Post by The Pilot on Sept 14, 2007 12:29:37 GMT -5
Both ancient elf and uncouth lass alike took several steps back from the bear, now thought to be anything but a bear at all. They still had their weapons at ready, their stances defensive, ready to strike. But the bear, now towering over them on his haunches, closed his mouth and did not come any closer.
“Get behind me,” Narthas hissed.
“What?”
“Get behind me!” he commanded again, looking at her this time. When he turned back to the bear, an “Oh, shit!” escaped him. The elf dashed in front of Lauren. With eyes as wide as dinner plates and breaths as short and quick as haikus, they watched the bear change.
A seam somewhere in its chest opened up, revealing an extremely complicated infrastructure of mechanical pieces. Its hind legs both split down the middle, and a mechanical mass from inside them shot downward, extending the legs even further, and giving it bipedal robotic feet. The bear’s head folded back and another seam in the chest opened. Pieces moved and folded away, and eventually, a second head emerged to sit atop a pair of shoulders. The bear’s forearms shifted up and allowed an extension of the arms, from which articulating hands assembled. Another moment passed, and the transformation was complete.
Lauren swallowed, thinking of something to say. She willed her breathing to slow down as she stepped out from behind Narthas to whisper in his ear: “If this is a bad guy, we’re dead.”
The elf said nothing, but she saw him nod slowly. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face.
The girl took another extremely cautious step toward the giant robot. “A-are you a Predacon, or a Maximal?” She didn’t think that he would have been an Autobot or Decepticon because of his bear form. This is Beast Wars they were talkin’, right?
To her astonishment, a laugh welled up within the robotic invader. A moment later and he kneeled down in an attempt to be more at their level. He was of course, nearing twenty feet tall. “Sorry,” he said. “Wrong generation of Transformers.”
An anxious and almost painful smile crossed Lauren’s face at his answer, which was soon enough followed by a relived laugh of her own. “Oh, fuck!” she said. “You scared the shit out of us, you know that?”
“Sorry… but it’s not like there are any vehicles I could scan around here.”
Narthas stepped up next to Lauren and sheathed his sword. “All right,” he said sternly. “Who are you, and why in the pits of Mordor are you in Middle-earth?”
The Autobot fan looked at the elf with his glowing blue eyes. “Name’s Gasket,” he said, introducing himself. His voice was deepish, though unnaturally so; it was as if he still had his human voice, but due to his new size, the sound was forced to adopt another pitch. “I’m a human-turned-Autobot. You guys are fans, right?”
“I am,” Lauren said, pointing to herself, then gestured to her friend. “He isn’t.”
“Oh crap. The others aren’t going to be happy that I revealed myself to a resident.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Narthas said. “What ‘others’ are you talking about?”
The Transformers fan stood up again, pointing away east. “I came with two other Autobots, and we landed last night. Unfortunately, I’m the only fan among them.”
“Can we communicate with them? Do they know Westron? Wait... how do you know Westron?” Lauren’s brows knitted together in confusion as she looked up at him, and then she turned to Narthas. “Wait, this IS Westron that we’re speaking, isn’t it?
The elf shook his head in dismissal. “No, this is English. But I’ll explain later.”
The Autobot chuckled. “No, we know English. Well, the fans did by default, and because all of the information we had in our old brains were transferred to computer chips, we were able to share that lingual information with them and the rest of the bots learned it too.”
“Okay, but why are you guys here?”
“Mithril.”
“Mithril?” Lauren said, astounded. “Light as a feather, yet hard as dragon scales?” She was quoting Bilbo.
“Unfortunately, there are more uses for it than just making armor.” Gasket crouched down again. “We’re facing more baddies than we know how to deal with anymore. Decepticons are now allied with the Sith. Their agendas are nearly one and the same: to manufacture armies of droid-like Transformers, using the Mithril to fabricate crude and unnatural Sparks to bring these droids to life. Vampires and evil mutants have joined the bandwagon too, having been promised riches and lives of luxury if they would serve the forces of evil.”
Lauren sighed in frustration. “Ain’t that how it always goes.” Then she turned to her elf friend. “What do you think Narthas? Did you know about any of this?”
He searched the ground for a moment with his eyes before clearing his throat. “I… I knew about the Mithril operation.”
