Chapter Eight: The Usefulness - and Lack Thereof - of Enchanted
Backpacks
Dedication:
This chapter is dedicated to SapphireRose
(aka Ellie), for her parodies, feedback, faithful reviews, and
contributions. This seemed an
appropriate chapter to dedicate to you…you should recognize a few things in it!
=o)
The three girls looked around furtively, to see if anybody was
watching them. Nobody was. Pippin and Merry were taking turns standing
and throwing rocks into the water, Gandalf was typing away on his laptop,
apparently attempting to hack into Moria’s computer network, Frodo kept
coughing experimentally, Boromir was staring blankly at the door, and Sam kept
pouring out his heart to Bill the Pony, complaining that nobody else in the
Fellowship “understands me the way you do, Bill.” Bill the Pony, meanwhile, was looking for
grass.
Camli was beginning to believe that somebody had spiked Sam’s
popcorn, too.
Since nobody was paying them any attention, Anagorn plunged her
hand into the Enchanted Backpack. Katholas
and Camli held their breath, waiting.
She pulled out a spray can.
“Again?”
Anagorn asked, staring at the can.
“Wait…that’s not spray paint,” Camli said, examining the can. “It’s hair dye.”
The three girls froze.
“It’s black spray hair dye! AAAAAAAAAAA!” They
screamed.
“Get rid of it! It’s
evil!”* Katholas cried.
Camli grabbed the offending can and thrust it into Pippin’s
hand. The hobbit obligingly flung the
can into the water after his rock.
All three girls breathed sighs of relief.
“That was close,” Anagorn said.
Suddenly, Frodo spoke up.
“What’s the elvish word for “friend”?”
Gandalf ran a translation program through his laptop.
Katholas whispered, “Why doesn’t he just ask the elf in the
group?”
“Because you just aren’t special enough,” Camli retorted
teasingly.
That earned her a smack on the shoulder.
“Mellon,” Gandalf
intoned, having finished his translation program.
The doors groaned open.
The girls stepped inside hesitantly, nervous over what they would
find inside the mines of Moria. As it
turned out, the mines had not been tampered with. There were still skeletons all over the
floor.
“Soon, Madam Elf,” Camli said, “you will enjoy the fabled
hospitality of the dwarves! Roaring
fires, malt beer, red meat off the bone!” Suddenly, she stopped. “What am I saying? I’m a vegetarian!”
“It’s all right, Camli,” Anagorn reassured her. “We all have to say dumb lines.”
“Anyways, this is my cousin Balin’s home. And they call it a mine. A mine!” Lowering her voice, Camli muttered, “I never
have understood that line…”
“This is no mine. This is a
tomb,” Boromir stated. “THIS is a
tomb. This IS a tomb. This is A tomb. This is a TOMB. This is a too-ooo-ooo-mb...”
Since Boromir showed no signs of stopping his quest for the
perfect way to say the line, Anagorn took over.
“Get out! Get out!”
“Oh…dear…” Katholas murmured, realizing what was about to happen.
The Watcher in the Water attacked.
A moment later, Frodo was being waved in the air.
Nobody had to think. Three
hands plunged into three Enchanted Backpacks.
From the red pack came an onion ring, from the purple a pineapple,
and from the green a video marked “TTT.”
Then came the three explanations.
“Foxtrot cartoon.”
“Random reviewers.”
“Two
Towers.”
Frodo screamed.
All three girls threw their objects into the lake and dug back
into their Backpacks. Anagorn whipped
out a camera.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, remembering Weathertop. “Hey, say cheese!” she called to the Watcher.
Much to everybody’s surprise, the Watcher struck a pose.
Anagorn snapped a picture.
The Watcher struck another pose…and dropped Frodo.
Anagorn took another picture.
“That’s good…turn slightly…”
The Watcher obeyed.
Camli grabbed Frodo, Katholas grabbed everybody else, and the
Fellowship retreated into Moria.
“Work it…work it…” Anagorn snapped one
final picture, turned, and sprinted into the mines.
The Watcher chased after her and tore down the doors, clearly
enraged now.
A light flickered on in the darkness. Everybody looked up to see Gandalf screwing a
new light bulb into the tip of his staff.
“We must now face the long dark of Moria. Be on your guard. There are older and fouler things than no internet
in the deep places of the world.”
Anagorn dug into her Backpack again, looking for a torch. She pulled out a lightsaber. “That works,” she commented, switching it on.
