Welcome to the Silmaril Awards Ceremony for the Most Mischievous Imp! 47 imps were in for the running, 5 made it to the finals, and today we get to see which single impish being has proven their mischief enough to walk away with the lifetime award!

The stadium hums with chatter as I slip up to the stage and look around appraisingly. This is much better than the falling apart warehouse I hosted last year’s awards. It’s never easy to find good accommodations for the Least Competent Henchmen ceremony, but this brightly lit stadium with a colorfully curtained stage is perfect for the Most Mischievous Imps.

I squint in the light, moving to the center of the stage, but halt at the sight of  a couple of boards looking suspiciously looser than the others. I give them a wide berth. If housing forty-seven imps for a week taught me anything, it’s to keep a wide-eye open for anything out of place. No more pranks for me, thank you very much.

I tap on the microphone to assure it’s working and then grin at the abuzz crowd. “If everyone can take their seats, we’ll begin!”

The murmur quiets as people shuffle around to find available chairs.

PFFFFFFFT.

The less-than-desirable sound echoes in a rush through the stadium, followed by much confusion. Multiple people jump from their chairs only to find whoopie cushions occupying their seats.

At the sound of constrained laughter, I shoot a glance at a certain section of the stadium with over forty familiar faces. And I thought I had managed to send all the imps home, but apparently they decided to stick around for the ceremony. Quite a few of them look a little too innocent, and I try to scold but a laugh slips out, causing for an awkward hiccupping sound to resonate through the microphone.

“Well.” I clear my throat. “With that lovely introduction… Welcome to the awards ceremony for Most Mischievous Imp!”

The crowd laughs and applauses in good cheer, with quite a few whoops and whistles from the imp section. Maybe housing these people wasn’t always terrible. Or at least never boring…

“Today to present the awards, we have a most honored guest! Knight of Gondor, Counsellor of the North Kingdom, Thain of the Shire, the brave halfling who aided in the destruction of the One Ring and bringing peace to Middle-earth, please welcome Peregrin Took or, as he’s most fondly called…Pippin!”

The stadium shakes with deafening cheers.

Grinning, I hold a hand out to the curtain. And…continue to…hold my hand out. Annnd continue. Okay, now my arm is getting tired.

The applause lowers into a smattering of hesitant clapping.

“Pippin?” He was behind stage just a moment ago.

Stars above, one of the more rowdy imps better not have kidnapped him or—

PUFF.

A plume of blue smoke erupts from around the curtains and out trots a short, somewhat blue fellow.

“Well, that wasn’t the entrance I was going for exactly,” he says cheerily, swiping blue soot from his tunic. With a shake of wild curly hair—rather blackened and frayed, I couldn’t help but note—he looks up and grins at the crowd. “Hello, everybody!”

Only a heartbeat of awkward confusion holds the audience silent before the cheers take up again, louder than ever.

I lean toward Pippin. “What happened?” I whisper-shout above the crowd, covering the mike.

With a rather smoky cough, he points a thumb behind him. “That adorable little golden-haired boy back there assured me I’d make a grand entrance with his colored smoke spell.” He merely shrugs. “I must’ve used it wrong.”

“Whoopth.” A snicker comes from behind the curtains. “That wath the explothive thpell.”

I frown at the curtains, but the cheering has died down before I can give a certain little someone a good scolding. Not that he’d listen. Rolling my eyes, I turn back to the crowd and present Pippin with five envelopes.

All grins, he takes them—leaving slightly blue smudges across their edges—and waves them high above his head. “Here we are folks! The five candidates for this year’s most prestigious and esteemed award. For what greater honor is there than the honor of titled tomfoolery?” His eyes twinkle as the audience bubbles with laughter.

Eagerly, he tears open the first envelope. “With 19 votes, our first nominee is…ah! The magical little boy I just met. Twinkle!”

An echoing chime of “Awwww!” resounds through the crowd as a little curly golden-headed, sparkling blue-eyed boy skips from around the curtains, all dimpled smiles and waves of chubby hands—but I don’t miss the roguish gleam in the corner of his eye.

“Thowwy for the explothion thpell,” he lisps to Pippin with a smile that would probably charm Ugluk himself, bringing another round of “Awww’s”.

I roll my eyes. Yeah right. The boy had been placing catastrophic spells all across my house for the past two weeks, claiming “he was just a little boy, how was he supposed to know how to control magic?”. Which was, of course, hogwash, and when I told him so and asked for him to please stop being a little boy for a while or I’d sic Sophie on him, he just gave me one of his infuriatingly secret smiles and ran off to cause more mischief.

But poor Pippin, none the wiser, just pats the boy’s curly golden head. “Not at all, not at all. I think I look quite good in blue!”

