Orcs, Sue Blood, and Coffee
Somewhere in the depths of Moria, a dwarf was running for her life. This was made slightly more complicated by the fact that she had no idea what she was running from. She just knew it was bad, and that she had absolutely no desire to let it catch her.
The dwarf had been quite sure her friends would save her. They were brave, powerful, beautiful... and there was something very wrong about them. She wasn't, come to think of it, very sure they were her friends at all; and that irritated her.
The whole affair irritated her. One day, she'd been living a nice, peaceful life (which, granted, she couldn't really remember); the next, it was all running from dragons and being dragged randomly from who-knew-where to who-knew-where-else by a couple of unrealistically beautiful rescuers who charmed you into inexplicably forgetting your own battle training.
Rounding a bend in the tunnel, the dwarf found herself suddenly flat on her back, having bounced off something too soft to be stone but quite unyielding enough to leave her sprawled across the floor of the tunnel. As she pushed off the floor, the dwarf's gaze followed a pair of iron-shod boots upward to find a pair of gray-skinned legs, which were attached to an equally gray-skinned orc, which was standing next to a second orc. Both were splashed with a viscous pink fluid, the origins of which the dwarf refused to guess at.
Whatever else was confusing about her current life, the dwarf knew what to do with orcs. In less time than it took her to think about it, she was back on her feet, axe in hand, and swinging it in a wide arc headed straight for a couple of pairs of orcish kneecaps.
The first orc yelped in a most un-orclike fashion, grabbed the other, and pulled them both out of the way. The dwarf's axe cut through thin air.
"Get the crossbow!" yelled one of the orcs, inexplicably speaking Westron.
"Working on it..." mumbled the other, digging through what looked like half an arsenal. In a moment the dwarf was looking down the business end of an oddly small crossbow, but ignored the weapon to take another swipe with the axe. The orc with the crossbow wasn't quick enough to move out of the way this time, and the axe bit into its flesh, felling it to the ground--
--or would have, if the dwarf hadn't suddenly been holding a throwing axe instead of a battleaxe.
Much too small and not at all balanced properly for melee use, the throwing axe swished through the same thin air as the battleaxe. The difference in weight threw the dwarf completely off-balance. Too confused to notice the sting of the tiny crossbow bolt (and a second for good measure), the dwarf stared at the throwing axe and backed away from the orcs, before shrugging and preparing to throw it. Hadn't mama always said, if life gave you a throwing axe, make orc kebabs? Something like that...
"Thank goodness for character instability," muttered the other orc, as the dwarf's beard inexplicably began to fade in and out of existence.
"Well, if she hadn't fallen through that plot hole before we got to her, we wouldn't have needed to depend on luck!" accused the first.
One throwing axe went wobbling through the air, thrown by a dwarf wobbling almost as badly as the weapon. The orcs didn't bother to dodge as the axe clattered to the ground nearby.
"Aaannd three, two...." intoned an orc. The dwarf never quite heard "one", as the ground was looking awfully comfortable, and a nap seemed like a really good idea.
*****
Jason Harris straightened his back, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and leaned on the handle of his mop, sighing in annoyance at the glittery, bloody footprints that some agent had left on the generic gray floors of FicPsych.
Sue blood was hard to remove to begin with, but cleaning it from Generic Surface added to the headache. The featureless gray walls of HQ, like any generic object, tended to accept description readily; and being smeared with the tacky, glittery substance definitely counted as description. It was taking a serious amount of elbow grease and Linguistic Solvent to return the floors to their proper featureless condition. Gazing glumly at the trail of blood, Jason watched his chances of clocking out early dwindle to near-zero.
Jason's mop resumed swishing across the glittery floor, occasionally making scraping sounds as the janitor bore down on the handle. Other than this mess, it was actually a quiet day in FicPsych. Legolas was back again after yet another rape!fic, poor elf; and the entire cast of the Les Misérables musicalverse was still being treated for the irresistible urge to sing songs from "Barney and Friends"; but there were no homicidal canons currently roaming the halls, which was the way Jason liked it.
