“Damn his bloody buggering omnipotent hide!”  Legolas turned and looked at Rhiannon, whose face was a picture of anger.  He was surprised, not because Rhiannon was angry, but because Rhiannon had a rather extensive vocabulary of swear words that would curl the toes of a hardened warrior.  She was putting that vocabulary of society’s worst to the test now.  She didn’t repeat herself.  “I’ll rip his inbred, smarmy face off and smear it with excrement if he ever shows his face around here again!  Use me for amusement, will he?  Not in this lifetime!  You hear me, Shit-fer-brains?  I’ll…” the tirade, questioning Fred’s lineage and his relations with any siblings, continued until Rhiannon felt a pressing need to breathe.
        When she paused, a voice emerged from thin air.  “Well done!” said the cheery voice of Fred.  “Keep up the good work!”  Rhiannon would have most likely exploded if Legolas had not put his hand on her shoulder again.
        Vicky was sitting on her bed, not sure what to make of the whole thing.  Firstly, an Elf had slept in her bed last night, and she hadn’t been there to enjoy it.  Secondly, and most to her chagrin, this Elf, who was probably the hottest male specimen she had ever laid eyes on, seemed to be enamoured with her eldest sister.  Thirdly, this whole fiasco seemed to be the whim of an omnipotent being named Fred who was bored out of his non-corporeal existence and who found their family “interesting”.
        Riiiiiiight…Someone’s on crack.
        Her mind had made it to absorbing the fact that an Elf had slept in her bed and she hadn’t been there when Vicky realized that Rhiannon had worked herself up into quite the hysterical frenzy and when Legolas put his hand on her shoulder, she actually calmed down.  It wasn’t a slow change from extremely angry to particularly placid.  It was practically instantaneous, something that, in those rare moments when Rhiannon got angry, almost never happened.  Normally she’d brood about it for a day or two before forgetting about it, but when Legolas touched her, it was as though someone had poured a lake over a bonfire.
        Interesting indeed.
        “Well,” Rhiannon said after a brief embarrassed moment.  “Why don’t you try those clothes on, your Highness?”  Her face was slowly returning to a more normal colour, although Vicky had the sneaking suspicion that it would not stay that way for long.
        Legolas nodded and Rhiannon retrieved the bundle of clothing from her bed, where she had placed it.  The clothes, Rhiannon noticed as she passed them to the resident Elf, were black, which was typical for Clayton.
        “I guess you can go into the closet to change,” Rhiannon suggested.  What she called the closet wasn’t really a closet, but more of a separate room with a thin wooden door.  There was a small window at the far end, the window from which Rhiannon had made her wish, and a fold out desk that was built in when the house was built.  Next to that desk were Vicky and Athena’s dressers.  The girls called it the closet because of the bars built into the sloping walls for hanging things on.  Rhiannon had a good many dresses stored in there.
        It was in the closet that Legolas found himself confronted with twenty-first century clothing.  It wasn’t how the clothes worked, for that was obvious, but rather the material and the make.  He had never before felt such fabrics, nor seen them with such a cut.  Nor, as he realized as he slipped on the long sleeved shirt, had he ever worn something with an open neck such as this.
        To his further discomfort, he found himself at the mercy of a zipper.  He had no idea what it was, and as he worked out the purpose of it, had a very near miss that would have caused him great pain if he hadn’t caught it time.  Great, inordinate pain.
        He heard laughter coming from the main attic, and with his acute hearing surmised correctly that Athena had returned and the other two girls were telling of the mishap with Tom Jones and Fred, the omnipotent being.  He chose that moment to step out of the closet.
        Laughter cut off abruptly.  Three heads swivelled to stare.  Three jaws dropped at practically the same moment and three identical looks were shot his way.
        “Well?” he asked, acutely aware that the three girls were staring at him with wide-open surprise.  “Does this suit the tastes of this time?”  Dead silence greeted him.  Until…
        “Hot damn!” Athena breathed from her place at the top of the stairs.
        “Wow!” Vicky exclaimed a moment later from her bed.
        Legolas turned to Rhiannon to judge her reaction.  She was just staring at him, mouth open, eyes glazed over while her mind tried to get things running again.
        “Rhiannon?” Legolas asked worriedly a moment later.  She still hadn’t said anything.
        “Mur,” said Rhiannon, eyes fixated on a particular part of his body.  Athena caught the direction of her sister’s gaze.
        “Yo, Leggy, you’re supposed to do up the button at the top,” she said, her own face turning a variant of Rhiannon’s own red.  Legolas looked down at himself with a baffled expression.
