Summary:
Alice is an independent modern young woman, thank you very much. But more importantly, she's a St. Trinian's girl, and one who's considered to be strangely 'nice' at that. Which means she has odd logic, highly subjective morals, pepper spray, makeshift bombs, card shark skills, way too much weaponry knowledge, and is not afraid to use them. The rest of Wonderland is equally besotted and bewildered. [au]
Disclaimer:
I don't own Heart no Kuni no Alice, or the cover picture, or St. Trinian's. I only own the concept of 'saltpetre and piperine,' and honestly, I'm mostly working off the assumption that St. Trinian's is a violent, bloodthirsty, dark girls-only school full of sadistic future criminals and psychopaths. Actually, no, take out the 'future.'
The moment she wakes from from what should've been a peaceful nap in her relatives' summer home, enjoying the sheer novelty of no ambush assassinations or secret suffocations while one is resting and 'vulnerable,' and instead finds that she is slung over the shoulders of somebody larger than her moving, Alice spares a single breath to sigh.
Typical St. Trinian's tactic: let the quarry relax, then seize your chance.
Really, she feels nearly ashamed of having let her guard down so much, though to be fair, she'd thought she'd checked her surroundings thoroughly for any sentient beings, then warned off her relatives, before setting up a basic round of traps around her chosen napping spot at the base of a slim elm, which, while not offering much shade, also didn't offer much camouflage or maneuvering space for a possible aerial attack.
Basic, since it would terribly naughty of her to accidentally kill one or more than one of her relatives'; then who would pay her bills and tuition to be sent off to the 'troublemaking girls' school, and more importantly, then whose house would she stay at for summer vacation?
Pickpocketing, thievery, extortion, and murder-for-money was good 'n all, but there was something undeniably idyllic about lazing about on a sunshine-soaked grassy hill instead of inside a cold, dark, antiseptics-reeking safehouse.
Though, of course, the latter was safer than the former.
Well, most of the time.
She'd learned, very soon after enrolling in St. Trinian's and sticking her first pitchfork perfectly through an ambusher's heart on her first try, that it wasn't a Good Idea to use definitives, just like it wasn't a Good Idea to use real gasoline and a real lighter and real dynamite with unreal safety equipment when giving a demonstration of what else wasn't a Good Idea.
St. Trinian's was big on Good Ideas.
Good thing, too, since another Good Idea was never going anywhere (bathroom, shower, whorehouse, nightclubs, gardens, especially the gardens liable to harbor human-eating mutant plants with semi-sentient intelligence) without having a weapon.
Arguably, being a St. Trinian's girl, much less being St. Trinian's most prodigious and (probably) most mentally sound Head Girl in decades, meant that you were already a weapon by yourself, or at the very least a menace to society, something St. Trinian's rather prided itself on.
Which is actually rather sad to think about; if she got kidnapped now, then she wouldn't be able to attend next year, when she officially inherits her title's duties!
What would all the little cannon-fodder firsties do without her there to supervise for excessive and sloppy advancement attacks?
They might start thinking that a sloppy murder was good enough to get them somewhere in life!
Now that just couldn't happen.
So, with her second breath, Alice bit down hard on the soft, furry, but warm and alive rabbit ears near her head, ducked down to bite her kidnapper's shoulder clean through the cloth, kneed him as close to his solar plexus as she could estimate in her adrenaline rush-enhanced clarity of thought, sent up a quick apology for such sloppiness in her own attack, and then jerked forward, tucking into a neat roll out of his grip.
For good measure, when her kidnapper (who she only registered as a., tall, b., 18-24, c., trained male fighter with a height advantage, d., actually a bunny-eared man and not a man with a pet bunny on his head, terribly sorry about that mistake, she rather likes rabbits herself and e., strangely symmetrical facial features) turned around as well, she ripped out the tiny canister of personally-made pepper spray sewn into her (adorable, if she does say so herself) headband's rabbit-ear bow.
Then she twisted off the cap, threw it in his shocked face, and dove past him into the cover of the forest.
... wait, forest?
There was no forest around her relatives' summer home.
"Oh, damnation, how far did Mr. Bunny get me?" she wondered aloud after having sprinted and wove an acceptable distance from said 'Mr. Bunny.'
Alice pouted, crossing her arms, more upset at her own should've-been-better failed security measures and downed guard than actually begrudging Mr. Bunny, who had, after all, only been doing his job as a kidnapper.
She could, professionally, from one kidnapper to another, accept that.
"Wait," she cried, suddenly smacking one fist into her palm, "I should've disabled him and interrogated him for details on his employer and our current surroundings! Summer break really has made me start slipping!"
Sighing, Alice shook her head, and stared up at the barely-glimpsed sky above the thick foliage.
"Well, that's no good to think of regrets now. There's still light... so, time to put some St. Trinian's Wilderness Survival courses into practice. And thank Home Ec, for teaching us all that handy recipe for pepper spray. Good ol' St. Trinians, I'll be back for the next school year!"
And then the brunette teen, dressed in a reasonably practical ensemble of a blue-white summer dress, gray leggings, and steel-tipped boots, fixed (reloaded) her headband, checked her favorite knife's hiding spot in her sash, and then skipped (silently) through the forest, as if she hadn't just left a grown man with a faceful of merciless pepper spray writhing in agony somewhere on the ground far, far behind her.
Or maybe it was the fact that he was, well, writhing in agony somewhere on the ground far, far behind her that comforted her.
It's hard to tell with Alice Liddell, the one voted most likely to go on a berserk psychotic rampage and slaughter hundreds with a smile.
Seeing as it was a St. Trinian's vote, an unanimous one where Alice hadn't even needed to cheat to win, that really, really, really meant something.
The thing is, does it mean the same thing in Wonderland?