You've Got Fanmail 3 The Infamy List!

by Melda Burke

The Hall of Fanfiction Fame and Infamy has been completed. Ellie is offered a promotion. She is to protect the Infamy List, which names criminal writers. However, just when everything seems to be sane, the List is stolen and Marie and the Gang must rescue the Infamy List from the bowls of the Internet. Memes and insanity await our beloved bunch of characters!

3. Shit Happens More Often Than We'd Like

"Hello, again! It's me, Melda!"

E~ I am also here, don't forget me!

"Of course not, dear! Thanks for writing the chapter 2!"

Willy: I miss the rest of the cast.

Jack: I miss my rum. Rum! Rum! Wherefore ar' thou, Rum?

"You just misquoted Romeo and Juliet, ."

Jack: Naw, I 'ave i' on good authority tha's how tha' quote goes!

Willy: Who did you ask?

Jack: Er..I'm no' inclined to acquiese to yer request...

"This is just silly. Let's get the disclaimer overwith so that I can post this! I own nothing, I get no money from writing this and E~ is super-de-dooper awesomesauce on the ice cream of the world. Just thought I'd slip that in there... Anyway, on with the show!

Marie sat on the black leather couch with Vergie perched on her lap. She absently stroked his fuzzy head while lost in thought. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly time for the tour, where was Ellie? She'd left so suddenly and had acted so strangely..."You look worried." An indiiferent baritone rumbled in her ear.

She turned to face Snape. He was reclined slightly and was teasing Vergie by gently poking his feet. He was also noticably smirk-free. She forced a grin. "Worried? Why would I be worried? I'm not worried! I mean, Ellie just came in practically shouting at everyone and not in the way she usually does. Then she went kinda pale and ran out...why should I be worried?"

"You're rambling!" Hatter pointed out in a sing-song voice.

"Don't worry, love." Gimli patted her head soothingly. "She's fine. Incarnadine probably just tried to show her his robe collection." There was a collective shudder. Incarnadine was a notoriously flamboyant dresser with a wardrobe that, as Snape would say, would put Lockhart's to shame.

"I dunno.." She said uncertainly. She was going to say more, but was cut off by the appearance of said flamboyantly dressed monarch. "Speak of the devil and he shalt appear." She mumbled as he sauntered up to the small group.

"Is this really everyone? What happened to rest of you?" He asked with surprise. "Weren't there about ten more of you?"

"Boromir was busy with his fencing class." Aragorn explained. "He's teaching fencing to poor fangirls who have failed in proper swordmanship terminology. Pippin and Merry are with him and teaching a cooking class."

"How sweet!" Marie said.

Aragorn tried to smother a snicker, but failed. "They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They're on probation for larceny. Apparently, Farmer Maggot finally decided to press charges."

"L refused because he's working on processing the fact that he only has 23 days more to be a living character. Also, Hellboy's with Liz because she's having his Hellspawn. And most of the others can't come because they don't have EDGARs yet and there was no way we could ever get to most of them in an hour." Interjected Jareth.

"Why isn't Ellie here yet?" Legolas asked. "It's 11:59. She's very prompt."

As if on cue, Ellie burst through the door. She definitely looked a lot better than she had before. There was color in her cheeks and a strange light in her eyes. "Alright, everyone's here! So let's get going!"

They marched through the doors and into the Fanfiction Hall of Fame and Infamy. As soon as they walked in, the doors shut with a resounding boom behind them and they were left in almost utter darkness. Incarnadine whispered a word and the hall lit up brightly. It was indeed a Hall, well actually a hallway. Just a straight hallway with several doors leading off to the side. "This castle is more of a maze than my Labyrinth." Jareth commented. He and the others stared all around in obvious awe.

Incarnadine smiled proudly. "Just look at the walls! What do you see?"

Marie was the first to notice. "They're words!" Indeed. The walls had at first seemed to be wallpapered with horizontal stripes, but when closely scrutinized it became clear that lines of text decorated them.

"There are entire stories written on these walls, my dear." Incarnadine ran his hands over the wall. "Some of them are even about your friends. Come along, still so much to see!"

Meanwhile, Alex was in his tower working on Ellie's safebox. He had created it from a spare safe that he'd found gathering dust in a corner somewhere. He'd done away with the dial and replaced it with an EDGAR code scanner. Besides that, he had added a device which could connect to the Internet via Ellie's EDGAR.

However, he could only check to see if this would work by doing a run-through with his computer. His laptop was sadly out of commission at the moment. Wait a minute..."For a genius, I am an idiot." Alex muttered, then pressed the intercom button labelled 'Library'. "Jeremy, come up to the tower please. I need your help."

"Okay, just a minute. I'm helping Ozzy put away some books." Said Jeremy's static-laden voice.

Once the computer savvy technician was in the tower, Alex pointed to the problem. "Please get rid of the virus. It is getting in the way of my work."

Jeremy immediately picked it up and took a look. "It must be a real toughie if you're calling me for help, Alex." He ran a scan. "Whatchya workin' on, buddy?"

