Solid Frodo: Hobbit Espionage Action

Chapter 18: A Bit of Rope! We’ll Want It if We Haven’t Got It

The four Hobbits waited for a little while under the desk. Well, three actually—Frodo was far too deeply asleep to be considered ‘waiting’ for anything.

While they waited, they quietly discussed their plans over a ketchup-covered ration. "So," Merry said, "we’re going to have to get back to where we were before...the Communication Tower...."

Sam groaned. "Not them Wargs again! I’m getting mighty tired of Wargs you know."

"I think that handkerchief Otacon gave us will help. The one with the perfume? It’s pretty strong, it should make the Wargs think we’re Sniper Wolf."

"Just as long as I don’t have to go around in my unmentionables."

"I don’t think you will," Merry said reassuringly.

While they talked, Pippin got started writing out all the tengwar and tehtar on two sheets of paper. His handwriting wasn’t as sure as Frodo’s, nor as thin as Bilbo’s; it was actually a bit messy, but he was trying his best to make it legible. He usually tended to write quickly when he did at all. Sam glanced over and frowned. "Maybe you should let me do that, Otacon will want to be able to read them."

"I can write just fine, Samwise Gamgee!"

"Maybe so, but can you write legibly?" Sam countered.

"I suppose you think you can do better?" Pippin asked heatedly.

"Gimme the paper and let’s see," Sam said, taking the pad and pen out of Pippin’s hands. Then he set about making one page with the tengwar and tehtar, and his handwriting was very clear and deliberate, owing to the fact that he was rather proud of being a lettered Hobbit. He wrote a great many more tehtar than Pippin had, probably more than they would need, as a lot of them were used only in special cases or specific modes.

"Oh stop it, Sam," Pippin said, taking back the pad, "Otacon’s not going to need to know every single mode of tengwar used since Fëanor invented them! He only wants them for his curiosity I’m sure."

Sam made a face but said nothing more. Pippin decided to give the paper with Sam’s tengwar to Otacon and keep the one with his on it, since Sam’s letters were easier to read for the totally clueless.

Shortly the door opened and then closed. The conscious Hobbits quickly did their best to look invisible (and Sam did his best to hide Frodo), and as many Big People have discovered, they were quite adept at it.

Out of thin air, the Hobbits heard Otacon speaking. "Are you guys in here?" He must have been wearing his stealth camouflage.

The three Hobbits came out of their hiding spots when they heard Otacon’s voice. Merry said, "We’re here."

"Oh, you guys are really good at hiding," Otacon commented, then the Hobbits heard some rustling, and shortly Otacon became visible, right next to Merry, hiding as much of his long body as he could under the desk.

Merry squeaked slightly in surprise, but recovered quickly. "Hobbits have made a practice of being able to hide well whenever we feel the need."

"Oh. I guess that’s a useful skill. Where’s Frodo?"

Merry pointed back toward a corner, where in haste Sam had rather unceremoniously stuffed him. He was sitting up, or rather propped up, as he was leaning heavily to the side...and he was apparently so extremely asleep that he was drooling slightly. Otacon snickered. "I’m sure he’ll be quite pleased when he wakes up," he said, pointing out the little wet spot on Frodo’s cloak.

"Oh dear," Pippin said, smiling. "I’d wipe it up with his towel, but I think we’ll just leave the towel here; we’ll know where it is, since for some reason that seems important, but it has germs all over it."

"It wouldn’t do getting him sick again," Sam agreed.

"Anyway!" Pippin declared, "down to business. See, we’ve written up two lists of tengwar and tehtar...one for you and one for us. You can ignore all the extra stuff on your copy, Sam got a little tehtar happy." Pippin laid the two papers side by side so Otacon could easily write the Roman letters next to them.

"OK," Otacon said, "So I guess we’ll go through these...you sound them out and I’ll write the English letter next to them."