Suddenly, the adrenaline of the Watcher’s attack wore off, and
Anagorn’s brain kicked into high gear.
“Katholas, tell me I’m wrong.
Just…tell me I’m wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
“Wrong about what I threw into the lake of the Watcher.”
Katholas gasped. “You
didn’t! I thought you hung on to it!”
“No.” Anagorn smacked
herself in the forehead. “I just threw a
copy of
“It’s all right, Anagorn,” Katholas reassured her. “We all make mistakes. We’ll see it soon…”
“That doesn’t help any,” Anagorn retorted.
Before the girls could further lament the loss of the movie they
had been waiting for ever since they saw Fellowship
for the first time, they found themselves seated on a rock.
“Are we lost?” Merry
sounded decidedly terrified.
“We’re lost,” Sam agreed sullenly.
“We’re not lost,” Frodo argued.
“Though my head is feeling decidedly sore…”
“I think we’re lost,” Merry whispered, trying to crawl under a
rock.
“Sh!” Pippin said.
“Gandalf’s thinking about which way to go ‘cause
he can’t remember which way it is, except he’s not thinking about it anymore
‘cause now Frodo’s asking him about something, and do you have any pipeweed,
Merry?”
The three girls turned away from the hobbits. “Why aren’t we in the Mirror?” Camli
asked. “We don’t do anything during this
long discussion between Gandalf and Frodo.”
“But we technically are in the scene,” Anagorn said dully. Clearly, she was still kicking herself for
having literally thrown away the opportunity to see
“Come on, Anagorn,” Katholas said, in an attempt to cheer her
friend up, “let’s see what else is in these Backpacks.”
Obligingly, Anagorn stuck a hand into her green pack and hauled
out a plastic figurine of Gimli the Dwarf, axe slung over one shoulder. “It’s a LotR action figure…”
Camli was right behind her friend.
“A candy bar?”
Then, she began giggling. “It’s
one of those nasty, half-peppermint, half-pure-sugar candy bars!” A wicked smirk spread across her face. ‘Oh, Pippin!”
“Don’t! Please!” Katholas
begged.
It was too late. Pippin had
bounced over to Camli and, on seeing the food, grabbed it and stuffed the entire
candy bar into his mouth. A moment
later, the hobbit was literally bouncing off the walls – he was running at full
speed around the cavern, simply allowing his collisions with solid objects such
as rock walls to redirect his crazy motion.
Camli shook her head and laughed.
“What’s that?” Boromir had noticed the three in tight conference.
“They’re Enchanted Backpacks,” Camli replied without thinking.
“What do they do?”
A mischievous gleam appeared in Katholas’ eye. “You pull random objects out of them,” she
informed him, a bit too innocently.
“May I try?”
Camli was about to say “no,” but Katholas held out her purple pack
to Boromir. “Go ahead.” She grinned at the others. She was eager to see what he would find in
the Backpack.
Boromir reached in and pulled out a stapled booklet of five sheets
of paper. Across the top of the first
page were the words, “Final Exam.”
Boromir drew himself up to his full height as if he were about to make
some weighty statement. “This is only a
test.”
The Man of Gondor could not understand when all three girls began
laughing so hard that Anagorn fell off the rock she was sitting on.
As Anagorn fell, she knocked her green Backpack off its
perch. When the pack hit the ground, the
catch holding it closed slipped open, and a multicolored coat fell out.
A moment later, the music started.
“How he loved his coat of
many colors…it was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and
ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and…”
All the girls began looking around them for the source of the
music.
“…cream
and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and
purple and white and pink and orange and BLUE!”
The music finally ended, just in time for the girls to hear
Gandalf say, “Oh! It’s that way!”
A moment later, Camli looked over and saw a familiar-looking room
with a beam of light landing squarely on a white casket. More
missing footage, she realized.
“No!” Jogging into the
burial room, Camli knelt beside the burial place of Balin and began to feign
tears.
Katholas came up behind her.
“You’re not crying,” the elf-girl whispered.
“Oh, hush!” Camli snapped softly as she dropped her helmet-clad
head onto the stone edge of the casket.
Gandalf scanned the pages from the Dwarven records into his laptop
with a – predictably – grey scanner that he pulled from his robes and began
reading the translation he found there.
“We cannot get out….they are coming.”