The girl whirled around and stared him down. “You were in on their plans for universal domination?!”
“Oh, come on, Lauren! You know me better than that!” He was seriously offended.
“Then how the hell do you know about the Mithril?”
The elf sighed in defeat. “My contact in Gondor,” he began. “He’s from Coruscant. He’s been here for the past few years studying the Mithril because word was that Sith were showing considerable interest in it. I haven’t seen him since last fall, though. We have to tell him what’s going on.”
“You have a contact here?” Gasket asked eagerly.
Narthas ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah.”
The giant robot stood up again. “You guys have to come with me then. You have to tell Hound and Airlock everything you just told me.”
The human and the elf looked at each other, knowing that they had to go with him. “What about our horses?” She asked Narthas. “Our stuff?”
He looked behind them out past the edge of the forest and onto the plains of Rohan. Then he turned back to look at Lauren and Gasket. “They’ll find us.” The girl suddenly remembered Moria, and their run-in with the orcs, and knew he was right.
“Kay. Take us to them.”
Gasket nodded. “Alright, get on my back.” He crouched down low, and the two companions clung to the fur around his shoulders, holding on to any bit of protruding machinery they could find. “Ready?”
“Go.”
“We need to take the cover of the forest,” the Autobot said. And with that, he broke into a jog. They sped through the trees at a good pace, and a low, rumbling thud resonated through the trees and shook Lauren’s stomach with every heavy footfall.
“You know,” Narthas said. “Never in all the thousands of years I’ve been alive did I ever imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that I would be doing something as crazy as this.”
“I wanna be a robot…” came the sad reply.
“Well, if you get kicked out of Middle-earth, who knows. Maybe you’ll be able to go to wherever this guy’s from instead.”
She fell silent for a second, feeling the boom of every of the robot’s footsteps, listening carefully to the machinery at work in his metallic body. “I don’t wanna leave you, though. You’re my main dude.”
Narthas laughed. “We’ll see how this whole thing turns out. If we’re not so lucky, you might not have a choice.”
They went on for a bit longer, gradually nearing closer to the foot of the mountains. When the land became much less flat than it was, Gasket slowed down, carefully maneuvering around old trees and huge rocks. Then, he stopped. He crouched down low again, a cue for the two of them to get off, and he rose up once more. Lauren stretched and cracked her neck. “Uh, where are they?”
Gasket motioned for them to follow. He trod through the fingers of the mountain, up a wide canyon, and to the mouth of a cave. “Hound! Airlock!” he called inside. “I’ve found some people that may help us.”
The three of them stepped back when some mechanical noises were heard from inside, followed by a voice: “Good work, Gasket!” Two bots emerged from the shadow of the cave. One was about Gasket’s size, and the other was slightly smaller. She noticed right off the bat that, even though they were in their humanoid form, neither of them wore any traces of another form, either vehicle or animal. They just looked like a pair of robots that might have been dug up near some ancient ruins.
Aside from that small trace of logical thinking though, her brain had turned to mush. She couldn’t blink, or close her mouth, or slow her breathing. The situation she had found herself in was so cool that she might’ve passed out, had she been fainter of heart.
“Hi there, humans!” One of them said. He sat down low, just as Gasket did, when talking to them. “I’m Hound, and this is Airlock.”
“I’m Lauren, and this is Narthas. He’s not a human, actually. He’s an elf.”
Hound rubbed his “chin” with a four-fingered articulating hand. “Well, he looks human to me. What’s the difference?”
“Well,” Narthas said, stepping forward. “Elves are immortal. At least, we are in theory…”
“They have pointy ears too,” the girl pointed out.
“Haha, all right. Narthas, and Lauren.” He stood up again.
Lauren looked up at them towering over her and shielded her eyes from the sun. “Can I ask you guys a question?”
“Shoot,” said Airlock.
“Why is Gasket the only one to have taken a form? How come you’ve still got that ‘fresh-out-of-Cybertron’ look going on?”
“Well. You see,” answered Airlock. “That’s because we are fresh out of Cybertron. We can still transform, too, but only into the vehicles that we are on our home planet as well. We sent Gasket here to look for some fans, figuring that he’d be the best candidate being a fan and all himself. We didn’t think it’d be too smart for the three of us to go parading around your world. That would be far too conspicuous.” The three bots nodded in agreement.