So for the better part of an hour, Otacon and the three Hobbits proceeded to make the two charts. A good deal of confusion on Otacon’s part occurred when they got to the tehtar, which were the vowels; he was having trouble wrapping his mind around putting vowels on top of consonants instead of just having separate letters for them the way the Roman alphabet did.

After they made the charts, just for reference, Sam wrote all of their names out in tengwar and Otacon tried to make sense of them. "Now this can’t be right at all!" he exclaimed. "You said your name was Samwise, Sam, but this says something totally different!"

"Wait wait wait...," Sam said, looking at what he had written. "No, I wrote it right. Pretty certain I can spell my own name."

"Hrmmm," Otacon muttered, then decided to write their names as he heard them in Roman letters: Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Peregrin Took. The Hobbits looked at them, and after carefully working them out (they had as much trouble with having separate letters for vowels as Otacon had with tehtar), they suddenly realized the names looked all wrong, except for Pippin’s last name, which looked only as if it had been spelled slightly off. But when they haltingly pronounced them, they sounded right to their ears.

"Now I am officially confused," Pippin declared.

"Only now you’re making it official?" Merry said.

Pippin promptly swatted Merry.

"So...what does this mean?" Sam asked, pointing at the Roman letters that supposedly spelled his name. "That is not my name...but it sounds like my name when I say it!"

"Let me try something else," Otacon said, and wrote a simple sentence for them. The Hobbits looked it over.

"That’s meaningless," Merry said.

"But what if we say it out loud?" Pippin suggested. So they did, and suddenly the sentence made sense.

Sam crossed his arms and looked distinctly unhappy. "I don’t get it."

"Maybe you guys have a Universal Translator or something?" Otacon suggested tentatively. "So when you talk it comes out in English to us, and when I talk it turns into, um, Hobbitish for you?"

"It’s called Kuduk," Merry informed Otacon, "not Hobbitish. It’s a dialect of Westron, with heavy ancient Rohirric influence."

"Now you’re just trying to confuse me."

"OK, nevermind the language lesson. We’ll just have to accept that for some reason while we speak two totally different languages, we understand each other, but that if we want to read something, we’ll just have to say it out loud. Apparently this doesn’t work in reverse though, if our names aren’t coming out the same for you Otacon." After a pause, Merry added, "Just as well, you don’t need to know what Frodo wrote on that paper the first time."

"Why don’t we try it though? Just because your names came out all garbled, doesn’t mean words would."

"OK," Sam said, and promptly wrote out the same sentence Otacon had, but this time in Kuduk.

Otacon looked it over, and after a few moments he said, "Nope. That makes no sense." Then he said it out loud, and shook his head. "It’s just sounds to me."

"It sounded right to us," Merry said, a little confused.

"One more thing. I’m going to write what your names translate to for me in English letters, and see if they look right to you," Otacon declared, then went about writing the Hobbits’ names as he translated them out of the tengwar: Maura Labingi, Banazîr Galpsi, Kalimac Brandagamba, Razanur Tûk.

The Hobbits looked at what Otacon had written, and they unanimously agreed that those were their names. Otacon threw his hands up in despair, as not one of those names except Tûk looked or sounded anything like the names the Hobbits had given him. He had the distinct feeling that it wouldn’t matter to the Hobbits if he said Maura or Frodo; they would hear both and think of their nominal Hobbit leader who was currently drooling on his cloak.

"Let’s just forget about it. This is giving me even more of a headache than trying to figure out how we ended up in this entire confounded situation," Pippin said. Otacon nodded vehemently in agreement.

"Anyway, thanks Otacon," Merry said, picking up the paper with Pippin’s writing on it. "It looks like we can use this to read your language if we have to."

Otacon glumly picked up the paper with Sam’s writing on it, folding it to place in his pocket. "This is interesting, but kinda useless for me. I’ll keep it anyway." He had almost hoped he could use the chart to translate Frodo’s first curse-ridden page and learn new and exciting ways to cuss at people without them realizing he was doing it. But he realized he would never be able to, since the paper had more than just a string of bad words on it...there was no way for him to know which was which, and he doubted the Hobbits would translate for him. "Well, I better be going. You should too...as soon as Frodo wakes up anyway." With that, Otacon flipped on his camouflage and left the room, followed by Hobbit goodbyes.

