Chapter 2: Asking the Wrong Questions
When Kakashi reached one of the cells under the T&I building with his shunshin, he was surprised when Alice suddenly became a mass of blue butterflies that whirled away from him and then reconstructed themselves into the figure of Alice, who stood back with a rather large knife that she had seemingly pulled from thin air. She held it defensively in front of her, and watched him warily.
Kakashi, having seen such tricks before was unperturbed by the suddenness of the knife's appearance, though he was mildly interested that it had a shape that spoke more of a kitchen knife than a kunai.
He was much more interested in what she had done to get to the position she was currently in.
"Butterflies?" He asked calmly, half out of genuine interest, and half to throw her off balance. "Is it a genjutsu?"
Alice didn't lower her knife, but mostly just seemed confused and wary, rather than moments from attack.
"What is a genjutsu?"
"An illusion technique that affects the senses," he rattled off the old Academy answer automatically, and without inflection but inside he wondered. How could she not have heard of genjutsu from wherever she received her training? Or was she playing dumb? What was her angle? Act crazy until her every action was written off as being some sort of mad response without reason? But that called attention to her, attention that any spy would seek to avoid. But then it could be a double bluff, and in fact the real intention was to catch attention so that she was consisdered to be not a threat, and then she would do apparently random things that would somehow fit an elaborate pattern that would eventually allow her to take over the village...
Kakashi inwardly winced. Sometimes looking underneath the underneath was almost more trouble than it was worth.
Alice seemed amused for some reason. Did she know what he was thinking? "Now I know this can't be the real world. Usually my hallucinations aren't catching."
Alright, now that was a weird statement to make.
She waved her knife, and it left behind a blue trail in the air. "Then again, I generally can't access my Vorpal blade in the real world either."
"Vorpal blade?" Kakashi asked her. The name sounded bizarre to him. He unsure he wanted to ask what she meant by the "real world". Did this mean that Wonderland was not real?
Was this what she meant by being mad?
"It goes snicker-snack," Alice replied, deadpan. Kakashi noted from the slight glint in her eye that it was some sort of private joke. "I don't normally pick fights with humans if I can avoid it, but if you come any closer, I might forget."
It was at this point that the interrogator on duty, Aburame Mushimaru if Kakashi was not mistaken, shushinned in, a whirl of leaves preceding him by milliseconds. Which was perhaps fortunate, because Kakashi was unsure as to whether or not Alice's last comment had been a threat.
Alice looked interested. "Leaves? Oh, so that's how we got here," she said, gesturing with the knife between herself and Kakashi. "I didn't know you could pull people along when you turned intangible, how curious."
The Aburame raised a thin eyebrow above his dark glasses. Kakashi, who had worked with Aburame before knew that he wanted an explanation.
Kakashi decided to oblige him.
"She says her name is Alice Liddell. She just turned up in front of the gates, by way of the Forest of Death, from what she says." Meanwhile, he signed to him, "Skill level unknown. Village unknown. Purpose unknown. Maybe dangerous. Possibly delusional."
The Aburame regarded Alice, who regarded him right back, with eerily unblinking concentration.
Kakashi generally prided himself on his skill at reading people, but right then the two figures before him might as well have been stone blocks for all the emotion they displayed.
"Greetings," he said, bowing politely. "You can call me Aburame."
Alice bowed politely back, her Vorpal blade vanishing from sight. Suddenly, she was in some sort of kimono, with flower patterned black silk.
"Greetings to you also, sir," she replied. "You may call me Alice."
Kakashi stared at her. Was that a genjutsu as well? If so, it was not exactly harmful looking, but that in itself was enough to put him on his guard. He considered looking through his Sharingan eye to test it, but decided against it. It might be an important thing to have in reserve should Alice turn out to be hostile.
It would not be the first time that something of the sort had happened.
"If you would just come through here," Aburame said, opening a previously hidden door, "I would be much obliged. I would like to ask you a few questions."
To Kakashi's surprise, Alice did just that.
He took up a position by the door, and the Aburame gestured for her to sit down at the plain wooden table in the cold, windowless room.
She sat straight-backed down on a chair on one side of the table, and waited for the Aburame to sit, before she asked, "I know it is a little rude to ask, but I don't suppose I could have some tea? I am absolutely famished. The last thing I ate was some mushrooms from the forest."
The Aburame's eyebrows shot upward. "What sort of mushrooms?" he asked her. If she had indeed come from the Forest of Death, then it was unlikely that whatever fungus she had ingested had been safe for human consumption. To his knowledge there were only fifteen species that failed to kill a person within minutes, with nine of those being hallucinogenic and of the remaining six, only three did not require some sort of antidote to be administered to prevent eventual organ failure.
