Chapter One: Forced to Love
I believe I have found a compromise. I shall not post anything potentially offensive on FFN, and there will be no reason for anyone to kick me off this fine site.
Which does not, of course, mean that I have learned the virtue of mercy. Only the virtue of exploiting legal loopholes. (Anyone who does not count this a virtue has never been employed as a lawyer or a government official.)
The Lord of the Rings universe, and all that is supposed to lie within, belongs to JRR Tolkien. I'm just clearing the mess a little. The PPC belongs to Jay and Acacia (or perhaps I should say they belong to it). Brent owns himself, but I own Amy. Some of the time, anyway, I'd like to think. The Mini-Balrogs, in all their terrifying absence, belong to Miss Cam, without whom there would be no Official FanFiction University of Middle Earth. The pain meds and junk food belong to their various brand names. Oh, yeah, and the Gameboy belongs to Nintendo.
I think its safe to say that if I was going to make money off this, I'd be in court fairly quickly.... But I'm not. Who would buy it?
The door before her was numbered '10,' but the door to the left of it was "1008" and the door across was '1011," so she was sure she was at the right one. Fairly sure, anyway. At places in the building, Headquarters acted like it was designed by a drunk adolescent architect who had accidentally fed the blueprints to the papershreader. To get to this door, she had been through a hallway converted into a bathroom (and then back again), an elevator that was otherwise a functional shoe polisher, and an empty, dull coloured room which had led to a huge 'Do Not Enter: Mini-Balrog Training' sign on the other side of the exit.
The engineer must have had about five minutes to tape the plans back together before handing them to the building crew, Amy mused. In any case, the door was either the right one or the wrong one. The worst that could happen was she'd have to find her way back through HQ. Unless she had stumbled onto the real Mini-Balrogs.
Amy knocked on the door. At least, if she interrupted their training, she'd just be dead, and wouldn't have to worry about the cafeteria's meal lottery any more. ("Everyone with a pink ticket: Chocolate pudding! Anyone else: Last week's asparagus. Better luck at dinner.")
She waited a minute. Nothing happened. She decided this was a good sign, and knocked again, audibly, this time.
The door was opened by a young man, probably in his early twenties. He was good looking, in a rugged sort of way, but he ruined the effect by staring down at Amy as though she was some bug he caught trespassing.
She did her best to smile at him. "Hello," she managed. "You must be Brent."
He looked affronted by this amount of personal information she had acquired about him. His eyes narrowed.
"I - I'm Amy. I don't know if they told you-"
"Who's they?"
"Uh, well, the flowers, of course. But you see, I'm-"
"New partner?" he interrupted again.
"Yes!" Amy sighed in relief. "I wasn't sure I was at the right door. Or planet, for that matter."
He continued to study her for another moment as if uncertain whether to squash her or capture her for a science project, and then his face suddenly softened. "I'm Brent," he told her. "But you can call me Brent."
Amy wasn't certain what to say to that, so she just smiled weakly and followed him inside the room behind the door.
"I don't know what they taught you at the academy, so I'll go slow. We kill Mary Sues. I assume you know what a Mary Sue is? Good. When we have to perform this essential service, you'll hear a loud, really irritating noise that some little punk is too busy to tone down. I sounds like -"
[BEEEEEEEEEEP]
"Well, like that, actually," he finished.
Amy, slightly recovered from the hallway incident, glared. At least, she told herself it was a glare. To Brent it seemed more like a sulk. "I know," she said. "I've been transferred from another genre. I've heard it all before. You can turn that off."
Brent smirked at her. "Not really. You see, we have an essential service to perform. Or weren't you paying attention?"
"What? Already? Now?" Amy, standing a metre before the door holding three huge duffel bags of random stuff, was not in the right mind frame to deal with a canon breach. Her mind was having enough difficulties dealing with Brent.
Her partner was checking various weapons and putting them in a bag that was about a third as big as Amy's smallest one. Realizing he wasn't joking, Amy dumped the contents of one of her bags onto the floor and searched for anything that might be useful. Jeans... jeans... some makeup she hadn't used in months... a T-shirt....
"What do you need all the clothes for," Brent asked. "We have uniforms."
"Maybe I like to wear something a little more casual during my off-time."
He snorted. "What off-time?"
Amy still hadn't found anything she wanted to bring, so she dropped the bag on top of the clothes and went to Brent empty handed. He rolled his eyes. "Here. At least take a gun." He handed one to her, and Amy barely had time to pocket it before the portal opened before her and someone pushed her through.
The ground felt solid under her feet, but her feet didn't feel solid under her legs. Amy took a few short steps, and, when there seemed something strange about the movement, looked down. What she saw inspired her to produce a few gagging noises.
"Brent!" she shouted between gasps. "Aghh!"
A vile looking creature several metres in front of her turned around at her cry. She tried to run away from it but slipped, landing in a tangle with the disgusting grey things she was beginning to suspect were her legs. The creature was staring down with a look of amused disdain. She decided it was probably Brent.
"What... what is... am...." Amy gave up on speaking. She flapped her arms a few times and made a high-pitched nasal noise in an attempt to sum up their current physical state.
The maybe-Brent rolled its eyes. "Orcs," it said. "We're orcs. You know, goblins?"
Amy took a few deep breaths and climbed to her feet. "Okay, orcs, fine. Why?"
The thing snorted at her, which made her certain it was her partner. "Well, we can't exactly go tromping around Middle-earth as ourselves, can we? Not when we're sworn to protect canon, and all that."
Amy was tempted to say, "Why not?" Instead she just grumbled, "Why can't we be Elves. I could deal with Elves."
"What would Elves be doing out here?" Brent asked. He started walking away, and Amy ran a few steps to catch up. He grinned back at her, his face twisting into something even more grotesque.
"I think it's an improvement," she snarled.
"Testy today, are we?"
They continued walking in silence for several minutes. Brent was taking his time, pausing every so often to gaze thoughtfully at the sun, or the trees, or a cloud that resembled a tennis shoe.
"Where exactly is here," Amy said finally.
"Just outside Moria," he replied, while considering a nearby rock.
"And where are we going?" He made a sweeping motion with one arm, indicating, Amy supposed, north. Or possibly west. "And is there any particular reason we're going so slowly?"
He glanced at her, the same vaguely interested look he had offered the rock. "You really have no idea what we're about to get into, do you?"
"We're going to kill a Mary Sue," Amy said. "I'm not frightened, if that's what you're thinking."
Brent shrugged. "You haven't looked at the words yet."
They cleared a ridge, and Amy could see the eight remaining members of the fellowship, just out of Moria. They were strewn about, mourning for Gandalf. All in all, it looked decently canonical.
Brent burst out laughing. At Amy's bewildered expression he gestured her attention towards the words that the world around them was comprised of. Amy started giggling. She couldn't help herself.
If you want to find out what Brent and Amy are laughing at, the rest of this chapter can be found at http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3b4pq/PPC_TOS/anyamy/goodbye1.html. It cannot be found on FFN, for pseudo-legal reasons, which I will not rant about here.