Chapter 1: In which our heroine gets lost in some caves.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Lord of the Rings, just in case you thought for some weird reason that I did.

As anyone who's waded through my previous fic knows, I like playing things for laughs. But I've had a couple of ideas for (shock, horror) serious fics which I'm going to try to play straight. So I need an outlet for my tendency to silliness, and this fic is it. Any time I feel the need to joke around, I can write another chapter of this, thus leaving me free to explore post battle traumatic stress and doomed love elsewhere.

Any resemblance to any real Legomances out there is of course entirely non-accidental. Because, let's face it, the bad ones outnumber the (very few) good ones about 10 to 1! (Which is not to say that there aren't the occasional very good ones which are a joy to read – but, my goodness, they're rarer than hen's teeth).

Heads up for those of a delicate disposition: In the pursuit of a cheap laugh I will exploit any pairing (canon or non-canon, het or slash) that I think might prove amusing/subversive. However, in keeping with the T rating, I promise nothing explicit. But if you don't like references to wildly unlikely pairings (even in jest), this may not be the fic for you.

I've often wondered how Charlize and I ended up as friends. I'm quiet, maybe even a bit nerdy, keep my head down, work hard at school, manage to get okay marks, nothing spectacular, but good enough. Charlize on the other hand. Well, she's the archetypical wild child. The cool kid – in fact, the too-cool-for-school kid. She's pretty, and a bit flaky, but kind and funny. Mostly she lives in a world of her own imagination. And a lot of the time, that world is Middle Earth. She's wildly in love with Legolas, of course. Film version, naturally. I don't think she's actually read the books.

The day our, or rather, her story started, we were in a double maths lesson. Charlize hated maths lessons. She hated them even more than she hated English, History, Business Studies, IT. In fact she hated them almost as much as she hated sports lessons. And sport was something that really sucked, in her opinion. All that getting hot and sweaty. It made her hair lank. Her face went red and unattractive. There was the ever-present risk of breaking a nail. Eww. Viewed that way, maybe maths wasn't so bad. At least she could stare out the window.

So stare out the window she did. In the distance, on the edge of the school field (scene of aforementioned pink and sweaty humiliation and nail-breaking incidents) was a stand of trees. I felt as though I could read her mind. It wasn't hard to guess that the trees were being woven into her favourite fantasy, the one in which she was a beautiful wood elf with violet eyes and waist-length golden curls. (Yes, I have pointed out to her that no-one has violet eyes. No, it hasn't made a difference. She just says what's the point of having a fantasy unless you make it a good one). And a flowing, figure-hugging dress of soft white silk with a silver girdle – Charlize devotes endless amounts of time to thinking about the clothes she might wear. Personally I go for whatever's on top of the heap in my drawer and looks like it isn't too crumpled. But of course, today we were in school, so neither of us looked our best, in shapeless polyester school trousers and crumpled white shirts and a tie of a hideous and peculiarly vivid green – one fashion issue we do agree on is that we both look terrible in school uniform.

Charlize has told me about her fantasy so many times I feel like I could tell the story myself. It's the one in which her amazing martial arts skills save the day time and time again, and earn her first the respect, then the undying devotion and love of Legolas Greenleaf. Needless to say, Charlize has not realised that Greenleaf simply is the English translation of Legolas. And of course, given her attitude to sports, she doesn't actually possess any martial arts skills either. But I digress.

Back in the classroom, her reverie was abruptly and annoyingly interrupted.

"Miss Jones, would you care to tell us whether we should use the sine or cosine of the angle to solve this particular problem?"

I could see Charlize reassessing her list of most hated lessons. Suddenly, maths went back up into the number one spot, ousting the hated PE lessons, no matter how hot and sweaty they made her. I surreptitiously scribbled 'sine' on the back of my notebook just as Charlize said "Cosine." The wrath of Mrs Stone descended on her, scarier than the legions of Sauron before the black gate. Extra homework was duly awarded.

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

Given the extra homework, I was a bit surprised when, 10 minutes after I got back from school, Charlize called. Though thinking about it, I probably shouldn't have been. She'd probably cobble something together during register next morning. Charlize was not one for letting something as mundane as homework cramp her style. However, her next words really were cause for surprise on any understanding of the word: she suggested a bike ride in the country. Charlize, who never does any exercise, whose idea of a hobby is trawling round endless (and I mean endless) clothes shops in Manchester city centre on a Saturday.

"Where to?" I asked, thinking we'd probably go as far as the local park where she'd hang out eyeing up the lads on the skateboard park while I died of boredom.

"Alderley Edge," she replied.

