Chapter Four: A
Inside Galadriel’s Mirror, three teenaged girls sat
side by side. All six eyes were fixed on
a small TV set. On the screen, Gandalf
said, “I was…delayed.”
“Now we get to find out just how twisted Gandalf’s
personality is,” Anagorn said bitterly.
“Oh, cheer up,” Katholas said. “Maybe he survived intact.”
“Or maybe not,” Camli responded, pointing to the
screen.
Gandalf slowly stood to his feet on the roof of
Orthanc. “Where’s my laptop?” he
muttered.
“Gandalf has a laptop?”
Camli echoed.
“How am I supposed to get down from here without my
equipment?” Gandalf asked himself.
Suddenly, he reached into a large pocket on his robe and pulled out…a
small laptop! “A-ha!” Then, of course, it began to rain. Quickly, Gandalf scurried into a corner and
hunched over his computer, protecting it from the rain. Then, he began to type.
Suddenly, Saruman appeared on the rooftop. “We mutht join Thauron, Gandalf,” he lisped.
Utter silence snapped onto the Mirror. Three jaws dropped in shock.
“There ith no other way,” Saruman added.
Simultaneously, the three girls watching from the
mirror recovered from their shock – and dissolved into helpless laughter.
“I-I-I’m Tharoman!” Katholas cried through her giggles.
“I am the white withard of Ithenguard!” added
Anagorn, imitating Saruman’s lisp perfectly.
“Uhm… girls?” Camli said, suddenly
laughing even harder than before. “You
might…want to…see this.”
Rather than using his staff to fling Gandalf around
the roof, Saruman had whipped out a small, and predictably white, laptop of his
own.
“I can out-program you!” Gandalf cried.
“Not while I hold the power of the white laptop!”
Saruman cried in return.
In exact unison, the two
wizards-turned-computer-geeks began typing furiously.
“Ha!” Gandalf said.
“I’ve blocked your access to all of Orthanc’s computers!”
“Ha yourthelf,” Saruman retorted. “I’ve jutht re-ethtablished contact with my
therverth!”
“Double ha!”
Gandalf was quick to respond.
“I’ve re-programmed the weather so it’s stopped raining!”
Sure enough, no rain now fell against the roof.
“And,” Gandalf went on, “I’ve told all your
orcs to stop ripping up the trees!”
Another moment of furious typing and counter-typing
followed.
“Triple ha!”
To the girl’s dismay, it was Saruman who spoke. “My orcth are back to their jobth, the rain
ith coming back, and…” He waited, seeming to enjoy the
suspense. “…I’ve jutht fixed
fanfiction-dot-net’s hardware problemth!
I have won, Gandalf.”
Gandalf typed a few more commands into his laptop,
then stood and replaced the computer in its pocket. “There is only one Lord of the Ring,
Saruman. And he does not share passwords!” With that, the gray wizard ran and leapt off
the roof’s edge, landing easily on the back of the eagle he had just summoned
via email.
“Tho,” Saruman intoned, “you have chothen…death.”
The scene changed yet again.
“Gandalf?” Frodo asked.
“Look at his staff!” Katholas exclaimed.
Rather than his usual wooden staff, Gandalf now held
a thin, gray pole capped with an oblong…something. The three girls studied the top of the staff
for several moments. Its identity
occurred to them all at the same moment.
“It’s a
computer mouse!”
“Well, it fits,” Anagorn muttered.
Just then, a voice floated over from the TV set. “Mista’ Frodo! Mista’ Frodo!”
“That doesn’t sound like Sam…” Anagorn muttered.
Six eyes returned to the screen.
“That doesn’t look like Sam,” Katholas added.
“Well, then, Miss Sherlock Holmes, deductive logic
would dictate that that isn’t Sam! Duh!” Camli said
with no little bit of sarcasm.
She was promptly smacked – from both sides.
“Cheeze it, Frodo! You’se awake!” said Not-Sam in a
thick
Elrond cleared up all mystery once and for all. “Racetrack has hardly left your side.”
“I was dat worried ‘bout ya, Frodo!” Racetrack
exclaimed. “’Sides, we was takin’ bets
on when you was finally gonna wake up. I
won, too!”
“What is Racetrack doing in Middle Aerth?” Katholas
asked rhetorically.
“Probably the same thing Tom Cruise is,” Anagorn replied. “Throwing a monkey wrench
into the story.”
On the screen, Racetrack flung a monkey wrench over
the edge of the balcony.
The three girls blinked in shock.
“Help,” Katholas muttered.
Then, Elrond appeared on the screen. “Welcome to Rivendell, Frodo Ins.”
Frodo and Gandalf both shot Elrond very confused
looks. So did the three girls on the
other side of the screen.
“Well, we certainly can’t call you Baggins, since
you haven’t got a bag,” Elrond explained, humor twinkling in his eyes. “Get it?”
Frodo shook his head.
Elrond sighed.
Anagorn, Katholas, and Camli smacked their foreheads
with their palms.
“He’s a comedian,” Anagorn muttered in disgust.
“A bad
comedian,” Camli added.
“Well, it could be worse,” Katholas said.
“How?” Camli asked.
Katholas smiled.
“He could have been in the Fellowship.
Now, at least, we only have to endure it during the Council.”
The
shot changed yet again – to Frodo and Sam out on the balcony of Rivendell.
“Well…”
Anagorn commented, “We have a while ‘til our next scene. Any bright ideas on how to
kill time?”
Silence
reigned in the Mirror.
“These
Enchanted Backpacks seem about as messed up as the rest of this movie,” Camli
said thoughtfully. “I wonder what else
we could pull out of there?”
“Let’s
try it!” Katholas exclaimed.
“But
what if we pull out something we’ll need later?” Anagorn asked worriedly.
“Anne,”
Camli put in, “the Backpacks don’t work.
Let’s just have some fun before we die, ok?”
“DIE?”
Anagorn exclaimed. “I am perfectly
capable of taking care of myself, thank -”
Before
Anagorn could say another word in protest, Camli stuck her hand into her red
Backpack. “Here we go,” she said. A moment later, she pulled out a white
rabbit.
“I
thought those always came out of hats,” Anagorn commented.
“I
was running late, and this was as close as I could get,” the rabbit replied
tartly. “Good day.” With that, the rabbit ran from the Mirror –
though none of the girls could figure out how, as the Mirror had no exits.
“Uhm…girls?” Katholas had turned her face back to the screen.
The
scene changed.
Again, a disclaimer: First of all, I do not own Sherlock
Holmes. I don’t actually know who does,
either… I, again, do not own Tom Cruise.
I also do not own Racetrack, nor do I own the movie Newsies,
which is where Racetrack is from. Disney
owns both of them. The white rabbit, the
laptops, Gandalf’s staff, the monkey wrench, and all other totally random
moments are mine.
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