"As long as he’s asleep, I’m going to get those boxes and write what they say on them in Kuduk so we don’t have to try to figure it out every time we want to use them," Merry said as he scrounged around Frodo’s pockets for the boxes. When he found them, he carefully translated the words, said them so he would know what they meant, then scribbled the tengwar in tiny letters on the inside of each box. Merry had extra-small handwriting, which many Hobbits complained they required magnifying glasses to read. As soon as he was finished, Merry stuck the boxes back in Frodo’s pocket. For his part, Frodo didn’t even seem to notice.

After that the Hobbits waited somewhat impatiently for Frodo to wake up. It seemed the cold medicine was staying in his system a lot longer than the Valium had stayed in Merry’s. Eventually he did awaken, at which time he promptly smacked his head against the inside of the desk. Frodo made a rather strange noise that might have been "ow" as said by a toad with a sore throat.

"Are you feeling better, Frodo?" Pippin asked, while Sam helped him get himself out of the corner.

Frodo tried to answer, but again, the noises he made were very hard to decipher except perhaps by that toad mentioned earlier. He nodded, and seemed somewhat pleased that he could actually make noise now without hurting himself too badly, even if it was just toad-croaks.

Once he was out of the corner, Frodo groaned upon the discovery that he had been drooling and reached for the towel to wipe it up. But Pippin held the towel out of his reach and said, "It’s covered in germs. Do you want to catch a cold again?" Frodo shook his head and slumped, then settled for wiping his chin off with his glove. Then Pippin stuffed the towel under the desk since he didn’t think any of them needed to be carrying around a germ-infested towel.

Frodo looked at the paper and all the writing on it. He pointed at the Roman letters that only said the Hobbits’ names if they pronounced them. "Don’t worry about it. It’s really confusing," Pippin said.

Frodo took the pad and wrote on it, ‘What is this anyway?’

"It’s a chart so we can read all the strange words around here. We have to say them out loud though, or they don’t make sense," Merry explained. Frodo shrugged and took his word for it.

After a second to stretch, Frodo motioned the Hobbits out of the room, and they followed him carefully, glad he wasn’t sneezing anymore. They quickly made their way to the Warg cavern, and much to Sam’s eternal delight, having Sniper Wolf’s handkerchief made all the Wargs follow them around happy as clams with little hearts over their heads.

Soon they reached the underground hallway where they had fought Wolf and where Frodo had been captured. As soon as they passed by the spot where Meryl had been shot, their Codecs beeped, and they answered.

Colonel Campbell came on and said, "Don’t worry about Meryl...she knew the risks when she joined up."

"I don’t know ‘bout that Mr. Colonel sir," Sam said. "She said she joined to learn more about her father. I don’t think she wanted to be a soldier anymore than we want to...."

"She said that?!" Campbell asked in shock.

"Yeah," Pippin said.

"Huh...."

Frodo wrote something and showed it to the Codec vision, but that only made Campbell grumble. Merry translated. "He says he’s sorry we couldn’t protect Meryl. We are too."

Suddenly and for no apparent reason, Master Miller joined the conversation. "Don’t dwell on the past. You can have regrets, but don’t dwell on them. You need to keep moving on, stop the terrorists from launching that nuke."

Frodo narrowed his eyes and suddenly turned very pale, as if he had just realized something dangerous. He scribbled something fast on his pad of paper, and the other Hobbits all gasped as they read it.

"What is it?" Miller asked, confused.

"Nothing really important," Pippin said casually. "Just that he still feels bad about Meryl."

Master Miller looked uncomfortable, as if he didn’t quite believe them, but he could hardly read Frodo’s message to find out what he had really written.

Then, Mei Ling joined the conversation. "Don’t feel bad Frodo! For all we know, Meryl is fine, right?"

