CHAPTER THREE: Hobbits and Uruks and Elves, Oh My

Our Characters Thus Far:

Dilly – sarcastic, strong, and stubborn. Has long dark hair, olive skin, and a quirky smile.

Cebu – a cheery redhead with a serious Frodo Fetish.

Eredolyn – a true Tolkien fanatic. With a concussion. No more need be said.

Tuima – an Elf. Nobody likes her much.

Eicys – Cebu's younger sister. We hate to use a word as clichéd as "plucky," but if the shoe fits…

On with the show!

Dilly cracked open an eye, saw only a reddish blur, and closed it again, with the reasoning that if she was really bleeding that badly she didn't want to have to see it. But then --

"Fancy seeing you three here," said a voice that was, against all the odds, chipper.

Dilly opened both eyes this time, mostly out of disbelief, and realized that the red blur she had seen was in fact hair. And hair that big and that red could only belong to… "Cebu! What are you doing here?"

"Uh… being tied up and generally abused? Again. How about you?"

"Likewise. Um, minus the 'again' bit. What's going on?"

The redhead squirmed around as best she could with her hands and feet tied. "I think… I think we've been captured by orcs," she said, her tone a mix of desperate, disbelieving, and determinedly cheerful.

Dilly beat back a memory of being grabbed from behind, huge clawed hands, ugly laughter, rope… "I think," she said, "that I've gone insane. Or maybe Eredolyn's gone insane, and it's contagious. This is the sort of thing that she would hallucinate."

An injured voice spoke from behind her: "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Ere!" said Dilly, twisting around. "Are you okay?"

"Are you joking?" asked Eredolyn. "Tell me you're joking."

Dilly glanced around at the clearing full of orcs, at their bound hands, at the dried blood clumping her friend's short hair. "All right, maybe 'okay' is a bit strong," she said.

"Strong?" repeated Eredolyn. "You're crazy! Those are orcs! Real live smelly vicious eat-your-unnecessary-legs orcs! And you think 'okay' is a bit strong?"

Dilly, who had enough cuts and bruises from her struggles to appreciate the 'vicious' bit, opened her mouth to defend herself. She was interrupted by Eredolyn's fervent exclamation: "This is fantastic!"

Dilly paused with her mouth still open. After a while she gained enough control of her hanging lower jaw to say, "You wanna run that by me again?"

"Do you realize where we are?" asked Eredolyn. "I heard them talking. They said they wanted to have some fun with us before they have to report back to… guess where? Orthanc!"

"Oooh," said Dilly, her usual gift for sarcasm deserting her in the face of utter bafflement and a fast-growing terror.

"Do you know what this means?" Eredolyn bubbled. "It means we're in Middle-Earth!"

There was a groan, and something that Dilly had taken for a log in the darkness shifted a little and opened its eyes. "You act as though you haven't lived in Middle-earth all your life," said Tuima. She touched her head with bound hands, and winced. "You might as well get excited about breathing."

"You got over that bump pretty quick," said Dilly, a bit coldly. "I thought you'd be out for hours."

"Elves heal quickly."

"Will you come off the whole Elf thing already?" Dilly growled. "Just because there's a gang of monster-things in Cebu's backyard doesn't mean you're the long-lost daughter of Elrond or something! There is such a thing as taking fanaticism too far! There is no such place as Middle Earth! Got it? It's made up – it's fantasy! In fact, you can just take those stupid, plastic, pointless, ugly, fake ears off right now!" With that, she seized the point of one of Tuima's ears with her bound hands and gave it a vicious tug.

Tuima let out a yell. "Let go!"

Dilly did so promptly, her eyes the size of saucers.

"Eredolyn…" she whispered slowly, never taking her eyes off the irritated Elf. "Ere, her ears … are stuck to her head."

"What did you expect them to be stuck to?" snarled Tuima. "My elbows?"

"You're… really an Elf."

"Your powers of observation never cease to amaze" said Tuima, in a voice acidic enough to eat through steel.

Dilly shut her eyes. "This is too much," she said.

"Are you kidding?" Eredolyn demanded incredulously. "This is great! Not only is Isengard a few miles away, not only have we met up with a real live band of Uruk-Hai, but now we get to be tied up next to an Elf!"

"Wha… I… What? " Tuima stammered. "What is wrong with… How can…" Finally she gave up, threw her arms in the air, and swore very nastily indeed in Sindarin.

Eredolyn was undeterred. "So it really was Elven rope that you used to tie up Cebu?" she asked gleefully. "It's all real? You got it from Lothlorien or something? Ohmigosh – Lothlorien! We're here anyway, we could totally visit Lothlorien! And Rivendell! And Rohan; I would kill to see the Golden Hall – " She broke off abruptly. "I could meet Eowyn," she said, pouring several years' worth of hero-worship into that one statement. "Wow. Wow. I mean… wow…" Her eyes shone. "And then there's the Fellowship," she continued, "Aragorn and Legolas and Frodo and – "

"Stop right there!" shrieked Cebu. Eredolyn's blissful ramblings stuttered to a halt. The others blinked at her. Even the orcs stopped what they were doing (arguing over who got which captive and for what – a discussion Dilly was trying very hard not to listen to).

"What?" asked Eredolyn. Then, as a dreamy lassitude crept over Cebu's face, she and Dilly groaned loudly and simultaneously, "Oh, no."

"What's wrong?" demanded Tuima.

"She's obsessed with Frodo," said Eredolyn.

"Beyond obsessed," agreed Dilly. "Infatuated." Tuima was still looking blank, so Dilly twisted to gesture at the redhead. "Just look at her," she said.

