November Thirteen (D-13) - Revolveolution in Wonderland
I think I'm starting to hit the more exciting part of the novel now. :3 Makes me happy.
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The Best of the Day: It wasn’t long before our own weight sent us imploding, though.
Sugar/Caffeine had: One gree tea latte! :9
Sanity: -39392843092874%!!!
Word Count (Daily): 2,281
Word Count (Total): 21,377
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Four - The Mushroom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • Freefall
I refuse to believe you.” Alexias’ voice came out flat and cold, but it was a forced emotionlessness. One could easily tell that he was purposely suppressing his disbelief and worry, keeping his voice level and unnaturally calm. He continued. “Wonderland is nothing but a fictional place. It doesn’t actually exist.” With that, he turned back to the Door, prying at the handle itself with a wide blade on his army knife.
It was a minute, maybe, or two, before the skull-helmeted young man spoke again, face crinkled in the same happy smile, hands still gathered at his back as if in imitation of the shy girls that so many older businessmen seemed to like for their innocence - but, of course, his pose came out so ridiculous, so faked, that it looked more sinister than adorable. As did his voice. “You seem to be having trouble.”
“You notice now?” The irritated blonde grunted in response, trying to use the molded handle of his knife as a level to tear off the base of the doorknob. “I’ve said it before, but I need to go back, sir.”
“You can’t.”
Alexias turned this time, snapping the knife blade back into the handle with a practiced twist of his wrist, eyes narrowed and brows furrowed in a skeptical frown, one tinted with irritation and borderline anger. “If this is any more nonsense about Wonderland, I’d rather not hear it.”
The smile widened yet again. Just how did that work? Did this person never frown? “It isn’t.”
“Alright, then what-“
“Because Wonderland isn’t nonsense, Alexias.”
The blonde finally broke down and hissed in blatant irritation, almost cat-like in his suppressed anger. “Please stop this ridiculous charade! If this is some sort of psychological experiment, I refuse to participate.”
Orange-flavored hair shifted slightly as the young man tilted his head to the side, blinking craftily (slowly? Thoughtfully? Alexias was having difficulty reading whatever emotion was in those slitted eyes). “Such denial, such denial. Will you really have the time for such denial? Avast elixir den a lee. You really don’t have the time for that.”
For some reason, the random words finally snapped into context, and Alexias cocked an eyebrow at the other. “…those words. You’re making anagrams out of my name.”
Another blink, then a pleased narrowing of the eyes. “Bingo.”
Whatever was going to happen next was then obliterated in a sudden and overwhelming blast of noise, one loud enough to have no identifiable source, one loud enough that it simply ripped through the air and tore at one’s eardrums before tapering off, leaving the victim hearing buzzing noises long after.
Despite the fact that light travels faster than sound, and thus, the source of the sound should have been seen before the actual noise, it took a moment longer before the mushroom cloud of smoke came blossoming up in the distance, visible to Alexias just back the fox-eared man’s shoulder like some sort of horrific umbrella. The smoke was black, grey, white, tan, khaki, a disgusting mix of all these colors that went clawing its way up into the sky.
“Wh-what was that?!” His composure crumbling at the same speed with which the noise of the explosion had torn past him, Alexias fell back onto the ground, staring, horrified, as the cloud of smoke continued to expand in the distance, losing opacity but gaining surface area, staining the otherwise pristine skyline ugly.
“Oh, that?” Calm and composed - too calm, relative to the situation, in fact, calm enough to frighten anyone nearby, including Alexias - the cat-eyed figure turned to give the spreading smoke a sideways glance, a quick look that spelled out only a small interest that faded quickly. “Do you not recognize it? The smoke of a bomb.”
“Of course I recognize it! Why is there an explosion over there?”
Turning back in the direction of the door, skull-helmet smiled. “Be lily tot. Fan mat.”
