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Merry and Pippin were out with some friends on an early winter evening in Bucklebury when a large and oddly shaped object fell from the sky and disappeared in the wood to the west. Merry didn’t see it because he was facing away, but Pippin and several of the others saw it. There was much murmuring and consternation among the group. It had not looked at all like a falling star, and it had fallen in a rather strange manner.
“We’ll go to investigate, Peregrine and I,” Merry announced to the group.
The others all agreed immediately. After the whole nasty business with Saruman a few years back, everyone knew that Merry and Pippin were excellent at dealing with strange things others would rather not worry about.
So Merry and Pippin crossed the river and made their way toward the place where the strange object had landed. By the time they arrived at the wood, evening had turned to night, and they crept through the trees in the moonlight.
They heard the sound of voices.
“Harry, I can still see the metal surface through the branches,” said a woman’s voice.
“Only if you look closely,” said a second voice. “It just looks like a pile of brush from here.”
Merry and Pippin followed the voices to the edge of a clearing. Crouched in the underbrush, the Hobbits watched unseen as two of the Big Folk wearing strange clothing traipsed around the clearing, gathering branches and piling them on top of a large, obscured shape. Squinting through the branches, Merry and Pippin could indeed make out that the large object seemed to be made of metal, but neither of them had ever seen a metal object of such size.
“Where do we go now?” the man who was named Harry asked. “There was a town in that direction – I saw it on the scanners as we were falling.”
“We’d better avoid that direction, then,” the woman said. “This place is obviously pre-Warp. Better to hide until Voyager gets here and receives our emergency signal. Then we can beam out and those people will never know we were here.”
“Those people had to have seen our ship falling,” Harry countered.
“So we should just waltz up to them and ignore the Prime Directive? We don’t even know how we’ll look to them.”
“And they might be hostile,” Harry said with a sigh. “Okay, maybe you’re right and our best bet is to find a nearby place to hide until Voyager gets here.”
Merry and Pippin exchanged baffled glances. Neither of them had any idea what the two strangers were talking about, but it was evident they weren’t from these parts and that they needed help. The only question was whether it would be wise to offer it.
“They seem friendly enough,” Merry murmured to Pippin in a voice soft enough that the Big Folk wouldn’t catch it.
Pippin nodded thoughtfully.
As Harry scanned their surroundings with the tricorder, searching for a place to hide, B’Elanna paced the clearing. She’d had an exhausting day, and now she was stuck on some random planet with a completely inoperable shuttle half-buried in the ground where it had crashed.
As the sky got darker it had grown colder, and now B’Elanna was shivering a little, wrapping her arms around herself to try to keep out the cold.
Voyager was supposed to rendezvous with their shuttle in six hours, but B’Elanna and Harry couldn’t make the rendezvous now. They’d been attacked by an unfamiliar ship, and had just managed to escape and crash here. They’d set up an emergency beacon and covered the shuttle with brush. All they could do now was wait.
At least they were alive, B’Elanna reminded herself. If that hostile ship had hit them a few more times, they might not have been.
“Greetings, strangers,” an unfamiliar voice called suddenly from behind her. “You wouldn’t happen to require any assistance, would you?”
B’Elanna spun around, reaching toward her phaser automatically. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Harry hastily shoving his tricorder away.
“Uh,” B’Elanna said, eyes fixing on the new arrivals.
At first glance they appeared to be children, but a longer look indicated otherwise. They were short and curly-haired with surprisingly large, furry feet.
“I’m Merry Brandybuck of Buckland,” one of the two said. “This here is my friend Pippin. Who are you?”
B’Elanna exchanged a glance with Harry. These small aliens seemed the opposite of hostile, and while they had what looked like short swords, they hadn’t taken them out. They seemed unalarmed by B’Elanna and Harry’s appearance too, despite their obvious size difference. B’Elanna’s hand drifted away from her phaser.