"Come off it Charlize, quit messing. That's a good 6 or 7 miles each way and you hate cycling."

"No, it'll be fun. The weather's nice, it won't get dark for hours yet, we can go and explore the caves..."

"You... caves … dark... mud … spiders," I said, then did my best computer-voice imitation, "Does – not – compute."

"No, seriously, I've got a brilliant idea. But I need to go to Alderley Edge to put the plan into action."

And that's how I found myself trundling along the Cheshire lanes, past fields of cows and expensive houses with footballers' flashy cars parked outside them, while Charlize puffed and panted and sweated on a naff pink bike that she'd outgrown a few years back but hadn't been bothered enough to replace. While we cycled, she explained the plan. Even by Charlize's mad-cap standards, this one was outstanding. Outstandingly dumb, that is.

I knew she read loads of fan fiction. She particularly loved those 100,000 word plus, multi-chapter epics where someone with violet eyes, wearing a floaty white silk dress (yup, that's right, it wasn't even her own imagination that concocted her favourite maths-lesson-fantasy) fell into Middle Earth, fell out with Legolas (because every Legomance needs a bit of ramping up of sexual tension), saved his life in battle and eventually married him. I have to admit I love them too, albeit for rather different reasons. There's something hypnotically addictive about the bad spelling, atrocious grammar and general crimes against the English language. They make Dan Brown look like Joseph Conrad. And that's before you get to the hilarious anachronisms. I mean, the books are modelled on a Saxon and Medieval world (with a side order of Roman architecture in Gondor and Norse mythology), and yet some of these writers have zip fasteners, electric light switches and bras (I'm still looking for brain bleach to erase my memories of the scenes involving the removal of ye genuine olde worlde Medieval brassieres).

But she'd really lost the plot this time (assuming there had ever been much of a plot there in the first place, which generally there wasn't). She thought that by recreating some of the opening scenarios for girl-drops-into-Middle-Earth stories, she'd actually manage to get there herself. Totally crazy. And the one she favoured for today's little adventure was that good old standby, "Girl gets lost in caves and wanders around until eventually she stumbles across the Fellowship and realises she's in the Mines of Moria, by which time she's so frightened, in a bravely-trying-to-hide-her-fear-while-biting-her-l ip-endearingly sort of way that Legolas just has to hold her in his arms and soothe her to sleep."

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

It was about 5.30 when we finally got to the Edge, that peculiar, wooded, beached whale of sandstone outcrop rising above the otherwise flat Cheshire Plain. We cycled through the village of Alderley and then set off up the road that runs up the slightly gentler slope round the back of the hill.

I waited half an hour at the top of the Edge while Charlize wheeled her bike up the road. I'd suggested taking the path straight up through the woods, but Charlize had voted that too steep even to push her bike along. We padlocked our bikes by the style, and hopped over a style onto one of the myriad paths that threaded their way round the top of the Edge. I knew my way around pretty well; I quite often cycled out this way with my brother, and had been mucking around there since childhood. Many of our games involved elves and dwarfs, but not Tolkien's (my spelling of 'dwarfs' may have tipped you off); in our games, we wriggled through caves and pretended we'd rescued the Weirdstone of Brisingamen and were going to raise Arthur's sleeping army of Knights to ward off the forces of evil in our world, not Middle Earth. But we'd grown out of those games a few years earlier. However, the layout of the top of the Edge was still clear in my mind. We emerged from the fringes of the sparse trees on its flat top, and onto the red sandstone outcrop above the scarp slope. Slithering down the sandy path, we crossed under the cliff and found the most impressive of the cave systems. I say 'most impressive' because this particular cave had a large entrance, though in fact the tunnels didn't penetrate that far into the hillside.

Charlize produced a torch from her bag.

"Stay here, Sophie. I need to do this on my own." I interpreted this to mean "Even though you're geeky and nowhere near as pretty as I am, there is no way I'm risking Legolas falling for the wrong girl." She switched the torch on and set off down the sandy slope into the mouth of the cave, disappearing round a corner into the darkness of the left of the two tunnels. I settled down with a book (by an odd coincidence, another of Alan Garner's, only set in Wales this time – The Owl Service) and waited.

After three quarters of an hour I started to feel a bit worried. After an hour, I decided I had to do something. I got my own torch out and started to explore. My brother and I had been down this particular set of caves when we were younger. I knew that all the tunnels led to dead ends, so I searched them systematically, starting with the left hand one which I'd seen Charlize go down. To my surprise, she wasn't there. I felt a bit unsettled, scared even, but told myself that there had to be a rational explanation. I'd been so absorbed in my book, perhaps I'd not noticed her emerge from one and go off to explore another. I set off down the other tunnel, one hand running down the dusty, cold sandstone wall as I went, the other holding the torch. It didn't take long for me to reach the end of the tunnel. A blank wall of red rock greeted me. No sign of Charlize here either.

