milliways_bar | (no subject)

Hermione shakes her head. "You played chess. With Smeagol. Possibly the most mentally disturbed person in fantastic literature. I'm surprised you're still alive."

Hermione pales at the thought. "I hope the Ring isn't here. Of all the things that could destroy the bar . . . Ron, do you know if Smeagol is dead?"

"Okay, what is this bloody Ring you're all on about and what's this have to do with books?" Ron asked them, his eyes narrowing. "And yeah, I think he's bit it."

Hermione breathes a sigh of relief.

“If he’s dead, the Ring was destroyed, too. And if it had come here with him, we would know about it by now.”

She turns to Ron.

“The Ring is . . . well, think of a dark lord, Ron. Something like Voldemort, only worse, because instead of being a wizard, he’s more like a god. He tricked the leaders of his world into accepting magic rings that they thought would make them more powerful, and they did. But he also made a ring for himself, in secret. He put all of himself into this Ring, all his cruelty, all his hatred, everything that made him evil and horrible, and in making the Ring he gained power over the other rings, which gave him enough power to wage war on Middle-earth and take it over."

She paused for breath, and a glass of water appeared on the bar. She drank from it gratefully.

There was a very pregnant pause.

"What?"

Why had this turned into storytime?

"What does all this have to do with Smeagol?"

Hermione looks a little sad.

"Sauron lost a very important battle when a human prince cut the Ring off his hand, leaving him bodiless and without power. Much like Voldemort after he tried to kill Harry the first time. And the prince, Isildur, could have destroyed the Ring, then - he was in the Dark Lord's country, by the volcano where the Ring had been forged, the only place it could be destroyed. He could have saved countless people's lives from being ruined . . . but that's what made the Ring so terrible. He didn't destroy it. He kept it. The Ring began to take over his mind the minute he saw it. It was insidious like that. No one, no one at all, could look at it and not immediately desire it.

Well, Isildur was attacked and killed, and the Ring fell into a river. For years, everyone thought it was lost forever . . . but then Smeagol's cousin Deagol found it, when the two of them were out fishing, and the first thing they did once it had been established that both of them wanted the Ring was try to kill each other for it. Smeagol won."

Ron's eyebrows nearly disappeared under his hair. "He...he killed his cousin?"

"In his defense, his cousin tried to kill him, too. And they were supposed to be great friends, before the Ring," Hermione says softly. "And really, considering what happened after that, Deagol got the better end of the bargain."

"He said he'd killed his friend," Ron said after a moment. "He seemed to feel so horrid about it though...I mean, the Ring thing makes sense then." Ron scratched at his templed. "But why's he acting this way? It's gone now, right? Shouldn't he be better?"

Hermione shakes her head. "The Ring doesn't just let go, Ron. It ruined him. It brought out everything bad in him and made it grow, until he had gotten so nasty and cruel that his family had no choice but to kick him out into the wild. By then, sunlight and moonlight caused him pain, and the Ring was beginning to speak to him in his head. He wandered through the wilderness until he found his way into a cave under a mountain, where there was no light to hurt him . . . and he stayed there for five hundred years.”

She takes a sip of water. She’s always pitied Sméagol, though she never actually thought about him much. She liked thinking about Faramir more, but that’s a different story entirely.

“The Ring doesn’t let its bearers die,” she explains. “And in all that time, it kept on changing him, driving him mad. It’s easy to go mad when you live alone in darkness, with only a voice in your head for company. The Ring turned him into a horrible little thing, barely recognizable as a hobbit anymore, all skin and bones and nastiness. That was Gollum.” She shakes her head. “He wasn’t pleasant.”

Ron held a hand over his mouth to keep himself from shrieking.

"You mean that nasty little goblin running around here before was him?" HE looked disgusted. "He was talking about eating baby birds in front of me. Bloody hell!"

Hermione grimaces.

"He ate much worse than birds," she says grimly.

"Anyway, after a few years a hobbit came along and stole the Ring. Gollum followed him. A whole other adventure started happening, and it would take hours for me to explain it all. Suffice to say the thief had left the Ring to his nephew, who was going to destroy it, and Gollum followed him, almost made friends with him, tried to kill him more than once, and died.”

She turns to Val. “And I suppose he came here afterwards, right?”

Val, who has been listening to all of this silently, nods. "I'm fairly certain he's from after all of that." She ponders for a moment. "He got here, and was very scared of everything, and wandered around as Gollum for a while. Moiraine healed him, then, and he went back to being Smeagol. However, I think he still has the mental scarring of Gollum." She shakes her head.

"It sounds like he does," Hermione agrees. "I can't believe you played a war game with him, Ron. I doubt he knows the difference between a game and real life anymore. Especially not when the object of the game is to keep something precious from being taken."

Ron's jaw dropped open in outrage. She was scolding him for it?

"How was s'posed to know he'd got mental over a chess game?" Ron asked her irritably.

Val sighs. "Alright, the question now, though, is what do we do about it for now." She quickly changes the subject from war games. She's not really wanting to deal with that right now. "Any ideas?"

Hermione thinks.

"Honestly? I have no idea why he would suddenly turn violent again, if he hasn't been acting that way before. I read Lord of the Rings a few times, but I didn't exactly study it. And I was more interested in F -" she pauses. "In other characters, when I did."

Ron's eyes narrowed. "More Interested in what?" he asked.

Val shrugs. "Beats me. I read it ages ago, and I didn't pay a lot of attention when I did. It was the same semester that we read Narnia, and I was a bit more interested in that." A shrug. "I shoudl read it again."

To Val, she says "I read it over the summer after my second year, when there wasn't really anything else to do. I'd read Narnia the year before. I think I liked Lord of the Rings better, but that may have been because it took me longer to get through . . "

To Ron, she says, "Um. Well, there was this one character, Faramir . . ."

Her eyes do not go starry as she says the name. Not at all. You are surely hallucinating.

She waves her hand suddenly. "It doesn't matter. We need to find someone who knows the Lord of the Rings much better than I do."

Ron snorted at the mention of this Faramir fellow, but his eyes were still narrowed.

Girls.

"Someone in here has to read more than you do," Ron said, a little nastily. "It is the bar at the end of the bloody universe, after all. There are plenty of freaks and aliens."

Val blinks at Ron. "Um, hate to tell you this, Ron, but between Hermione and I we probably read almost as much as the rest of the bar combined." She winks at Hermione. "Although, I have heard that there are vids of the books. Don't know if that would help at all, or if we'll just have to go back to the old-fashioned way."

"They made them into movies?" Hermione looks delighted. "Do you know if they're any good? I saw the old cartoon once and I laughed myself sick over it."

"That's be better than slogging through some boring old book, at any rate," Ron said, still sounding irritable.

"Ron, you don't have to be grumpy about it." She ponders for a moment. "I think Andrew might have the vids. Or I could just go home and grab copies of them. We should sit down and at least watch the relevant parts. It'll be a good refresher at any rate."

"Yes, that's a good idea."

Not that she's agreeing because she wants to see Faramir. Nope.

~~Besides, she'll be madly disappointed to the point of cursing the television into a million itty-bitty pieces when she does.~~