Pippin, who had been running circles around the group, ran over to
the well, which had a skeleton perched precariously atop the edge.
The three girls spoke with one voice. “Oh, no…”
Sure enough, Pippin bumped the skeleton, which proceeded to fall
down the well, sending echoes through the mines.
Orc drums resonated through the room.
Three girls swallowed hard, sent up a prayer, and leapt into
action.
Boromir pulled the doors closed.
“They have a cave troll!”
“I love that line!”
Katholas commented as she tossed several long poles to Boromir and
Anagorn, who quickly barred the doors.
“Let them come!” Camli
leapt atop the casket and brandished her fork, feeling like an idiot. “There is one dwarf in Moria who still draws
breath!” Well…sort of…
Mere seconds later, orcs burst through the doors.
Anagorn had but time for one comment. “Oh, UGLY!”
Then, battle was joined.
Gandalf began typing one-handed, wielding Glamdring with the
other. One by one, the orcs around him
began to vanish into thin air. Merry was
cowering in a corner, but Pippin seemed to be thoroughly enjoying his battle,
swinging wildly at anything that looked remotely orcish. He had to apologize for nearly decapitating
Sam at one point. Anagorn, Katholas, and
Camli were far too busy ducking and reaching for the Enchanted Backpacks to
notice where Boromir, Frodo, and Sam had gotten to.
Then, the cave troll burst in, and the mayhem got worse.
The next thing the girls knew, they were standing in front of the
Lady Galadriel in Lothlórien.
“What happened to the rest of Moria?” Katholas asked.
Galadriel intoned, “Sleep now and rest…”
And then the girls were back in the midst of the battle with the
cave troll.
All three of them shook their heads, trying to clear their minds,
and reached into their Backpacks.
Anagorn pulled out a mushroom.
A moment later, Pippin appeared by her side, snatched the mushroom from
her hands, neatly dispatched the half-dozen or so orcs in the near vicinity,
and popped away again.
Camli retrieved a scrunchie.
Shrugging, she pulled it back like a rubber band and shot it at an
orc. The orc fell and did not rise
again.
Katholas felt her hands brush fur.
She pulled out a large, headless stuffed animal. “The Goat!” she cried, remembering the music
that had been played a moment before.
Then, a highly random idea struck her.
“Camli!” she cried. “Give me a
C!”
Camli immediately understood her friend’s idea. Reaching into her Enchanted Backpack and
praying, she pulled out a pitch pipe.
“That’s the first time this thing has worked correctly all movie!” she
yelled in relief. Then, she sounded
middle C on the pipe.
Katholas readied her stance, took a deep breath, and, using all
the power she could muster, sang out a high C – two octaves higher than the
note Camli had played. The note was loud
and piercing enough to make everybody in the room wince – even Camli, who was a
first soprano herself and used to such notes.
The cave troll, however, began staggering and roaring. Then, it collapsed.
Katholas felt like cheering.
Then, she remembered something. Frodo and Anagorn.
Sure enough, Anagorn was crawling across the floor toward an unconscious
Frodo.
Frodo gasped and sat up.
Anagorn glanced back at the others. “You see?
There is a God.”
Before any of the others could respond, orc drums sounded once
more.
Gandalf glanced down at his printout from Moria_Map.com and cried
out, “To the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm!”
The three girls took deep breaths and ran off. This was far from over.
*If you have ever been
involved with a theatre production in which you had to use theatre-grade
spray-in hair dye, you will understand why it is evil. If you are blessed enough to have never had
contact with the stuff, consider yourself to be blessed indeed. It gets everywhere! I figured I should explain why Katholas
called something as seemingly innocent as hair dye evil. She had her reasons.
Notes, notes, and more
notes! – First, the obligatory
disclaimers. The onion ring was inspired
by the Foxtrot cartoon, “Lord of the Onion Rings.” I don’t own Foxtrot, but I like the comic! The pineapple was inspired by Figure
and Elven Princess, who put it in their reviews. Thank you for the randomness!!! Two Towers, obviously, belongs to New
Line Cinema, who, coincidentally, also own the movie I
am currently destroying in this fic.
Don’t fear, New Line! I’ll return
it when I’m done. The Technicolor
Dreamcoat, and the song about it, are from the musical Joseph and the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, as is the goat. They belong to Andrew Lloyd Webber and
whoever else officially owns his stuff.
I stole all of the above…please don’t sue me for taking it!
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