Well obviously she didn’t come from the Shire. Someone would have noticed her being there, because to come from there she would have had to have been there.

It’s troubling that the young? Probably young, tallfolk grow up faster so it can be harder to guess sometimes. It’s troubling that the young lady woke up far from anywhere she recognises. He’s never been so black out drunk that he ended up so far away from home he’d never heard of the nearby towns. That’s weeks of travel probably.

Doesn’t seem like she’s lying though.

”If you are from further out than Bree, I doubt it’s because of drunk wandering. Even with a pony you couldn’t get that far. You hear stories of elves in the forest doing tricks where you go in for mushrooms but come out of a totally different part of the forest than when you came in, but thats only in the forest, and only in stories. Never heard of someone showing up on a hill they never saw before. Do you feel weak? If you’ve been asleep for days and days and days of travel you would feel weak I think.”

He strokes his moustache, thinking. This is stinking far too much of mystery and magic and adventure for his liking, like right out of the stories. He doesn’t want Gandalf to be visiting him with a bunch of dwarves and have to go off chasing dragons or who knows what else.

”If you feel well enough to walk, I think you should go see Master Baggins at Bag End in the north of Hobbiton. He’s been on an adventure, he’s been all over and might be able to help you figure out how far from home you are. He has Dwarves and Men as visitors and everything, even knows Gandalf. If anyone can figure out whats what it’ll be him.”

Elves? Ponies? Dwarves?

"Gandalf?"

Even if she never read the books or saw the movies, you can't really avoid learning the name Gandalf. She's not exactly "meme-savvy" or whatever, but she knows about You Shall Not Pass.

Well, she’s heard of Gandalf then. Good for Gandalf that Gandalf’s fireworks as so well known even to people from that far away.

”Oh know of Gandalf do you? He’s an alright sort. Makes the best fireworks I’ve ever seen. He should be coming to the Shire soon-ish, I heard Bilbo bought an enormous amount of Gandalfs fireworks for his party. Should be no problems finding out where your home is if Gandalfs been there to sell fireworks.”

The farmer seems quite pleased that everything worked out, even if the mystery of the girl appearing on a hill with no idea how she got there is left unsolved. Mysteries like that are better left for those who enjoy that kind of thing to solve, but he is glad the girl will be able to find out how to get home at least.

But Gandalf's not real.

She can keep her incredulity to herself. She's talking to a tiny man in a field in the middle of nowhere clearly pretty far away from where she last remembers being. She has a UI, apparently. Incredulity can take a hike through the rolling hills back that way.

The tiny man also clearly has no idea what to do with her but pass her on to someone who might. Fuck.

She looks down the path, the way he'd said the Shire was.

"How do I get to Bag End? And how far is it?"

“At the end of the path go right on the road, you’ll see houses and such once you get into Hobbiton proper. Just ask around for a Bilbo Baggins and how to find Bag End. Shouldn’t be anyone who wouldn’t help you find it.

I don’t think you’d know any of the landmarks I’d use to give you more precise directions than that. Can’t exactly tell you to turn right when you reach the Gamgee’s place now can I, you wouldn’t know what that looks like. So ask around and you’ll be set on the right way I’m sure.” 

More pensive moustache rubbing.

”Well, with a cart it takes me all afternoon. You aren't carrying anything though and have longer legs, might maybe take you the time between lunch and afternoon tea? Not exactly the distance of a relaxing stroll to a neighbours place but not that far either.”

He looks her up and down as if to double check she really hasn’t got anything on her at all except her clothes.

”You’d probably be fine until you arrive but I could lend you a waterskin for the walk? I can pick it up next time I bring my produce in on market day.”

What if she gets very thirsty on the way, she probably wouldn’t get thirsty enough to be in any danger even if she got lost, but it seems like the thing to do to offer her one.

"I-" she looks down the path towards the road, then up towards where the sun is in the sky. Between lunch and afternoon tea is probably... Twelve to three? If it's still morning, that's a few hours' walk. She doesn't hike much, but it sounds... do-able.

Oh- she completes that thought from earlier, "That's okay. I'm not thirsty, I should be fine."

“Well alright then. Hope Bilbo can help you figure out where your home is, and how to get back. If you do get thirsty wait until you can find a well in town, the stream water needs to be boiled first.”

That might be a little insulting to assume she doesn’t know, but if she is a merchants daughter she might not know. The farmer thinks it’s better to maybe be seen as a little rude than for her to get the runs and ruin those expensive looking clothes.

He goes back to his field to go back to checking the wheat stalks. “Be safe, Lass.”

She doesn't have... iodine tablets, or anything, she knows better than to drink unfiltered water without that. But, wells, huh? Great.