These anagrams were short enough to recognize, and Alexias snapped back, face drawn in suspicion and, by now, ill-suppressed anxiety. “Little Boy and Fat Man. Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you mean that’s a nuclear weapons?”
A pleasant laugh filled the air, almost like the mushroom cloud had, but several times more terrifying. “Oh, a nuclear weapon, what a funny idea! Oh, no, we here would never be so brutal! So idiotic! Oh, no, never!”
“Then what-“
“Cleansing weapons.”
“There aren’t anything such as-“
Alexias suddenly found his head tilted backward, the fox-eared young man’s fingers (nails dangerously sharp, Alexias noted for the second time, again, his brain throwing up these observations out of instinct) placed just under his chin and yellow eyes trained directly at the blonde’s own blue pupils. “Wonderland is at war, Alexias. That is why I have said you do not have the time for such denial.”
The fingers at his chin were gone just as suddenly as they had been there, and Alexias found himself faced with the same smile that had been aggravating him for the past few minutes.
“As I have said, you cannot leave here. You do not have time for denial. This is not something you can simply shrug off.” The same head tilt to the side, casting a weird shadow on the skull helmet, a black halo surrounding the cracked left socket.
“This is reality. The Door will not open.” How did he talk so much without taking a breath? Did he have a double set of lungs?
“You are stuck here. You cannot open the Door.” It wasn’t humanly possible, that lung capacity.
“You are stuck here.” Oh, wait, he wasn’t human.
“Here in Wonderland.” There was a pause, and the smile changed, slightly, subtly, barely enough to notice, but drastic at the same time, now tinted with a trace of familiarity that vanished as soon as Alexias had thought that he’d caught sight of it, lips moving slowly as the slit-eyed figure purred out, almost. “And you should know this.”
He did. He’d known from the start that this entire situation was real. Wonderland was real. The Door led to Wonderland. How else could they have existed? He knew nothing about this supposed war in Wonderland, but he was smart enough to know that this wasn’t a hallucination, it wasn’t a dream (if it were a dream, he’d be awake by then), it was…real.
“You knew this, didn’t you?”
It took Alexias an eternity, in his mind, to bring himself to tear down the denial he’d been building up, to cast aside the argument he’d been reasoning out that this was a dream, to swallow and take a deep breath and feel some strange weight lift off his shoulders and look up properly at those golden eyes for the first time and nod, feeling the brush of his hair against the back of his neck.
He felt like he were in free-fall through an endlessly dripping sky, the reality (it was real) of the ridiculous situation (down the rabbit hole) sending his brain spinning (Alice in Wonderland). The Door. This man. Wonderland at war. Real. Real. Real, real, real. His grip on his knife loosened, the plastic handle nearly slipping to the ground before he caught himself and tightened his grip around it, almost out of instinct. No time for denial.
He was there. Wonderland.
Of course.
Of course, of course, of course.
“…of course.”
IV - Marble Cake • Barbarian
School became more of a habit after a while, after the initial nervousness (and slight shock) of day one passed. I would wake up at morning to my alarm clock, at either seven thirty or eight (I don’t remember which it was), and stumble to the bathroom. Splash water on my face. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Water. Towel. Back to the room. Get dressed. (But make sure the clothes follow Mommy’s standards of what looks good because otherwise I’ll look funny and have to get dressed again and be almost late and have to run for the express limousine bus.) Downstairs. Breakfast. Toast and cereal or milk and pancakes or something like that. (I had low blood pressure back then, so I usually wasn’t awake enough to taste things properly that early in the morning.) Then pack my bag with the books, homework, pens, pencils, eraser, whatever. Run out to the school limousine bus. It was a shiny white behemoth, headlight gleaming like fireflies or eyes and the front grill bearing a monstrous grin. Plush seats covered with brown leather that sank in softly to touch, almost so soft that it was sickening. The words “Belland Academy” stitched or painted on everything in neat black letters, swirling and curving like the bus did as it glided silently over the street across the miniature bridge and up the hill before screeching to a halt at the Academy gates. The doors would open with the small sigh of escaping air, and we would trudge off, smashing the green grass beneath our feet as we scurried up the slope and through the glass double doors.