Jason switched to a sponge and started scrubbing at the glittery handprint that had been left on the window of the observation room across from the nurse's station. On the bed in the room sat a dwarf, cross-legged, tugging at his beard and reading a large book, a frown of concentration on his forehead. Scattered around were several empty Styrofoam cups.
Hmm... since when did they let FicPsych patients drink coffee? Jason was almost certain this dwarf was from Middle-earth, as everything about him screamed "Generic Middle-Earth Dwarf"; and it wasn't generally a good idea to let Middle-earth natives ingest uncanonical substances. Come to think of it-Jason squinted at the large book-wasn't that the PPC Manual the dwarf was reading?
Jason scraped away the last of the handprint, dropped the sponge back into his bucket, and leaned against the counter at the nurses' station. The nurse on duty was currently elbows-deep in paperwork. "Hey, Nathonea?" he said.
"Hmm?" she replied, shuffling through a sheaf of yellow and pink forms. Then she looked up at him. "Yes?"
"Did you notice that the Dwarf in your observation room is drinking coffee?" Jason said.
Nurse Dewstan glanced regretfully at the empty coffee pot which was currently balanced on top of a stack of patient records. "Oh, yes. I gave her a cup this morning and made the mistake of telling her she could have more if she liked. Didn't know she'd like it this much! She's already depleted my supply."
She? Oh. Tolkienverse dwarf. Right.
"But... she's from Middle-earth. I thought coffee..."
"Not anymore, she isn't. Recruited bit character. Goes by the name of ‘Jane Doe', if you'll believe it; we called her that when they dragged her in, and she said it was as good a name as any. Wouldn't pick another."
That explained the Manual. Well, it explained the Manual to some extent; Jason had never actually heard of anyone reading the thing voluntarily, new recruit or not.
"I'll be glad to have her assigned and have the use of my coffee machine back," Nathonea remarked. "She's as sane as she needs to be, if a bit poorly described; and she's got enough of a personality to start developing more on her own. Tolkienverse is a nice strong canon; it's given her enough background to build on just from being described as a dwarf. Her DSA levels have been staying nice and low, too."
"DSA?" Jason asked. He rounded the end of the counter, entered the nurses' station, and started gathering wastebaskets.
"Drunk Scottish Axeman," Nathonea explained. "Reverting to stereotype is always a risk with these bit characters, which is why she's under observation. I don't think we need to worry, though. She'll probably be discharged today."
"Ah." Jason shook open a new trash bag and popped it into a Generic Wastebasket. He wondered darkly how long it would take before the dwarf returned to FicPsych, maybe screaming incoherently about cucumbers, or possibly struggling with an overwhelming phobia of the color pink.
In Jason's back pocket, his cell phone vibrated its notification of an incoming text message. Jason tucked the roll of garbage bags under his arm and reached back to check the phone.
Agent Harris,
Please report to the Marquis de Sod's office as soon as possible.
Personnel Department
Only the Flowers would leave text messages without so much as a single word of textspeak. Still, it wasn't wise to keep the Flowers waiting; they'd only make it harder on you if you pretended you hadn't got their summons.
Jason gathered his supplies. At least this way, he would miss the rest of his shift; it was going to take at least that long to find his way through the halls of HQ. "See you tomorrow, Nathonea."
The Borg nurse waved a goodbye, already re-buried in her paperwork.
Jason wheeled his cart toward the nearest janitor's closet and made for the Daisy's office, falling easily into the usual daydreams required to reach his destination.
Half an hour later, the Laws of Narrative Comedy saw to it that an astonished janitor was staring at a sentient daisy, a look of utter horror on his face.
"You're transferring me where!?"
*****
A/N: The PPC was created by Jay and Acacia and the PPC community. Nathonea Dewstan was created by Nathonea. Lord of the Rings is the creation of Tolkien. I don't own any of them. Permission to write PPC spinoffs was given by Sedri.