Alice shrugged. "Not anything I recognised, but I haven't been feeling ill, so they can't have done me too much harm. Then again, I never met a mushroom that disagreed with me after I tried some of Caterpillar's Toadstool. They sometimes make me feel rather large or small, but they don't disagree. I wonder if this means that they're like yes-men," Alice pondered.
The Aburame's brows returned to a relaxed position. Kakashi wondered if that meant he too thought Alice had revealed some sort of acquired immunity to the poisons from fungi.
The Aburame let out a few of his bugs in a light swarm, and a few minutes later, a non-descript chunin in uniform brought a tea-service that included a few sticks of dango. The Aburame poured the tea as his bugs returned to their place within him.
Alice watched all of this with undisguised fascination. "Where did the insects come from? Do they live inside you?" she asked him as she took her tea from him.
"Yes. The ninja of the Aburame clan all have kikai within them." Such information was hardly difficult to come by, so the Aburame felt no compunction in releasing it. If the Aburame ninja had in any way desired to hide the fact that they all contained the kikai, then they would have not all dressed practically in uniform- sunglasses and white high-collared jackets or tunics in monochrome colours made the Aburames at least as distinctive as the Inuzuka with their furs, facial tattoos and canine companions. Though the bug-derived jutsu tended to be somewhat stealthier than many flashy ninjutsu, every once in a while an Aburame made it into the bingo books of the other nations.
Kakashi privately thought that this might have something to do with the occasional rumours that there were kikai bugs that ate flesh as well as chakra. He had never confirmed this as more than a rumour with any Aburame. He suffered from chakra exhaustion on a regular enough basis without pissing off an entire clan with chakra-eating techniques.
To Kakashi's surprise, Alice seemed neither disgusted nor perturbed by the announcement that Aburame had bugs under his skin, and she did not act as though she had heard of such a thing before. The latter was extremely rare. "That sounds rather uncomfortable," she commented conversationally. "Although if sending the... kikai was it? as messengers to get tea is any indication, at the very least they must be rather useful. I suppose you must have to be rather wary of spiders in your home, otherwise your tenants would get eaten."
Kakashi and the Aburame both stiffened. Was that a threat?
Alice sipped at her tea, completely unconcerned by the sudden tension in the room. "Oh, this is a marvellous blend. I really must ask where you get it. This is quite delicious." She reached for one of the dango sticks. "Since you didn't give me a fork, you will have to forgive my fingers. I truly am quite hungry, but even though they say I am mad, I do my best to at least show some manners," she said, delicately eating the sweet dumplings.
Kakashi wasn't sure quite what to make of her. She seemed perfectly happy to be consuming tea and dumplings that had been made outside of her sight, so she didn't appear to be afraid of poison. Either she was immune, or she didn't think to be paranoid, a quite un-ninja-like trait.
After she had polished off three of the dumplings, Alice looked up at the Aburame. "Are you not having any Mr. Aburame? Surely your kikai at least would like some of the dumplings. The few times I have been on picnics I've had to protect the food from insects, especially the sweet things, so I imagine they would enjoy these," she said.
The Aburame considered her solemnly, and then let a few of his beetles exit his sleeves. They fell upon one of the sticks of dango, and shortly, only the stick itself was left behind.
Again, Alice watched with undisguised fascination. To Kakashi's surprise, she clapped her hands.
"Goodness, what a disappearing trick! If I were to tell the children from the orphanage about this they never would have believed me. Though they didn't really believe me when I told them about Wonderland. Little brats." Alice suddenly sounded bitter. "They used to say the most awful things to me. Bumby must have told them to. Still," Alice brightened, "I told the new woman they put in charge that if she didn't treat those kids right I'd come back and do worse to her than I did to Bumby." She grinned savagely, and Kakashi momentarily wondered if Alice was somehow related to Anko. "She believed me. Threatened to call the police though, so I decided to go back to Wonderland. I'd rather gaol over the Asylum again, but even that wouldn't be all that much fun to visit for a long time."
Her brow crinkled minutely. "Except this doesn't feel like Wonderland. There's no edge of hysteria. Mr. Aburame it seems clear to me that you're not a normal human being, and it seems that others here can melt away into leaves like I do with the butterflies, but there aren't any gaps! No gaping chasms, no card people, a distinct lack of randomly placed teeth and violets... and everyone at least appears humanoid. Even Hatter is more machine than human nowadays. This is all really quite curious."