“Me too!” With a wave of his hand, Twinkle’s clothes blur and shift, transforming them into a dazzling, if not ostentatious, silky blue and silver suit with flowing sleeves that made his blue eyes sparkle to the point of distraction.

This brings the cheers and coos of the audience to a obnoxious state and, with an overly self-satisfied smile, Twinkle skips over to his place at the end of the stage.

I clear my throat, bringing Pippin, who seemed rather hypnotized by the absurdly adorable boy, back to the task at hand.

“Oh, yes, yes. Let’s see now…” He takes up the next envelope. “Tied with 19 votes, we have Julio Aquino!”

The audience booms with applause and

…nothing.

No one appears. This seems to be a running theme for the day. Pippin shoots me a questioning look, and I glance at a man, woman, and blindfolded girl down in the audience, but they look just as mystified.

This did not bode well. Of course, with someone from the Afterverse, there’s no telling what catastrophe they were distracted with. Unless it was something less dangerous and more impish. After all, Crispin disappeared from the Most Mischievous Imps award last year.

Speaking of, I thought I caught sight of something white—or someone?—rush to the back of the room and disappear in a flash of light.

Fearing what was to come, I nudge Pippin. “How about we just move on?”

“Well, all right. But I wanted to meet this Julio fellow. He sounds like an interesting chap.” Shrugging, he opens the third envelope. “With 21 votes, please give your applause to…” He squints at the paper. “This sounds quite intriguing. Nidawi the Everblooming!”

The confused murmurs of Julio’s absence quickly shift to awe as a willowy young woman traipses around the curtains, her dress of ferns and coils of dark hair rustling around her. Vines twist across her arms and flowers bloom in her hair, as if part of her very being. The heady smell of flowers follow in her wake as petals drop from her hair.

Twinkle watches her with the faint trace of wonder, but as he seems to realize the crowd has all but forgotten him in the presence of this new arrival, he wrinkles his nose.

Nidawi’s piercing violet gaze narrows on him and then, with a curling of her lips, she shifts. Where there once stood a beautiful woman, now a child occupies the space. Wild and unruly but with the same unearthly violet gaze.

Twinkle’s eyebrows rise. “I thee. Nithe magic you got there.”

“Magic?” Young Nidawi bursts into raucous laughter. “Is that what you call your little trick?” Then she shifts again, becoming older, much older, ancient even. And as stern and commanding as a solid oak. “You know nothing of true magic, little mortal.”

To his credit, Twinkle actually looks frightened, but the spark of fury in his eyes makes me uneasy. A give Pippin a poke to continue before things get really ugly.

He shakes himself as if from a trance and blinks blearily at the fourth envelope. “Um. Right yes. Where were we? We certainly have some intriguing characters today, don’t we?”

Nervous laughter echoes from the crowd, loosening the tension. Nidawi reverts back to her childish state, and casts everyone a charming, if not devilish, smile.

Pippin fumbles a bit with the envelope and clears his throat. “Running in second place, with 36 entire votes, please welcome Leo Valdez!”

Now fully recovered (and seeming rather relieved), the audience takes up another wild round of cheers as a scrawny, curly dark-headed boy saunters on to stage. His eyes gleam with a look as if he just downed five cups of caffeine and, grinning from ear-to-ear, he waves with both hands to the audience.

“Thank you, thank you! Second place ain’t bad. Maybe next time I’ll make it home with the prize, yeah?”

This brings out more cheers and encouragement as he makes his way to where Twinkle and Nidawi stand, very carefully taking a circuitous route around the loose floor boards. Suspicious. But he fumbles as he catches sight of Nidawi.

“Now what do we have here? A wood nymph?”

A strange look comes across Nidawi’s features. “I smell both mortality and immortality on you,” she says, almost accusingly.

Leo merely shrugs. “Comes with the territory of a demigod, I suppose.”

Her eyes widen and she shifts until she once more stands as a beautiful young woman. Leo’s eyebrows rise in great interest, and Nidawi’s lips curl into a coy smile.

Ooookay. I cough loudly and motion at Pippin. Nidawi and Leo could flirt in their own time. Or not.

“Ah!” Pippin waves the final envelope. “It looks like it is at last time to announce our winner!”

Oh good. This ceremony may, miraculously, go off without any great disaster.

Excitement bubbles amidst the crowd as Pippin peels open the envelope, slowly. For dramatic effect purposes of course.

A wring my hands together, keeping a sharp eye around the stadium to assure no disasters befall.

Pippin pulls out the envelope and…

A flash of light.

“FWOOM!”

A dragon materializes in the stadium, green scales glittering in the light as it swooshes above the crowd. A strange mix of horrified screams and delighted cheers throws the stadium into a cacophonic uproar.

“It is a child of Death-in-Life!” Nidawi’s voice somehow carries above the chaos, shaking with both fury and horror. Her form changes again—with streaks of silver in her dark coils of hair and fire burning in her eyes, battle ready.