Making contact wasn’t ideal, but it seemed they had no choice.
“I’m B’Elanna,” she said. “This is Harry.”
“We’re a bit lost,” Harry said apologetically, coming to stand beside B’Elanna.
“We gathered that,” Merry said. “I must say, we’ve never seen clothing like yours before. You must have come from far away indeed. Did you journey here from the East?”
“Yes, the East,” Harry said quickly. “Really far in the East.”
B’Elanna agreed it was probably best to just go along with whatever they said.
“Well, that explains it, then,” Merry said. “Pippin and I have only been a little ways East, just over the mountains, not far to the East. In fact, I don’t believe we’ve met anyone who’s been far to the East before, have we?”
He’d turned to Pippin.
“Gandalf, maybe,” Pippin said doubtfully. “But if he ever did, he never mentioned people like you. That doesn’t mean much, though. Gandalf hardly said anything about a great variety of topics.” He turned to look at B’Elanna directly. “Madam,” he said with what B’Elanna read as a respectful nod of his head, “I do not wish to be rude, but I have never seen a forehead like yours.”
B’Elanna reached toward her forehead self-consciously.
“All my people have foreheads like this,” she said, hoping the truth sounded plausible.
“He doesn’t,” Pippin said, gesturing to Harry. “You’re not of the same people, then?”
“You are being frightfully rude, I’m afraid, Peregrine,” Merry said to Pippin. “After all, we probably look strange to them as well.” He turned to B’Elanna and Harry. “I don’t suppose you have Hobbits where you come from?”
“Hobbits,” Harry said. “That’s the species… that’s the people you both belong to?”
“Some call us Halflings,” Pippin said a little derisively. “But we call ourselves Hobbits.”
“We’ve never heard of Hobbits or Halflings,” Harry said.
“That’s not at all uncommon,” Merry said. “Even if there were Hobbits or others very like us where you come from, it’s likely you’d never have heard of them. We like to keep out of the Big Peoples’ way. Most in the Shire – the Shire is here where you’ve found yourselves lost, by the way – have always been wary of the Big Folk, and these days a lot are downright hostile.”
“Not us, though,” Pippin added. “We’ve got plenty of friends among the Big Folk.”
“And you seem trustworthy, which is why we’d like to help you,” Merry said. “Come with us and we’ll take you somewhere you can have a bite to eat and a warm place to rest. It’s best to keep out of sight on the way there, though.”
So B’Elanna and Harry found themselves led along by the Hobbits. They left the forest and headed through farmland. Several times, Merry and Pippin told them to walk crouched down so as to not be visible from the other side of fences.
“It would be easier to sneak around if Big People didn’t make so much noise,” Pippin muttered at one point.
“We aren’t making any noise,” B’Elanna whispered back, a little annoyed.
“Well, at least we know for certain they aren’t elves,” Merry said to Pippin, whatever that meant.
Eventually, they made it to another gate which Merry opened, quickly gesturing everyone else inside. Down a short path was a tiny house with a round door. Long weeds grew in the yard, and unlike the other houses they’d passed, this one didn’t look as if it was occupied.
B’Elanna ducked through the door after Merry, then stood back up carefully. The ceiling was only a short distance above her head.
“Old Fardoc used to live here,” Merry explained. “He was a cousin of mine.”
“Practically everyone around here is a cousin of Merry’s,” Pippin interjected.
“But he died this past spring,” Merry continued. “He passed the house down to his daughter, but she’s living in Hobbiton and didn’t want to move back, so she asked me and the other cousins to deal with it. We haven’t exactly gotten around to it yet, so it’s still empty. It won’t do any harm for the two of you to spend the night here, as long as no one finds out.”
“Thank you very much,” Harry said. “I’m not sure what we would have done without your help.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” Merry said.
“There’s no food here whatsoever!” Pippin exclaimed, looking through what must have been the pantry. “I’ll go back to Bucklebury to procure us some. You’ll be fine here alone, Merry?”
