Platy sat back in her chair and grinned. "It's another chapter, everyone!"

"I'll drink to that!" Jack cried, tipping back in his chair and downing a bottle of imported rum.

"Me, too!" Will chimed in, lifting his sippy cup of apple juice. "Look, Platy! No spill!" He tipped the cup upside-down by way of demonstration.

"Good for you, Will," Platy said with an indulgent smile. Then she sighed, and her expression turned serious. "On a less cheerful note, I'm being harassed by the same troll who took it upon themselves to bother Philosophercat about fics she hadn't touched in ages. This 'O.M.G.' person left an anonymous flame-"

"In a manner befitting a coward!" Jack interjected, drawing his sword and waving it unsteadily.

"So I briefly disabled anonymous reviews in an effort to deter them," Platy finished. "They left, and now anonymous reviews are allowed once again." She nodded.

"By the way, 'O.M.G.,'" Jack sat up in his chair and adopted the attitude of a college professor, "'big surprise' is a sentence fragment, and as such should not be set apart as a complete sentence." He sat back, dropped the professor act, and smirked. "If you're going to criticize the grammar of others, it might be prudent to make sure you haven't made any glaring errors yourself, eh?"

"What does O.M.G. even stand for?" Will asked, looking up at Jack.

Platy rolled her eyes. "Well, in internet-speak, it means 'Oh My God,' as in 'Oh my god, I'm making phantom grammar errors.'"

Jack grinned wickedly. "But in this case, it stands for 'Obnoxious Malicious Git.'"

Platy shook her head and grinned. "All right, that's enough disclaimer. On with the story!"

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

After recovering from her consternation, Randi sighed and looked at the elf. "So, you're going to follow me to class?"

"Yes," Legolas said, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

"No matter what I do to dissuade you?"

The elf nodded eagerly.

Randi regarded him for a moment, then wrinkled her nose. "Dressed like that?"

Legolas frowned down at his elven garb. "What is wrong with my current attire?"

"It makes you look like a forking lunatic, that's what is wrong with it." Randi shook her head slowly. "You'll stand out like a... well, like some kind of fictional creature in the real world. Which isn't really surprising, I suppose."

"Creature?" Legolas objected.

"And your hair is really long," Randi continued. "We might have to cut it."

"Cut it?" The elf actually managed to pale. He reached up and touched his hair possessively. "But... is that really necessary?"

"Well," Randi said, brightening as she seized the opportunity, "you could always stay here, couldn't you?"

Legolas looked completely torn for a moment. Then he shook his head, and his lost puppy expression was replaced with one of resolve. "I'd rather go with you."

"You're going to let me cut your hair!" Randi leaned forward in incredulous delight.

"If it's the only way," Legolas said stoically.

"Oho," Randi giggled, "it's the only way now, biatch!" She turned back towards her desk and started rummaging for some scissors.

"You're going to do it now?" Legolas leaned back slightly, eyes wide.

"Do you want to come to class with me, or not?" Randi simpered, finding her scissors and holding them aloft.

"I..." Legolas stared at the scissors and swallowed heavily. "I want to go to class with you."

"Are you sure?" Randi asked, holding up the scissors and snipping them very slowly.

The elf's lower lip trembled for a moment, but then he recovered. "I'm sure," he said.

"Are you positive?" Randi grinned a very large and very evil grin. She tilted the scissors slightly so that they glinted in the lamplight. Legolas watched the scissors with a terrified look in his eyes, but he recovered yet again and nodded. Randi cackled in response, then jumped off of her chair and ran behind the futon. She lifted a lock of the elf's hair, then paused.

"You can still save your luverly golden locks, you know. It isn't too late."

"Just do it," the elf replied testily, shutting his eyes.

Randi snipped the scissors a few more times, but the elf stood-well, sat-firm. So, with a shrug, Randi neatly snipped off a lock of hair. Legolas winced slightly, but said nothing. After one last pause to make sure the elf wasn't going to break down and beg to have his hair follicles spared, Randi began snipping with growing enthusiasm.

"Do you, er, know what you are doing?" Legolas asked after several minutes had passed.

"Nope!" Randi said cheerfully. "I haven't cut anyone's hair... unless you count my Barbie dolls when I was little, and they all turned out looking like G.I. Jane."

"G.I. Jane?" Legolas echoed weakly.

"They had very, very little hair left," Randi clarified, grinning broadly. "And what they did have was in, you know, little tufts."

Legolas suppressed a whimper.

