Our tale begins, as all good tales should, with a hobbit who was about to set out on an adventure. Now, hobbits are home-loving people, who tend to have adventure thrust upon them, rather than seeking it out. But in this respect, Ruby Fairweather was a somewhat unusual hobbit. Perhaps this stemmed from the fact that she was from Buckland, and as all Shirefolk from the other side of the Brandywine know, Bucklanders are a bit odd.

Ruby was the eldest daughter of a farmer and his wife whose farm lay on the narrow strip of land between the Brandywine and the Old Forest. Her elder brother Percy was a solid, sensible hobbit of 45 summers, well past his tweens and even the somewhat flighty, he donistic years of the late thirties where many hobbits had come of age but not of sense. In truth Ruby found him a little dull. Her younger brother Tobias was a harum-scarum youth who (the older hobbits in the neighbourhood agreed) was generally in need of a firm hand and some hard work to settle him down. Her younger sister Gentian was scarce out of the nursery (in Ruby's opinion), being a mere 16 years old.

Ruby had witnessed the scouring of the shire and been at one and the same time terrified by it, but strangely stirred. She had been most taken with the sight of magnificent, mail-clad hobbits wielding swords and sounding horns – though perhaps not taken in quite the same way as so many of the hobbit maids of her generation. Rather than swooning at the thought of their fair faces and bravery, she found herself fascinated by the promise of adventure and a life beyond the normal confines of the Shire which their appearance seemed to betoken. They had clearly seen great things and done great things, and Ruby found herself with a yen to follow in their footsteps.

However, dreams rarely become reality, and Ruby might have had to content herself with listening at second hand to the tales of the ring bearer and his companions, never getting her own adventure. But two events conspired to tip the scales in her favour. The first was the discovery that her friend Daisy's father having died during the lean times when the Shire was run by Sharkey's men, that Daisy and her mother were now trying to make ends meet by recourse to the age-old Buckland craft of lace making, and were looking for new markets. The second was her foolish younger brother getting himself into trouble.

She and her father found themselves accompanying Tobias to Brandy Hall, for a hearing with the Master of Buckland. Tobias had got himself involved in what he thought was simply a scheme to shift sheep around the shire to make (so he claimed to believe) the best use of available pasture, but which had turned out to involve a mixture of rustling and tax evasion. Father and daughter had pleaded for clemency for a first offence, and in the end Tobias had been fined (which his father had reluctantly paid) and bound over for the next year, having promised he would work as the family saw fit on their farm, or on family errands.

After the hearing, Ruby took to wandering the garden. The fine, though not punitive, would put a sizeable hole in family finances for the coming year. How on earth had her brother been so foolish? She took a willow switch and set to knocking the heads off dandelions. Thus engaged, she didn't hear footsteps behind her, and was quite taken aback to hear a voice. She jumped and turned to see none other than Mister Meriadoc Brandybuck (in tweeds, rather than armour).

"I believe," he said, "We are distant cousins. What brings you here?"

Blushing somewhat (for she felt the shame of her brother's actions somehow attached to her name as well) she found herself telling Merry the sad tale. And from there, she moved onto the general topic of how hard life had been under Sharkey (and how grateful she was that Merry and his companions had released the shire from bondage). And then to how many people had been hard hit by the difficult times, not least her friend Daisy and Daisy's mother.

And then, finally, encouraged by his gentle questioning, she hesitantly raised her hankering for adventure.

"But I suppose you must think it most foolish. After all, I'm only a girl, and a girl not long come of age," she said, her voice taking on a sad note.

"Nonsense. Age doesn't matter – after all my cousin Pippin wasn't much older when we left the Shire with Black Riders at our heels." He gave a shudder, and a dark shadow passed across his face. Giving his head a slight shake he continued. "And being a girl doesn't come into it either – the bravest person I met was the lady who let me ride behind her saddle into battle – and she killed the king of the Black Riders, too."

He paused for a moment, thoughtfully. "I have an idea. Come to the hall for second breakfast tomorrow, and bring some of Daisy's lace work with you."

He held out a hand and took hers, giving it a firm shake. Then he watched her as she left the garden to find her father and ne'er do well brother. With a faint smile he returned to his own rooms, where he pulled an old wooden chest from under the bed. Within it lay an elven cloak, a long dagger, long enough to serve as a small sword for a hobbit, and a quite beautiful horn. He ran his fingers across them thoughtfully. Perhaps a journey was in order.

Several hundreds of miles to the south, the woman who had given him the horn prepared to go on a journey of her own.

~o~O~o~

So, the idea behind this is that it's a 4thage soap opera. It'll just ramble a lot of the time, but tick off pretty much all of our favourite characters, with a host of other characters, many lifted from some of my previous stories. Every so often we may even stumble upon a plot arc by accident.

The chapters will be short, because I'm aiming for frequent updates, at least weekly and hopefully sometimes twice weekly. Because I'm aiming to entertain and distract and give everyone a bit of pointless frivolity to take their mind off stuff.