“Certainly,” Merry said with a slight nod of his head toward his sword.
So the Hobbits didn’t entirely trust them. That was probably smart on a planet that seemed to be home to aliens both Hobbit size and much larger.
Pippin might be going to get reinforcements to trap Harry and B’Elanna in this house rather than food, but B’Elanna didn’t think so. She and Harry shared a silent look, agreeing to wait and see.
While Pippin was gone, Merry lit a fire and B’Elanna gratefully huddled beside it, the soothing warmth easing the stiffness in her limbs.
“Is it warm where you come from?” Merry asked, apparently noting her appreciation of the fire.
“Warmer than here,” B’Elanna said, because that was the simplest answer.
“Pippin will complain about me asking this while he’s away and can’t hear your answer,” Merry said, “but how exactly did you end up so very far from home?”
B’Elanna and Harry exchanged another glance. They didn’t know enough about this world to be sure they were coming up with a convincing backstory.
“We didn’t mean to come so far,” Harry said. “B’Elanna and I are part of the crew of a ship.”
“A ship on the ocean?” Merry asked, eyes widening.
“Yes. On the ocean. We were… exploring. Sailing to new places to learn about them and bring that knowledge back home. But then we got caught in a huge storm that blew us badly off course. It took weeks to find land, and by that point we’d run out of food and our ship was badly damaged. We’ve been stuck in this part of the world since, trying to figure out where we are and how to get back home. B’Elanna and I got separated from the rest of our crew and found ourselves in this place you call the Shire. We’re trying to find our way back to them.”
Merry’s eyes sparkled with excitement and he proceeded to ask many questions about their ship and crew, to which Harry invented elaborate and often half-true answers. B’Elanna mostly stayed quiet, enjoying the fire’s warmth.
When Pippin returned with a basket stuffed with food, Merry caught him up on the details of B’Elanna and Harry’s story while the food was laid out on a low table. Pippin was as delighted with the story as Merry.
“We like to think of ourselves as adventurers of a sort, Merry and I,” Pippin said. “We’ve gone farther than any of our kind, although technically Frodo and Sam went farther than us. But you are even greater adventurers than us, and you’ve sailed in a real ship, you say.”
The food Pippin had brought consisted of fluffy bread with various jams to spoon onto it as well as a pile of small, sweet cakes. B’Elanna took a few tentative bites and found that it was all delicious.
“Do your people only nibble at food, then?” Pippin asked after finishing his second slice of bread. “Or perhaps the food isn’t to your liking.”
Despite their small sizes, Merry and Pippin seemed to have very large appetites and had already eaten many times the amount Harry and B’Elanna had.
“Not at all,” Harry said quickly. “This is all delicious.”
B’Elanna and Harry ate with less timidity after that which seemed to greatly please Merry and Pippin.
After they’d eaten, they sat by the fire and Merry and Pippin told their own stories about their adventures, half of which sounded so fantastical B’Elanna assumed they were as embellished as Harry’s version of their backstory.
Merry then asked more about the boat they’d sailed on, and Harry invented some more tales.
“Hmm,” Merry said at one point in response to a particular boat-related detail Harry had given. “That’s very interesting. I suppose boats must work differently where you come from.”
B’Elanna gazed at Merry speculatively after that. He and Pippin both acted cheerfully oblivious, but it seemed Merry was paying a lot more attention to what Harry said than he seemed to. Merry suddenly met her gaze, and they looked at each other for a long moment.
Later, Pippin dragged Harry across the room to show him some sort of child’s toy he claimed had been made by dwarves.
It had been over six hours since they’d landed, B’Elanna was fairly sure, and she was getting anxious that Voyager might have trouble finding them. To distract herself, she went to help Merry put away the dishes.
“No, no,” Merry protested, snatching a plate from her. “You’re a guest.”
