A/N: Sorry that it took so long for me to get this chapter up. I was extremely busy this week.

Disclaimer: LOTR does not belong to me.

Chapter 4

Talking to Elrond Half-Elven

Hunter could only stare. Here he was, sitting across from an Elf-Lord in Middle-Earth on the brink of a major war. An Elf-Lord who probably suspected him and Thor of being spies. His mind was racing: 'to tell him or not to tell him, that is the question.' Yes, that was true. He decided on not telling Elrond that Hunter knew all about Middle-Earth and the War of the Ring. 'Yeah, pretend to be clueless.'

"Rivendell? This is America, right?" He asked.

Elrond looked at him as if Hunter were insane. "America? No, Rivendell is closest to Rhuadar."

Rhuadar. Hunter knew that he had heard that name before, he was just struggling to place it. 'Must be somewhere in Arnor.' He knew that Rivendell was closest to Arnor. He pretended he had no clue what Elrond was talking about. "Rhuadar?" He hoped that Elrond was believing his lies. Hunter and Thor's lives depended on their abilities to deceive.

"

Elrond took pity on the boy, who clearly knew little of history. Of course, if he was from Harad (though his accent clearly indicated some other country), then there was a small chance that he would've studied Arnorian history extensively. Still, it was ridiculous for Hunter to not even understand the basics. "One of the states of Arnor."

Hunter simply stared at him and Elrond quit trying to explain history to him and simply asked the question that had been driving him mad. "Where are you from?"

"

Hunter almost breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, something that he didn't have to lie about but something that would convince Elrond of Hunter's story. "Oregon. Thor and I go to the same school." Elrond simply looked at him. "Oregon's one of the fifty states in America. It's on the western coast, between California and Washington." Hunter made a point of saying as many names as possible, knowing from experience that making up good names was not easy and this could only make him more believable.

"

Elrond quickly ran each name through his head, trying to find something familiar about them. They certainly weren't of Elvish origin, nor were they Dwarvish. Numenorian sounded slightly closer, though Elrond couldn't place any of the roots.

Hunter had said something about Thor and him going to the same school. What exactly did he mean? The only schools Elrond knew of were those for warriors. "School?"

"

Thor decided to answer. "We go to the same high school. Children are required by law to go to school between six and sixteen. They spend the first five years in elementary school, then three in middle school, and four in high school. There's an option of dropping out when you turn sixteen, but most people stay in school."

Elrond looked at her. "You have such short lives and yet every child spends ten years in school? Who pays for it?" Thor tried not to glower at Elrond, remembering that he had grown up with a class system where only the wealthiest children were educated.

"Taxes." She hoped Elrond didn't asked exactly how much taxes were. The idea of such control by government would probably seem abhorrent to a race that loved freedom so much. "It's really quite economical."

Elrond didn't ask about taxes, but instead about school. "How are they set up, these schools?"

"Well, it's organized by geography. There are several neighborhoods to a large city, like Portland, where we live. So there are a few elementary schools for each neighborhood, usually having around five hundred students, so a hundred students per grade--year, that is. That's four or five classrooms, depending on class size. Then there's usually one middle school for a neighborhood, with around eight hundred students. Large neighborhoods have one high school, with around fifteen hundred students." She took a deep breath after finishing this lecture on public education in America.

"

Elrond was shocked, even though his impassive Elven features showed no emotions. These Americans tried to educate everyone in the country by putting them into huge classrooms. In his opinion, that was just asking for a disaster. Only the children of the wealthy were intelligent enough for education. Trying to school the lower echelons of society was a waste of money. It did not take ten years of school teach a peasant child how to farm. However, Thor seemed to think it was normal.

"Why does it take so long?" he asked.

Hunter and Thor seemed to falling over themselves trying to answer him. "Because there's so much to learn."

"There's not enough money."

"Inefficient administration."

"Taxpayers don't care enough to pay more than they have to."

" Because no one care," Hunter said quietly. "The taxpayers don't understand the need for good education and kids hate school."

"Hunter, kids are juvenile goats," Elrond told him. Was this child insane?

"It's a colloquial term for child in our culture," Thor informed him with an icy stare. She was so utterly infuriated by Elrond's condescending tone. She did not reflect on the fact that in the Elvish race, a sixteen-year-old was probably still a baby. At least considered a baby, if more physically developed than that.

"

With Thor's remark, Elrond decided to change the subject. "Have you ever heard of Gondor?" He expected a denial.

"You mean the town in Ethiopia?" Hunter asked. The town, which was actually named Gondar, had been the capital of Ethiopia in the late eighteenth century. (He only knew this because he had looked it up while researching derivatives for names in Middle-Earth.)

Elrond shook his head. "It is a country south of here that battles the evil of Mordor."

"And you don't?" Hunter asked sweetly. He was still irritated at Elrond's treatment of him. He knew that he probably shouldn't try to annoy Elrond, but he just couldn't resist.

"Yes. Though not directly, as Rivendell does not border Mordor." Hunter knew that Elrond was lying. After all, the Elves were the ones who went to the Grey Havens to leave Middle-Earth. Elladan and Elrohir were the only Elves that Hunter knew of that actively worked to kill orcs, and that was only because a party of orcs had taken their mother captive and treated her brutally. Most Elves only cared about orcs when they trespassed on Elven lands.

Hunter pretended not to care about Mordor. "So where's Sam from?" He already knew the answer, of course, but he felt like talking about something other than Mordor. The suspicious glances from Elrond hadn't helped.