The unidentified agents who recruited Jane Doe are exactly that--unidentified. They could be anyone; there probably isn't a reasonably experienced agent in HQ who hasn't portalled into Middle-earth in Orc disguise. If you want them to be your agents, feel free to claim them.
The dwarf had been quite sure her friends would save her. They were brave, powerful, beautiful... and there was something very wrong about them. She wasn't, come to think of it, very sure they were her friends at all; and that irritated her.
The whole affair irritated her. One day, she'd been living a nice, peaceful life (which, granted, she couldn't really remember); the next, it was all running from dragons and being dragged randomly from who-knew-where to who-knew-where-else by a couple of unrealistically beautiful rescuers who charmed you into inexplicably forgetting your own battle training.
Rounding a bend in the tunnel, the dwarf found herself suddenly flat on her back, having bounced off something too soft to be stone but quite unyielding enough to leave her sprawled across the floor of the tunnel. As she pushed off the floor, the dwarf's gaze followed a pair of iron-shod boots upward to find a pair of gray-skinned legs, which were attached to an equally gray-skinned orc, which was standing next to a second orc. Both were splashed with a viscous pink fluid, the origins of which the dwarf refused to guess at.
Whatever else was confusing about her current life, the dwarf knew what to do with orcs. In less time than it took her to think about it, she was back on her feet, axe in hand, and swinging it in a wide arc headed straight for a couple of pairs of orcish kneecaps.
The first orc yelped in a most un-orclike fashion, grabbed the other, and pulled them both out of the way. The dwarf's axe cut through thin air.
"Get the crossbow!" yelled one of the orcs, inexplicably speaking Westron.
"Working on it..." mumbled the other, digging through what looked like half an arsenal. In a moment the dwarf was looking down the business end of an oddly small crossbow, but ignored the weapon to take another swipe with the axe. The orc with the crossbow wasn't quick enough to move out of the way this time, and the axe bit into its flesh, felling it to the ground--
--or would have, if the dwarf hadn't suddenly been holding a throwing axe instead of a battleaxe.
Much too small and not at all balanced properly for melee use, the throwing axe swished through the same thin air as the battleaxe. The difference in weight threw the dwarf completely off-balance. Too confused to notice the sting of the tiny crossbow bolt (and a second for good measure), the dwarf stared at the throwing axe and backed away from the orcs, before shrugging and preparing to throw it. Hadn't mama always said, if life gave you a throwing axe, make orc kebabs? Something like that...
"Thank goodness for character instability," muttered the other orc, as the dwarf's beard inexplicably began to fade in and out of existence.
"Well, if she hadn't fallen through that plot hole before we got to her, we wouldn't have needed to depend on luck!" accused the first.
One throwing axe went wobbling through the air, thrown by a dwarf wobbling almost as badly as the weapon. The orcs didn't bother to dodge as the axe clattered to the ground nearby.
"Aaannd three, two...." intoned an orc. The dwarf never quite heard "one", as the ground was looking awfully comfortable, and a nap seemed like a really good idea.
*****
Jason Harris straightened his back, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and leaned on the handle of his mop, sighing in annoyance at the glittery, bloody footprints that some agent had left on the generic gray floors of FicPsych.
Sue blood was hard to remove to begin with, but cleaning it from Generic Surface added to the headache. The featureless gray walls of HQ, like any generic object, tended to accept description readily; and being smeared with the tacky, glittery substance definitely counted as description. It was taking a serious amount of elbow grease and Linguistic Solvent to return the floors to their proper featureless condition. Gazing glumly at the trail of blood, Jason watched his chances of clocking out early dwindle to near-zero.
Jason's mop resumed swishing across the glittery floor, occasionally making scraping sounds as the janitor bore down on the handle. Other than this mess, it was actually a quiet day in FicPsych. Legolas was back again after yet another rape!fic, poor elf; and the entire cast of the Les Misérables musicalverse was still being treated for the irresistible urge to sing songs from "Barney and Friends"; but there were no homicidal canons currently roaming the halls, which was the way Jason liked it.
