Patchword

It was in Bree, of all places, that she found the first clue.
The woman known as the Hound had spent more than a year hunting for any trace of the fabled Entwives. That they had been missing for uncounted years did not disturb her; the Hound was renowned for doing the impossible, finding the unfindable. This was just one more mission for her.
Even Treebeard himself had almost lost hope. He hadn’t said anything, but she could read it in his eyes. He expected, at best, to hear that they’d all died long ago, or more likely that she couldn’t find any trace at all. She knew it from the way he promised her great rewards if she brought back any news, but made no mention of returning with the Entwives themselves.
She started by visiting and interviewing all the eldest of the Elves that she could find. But as she’d expected, none of them had any information. They’d merely shaken their heads sadly. One and all had offered any other assistance they could with her quest and expressed great interest in hearing the outcome, but that was all they could contribute.
On her way back from her visit to the last Elf lord she could reach, she stopped in the little town of Bree for a quick drink at the Prancing Pony. She rarely indulged in the beer there, excellent as it was, but felt the need for refreshment after the latest disappointment.
Late that night, she sat in the common room, nursing the single beer she had permitted herself. She was looking forward to her bed; her beer was nearly gone, and she was the last patron there. She drained the last of it in a single gulp and turned to go. That was when the visitor showed up.

Normally a visitor would not have been particularly worthy of note. The Prancing Pony was an inn after all and one on a major trading hub. Even the halfling shire folk wandered out this way periodically to buy and sell and to get their bit of information regarding the wider world. If they could tolerate a place like this it had to be a quiet and generally pleasant affair with few enough surprises. This one was different though. This one would arouse even the sodden soul deep in their cups as it was both wonderful and unaccountable all in one personage. But perhaps the most surprising thing about them was that not one of those who looked at them would have been able to suss out why they were so intrigued. The visage was that of a tall and thin lady. Or at least she seemed a Lady she had the bearing of a great person. The clothing was a little odd with certain items that seemed to glint and shine all about her person and some of the cloth had a sheen that the Hound could not recall seeing before. She spoke briskly but kindly to the old innkeeper as she requested her meal and lodging for the night. Their business concluded she glided gracefully toward the stairs to the second story rooms.

The Hound didn't quite know why she decided to follow the Lady. It was a result of her own deep seated instincts that drove the action and she had long since learned to trust those. One did not always make connections that had perplexed dozens of others in a search without some special quality. Whatever it was that drove her she found herself just a few steps behind the Lady and opening her mouth.

The tall visitor stopped at one of the room doors and pulled a bag out from where it had been hidden beneath her cloak. The bag, too, was of a material unlike any the Hound had ever encountered - seemingly leather but with an odd sheen and bright colors, adorned with -- was that a purple horse? -- no, a violet unicorn with ridiculously large eyes and bands of rose through its mane and tail.

The Hound, never before at a loss, could only gape in astonishment as the Lady fumbled through the bag. She could hear the jangle of metal and a muttered imprecation until finally the room key appeared, only to be tangled among other items which cascaded out of the odd bag and onto the floor. The Hound recognized few of them, and all were of a variety of baffling materials in a perplexing flood of bright colors. The Lady cursed again and bent down to start picking things up, and it was then that she saw The Hound in the shadows nearby.

The Hound grimaced inwardly. She should have known better! She was an expert at stealth, yet this otherworldly Lady had so thoroughly confused her that she had not remembered to practice even the most rudimentary defenses. All that was left was to confront her quarry. She opened her mouth to speak, but the Lady started first.

"Oh hi! I mean, ah, well met friend. I pray I am not in your way. I shall, uh..." Trailing off, the Lady finished putting her belongings back in her bag and stood up, back to the door. "I mean, I... " Suddenly, to the Hound's even greater amazement, she burst out laughing. "I'm sorry, I can only stay in character so long and I have to admit I'm a little bit high right now. Isn't this the best LARP ever?"

Larp? Character? This was more than the Hound could comprehend. She had to pull herself together before this debacle became any worse. Meanwhile the Lady continued her cheerful banter, but the Hound noticed that while her words were lighthearted her stance and expression were not. Her eyes were narrowed and alert, and her hand remained concealed in the strange bag, grasping Eru-knew-what.

A high-pitched, almost whiny voice cried out, "Tiffany!"

The Hound and the Lady both startled. The Lady drew her hand from her bag, revealing a large, weathered map labeled "SHIRE QUEST 2037" while the Hound's choice was considerably more practical... and pointier. The Lady's eyes went wide at the elven steel weapon and, unprovoked, she grabbed it with her off-hand.

"Ow! Dude, that's sharp!" she exclaimed, sucking the blood from her own fingers.

