Welcome back (Even though the fandom is small)! I've added the next installment to this little story, though this kind of makes me nervous. Honestly, I'm just stumbling over myself as I'm writing this story. It was a little concept I started late last year and now I sort of forgot where I wanted to go with it. So the starter chapters will maybe not be good as a way of stalling myself to do this story. I'm sure it will be fine though (I do have a little idea of something), as Mickey is once again accompanied by darkness. What's there, though? Disclaimer: I don't own Epic Mickey in any way, shape, or form, or the story of the misfortune of Alice. The rest of it is up to you.
Mickey in Wonderland
Mickey huddled over to where the talking door once was, clutching the paintbrush close as there was virtually nothing he could grasp on to to make sense of where he was. It was completely dark, yet he was perfectly framed; his white standing out with even the black outline, with even the blot droplets flowing from his skin. To have at least one's figure to make out real should be his assurance. He was having a sense of fear, however, but there was nothing to fear technically; then that was what he feared. Of not knowing where he was and what would happen.
Mickey suddenly shook. He was letting nothing get to himself, so he quickly straightened and fell back to more of the darkness, until he suddenly met an end against a wall. Lights flickered on dimly, revealing a very confined room he was trapped in, a closet to be procise. Clothes piled up, books hanging loose between each folded article, and a long chain connecting to the bare lightbulb illuminating the room. That seemed unusual since he was previously in a large space much bigger than the closet capacity. Mickey shook his head anyway. The chord. If only he had felt for it (if it was always there) and solved the situation quicker. Mickey curved his features, bemused, where am I, exactly?
"Mary Ann!" Mickey jerked his head up ward, the silver chain coiling around his ears. "Mary Ann?"
"Who?" He breathed out, pressing himself immediately to the withering, mahogany door. He could make out a distinct thump-tick-thump-tock noise, scurrying near his location. Being even more puzzled, he bent down at the little light seeping from below the door, endeavoring to peek under, then just sticking his nose out and sniffing. The room smelled fresh compared to the door. He could sense friendly sunlight, a pleasant change from the paralyzing darkness. If only he could get out there.
"Mary Ann, where are you!" Mickey heard the voice again, this time distinctly closer and the thumping and ticking noise arose.
Mickey jumped up. He began seizing the opportunity by calling from the door. He heard the voice calling for him let out a surprised mutter, and thump over to his location. The door was unlocked and Mickey was tumbled out into the suddenly blinding light.
"Wha-, but you're not Mary Ann," the voice said and Mickey shook his head and propped himself to see a full grown rabbit dressed crisp and well. In fact, he appeared in a castle ground uniform with noticeable heart markings. Talking as well. Not usually unusual, but there were still no citizens around Wasteland who looked anything like him. His miniature glasses snuggled up closer to his eyes as he ruffled his nose, tempered. "Now what were you doing in my closet, mouse?"
Mickey widened his eyes. He had been simply staring at him the whole time. He chuckled cumbersomely as he helped himself off of the plush, pink carpet, "a-hah, sorry about that." He suddenly noticed the amount of hearts and pink that were adorning the room and he irked that rabbit again with no response.
He stomped his overly sized rabbit foot. "No no, this just won't do! I can't have a large mouse infestation in my house now! I'm much too busy for this, I have very important businesses to attend to," with heat steaming off, the White Rabbit proceeded to check his large pocket watch, only to freak out on the spot.
"Oh my! I'm late, for a very important date!" He exclaimed and started down the stairs nervously.
Mickey reached out, "no, but wait!"
"I have to go, he cannot wait! Oh my, oh me, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!" He rushed out of the house without attending to whatever he came there for and Mickey could hear the slam of his front door.
Mickey rushed over to the nearby window upstairs and saw the rabbit trotting out casually, as if he hadn't been worrying. Mickey was stupefied for a moment, but shook it off and hollered out, "hold on, what about me? Where am I, exactly?"
"Wo-wa, what!?" The White Rabbit hitched violently. His quickly furious tone frightened Mickey, but the White Rabbit answered, "WELL... Mary Ann was supposed to be here, but because she's not, you must help with my things in the house. Get me what I need!"
Mickey gaped. How assertive, which there was no need for, he was just lost and confused. "Who's Mary Ann, and, uh, what do you need?"
The fine dressed rabbit seemed to bite his cheek when Mickey mentioned Mary Ann, and simply repeated heatedly, "just go get my things, before I'm late!"
"Okay," he hollered back, gently turning away from the window and grumbling, "his things, I don't even know what."