“They sent me to go find someone, but I couldn’t go walking around Middle-earth as a giant alien robot, or a as an alien vehicle, so I scanned the first thing I saw: a bear. But let’s get down to business,” Gasket said, turning to his fellows. “The elf says he knows about the Mithril operation.”
Hound gestured to Narthas. “Well, let’s hear it! What can you tell us?”
The elf cleared his throat and miraculously kept his composure. “About four years ago, I met a young man by the name of Alt Fen while visiting some friends in Gondor. For a little while he maintained that he was a Tolkien fan, but eventually I came to the conclusion that he was from somewhere else. And, after confronting him about my suspicion, he revealed that he was indeed a foreign fan. Said he came here looking for someone, so I said I would help him try to find this person if they were here. And so, with my help, he managed to open an underground club in Minas Tirith for Tolkien fans, and I guess Elves too since they know about the whole afterlife situation… but anyways. He opened that up. However. It’s just a front. The actual club itself it only about a third of the actual underground setup he has going on. The rest is dedicated to various technological equipment he has… storage, a small lab area, and a more recent arms room.
“The original idea behind the club was to have a sort of home base so he could look for whoever that he was looking for (he never told me) but as it later became apparent that Middle-earth was becoming a point of interest for bad guys from his fandom, he abandoned his search and instead built it up to do more detective work.
“Now because I travel all over, Fen had me be his eyes and ears since he wasn’t used to this world and was afraid of blowing his cover. He knew about my portal—“
“Wait, wait,” Hound interrupted. “You’ve got a rift open?”
Narthas waved his hand in dismissal. “You wouldn’t be able to find it even if you were looking.”
“You do know that for every tear through this planet’s spacetime there is, the easier it is to make more, right?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. But wait a second… how did you get here?”
“We flew in,” Gasket said. “Last night, remember?”
Lauren suddenly grabbed Narthas’ shoulders and shook him. “That’s what I saw last night! They are the three meteorites I saw!”
The elf slapped himself on the forehead. “Of course! Wait. You said you saw something else too.”
The girl let go of her counterpart and turned back to the Autobots, who had now taken to sitting down. “There was a fourth something with you. Who was that?”
“There was a fourth?” Gasket asked Hound.
“Not that I know of,” he said, thinking. “Prime just sent us three to investigate. What’d it look like?”
“Looked like a plane, or a ship or something.”
Hound shook his head. “I don’t much like that sound of that. I think we were followed here.”
“By who?” Lauren followed their example and took a seat on the ground too.
“Well, could be any number of baddies. Couldda been a follower of Megatron in his vehicle form. It couldda been a Sith cohort. It couldda been a vampire and a Sith cohort. Riding inside of a Decepticon in his vehicle form. If he’s not here with us right now, he was definitely spying.”
“All right,” Narthas sighed. “Now we’ve got that to contend with too.”
“Sorry for interrupting you there,” Hound said, ushering the elf to continue his story.
“Oh, right. Where was I…”
“The rift,” Airlock said.
“Right! The rift. So. Fen knew about the existence of my portal. He told me to keep it open for the sole sake of it being a backdoor means of escape. Because at this point in time, Earth is untouchable by anyone from a different world, planet, universe, whatever. But, that would be our last hope. But other than that, my portal doesn’t mean too much.
“Uhm… oh! About the Mithril now. Fen and I started to notice some things out of place. Strange shadows, that sort of thing. In my travels I’d also see strange markings on the ground in forest clearings, or sheltered gulches on the plains, too. It was shortly after all of this that it became apparent that Middle-earth was receiving regular visitations from fans and natives of other worlds. Fen and I had to remain on the down-low, though. We didn’t want DERIF sniffing around the underground compound, and as far as I know, they still know nothing of it.
“That’s all I can tell you for now, because that’s all I know. I don’t even think Fen is aware of the Sith’s alliance with the Decepticons or other fans. Whatever we do, though, it MUST remain covert, or Middle-earth is screwed.”
“I agree with Narthas,” Hound said. “If war is what they want, then it’s going to be a secret war if we can help it.”
