Well, It Started With the Cookie Jar . . .

One day in Middle-earth, Pippin ate all the cookies.

But the last one was stuck to the bottom of the cookie jar (which also happened to be Aragorn's giant coffee mug). So he tried to pry it off with his fingers. That didn't work, so he got a hammer. . . .

Merry, who was playing some unspecified game upstairs, suddenly heard a CRASH. He ran to the kitchen and saw Pippin standing with a pile of red broken glass in front of him.

"Oh no," said Merry, face-palming and getting the broom. He had just swept it up and was dumping it in the trash can, when Aragorn came in and bumped his head on the microwave.

"Umm . . . hi!" said both the hobbits at once.

"Ow! Hi," replied Aragorn, rubbing his head and looking for his favorite mug. "Hey, where's my coffee mug?" He turned to them suspiciously. "Did you drink from it, Pippin?"

"No. Of course I didn't drink from the cookie jar!"

"Okay." So Aragorn went to the downstairs hallway to tell Gandalf about it. Merry and Pippin tried to listen through the wall but all they heard was: Manamanah horply-doo; blah blah blah.

So Gandalf went back in with Aragorn and used his Creepy Wizard Powers to find out what happened. (Or maybe he just looked in the trash can but didn't tell anyone.)

"So, where's my mug?" Aragorn asked.

"Your mug isn't anywhere, anymore. But its pieces are in the trash can."

Aragorn looked into the trash can. Then he stared into the trash can. Then he fainted into the trash can.

A while later he woke up and saw . . . let's just say, stuff from the litterbox . . . about half an inch in front of his face. This was the trash can Ered had used cleaning up after Waffles and Rohan.*

Of course, being the heir to Gondor, Aragorn didn't scream and jump up and run around while forgetting to take the trash can off his head. Quite.

Instead he got up to wash his face. But he got too much soap, slipped in it, and banged his head on the dishwasher.

Face-palming (as if his head didn't hurt enough already), he looked in the dishwasher. No dishes were broken, but when he closed the dishwasher he saw a giant dent in the door.

Gandalf saw it too, and his jaw dropped to the ground.

"Oo, e-er ee-uh-ah eye aw," he said. (Translation from the Vowelish: "Oops, better reattach my jaw.")

Aragorn picked it up for him.

"Thanks," Gandalf said, once he could. Then he got out his Creepy Wizard Powers, lifted the pieces of Aragorn's mug out of the trash can, and fixed them - the wrong way.

"What is that abomination?!" cried Aragorn. "That's not my mug! It's a monster." And he started crying for his mug.

"Oops," said Gandalf, and he switched around the pieces till they looked just about like Aragorn's mug/cookie jar. And Aragorn cried because he was so happy.

Then Gimli and Legolas came in from a snowball fight.

"Aragorn? Why are you crying?" Gimli asked in puzzlement.

Aragorn just held up his empty mug, as his crying made a puddle on the floor.

"I never knew you liked cookies that much . . ." said Legolas. Then he left the room so the heir to Gondor couldn't get back at him.

Meanwhile Frodo, with no connection to anything that happened so far in the story, was playing a video game.

As everyone knows, Gandalf hates video games, because they weren't around when he was a kid.

Gandalf started coming towards the living room.

At light speed Frodo jumped up, hid the video game, put in a DVD, and started watching it a tenth of a second before Gandalf came in.

"Hello!" said Frodo cheerfully.

"Hello," said Gandalf blankly, and walked out.

Whew! Frodo thought; he was relieved that Gandalf hadn't asked him why he was watching the Teletubbies. He took out the DVD as fast as was hobbitly possible, and started the video game again.

A while later:

"WOO HOO! I JUST DEFEATED THE CAVE TROLL!" Frodo shouted triumphantly.

Gandalf zoomed back in. "Why did you just shout for no reason?" he asked sternly.

"Because . . . I . . . was having an imaginary battle! Yeah," Frodo said, picking up a cave troll doll and a Bilbo doll.

"That's girly stuff!" said Gandalf. "Girly stuff isn't allowed!" And then he saw the video game: his worst enemy.