I was starting to get really scared now. Where the hell had she gone? I turned to make my way out. I'd have to call the police, get the cave rescue out. Perhaps she'd sneaked past me and gone looking elsewhere on the Edge, for a more extensive cave system. Some of them were quite large, with hidden sink holes and drops she could have got trapped in. And at the back of my mind was the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, her madcap scheme had worked. Surely it couldn't have. Maybe I was going as crazy as she was. I had a vision of myself, standing awkwardly in front of a police officer and Charlize's parents, trying to explain that she'd gone to Middle Earth because she had a crush on a fictional elf.

Just as I reached the entrance, a piercing scream rent the silence. It came from the left-hand tunnel, the one I'd explored first, the one that had been empty moments earlier. My heart started to race and my mouth went dry with fear. My instincts told me to run like crazy, but gathering what little courage I had, I went back down the tunnel, the beam from the torch dancing around like mad as my hand shook. I turned the corner, and almost fell over Charlize. She was unconscious on the ground. Running from her cheek to her jawbone was a set of scratches, which looked as though they'd been made by fingernails. I knelt beside her. As I knelt to feel for a pulse, terrified that I might not find one, she gave a loud groan and her eyes flickered open.

"Oh god, that was awful. Get me home..."

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

It took me ages to worm the story out of Charlize. Eventually she told me. (I had to promise to let her copy my maths homework for the next month).

She had stumbled down the tunnel. Unlike the real tunnel in our world, this one went on for a long time, several hundred yards. Suddenly she came out into a brightly lit hall, torches hanging from sconces. The hall was filled with the sound of voices and merrymaking. She realised that the merrymakers were in fact dwarves. Delighted by the apparent success of her plan and spurred on by the prospect of meeting her beloved elven prince, she strode up to the dais at the top of the hall where what she presumed was the dwarf king sat in state with his highest courtiers.

"My lord king," she said, sweeping a low curtsey. She paused, surprised to find her voice a little deeper and hoarser than normal. Perhaps the dust in the tunnels. She coughed in an attempt to clear her voice, then continued, "I am a stranger, come to your world by the grace of the Valar." (Yes, that sounded convincing, never heard that line before). "Would you, of your courtesy, do me the honour of telling me where I am, and what year this is?" (Getting into the swing of things now, any moment now, she'd start adding 'eth' to the end of words completely at random).

"My Lady, you are in the Hall of the Mountain King beneath the Lonely Mountain, in the year 3018 of the Third Age."

"What month? I must know whether I am in time to get to Rivendell in time for Lord Elrond's council," Charlize said, her voice still sounding strangely husky. She looked up at the dwarf. Strange, in her fantasies she had always looked down on him, her elegant elven stature lending an imposing gravitas to her appearance. Maybe the dais was higher than she thought.

"It is the month of June. You may, if you wish, travel in the company of Gimli son of Gloin, who goes to the council on behalf of our people." (Yeah, right, she drops in from nowhere, but the King's going to send her off to a top secret meeting in Rivendell, no questions asked...) The King continued, "A Lady as beautiful, as clearly virtuous, as supremely wise and benevolent as yourself should not travel the northern wilds alone."

"Why, your majesty, you are too kind..." Charlize simpered.

"But surely you must realise how beautiful you are, beautiful beyond compare. Your eyes, of a gem-like violet, the like of which I have never seen before. Your hair, like the purest spun gold. Your skin, so delicate and glowing, like blossom under the light of the moon."

Charlize felt a blush rise to her cheeks. The King continued, "And the lusciousness, the luxuriance, the exquisite softness of your beard..."

Charlize's hand flew to her chin. Sure enough, it sprouted an amazing, thick, bushy growth of hair. Suddenly it all fell into place – her hoarse, deep voice, her stature. She was a dwarf. With a shriek, she fainted.

Coming up next: Chapter 2, in which our heroine falls from a horse...

I hope I don't offend any writers of Legomances. After all, I've written a Legomance (only a couple of chapters left to go). One in which Galadriel has an i-pad. And Legolas gets to remove a bra (having first had an argument to ramp up the sexual tension). And I get a joke about an MPreg to run and run way beyond the point at which any sane writer would have changed the subject. So hopefully you'll forgive me on the grounds that I'm prepared to send myself up along with everyone else.

You all know the drill... if you like it, write a review. Then I'll know whether to bother with some more chapters.