Kakashi watched as the Aburame considered her words with characteristic solemnity, and then decided to move on to another line of questioning.
Under the table he signed to Kakashi, "Delusional? Or Speaking in Code?"
"So, why did you come to Konoha?" the Aburame asked her.
Alice seemed unperturbed by the change in subject. "I am not sure yet," she responded. "I rarely end up in places I expect to, however, I always discover a purpose once I am there."
So either she was hiding something, or she was a drifting wanderer. Which didn't seem to make any sense, because if she were the latter, then she would have to have heard about Konoha before.
"Where were you before you came here?" the Aburame asked her.
"The Oriental Grove. Before that, London, I suppose. I managed to skip Hatter's Realm, which was quite a relief, I can tell you. Rather unpleasant place, that, although the factory does produce a rather good tea. Not as good as this one mind. I think it must be because of the workers. I hear that you don't have to be mad to work at Hatter's Tea Factory, but it helps."
She said this with a slight glint in her eye, as though she were sharing a joke, but neither Kakashi nor the Aburame recognised her reference.
"I wonder," she said in a thoughtful tone, "what he ever ended doing about the March Hare and the Dormouse. They had rebelled, you know, and taken poor Hatter apart. I ended up getting him all back together again, so I suppose that he was not like Humpty Dumpty..." she trailed off.
Kakashi exchanged glances with the Aburame. What in the name of Kami...? Was she a medic nin? But she had said that the Hatter was mostly mechanical. Was he a puppeteer who had himself become a puppet like Sasori? But neither of them had ever heard of such a nin. Either Jiraiya's network had had a critical slip-up, or Alice was telling them lies, or...
Something else. Something strange. She kept making bizarre references that neither of them understood. Could this be some kind of code, or was Alice some sort of madwoman?
After a slight pause that Alice seemed to have no intention of breaking as she sipped contently at her tea, the Aburame cleared his throat.
"What do you intend to do while you are here in Konoha?" the Aburame asked her.
Alice shrugged. "I have no firm notion yet. Whatever needs to be done. I will find something. Maybe I'll tell stories to children. I liked telling stories. Trick is to scare them just enough that they find it exciting, but not too much, or they'll be wetting the beds with nightmares for weeks." She said this last in a light, almost cheerful tone, and Kakashi got the sinking feeling that this woman was speaking from experience. It was beginning to seem quite obvious that as she claimed, she was indeed mad. Her swiftness to pull that blade from nowhere suggested that she was dangerous too. However, she did not appear to have any ill-will towards Konoha. In fact, if she were to be believed, before today she had not even heard of the place.
Which in and of itself was an extremely strange thing.
Kakashi was beginning to notice that this seemed to be the trend with Alice.
"So, you tell stories," the Aburame stated. "What other skills do you have?"
Alice cocked her head and considered for a moment. "Not a lot really. I was in the Asylum for ten years, and skills weren't really a thing that they tended to foster there. I can cook clean and sew enough to get by, but I am long out of practice, and I only remember a few things my mother taught me. I am not unskilled at finding things. Most recently, it was teeth and bottles and memories, but I'm sure if pressed I could find other things as well." She paused for a moment. "I suppose my only other skills lie in the martial arts. No doubt you would find me rather unladylike for saying so, but I seem to do quite well in dealing with multiple foes when I use my Vorpal Blade. Or of course the Pepper Grinder or the Hobby Horse or the Teapot Cannon."
Kakashi looked at the Aburame, and was amused to see that the habitually blank expression had become even blanker. He had never heard of those weapons either. He wondered whether Hasuwada* the weapons smith would recognise the names. Perhaps he would ask him later.
"So you have never belonged to a Hidden Village?" the Aburame asked her.
Alice shook her head, taking another sip of her tea. "I'm not entirely sure what you lot mean by Hidden Villages. I was born and raised in England in case you wanted to know. My childhood home was a nice two-storey house with a large garden, but for the last eleven years I've been in London. Filthy grey place. I have no wish to go back."
The Aburame made a sign under the table to Kakashi. Kakashi inclined his head in agreement. It was time to bring in a Yamanaka. If her story checked out, (which seemed impossible, but then, neither of them had yet detected a lie,) then the next visit would be the Hokage.
The Aburame nodded to Alice, who seemed to have noticed the exchange.
She folded her arms in front of her.
"It's impolite to speak about a person as though she is not there," Alice chided them.
"Apologies," the Aburame said simply. "I was merely asking Hatake-san's opinion on whether now would be a good time for you to meet one of our Yamanaka colleagues."
"Oh?" asked Alice. "And who might these Yamanaka be?"