Cebu was sighing rapturously and murmuring about "dreamy big blue eyes…"

Tuima looked nauseated. "What's wrong with her?" she asked.

But before Dilly could answer, Cebu interrupted ecstatically: "We might even meet him, and then… and then… You guys, we have to escape!"

"But I want to watch the orcs some more," protested Eredolyn.

"Forget the orcs! We've got a Halfling to find!"

"What's tha' you said?" a nearby Uruk demanded unexpectedly, stalking closer to the trussed-up friends. "A halfling?"

Tuima hissed at Cebu in horrified protest, but it was too late. The redhead carried on joyfully, "Yes, he's absolutely gorgeous, and so brave, with that awful Ring and all those Nazgul, and the big eye whenever he puts it on…the other hobbits are cute too, of course, but Frodo…"

Tuima buried her face in her hands and bit her bonds fiercely to muffle a scream. The orc was looking at the group with a kind of curious appraisal that she did not like at all. Finally, he lumbered away and began a whispered discussion with two of his fellows.

As soon as he was out of earshot Tuima slid over to where Cebu was still gushing about the Ringbearer, and administered a sharp smack to the top of her head.

"Ouch!" cried Cebu, rubbing it as best she could with her hands tied. "What was that for? That hurt!" She scowled at the group. "You chase me down, tie me up, throw me in a closet, feed me gruel, and now you hit me? What kind of friends are you guys?"

Tuima gave her a look that suggested Cebu had just been found adhering to the sole of her boot. "I," she said, "am not your friend." And then she launched into a tirade the likes of which had not been seen in Arda since Feanor discovered the theft of his Silmarils – degenerating occasionally into Elven insults and swearing in at least six languages. The others stared in fascinated horror as she denounced them to every Vala and Maia known to the Eldar and questioned their ancestors for seven generations.

"…This may seem like a fantasy trip in the woods to you moonstruck morons, but it is not a game," she snarled after several minutes of this. "And if I wasn't afraid of being stuck in your ridiculous country again I would escort the rest of you out of this one right now, but I don't have that option because we are stuck here surrounded by orcs, about to be tortured or worse – and what do you do? Hand them the most dangerous secret in the history of all Arda before they've even begun! Don't you Morgoth-spawned idiots realize what this means?"

There was a ringing silence, broken only by Tuima's ragged breathing. Then Eredolyn said in quiet awe, "We just got yelled at by an Elf."

The Elf in question stared blankly for a moment. Then she tipped back her head, raised her hands high, and shrieked uselessly at the stars.

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Eicys crept nervously through the woods, clutching the ziplock baggie full of gruel against her chest. It was not the most comforting thing to be clutching. A weapon of some sort, even a stick, would be much nicer. Or perhaps a teddy bear. You know, just to emphasize how completely out of her depth she was feeling. Because right now, Eicys was so far out of her depth that the fish had lights on their noses.

She was tramping through the dense forest that occupied most of her family's backyard, armed with only a flashlight and a bag of gruel, and she was still hearing the echoes of screams bouncing back and forth inside her skull. At first she'd thought it was Eredolyn, but then there had been a pause and it honestly sounded as though Dilly was screaming.

That was… worrying. Very worrying. Dilly just wasn't the screaming type.

Eicys swung her flashlight in a slow arc. "Hello?" she called. "Eredolyn? Dilly? Is anybody there?"

Silence.

"Heck, I'll even take Tuima," called Eicys. "Guys? Come on, this isn't funny."

More silence.

"I'm serious! Cebu? Come on, you guys!"

There was a scraping, scrabbling noise from somewhere up ahead. Eicys aimed her flashlight at it. "Dilly?"

Scrape, snuffle, scrape.

There weren't any bears this far from the mountains, Eicys told herself. It was probably a raccoon. Or a squirrel. Or maybe a cougar.

Gulp.

"Cebu…?"

A dark shape moved amid the underbrush. Eicys took a few steps closer, willing the feeble flashlight beam to reach it. It was definitely a human shape, but there was something… off… about it. It was hunched, twisted, deformed. "Hello?" whispered Eicys.

The thing looked up. The flashlight was too dim to illuminate its face, but its eyes shone out at her, a bright, sickly green, gleaming with malice. It let out a gleeful, half-human snarl, and leapt at her suddenly, clawed fingers outstretched.

Eicys screamed and hurled her flashlight into its face. It howled and fell back, and then Eicys was running, running faster than she'd ever run in her life – skipping over roots, dodging branches, zig-zagging between tree trunks, her breath sobbing in her lungs. She kept running until the adrenaline began to ebb, and then, spurred by the last vestiges of terror, she climbed a tree, put her arms around the trunk, and held on tight as her heartbeat slowed from a whine down to at least a purr. Absurdly, she still had the baggie of gruel clenched in one fist. She stuffed it under her sweater for safekeeping and went back to hugging the treetrunk, beating down sobs, feeling her muscles slowly relax again.

Sniff, snuffle, scrape. Sniff, sniff.

Eicys stuffed a fist against her mouth to stifle a scream. The gnarled black shape came creeping out of the trees, bent almost double, scanning the ground. It was tracking her. Like a dog. Eicys froze against the tree trunk, not breathing, and stared down at it as it snuffled and slavered and scanned the forest floor.

It stopped. A grin wandered across its horrible face, and it looked up, straight into her eyes.

And then, most terrible of all, it spoke. "'Allo, liddle birdie," it rasped. "Come on down an' play."