A/N: This will be finished very quickly and has been written very quickly. It is only meant to be a short fiction, and was spurred on by an Easter Egg hunt I was forced into at work today. It turned out to be rather fun in the end, and I won (which is always nice)!
Disclaimer - There will be references to other fandoms, please forgive my shamelessness, I own nothing at all.
'Very Uncomfortable for the Dormouse.'
"Now remember, this is as much an exercise in team work as it is about having fun. You will have to rely on your team mate and their skill in order to complete the challenge. The first team to complete the challenge wins a prize. Are you ready, Teams?"
'Ready'? Seifer was barely awake and mentally present, forget 'ready'! And even if he were himself 'ready'... Was Trepe? He blinked at her with no small amount of trepidation - what on earth had possessed Cid to make them into a team?!
They were currently stood in the Headmaster's office along with several other 'pairs' made up of the Garden faculty, waiting to be let loose on Cid's latest interactive brainchild. The Headmaster had decided, following several reports from his faculty that they felt they were becoming more detached from their colleagues and that this was presenting potential issues in the quality of the education the students were receiving, that there needed to be more activities available for - read: impressed upon - his staff to encourage inter-departmental co-operation. Inexplicably, this was translated somewhere along the line into an Easter egg hunt.
Being an instructor from the Physical & Tactical Combat Department had evidently opened him up to be partnered with Instructor Trepe, of the Magical Theory Department. And, as Cid was obviously so very fond of slamming his two most difficult children together in an effort to get them to bond as frequently as possible, their partnership seemed fated from the start. Seifer could have scoffed.
"Then here are your first clues!" The headmaster announced gleefully, handing out some multicoloured, hollow plastic eggs.
Quistis popped theirs, a green one, open and took a little scroll of paper from inside. Seifer sidled a bit closer as she stretched it out. "VERY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR THE DORMOUSE."
They blinked at it for a moment, then looked at each other and blinked again. "Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse..." Quistis repeated. "I don't have any idea what that means."
Meanwhile, the other faculty members had begun filtering out of the room in varying degrees of hopefulness and listlessness. Seifer watched them go with a distinct feeling of doom.
"Well," He folded his arms and looked at Quistis, "You're the genius, if you don't know then we're fucked."
"Aren't you going to help me?" Quistis gave him a look.
"How? I don't know anything about mice. You're the bookworm, shouldn't you know?"
"About mice?" She gave him a disbelieving look, then went back to the scroll of paper. "...Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse, I've heard that before..."
Quistis paced for a while with the scroll in her hands, and Seifer stood and watched her for a while. After a good 5 or 10 minutes however his feet began to complain at the lack of blood circulation they were getting and he took a seat in one of the Headmaster's plush leather chairs.
"Oh get up!" Quistis huffed, stopping her circling and turning to glare at Seifer in a very disapproving fashion.
"But we're going to be here forever." Seifer reasoned, "You're not coming up with anything!"
"I might do if you helped me!" She snapped, "Besides, even if you're not going to help, no one invited you to sit down!"
Thoroughly unperturbed by this outburst, as it followed along the lines of so many previous outbursts much the same, Seifer simply propped his ankle up on his knee. "I didn't know this was your armchair." He replied, nonchalant because of course it wasn't.
"It's-" Quistis started to speak, but then, realising what Seifer had said, stopped herself to think, before deciding that yes she was most likely correct in her assumption, and giving an excited squeal. "Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse!" She repeated, a note of triumph in her voice.
Seifer just stared at her cluelessly. She tutted at his ignorance. "Alice in Wonderland. 'Very Uncomfortable for the Dormouse'?"
He shook his head, "Nope, sorry Trepe, you lost me there."
"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'?" She asked, eyebrow raised in scepticism.
"No." He rolled his eyes. "I'm not a girl."
Evidently concluding that he might have had a point, Quistis began to explain. "It's a book about a little girl, called Alice, who falls asleep and has a dream where she falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in a place called Wonderland."
"Sounds like she might have been a bit heavy on the greens."
"Shut up. She wanders about trying to find the rabbit, who is late-"
"For?"
"He's going to see the Queen-"
"As you do."
"It's not important now shush! She's following this rabbit and comes across a tea-party with only three people at it, and there's a Dormouse and the other two people, a Hatter and a hare, are using the Dormouse as a cushion and she thinks it must be very uncomfortable for him!"