It should have been new! exciting! and interesting!!! every day, but even a kid gets bored of methodical, scheduled events like that. The green grass seemed to be mocking us after a while, beckoning us outside as we were stuck inside the white building, all the surfaces cleaned until they gleamed in the light and showed us our reflections, but distorted with the pattern in the marble so that our faces were marred with twisted white streaks.
We lost our names there, after a while. It wasn’t really something that the teacher had intended to happen, but it happened anyway because all of us little kids were either too scared or too stupid to stop it from happened. It was a weird process. One that took place during another round of icrebreakers we’d been playing that dragged out a bit longer than it should have. Mafia, it was called. That game where you sit around in a circle and pick cards to chose positions and one or two or three people constitute the mafia and have to kill other people (we called it kidnapping because we weren’t supposed to know about murder yet at that tender age, and the people we voted our were “chased out of town” rather than executed), but because the teacher didn’t want us to get our feelings hurt when she read out “Okay, today, Matt was kidnapped by the mafia,” we were given “game-names.”
They were names that we had made for us on little paper name tags, and we referred to each other by those names. It was in alphabetical order, one boy and one girl for each letter of the alphabet except for six letters (u, v, x, y, z, and q). Mine was Moth. I don’t know how I ended up with that name, but end up with it I did, and I was promptly pulled out of the game when Ms. Dilworth read out, “Tonight, Moth was kidnapped by the mafia.”
The names were supposed to last inside the game only, but we liked the names, they were easy to memorize, and if they were inoffensive in the game, then surely, they would be inoffensive in real life too.
We began to shed our real names and call each other our game names instead. The teachers followed suit after a while.
Rabbit. Blossom. Tender. Flamingo. Hedgehog. Platypus. Hatter. Marchen.
Moth.
Not Alexias.
Moth.
-----
The Best of the Day: It wasn’t long before our own weight sent us imploding, though.
Sugar/Caffeine had: One gree tea latte! :9
Sanity: -39392843092874%!!!
Word Count (Daily): 2,281
Word Count (Total): 21,377
-----
Four - The Mushroom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • Freefall
I refuse to believe you.” Alexias’ voice came out flat and cold, but it was a forced emotionlessness. One could easily tell that he was purposely suppressing his disbelief and worry, keeping his voice level and unnaturally calm. He continued. “Wonderland is nothing but a fictional place. It doesn’t actually exist.” With that, he turned back to the Door, prying at the handle itself with a wide blade on his army knife.
It was a minute, maybe, or two, before the skull-helmeted young man spoke again, face crinkled in the same happy smile, hands still gathered at his back as if in imitation of the shy girls that so many older businessmen seemed to like for their innocence - but, of course, his pose came out so ridiculous, so faked, that it looked more sinister than adorable. As did his voice. “You seem to be having trouble.”
“You notice now?” The irritated blonde grunted in response, trying to use the molded handle of his knife as a level to tear off the base of the doorknob. “I’ve said it before, but I need to go back, sir.”
“You can’t.”
Alexias turned this time, snapping the knife blade back into the handle with a practiced twist of his wrist, eyes narrowed and brows furrowed in a skeptical frown, one tinted with irritation and borderline anger. “If this is any more nonsense about Wonderland, I’d rather not hear it.”
The smile widened yet again. Just how did that work? Did this person never frown? “It isn’t.”
“Alright, then what-“
“Because Wonderland isn’t nonsense, Alexias.”
The blonde finally broke down and hissed in blatant irritation, almost cat-like in his suppressed anger. “Please stop this ridiculous charade! If this is some sort of psychological experiment, I refuse to participate.”