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

The three hobbits had reached the edge of the forest before sunset, just as Carrie predicted. In fact, Carrie had the sneaking suspicion that they had made such good time because she had predicted it. But she had other things to be suspicious about. At the moment, the big one was the mysterious hooded figure.

She sat on the grass at the very abrupt edge of Fangorn Forest. The boughs of the trees stretched overhead, and her traveling companions were busy making a fire and cooking food that must have issued from a plothole, since she couldn't recall obtaining any from Treebeard. Their behavior had stopped switching rapidly from slashy to straight; as far as she could tell, they were both straight. But they had also stopped being so annoyingly moony, so it was difficult to say for certain. Perhaps Celestina was ignoring the fic.

But back to that hooded figure, Carrie thought stubbornly. It bothered her that she was having so much difficulty concentrating on something so important. Any time she tried to focus on the hooded figure, her mind drifted idly away. Could it be Saruman? That would make sense... dude, Christopher Lee is so forking creepy... like, an evil skinny cadaverous Santa... and Santa is an anagram of Satan... no! Argh! Focus, you stupid brain!

"Daisy?" Merry interrupted Carrie's futile attempts to figure anything out. "Are you hungry?"

"Raaa," Carrie growled in frustration before standing up and walking over to the fire. She was hungry. And they had made bacon. "Well, hot damn," Carrie muttered under her breath. Raising her voice, she added, "Where in the hell did we get bacon from?"

"Haven't we always had it?" Pippin inquired, looking mystified.

"Never mind," Carrie said immediately, not wanting to get into it. She loaded her plate-from-who-knows-where with food-from-who-knows-where and plopped down near the fire to eat. She stared blankly over the flames as she ate, trying to mull over the identity of the hooded figure and instead mulling over the possible significance of the Santa-Satan anagram. Was the devil trying to spoil Jesus' birthday by infusing it with commercialism? Carrie frowned and shifted uncomfortably; the grass she was sitting on was very prickly. She halted her musing and looked down to make sure she wasn't sitting on anything spiky. Then she blinked in shock.

The grass wasn't grass. She reached down disbelievingly and ran her fingers over the short, stubbly, plastic-y green. Astro-turf! It was as if she had been thrust from the wilderness into a set built in an indoor stadium. She opened her mouth to say something to Merry and Pippin, but before she could get any words out, the ground changed back to normal grass. She frowned and poked a blade uncertainly. What the hell?

Merry and Pippin were eating and talking quietly amongst themselves... probably, Carrie guessed with some bitterness, about how crazy she'd been acting lately. She couldn't help the fact that she saw mysterious hooded figures that they didn't see, and had random-ass dizzy spells they didn't have. Maybe she was having weird hobbit hormonal issues. She wrinkled her nose at the thought and went back to staring over the fire. She was still failing to muse about anything constructive, and was only jerked out of her thoughts when her eyes landed on what should have been the subject of them.

The hooded figure was standing just inside the tree-line, about sixty feet from the fire. It was also, to all outward appearances, staring straight at her.

"Hey!" Carrie shouted, leaping to her feet and causing the remains of her dinner to decorate the ground. Merry and Pippin stared at her, frozen in mid-chew. The figure didn't move a muscle. Figuring that she'd capitalize on the opportunity, Carrie charged around the fire and headed straight for the trees.

Pippin swallowed. "Daisy? What are you doing?"

"I'm catching myself some hooded stalker ass, that's what I'm doing!" Carrie snapped, then stopped dead and bent over as a wave of dizziness struck full-force. When she looked up, the figure was gone. Again. "Damn it," she said through gritted teeth before toppling over onto her side.

"Daisy!" There was the sound of plates being hurriedly set down followed by rapid footsteps, and then both hobbits were kneeling next to her and helping her to her feet.

"She must be ill or something," Pippin said, the concern evident in his voice.

"I'm right here," Carrie grumbled, annoyed at being talked over like she wasn't present. "And I'm not ill."

"You keep seeing things that aren't there, dashing off into the woods, and falling over," Merry said pointedly. "What do you expect us to think?"

"I don't know," Carrie snapped in frustrating, shaking off the hobbits as soon as the dizziness passed. "And it was there."

"Well, whether you think you saw something or not, there's nothing there now," Merry said firmly, taking Carrie's arm again and half-dragging her back to the fire. "Now sit down and stop making yourself sick." Carrie scowled and sat down with no small show of reluctance (though she privately found this blunt, take-charge side of Merry rather refreshing). Merry sat down on her right side and resumed eating; Pippin did the same on her left. Realizing that any more attempts to enter the woods would be thwarted in under two seconds, Carrie sighed and went back to staring moodily at the flames.