“I think the first step toward it being secret, however, is to get you guys in costume. Is there anything you can scan to hide yourselves?”
“Of course,” laughed Hound. “They don’t call us robots in disguise for nothing!”
“Get behind me,” Narthas hissed.
“What?”
“Get behind me!” he commanded again, looking at her this time. When he turned back to the bear, an “Oh, shit!” escaped him. The elf dashed in front of Lauren. With eyes as wide as dinner plates and breaths as short and quick as haikus, they watched the bear change.
A seam somewhere in its chest opened up, revealing an extremely complicated infrastructure of mechanical pieces. Its hind legs both split down the middle, and a mechanical mass from inside them shot downward, extending the legs even further, and giving it bipedal robotic feet. The bear’s head folded back and another seam in the chest opened. Pieces moved and folded away, and eventually, a second head emerged to sit atop a pair of shoulders. The bear’s forearms shifted up and allowed an extension of the arms, from which articulating hands assembled. Another moment passed, and the transformation was complete.
Lauren swallowed, thinking of something to say. She willed her breathing to slow down as she stepped out from behind Narthas to whisper in his ear: “If this is a bad guy, we’re dead.”
The elf said nothing, but she saw him nod slowly. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face.
The girl took another extremely cautious step toward the giant robot. “A-are you a Predacon, or a Maximal?” She didn’t think that he would have been an Autobot or Decepticon because of his bear form. This is Beast Wars they were talkin’, right?
To her astonishment, a laugh welled up within the robotic invader. A moment later and he kneeled down in an attempt to be more at their level. He was of course, nearing twenty feet tall. “Sorry,” he said. “Wrong generation of Transformers.”
An anxious and almost painful smile crossed Lauren’s face at his answer, which was soon enough followed by a relived laugh of her own. “Oh, fuck!” she said. “You scared the shit out of us, you know that?”
“Sorry… but it’s not like there are any vehicles I could scan around here.”
Narthas stepped up next to Lauren and sheathed his sword. “All right,” he said sternly. “Who are you, and why in the pits of Mordor are you in Middle-earth?”
The Autobot fan looked at the elf with his glowing blue eyes. “Name’s Gasket,” he said, introducing himself. His voice was deepish, though unnaturally so; it was as if he still had his human voice, but due to his new size, the sound was forced to adopt another pitch. “I’m a human-turned-Autobot. You guys are fans, right?”
“I am,” Lauren said, pointing to herself, then gestured to her friend. “He isn’t.”
“Oh crap. The others aren’t going to be happy that I revealed myself to a resident.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Narthas said. “What ‘others’ are you talking about?”
The Transformers fan stood up again, pointing away east. “I came with two other Autobots, and we landed last night. Unfortunately, I’m the only fan among them.”
“Can we communicate with them? Do they know Westron? Wait... how do you know Westron?” Lauren’s brows knitted together in confusion as she looked up at him, and then she turned to Narthas. “Wait, this IS Westron that we’re speaking, isn’t it?
The elf shook his head in dismissal. “No, this is English. But I’ll explain later.”
The Autobot chuckled. “No, we know English. Well, the fans did by default, and because all of the information we had in our old brains were transferred to computer chips, we were able to share that lingual information with them and the rest of the bots learned it too.”
“Okay, but why are you guys here?”
“Mithril.”
“Mithril?” Lauren said, astounded. “Light as a feather, yet hard as dragon scales?” She was quoting Bilbo.
“Unfortunately, there are more uses for it than just making armor.” Gasket crouched down again. “We’re facing more baddies than we know how to deal with anymore. Decepticons are now allied with the Sith. Their agendas are nearly one and the same: to manufacture armies of droid-like Transformers, using the Mithril to fabricate crude and unnatural Sparks to bring these droids to life. Vampires and evil mutants have joined the bandwagon too, having been promised riches and lives of luxury if they would serve the forces of evil.”
Lauren sighed in frustration. “Ain’t that how it always goes.” Then she turned to her elf friend. “What do you think Narthas? Did you know about any of this?”
He searched the ground for a moment with his eyes before clearing his throat. “I… I knew about the Mithril operation.”
The girl whirled around and stared him down. “You were in on their plans for universal domination?!”
“Oh, come on, Lauren! You know me better than that!” He was seriously offended.