"They have skills in the mind arts," Kakashi informed her from his post by the door.
Alice stiffened. "I have had more than enough of psychologists. Enough to last me a lifetime," she gritted out, her knuckles turning white as she gripped her own arms. "I might be mad, but I am yet to meet a psychologist whose therapy has actually done me any good. If anything, they tend to make me more insane. I have had more than enough of 'cures'." She was close to hyperventilating.
"You need not feel anxiety about this Yamanaka attempting to cure you of anything," the Aburame said calmly. Alice remained tense, and Kakashi could not help but think that he would likewise have remained tense having heard the Aburame's emphasis. Privately Kakashi wondered if it was for the sake of clarity, or to keep a future threat "Though a few of the clan are more oriented towards the healing arts, Yamanaka are best known for their abilities to enter people's minds."
For the first time since Kakashi had seen her, Alice's composure slipped entirely as she shot out of her chair.
"Wh-what?" she looked entirely flabberghasted, and Kakashi could smell a little fear sweat. "You mean that literally, you want this Yamanaka to enter my mind? Enter my mind?"
"It is completely painless," Kakashi intoned. What on earth had been done to this woman in the 'Asylum' that she was so fearful of people going near her mind? Was it merely an expression of her madness? Post traumatic stress? Or something else entirely?
Alice looked at him suspiciously. "How would you know? Have either of you had a Yamanaka in your head?"
"Yes," replied the Aburame simply. "This is merely protocol to ensure that you are who you say you are."
Alice suddenly smiled eerily. "But I could be anybody. For all I know, I've been changed in the night. Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, now that's the great puzzle!" Once again Alice seemed to be in on some private joke** and Kakashi was starting to feel more than a little unnerved. This feeling only increased when Alice seemed to suddenly snap back into clarity again.
She looked from one to the other of the ninja, wide-eyed.
"With respect sirs, I really, really do not think this is a good idea." She laughed, but it was certainly not a happy sound. "There are things in my head. Bad things. She is still in there, tentacles and all, even though I managed to get the train out. She once swore to chop off the heads of all who trespassed, and though I have managed to enter into a truce with her, I do not think she will take kindly to this Yamanaka person intruding!" If Alice had not smelled so frightened, Kakashi might have thought she was trying to threaten them. As it was, he could not help but think that she was trying to warn them, though her words made no sense to him.
The Aburame stood slowly from his chair.
"I am afraid that it is protocol, although your objection is noted-"
He was cut off, " And I, Yamanaka Tsubaki have been within some of the foulest minds that the Nations can offer." A tall blonde woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, clothed in a purple kimono had entered the room. "However," she conceded to the wary-looking Alice, "I will as always exercise the utmost of caution."
"Yamanaka-san." The Aburame bowed to her. "This is Alice Liddell."
"Hello Alice," the Yamanaka said. In a not unkind tone, she asked Alice to sit back down.
Alice sat, but she watched the Yamanaka with an expression Kakashi had seen on cornered animals.
"You may have seen foul minds before," said Alice,with an uncertain-sounding giggle, "but I doubt you've seen anything like mine. Very well. I warn you though, avoid anything that looks red and tentacled. Oh, and if that grinning Cat is in there, be careful of his advice- it's always cryptic, and only sometimes helpful."
The Yamanaka nodded solemnly, and to Kakashi's surprise, she seemed to be taking Alice's suggestions to heart. Then again, he supposed, if Alice was mad as she said she was, and more to the point, if she was telling the truth about some of her delusions, then the Yamanaka really should be wary.
Sitting down on the Aburame's vacated chair, the Yamanaka requested for Alice to relax. She then placed a manicured hand against Alice's forehead, made a sign, and then her body went slack.
Kakashi felt no worry, as he had seen this scene many times before when Yamanakas interrogated people. Considering that very few ninja made it through the ranks without cracking up in one way or another, he was not particularly perturbed by Alice's claims to madness. He had seen the Yamanaka come out of a few minds looking like she definitely needed a shower to wash the grime off, but even then her composure had always stayed firm.
It was not until the screaming started that he started to get an extremely bad feeling about this.
*Hasuwada is the owner of the weapons shop in Mouse of Konoha, a completely rad fic, in case you guys were wondering. It's in my favs somewhere if anyone wants to check it out.
**If this section sounds familiar, it's because I adapted it straight from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with a few small changes for style.
In other news, wow, so I take it you guys want more then? Totally doable. I'm having fun writing this. Thank you all who have reviewed! It's always nice to hear some constructive criticism. Next episode: Remember what the Dormouse said.