The Hound's bitter retort was cut off by a repeat of the much more important event: "Tiffany, O Thank the Stars, you've found her!"

The Lady turned back to her bag, and held the unicorn logo where both women could see it. She pointed at the Hound and mouthed the word "You?"

The Hound could only shake her head in astonishment. She pointed back to the Lady and quirked her eyebrow. The Lady shook her head, nearly panicked, and jabbed her bleeding index finger violently back at the Hound.

The unicorn spoke up again. "I'll bet you ladies are wondering why I brought you here today..."

The Lady and the Hound looked at the Unicorn, captivated by what its message might be. According to the Unicorn, the women were to journey together to Gollum's cave. There they would find the Unknown Ring of Power. This Tenth Ring was forged in the fires of Mordor along with the other nine, but was immediately taken by the Dark Wizard Leomore. No sage or seer in all of Middle Earth knew of this Ring. Leomore took the Ring to Gollum's cave. The Unknown Ring held all the secrets of Middle Earth - past, present and future. The Ring alone knew what happened to the Entwives - and others in all the Realms of Middle Earth who had "disappeared."

When the purple unicorn had completed this dizzying pronouncement, there was a long pause during which neither woman moved nor spoke. The Hound with her elven blade interposed between herself and the purple unicorn which had, to all appearances, been painted upon the canvas surface of the bag, and the mysterious Lady likewise staring at the satchel in her hands as though she had never seen it before.

“Wow,” Finally, with a burst of nervous laughter the Lady exclaimed after a long pause in her peculiar patois that was unlike anything The Hound had heard in her travels, “That was quite the info dump.”

Pointing her blade at the bag, The Hound asked, “What sort of enchantment is this? Is it of Dwarvin make or something…older?”
The Lady only shrugged, “I picked up on sale at Hot Topic.”

The Hound heard a heavy footstep on the stairs below, the sounds of another patron ascending to their room. Finally recovering herself somewhat, The Hound put her weapon away, and lightly touching the Lady’s elbow said, “Could we continue this conversation inside?”

After a little more fumbling with the door key they managed to get inside the Lady’s single room.



It took some time to unwind the whole tale and make sense of what they had both heard and seen. No matter what they did to again gain the purple unicorn’s attention, it remained as inert as any inanimate object should be. Whatever magical influence had temporarily possessed the Lady’s bag seemed to have fled.

With a little coaxing The Hound was able to confirm that the mysterious Lady was in fact named Tiffany, as the unicorn had called her. But the rest of the information she was able to get out of her was murky if not downright confounding in nature. She said she had hiked into Bree that day as part of what she continually called LARPing.

She had gone into a local woodland area with her friends for this so called LARP but had somehow gotten separated from them, “After a couple hours I started making my way back to town on my own and that’s when I stumbled upon this massive Ren Faire. Everything here looks so authentic. I though everyone was just really committed to their roles…but now I’m wondering if I got some bad weed or something…”

It took the better part of the next hour for The Hound to convince Tiffany that she was neither an actress nor was this part of an extended joke that was being played on her by her friends.

“However you ended up here,” The Hound said at last, “I don’t think our meeting was an accident. I didn’t understand everything your enchanted parcel said, but I’ve heard of the rings of power, and my task truly is to find out what happened to the lost Entwives. I think, for the time being, you and I have become companions on a quest.”

The Lady Tiffany groaned, cradling her head in her hands, “Tell you what, if I had known this morning I would end up in a goddamn Tolkien-themed Isekai, I definitely would have packed more munchies.”



If someone like Tiffany, who was not of Middle Earth could walk into Bree from some as yet unknown world, then it would seem to follow that beings as ancient and mystical as the Entwives could walk right out of it. Though it had come in a form so strange, so alien that it threatened to break her grasp on the reality she had known, The Hound finally had her first lead. And she would follow it, no matter where it led.

The Hound stared at Tiffany blankly for a moment, attempting to unravel her latest cryptic comment, before a jaw-cracking yawn interrupted her train of thought.

"I do not believe there is anything we can do tonight, at the least. I suggest that we adjourn for the night and begin our quest on the morrow."

With a yawn of her own, Tiffany agreed readily, and the two retired to their separate rooms for the night.
---------------------------------
The next morning, the Hound was almost finished with breakfast when Tiffany stumbled down the stairs, bleary-eyed and disheveled. She fell rather than sat on the bench next to the Hound, and when a hobbit server hurried over to take her order, she responded with nothing but a mumbled "Coffee".

The Hound eyed the beverage dubiously when the server brought it out. She'd tried it on her last visit to the Shire, but didn't care for the flavor. At the sight of her companion gulping the piping-hot stuff down as fast as she safely could, she refrained from comment, sipping her own drink in silence.