Leo takes a stance by her side, muscles tense as if ready for a fight. Twinkle seems to be inching behind the curtains. Pippin’s eyes widen in horror.

“No, wait!” I hold a hand out toward Nidawi. “This is a good dragon!”

Her eyes pulse. “Good? There is no such thing! Dragons are spawned from the Dark Father himself!”

“Well yeah, in your world, but—”

A rush of dragon wings pounds against my back –oomph—and I sprawl to my hands and knees.

“Sorry I’m late,” the dragon says just as he begins to shrink, and in the next moment a young Spaniard-looking man stands amidst the nominees, not seeming the least aware of the discord around him. (Or perhaps very aware and enjoying it, if the gleam in his eyes has anything to say about it.) “It seems I somehow got in the wrong timeline or some-such-something. A white rabbit fellow brought me back here. Hope I didn’t miss anything important. I— Oh.” His eyes widen as Nidawi charges with all the fury of the Wood blazing in her eyes. He stumbles back, and I open my mouth to warn him just as he steps on the suspicious loose floor boards.

Too late.

A strange crank screeches beneath his feet and the boards give way.

Ploomp.

With a thick splash, the dragon-man falls straight down and glittering pink slime sloshes up onto the stage.

“Well, that’s one way to get rid of a dragon,” Leo says, a wry smile on the corner of his lips.

Spluttering, Julio hauls himself out of the tub, glittering pink slime following in his wake. “That was…unexpected,” he says, slinging slime from his arms.

Nidawi blinks in Leo’s direction. “You did that?”

Leo grins unrepentantly. “The other little tinkerer helped. He’s pretty handy with tools.”

Speaking of the other tinkerer, we really need to get a move on before who-knew what else mischief pops from…anywhere.

Julio chuckles, flicking slime at Leo. “Not bad, chico. I’ll have to remember that little trick. Todd would love it.”

“No I most certainly would not!” comes a man’s shout from the audience.

Nidawi backs up, appearing nullified. Apparently pink slime and glitter dampened the ferocity of a dragon.

Pippin grins. “Oh, I like this group. Shall we continue?”

“Of course, of course.” Julio inclines his head. “I apologize for interrupting,” he says in a completely unapologetic way.

“You came just in time.” Leo clasps Julio on the shoulder, and then seems to regret it as he acquires a palmful of pink slime. “I think the winner is about to be announced.”

“Oh. Well then.” Julio straightens, looking as dignified as a pink-slimed man could look, but his brow dips as he counts the people on stage. “Shouldn’t there be five of us?”

“Well…” I tug at the end of my hair. “The winner hasn’t been announced yet, Julio.”

He just blinks.

“Or appeared on stage yet,” I clarify. “I’m afraid you tied for last.”

“Fifth? …Again?”

“Well…”

“Fifth?”

“Well, you did make it as a finalist out of forty-seven contestants, and you’re a finalist in other awards as well!”

“Fifth?”

“Me too,” says Twinkle, appearing from around the curtains. “Ith juth rude.”

Here we go.

While Julio and Twinkle sulk, Leo attempts to wipe slime off his hand while simultaneously casting Nidawi flirtatious smiles, and she promptly ignores him in favor of glaring at Julio, I turn back to Pippin.

“Shall we?”

“Oh yes!” Recovering quickly—for what is a little chaos to a hero and renowned jokester of Middle-earth?—Pippin at last pulls out the paper from the final envelope. “Here we are at last, good folks! With an impressive 49 votes, the winner of this year’s Most Mischievous Imp award issss…” He looks out at the audience, relishing their anticipation. “Issss…” Another dramatic pause. “Kalmar Wingfeather!”

“That’s Tink!”

Laughter and applause thunder across the stadium as a young boy bounces out from around the curtains. He stops short, eyeing the distance between the stage and the ground below. Backing up away from the edge, he glances over at Julio, and his fear of heights rush out in burst of humored glee.

“It worked!”

“You better believe it did, little guy,” Leo says, slapping Kalmar on the back.

“The pink slime was my idea,” Kalmar says to the audience in general, eyes dancing.

“Well then, you certainly deserve this, don’t you?” A hush falls over the audience as Pippin pulls something from his pocket and, clutching it by an attached ribbon, holds up a glittering blue gem—a Silmaril.

Kalmar’s jaw drops. “I…I really won?”

Grinning, Pippin nods enthusiastically and slips the ribbon over the boy’s head (with a clear sigh of relief that he could reach this nominee’s shoulders). “With the highest amount of votes, the people have spoken and dub you the most mischievous imp of all. And I can see why,” he adds with a surreptitious smirk Julio’s way.

Kalmar stares in awed speechlessness at the gem hanging from his neck. And then he lets out a whoop. “I won!” He practically bounces across the stage. “I’m gonna make sure to always live up to this title!”