"That's it! You're not allowed to play with video games or dolls ever again!" And he took the dolls and video game to the vault he had in his room for things of that sort. It had many rooms and passages, all filled with mouse traps, laser pointers, and lightsabers that whirled out of the walls at intruders.

Frodo followed him, avoiding all the lasers and lightsabers but stepping on the mouse traps.

Then he tripped and sat on a mouse trap.

"YOWWWWWW!"

Boromir's ghost, taking a walk outside, saw something in the sky. "Is that a rocket?" he wondered to himself.

The next morning, Frodo fell. He ended up destroying one of the trees in the front yard. Then he hit the trampoline, bounced, and landed in the hole he'd made in the roof yesterday.

Gandalf happened to be taking a nap in his vault, and the sound of Frodo's landing woke him up.

"How did you get in here?!" he said. "You won't get away with this!"

And he used his Wizard Powers to get some floating guns that surrounded Frodo, ready to shoot paintballs at the slightest provocation.

"SOMEONE HELP ME!" Frodo yelled.

The rest of the Fellowship heard him, and ran into the vault. Sauron and his Mouth heard him too, and ran in to capture Frodo and the Ring.

Sam got there first, but Sauron got there next. The guns were so scared of him that they ran away. Then the Fellowship ran out of the vault, pushing past the Mouth and the Eye.

"Ow! They STEPPED on my EYE!" said the Eye of Sauron, crying.

"Of course. You are an eye," said the Mouth.

And they tried to find their way out of the vault - which turned out to be kind of painful for the Eye.

Later, Legolas and Gimli were snowball fighting again. Suddenly they saw an Eye and a Guy With a Creepy Mouth burst out of the house.

"It's Sauron! Let's get him!" said Gimli.

"What about me?" asked the Mouth. "No one ever mentions me!" But then Legolas put a snowball on his bow and shot it into the Mouth's mouth.

The Mouth ran home and sat with his mouth in front of the fireplace.

"Hey, wait! I can't go places without a bodyguard! What if I blink?!"** said Sauron, running after the Mouth with Gimli's snowballs pelting him all the way. (Ouch. . . .)

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Pippin was watching Boromir's ghost make more cookies.

He had a spoon ready and waiting, and as soon as Boromir's ghost's back was turned, he took a giant spoonful of dough.

But then he dropped it on Boromir's ghost's foot.

Boromir looked down and saw it. "AAAHHH!" he said. "A SPOON WENT THROUGH MY FOOT! . . . Oh wait, I'm a ghost, it's supposed to do that." And he picked up the spoon and ate the dough.

Aw man! thought Pippin. But he got another spoon and waited again.

Sauron and the Mouth came back to throw snowballs at Gimli and Legolas, but no one was outside and Sauron's "body" heat was melting the snow, so they left.

In the kitchen Boromir was busy shaping the cookies on the pan, so Pippin stuck his spoon in the bowl and took about half the dough that was left.

Boromir turned to get some dough for the next pan. "Hey, I thought there was a lot more dough in here. . . . Pippin?"

Pippin back out of the kitchen, then ran backwards up the stairs, somehow not hitting anything. He even managed to pass Legolas safely at the middle of the stairs.

Legolas looked at him and shrugged - you can't expect Pippin to be anything but weird. Then he went to his room and started reading a book.

A knock came at the door, and before Legolas could answer, Pippin came in at light speed and backwards.

"Hi. Mind if I hide in here from Boromir's ghost?" he asked, turning around.

But then Boromir came in.

Then the five wizards came in.

Then all the hobbits in the world came in.

Then Legolas's room exploded. That was okay - it reassembled itself in record time - but there was an awful smell in the room.

Aragorn opened the door and asked, "What the heck is that stink?"

Legolas pushed through all the hobbits and wizards and said, "My room exploded - because a hobbit farted."

Aragorn nodded and walked out of the room. And fainted.

Then Boromir and all the hobbits and wizards of Middle-earth walked out and went home.

And fainted.

THE END

*Waffles and Rohan are my family's OC's (Original Cats), and Ered is my youngest sister's OE (Original Elf).

**Apparently blinking can cause problems if you have no eyelids to open afterwards.