Allecto: fornication, cellophane, coat hanger, ear wax. Go!
Drew: with the exception of "fornication", they're all household words!
Allecto: well yes. but thanks to fornication, you can use them in new and interesting ways!

"Watch where you're pointing that thing!" Lance yelled, as Chris charged past waving a homemade battle-axe. The guys had gone to see The Lord of The Rings, and it was decided that since Chris was the shortest, that he would be Gimli, the dwarf. Lance was beginning to regret letting them play out such an elaborate version of the movie in his living room, but he realized that he couldn't stop it any time soon, and he found that he liked playing Legolas. The elf's logical mind appealed to him, as did the bow. Lance had a knack for projectile weapons.

Chris barked something back in what Lance recognized as Chris's most recent attempt at dwarvish. Lance shook his head as Chris charged ahead. Lance recognized the battle-axe -- it had once been a roll of tinfoil, one of his wire coat hangers, and a roll of electrical tape. It looked remarkably realistic. If you squinted really hard. He hoped his house would survive this little game.

The only problem was, the others weren't treating it like a game. They were completely and utterly convinced that Lance's entertainment center was throwing an avalanche down upon them to disallow passage. Lance grimaced as Joey knocked into the television after plowing through a wall of pillows. JC and Justin followed, padding along in green-cellophane capes with bread-knives at their sides. It was comical, really. JC and Justin, two of the tallest of the group, were hunching their shoulders over and huddling extremely close together, as though they were keeping each other warm. Or something.

Lance looked closely. There was something up with those two, how they'd squealed about how they had to be Frodo and Sam the entire time the Great Character Battle was going on. Which hadn't mattered a lot to the others, who were more worried about who they were going to be -- should Joey be Boromir or Aragorn? Why couldn't Lance please be Gandalf because they needed a wizard sooo much? What on earth had possessed Chris of the great berserker rage? And when had he had time to make the battle-axe? There was always the obvious question, which hadn't been asked until Lance looked around and said "um, guys? How the hell do we have a Fellowship of Nine when we only have five people?"

Four glares answered him.

* * *

Six hours later, Lance was finally as into everything as the rest of the guys were. Well, almost. He thought it might have been Chris's continued references to dwarvish ear wax and how they made candles out of it. Lance didn't believe him one bit. He hadn't read that anywhere in the books.

But there was no mistaking that their little adventure was only tangentially related to the books themselves. For instance, JC had a huge dilemma after they'd gone through Moria (under Lance's back porch) -- he wanted so badly to be Galadriel that eventually they'd relented and said Justin could sub for him, which had its own complications, mostly due to the fact that Joey thought Justin made a better Frodo than JC had been, which had led JC to un-bequeath his daughter (Lance, as a stand-in) to Joey and threaten the others with the Ring of Adamant. Chris protested this, "but we don't know you have the ring!"

"Oh, right. Whoops." was JC's unrepentant reply. And so the story kept most of the characters, but lead those characters on down to a full-on seige of the Dark Tower with "the Ring, the Sword, and our poppin' fresh dance moves!" Even when they had to pry the key to the city of Gondor out of the Steward's (a very disgruntled Justin) cold, dead fingers. Becuause "dude, he's a power-hungry weirdo! He's got to go! Besides," Chris continued, "Joey's got to take the throne!"

Even throughout the rest of the week, though, they kept on with the Rings identities, and when a not-quite-so-surprised Lance caught JC and Justin having slow, loving sex and calling each other Frodo and Sam, Lance tormented them the next morning by raising his eyebrow when they came downstairs and telling them, "um, guys? There's no fornication anywhere in the book."

JC just smiled.