She spots the truck the moment before it hits her, and has the time to begin the word, "Fu-" before she is struck, and swiftly thereafter unconscious. She doesn't even have the time to have regrets.

And thus another soul enters the cycle of death. Off to go to where dead earthlings go, probably nowhere nice, maybe just oblivion.

…Not this time! Yoink! 

The soul is now no longer wherever dead souls from earth should be, but is instead on a desk in what anyone would recognise as a wizards study, filled with magical gizmos and arcane books laying on every available surface. The dead girls soul is not at all behaving the way dead souls are supposed to, instead of being incorporeal and not an actual thing you can interact with, the girls soul is now a sparkly indistinct person shaped blob on a desk in that wizards study. The shiny blob is about the same size as the pencils on the desk.

“Hmmm…. Another one from Earth…”

A wizened old man with a powerful aura is examining the souls it just pilfered from neighbouring universes. A hand the size of a shipping container is holding up the dead girls soul while similarly giant eyes peer at her essence.

”Good potential… Courageous and Kind… Terrible liar though, not ideal.” The giant old man pokes at the shining figure with one bony finger, then recoils as if burned. “HAH! The righteous fury on this one! Hot enough to burn the heavens! Oh yes this one will do nicely.”

The old man gets up from his desk and brings the soul blob to the window. The window looks out onto a void so deep even a complete lack of light is blinding compared to the level of nothingness this window looks out over. The wizened old figure reveals a surprising amount of flexibility as he brings back the arm holding the soul like a baseball pitcher, and flings it into the void at blinding speeds.

”Let’s see if that bastard can still enjoy his precious tragedy when I introduce an actor without a script. Hee hee hee.” The old man cackles to himself as he heads back to his desk, to examine another shining soul.

Alex Morcant is now suddenly not dead! Back inside a body and everything. No more being a strange shiny soul blob person. Not that she would remember that, you do need a brain to form new memories, and shiny soul blobs don't have those.

But she has a brain now, along with all the other normal parts of her human body, and once roused to consciousness will find herself in an idyllic grassy hill surrounded by picturesque farm fields.

There will also be a UI box in the corner of her vision that says [2 notifications pending].

-she wakes with a gasp that turns into a coughing fit. A quick scramble brings her up from the ground, hands splayed in front of her, holding her up as she looks frantically around, searching for the truck, the street, the people- and seeing nothing of the sort. What-? How-?

Where is she?

Her attention turns to the box in the corner of her vision. Two... What?

It’s still there! In the lower right corner of her vision. [2 notifications pending]

As for where she is, she is on a lovely grassy hill with some very pretty flowers scattered around, and further away there’s some fields of crops. Recognisable crops like wheat and pumpkins and vines that might be for grapes or tomatoes or something. There’s a little dirt path by the farm plots leading away. The area is mostly flat with scattered farm plots and the odd gentle hill with shining green grass and flowers. Way far away on the horizon are some snow capped mountains.

This whole area could be the desktop background of someone really into cottage core, it’s a very pretty landscape.

...pretty, but not even kind of where she was before. You've gotta go a few hours west before you start to see a hint of the mountains. And hills like these... Not where she comes from.

And there's still that... Thing. In the corner of her eye.

"...notifications?" She asks herself more than anything, reading off the word.

The notification disappears and a new UI window appears in the middle of her vision!

1/1

|You have not been delivered to the correct afterlife. As recompense for any inconvenience this has caused, you have been given compensation. GAME INTERFACE UNLOCKED. Please use (or develop) a local form of interdimensional communication to contact the dev team with any complaints or feedback. - SysAdmin1

 

[this has been an automated message] |

Under that message is a smaller UI window.
2/2

| Status effect removed: Dead. |
You are no longer Dead. Full health restored.

And in the corner of her vision the notification box pops up again.

[1 new notification!]

Dead. She's no longer dead?!

This is. Not the form she'd been expecting insanity to take. Not that expecting insanity to be anything in particular makes sense, probably, but still.

With birdsong as her backdrop, she says, "Notifications?" Again, just... To see where this goes.

Here comes another UI window!

| Perks unlocked! |
I've got the power!: Your life can be lived like a game! You now have the power of the Game Interface. Allows you limited access to the settings.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!: Your body is now your Avatar. You now have bars to track things like HP and other resources. You have Character Stats. Your Avatar functions on Game Logic. 

A red bar appears in the upper left of her vision!

It is accompanied by a green bar just underneath it!

Someone who has played or seen people play videogames since 1995 could probably guess red is for Health Points and green is for Stamina or Energy.

...Lex has never been a big gamer by any stretch of the term. There'd been no money in her budget for game systems, not since she was a little kid when her mom bought the family a Playstation. The old console died years ago. Most of the games she'd played had been at the houses of friends.