“Oh dear,” comes a murmur from the crowd. A boy and girl, sharing a clear family resemblance with Kalmar, cast each other longsuffering looks.

Kalmar just grins all the wider.

Pippin holds an arm out toward the boy. “May I present this year’s Most Mischievous Imp, Kalmar Tink Wingfeather!”

The stadium explodes in cheers and whoops and applause and feet stamping. Kalmar stands as tall as his short stature allows, hands on his hips and his chest puffed out.

I can’t help but smile. That could have gone much worse.

“Thank you all for coming!” I say into the mike once the cheering at last dies down. “Be sure to stick around for refreshments.”

“Food?” Kalmar looks up at me as if I’m offering him a second Silmaril.

“Yes, of course.”

“Oh, oh!” He scrambles forward, but pauses, fidgeting at the edge of the stage, his love for food and fear of heights seeming to be at war.

“You can use the steps right over th—”

POOF!

A myriad of colorful smoke bursts from around the curtains, bright and vivid and…ostentatious.

“Whoopthie.”

A golden curly head of hair pokes out from the edge of the curtains, followed by an overly charming child’s grin, but it’s soon covered up by a splat of pink slime.

Leo, looking far too innocent, wipes slime off his hand on his shirt. Twinkle, now very pink faced, scrambles out, reaches down into the hole in the stage, and scoops up two arms full of slime and hurls it forward. Leo darts out of the way and—

Oh dear.

Glops of slime smack right across Nidawi’s beautiful face.

“HOW DARE YOU INSULT THE QUEEN OF TADEW-THAT-WAS.”

But Twinkle giggles.

With a sigh, I ignore the pandemonium erupting behind me and address the audience.

“Anyway, refreshments are available. And do be sure to not miss the awards ceremony for Least Competent Henchman tomorrow! Just, um, tread careful.” My eyes glaze as I flashback to the disaster that was the Least Competent Henchman award ceremony when I attempted to host it last year. “Ahem. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Aaanywho. Thank you all for com— Oomph.” I wince as a very distinct sliminess smacks the back of my head. “Thankyouforcoming!” I huff out, then spin around and scoop up a pile of slime. “Twinkle, get back here, you little mongrel!”

And thus ends the awards ceremony for Most Mischievous Imp! I hope you all enjoyed it. I’m just glad I survived and can finally send the rest of the nominees home. Anyone want to help me get my house back in order? Please?

And in case you got lost amidst all the chaos, here’s the final score:

Most Mischievous Imps 2020

• Kalmar “Tink” Wingfeather (The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson) – 49 votes
• Leo Valdez (Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan) – 36 votes
• Nidawi the Everblooming (Shadow Hand by Anne Elisabeth Stengl) – 21 votes
• Julio (Crockett and Crane series by Kyle Robert Shultz) – 19 votes
• Twinkle (House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones) – 19 votes

The Other Ceremonies

The award ceremonies continue every weekday this week and next! There is still much fun to be had.

You can find the schedule below (and I’ll try to update the links as each ceremony goes live):

• Most Epic Heroine – Tracey Dyck (Sept. 14)

• Strangest Character – Madeline J. Rose (Sept. 15)

• Most Mischievous Imp – Christine Smith (Sept. 16) (You are here!)

• Least Competent Henchman – E.E. Rawls (Sept. 17)

• Most Epic Hero – Zachary Totah (Sept. 18)

• Most Silver Tongue – Kyle Robert Shultz (Sept. 21)

• Most Magnificent Dragon – Sarah Pennington (Sept. 22)

• Most Nefarious Villain – Kenzie Keene ( Sept. 23)

• Most Faithful Friend – Jenelle Schmidt (Sept. 24)

• Wisest Counselor – DJ Edwardson (Sept. 25)

The Giveaway

And don’t forget we still have this epic giveaway running all the way until the end of the ceremonies!

Such fantastic prizes!

Each prize goes to one person, so there is a high chance you could win something. Monday, September 28th Jenelle will announce the winners on HER BLOG, so do be sure to stop by there then!     

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If the embedded form isn’t showing up use THIS LINK!

I had an absolute blast being a host for my second year in a row! And, disastrous and headache-inducing though it was, I’ll miss spending time with all these silly imps.

But it will be nice to sleep in peace again.

Thank you all so much for your participation! You guys make this blogging event SO FUN!!! I hope you have as much fun as we do (because, really, we have a ridiculously good time).

*throws pink slime at you and runs away*

See you all next year! >:D

LET’S TALK!

Well that was…something. *grins* What did you think? Hopefully you all enjoyed this little awards ceremony and are excited about the outcome! Don’t forget to join in all the others over the next few days! *points at links above* Are you having fun with this years Silmaril Awards? I sure am!