        “Button?” he asked, ignoring for the moment the abbreviation of his name.  They had clasps and broaches in Elvish clothing, but he had never encountered modern buttons before, especially one at the top of a zipper.  These clothes were just full of surprises.  He had no idea how much Rhiannon would have agreed with him if she had heard that thought.  Legolas looked up again to see that the three girls all had smiles upon their faces and were trying very, very hard not to burst into giggles.
        “You put it in the hole,” Rhiannon said remembering how to speak.  That didn’t last long as she realized what it was that she had just said.  There was a shocked silence and Athena and Vicky turned to stare at Rhiannon, who looked as though she wanted to crawl into a hole and then stay there for the rest of her natural life.
        Legolas looked at each of them in turn, Rhiannon longest of all. Why did these girls have to know about that?  Things would be easier, not to mention less embarrassing for Rhiannon, if they didn’t know about that.  Mustering his dignity, he retreated back into the closet simply out of need to get away from their stares and to work out for himself exactly how buttons worked.  These females are unusual, he thought.  Leggy?  No one had ever called him that before.
        When he once again stepped out of the closet, to a suspicious silence, he found that the three girls were on each of their respective beds, trying very hard, it seemed, not to laugh.  Apparently there had been some sort of whispered conversation among them that Legolas hadn’t picked up on, but whatever had been said, it had been humorous.
        From her spot on her bed, Rhiannon had quite the view of the newly clad Legolas.  He looked damned good in black.  Really damned good.  Borrowed black jeans, borrowed black shirt, and his own dark leather boots completed the out fit, and seemed to make the blue of his eyes all the more vibrant.  Hot damn!  She thought, echoing Athena’s earlier statement.  Ye Gods, he is hot!    A slight stab of guilt brought her back to her senses.  You barely know him, Rhiannon, she said to herself.  Get over this.  He’s just a pretty face.  But even as she said this to herself, she knew it to be a lie.  Legolas had a depth to him that she had never encountered before.  He looked so young, and yet he felt so old.  He had the grace of old age, this Elf.  She wondered how old he actually was.  But she was right about one thing; even in twenty first century clothing he looked out of place.  He wore his borrowed clothes much as he wore his own, with a sense of one who could meld into a forest at a moment’s notice and of a glimpse of something that was lost long ago.
        “Oh, lunch is ready,” Athena said, finally delivering the news she had come up to deliver and startling Rhiannon out of her thoughts.
        “What are we having?” Rhiannon asked, wrenching her eyes away from the black-clad Elf Prince.
        “Kraft Dinner.”
        “Oh boy.”

         Five minutes later, they were standing around the dinning room table, watching as the three boys seated themselves.  Rhiannon’s father was still asleep, and the boys, for once, were being well behaved and quiet.
        Legolas was wondering exactly what this ‘Kraft Dinner’ was.  Neither Rhiannon nor her sisters had explained what to expect, although, Legolas realized, in this world of Men where he had appeared, expecting anything would be fruitless.
        It was at about that moment that Athena emerged from the kitchen carrying a pot.  A smell wafted before her that Legolas had never encountered and he hoped beyond all hopes that he would never find himself at its mercy again.  Looking in the pot only made his disgust at the ‘food’ stronger.  They eat maggots?
        Some of his horror must have been reflected in his face because Rhainnon shot him a sympathetic look and vanished into the kitchen while motioning him to follow.  When he caught up, Rhiannon was spooning a stew from another pot into a glass bowl.  She put a spoon in it and handed it to him.
        “Don’t worry,” she said.  “We only make the boys eat that stuff.  They like it, although I don’t know why.  We get stew.  Smells like dog food, but it tastes good.”
        What kind of food did Men eat these days?  How could they eat it?  Sickly-yellow maggots?  Dog food?  He asked Rhiannon the same question, and to his further surprise, she laughed.
        “Those aren’t maggots,” she said between giggles.  “They’re noodles.”  She laughed again, the conversation reminding her of the argument that she had had with David the day before.  She smiled at the Elf’s perplexed expression.
        “Noodles?”
        “I’ll explain later.  Right now, eat your stew.  If you need more, there’s some in the pot on the stove.”  She put the pot down, ignoring Legolas’ questioning look about the appliance.
        Legolas followed her out into the dinning room again, holding the bowl of stew as though it was going to bite him.  He normally wouldn’t have questioned the food his hosts served, but one look at the ‘Kraft Dinner’ and Rhiannon’s comment about dog food made him forget his manners.
        As they ate, Rhiannon was consistently looking over her shoulder, hoping to any deity that cared that her father would not grace them with his presence.  It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father, more that he wouldn’t be too forgiving of an Elf who appeared in her bed in the middle of the night, whether or not it was at the whim of an omnipotent being named Fred.  Going spare would be the least of it.