B’Elanna smiled just a little, charmed by the small alien.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” Merry said. “Normally you’ve got a distant, somewhat sad expression that makes me think you’ve lost many things in your life.”
B’Elanna didn’t know if she liked being read so closely.
“I haven’t lost any more than many others,” she said.
Merry nodded.
“You remind me of a woman I know across the mountains,” he said. “The bravest person I ever met, but with the same sadness in her eyes. Things turned out happy for her in the end. I think they will for you too.”
B’Elanna was oddly touched, though she couldn’t have explained why.
“Are there many women on your ship?” Merry asked.
“Yes. Our captain is a woman.”
Merry seemed fascinated by this.
“You must do a great many things differently than we do,” he said. “In your ship in the sky.”
B’Elanna froze. Merry had said the words casually, but he was looking at her closely now. Well, Merry and Pippin had seen something fall from the sky. B’Elanna supposed there was no point denying it.
“Yes,” she said. “We do many things differently.”
A voice suddenly came through B’Elanna’s combadge, loud and startling in the small house.
“Voyager to Lieutenant Torres, do you read us?” Janeway’s voice said.
“Where did that voice come from?” Pippin exclaimed from the other side of the room.
“From the sky, I expect,” Merry said.
“Just a moment,” B’Elanna said, dashing into the next room and huddling in the corner before pressing her combadge. “Torres to Voyager,” she murmured. “Harry and I are stuck in a pre-Warp town trying to hide that we’re aliens.”
“Understood,” Janeway said. “Are you in any danger?”
“Not at all. We’ve met some friendly locals, but the shuttle is inoperable and will have to be beamed out.”
“We see it,” Janeway said. “We’ve got a lock. Beaming it aboard now.”
B’Elanna was relieved. She’d felt anxious leaving a shuttle in the middle of that forest, even covered in branches.
“Harry and I will have to find an excuse to leave,” B’Elanna said. “We’ll contact you when we’re away from any witnesses.”
“Understood.”
B’Elanna returned to the main room where Merry and Pippin were interrogating Harry about the phantom voice.
“It’s a sort of message,” Harry was explaining. “From our captain. She’s found us.”
“But how does she speak from such a distance?” Pippin asked. “Is it some form of magic?”
“Magic? I guess it sort of is, from your perspective.”
“They aren’t elves,” Pippin said to Merry, “but they certainly talk like them sometimes.”
B’Elanna and Harry made their farewells, thanking Merry and Pippin for their hospitality.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer us to accompany you?” Merry asked. “We could help you leave the Shire unnoticed.”
But B’Elanna and Harry insisted they’d taken enough of Merry and Pippin’s time and could find their way on their own.
“I’d almost have liked to stay longer,” Harry murmured to B’Elanna as they snuck back down the dark roads, ducking low behind fences to stay out of sight of farmhouse windows. “Those two were entertaining, and the cakes were really good.”
“It’s probably best that we leave before we give anything more about us away,” B’Elanna said. “They didn’t buy your sailing ship story at all.”
But truthfully, she would have enjoyed staying longer too.
Finally, they reached the forest and looked around to make sure they were alone before contacting Voyager.
“We’re out of sight,” B’Elanna said over the comm. “Two to beam up.”
As the Big Folk faded into thin air, Merry and Pippin stared from where they were hidden in the nearby brush.
“Now what do you make of that?” Merry asked after a long silence.
“Well,” Pippin said, “we’ve seen a lot of strange things in our time, haven’t we? But I will admit that might be one of the strangest. I don’t suppose they might have had a pair of magic rings.”
“I didn’t see any rings,” Merry said. “Anyway, they did come from the sky. Perhaps they went back into the sky.”
They both pondered this for a while, then Pippin said, “No one is ever going to believe us. Not even Sam.”
“Especially not Sam,” Merry said. “Well, we’d better get home. And the next time something falls from the sky, we’ll be sure to be the first ones to find it.”
“Of course,” Pippin agreed.