By the time Tiffany had finished her mug, she was looking noticeably more alert. "So what's the plan?"

"My horse and mule are in the stable. I take it you have none? I will find a horse for you to ride, then. I am well supplied, so we should be able to start immediately."

Tiffany smiled. "Cool. I've always wanted to go horseback riding. I'll grab my stuff and meet you out front."

An hour later, with the innkeeper paid (out of the Hound's money) and a new horse purchased, they were ready to go. Despite her obvious lack of experience with horses, Tiffany managed to stay reasonably well in the saddle of the sedate old mare the Hound had found.

"So...how far away is this Golem's Cave?"

"Gollum. It is a cave which was once inhabited by a creature called Gollum." Like any good Gondor girl, the Hound knew her lore. "If we make good time, it shouldn't be more than..." She eyed Tiffany's less-than-impressive physique dubiously and revised her estimate. "A couple months at most."

Tiffany gasped. "Months?! I can't be gone that long! This LARP was only supposed to last for the weekend. I need to be back to work on Monday, or my boss is gonna kill me!"

Without warning, the cartoon unicorn on her bag - currently slung over the back of the saddle - spoke up again. "I may be able to help with that!"

The Hound had a knife in her hand as soon as the unicorn started speaking. When she saw who it was, she tucked it away again with a disgusted grunt. "Where were you? We sought your counsel, but you did not respond."

"Sorry about that. I came back here as soon as I could." The unicorn began pacing back and forth along the bag's surface, the star-shaped image on her flanks flashing with each turn. "I'd been researching this strange prophecy that popped up in my world but seemed to have nothing to do with it, when suddenly I found myself trapped in this image with...it felt like a geas, compelling me to make sure you two met and began this quest. As soon as I finished speaking, I was returned to my own world, where I've been doing my best to figure out what's going on." She paused, looking up at the two astonished faces staring down at the bag. "I still don't know exactly what's happening, but I did find out how to use the scroll with the prophecy fragment to pull myself back to this world for a little while. This does appear to be a world of magic, so I may be able to use my own magic to help you out a bit, though it's taking a lot of my power just to maintain my presence in this world. Now, let's see if this works..."

The unicorn took a deep breath and closed her eyes in concentration. A purple glow appeared around her horn. For a moment, nothing more happened, and Tiffany and the Hound eyed each other dubiously. Then, without warning, the purple glow expanded off the bag to enclose themselves and the horses in a sphere of violet light that rapidly brightened to a blinding white, then faded away again, leaving them...somewhere else.

The trio, or was it duo now? The pony didn't appear to be moving but there was a distant voice emanating from the image. It sounded like a southern drawl to Tiffany. The hound had never heard such and accent before. The voice was worried and urgent and seemed to be talking to someone other than they saying "Twilight? Are you ok. Why'd you go and push yerself like that agin?. Is it really that important? I suppose I'll go fer help." With a brief sound of hoofbeats everything then went silent. Clearly the pony wasn't making any other world shattering pronouncements for the moment.

As they began to get their bearings it became quite obvious they were indeed in a cave as the purple pony had intended. What was less clear was just what cave that was. "So this is Gollums cave?" Tiffany inquired gazing at the glowing gems hanging from the ceiling and encrusting the walls. "It sounded much more drab the way you described it before". The Hound was deeply confused and a little perturbed. While she had personally never visited the old caverns of the Goblins she had read several reports of them at one time or another as she dug through ancient dusty libraries. In particular the descriptions provided by Bilbo Baggins in his memoirs titled 'There and back again' contained vivid descriptions of that place. Not a single one of them mentioned anything about glowing crystals. "I'm not sure we are in Gollums cave" she said to Tiffany. "Nothing I have read or heard suggested it looked anything like this." Tiffany was still admiring the crystals but her enthusiasm seemed to wane as she looked down.

Then it disappeared completely as she noticed that she wasn't wearing shoes. That in fact the lack of shoes was not the weirdest thing going on. Her legs, or really she would swear her arms given the neuromuscular responses when she moved one, were yellow. They also seemed to bend in ways that didn't look natural. "Wh... what is going on!? Tiffany yelped not able to control her fear and confusion at this point. The Hound was becoming equally confused but was much better at controlling her emotions even in extremis. Taking a long look at what she assumed to be Tiffany and noting the cheerful yellow shade of her body and the white mane like hair with a shock of turquoise running through it "I think" she said a bit of concern still creeping into her voice "We have become something similar to the purple unicorn in the image on your satchel" She closed her eyes then and forced some deep breaths. They felt quite different now that she was paying attention to them. This would certainly take some acclimatization.