        Athena mentioned that their father wouldn’t even notice Legolas if he were to walk in, because it takes a while for people to notice something that they’re not expecting.  Seeing a living Elf in their dinning room, even one wearing borrowed clothes, would definitely fall under the category of ‘unexpected’.
        Rhiannon considered this.  Yes, seeing Legolas would be unexpected, but then her father had noticed him before.  But since Fred had revealed himself, Rhiannon was unsure as to whether any of their behaviour was their own or prompted by the omnipotent pest.  Nothing was certain anymore.  An omnipotent being wanted amusement and was willing to hang around their house to get it.  Being immortal must really get dull.
        Their lunch continued uninterrupted, even with Legolas staring distrustfully at the pot of Kraft Dinner on the table in between mouthfuls of stew and Wesley and Duncan arguing about who won their Pokemon trading card game.  No surprised visits from paternal parents going ape occurred, much to the relief of Rhiannon.

        When lunch was over, and everything was cleaned up and put away, the three girls and the Elf secreted themselves away in the attic, where Rhiannon packed for school.  As she packed, she brooded on how she was going to tell Legolas of all the strange and new things in their world, and suddenly realized that she couldn’t.  No one could.  There was no telling what would happen to the past should they explain anything of what was going on to the Elf.  It could drastically alter the timeline.  Her mood grew slightly gloomy as she realized that she was going have to tell the Elf that if they tried to explain the various developments Mankind had made since he had been aware of them last, they would either have to kill him or have Fred erase his memory of his time here when he was returned.  She soon had to do just that.
        Legolas had been staring at all the pictures on her wall, and was wondering how they had come about.  To the best of his knowledge, he thought they were simply paintings of great and wonderful skill, the like of which he had only seen from the hand of the most ancient and skilled Elvish artisans.  He asked Rhiannon about them, and was surprised when Rhiannon declined to explain how they were done.
        “If you go back and tell all your Elvish artisans about everything we’ve done, it’ll wreck the timeline,” Rhiannon said.  “We may never be born, thereby cancelling out your visit, and resulting in the restoration the previous timeline, only so you could come along and bugger the whole thing up again.”
        Legolas stared at her as he attempted to absorb this.  “Your pardon, Lady?”
        “A paradox will bite ‘ye up the ass.”
        “A pair of what?” Legolas asked, wondering if a doc was really all that bad even if there were a pair of them.
        “No,” Rhiannon replied, “a paradox.”  She shook her head, looking for words to describe the concept.  “It’s too hard to explain other than by saying that it’ll really bugger a lot of things up if we attempt to explain things.  You’ve already seen the Internet, and computers, and modern kitchens and this bedroom.  If we told you all the secrets Mankind has dragged out then thing’s would get messed.”
        “My mind is already, as you say Lady, messed,” Legolas replied, still trying to work out a paradox.  Rhiannon smiled at his use of her slang.  “But even with the marvels you have in this very room, the Elves would not be satisfied.  We have musicians that can take you places, take you away while you’re still sitting in a chair.  We have works of metal that is art within itself.   I do not believe that there is a danger if I were to tell them of these things that you have, for we are content with our own, and do not covet such contraptions.  But if it is as you say, and you cannot explain your marvels without endangering all you know, please, say no more!  I will not ask for explanations of your gadgets.”
        Rhiannon sighed.  “Perhaps you’re right, your Highness.  I have the feeling that your people would think our world dead and poisoned, and only give thought to the sadness that we have caused.”  She shook her head.  “Sorry,” she apologized, “sometimes I blow things way out of proportion.”
        Athena couldn’t help herself.  “You blow lots of things, Spooey,” she said with a huge, mischievous grin that bespoke of her humour and completely killed the sombre mood that had fallen.  If looks could kill, Athena would be a small bubbling patch of organic matter, nothing more than a stain on the sheets.
        Legolas frowned.  Blow?  And now what was embarrassing Rhiannon?  Was that another form of innuendo?  He had no idea in which context that the girls were using the word in, and, judging by the look on Rhainnon’s face, he really didn’t want to.
        Rhiannon snorted, turned her glare upon her suitcase and zipped it shut.  She sighed, as though a weight had been lifted off her back.  “I will do my best to explain things, Legolas,” she said, stumbling ever so slightly over the foreign word.  “But I do not have all the answers.”
        “The first step to wisdom is to admit ignorance,” Legolas said softly, his voice barely above a whisper.  His Elven eyes saw the tremor that ran down Rhiannon’s spine, however much she tried to hide it, and his ears detected the soft but ragged breath she drew in an effort to calm herself.  Tiny hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he made an effort to ignore them.
