Merrie and Sioux in Middle-Earth.

Chapter 2

Disclaimer: JRR Tolkien owns Middle-Earth. In case you were wondering. And nope, I'm not him. If I was I would be richer and far more dead. And male. And not writing this story, which is all in fun and not meant to legally harm anyone.

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When the two young women came to, they immediately wished they had stayed from. Despite the pounding headache, Sioux struggled to her feet to survey their new location.

"Insert requisite remark on the current lack of Kansas-like characteristics in our surroundings here," Sioux groaned as she stared around at the very gray, rocky, foggy landscape. She placed a hand to her head and whimpered. "That book bites."

"Remarking on simply a lack of Kansan characteristics would imply the possibility of our locale being in a highly-colored land, surrounded by small singing people, whereas we are in a remarkably gray mountainous place, surrounded by large silent rocks." Merrie finished this speech with a dramatic shiver and hugged her knees to her chest, curling up and looking stylishly waifish.

Sioux sighed, looking down at her companion. "Come on, let's get out of here, Mer. This place is giving me the creeps." Merrie's head shot up and she glared reproachfully.

"Out! Out to WHERE!" She flung her arm out, gesturing at the gray around them. "We don't know where here is or how to get anywhere! Let's just stay here and wait for the search parties to find us."

The shouting echoed off the rocks, taking on an ominous, empty tone which sent chills down Sioux's spine, but seemed to mollify Merrie as she folded herself back into her forlorn waif pose.

"We can't be that far!" Sioux protested, keeping her tone carefully calm. "We weren't out that long. Look," she tapped her watch, "It's been like, half an hour."

"FAR!" Merrie's voice rose several octaves, turning the syllable into an outraged squeak. "We. Were sucked into. A book. A Book, Sioux. A book pulled us into a picture and spit us out!"

Sioux took a deep breath, fighting her annoyance. "You bought it," she said under her breath. Merrie snorted in disgust.

"You had to paw through it looking for pictures of hot elves."

"Elves are hot!"

And htat seemed to brook no further arguments. It was hard to protest the truth, unless one was a politician and trained for such things. The two lapsed into silence, staring out at the grayness until Merrie finally spoke.

"What picture were you looking at?"

Sioux closed her eyes, taking a moment to remember. "Rivendell," she said at last. "Why?" She turned from admiring the scintillating vistas of haze to look closely at her friend.

"Well," Merrie drew the word out as she considered her next words, feeling that speaking the thoughts out loud would be taking a much larger deviation from sanity than she was comfortable with. "Well, if we fell into a picture of Rivendell, maybe these are the Misty Mountains…"

Sioux raised an eyebrow. Merrie too had suffered a bump on the head, she was even now rubbing her temples. Maybe the bump had been worse than Sioux's.

"If we fell into that picture, we would be in Rivendell, a place with is not real," she said evenly, pronouncing each syllable with careful precision, as if she was speaking to a partially deaf thee-year-old. Merrie's jaw clenched.

"Fine," she growled between gritted teeth, "you explain our literary transportation to the Gray and Murky."

They fell into silence once again, listening to water drip steadily onto stone somewhere nearby until Sioux gave in with a heavy sigh. She was fairly certain listening to the dull dripping was some sort of torture.

"Okay, so if these are the Misty Mountains, which we fell into via a picture of Rivendell by some fluke of directionally-challenged fate, Which way do we go from here?"

"West," Merrie answered readily, then sighed. "Whichever way that is."

"Right. West." Sioux turned to the left, where a vaguely clear path could be discerned through the rocks. "Does that look westish?"

Merrie stood, looking to the right where the path was even less clear. "Works for me," she shrugged after a moment, turning to follow Sioux's leftward lead.

"Mer," Sioux's quiet voice echoed through the mist around them, accompanied by the crunching of their unsteady steps on the rocky path. "Thanks."

"For what?"

"Starting that ballet flat trend. Imagine this in stilettos."

Merrie laughed softly. "Yeah, well, my feet are still kiling me. Why didn't we start a tennis shoe fad?"

"Good question. Do you think we'll end up in Rivendell? What else is around the Mountains?"

It took Merrie a moment to try to construct a map of Middle-Earth in her head. "Maybe. Or the north, whatever's there, or the south… which I think is a lot more mountains and then like Gondor or something… or the east, which is Mirkwood."

"I hate spiders," Sioux whispered, shuddering.

They said nothing more, contemplating their possible destinations, with only the crunching of rocks beneath their stylish flats (and the occasional curse as one pebble after another rebelled by leaping into one of the stylish flats) to break the silence.

After a long time and one particularly violent pebble, Sioux announced that they needed to find a cave for the night. This was because the hazy nebula of light she supposed was the sun was starting to get near the horizon and because this seemed to be an adventure in Middle-Earth and finding caves for the night had been the customary venue for nightly accommodations as far as she could remember.

"The light is fading," she remarked, feeling that the very least they could do to make the best of the situation would be to utter impressive phrases.

"How can you tell?" Merrie wondered, looking up at the nebulous ball of light. "This place is like smog central…" she scowled at the offending mist. "I think you're right though. Let's go spelunking."

