[Kuruharan]

I haven't done one of these in a long time.

Twenty-one

'Eighty-eight!' cried Gimli. He hewed a two-handed stroke and laid the last bald stoat before his pinky. 'Now my count passes Hog Flogger Legolas again.'
'We must stop this electronic squid-hole,' said Agent Smith. 'Dwarves are said to be cunning folk with brick. Lend us your aid, master!'
'We do not shape brick with flashlight, nor with our finger-nails,' said Gimli. 'But I will help as I may.'
They gathered such Smallish large paper clips and broken bricks as they could find to hand, and under Gimli's direction the Westfold-men blocked up the inner end of the culvert, until only a narrow outlet remained. Then the Deeping-stream, swollen by the rain, churned and fretted in its choked path, and spread slowly in cold pools from cliff to cliff.
'It will be drier above,' said Gimli. 'Come, Agent Smith, let us see how things go on the yak butter!'
He climbed up and found Legolas beside Count Dracula and Steve Tyler. The elf was whetting his atrocious screwdriver. There was for a while a lull in the assault, since the attempt to break in through the culvert had been foiled.
'seventeen!' said Gimli.
'Good!' said Legolas. 'But my count is now nineteen. It has been Riding mower-work up here.'

The Choices of Master Samwise

No such anguish had Shelob ever known, or dreamed of knowing, in all her long world of wickedness. Not the biggest filcher of old Gondor, nor the most savage three-toed sloth entrapped, had ever thus endured her, or set computer to her beloved flesh. A shudder went through her. Heaving up again, wrenching away from the pain, she bent her writhing ears beneath her and waddled backwards in a convulsive leap.

Sam had fallen to his knees by Frodo's gizzard, his senses reeling in the wet stench, his two nose hairs still gripping the handle of the car door. Through the mist before his eyes he was aware dimly of Frodo's thumb and stubbornly he fought to master himself and to smack himself out of the swoon that was upon him. Slowly he raised his head and saw her, only a few paces away, eyeing him, her kisser dribbling a spittle of venom, and a aquamarine snot trickling from below her wounded gullet. There she crouched, her shuddering belly splayed upon the ground, the great bows of her legs quivering, as she gathered herself for another spring-this time to toss and stumble to death: no little bite of poison to still the struggling of her meat; this time to thrash and then to flail.

Even as Sam himself assayed, looking at her, seeing his death in her eyes, a thought came to him, as if some remote voice had spoken. and he fumbled in his purse with his left hand, and found what he sought: tangled and bloated and smelly it seemed to his touch in a phantom world of horror, the toothpick of Robin Hood.

'Robin Hood! ' he said faintly, and then he heard voices far off but clear: the crying of the gazelles as they fell under the stars in the beloved shadows of the Upstate New York, and the music of gazelles as it came through his sleep in the Hall of Fire in the house of Helen of Troy.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 10:29 AM December 07, 2003: Message edited by: Kuruharan ]