Jason switched to a sponge and started scrubbing at the glittery handprint that had been left on the window of the observation room across from the nurse's station. On the bed in the room sat a dwarf, cross-legged, tugging at his beard and reading a large book, a frown of concentration on his forehead. Scattered around were several empty Styrofoam cups.
Hmm... since when did they let FicPsych patients drink coffee? Jason was almost certain this dwarf was from Middle-earth, as everything about him screamed "Generic Middle-Earth Dwarf"; and it wasn't generally a good idea to let Middle-earth natives ingest uncanonical substances. Come to think of it-Jason squinted at the large book-wasn't that the PPC Manual the dwarf was reading?
Jason scraped away the last of the handprint, dropped the sponge back into his bucket, and leaned against the counter at the nurses' station. The nurse on duty was currently elbows-deep in paperwork. "Hey, Nathonea?" he said.
"Hmm?" she replied, shuffling through a sheaf of yellow and pink forms. Then she looked up at him. "Yes?"
"Did you notice that the Dwarf in your observation room is drinking coffee?" Jason said.
Nurse Dewstan glanced regretfully at the empty coffee pot which was currently balanced on top of a stack of patient records. "Oh, yes. I gave her a cup this morning and made the mistake of telling her she could have more if she liked. Didn't know she'd like it this much! She's already depleted my supply."
She? Oh. Tolkienverse dwarf. Right.
"But... she's from Middle-earth. I thought coffee..."
"Not anymore, she isn't. Recruited bit character. Goes by the name of ‘Jane Doe', if you'll believe it; we called her that when they dragged her in, and she said it was as good a name as any. Wouldn't pick another."
That explained the Manual. Well, it explained the Manual to some extent; Jason had never actually heard of anyone reading the thing voluntarily, new recruit or not.
"I'll be glad to have her assigned and have the use of my coffee machine back," Nathonea remarked. "She's as sane as she needs to be, if a bit poorly described; and she's got enough of a personality to start developing more on her own. Tolkienverse is a nice strong canon; it's given her enough background to build on just from being described as a dwarf. Her DSA levels have been staying nice and low, too."
"DSA?" Jason asked. He rounded the end of the counter, entered the nurses' station, and started gathering wastebaskets.
"Drunk Scottish Axeman," Nathonea explained. "Reverting to stereotype is always a risk with these bit characters, which is why she's under observation. I don't think we need to worry, though. She'll probably be discharged today."
"Ah." Jason shook open a new trash bag and popped it into a Generic Wastebasket. He wondered darkly how long it would take before the dwarf returned to FicPsych, maybe screaming incoherently about cucumbers, or possibly struggling with an overwhelming phobia of the color pink.
In Jason's back pocket, his cell phone vibrated its notification of an incoming text message. Jason tucked the roll of garbage bags under his arm and reached back to check the phone.
Agent Harris,
Please report to the Marquis de Sod's office as soon as possible.
Personnel Department
Only the Flowers would leave text messages without so much as a single word of textspeak. Still, it wasn't wise to keep the Flowers waiting; they'd only make it harder on you if you pretended you hadn't got their summons.
Jason gathered his supplies. At least this way, he would miss the rest of his shift; it was going to take at least that long to find his way through the halls of HQ. "See you tomorrow, Nathonea."
The Borg nurse waved a goodbye, already re-buried in her paperwork.
Jason wheeled his cart toward the nearest janitor's closet and made for the Daisy's office, falling easily into the usual daydreams required to reach his destination.
Half an hour later, the Laws of Narrative Comedy saw to it that an astonished janitor was staring at a sentient daisy, a look of utter horror on his face.
"You're transferring me where!?"
*****
A/N: The PPC was created by Jay and Acacia and the PPC community. Nathonea Dewstan was created by Nathonea. Lord of the Rings is the creation of Tolkien. I don't own any of them. Permission to write PPC spinoffs was given by Sedri.
The unidentified agents who recruited Jane Doe are exactly that--unidentified. They could be anyone; there probably isn't a reasonably experienced agent in HQ who hasn't portalled into Middle-earth in Orc disguise. If you want them to be your agents, feel free to claim them.