Hey, I know, OOC Jack isn't back up yet. We've been having technical difficulties concerning our regular computer. The delay in this story is due both to the freezing of our account and then a weekend-long convention, during which we did no writing, nor even thought of writing.

Also, this story is no longer garunteed to have weekly updates. There's a lot going on right now, and we just can't keep up. We'll be sending chapters out to you as fast as we can sit down and write them, though, and we do promise to try to write at least a little bit every few days.

Crap-shooting monkey!

MASTER LIFE CLOCK: 4:00

"Once, I was at an entmoot, and I had too much entdraught," commented Treebeard. "I puked all over Quickbeam, haha, serves him right, hasty bastard."

Treebeard had been telling Merry and Pippin gems like this story for hours now, and they were both rightfully sick of it. Pippin stared off into space, a blank expression on his face and drool dribbling down his chin, and Merry bashed his head repeatedly against one of Treebeard's branches.

"And so, this other time," continued Treebeard, "Quickbeam was walking through the forest, and then I ran up behind him and punched him in the back of the head! And then he all started screaming, and he was like, 'Treebeard, why'd you hit me in the back of the head?' and I was like, 'Because you suck!'"

Treebeard doubled over laughing at the memory, and Merry and Pippin fell off his head and into a thorn bush.

"I'm not picking you up again," complained Treebeard. "We're close enough that you can just walk."

Five hundred yards later, Merry and Pippin arrived in a clearing, complete with standard babbling brook.

"Stay here and don't die," commanded Treebeard, and he left.

"So we're going to Rohan?" asked Aragorn.

"You've asked me three times now, and the answer is still yes," replied Gandalf.

"Why are we going to Rohan?" asked Aragorn.

"Because the king's drunk or crazy or something," explained Gandalf. "We need him to stop letting his country run to ruin if we're going to use his army."

"Ah," said Aragorn. "So how are we going to make him stop being stupid?"

"I dunno," shrugged Gandalf. "I figured I'd just smack him around some and see if that helped."

"I feel so much better now that we have a wizard to make our plans," grumbled Gimli sarcastically.

Gandalf muttered something under his breath, and Gimli was instantly turned into an armadillo. Legolas laughed and pointed, even though he had to twist around backwards to do it, as he was riding on Probably Hasufel with the dwarf-turned-armadillo behind him.

"Man, that would have made my life so much easier a few days ago..." muttered Aragorn. Legolas continued to point and laugh at Gimli, who then bit his finger.

"Hey Gandalf, can you turn him into other things?" inquired Legolas. "I think he'd make a great horse. Then I could ride him, and he'd be useful for something!"

Gandalf muttered under his breath once more, and Legolas turned into a horse,knocking Probably Hasufel over and nearly breaking the real horse's back in the process.

"Damn, Gandalf!" exclaimed Aragorn, looking back at Legolas, who had just gotten up and begun to follow them with a somewhat bewildered look on his horse face. Gimli still clung to Probably Hasufel's back, looking...armadillo-ish. "What's up with you?"

"How would you feel if you were brought back to life and sent to work with bickering idiots?" demanded Gandalf.

"Okay," shrugged Aragorn.

Frodo, Sam, and Gollum looked down a steep slope to where they could see a column of genome soldiers marching toward a very large and ominous-looking black gate. This was the Black Gate, so known because it was both black and a gate. That's a killer combination there.

"Who's there?" yelled all the genome soldiers in unison. This startled the hobbits quite a bit, until they realized it was a chant the soldiers were still saying. "What's that noise? Whose footprints are these? Huh?"

The genome soldiers continued in their chant, but the hobbits stopped paying attention because it was so stupid. Well, Frodo kept paying attention, but that's because he was a moron.

A bunch of ogres and orcs and things worked a large mass of neat doohickeys behind the gate, causing it to open. Sam leaned far forward, trying to see what was going on. Gollum took the opportunity to give him a good solid shove, and Sam went tumbling down the slope, hitting several boulders on the way down.

To Gollum's dismay, Frodo leapt after him and also hit the boulders, only more so.

Sam was buried up to his midriff in gravel and other assorted bits of Middle-Earth when Frodo reached him. They both began to work frantically to dig him out.

"Huh?" wondered a genome soldier who had been looking in their direction and saw the rockslide. A question mark appeared over his head, and he went to investigate. The hobbits continued to dig until they noticed him standing just fifteen feet away, staring in their direction.

Frodo threw his cloak over both himself and Sam, thinking that maybe if he couldn't see the soldier any more, the soldier couldn't see him.

Surprisingly enough, this ploy worked. It wasn't because the soldier believed that he had seen two hobbits turn into a piece of cloth. It was actually because genome soldiers are incapable of seeing a person until they are within ten feet of each other. By the time he got that close, all that was visible was a gray cloth lying on the ground. He accepted this as normal, just like all those cardboard boxes he ran into everywhere.

The soldier went back into formation, and Frodo finished digging Sam out. Both hobbits braced to dash into Mordor as soon as the soldiers were almost through. Just as they got up, though, Gollum grabbed both of them and pulled them back to the ground.

"What are you doing?" demanded Sam, shaking Gollum's hand off.