“Then how the hell do you know about the Mithril?”
The elf sighed in defeat. “My contact in Gondor,” he began. “He’s from Coruscant. He’s been here for the past few years studying the Mithril because word was that Sith were showing considerable interest in it. I haven’t seen him since last fall, though. We have to tell him what’s going on.”
“You have a contact here?” Gasket asked eagerly.
Narthas ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah.”
The giant robot stood up again. “You guys have to come with me then. You have to tell Hound and Airlock everything you just told me.”
The human and the elf looked at each other, knowing that they had to go with him. “What about our horses?” She asked Narthas. “Our stuff?”
He looked behind them out past the edge of the forest and onto the plains of Rohan. Then he turned back to look at Lauren and Gasket. “They’ll find us.” The girl suddenly remembered Moria, and their run-in with the orcs, and knew he was right.
“Kay. Take us to them.”
Gasket nodded. “Alright, get on my back.” He crouched down low, and the two companions clung to the fur around his shoulders, holding on to any bit of protruding machinery they could find. “Ready?”
“Go.”
“We need to take the cover of the forest,” the Autobot said. And with that, he broke into a jog. They sped through the trees at a good pace, and a low, rumbling thud resonated through the trees and shook Lauren’s stomach with every heavy footfall.
“You know,” Narthas said. “Never in all the thousands of years I’ve been alive did I ever imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that I would be doing something as crazy as this.”
“I wanna be a robot…” came the sad reply.
“Well, if you get kicked out of Middle-earth, who knows. Maybe you’ll be able to go to wherever this guy’s from instead.”
She fell silent for a second, feeling the boom of every of the robot’s footsteps, listening carefully to the machinery at work in his metallic body. “I don’t wanna leave you, though. You’re my main dude.”
Narthas laughed. “We’ll see how this whole thing turns out. If we’re not so lucky, you might not have a choice.”
They went on for a bit longer, gradually nearing closer to the foot of the mountains. When the land became much less flat than it was, Gasket slowed down, carefully maneuvering around old trees and huge rocks. Then, he stopped. He crouched down low again, a cue for the two of them to get off, and he rose up once more. Lauren stretched and cracked her neck. “Uh, where are they?”
Gasket motioned for them to follow. He trod through the fingers of the mountain, up a wide canyon, and to the mouth of a cave. “Hound! Airlock!” he called inside. “I’ve found some people that may help us.”
The three of them stepped back when some mechanical noises were heard from inside, followed by a voice: “Good work, Gasket!” Two bots emerged from the shadow of the cave. One was about Gasket’s size, and the other was slightly smaller. She noticed right off the bat that, even though they were in their humanoid form, neither of them wore any traces of another form, either vehicle or animal. They just looked like a pair of robots that might have been dug up near some ancient ruins.
Aside from that small trace of logical thinking though, her brain had turned to mush. She couldn’t blink, or close her mouth, or slow her breathing. The situation she had found herself in was so cool that she might’ve passed out, had she been fainter of heart.
“Hi there, humans!” One of them said. He sat down low, just as Gasket did, when talking to them. “I’m Hound, and this is Airlock.”
“I’m Lauren, and this is Narthas. He’s not a human, actually. He’s an elf.”
Hound rubbed his “chin” with a four-fingered articulating hand. “Well, he looks human to me. What’s the difference?”
“Well,” Narthas said, stepping forward. “Elves are immortal. At least, we are in theory…”
“They have pointy ears too,” the girl pointed out.
“Haha, all right. Narthas, and Lauren.” He stood up again.
Lauren looked up at them towering over her and shielded her eyes from the sun. “Can I ask you guys a question?”
“Shoot,” said Airlock.
“Why is Gasket the only one to have taken a form? How come you’ve still got that ‘fresh-out-of-Cybertron’ look going on?”
“Well. You see,” answered Airlock. “That’s because we are fresh out of Cybertron. We can still transform, too, but only into the vehicles that we are on our home planet as well. We sent Gasket here to look for some fans, figuring that he’d be the best candidate being a fan and all himself. We didn’t think it’d be too smart for the three of us to go parading around your world. That would be far too conspicuous.” The three bots nodded in agreement.