Orange-flavored hair shifted slightly as the young man tilted his head to the side, blinking craftily (slowly? Thoughtfully? Alexias was having difficulty reading whatever emotion was in those slitted eyes). “Such denial, such denial. Will you really have the time for such denial? Avast elixir den a lee. You really don’t have the time for that.”
For some reason, the random words finally snapped into context, and Alexias cocked an eyebrow at the other. “…those words. You’re making anagrams out of my name.”
Another blink, then a pleased narrowing of the eyes. “Bingo.”
Whatever was going to happen next was then obliterated in a sudden and overwhelming blast of noise, one loud enough to have no identifiable source, one loud enough that it simply ripped through the air and tore at one’s eardrums before tapering off, leaving the victim hearing buzzing noises long after.
Despite the fact that light travels faster than sound, and thus, the source of the sound should have been seen before the actual noise, it took a moment longer before the mushroom cloud of smoke came blossoming up in the distance, visible to Alexias just back the fox-eared man’s shoulder like some sort of horrific umbrella. The smoke was black, grey, white, tan, khaki, a disgusting mix of all these colors that went clawing its way up into the sky.
“Wh-what was that?!” His composure crumbling at the same speed with which the noise of the explosion had torn past him, Alexias fell back onto the ground, staring, horrified, as the cloud of smoke continued to expand in the distance, losing opacity but gaining surface area, staining the otherwise pristine skyline ugly.
“Oh, that?” Calm and composed - too calm, relative to the situation, in fact, calm enough to frighten anyone nearby, including Alexias - the cat-eyed figure turned to give the spreading smoke a sideways glance, a quick look that spelled out only a small interest that faded quickly. “Do you not recognize it? The smoke of a bomb.”
“Of course I recognize it! Why is there an explosion over there?”
Turning back in the direction of the door, skull-helmet smiled. “Be lily tot. Fan mat.”
These anagrams were short enough to recognize, and Alexias snapped back, face drawn in suspicion and, by now, ill-suppressed anxiety. “Little Boy and Fat Man. Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you mean that’s a nuclear weapons?”
A pleasant laugh filled the air, almost like the mushroom cloud had, but several times more terrifying. “Oh, a nuclear weapon, what a funny idea! Oh, no, we here would never be so brutal! So idiotic! Oh, no, never!”
“Then what-“
“Cleansing weapons.”
“There aren’t anything such as-“
Alexias suddenly found his head tilted backward, the fox-eared young man’s fingers (nails dangerously sharp, Alexias noted for the second time, again, his brain throwing up these observations out of instinct) placed just under his chin and yellow eyes trained directly at the blonde’s own blue pupils. “Wonderland is at war, Alexias. That is why I have said you do not have the time for such denial.”
The fingers at his chin were gone just as suddenly as they had been there, and Alexias found himself faced with the same smile that had been aggravating him for the past few minutes.
“As I have said, you cannot leave here. You do not have time for denial. This is not something you can simply shrug off.” The same head tilt to the side, casting a weird shadow on the skull helmet, a black halo surrounding the cracked left socket.
“This is reality. The Door will not open.” How did he talk so much without taking a breath? Did he have a double set of lungs?
“You are stuck here. You cannot open the Door.” It wasn’t humanly possible, that lung capacity.
“You are stuck here.” Oh, wait, he wasn’t human.
“Here in Wonderland.” There was a pause, and the smile changed, slightly, subtly, barely enough to notice, but drastic at the same time, now tinted with a trace of familiarity that vanished as soon as Alexias had thought that he’d caught sight of it, lips moving slowly as the slit-eyed figure purred out, almost. “And you should know this.”
He did. He’d known from the start that this entire situation was real. Wonderland was real. The Door led to Wonderland. How else could they have existed? He knew nothing about this supposed war in Wonderland, but he was smart enough to know that this wasn’t a hallucination, it wasn’t a dream (if it were a dream, he’d be awake by then), it was…real.