Frodo nodded.

"So just go stop Liquid, OK?"

"OK," Merry said, with a strange expression.

Then again, suddenly another participant joined the conversation. This time it was Naomi. "Meryl was pretty special to you huh," she said.

Frodo wrote something very fast, and Sam translated. "He says ‘Not that way!’. I think he’s still a little freaked by what Psycho Mantis made her say."

Merry added, "She was nice enough. Nicer than some people I know."

Naomi bristled. "So she doesn’t mean anything at all to you guys."

"Dr. Hunter, we just said she was nice! She helped us out, and we feel bad that she got shot up. So she’s like a friend," Pippin said.

"Oh c’mon, nothing more?"

"I’m NOT explaining this a third time!" Merry yelled. "JUST ACCEPT THAT HOBBITS DON’T LIKE BIG PEOPLE WOMEN THAT WAY!"

"You ask way too many questions, Dr. Hunter," Sam commented with a deep frown. "I hope that doesn’t mean you’re jealous or nothin’, because that would be really...ugh."

"If Hobbits don’t find Big People women attractive at all, imagine how we feel about Orcs!" Pippin growled.

Naomi was nearly snarling now. But Campbell interrupted her. "It’s probably in the genes. Naomi’s grandfather rose pretty high in the FBI."

"FBI?" Sam asked.

Campbell started rubbing his temples. "The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigations. They like to ask a lot of questions."

"Oh."

That little revelation launched a rather long and tense exchange between Miller and Naomi about her grandfather and what he did, where he did it, and many other things the Hobbits either couldn’t follow or didn’t want to bother trying to figure out. After several minutes of this, the Hobbits got rather bored and cut the Codec line, certain that the two wouldn’t even notice.

After that, the Hobbits took another look at what Frodo had written so hastily a few minutes ago. It looked like a rather shocking revelation. "So you mean to say that Master—mmmmph!!" Pippin said, cut off by Frodo’s hand clamped over his mouth.

Then the oldest Hobbit wrote quickly, ‘They can hear what we say. We have to write it.’

Pippin nodded, and took the paper. ‘So Master Miller is really Liquid Snake?! How do you know?’

Frodo wrote, ‘Remember when we called him the first time? He changed accents when he found out we weren’t Solid Snake. That new accent he had—his voice was just the same as Liquid Snake’s.’

Sam grabbed the paper and added, ‘So the DARPA Chief and Master Miller are really those FOX-HOUND guys?’

‘Yes...I saw Liquid Snake earlier, he thought I was his brother, like Solid Snake, except he said he thought I was a reject that he didn’t think had survived.’

Sam huffed. ‘That’s a bunch of nonsense and no mistake.’

Merry took the pad and added, ‘Should we tell the Colonel about this?’

Frodo wrote, ‘No, I think Liquid is listening in...I don’t think we should arouse his suspicions. He already knows that we know that they don’t have the launch codes.’

Pippin said out loud, "I wonder what he thinks he’s doing?"

‘I don’t know. Keep your ears open, we might find out if we pay attention.’

"OK, we can do that," Merry said, and the Hobbits carefully moved forward. This time they approached the door to the Communications Tower very carefully, just in case anyone was lying in wait for them. Fortunately there was no one, so they entered the doorway.

As soon as they entered, Sam found something he felt was always an important item for adventures. "Rope!" he said, picking up the coiled length. "Not as fine as the stuff the Elves made, but it’ll do in a pinch!"

Just as he pocketed the rope, an alarm went off and guards started pouring into the room. Pippin picked off a few with his SOCOM while the other three slashed at the remaining guards with their swords. For a brief moment the Hobbits were alone, and Pippin quickly took the opportunity of equipping the body armor. The alarm was still blaring.

"OK, I think I should go first and you last," Pippin said to Frodo. "I got the feeling there’s more guards coming. And since I have a gun and this armor, and you have the mithril, if Sam and Merry stay between us, they should be pretty safe."