"Hobbits must not go into Mordor!" explained Gollum. "There's orcses everywhere, and they'll catch you!"

"We have to go to Mordor, Gollum," sighed Frodo. "And the gate's closing."

"There's another way!" exclaimed Gollum.

"Why didn't you tell us before?!" shouted Sam angrily.

"You didn't ask," replied Gollum. "And I have this pain in all the diodes down my left side."

"Voon," commiserated Frodo.

"Fine, whatever," snapped Sam. "What kind of way is it?"

"There's a lot of forestssses, and then a big cli—I mean, staircase, and then you goes in a cave full of...uhh...cake!"

"That sounds pretty good," commented Frodo.

"Oh, come on, Frodo!" protested Sam. "That's got to be a bunch of bullshit!"

"I trust Gollum's judgment," replied Frodo, giving Sam a Meaningful Look.

"Does it ever strike you how immature we are for people in our mid-twenties?" asked Pippin, looking at Merry over a bowl of entdraught. "Kind of odd, isn't it?"

"Don't even get started on it," muttered Merry. "I know you'll just start in on how it's the fault of the "authors" or something."

Pippin shrugged, and drank some entdraught.

"Hoom," burped Pippin.

"Hey, Pippin," commented Merry. "You sound like that idiot, Treebeard."

"Really?" asked Pippin. He drank again, allowing him to do an impression of Treebeard. "And then one time, I slept with this chick, but she turned out to be a dude!"

"Let me try!" exclaimed Merry, laughing. He grabbed the bowl from Pippin, and did his own impression. "I hate Quickbeam! He needs a boot up his ass!"

Both hobbits got up and began stomping around the clearing, passing the entdraught back and forth and keeping up the mockery.

"Baroomahoomadingdongdooooom!"

"And this one time, I did this other thing that's stupid and no one wants to know about!"

"My name is two nouns jammed together!"

"Yeah! Meet my friend, Brambleass!"

By now the hobbits had moved to the edge of the clearing. Quick as possessed tree roots bursting out of the ground and grabbing someone, the roots of the nearest tree burst out of the ground and grabbed Merry and Pippin.

"Arg, no, tree roots!" screamed Pippin.

"Yeah, they're dragging us into the tree!" cried Merry.

"That's not what I'm worried about!" yelled Pippin. "Haven't you ever seen Evil Dead?"

Merry would have hit Pippin, but they were both already inside the tree. Besides, he thought he could feel a root squirming its way into his pants. He heard loud breathing behind him.

"Hey, who else is in here?" worried Pippin.

"It's Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadil-o!" sang Tom Bombadil happily.

"So that's where he went!" realized Pippin. "It felt like something was missing a while back. Hey, Tom, you didn't really eat those horses, did you?"

"What are you even talking about?" yelled Merry.

"Well, actually," admitted/sang Tom Bombadil guiltily, "I ate those horses, horse-a-horse-a-dil-o!"

And so, the three were stuck being molested by the tree for a few hours, until Treebeard showed up.

"What's this?" wondered Treebeard. "Roamingroots, are you stealing and molesting my guests again?!"

Roamingroots twisted its branches in what would have looked like a shrug if the tree hadn't been so obviously enjoying itself.

"I warned you last time!" growled Treebeard. Then he kicked Roamingroots over, exposing the two hobbits and Tom Bombadil, who were entangled in the roots in a fairly suggestive manner. "You again!" grumbled Treebeard, pulling Tom Bombadil out. "I told you to stop coming into my forest and having sex with my trees!"

Tom Bombadil looked very slightly ashamed of himself, and Treebeard chucked him like a football so far he soon disappeared into the distance.

"All right, come along," sighed Treebeard. The hobbits carefully eased themselves away from the roots and stood up.

"Are all trees like that?" asked Pippin as soon as he and Merry were sitting on Treebeard and they were all on the move.

"Hell no!" replied Treebeard. "Roamingroots was a freaking pervert!"

"So who do trees normally have sex with, then?" wondered Merry.

"They reproduce by spores," explained Treebeard.

"Do you reproduce by spores?" inquired Pippin rather rudely.

"Thankfully no," stated Treebeard. "We get little ents with entwives. Unfortunately, we don't know where the entwives are, so we're kind of screwed as a species."

"What happened?" pondered Pippin.

"They left," sighed Treebeard. "They all just got together one night while we were sleeping and left. I can't imagine why."

"That's too bad," sympathized Merry.

SPIFFTACULAR FLASHBACK

Treebeard sat in his clearing, watching the babbling brook intensely.

"Can you look away from that for one minute?" grumbled his girlfriend, Treecleanshavenface.

"Why don't you just get me some more entdraught, wench?" requested Treebeard, giving her and appreciative slap on the ass. She tried to give his a not-so-appreciative slap on the face, but he just grabbed her arm and locked her into an involuntary kiss.

END FLASHBACK

"Why did they have to leave?" moaned Treebeard. "Those were such good times!"

MASTER LIFE CLOCK: 2:55

Hey, sorry about no review responses this week, but we currently don't have much access to anything, and we're really busy trying to back everything up right now.