Louise's Rather Unexpected Adventure
Chapter 1 – Louise Threatens the Cat and is Threatened in Return by a Badly Stacked Volume of A Level Class Notes
Louise screamed loudly as the ground came hurtling towards her, then the scream abruptly stopped as the ground ceased hurtling and instead smacked her hard in the face. Spitting out a mouthful of leaves and whatever invertebrate had been eating the leaves at the time, she looked around wildly at the landscape. Lush, green trees that may or may not be talking to each other depending on whether they were evil trees, spread for miles, and in front of her was a wide blue river, which, Louise considered, would have been a far less painful place to land but that's fanfiction for you. Her wild, auburn locks gleamed in the afternoon sunlight like living fire, the added ornamentation of three twigs and a bit of moss acquired from her fall adding to its pagan beauty. Her eyes, flashing blue like twin sapphires glanced around in wonderment. Was she where she thought she was? She stood up and looked down at the dazzling green medieval dress she had sown herself in preparation for this moment, but it unfortunately wasn't as dazzling as it originally had been due to the long tear in the skirt and mud stains that decorated the front. A few of the sequins had come off too she noticed. Never mind, as soon as she became Lady Arwen's confidant, hundreds of beautiful and elegant Elvish-made dresses would be especially made for her and she'd never have to make her own clothes again. Lifting her dirt and grass smeared face to the sun; she went over again the process which brought her to this amazing world, the world of Middle Earth.
Louise was not very happy, her cat Bobby was at the top of the tree in the back garden again and it was up to her to get him out of it. While deciding how to achieve this she sighed again at how unfair her life was. Most of her friends had gone to university and were spending all their time writing difficult essays, making a pig's arse of laboratory practicals so they were always the last ones to finish, and getting into horrific debt which would take them the rest of their lives to repay and her job hunting was going abysmally, meaning she had to sit at home all day playing on the computer and watching music channels on Sky. To add to this misery, the man she bought her internet cards off was decidedly dodgy and this Christmas there had not been a single copy of Lord of the Rings Special Edition DVD with all the deleted scenes left in the supermarket. Of all these things, this had incensed her the most, how was she supposed to be the biggest Lord of the Rings fan in the world if she didn't own the DVD containing the deleted scenes? After throwing a frying pan at the cat in an attempt to dislodge it she gave up and went inside to immerse herself in the only thing that gave her pleasure apart from eating blue ice blasts at the cinema and scaring the neighbours; reading other author's stories on fanfiction. Lord of the Rings fanfiction especially, but occasionally Harry Potter fanfiction as well, and she had even had a go at writing Harry Potter fanfiction herself; dark, angsty fanfiction which included her favourite characters; Remus - tragic and misunderstood, gentle apart from being a man-eating werewolf, and Sirius - a sufferer of unimaginable mental torture and loss of good looks. Recently King Arthur fanfiction had been newly added to her repertoire, even though it was about as historically correct as Braveheart, mainly because the scenery shots in it were particularly impressive and Pirates of the Caribbean appeared occasionally but this was for the sole reason of Legolas being in it, minus the long blond hair and pointy ears admittedly but you can't have everything.
Louise had just started on a really juicy story involving Legolas being tied up, tortured for his immortal soul and heroically rescued by the hygienically-challenged but is still fantastically good looking Aragorn just seconds before he decides that he cannot cope with being captured again and again. Why couldn't somebody else be captured for once so he could be the rescuer for once, but with nicer hair? She'd just gotten to chapter 148 where Legolas for the first time meets the nasty, evil, twisted and without doubt completely insane bad guy that hates all Elves for being so wonderful and perfect when her phone rang, the melodious tones of the Lord of the Rings theme tune rudely breaking her concentration. Unfortunately, Louise never knew where her phone was and if, by the miraculous work of chance, she did find it, it could be replied upon not to have any credit left. What happened to this credit after she topped up her mobile and listened to the dulcet tones of the shoe shine boy, nobody knew. It was, as were many things concerning Louise's habit of putting things away in places where they could never be found again, one of life's little mysteries.
After fruitlessly searching through her shrine of Lord of the Rings memorabilia and last year's Philosophy notes that she refused to throw away because you might never know when they might come in handy even though they were threatening instant death from paper cuts if the towering pile was unbalanced by a slight breeze, she gave up on trying to find her phone and instead threw a pair of socks out of the window in the general direction of the tree to make it seem like she was still trying to rescue the cat. A startled meow and thud from outside told her that she'd hit her mark and she settled down once again to her Legolas-torture fics.
After another 53 chapters, where Legolas was beaten several times then threatened with having his hair cut by an Orc wielding a pair of shears, Louise decided she'd leave the rest for a treat and went on the author's favourites. Without really reading the summary she clicked on the first link, presuming that somebody who could produce such gruesome realism and nail-biting terror would almost definitely have excellent taste in other people's stories, hopefully stories similar to the one she'd just been reading from behind a pillow. Unfortunately this was not the case. What she had inadvertently meandered into was a thoroughly shameful fic about a girl who, fed up with her pathetic existence, was sucked through her much-revered copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and landed in Middle Earth, causing immediate strife from within the Fellowship as each member fought for her attention, deciding to completely ignore the trivial matter of saving the world and therefore leaving it to her to make sure history was realigned back to its original course and destroying the ring. Presumably the girl then stays on and teaches Aragorn about the virtues of indoor plumbing and regular bathing but nobody ever found out because nobody could ever stomach reading the story till the end.
Luckily, Louise quickly managed to extract herself from this horror fic after coming across the girl suddenly revealing she is half Elf, half Hobbit and three quarters Valar and therefore able to mind-read, fly and disappear at will. Congratulating herself on this narrow escape, she stood up and turned to leave her room and go downstairs for a Marks and Spencer's BLT sandwich when the Philosophy Paper Pile gave an angry shudder. Louise launched herself matrix-style through the air onto her bed and landed next to her own copy of Lord of the Rings. She stared at it. It stared back. A thought dawned. Would it be possible she wondered, to actually go into Middle Earth through the book? She stood up and battled her way to her wardrobe, Dawson's Creek videos being flung left, right and out of the window to follow the unfortunate socks. There, she had it, her costume which she was going to wear when she first touched down on the sacred soil of Middle Earth (or New Zealand as the natives still insisted on calling it). She didn't know exactly when she was going, but in the far and distant future that day would come and she would be ready, prosthetic pointy ears and all! She quickly donned her outfit and mountain-climbed back to her bed where the book lay ready. Scrawling a quick note to her mum- Be away for a bit, don't make me any tea- she slowly lifted the glorious tomb and held her breath. With trembling fingers she turned to the first page and waited to be transported. When nothing happened after a couple of minutes she lay the book back down on the bed, mainly because her arms were beginning to ache, and heaved a heavy sigh. She couldn't even be sucked into a book properly. Unbeknownst to her, her sigh, as well as making the Pile of Ultimate Death even more likely to impale the next living thing that walked past, be it human or cat, also made a couple of chapters of the book before her flip over. It was a very heavy sigh. The only sound that Louise could make before she was vacuumed into 'The Council of Elrond' was a strangled sort of "Erk!" Downstairs, completely oblivious to the sudden translocation of her eldest daughter from this world, her mother called from the living room, "Louise, the cat's in the tree again."