With that, Mickey wandered slowly about the room, not feeling the energy to hurry unlike what the rabbit was implying to do. The curious mouse shifted his gaze over the rabbit's decor. The pink in the room was surprisingly dull, but it was the color of everything in his room (oh, with the exceptions of some whites and speckles of red). Mickey stopped in the middle of the room. Just where exactly did he land in. How extraordinary his situation from dreadfully bleak and gruesome and dark to bleed to these fluffy shades of pink. The transition seemed unpleasantly unsettling.
"Tick Tock, time is running out Mary Ann, or, whoever you are!" The rabbit called gruffly. A grimaced pity graced Mickey's face, hearing the- surely there- incessant clicking of the pocket watch.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm looking," Mickey replied, hearing a gruff noise from him again, and straightened up. He glanced around the decor once more. He sighed, "well, I guess I should really be looking around... huh."
Mickey strolled over to the cream-pink slashed dresser- despite it being near the bothersome window- and checked through the drawers, climbing his fingers to the table top. A white table clothe with flower trimming touched Mickey's nose and he realized he had found nothing. He stared down at the only thing on the dresser. A small, specially designed box, conspicuously open. Inside were little, cutely crafted wafers and biscuits. Mickey gingerly picked one up, sprouting a smile for one decent thing. Tied to the cookie was a ribbon with fresh smelling, crisp paper, fascinatingly written: Eat Me, in beautiful print. Well, a cookie telling the holder to pleasingly eat them, how do you not!
Mickey shrugged a smile and popped the delicate wafer in his mouth. He chewed and chewed and suddenly noticed the flavors it was taking on: air freshener, steamed potatoes, cold lemon water, buttercream cake, a teaspoon of honey. Or how peculiar the taste ranged. Mickey licked his lips at the sweet taste, but suddenly felt a sharp change in his mouth enough to knock him on to his knees, off guard. The taste was morphing into much different flavors: ripening bitter lemons, stale moldy cheese, the overwhelming sensation of dying roses that shot pain through the mouse's body. He threw his arms to the ground completely, grunting and convulsing as he slowly felt his limbs beginning to stretch. The perfect black skin on his flesh began to tear and rip at the mid-way of his ankles and wrists the more they elongated, curling back gently on itself and allowing blood to ooze out. The White Rabbit's carpets were no longer a fluffy, happy-go-lucky pink as it felt his blood spread around the room, killing the colors and changing the room's atmosphere dark. His shriek gurgled as his head began to split, little hairs falling off and his skin flapping off to each side. The blood spurted wildly and streamed down to his pained white face. The feeling of growing larger and larger pumped Mickey's heart faster and faster until he thought he would have a heart attack. His ridged back connected with the roof of the home, his arms pushed through the sides of the house, splashing blood into the woods, and his legs glided down the bottom half of the house and out in the open. He had completely tripled in size, along with practically destroying the White Rabbit's home!
The owner of the home (who was of course there at the sight.) shrieked loudly at the even more overgrown mouse, but more so for the destruction of his home and the pouring of blood through the windows. "Oh-oh my, what's-'s," he stunted the outcry (almost as if that was all he was made to say in this unexpected situation.) when spotting something flowing down from the house. *White shredding of gloves and a fan swayed down to his feet, and his panicky movements were halted abnormally. "My gloves and fan... He'll be so upset... because of him-" The Rabbit stopped altogether.
"MARY ANN! HOW DARE YOU DEFILE THE BALANCE!" The no longer classy looking rabbit screamed, anger seething to the bone. The light atmosphere formally changed to a wicked tone, morphing the sunny setting into black splotches of red. The rabbit's animated, simple look suddenly shifted. His own body jerked violently as it stretched and grew in size. Fur textured his body more, straggled. His typical rabbit features transformed like one of a creature in a horror story, along with his claws curving to a point, and his snout extending to bare his long buck teeth. The most disturbing part was how much he still retained of his formal self, just more intensified. "I AM TERRIBLY LATE, AND BECAUSE OF YOU, YOU SHALL PAY!"
Mickey rolled his head from the original disorientation of crashing through the house, having heard more the twisted tone in the White Rabbit's voice than the words. He stared down at the transformed creature, paralyzed in fear. All he had done was mistakenly eat a cookie and broke someone's house, whom he had been placed in for unknown reasons. Now that he was stuck like a new remodeled home, how was he going to escape from the freaky wrath?
The White Rabbit, with his crazy new version, rushed over to his fence around the house and tore it to shreds, grunting unnecessarily through it. He then proceeded to throw the wood towards the foot of the house, building up a pile that bemused Mickey for a moment. When he started to notice thick smoke ominously flowing from the wood, he panicked from the thought of being burnt alive. As if the ever flowing- but miserably tedious- blood from his torn flesh wasn't enough to rack pain in his body!