She can pretty much figure out what the box is saying, though.

"...settings," she tries, her eyes catching on that word.

A new UI window! What a surprise. 

Settings:

Graphics

Audio

Interface and UI

Accessibility

Difficulty and Balance

The window actually flickers for a second before it stabilises, now showing:

Settings:

Graphics

Audio

Interface and UI

Accessibility

She squints at the text. What was that-? Difficulty and-

Whatever this is doesn't want her to be able to put it on easy mode, then.

...she doesn't like that it changed. She's not sure what about that is so ominous, but something about it is.

"Difficulty?" She tries, seeing if she can still call up the vanished option.

No new UI windows.

A cute bunny rabbit is hopping around the pumpkin patch thats near the bottom of the hill shes on, the birds are singing, a big fat bumblebee is poking around one of the flowers, the air smells faintly of manure from the farms.

She was kind of trying to ignore the inexplicable environment for the other inexplicable thing, but the buzzing of the nearby bee draws her attention away.

There's fields, out in the distance. A clear sign of civilization. However she got here, and whatever insanity she's been infected with, she should really go find out where she is soonest.

She rises to her feet, looking around for any kind of path leading downwards.

The hill isn’t all that tall, or steep. Heading down is trivial. The bunny notices her as she heads down and runs off to hide.

There is little stream down by the farm plots, probably what was used to irrigate them. Theres also a dirt path. In one direction of the path the land slightly slopes upwards, and there seems to be slightly less farmed land and more picturesque grassy fields. In the other direction of the path there seems to be more farms, and the land slopes down in the direction the little stream is flowing.

Maybe there’s a little dirt house visible downstream? Or that might just be a dirt hill. From this distance what could be a doorway could also just be a bit of broken trunk or a rock.

Dirt houses aren't really a thing anymore, she's pretty sure? Not anywhere near where she lives. Sod houses were common like a hundred years ago but now?

Anyway, she wants to try for some kind of population center if possible, not just walk up to some strange person's door. Are there any signs of a town one way or the other at all?

Not easily visible from where she is! The trend in number of farms and plausible houses in one direction might be a hint. Little paths also tend to link up with bigger ones and not exist all on their lonesome.

All sorts of things could be hidden by the gently rolling hills or the rows of trees planted as windbreaks to protect the farms.

She'll... go in the direction of the farms, then.

Is there anyone else on the path? Or out in the fields?

After walking down the path a while, there is a really short person working on a wheat field that she can spot. The wheat stalks tower over them so she almost didn’t see them. They don't look like a person with dwarfism, the proportions are of a typical person, just really short, maybe just over 3 feet tall. Someone might think they were a child from a distance if not for the moustache. He seems to be checking the stalks for something.

...well.

She thinks there's other forms of dwarfism?? But this is the third unlikely thing to have happened since she woke up, it's probably not wrong to think something bigger is going on here.

Regardless of the person's height, she still needs to figure out where she is.

"Hello?" She calls out over the rippling wheat.

The short man turns to face the voice and looks where he thinks someones head height is supposed to be, and blinks surprised when he has to lift his head even further to meet her eyes. 

“Oh hello there, not often we get tallfolk round these parts. You seem to have ended up a fair bit off the main road to Bree, lass.”

He comes out of the wheat so he can have a proper conversation with this stranger. Sunburnt cheeks, expressive brown eyes and a well groomed moustache greet her. His overalls are definitely homespun and not machine made. He looks friendly enough, if a bit confused as to why anyone is so far out from the main road and in his farms. But this tallfolk lady doesn’t have any baskets or a cart or anything so it’s unlikely she is here to steal crops. 

"Um." Tallfolk? That suggests there's more people around here who are his height. Still not going to ask, yet. "I don't know this area." That's an understatement. "Is Bree the nearest town?"

Lex's clothes are decidedly machine-made. Dark jeans, a cotton t-shirt, and a black leather jacket on top, her sturdy work boots rounding out the outfit. Her hair is long - she'd been letting the length go for a little while - and a brown so dark it might as well be black, tied at the neck with a black elastic hair-tie, and while she has something of a tan, it's not the kind of tan that would suggest she's done much working in the sun. Her hands would corroborate the comparatively gentle life that suggests; she has calluses, but mostly ones caused by extensive pen use, playing a stringed instrument, and punching people. She has a few scars, but the little ones on her knuckles are the only ones visible.

Well if she didn’t come from Bree, where did she come from? That’s the closest place for a tallfolk to come from. The farmer suffers from visible confusion.

”Well the Shire is is where you are. Just Bree is where you tallfolk come from usually.”