        “Perhaps,” Rhiannon said, feeling vaguely as though somebody was Swing dancing on her grave.  Did he have any idea the sort of power his voice had over her?  Evidently not. Either that or he was every bit the gentleman that she suspected him to be.  “I believe – Well, we could start with my pictures.”
        Turning towards her walls, Rhiannon explained to the best of her ability, with numerous interjections from Athena who had taken photography classes, how pictures were created.
        From photography they turned to art, and Legolas found out that humans had a rather unusual definition of art.
        “I went to an art gallery once,” Rhiannon said at one point, “and there was this bathroom sink attached to a piece of canvas with a little bit of black paint behind it.  That was the whole thing.  Not really any point to it.  Apparently it was done by this guy who had a bit of a fetish with drainage pipes.”
        “Drainage pipes?”
        And thus Legolas of the Mirkwood was introduced to modern art, and modern plumbing all in the same hour.  That hour was quite educational, for he was instructed, in detail, on How One Works a Toilet, and Bathtubs: A Guide For The Ignorant.
        By now it was approaching three o’clock, and the three girls and the Elf moved on from plumbing to politics, both of which, in Rhiannon’s opinion, had a lot to do with excrement in various forms. From politics they turned to sports, and finally, music.  From music, which they spent a long time on, it was movies, and then show business in general, each topic bringing up many more which they had to explain before Legolas could absorb the last.  It all got quite confusing for the poor Elf, and for Rhiannon, Athena and Victoria as well.
        Eventually, when they lapsed into a short silence, Legolas was able to ask a question that had been on his mind all morning.  “What are Harlequin Romance novels?”
        Rhiannon froze.
        “Smut,” Vicky said before either Rhiannon or Athena could say anything.  They both shot glares in the direction of their youngest sister, who seemed unconcerned.
        “What is smut?” Legolas asked, unsure as to whether or not he really wanted to hear the answer.
        Rhiannon sighed.  “Graphic depictions of copulation, either written, auditory, or in visual form, involving anything from men to women to sheep.  Harlequin Romance novels are written in a self-congratulatory manner for old women everywhere who think that the plots aren’t actually recycled and that they’re really valuable pieces of literature, and wherein the plain, average female, wins the caring, considerate heart of the absolutely gorgeous studmuffin, despite danger from stalker ex husbands/boyfriends/lovers, and wherein the two consenting adults dance about each other until the end of the book, at which point they suddenly decide they’re right for each other, get married, and have multiple children.  Damn bugger to write, though.”
        Legolas had been right.  He hadn’t wanted to hear the answer.
        Fred was having a wonderful time.  Smut!  Who would have thought that the Elf Prince of Mirkwood would ask about smut?  This was superb.  He should have tried this earlier in his existence.
        Legolas, for his part, hadn’t said anything.  The look on his face was priceless, and Rhiannon suddenly wished she had a camera on her at that moment.  To her sudden horror, a Polaroid appeared in her hand, and unbidden her arms rose and snapped the picture of the shocked and surprised Elf.  The motor whirred and the picture popped out, where Rhiannon held it and looked at it.  How-?
        Ah yes.  Fred.
        “You’re welcome!” a disembodied voice proclaimed. Rhiannon started.
        “Thanks,” she said, unsure if she meant it.  Somebody sniggered, and Rhiannon was strangely relieved to find that it had been Vicky, who was crossing over to Rhiannon’s side of the room to see the new picture.  Legolas, on the other hand, was staring at the Polaroid and the picture in Rhiannon’s hand that was slowly beginning to develop as though they were works of devilry.
        “Fred,” she said by way of explanation.
        “Ah,” the Elf replied, understanding things a little better, but still weary of the strange camera and picture in Rhiannon’s hand.  He hadn’t liked the flash all that much.

         Hours whiled away after the incident with the Polaroid.  Rhiannon told Legolas much of her life on Earth, and of the world, even if she couldn’t really explain everything.  Legolas in turn told Rhiannon and her sisters of his world, of the Mirkwood and the joy he took in simply being beneath its branches.  As Rhiannon listened she began to catch a glimpse of how things might have been long ago, in the forgotten corners of the world.  She closed her eyes and pictured golden Lothlorien, and the northern Imladris, and the world that Legolas called Middle-earth.  She felt an indefinable sadness at the thought that such things were lost, and that the only thing that Mankind remembered about Elves was that they stole babies and were deathly allergic to iron.  Or worked in hidden toyshops for some fat guy who somehow managed to make it around the world in a single night, despite time zones and international date lines.
        When the four emerged from their discussion, they were surprised to learn that the sun had disappeared behind the horizon and that Rhainnon’s mum had just walked in through the front door.
        Finally!  They’d get to explain things to her father!
        Somehow, Rhiannon wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect.  But Fred was.  Boy was he ever!