"Something for Ellie. She got promoted, you know." He informed the other man, his chest puffed up with pride. "The reason for her promotion is in this box." He patted the black suped-up safe and it sparked. "Huh..that's not supposed to happen." He shrugged it off. "Probably just static. How's that scan coming along?"

Jeremy smiled and showed him the screen. "Seriously, man? This virus was just a pathetic malware worm. Absolutely ancient and super easy to get rid of. I thought this was at least a Trojan or something."

Alex blushed. "Computers and I don't get along very well."

"Whatever." Jeremy rolled his eyes playfully. He sat the laptop atop the safe. "Go ahead and do what you need to do so that I can get back. I'm scheduled to pull a portal into the library within the next ten minutes."

Alex brought up the Internet page. "You know what would make this thing even safer?" He asked Jeremy excitedly. "If you could put a spell on it. Come on, Jerry. You've always been better at magic than me. Put a protection spell on that'll send whoever tries to break into it to Kingdom Come!"

"Erm, not sure about Kingdom Come, but it'll give the person a real shock." Jeremy rolled up his sleeves. "I was taught this one by an old Witch doctor in the wilds of Africa."

"You've never been outside of Maine, Jerry."

The techie gave a lopsided grin. "Yeah, but I was tryin' to act mysterious." He took a deep breath. "Here goes nothing! Alavibloom Rhysdaviesaroo bippido bopiddy diddly do culatur snorkaroo!" Teal bolts of liquid energy dripped from his fingers and spread over the surface of the safe.

The safe began to shake violently back and forth and emitted strange noises. The EDGAR code scanner beeped and booped as an alarming amount of smoke seeped from it. Several sparks jumped and snapped, one of them managed to catch Jeremy's pantsleg on fire. He yelped and grabbed Alex's glass of red wine to douse it.

"NOOO! Don't use the wine!" Alex begged.

"My leg is burning, I'm using the frickin' wine!" He dumped the entire glass over the tiny flame. He sighed in relief and examined his scorched clothes. "That is the last time I go along with one of your ideas."

"Never mind about that, just take a look at this!" Alex pointed at the melted Edgar scanner with dismay. "I spent an hour wiring that thing! That's a long time for me!"

"What about Ellie's promotion thingy?" Jeremy kicked the useless, smoking device off the safe. The door to the safe easily drifted open. The inside was empty!

"What. The. Hell?" Alex shouted. "Where did it go? Oh no, I can't have lost it! Poor Ellie! I'm so sorry, Ellie!"

"Get it together, man!" Jeremy shook his friend, trying to get him to calm down. Someone should have told him that shaking isn't the best way to calm a panicked person down. "Are you sure you didn't just forget to put the darn thing in?"

"No, I know that I put it in there." Alex bit his lip. That was when he caught sight of his computer. The cord that had linked it to the EDGAR scanner was charred, but the computer appeared unharmed. In fact, the Internet page was still up. "Wait, what's that?"

Another window had popped up. The topic bar read DOWNLOAD TO INTERNET COMPLETED. Lines and lines of Binary populated the window. Before their eyes, the window closed itself and the Internet window went blank. An error message replaced it.

Jeremy and Alex glanced at each other. "You don't think-?"

Alex nodded. "We're in deep shit."

"..and this is your section." King Incarnadine opened the door to the left. In the corner was a stuffed replica of the rabid Plot Bunny that had Legolas had taken down. In the middle of the room was a bronze statue of Marie, Aragorn, Legolas, Ellie, Jareth, Willy, Jack (bottle of rum in hand), Snape, and Hatter (teacup in hand).

"They made me look like Cyrano de Bergerac!" Snape growled dangerously.

"Nose? Nay, a peninsula!" Quipped Marie as she bounded into the room to explore further. "Better Cyrano de Bergerac than Pinnochio." She picked up a familiar device. "Hey, I remember this doo-dad. This helped you guys rescue me! Don't you use this anymore for other postpeople who get lost?"

"No, because other people have the sense to wear their uniform, Marie." Incarnadine tapped a glass box. "See this? It's a compilation of your adventures!"

"You've Got Fanmail?" Marie frowned. "What a weird thing to call a book. Wasn't that an episode of Victorious?"

Incarnadine sniffed, more than a little miffed. "I was the one that suggested the title."

Marie wasn't listening, though. She was grinning at a picture painted of her friends at the height of their adventures. "There's Morpheus!" A finger to her lip, she searched out others. "And there's Eddie!" She skipped over Edward Cullen as if his Sparkling Majesty didn't exist. "And there's Father Anderson..heehee, he's trying to throttle Alucard and Alucard is laughing..."

"That reminds me, how is the annullment going?" Snape turned to Ellie, who smirked.

She examined her nails. "Oh, that old chestnut. Done and over with, thank goodness. I had Father Anderson do it. He was happy to do it because it pissed Alucard off majorly."

"Piss!" Vergie parroted, cackling. "Shit! Co-" Marie covered his mouth.

"Not here, honey. There are sensitive ears. We are not in the mine, dearest." She picked him up and he pouted.