“They sent me to go find someone, but I couldn’t go walking around Middle-earth as a giant alien robot, or a as an alien vehicle, so I scanned the first thing I saw: a bear. But let’s get down to business,” Gasket said, turning to his fellows. “The elf says he knows about the Mithril operation.”
Hound gestured to Narthas. “Well, let’s hear it! What can you tell us?”
The elf cleared his throat and miraculously kept his composure. “About four years ago, I met a young man by the name of Alt Fen while visiting some friends in Gondor. For a little while he maintained that he was a Tolkien fan, but eventually I came to the conclusion that he was from somewhere else. And, after confronting him about my suspicion, he revealed that he was indeed a foreign fan. Said he came here looking for someone, so I said I would help him try to find this person if they were here. And so, with my help, he managed to open an underground club in Minas Tirith for Tolkien fans, and I guess Elves too since they know about the whole afterlife situation… but anyways. He opened that up. However. It’s just a front. The actual club itself it only about a third of the actual underground setup he has going on. The rest is dedicated to various technological equipment he has… storage, a small lab area, and a more recent arms room.
“The original idea behind the club was to have a sort of home base so he could look for whoever that he was looking for (he never told me) but as it later became apparent that Middle-earth was becoming a point of interest for bad guys from his fandom, he abandoned his search and instead built it up to do more detective work.
“Now because I travel all over, Fen had me be his eyes and ears since he wasn’t used to this world and was afraid of blowing his cover. He knew about my portal—“
“Wait, wait,” Hound interrupted. “You’ve got a rift open?”
Narthas waved his hand in dismissal. “You wouldn’t be able to find it even if you were looking.”
“You do know that for every tear through this planet’s spacetime there is, the easier it is to make more, right?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. But wait a second… how did you get here?”
“We flew in,” Gasket said. “Last night, remember?”
Lauren suddenly grabbed Narthas’ shoulders and shook him. “That’s what I saw last night! They are the three meteorites I saw!”
The elf slapped himself on the forehead. “Of course! Wait. You said you saw something else too.”
The girl let go of her counterpart and turned back to the Autobots, who had now taken to sitting down. “There was a fourth something with you. Who was that?”
“There was a fourth?” Gasket asked Hound.
“Not that I know of,” he said, thinking. “Prime just sent us three to investigate. What’d it look like?”
“Looked like a plane, or a ship or something.”
Hound shook his head. “I don’t much like that sound of that. I think we were followed here.”
“By who?” Lauren followed their example and took a seat on the ground too.
“Well, could be any number of baddies. Couldda been a follower of Megatron in his vehicle form. It couldda been a Sith cohort. It couldda been a vampire and a Sith cohort. Riding inside of a Decepticon in his vehicle form. If he’s not here with us right now, he was definitely spying.”
“All right,” Narthas sighed. “Now we’ve got that to contend with too.”
“Sorry for interrupting you there,” Hound said, ushering the elf to continue his story.
“Oh, right. Where was I…”
“The rift,” Airlock said.
“Right! The rift. So. Fen knew about the existence of my portal. He told me to keep it open for the sole sake of it being a backdoor means of escape. Because at this point in time, Earth is untouchable by anyone from a different world, planet, universe, whatever. But, that would be our last hope. But other than that, my portal doesn’t mean too much.
“Uhm… oh! About the Mithril now. Fen and I started to notice some things out of place. Strange shadows, that sort of thing. In my travels I’d also see strange markings on the ground in forest clearings, or sheltered gulches on the plains, too. It was shortly after all of this that it became apparent that Middle-earth was receiving regular visitations from fans and natives of other worlds. Fen and I had to remain on the down-low, though. We didn’t want DERIF sniffing around the underground compound, and as far as I know, they still know nothing of it.
“That’s all I can tell you for now, because that’s all I know. I don’t even think Fen is aware of the Sith’s alliance with the Decepticons or other fans. Whatever we do, though, it MUST remain covert, or Middle-earth is screwed.”
“I agree with Narthas,” Hound said. “If war is what they want, then it’s going to be a secret war if we can help it.”
“I think the first step toward it being secret, however, is to get you guys in costume. Is there anything you can scan to hide yourselves?”
“Of course,” laughed Hound. “They don’t call us robots in disguise for nothing!”