"Samwise? He is a hobbit from the Shire." Elrond did not elaborate on the matter and neither of the teens pressed him about it. Both of them already knew about Sam, and probably knew more than Elrond did about the short gardener.

"So, do you have any kids?" Thor asked, pretending to be bored.

Elrond was almost shocked by the question. Why was important? He was growing suspicious: the children had dodged the discussion on Mordor to ask incredibly irrelevant questions. Perhaps they were merely bored. Men were alleged to have short attention-spans, though Elrond had rarely observed this in his foster-son. Of course, Estel was rather unusual. "Children? Elladan and Elrohir are twin boys and Arwen is my only daughter." His shock at the question kept him from speaking in intelligent sentences. He decided that he needed to speak with Glorfindel and Erestor about Hunter and Thor. He'd let Estel fill them in on the history of Middle-Earth. "I am sorry, but I must leave now. If you wish, you may walk in the gardens, though I would advise you to keep to your rooms, since your bodies still need to heal."

Hunter and Thor promptly nodded, having heard nothing of what Elrond had said, or at least, not having cared. Satisfied, Elrond left.

As soon as the Elf-Lord had left, Hunter and Thor began to talk. "Well, what do you think?" Hunter asked.

"I think we scared him off," Thor said. "He'll need a little time to get used to the idea of multiple worlds, but he'll come around eventually."

Hunter nodded. "Yeah. Funny thing is, Tolkien didn't write The Lord of the Rings in English, yet that's what everyone is speaking."

Thor just looked at her friend. "What do you mean he didn't write in English? Tolkien may have been a polyglot, but most people write in their native language."

"Well, he didn't actually write the story in Westron, but all of the names in the English versions of Middle-Earth sagas are translated. He explains in one of the appendices," Hunter said. Judging by Thor's reaction, she thought that Tolkien had been insane, and Hunter had to agree.

"Well, that's stupid. Why think up so many names and then translate them?"

"Hell, I don't know. Tolkien was a little weird. Besides, Thor, your brother woofs at basketball games," Hunter pointed out. Their high school mascot was a German Shepherd and Rupert Marshall, a drummer in the pep band, had a habit of woofing every time their team scored a basket. Thor found it endearing. Hunter continued, "my point is that we can't be in the Lord of the Rings as according to Tolkien. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to understand anyone but each other."

Thor shrugged. Hunter clearly needed to stop trying to solve the situation from a theoretical angle. None of them knew much about what was going on, or how this Middle-Earth was different from Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and here he was trying to dissect the situation with theory! She rolled her eyes and said, "Hunter, let's just wait and figure out what's going on before making any complicated theories involving physics, because I know that's what you're going to do."

Hunter blinked. He had been going to say something about a theory, but how had Thor known? He hadn't even known what kind of theory he was going to propose! "Wait, what'd you say?"

"You were going to say something about multiverse theory and quantum mechanics," Thor said, with a slight smirk on her face. Oh, how she was enjoying this battle of wits! It was not often that she got Hunter to admit to having been outsmarted, and she intended to savor this victory.

Hunter started at Thor's announcement. Now that he thought about, he had been going to say something along those lines! "How'd you know that was what I was going to say?"

Thor only smiled at him. "Hunter Jameson, I've known you for a year and a half. I know how your mind works."

Hunter was almost outraged that Thor dared to gloat over her victory. "A year and a half is hardly long enough for that," he observed wryly, exposing the flaw in the argument.

Thor saw through his words. "It's long enough when that's a year and a half spent in our high school." It was true, at least for Hunter and Thor. The ostracism and pressure that they had faced from other teens had brought them together. Those shared classes, lunches together, and hours spent on school projects had let them understand each other so well that they could read each other's thoughts half of the time. Considering that both were quite introverted, this was a major accomplishment.

Hunter gave up and allowed Thor her victory. "All right, you win. So I was going to say that." He refused to pout about that: that was just beneath him. Changing the subject, he asked, "so, read any good books lately?" He felt that he had to keep talking, he didn't know why. Maybe talking would reveal some of the answers to the questions that were driving him mad.

Thor just gave him a look that seemed to ask if he was trying to be funny. "Books at home or books here? Either way I really don't see the point: we don't have access to books at home and I haven't read any here."

Hunter shook his head, partly from frustration, partly from amusement. "I'm trying to start a discussion, Thor. Now have you read any good books lately or haven't you?"

"Yeah," she admitted. "Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. Have you read it?"

"No. What's it about?" he was surprised that he had not read it. Hunter was extremely bookish and practically spent all of his free time reading, while Thor mixed it up with sports. She was also more outgoing than him.

"An extremely strange man named Heathcliff," she said with a strange look on her face. "It's very interesting." She must have gotten that habit from Hunter, that habit of taking things and examining them as if under a microscope. Of scrutinizing things and dissecting them in such a manner suggesting that the mind was somewhere distant. It was hard to describe, harder to understand, and most people just dismissed it as another of Hunter's odd qualities.

Hunter shrugged. "I'll read it when I find the time."

They wandered outside together and made their way to the gardens, neither of them noticing the three elves and an old man who watched them from afar.

"Those children are a mystery," Gandalf said, musing. "I feel that there is something more to this than what they have said. But what it is I cannot tell."

Next chapter: Gandalf, Elrond, Erestor, and Glorfindel talk.

I am switching to weekly updates now, since that allows me greater flexibility for when I can write.

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