"Right." Seifer said slowly, wondering, not for the first time, how Trepe had turned out so sane for having read so much utter rubbish in her younger years. "And this helps us, how?"
"Well it's clearly a clue to the next egg." She said, resuming her pacing and staring back down at the scroll again.
"Yeah, thanks for that, Einstein," Seifer cut, throwing his hands up in the air. "I think I got that bit, we're looking for eggs, bravo for working that out, but where is the next egg?"
"I don't know..." Quistis muttered, to which Seifer groaned and threw himself back in the chair.
"Well, what else happens in the book?"
"Loads of things, I really hope we're not meant to decipher the whole damn book, none of it makes any sense at all." Quistis muttered, and shot Cid - who was doing his best to look incredibly busy on the other side of the desk - a suspicious look. When the glower got her nowhere she turned her attention back to the scroll, and Seifer, who was sitting with a hand over his mouth, rubbing at the blonde stubble on his chin. She was an early bird, but he was clearly not and had been dragged from his bed with very little warning, so had run out of time to shave. The fuzz was an unusual addition to his countenance, which was usually nicely maintained and not at all what one might describe as 'scruffy', and was so pale that really she didn't know why he bothered to shave at all, but the morning light coming through Cid's windows illuminated it wonderfully. Like a halo for his chin.
"So, what else happens at the 'tea-party' with the mouse?" He asked.
"Well, they drink tea, obviously," Quistis explained, "And talk about Time, and there's a riddle about a raven and a writing desk, and they told stories about treacle."
"Why treacle?"
"Just read the book, none of it makes sense otherwise."
Seifer - who had never been a great fan of reading anything - groaned and sank a little further in his chair. "You just said none the book made sense anyway so there's no point in trying to decipher it." He muttered, but Quistis wasn't listening, she was pacing again.
"I think we should go and walk around and see if we can find anything that might be useful."
"I think that's a fucking terrible idea."
Quistis glared. "Well, frankly, as you have thus far failed to add anything of worth to this 'partnership' I don't think you have any right to start pooh-poohing my ideas!"
Pooh-pooh, Seifer thought, finding it quite funny, funny enough to gloss over any snarky retorts he might have had to give in response to Quistis' belittlement of his involvement in the hunt in any case. "I think we should start again," He said with a smile, "Instead of deciding that none of it makes sense."
Disgruntled, Quistis mentally agreed and began thinking over everything she could remember of Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Tea-Party. Eventually she announced, to Seifer's expectant ear, that they should begin their search in the cafeteria, because that was where one might reasonably expect to hold a tea-party, so it was as good a place to start looking as any.
Arriving in the cafeteria, they had a bit of a look around before reconvening by the door to confer again.
"Ok, so I don't see any tea-parties, what now?" Seifer asked first. Quistis pursed her lips as she thought and glanced about.
"Alice came upon a clearing, where there was a large table filled with drink ware and other bits and bobs related to tea time," She explained, hoping against hope, that it might help them to locate the egg, "and when she got there there was a hatter and a hare, drinking tea, and leaning on the Dormouse."
"Using it as a cushion." Seifer finished.
"Yes..." Quistis trailed off.
Seifer looked about again, "A big table with drink ware on it." and set off towards the lunch line. If one wanted a hot drink around here they had to order it from the hatch along with everything else.
Quistis waited around nervously for him to return and when he did so it was empty handed.
"No eggs." He confirmed.
Quistis huffed in annoyance. "Well I don't know what we're meant to do then. This is ridiculous! We've already lost so much time. The others are going to be finished already and we haven't even got the first one!"
"Calm down, this can't be the only place in Garden to get a drink."
"Well no, I guess there are the water dispensers all over the place. And there's the staff..."
They exchanged a look, then took off at speed towards the staff lounge. Seifer got through the door first , Quistis careening in just behind him. Sure enough, the counter top was awash with fresh cups ready for the day's traffic, and pots waiting to be filled with either tea, or coffee. And at the very end of the counter sat a small cushion with a bright green egg on the top.
Quistis strode over and snatched up the egg, grinning at Seifer. "One down," He said in reply, "Who knows how many more to go."
She wordlessly popped open the egg, and took the next clue from inside.