"Your son is a pain in the-"

"ASS! HEEEHEEEHEEE!" Dvergatal burst out laughing again and his mother had a hard time quieting him.

Gimli had the decency to look somewhat embarrassed. "We're trying to get him to say it onlyin the mine. There's no use in trying to keep it from him. Although, until he learns...this is going to be somewhat awkward. I apologize in advance."

"This is why children shouldn't learn curse words." Ellie sighed. "They have no filter."

"Neither does Marie." Snape reminded her. "He's probably worse because of that."

Marie ignored him and led the procession out of the room into the one across the hall. "What's this place?" There were three statues in the room. One was a girl in suspenders with a snaggle-tooth smile and pockmarked face, she was holding a pen and frozen in the act of writing viciously on a piece of paper.

"This is the room dedicated to three of the most terrible fanfiction authors EVER." Incarandine tapped the suspendered girl. "This is JoBekke."

"I've read that fanfic. She deserves to be served in a Sue Stew." Marie stuck out her tongue at the offending statue. She went to the next one and gasped. "PIgglieSquigglie35 is here too? No wonder. I've read Hunger Games High. It was...painful. I popped an eye vessal because of her."

"SlurtieflirtydupdieElf982341324358373748789438377 37 is here, too." Incarnadine frowned at the square-jawed, mannish girl clutching a truncheon. "When we brought her in for questioning related to her fanfiction activities, she put two of my employees in the hospital before accidentally knocking hereslf unconcious."

"How did she do that?"

"She saw a poster of you, Legolas, and thought it was the real thing. She ran full speed into the stone wall that it was taped on." Incarnadine ushered them back out of that room and was about to show them the next when they all heard frantic shouts coming from behind.

"What is going on?" The monarch demanded when he saw that it was only the resident Inspecter Gadget (Incarnadine had strange nicknames for his some of his favored employees) and Jeremy the techno-genius.

Alex and Jerry shared a glance, a silent conversation went on between them until they reached a mutual agreement. "Um..nothing. Can I borrow my sister for a while? It's urgent!"

Ellie walked back to the waiting room with them. "This had better be important. Did you spill your tea all over your worktable, again? I told you, it's easy to clean up. All you've got to do is take a washcloth and-"

He took up her hands. "No, no, no! That's not it at all!" Alex looked down, ashamed of himself. "I tried to help you out with protecting the Infamy List. I even designed a safe specifically for it with an EDGAR code scanner that was set to open only to your code. But..but, then I tried something stupid." He bit his lip and blinked. "I'm sorry, El, but I didn't think that was enough, so I asked Jerry to put a spell on it that would deter anyone else from coming near the thing."

"And?" She could feel a lump of fear rising in her throat. "What happened?"

"We were connected to the Internet to try and check the effectiveness of the security." Jeremy told her because Alex was overcome with guilt. "The spell somehow had an adverse effect on the safe and the mix of technology and magic must have caused the...accident."

"What accident? Just tell me in plain English what the heck is going on instead of trying to beat around the bush!"

"We think we managed to accidently download the Infamy List onto the Internet." Jeremy winced at her dumbfounded expression. "I'm sorry, Ellie. We were just trying to help-"

"I'm not mad." She took a deep breath. "I'm just..I don't know. You realize what this means, right? There are thousands of fangirls on that List, you two. Thousands. And now every single one of them has the means to erase their names from the List. They might not find it now or even tomorrow, but if even one of them finds out about this, then eventually they will ALL know. And they could possibly take their revenge."

Jeremy gulped. "Revenge?"

"Badfics will breed like evil plot bunnies. They will overcome the entirity of the good stories out there and there is the possibility that fanfiction as a practice might have to be shut down for the sake of the sanity of every fan." She pinched her nose. "And just when I thought things were going smoothly!"

"I'm really, really sorry, El." Alex was practically tearing up over the thought that he'd upset his sister.

"It's not your fault, Alex. It was an accident. Shit happens." She said, smiling weakly. "Well, I guess the only option left is to retrieve the List from the Internet."

"I'm not going to let you do it alone!" Ellie turned around to see Marie behind her, Vergie in tow, grinning like the madwoman she was. "I heard everything. Don't even think you're going to do this on your own, babydoll!" Ellie blanched and tried to protest, but Marie stopped her. "I already figured it out. That's what Incarnadine wanted to talk to you about, right? He wanted you to keep the List safe. I understand, it's okay. I won't tell."

Ellie let out a sigh of relief. "You know, I think that sometimes I underestimate you."

Marie only shrugged. "It's easy to do. Now, I think the others are almost done with the tour so we can tell them in a few minutes once the boss is gone on his way." She put a hand on her friend's shoulder. "Don't worry, we can get the List back before anything goes wrong."

Now Alex really did start to sniffle. "You two are just so adorable!" He announced, embracing them both in a crushing hug. "I believe we can do it!"

"We've saved the Cannon-verse before, we can do it again!" Marie assured them all. "Besides, how hard can a trip through the Web be, anyway?"

If you're looking for famous last words, those would be IT.