"...Thanks for your help," she says, and then she starts off down the path towards the road.

Once she gets a bit of distance from the farmer, she looks around furtively for any followers, and then says, "Settings?"

Settings:

Graphics

Audio

Interface and UI

Accessibility

Settings UI window is back! Seemingly floating in front of her again.

She re-reads the options between checking the path in front of her, eventually choosing one.

"Interface and UI."

Assuming that alex will go through all the sub menus this brings up.

The interface and UI options are many and varied! Menus within menus within menus.

You have options for UI window colours (including Gamer™️ RGB rainbow effects), the opacity (for that cool translucent effect), the brightness, the size, the width or height, the position. You have options for notifications windows that are mostly the same, color size etc. Options for your main menu, your inventory, your map (both full size and mini), achievements, notes, quests, perks, status, party tab, skills and a general set of options for ‘other’.

As well as options on how to display all those things, theres options on how to interact with them. You can set your menus to be voice activated, touch activated, you can record gestures for it, you can set it to work with subvocalisation or eye movements, you can record and add non standard inputs if none of those are to your liking.

You can change how much of your UI is displayed at any time and under what conditions. A lot of resource meters and timers are currently set to not show unless they are actually being used, and theres tons of them. You can change if you want to display your Mana bar, your hunger meter, tiredness, how irradiated you are, if you are poisoned, if you are enchanted, dazed, hypnotised, enthralled or ‘charmed’ (wich has a pink heart symbol as its icon), and a dozen other obscure status effects. You can change how your party UI is displayed, what parts of their status should be shown and under what conditions. Can even go deeper into the options and change how long it takes for an unused UI widget to fade when not being used, or wether it should always be showing if beyond a certain thresh-hold (like say always showing the health bar when under 40% health).

There’s UI widgets unrelated to your normal menus and status that have options for them, a clock, a compass, a greyed out option for a music player, a thermometer, a barometer, and other widget icons that aren’t obvious what they are for. And each of those widgets has the same levels of customisation as all the UI and status displays.

However you want your information displayed or interacted with, there is probably an option to enable that.

Current UI settings are to always show health and stamina, and situationally hide everything else until it becomes relevant. Settings for interacting with menus are currently set to voice and touch.

That's a lot.

She stops several times as she goes through it, lengthening her walk considerably. There's an inventory. There's a map. She gets very distracted going through various setting menus multiple times before getting back on the track of just getting an overview.

She experiments with setting various menus to be about 70% opaque, so she can see a little bit through them but still read what they say.

She sets the UI to be controllable by subvocalization as well as the other two - she might have to try to interact with this without convincing people she's crazy. Maybe she'll try experimenting with.. humming or whistling as commands, at some point, but that's a bit much while she's also trying to make her way down an unfamiliar road.

She'd like to know the moment she's affected by any kind of status effects, and having her health bar stick around if it's lower than 40% sounds smart. Stamina, too; might as well. And magic, she supposes? Not that she's using any magic, but if she somehow starts she'd like to know!

...having a clock sounds incredibly useful. She can never keep track of time, without her watch she'd be late to things constantly. She sets it to hover at 50% transparency in the upper left corner of her vision, and she sticks a similarly transparent compass next to it. Combined with checking the map - once she gets to it - hopefully she won't get lost?  

Side note, a music player? Why's it greyed out?

Distracted by this, she closes Settings with a quick tap and calls for - subvocalizes - "Music Player?"

Nothing happens! No error message or sound or anything.

Just walking down the dirt road to a fantasy town of tiny people.

Well that's some bullshit.

Right, map. Inventory.

"Map," she calls* first.

*subvocalizes

Big overhead map! There’s a little red “you are here” icon on the road. The touch controls are intuitive enough, dragging to move, pinch zooming or unzooming. If she zooms out far enough on the map she will see the houses and streets of Hobbiton! Lots of the houses are only obvious as houses from a top down view because of chimneys and outhouses and porches sticking out of hills. The road is sloping up a little where she is right now but according to the map it slopes back down, then she should be able to see the buildings in person.

There is a set of icons off to the side that she can drag and drop onto the map to mark things if she wants to.

On the map relatively close by is a donkey cart coming into the main road off one of the side paths into the farms.

...she drops a mark onto the map around the middle of Hobbiton, and then she shoves the map off to the side so she can focus on speeding up a bit to meet that cart.

Lo! A donkey cart! With an old and gray haired hobbit lady holding the reins. She looks pretty fit and healthy but the wrinkles and hair do give away her age. For a human you would guess maybe she is in her 70s.

Her eyes go a bit wide when she sees a Man approach. Well, a woman Man. The language should really be more precise about these things. She never liked the term Tallfolk, that would make Hobbits Shortfolk, and then what would that make dwarves, or elves? She pulls herself out of the linguistic rabbit hole as the young woman approaches.