"Well this is at least the best evidence I've seen that this isn't just another immersive LARP. A location change like that would require at the very least hollywood level set design." The hound was puzzled by the term Hollywood but quickly shrugged it off. There were far more important concerns right now than trying to comprehend the peculiar world that her companion apparently came from. "We need to work out where we are and where we need to be going. Caves can be notoriously tricky to navigate and getting lost in one is a mortal threat." She said poking the bag. Tiffany was a bit uncomfortable with the prodding. "I don't think our Pony Guide is available at the moment." She said with mild irritation. "Perhaps not" the hound muttered her mind racing through options. "Then unless you have another idea we are left to escape this place on our own. I've a bit of parchment we can use for mapping and I think we can collect some of these gems to ensure we have continual light. They may prove of value later for barter as well. How we do that with hooves I do not know." Tiffany then asked a more provacative question: "Where are the horses?" Somehow until now neither of them had thought to check for their more normal equine companions but their earlier searches revealed them to be completely absent. Sighing the Hound replied "Gone as far as we know. And the saddle bags along with them. Which means we have no food or water and the urgency to escape this cave just increased."

After walking for what seemed to Tiffany like hours and backtracking more than once the Hound called a sudden halt. While Tiffany was beginning to feel more comfortable after their awkward conversation during their explorations she still wasn't sure about this. She stopped all the same though feeling completely out her depth and more than a little nervous now that she had really had time to contemplate the situation. She heard a whisper form just in front of her. "Something is coming and it sounds very much like the hoofbeats we heard from the pony image earlier. listen". They listened quite intently as a bright light moving in their direction increased with the volume of the hoofbeats. Momentarily a grey pony shaped much like the one on the bag strode into view. It was wearing a yellow hat on its head from which the light emanated and appeared to carrying a pick of some kind. The creature appeared to take little notice of them and headed over to a seam in the cave and began chipping away with the pick.

After a prolonged and uncomfortable lack of conversation, Tiffany cleared her throat and said "Excuse me... we were sent here for directions? I think it was the pony Twilight, but I could be mistaken."

The miner continued chipping away, occasionally tossing rock fragments into one pile or another with the comment "interesting" or "boring". Finally it seemed to reach a decision, or at least a stopping point in its work, and turned to face the visitors.

"Twi sent you, and didn't explain what would happen next? Typical. She's always so impulsive."

Without further explanation, the miner pony went back to chipping away at rocks. Tiffany once again tried to take control of the conversation.

"So, ah, she said you would help us locate Gollum's Cave?"

Again, the miner stopped its work and turned to cast a bored look at the newcomers. "I suppose she also didn't stop to think how much more important my research is? Fine, let's get this over with. What is this cave you want to find?"

Tiffany and the Hound stumbled over each other's words explaining their quest. After another long, awkward silence the miner answered: "Never heard of this Gollum's Cave."

The two sagged with disappointment, only to be met with "... but I do have extensive maps of the entire underground cavern system."

Disappointment turned to hope as the pony unrolled a huge map and produced a pencil from... somewhere, holding the pencil in its mouth to point at locations on the map while muttering a rambling narrative.

"Let's see... you're here, with me..." -- stopping to draw little stick figures to represent Tiffany and the Hound -- and way over here is Gollum's Cave. Now, the shortest route appears to be this way..." -- a quick line with arrows was added -- "past Smurftown. Trust me, you don't want to go there."

"Are the Smurfs dangerous?" asked the Beast, assessing the security risk of this trip.

"I have no idea. But all they have is layer upon layer of clay and gypsum. No interesting rocks at all. Now, moving right along..." More elaborate routes followed, complete with directional arrows and occasional stick figures to represent the characters occupying that portion of the map. Tiffany's mind was a blur of Smurfs, dragons, magical ponies, and elves but the Beast seemed satisfied with the directions.

"I think we're good," assured the Beast, "except for one thing. Before we got here, we had other forms. This transformation is rather... disturbing. Is there anything we can do to get our natural forms back?"

"Seriously, Twi didn't even tell you that much?" demanded the miner pony. "She throws her magic around without any thought to the consequences. OK, look, it's not permanent. As long as you keep that form, time works differently. She probably thought you were in a hurry, so she gave you a form that can travel vast distances in what appears to be a few seconds to the rest of the universe. Any time you'd rather have your original form back, you just need to..."

Tiffany and the Beast were frantic with impatience. "... to do what? Quit stalling and tell us!"

The miner cleared its throat and continued "Sorry, all this rock dust gets in my allergies and makes it hard to talk. As I was saying..."