It was much later before they found a cave. It looked satisfyingly large, with a good arched opening which reassured them that this was indeed a good adventuring accommodation, while retaining a certain aura of uneasy creepiness.

They stepped into the cave, but only went a few feet before they came to where the sun's dim light failed, giving way to a forbidding darkness. Neither girl had ever been one to have childish fears of things going bump in the night, yet looking onto this particular darkness, where no stars or moon or McDonald's sign glowed in the distance, they edged closer to one another. It was not so much as things going bump in the night, but more as if this dark would be going bump all by itself.

Sioux took a long, quavering look at the blackness. "Should we see how deep the rabbit hole goes?" she asked, forcing herself to use a cheery, brave, heroine voice she had perfected on the set of a pirate movie, one of her more cherished films.

Recognizing the tone of the voice, Merrie nearly laughed. At least, she made a sound that might have been a laugh, if a deep near-panic hadn't been trying to close her throat.

"We know how deep it could go," she managed, outraged at her friend's cheerful disregard of their possible current predicament. Hadn't Sioux bloody read the books? "Do you really want to investigate?" she asked in disbelief. "Do you remember what lives in the Misty Mountains?

"I mean, I'm all for getting captured and served to a Goblin King… but I'd rather he be a David Bowie clone in tights, and honestly, this does not look like the place to find singing Muppets!" she could feel the hysteria bubbling up again, threatening to sweep her off into frantic shrieks and wall-clawing fits.

"But sure, let's go get beaten up and served flambe to some twisted fantasy of a bored sadistic college professor! I mean, what the hell, that's how I want to spend my weekend! When the book spits us out we can laugh and have a great chat about it: Hey, wasn't it great when he busted your ribs and snacked on your still-beating heart? Oh yeah, and I loved the part where I got a rusty sword stabbed through my stomach…!"

"Oh my god, Merrie! Calm the hell down!" Sioux hissed.

That did it. She spun to face her best friend, shoving tangled blond hair away from her face in preparation for battle. "Calm down! CALM DOWN? Fucking hell, Sioux, we are in The Misty fucking Mountains in Middle fucking Earth, via a picture of Riven-fucking-dell. And now we are in a cave, in a place where there are things that kill, eat, maim, torture, and oh yeah, kill you. Did I mention killing and torture?

"So don't fucking order me to calm down. I am not your personal—"

"Shut the HELL up!" Sioux snarled, glaring into her friend's blue eyes. "You think I don't get that? Yeah, I do, but excuse me if I don't feel like cowering like a- a- coward! God, get a spine."

"Coward? Just because I don't want to waltz into the dark and have a looksie at Goblin Land and get served up for dinner. Surviving, yeah, a real cowardly goal. Oh, the great Sioux Johan has denounced me as a coward!" She raised a hand to her forehead in mock distress, "Oh what shall I do? The woman who never stayed to fight for anything in her entire life says I am a coward! I die."

Merrie clasped a hand to her heart. "Really, I'm dying of shame inside. Being not-suicidal is so uncool. We can't all be sensitive artistes with a secret deathwish, I guess."

"Shut. Up. You selfish, arrogant, entitled, bourgeois brat. At least I never crusaded for inane causes no one cared about. Homeless Ferrets, oh, the world will weep at losing you. The Ralph Lauren ads will never be the same…. But wait, you were about to lose that contract anyway…"

"The contract was up," Merrie hissed. "I had other commitments. Unlike those of us who had such histrionics we were fired from… how many Broadway productions has it been now?" her voice was saccharine.

"You bitch," Sioux growled.

"Tsk, name-calling. Showing our down-home roots, I see."

"Oh get the hell off your high horse and quit acting like some well-bred debutaunte. You are Mary Ann Stanton from Dayton, Ohio and you damned well know it!" Sioux's hands were clenched, her green eyes narrowed as she stalked toward her friend.

In the last rays of light from the setting sun, Merrie's delicate features had set into something resembling a limestone statue that had had a very bad century. "Oh do tell me more, Susan Jones of Mascootah, Illinois…"

The fight might have gotten perfectly ugly, if the orcs hadn't chosen that moment to come rushing out of the darkness. Orcs as a species never fully developed a good sense of timing critical to their survival. Probably a side effect of being hatched by a wizard with a faulty understanding of evolution. Or a built in flaw to ensure none would ever go rogue.

If Sauruman had understood evolution and the survival of the fittest, more of his creations might have made it home that day. As it was, when Merrie and Sioux turned to glare at the intruders, several smarter orcs slowed their charge. For deep in the eyes of these females, the campfires of the Mesozoic were glittering with deadly intent.

It was a time of ancient survival the orcs had never known.

As the two delicate females parted their lips in feral snarls, somewhere in the ether something that might once have called itself Charles Darwin was chuckling, and something inside the brains of Merrie and Souix whispered "kill or be killed." And they knew in the genetic encoding, deep within the marrow of their bones, which side they wanted to be on.

It was weeks before the nearly-dead Orc captain collapsed before Saruman, his body shaking with exhaustion, nerves jumping with leftover adrenaline, the white hand barely visible through the layers of dirt and blood that coated him. His eyes fixed upon his maker were wide with horror, fear and loathing.

"You… bastard…" he gasped, between painful breaths before he fell to the floor, dead and thankful for it.