”Hello there! Rare to see your folk in the Shire.” The girl is heading the same way as her, and only one thing in that direction. “Heading to Hobbiton?”

The donkey also eyes up this stranger with suspicion, but the donkey never likes anyone new.

She eyes the donkey too, for a second. She stays out of its reach.

Good to know the people really are all this small, or at least this one is as well.

"Erm, yes. A man up the path back there told me I should go into Hobbiton and ask around for a Master Baggins of Bag End? I'm... Lost. Very lost."

“Well, we are also heading to Hobbiton. If you’d like you can ride with us. I’d appreciate the company.” She gestures to the back of the cart, where a human sized person could sit. The front only has hobbit sized seats and the middle is full of produce.

”I suppose it makes sense that Bilbo be the one who deals with lost Men. He’s one of the few people who leaves the Shire, he goes up to Bree every so often, Brings back news from the Bree Hobbits who live over there.  Even hired some Men to carry chests into Bag End after his adventure with those Dwarves. Supposedly filled with dragon gold, and he has lived a lot more lavishly since then.” The old lady starts with the usual gossip about Bilbo and his adventure, one of the most interesting things to have happened in living memory. It is also cementing his bona-fides as someone to deal with strange things like lost Men in the shire.

Oh, she almost forgot to introduce herself, how rude. “I’m Beryll Rummel, by the way, at your service.” 

She listens to the woman's words as she climbs into the back, trying to spread her weight out and not unbalance the cart. She has no idea if she's big enough to do that, but best to play it safe.

"-oh, Lex Morcant." She introduces herself. "Thanks for the ride. Are dragons a... usual sort of hazard?"

The cart is rather big by hobbit standards, it does need a donkey to pull after all, and that’s a pretty large animal to a hobbit. It bears Lex’s weight with no problem. 

”Not around these parts, maybe not around any parts. People say a lot of things about what Bilbo got up to on his adventure and if you believed half of them you'd think a Hobbit single handily slew a dragon.” The tone of her voice suggests that this is clearly impossible.

”It could still be dragon gold though, didn’t necessarily have to be an alive dragons gold after all. It’s usually reckoned there were more of those sorts of beasts in the past, he could have stumbled onto some long dead dragons hoard. Or he could just be making a lot of gold in Bree somehow, why else would he leave the shire so often. Could be he owns some kind of business up there. The chests coming into Bag End were real though, saw the carts and men myself.” She feels rather clever for her already dead dragon idea, it’s not one anyone else she’s talked to thought of. Her husband thought of the business in Bree idea and she finds it plausible enough to share.

Having a chance to tell someone who hasn’t heard about the adventure is fun, everyone else she knows has already talked to death about the possible dragon gold and what might be in those chests.

She relaxes a bit after some time without any rocking.

She's pretty sure there was another book written by the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings. She thinks they were making a movie, or a series of movies, based on it? Regardless, she doesn't know if there might have been a dragon in it, though it sounds familiar. Hard to say if this is the guy that was about, though.

"The farmer I met up the hill said he had... Dwarves and Men... visiting him all the time. No one's gotten any stories out of them one way or another?"

“The dwarves were very unsociable to the people who asked! They kept hushing each other if one of the others started talking about it.

The men were just hired from Bree to move the big chests. They were so heavy you could see the wagon they were on… whats the word…. The wagon was all pushed down by the weight. Took 4 men to carry one of the chests into Bag End.

All the time is an exaggeration for the dwarves anyway, they only visited a few times over the many years since the Bilbo’s adventure. Though by Shire standards that’s more visitors than we usually get. One got the impression they lived rather far away and it was a long trip, that they only would have made for someone very close to them. All night the neighbours can hear them drinking rowdily and singing songs late into the early morning every time they come. “

It sure is fun to be the font of knowledge, to get to be the authority on the Adventure related gossip. Instead of having to be the one to get most of the rumours second hand from Bilbo’s neighbours. It’s a nice day for a cart ride and the young lady Man is much more well behaved than she had been told Men were. This is a good afternoon for sure. She will also get to be the primary source about this visitor to the Shire! 

“Bilbo has a young nephew he’s adopted who I’m sure will tell you all sorts of fantastical tales of Bilbo’s adventure involving dragons and elves and other fantastical beasts. But they are rather unbelievable.”

Young Frodo was rather Took-ish, very excitable and curious. She thought he probably wasn’t purposefully lying just… making the stories more exciting.

"Weighed down?" She suggests, of the wagon mentioned. "That's very kind of him, taking his nephew in." Would've been nice to have relatives like that.

"How long has it been since his adventure?"