[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The magic on the self-refilling flask ran out about four hours after the inexpilicable road accident. He would have needed a stiff drink anyway after seeing his long-lost ex-girlfriend run over by a lorry right in front of him, but this was compounded by the fact that he had never seen a lorry before (hardly surprising, since they hadn't yet been invented), and had always thought it to be a sort of bird. He would have got more information out of the driver prior to hanging him with his own intestines, but the mysterious machina ex machina had disappeared as suddenly as it had turned up, leaving only a sadly ironic sign that read "How am I driving?" and quoted a telephone number that would be unusable for several thousand years.

So it was that the combined forces of new and terrifying developments, personal tragedy and time-travelling commercial vehicles had led to his draining ten years' worth of re-filling magic in one night. As dawn broke across the black rocks around him it fell on a bedraggled figure in the once-fine but tattered sable raiment of the heroic noble escapee sitting in front of the castle gates, snoring and dribbling onto his tunic.

He was awoken by one of the fortress' cats using his ear as a latrine, which elicited an oath so foul that it had been known to frighten trolls. It certainly frightened the cat, which never from that day forth moved more than twenty yards from a litter tray. After a breakfast made from the last dregs of enchanted hooch he switched to a flask of plain Miruvor that had been sitting in a hidden pocket since a long-ago trip to Dor Sumyewinion. It was the best of the liquor he'd been carrying, and it served to lighten his spirits from planning suicide to merely contemplating it; for such is the strange property of Elven vintages that they only ever make a man into an amusing drunk.

He had lost his horse, his sword and his lady love, along with his wallet and most of his clothes. He had absolutely nothing of value that could be pawned, no money, no transportation, no food and no water. On a crisis scale of one to ten this was about a seven in the history of Lord Etceteron's wanderings, but it became a nine when he finished the last of the alcohol around lunch time. So his companions found him, just as the last drop was drunk.

*******

He answered their questions as best he could, as they answered his. Oragarn Two was livid.

"What?!" He exploded. "I come traipsing over half of creation with a bag of mixed nuts and the Workmud branch of Alcoholics Anonymous; I don't find my wallet, get ignored half the time, and on top of everything our main enemy has a change of heart and gets run over by a hitherto-uninvented vehicle before I even get here! Are all my quests doomed to end thus in anticlimax?"

"Maybe," replied Earnur blandly. "You haven't seen my horse, have you?"

"We found your saddlebags near the skirmish," replied Merisuwyniel sadly. "Your mount was nowhere to be found."

"And Pasdedeux is missing too. Perhaps we're being stalked by international horse thieves." suggested Vogonwë.

"Hmmph," snorted the Dwarf. "Thieves? Chrysophylax has been hungry lately. If anyone got past him then I'm a garden ornament." He was not amused, as somehow someone had removed his best red-and-black map of the world at some point during the fracas, and he was by no means sure that it was the MoreScenarios who had taken it.

"Has anyone anything to drink?" asked the Lord of Dun Sóbrin hopefully, and Kuruharan, never one to turn down an easy sale, took out his best bottle of "Nurse Tremblin's Multi-Purpose Surgical Foot Ointment" (most efficacious against warts, corns, verrucas and, if misapplied, standing upright); but the great lord of drunkards frustratingly changed his mind. "No, it is hopeless," he sighed annoyingly. "No wine can ever salve these wounds, and anyway I want to enjoy not having that sword sober."

"One drink won't hurt" guessed the Dwarf, but he had lost the audience.

For Etceteron had launched into the full tale of his capture and events afterwards (leaving out the volcano, the cat and the poetry he'd written after his first meeting with She). He told of the end of Wylkynsion (related in her final moments by Vinaigrettiel); of the great palace, the foetid cells and She's weird taste in decor and weirder end. Then he asked "Does anyone have a horse?" at which Tofu sidled quietly out of the way: he had been getting used to wandering along without anyone much noticing him, mulling over lines from Juvenal's satires to himself, and was in no mood for more manliness just yet.

"Nobody?" continued Earnur. "Oh well; the time has come to complete our quest!" he preambled unnecessarily. "Behold the stolen Entish artefacts, torn from the torsos of our foes!"

The Foozle, the Entish Bow and a number of assorted pieces of dead wood were revealed as he stood up. They were sitting in a puddle that smelled a little funny, but Ents are used to that sort of thing.

"Gather these assorted objects and gird yourselves for further travelling!" announced the scarecrow of a hero. "For now we seek to re-make the Ent that was Broken and maybe get me a new sword!"

And so we leave them, shrouded in the stench of their Entish accoutrements and awaiting further developments heroically.