SUES AND SWORDS

Disclaimer: (dmraist) Tolkien. Blame him. The mayhem within is of our creation, yet the cast is (mostly) his. However, if you try to steal Karine or Amelan... we will hurt you. We will hunt you down and skin you alive and put your heads on our wall as trophies. (not really, the school/parents would kill us.) But alas, I deviate...

1. Of Beginnings and Discoveries

It all started as a search for pizza.

Well. Pretty much, anyways. You always heard about explorers and knights who had gone on a quest, a holy and noble rite or something else of the sort. In Karine's case...

Basically, what had happened was she'd ordered a pizza. Nothing complicated, correct? But the pizza hadn't come, and upset at the possibility of failing to eat yet again for possibly the third evening in a row, Karine had become upset. And she'd started to say an Elvish chant... and the rest, as they say, is history.

~~~

Thrust, parry, skip side, thrust, fake, thrust. "Ha! I finally got you! Admit I am the master of all things sharp and pointy!" *unintelligible grumble* "Good boy. Now take a break and start again."

Amelan lounged against a fence in her practice yard. She and her friends had taken up the lost art of swordplay, and despite her slightly dumpy figure and glasses, she was the best.

She stood and began an intricate pattern, all the while mumbling in Elvish. Besides being an expert swordswoman and master of all things sharp and pointy, she was an avid writer on FanFiction. She aspired to someday join the PPC (Protectors of the Plot Continuum), once her grammar skills were perfected, or as close as she could come.

Her recently defeated friend walked back to the ring to watch Amelan whirl more and more rapidly. Suddenly, with a small pop, she was gone. He fainted.

~~~

Well, I suppose you could say Karine had been calling on Elbereth Gilthoniel for aid... And I suppose you could say that the entire fiasco had indeed been her fault... But how did that all add up to her deserving the current situation? As in upside down, hung by her knees from a support beam in a cave with water dripping onto her nose?

"Hello? Is anyone within hearing distance? Uh... help? Do you think you could try to get me down? This hurts..." Echoes rebounded off the walls, chasing each other down the passages. "Urk. Yuck. Can anyone hear me? I want to get out of here... out! Out, out, out! This is so undignified..." She trailed off. A few more minutes of silence save the dripping water, and she had another idea.

"Maybe I can try to sit up and see why I'm stuck..." Karine's entire body ached magnificently, and her back especially didn't bear thinking about, but she gradually curled up enough to hook her bound wrists on the beam.

"Owwww!" She stopped and took a breather, but the position was too uncomfortable to hold. "OK, back to work." Stretching upwards again, she heard an ominous creaking and looked to the end of the beam. "Oh, shoot..."

The reason the beam was creaking was because it was broken, splintered at the top. While Karine had been hanging motionless, the beam had settled into a balance that just barely supported her weight. Now that she was moving...

"It's going to fall any second!" She realized she was panicking, knew from survival skills courses that that was bad, and completely, utterly, without any other thoughts, gave up on caring. "Heeeeeeeeeelp!" she cried out as the beam teetered on the edge of balance and fell with a resounding "thwock" that reverberated down the passages.

~~~

'Okay, I'm definitely daydreaming here! But it's so weird...!' Amelan found herself dreaming that a load of thundering orcs had surrounded her and that she had to use her battle patterns to escape. She twirled, hacked and parried, finally being rewarded with a path of escape, which she used to run and hide herself. Once clear, she looked down at her shirt and tsked at the bloodstains. 'Bloodstains?' "Oh crap..."

She looked up. Okay. She looked to the sides. Okay, except for the streaming hordes of foes. She looked down. Bad idea. She scrambled back from the ledge she had been standing on and went to get her mental bearings, which had been dropped somewhere along the way.

"I must be daydreaming. I mean, it's NOT possible for me to have fallen into Middle Earth. Although Moria is rather--"

"Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" The sound rang off the walls, followed by a tremendous crash. Then silence--besides the sounds of orcs' and goblins' thudding feet. They, too, had heard the sounds and had momentarily lost their focus, turning in that direction, before the leaders once more shouted orders and regained control.

"Great. I get dropped into a daydream that I don't even want to have, and now I have to save someone. Isn't this JUST PEACHY?!" Despite her grumblings, Amelan followed the echoes to a recessed side-chamber, which just so happened to have fallen in.

~~~

"Owwwwwwwww!" Karine blinked fruitlessly to clear her watering eyes, the dust from the fallen beam filling the cave. "Owww, my head hurts!"

"Given that you seem to have fallen on it, it should. And please shut up." Amelan busied herself untying the cords that were wrapped around the broken support beam. "Why are you tied to a beam in Moria anyways?"

"Wh--MORIA!?!? What in all heavens is going on? Look, how do you know I'm--we're--whatever--in Moria anyways? And how come you know so much about it? And what in the Abyss am I going to do now?" The last came out as a moan. Amelan decided she was near panic and hurried to introduce herself.

"I'm Amelan Sena--Lan, really, but whatever."

"I'm--well, I think I'm still her, but everything is so weird that I don't know anything anymore. Karine Erisil. I think."

"Good name for an elf."

"An--OK, I've put up with your crazy ideas so far, simply because they're possible, but I'm not an elf! I should know! I'm so fully human that every morning I wake up and curse my race! And you shouldn't make fun of me just because *you* have pointy ears, elf!"

"WHAT?!" Lan nearly dropped the load of rubble she was carrying. "I AM NOT AN ELF! YOU ARE, BUT ME? You need your pretty elven eyes checked!"

Karine closed her eyes. "You're insisting I'm an elf. I say you're an elf. Alright. Either we're both seeing things or we badly need mirrors. How about if... we both pretend we're elves to humor one another until we can really find out?"

"Fine. Now let's get going before this collapses again." Lan helped Karine to her feet and they limp-walked down the shadowy halls.

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Authoresses' Notes:

(Elerian) I think that for a first try this is gonna turn out okay. If my co-author doesn't DRIVE ME INSANE

(dmr) hey, u're already insane. I don't need to drive u, u can walk across the border.