanks so much for the really encouraging reviews – including those from people I can't PM (guests and some users who've got PM-ing disabled). Please review if you have a chance. I'm really interested to hear how you think things are going, which bits of the story work for you, which don't (especially feedback on the slightly angsty chapter with the row – it's the first time I've tried writing anything that hasn't been played for laughs, and I've a feeling I didn't quite pull it off).