E/N: Hi guys! Okay, so I haven't updated in about... a year or so... that doesn't mean I'm dead! Even tough being dead would've been a good excuse for not updating... Anyways, I'm back and uhm.. Hi!

Disclaimer: fellowship members are expensive. No, that does not mean I own any.

Chapter 3: Spooky business

So there they were. Sitting around, staring at each other. Who'd eaten the cake? Nobody seemed to know. Of course, somebody had to know, because the cake didn't just disappear, now did it? If it did, there wouldn't be crumbs left. Arwen, who'd grabbed an extra chair and joined the fellowship at the table, sighed.
"Guys, it's just a cake..." she said. Everybody looked at her.

"Just a cake..." Sam muttered. "How dare she..!"

"Arwen, honey, didn't you have something in the oven?" Aragorn said, trying to usher her away from the now deadly looking hobbits.
"Not that I recall, no... Why?"
"Well, maybe now's a good time to make that new pot roast Éowyn gave you the recipe of the other day."
"Oh, are you guys staying over for dinner too?" Arwen looked thrilled.
"Yeah, I think this is going to take a while, sweetie." Aragorn sighed.
"Great!" Arwen hurried away to the kitchen.
"So, we can eat here huh?" Pippin asked.
"Yeah, sure, I guess."
"Good. 'Cause I'm hungry."
"You're always hungry, Pippin." Merry said.
"Don't tell me you couldn't take a nice meal right now? All this investigating and questioning really worked up my appetite."
"About the investigating..." Aragorn started. "Who ate the bloody cake?" Nobody answered. "Come on, it has to be somebody in this room."
"But if it's not one of us, then there must be somebody else in the room." Gimli said. "Search the room!" Everybody searched the room. There was nobody under the table, or on the chandelier. Nobody behind the air-vents, and nobody behind the curtains. To make a long story short, the fellowship was alone.
"We are alone." Pippin said.
"But are we..?" Gandalf said, half closing his eyes in an attempt to look mysterious. "Maybe it is indeed not one of us who took the cake, but it is the one it originally belonged to..."
"But Arwen wasn't even in the room when the cake disappeared." Merry looked puzzled.
"Not Arwen, fool of a halfling, Boromir!" Gandalf smacked Merry over the head with his staff.
"But Boromir died... I saw it with my own eyes!" Gimli exclaimed. "By the mythril quarries of the world, I swear I will kill him if he is still alive after all that time."
"Gandalf means his spirit, Gimli." Legolas said, boredom obvious in his voice. "But if it really was his spirit, then why take a piece of cake? I have not before heard of an spirit consuming food meant for the living."
"It puzzles me deeply, Legolas. I neither have ever encountered anything like it before. But then again, it was a good cake."
"I still think that somebody in this room is lying. Somebody ate the cake, it can't be that a spirit took it."
"We must not exclude any options before we have proof, young elf. But for now, I think it is wise indeed to do some more of that so-called investigating." Gandalf turned to Aragorn. "You have been so eager to ask questions, great Ellesar, is that perhaps because you took the final piece?" Aragorn looked stunned.
"Never before in my long life have I been accused of something this evil, wizard of old. I did not take the cake, the thought hadn't even crossed my mind." Gandalf lifted one of his eyebrows. "Okay, perhaps I have thought about it, but is it not one of the flaws of human, to see temptation everywhere?"
"It is also humanity's flaw to give in to temptation..." Legolas muttered.
"But I am not like that, and you know that." Aragorn stood up straight, tall and proud. "I am different than other humans, that is why I am king." He pranced around the room. "Humanity is weak, but I am here to inspire, to show how it can be done, that it can be done. My people trust me because they know that I merely take decisions based upon good thought, not intuition or the rantings of some advisor. It is because of my ways-"
"Did you take the cake or not?" Gandalf interrupted.
"I did not" Aragorn responded. "for I, king Ellesar-"
"Then sit down and stop speaching. You're boring the readers." Gandalf continued the questioning "So, who is or next suspect? It was not Aragorn, nor was it Legolas. Gimli can be excluded from our list of suspects too, and I can assure you I wasn't the one who took the piece. That leaves, one of the hobbits..."
"Well, I don't know about you guys, but it surely wasn't me. Besides, shouldn't we look at the evidence before pointing fingers?" Sam seemed a bit stressed.

"You might have a point there, little one." Aragorn said. "Let us look at the proof first. We have the dish, on which the cake lay. Gandalf, turn on the blacklight, if you please." Gandalf's staff lit up. Aragorn took some white powder from his pocket and scattered it over the dish. He blew softly over the dish, and the powder, lighting up in the light from Gandalf's staff, revealed 3 fingerprints. "A-HAH!" Aragorn exclaimed. "Now we will find out who the culprit is! Everyone, you must hold your finger next to it so I can compare prints." Everybody did as they were told, and Aragorn investigated. It was not Gimli or Legolas, which was expected. Sam was proven to be innocent too. It weren't Aragorn's own prints, nor was it Frodo who had touched the dish. Merry and Pippin weren't guilty either. That left only one person. "Gandalf, how could you?" Aragorn looked very disappointed in his, to some extent, mentor.
"I passed the cake around, remember. That required me holding the dish." Gandalf tolled his eyes. "Let's not jump to conclusions to soon, great detective."
"Oh, right, forgot about that. So, the prints provide us no help, what else can we check out?"

"Was it not footsteps we heard on the table during the moment of darkness?" Frodo said, providing the next clue.
"It was indeed! That means two things. First of all, there must be footprint on the table, and second of all, who was sitting close enough to the light switch to be able to turn it off and then walk all over the table before it was turned back on?" Aragorn eyes the group suspiciously. "I need more powder." He stalked off. "And a fan!"

E/N: yet another fast chapter, but I thought that since you were all waiting for anything to get posted, this'll do. Right? Anywayz, thanks for your reviews trough all these months, especially the one I got the other day from flashkindi, it kind of reminded me of the fact that exists... ;;;
anyways, keep posting who you think did it! R/R!
thanks