He doesn’t have much opinion on her clothes, he hasn’t noticed them all that much, just that the leather jacket looks terribly expensive to make. She seems pretty healthy too, no missing teeth and well looked after skin. Probably wealthy, merchants daughter perhaps, not that he is the sort to pry overmuch into that sort of thing. Not really his business.

”Down the path the way you were going is the main road. Left is towards Bree wich is further away, right is towards the town of Hobbiton, which is not far away at all. But no Men there, it’s all Hobbits in the Shire. Not that tallfolk aren’t welcome to visit, just nobody has tallfolk sized things for you is all.” 

He wonders how she got almost all the way to Hobbiton without passing Bree. He doesn’t even know what is past Bree other than vaguely the kings lands from the old stories.

"I don't think I came from the Shire, either. I woke up on a hillside up the path, and I don't know how I ended up there, but it wasn't my idea."

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?"

“Oh! it’s not like Frodo didn’t have anyone taking care of him before, he was living with the Brandybucks, his mothers side of the family, after his parents died. Supposedly Frodo and Bilbo just got along so well that Frodo was always visiting and was never home, so eventually he just ended up living there.

Technically Frodo is Bilbos cousin, but Frodo is so much younger so the relationship really is closer to that of a nephew.” Beryll doesn’t want this outsider to think Frodo had been left homeless or anything and that Bilbo took Frodo in out of a need for charity. Even the poorest Hobbits would have lots of family to care for them if their parents died.

“Oh, has to be about 60 years now since Bilbo came back.” She was only a young hobbit when he came back, it doesn’t feel like that long ago. Suddenly Beryll feels very old. “Goodness that makes me feel my age suddenly. I was a young woman when that happened.”

Had it really been that long since something that exciting had happened? She knew her grandpappy fought off wolves and aggressive hedges, and if legends were to be believed the shire even sent some Hobbit soldiers when the king called for aid back in the early days. Guess the shire had been so peaceful lately that the most exciting thing to happen in living memory had been Bilbo’s adventure.

A house is pulling up into view on the road. It would have looked like a small hill if not for the chimney and porch, with a round circular door and and round shutter filled windows. It looks poor by modern standards. The door is not perfectly fit to its frame and the porch is heavily layered in dirt.

”Starting to reach the outskirts of Hobbiton. Won’t be long now until we get to the market square. I’ll walk you to Bilbo’s after I deliver my goods if you’d like.” Beryll thinks she would be more comfortable being led to somewhere she’s never been before in a town she is not familiar with, so she offers to lead this young woman. 

Sixty years since? Must be a pretty old man, by now. Person. Hobbit?

"Oh," she looks around, taking in the approaching... homes. "I'd appreciate it. I can help carry your things," she offers. Nothing in the wagon looks like it'd take four men to move, but it'd still surely be easier for Lex than for Beryll.

“Oh thank you, that’ll make unloading much faster.”

Couple more hill houses show up as they go along, all similarly shabby looking.

Then they start passing, more familiar looking to a modern human, stone houses that look a little nicer. Their doors all fit, the windows sometimes have paper or glass in them instead of wood shutters, porches are kept better swept. The further into town they go the nicer and larger the buildings are. Glass becomes more common in windows, well kept front yards are in front of most houses now, sometimes theres even an obvious gardener out front trimming a hedge or weeding a lawn.

The road starts being paved with stone as they enter the center of Hobbiton, and eventually they reach a meeting point of several of these paved roads for a large paved square. There are some stalls raised but they are either empty or have their owners unloading crates much like the ones Beryll is transporting.

“Here we are. I used to deliver goods market morning but that involved waking up in the middle of the night. It’s much easier delivering the day before when you become my age, even if townspeople think its fresher if they see it delivered the same day.”

She pulls the cart in besides one of the stalls. A stout middle aged male hobbit with ginger hair is waiting for her and he raises an eye when he sees Lex. Beryll waves him over. “Waldo! This is Lex! She has gotten very lost so she is going to Bilbo’s. He’s so well travelled so he can surely help her.” She turns to Lex. “Lex, this is Waldo Rummel, my second cousin. He runs the market stall for the family farms.”

Waldo grunts and looks annoyed. “Except for cousin Tambor’s farms.”

Beryyl rolls her eyes. “Yes of course I didn’t also mean for Tambors farms. Lex would have no idea who Tambor is, calm down.”

Waldo looks mollified.

Waldo starts taking hobbit sized crates of produce off the cart. Though they look heavier than you’d expect for someone that small to be able to carry. Beryll ties the donkey to the stall and also starts helping unload crates. Looking at Lex to let her know she is free to also start helping. The crates just seem headed to behind the stall front wherever there is room.

Lex steps down from the cart and joins in the unloading, then, after shoving her hair down her jacket to keep it out of the way. The work is pleasantly physical, and she has the time to look around while she's going back and forth, taking in the market square.