Frodo nodded, and the other Hobbits agreed as well. As soon as they were situated, they went through the door. Pippin was right—the long tall stairway was crawling with guards...so they made a run for it, Pippin shooting down guards as fast as he could, while Merry and Sam tossed out Stun grenades, and Frodo took the rear, slashing at guards that got too close.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of stairs to climb, and they were all Big People sized, which made them somewhat difficult for Hobbits to run up with any real speed. Every now and again there would be a gun camera, so Sam would toss out a Chaff to keep the bullets spraying at them to a minimum.

After far too long (in the Hobbits’ opinion), they reached the doorway that would lead them to the next Communications Tower. They hoped that one wouldn’t be crawling with guards.

But the door sparked and buzzed, refusing to open. Then their Codecs beeped and Otacon came on. "Oh! I forgot to tell you, that door gets frozen shut a lot. We usually would bomb it with C-4 from the outside, but you can’t open it from the inside."

"Well that’s just fine and dandy!" Merry shouted. "Now what do we do?!"

"There’s a connecting bridge on the roof of the tower, use that!" Then he cut the line.

"Not more sta~irs!" Pippin complained.

"Yes, more stairs," Merry said, downcast. So, they psyched themselves up and made another long stair-climbing dash for the roof.

More guards were in the way, but eventually they made it to the top...and blessedly, the top floor was guard-free. Merry and Pippin grabbed all the ammunition and rations they could find, and each Hobbit had a ration to themselves, because in the flight up the stairs, they had all been hit a time or two by stray bullets. Once they were healed of their wounds, they went to a ladder and exited to the roof.

Once they were on the roof, it didn’t take them long to find the catwalk across to the other roof. There was a big tilted dish shaped object near the catwalk. The Hobbits made their way over there, but were taken by surprise and all tossed back quite a way when the dish exploded along with the catwalk!

"Now what!" Merry cried, picking himself up off the floor.

Then they saw it. The big metal dragon-helicopter, sword-blades whirling. A loud voice shouted out, "I won’t let you pass! I’ll kill the lot of you!"

"Who is that?" Sam asked.

Frodo hastily wrote, ‘Liquid Snake.’

"Ooooo! Now what do we do?" Pippin exclaimed, echoing Merry’s sentiment. The helicopter started moving toward the Hobbits, so they quickly ran in a different direction. Eventually they ended up next to the destroyed catwalk.

Pippin looked down and said, "I see a little walkway down there...I bet that’s where the broken door led."

Sam had a sinking feeling in his gut. "Well...," he said slowly, as the Hind-D hovered nearer, "we got some rope...I always say we’ll want it if we haven’t got it...looks like they conveniently left us some just for this very situation."

"WHAT?!" Pippin cried, "You can’t be serious! We are not climbing down there!"

Frodo wrote, ‘Yes, I think Sam’s right. And he better tie the knot right this time!’

Sam assumed a supremely hurt air. "I DID tied it right before! I told you them Elves made it so it would come loose if you called! I grew up with rope-braiding and knot tying, I know how to tie a good knot!"

"Go do it then," Merry said, "if we really truly have to climb down the side of this building."

With an uncharacteristically heated glare at Frodo, Sam went and found a good spot to tie the rope. He made extra sure to tie it well, and when he was certain the rope was secured fast to the roof, he came back and said, "OK, it’s done. Does any of you know how to rappel?"

Merry and Pippin’s wide-eyed looks said it all. They hadn’t a clue.

Sam sighed. "I only knows ‘cause we had to on the Emyn Muil once...but...I guess...I’ll...um...go first...and then you two, so you can watch me, and Mr. Frodo last, so you can watch him too...oh dear...."

"Don’t really want to do this, huh," Pippin said.

"Not in the slightest."

"Me neither."

Before they could procrastinate any longer, a hail of bullets from the steel dragon came down on them, and that was quite enough motivation to get all four Hobbits onto the rope with no delay.

Go on to Chapter 19