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When Alli had made her serious little speech Sai hadn’t answered right away for fear of laughing in her face and losing her only companion. After what she had experienced the last few days she would go with pretty much anyone who seemed to know what they were doing! So far she had faced the BliddyUnnerground, been stuck in RCA records, confronted a Balrog, driven a car (mostly into things but still driven), nearly got killed on the motorways of Mordor and faced the Balrog again (who admittedly was a little friendlier the second time once they’d got past the whole Mardil threatening Alli thing). However, on almost all of these occasions she had been with Alli, and whilst the girl seemed to have a knack for getting into trouble, she had almost equal abilities at getting out of it. Sai had realised this after her first encounter with Alli’s methods, and had long since decided that it was better to simply trust to the plans and the luck that went with her. Finding Alli was staring at her again, she put as solemn an expression on her face as she could muster and gave her assent.
A little later, stuck in that van with the Brady Bunch family, she began to wish she hadn’t. There was a sticker on one of the windows, Baby on Board, and for a moment she wished she was back in her old car as an orc, as the sticker would surely cause inexplicable violent tendencies, allowing her to run up the back of them to make sure that dear little Michael and Susie would never be able to sing again. She was certain they were about to start up with I’ve Got A Song That’ll Get On Your Nerves, and if that happened bloodshed wouldn’t be far behind. The mother was just as bad, going on and on at Alli until Sai feared for her safety. The father simply looked shellshocked, and Sai wondered whether he had known what he was getting himself in for when he agreed to marriage, or whether he had simply been around so many people who thought that not having a significant other lowers your value as a human being that he eventually gave in. She thought the latter was most likely, and smiled at him. He returned the smile a little tiredly, and then motioned that they had reached their destination.
Standing in the gardens, Sai had to admit to confusion, until a group of raging fangirls hit her from behing. She stood up again, half listening to Alli and half watching as the girls flocked around the object of their affection. She wondered whether it was really him they were into, or whether it was just the fame and air of superiority he carried around with him. If it were the latter she mused, would some kind of swap work . . . ? With one ear she heard phrases like “might get back a bit late”, “how do we get those girls away”, and “unless you want to go hit on that pilot” coming from Alli, and as that last sentence trickled through into her brain she realised she had been caught not listening.
“Sorry, no, please you go do that. But we still have about two days to do this, maybe a little less if you take time off for getting back to Mount Doom, and if you get a promise of a lift from that pilot we should be ok on that front. The only real problem is working out how to convince those girls to come with us. I suppose if they really are hardcore Leggy-boppers there isn’t much we can do, though your plan might work, but most fangirls are fickle aren’t they? What if we could offer them a better obsession? Think they’d come back with us?”
Alli turned to look at her (not falling over this time), seeming surprised that Sai had come up with an idea all by herself.
“That sounds like it could actually work – but who could we bribe them with?”
Sai thought for a moment. Who would Orlando Blooms fangirls find attractive? She ran through a list of young, tall, apparently goodlooking celebrities in her head, and came up with just one that might meet the criteria.
“How about that guy from Harry Potter? Tom something, the one who plays Malfoy? He might work. And you know, they’re filming something from it around here so if we could kidnap him and then tell these girls that we have him they might come with us. This is all getting a bit farfetched, do you think we could do it?
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