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

About an hour later, darkness had well and truly fallen. Merry and Pippin had produced pipes-from-who-knows-where out of their packs-from-who-knows-where and were smoking pensively on one side of the fire, their backs to the blaze. Carrie had unrolled a bedroll-from-who-knows-where on the other side and was lying flat on her back, staring upwards. The sky was littered with stars, and she was both surprised and comforted to find constellations she knew from home. She recognized Orion and one of the dippers (she had never been able to tell the big one from the little one). She was craning her neck slightly to look for the other dipper when the sky blinked.

Carrie stiffened. The ordinary constellations had been replaced; the stars were now arranged in a precise grid. The sky blinked back to normal before she could point out this new, distressing anomaly to either of the other two hobbits.

First the grass had changed to astro-turf, then the stars had assumed a grid formation. It was as if the very fic itself was beginning to unravel. And if it unraveled completely, she could very well go down with the ship. The entire damn thing had been created to suit her, after all. Carrie frowned, then wriggled into her bedroll to stave off a chill that wasn't due entirely to the cool night air.

She could have at least tried to sleep, but she didn't. Instead, she thought about the breakdown of the fic. What could be causing it? Celestina couldn't be responsible; she wouldn't let one of her fics fall apart without making a giant fuss over it. And it couldn't be Claralinda, because the goddess knew that the fic had a civilian inside. There was a slight chance-okay, a good chance that Celestina was occupied with something else and not paying any attention to the fic, but that didn't seem like enough to make it crumble. The goddess probably just put them on auto-pilot or something. And if that was the case...

Oh, God, Carrie thought with an inward mew of horror, what if it's me?

Going to the Shire couldn't have been the original game plan. Pippin had mentioned going back to the Shire (which he had done in the movie, after all), and instead of dissuading him, Carrie had deviated from the script and encouraged him. Now they were off on a tangent that was as un-canon as it could be... and instead of irritating Celestina into showing herself, it was throwing the very fabric of the narrative into disarray. What would happen if they actually reached the Shire? Would the sky fall down on their heads? Carrie curled up in her bedroll and trembled. Fork... I'm an idiot, idiot, idiot. She had thought the bold move would wind up being her ticket out of the fic. But Celestina wasn't showing any sign of noticing the difference, and Carrie hadn't even considered what would happen if the fic fell apart with her still inside.

The hobbit Sue rolled over and stared into the trees, nibbling her lower lip. Perhaps she could talk Merry and Pippin into going back. The ent-moot was probably still in full swing. The situation could be remedied. They could go kick the crap out of Isengard, and everything would be fine. She paused in the middle of reassuring herself and stared sharply into the trees.

There it was again.

She stared at the figure, trying in vain to get a glimpse of its face; the hood left its features in shadow. She glanced over her shoulder at Merry and Pippin. They were facing away from both her and the trees. For a brief instant she considered alerting them, then discarded the idea; the figure would disappear again, and they'd just think she was hallucinating. She turned back to the woods; it was still there. Gritting her teeth and trying to make as little noise as possible, she wriggled out of her bedroll and started crawling towards the woods. She kept her eyes locked firmly on the figure, which was watching her without moving. That's right, she thought as she crawled along, you just stay right there, you freakish Peeping Tom.

The dizziness hit her about thirty feet from where the figure was standing. Carrie paused for a moment, then stubbornly continued forward. The figure took a single step backwards, then abruptly vanished. The dizziness lessened slightly, but Carrie wasn't about to give up. She could still see where the figure had been standing; perhaps it was invisible, but still there. So she continued wriggling forward. The dizziness quickly grew, accompanied now by nausea. Her head felt light and her limbs felt weak, but she had pure, unfiltered spite for fuel. Still, she only just managed to drag herself to within about seven feet of where the figure had stood. Then whatever power that emanated from the area overcame her. She dropped to the forest floor with a thud, out cold.

Back at the campsite, Pippin heard the noise and turned around.

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

I know, it's a terrible cliffhanger. Ah, well. Please review if you can! I love you all! And sorry if there were many author alerts, or if there are errors with spacing. FFN has seriously forked up this chapter, and I've had to upload it several times. I still don't know how to fix some of the mistakes, so I guess they'll just have to sit there for now.

Platy