Mickey now had to act and think fast with the little blood still in his brain. He tried shifting his body around, as to maybe free himself by knocking it completely down, but it was far too tight to hardly maneuver. What else could he do? The wood was stacking up more and more, and apparently without the need of some match, it was catching more and more dangerous fire. Mickey coughed and sweated all over from the smoke clouding him as he looked around and around for something to aid him when he stopped and heard some type of little noise from inside the house. He stiffly looked down a near chimney into the room he had been in, and watched on the dresser a new, deckled box appear next to the old one. It opened up gracefully and showed new cookies in it. That was a little strange, but those cookies were after all just that. Perhaps he could just eat one of those. I already know what they do, and even though I suffered for the first one, I'm sure trying again wouldn't be a bad idea. With a change of my height I could burst through the house and run away (suffering the consequences later)! Oh, well I don't really know if it would make me any bigger, they do look a little different, and why a new box if there already was one?... Well, I suppose if I grew bigger or smaller, either one would help me better at escaping then this cooped up height.
Mickey tried his best to reach his pinned arm to the cookies, but he couldn't exactly reach them to his mouth. He could barely poke them. Something wet tickled his back at that moment, to his surprise. He bent his arm back and touched the slender wooden surface up to the finely point bristles. He still had the paint brush with him! *How could he have forgotten! With no time to spare and absolutely all types of panic pumping through his sore veins, he managed to pull it out, holding it by a thread, and squirted out Thinner on half of the roof top. Suddenly he was in a cozier condition and in good reach of the biscuits. With that death rabbit still not noticing, as if Mickey was not even there anymore, he continued his wood stacking and fire burning madly, gradually clawing into the wood to dye his nails a dark red for some reason.
The tremendous mouse reached down to any given cookie and quickly swallowed it whole, wondering if it were possible for him to get any bigger 'till his skin would completely rip off and he would bleed away into nothingness. A taste suddenly flooded his mouth: cookie frosting, sweet peas, crumbs for a comedically small (or poor, obviously) mouse. Unlike the seizing transformation of extending big, Mickey's body suddenly shrunk smaller than originally sized. Snapped back like a measuring tape with his flapping skin along with him. He instantly dropped down to the house, tumbling off the edge and deep into the forest afterwards the house.
As if almost by a click of a button, the White Rabbit who was composed in looks, but terribly high-strung in personality snapped back to his normal sense of mind, inflating back and firming his aching head. "O-oh my," he shuddered dizzily, then spotted his (slightly) torn gloves and holed fan and had little to none recollection of the incident. He dramatically picked up his belongings, to any bystander, not knowing if he was remembering or not, then he jumped, "oh my, I'm late, for the later of coming up date!"
He stashed his belongings in his deep pocket and hopped off hurriedly, not minding his house which was now the only twisted and cracked thing in the area. He huffed and puffed the more he hopped down the road. "The longer I take, the more he will hate, the more punishment I will get with my woe!" He coughed and gagged unnaturally for air, but never stopped hopping on to the castle. "I'm late for the trial, it will be the mouse's final! I am late, I am late, I must go!"
That's the end of this short chapter! First of all, I'm sorry for not having updated in quite a few months, that's a trouble of mine, but I'm really hoping to get more chapters out maybe once every month. I really want to write more for this story, I can't wait to get to the great finale! Also, I'm sorry this chapter wasn't the greatest due to how quick it was and how Mickey started off in the White Rabbit's house; But hey! I did twist it up, didn't I! *sighs longingly~ = ¬ =* Ah yes, this is where it starts to get dark. In case none of you realized, I do intend on making this story dark, as implied by the book jacket (I'm always a sucker for those kinds of things sometimes, and I think the concept art exemplified a great potential for it!), so you have been warned. I have to admit, though, I thought it was pretty good up until a little bit of when the rabbit started changing. That felt a little cheesy -/- ,but I'm sure it'll get better, for sure!
*Notice* I just realized my story has been added to the "Epic Mickey's Greatest Fan fictions" community. That's pretty cool for one chapter! X) I thank you a lot, kind of an honor to me, and I hope it won't disappoint onward. (:
Also, here are what the two '*' meant:
1*- In the original story, the White Rabbit wanted his gloves and fan retrieved for him by "Mary Ann".
2*- I'm just getting at myself for the paintbrush thing, because while writing this, I completely forgot about it and had to drop it in. It wouldn't exactly be an Epic Mickey story without it.
Please don't forget to review and favorite it, if you like. See you in the next chapter!
