[Child of the 7th Age]

I shouldn't have come. I knew I shouldn't have come. This just proves it!

Child sat demurely in the corner throwing darts of mental venom back at Imp . Even so, she had to admit that Esty/H and Wilwarin's responses had shown considerable class, certainly more than her own.

Her personal talents did not extend to rhyming poetry. With a push and a shove, she could manage some blank verse where nothing had to match or rhyme, but her best hope for achieving any real recognition lay in her voluminous scholarly treatises that touched upon various obscure minutia in the context of Middle-earth. She had tucked one bulky volume under her right arm and brought it to the party as a present for the Wight. Child wasn't sure if the Wight had any interest in reading 1,373 pages on "The Wingless Balrog, or Why Fordim Hedgethistle is Definitely in the Wrong". However, the book could easily double as a heavyduty paperweight. Perhaps B-W could find another use for the thing, if Balrog reading wasn't his fancy.

Child sat in the corner and vegetated, chastising herself for her inactivity. She should be out circulating and mingling with the other guests, or at least serving the drinks as she had promised Esty/H. Instead, she was having a serious angst attack. Child squirmed in discomfort. Coming in your real personna had definite drawbacks. No character in Tolkien that Child had ever read about had serious attacks of angst. Frodo, it was true, sometimes had little ones, but at least his case had extenuating circumstances. All the other 'good' book characters were generally quite sure of themselves. So where did that leave her? Her RPGs read like Middle-earth soap operas, with half the battles taking place deep inside her character.

For one minute, Child had a horrifying thought: What if she didn't belong in Tolkien's Middle-earth at all? What if she really belonged in Peter Jackson's move? Come to think of it, her RPGs and fanfiction read a lot more like the cinema version than anything Tolkien had set down on paper. Child shuddered uncomfortably and made a mental note to hide her stories from Davem and Lalwende lest they brand her with the tag "movie fan", a fate almost worse than death within the confines of the book forum.

Unwilling to face this grim prospect, Child wrenched her thoughts back to the barrow and went off in search of Esty/H to see if she could help pass out drinks.