“You knew this, didn’t you?”
It took Alexias an eternity, in his mind, to bring himself to tear down the denial he’d been building up, to cast aside the argument he’d been reasoning out that this was a dream, to swallow and take a deep breath and feel some strange weight lift off his shoulders and look up properly at those golden eyes for the first time and nod, feeling the brush of his hair against the back of his neck.
He felt like he were in free-fall through an endlessly dripping sky, the reality (it was real) of the ridiculous situation (down the rabbit hole) sending his brain spinning (Alice in Wonderland). The Door. This man. Wonderland at war. Real. Real. Real, real, real. His grip on his knife loosened, the plastic handle nearly slipping to the ground before he caught himself and tightened his grip around it, almost out of instinct. No time for denial.
He was there. Wonderland.
Of course.
Of course, of course, of course.
“…of course.”
IV - Marble Cake • Barbarian
School became more of a habit after a while, after the initial nervousness (and slight shock) of day one passed. I would wake up at morning to my alarm clock, at either seven thirty or eight (I don’t remember which it was), and stumble to the bathroom. Splash water on my face. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Water. Towel. Back to the room. Get dressed. (But make sure the clothes follow Mommy’s standards of what looks good because otherwise I’ll look funny and have to get dressed again and be almost late and have to run for the express limousine bus.) Downstairs. Breakfast. Toast and cereal or milk and pancakes or something like that. (I had low blood pressure back then, so I usually wasn’t awake enough to taste things properly that early in the morning.) Then pack my bag with the books, homework, pens, pencils, eraser, whatever. Run out to the school limousine bus. It was a shiny white behemoth, headlight gleaming like fireflies or eyes and the front grill bearing a monstrous grin. Plush seats covered with brown leather that sank in softly to touch, almost so soft that it was sickening. The words “Belland Academy” stitched or painted on everything in neat black letters, swirling and curving like the bus did as it glided silently over the street across the miniature bridge and up the hill before screeching to a halt at the Academy gates. The doors would open with the small sigh of escaping air, and we would trudge off, smashing the green grass beneath our feet as we scurried up the slope and through the glass double doors.
It should have been new! exciting! and interesting!!! every day, but even a kid gets bored of methodical, scheduled events like that. The green grass seemed to be mocking us after a while, beckoning us outside as we were stuck inside the white building, all the surfaces cleaned until they gleamed in the light and showed us our reflections, but distorted with the pattern in the marble so that our faces were marred with twisted white streaks.
We lost our names there, after a while. It wasn’t really something that the teacher had intended to happen, but it happened anyway because all of us little kids were either too scared or too stupid to stop it from happened. It was a weird process. One that took place during another round of icrebreakers we’d been playing that dragged out a bit longer than it should have. Mafia, it was called. That game where you sit around in a circle and pick cards to chose positions and one or two or three people constitute the mafia and have to kill other people (we called it kidnapping because we weren’t supposed to know about murder yet at that tender age, and the people we voted our were “chased out of town” rather than executed), but because the teacher didn’t want us to get our feelings hurt when she read out “Okay, today, Matt was kidnapped by the mafia,” we were given “game-names.”
They were names that we had made for us on little paper name tags, and we referred to each other by those names. It was in alphabetical order, one boy and one girl for each letter of the alphabet except for six letters (u, v, x, y, z, and q). Mine was Moth. I don’t know how I ended up with that name, but end up with it I did, and I was promptly pulled out of the game when Ms. Dilworth read out, “Tonight, Moth was kidnapped by the mafia.”
The names were supposed to last inside the game only, but we liked the names, they were easy to memorize, and if they were inoffensive in the game, then surely, they would be inoffensive in real life too.
We began to shed our real names and call each other our game names instead. The teachers followed suit after a while.
Rabbit. Blossom. Tender. Flamingo. Hedgehog. Platypus. Hatter. Marchen.
Moth.
Not Alexias.
Moth.