It caught my eye immediately: The Knight with the Red Umbrella
Oh, this was a fun one! Silly fantasy story about a fairytale world in which all the famous knights and warriors have retired, so people from medieval fairs/fantasy festivals in our world get “recruited” to fight in a war.... Again, unedited NaNoWriMo story and thus very messy, and also the two different POVs are written in different languages, which made it challenging to find a bit to post (because the bits I liked more were all in German).
Silence fell again. Miri chewed and swallowed her food without really tasting it, absent-mindedly chasing Konstanze away from her and the vampire’s plate every so often. This whole strange thing here still didn’t show any signs of being any less than real, still none of the inconsistencies of a dream, no signs of being a fake – as much as she looked around, the furniture and the view from the windows didn’t show the slightest sign of modern times – but it also didn’t become any less impossible. A talking fox? A honest to God talking fox? It couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t. Talking foxes like that showed up in Disney movies, where they were called Robin Hood. But he had talked. She had seen his snout move. There was no way, no way on earth, no way in hell that this was just a trained fox and a hidden microphone.
And that dwarf. He still didn’t look any less than someone out of a fairy tale, or maybe out of the Lord of the Rings. True, nobody in the movie had ever been this grubby, so shabbily dressed and grease-smeared, but…
She only just suppressed another gurgle of sudden laughter.
This was Elrond’s council! This place here, this was the Rivendell of this crazy story she had landed herself in, the place where they all met, where they had all come, not always entirely voluntarily, and from where they would leave to battle evil.
The sudden mirth was short-lived. Elrond’s council had been where it had been decided that the main characters had had to go into the heart of danger, into Mordor itself. It didn’t sound as if there was a place like Mordor here, or someone as inherently and deeply evil as Sauron, but that didn’t mean this world was any less deadly.
In the Lord of the Rings, few of the main characters had died. But how likely was this much luck in real life? All right, so she still wasn’t entirely certain that this was real life, but to be on the safe side, she should treat it as if it were. And in real life, one could assume that if someone walked into a situation that promised certain death, one would be dead. In real life, people didn’t get rescued by wizards and giant eagles. In real life, people didn’t go to fairyland, and meet talking foxes, either.
If Miri had been prone to headaches, this would give her one.