A/N: Hello, everyone. I know this chapter took a while to get out, but I hope I made up for it by its longer-than-usual length. I had a lot of fun writing this chapter, as I have for all of these chapters, so I hope you enjoy it!
Peter flew through the jungle, leading the way for Alice, who was walking on foot. Tinker Bell flittered by Peter's side, leaving a trail of pixie dust behind her. "Don't worry; I'll keep an eye out for any wild beasts," Peter said.
"Wild beasts? Goodness," Alice said.
"Aw, they're nothing to worry about. They may seem scary, but they're really just a bunch of pushovers." There was a rustle in the jungle foliage. Peter stopped in midair and landed in front of Alice. "Stay back," he said, pulling out his dagger. A tiger jumped out from the foliage toward Peter and Alice.
"Oh, my!" Alice said, hiding behind Peter.
"Aw, he's nothing but a big, striped kitty," Peter said. "Go on, kitty. Shoo. Shoo!"
The tiger climbed up a nearby tree and rested on a large branch. Then, the tiger's orange fur began to turn pink, and the black stripes began to turn purple. The tiger started shrinking until he was no more than the size of a house cat. The cat then smiled an impossibly wide grin that stretched across his entire face.
"Why, it's the Cheshire Cat!" Alice said.
"The what cat?" Peter asked.
"Cheshire Cat," the feline said, using his tail to lift his scalp off from his head. "At your service." He set his scalp back down on his head again.
"Oh, that's very good, because we need your service," Alice said. "Have you seen any boys dressed as animals recently?"
"Oh, sure," the Cheshire Cat said.
"You did?" Peter exclaimed. "Where did they go?"
"I didn't say I knew where they went. I just said I saw them," the Cat said, chuckling.
"Oh, please," Alice groaned, "can't you tell us just a little more? How many of them did you see? Which direction did they go in?"
"Well, let's see," the Cat said. "I believe I saw two of them. There was one dressed as a rabbit and one dressed as a skunk."
"That's Nibs and Tootles!" Peter said.
"Good! Now, do you remember which direction they went in?" Alice asked.
"Oh, of course. They went in that direction," the Cheshire Cat said, pointing south, "along with a walrus and a man with a hammer."
"Yes, the Walrus and the Carpenter! I remember them from that story the Tweedles told me. Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Cheshire Cat," Alice said. She and Peter began walking due south.
However, the Cheshire Cat then said, "Of course, I could be misremembering things. They might have gone in that direction." Peter and Alice turned around and saw the Cat pointing east. "Or for all I know, it could have been that direction." He pointed west.
"Well, that's certainly no help at all!" Alice stomped her foot.
"I do apologize for not being of more use. My memory's not what it used to be. It seems to fade fast, quite like myself." As he said this, the Cheshire Cat's body began to fade away, starting with his tail and moving up to his head, until the last thing to linger on before fading away was his wide, cackling smile.
"Oh, what a horrible cat!" Alice said.
"How are we supposed to know which direction the boys actually went in?" Peter said.
"I'm not sure. The only thing we do know is that Nibs and Tootles went off with the Walrus and the Carpenter."
"That's if he wasn't lying about that, too."
"Hmm, you have a point there," Alice said. "Well, let's assume for now that he was telling the truth about that part. Where do you suppose the Walrus and the Carpenter would run off to?"
"How should I know? I've never met them. They came out of your head."
"True. Well, let me think. In the story, the Walrus and the Carpenter were walking along the shore of a beach, and the Walrus went into the ocean to fetch some oysters. Now, if there were a place here where sea life thrived… That's it! They must have gone to—"
"Mermaid Lagoon!" Peter said.
"Yes, I was just about to say that," Alice said.
"Great minds think alike, huh?"
"I suppose they do."
"Well, come on, what're we waiting for? Let's go!" Peter took off into the air with Tink, and Alice trailed behind them after a few failed takeoffs. She was still getting used to this whole flying thing, after all.
Peter, Alice, and Tink flew over to Mermaid Lagoon, where they spotted the Walrus and the Carpenter down below. Alice and Peter landed on a rocky ledge overlooking the lagoon.
"There they are," Alice said. "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
"But where're Nibs and Tootles?" Peter said.
"I'm not sure. I don't see them here."
"Well, maybe those two will know where they went."
The Walrus and the Carpenter were on a rock in the middle of the lagoon. The Walrus was talking to the mermaids. "My, my, what beautiful creatures you are," he said. He ran his hand through one of the mermaids' wet, silky red hair.
The mermaids giggled. A blonde mermaid combed her fingers through the Walrus's mustache. "And your mustache. It's so… bushy!" she said.
"Oh my, well, yes, I suppose it is," the Walrus replied, blushing. "And, uh, would you fine, young ladies know of any good seafood we could dish upon? I'm quite famished at the moment."
The Carpenter leaned over to the Walrus and whispered, "And if they haven't got anything to offer, we could always make some mermaid soup!"
The Walrus shushed him and shoved him with his elbow.
"We know of a great spot for seafood," a black-haired mermaid said. "Follow us." The mermaids dived underwater, and so the Walrus walked below the surface to join them. They led him to a vast, underwater kelp forest. "Here you go. This is where we get all our food from," the black-haired mermaid said. "Delicious and nutritious seaweed!"
"Seaweed?" the Walrus said. "You mean that's all?"
"What do you mean 'that's all'?" a mermaid said. "What more could you possibly need?"
"Well, how about some fish? Crabs, lobsters, octopus, oysters, squid. The possibilities are endless when you're in the ocean," the Walrus said.
"No! You can't do that!" another mermaid said. "Those creatures are our friends. We could never eat them."
"Oh, I see," the Walrus said, scowling. "Now, you lovely ladies have been so generous to lead me here, I feel like I must return the favor to you."
"Oh, you don't need to do that," a mermaid said.
"No, I insist. You led me to a special place of yours, so now I will lead you to a special place of mine! The time has come, my mermaid friends, to talk of special things. Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, cabbages, and kings! And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings. Callooh Callay, come run away with cabbages and kings!"
The Walrus then began playing his cane like a flute, and all the mermaids followed behind him in a single-file line. He walked along the bottom of the sea and back up to the surface at the end of the lagoon. The mermaids did not stop at the water's edge either, as they flopped along the land, continuing to follow the Walrus.
As this was happening, the Carpenter was busy constructing a restaurant in record time. The Walrus and the mermaids arrived just as he finished cobbling the restaurant together. It wasn't anything fancy, but it looked pretty good for being constructed in five seconds. The Walrus led all the mermaids into the restaurant.
Peter, Alice, and Tink had watched this whole scene play out as they looked on from that rocky ledge. "What do you suppose the Walrus is doing with the mermaids?" Alice asked.
"I don't know, but something definitely smells fishy about this whole thing, and I'm not talking about the mermaids," Peter said. "Come on, let's see what they're up to." Peter, Alice, and Tink flew down to the Carpenter's hastily-made restaurant, and Peter busted the door wide open.
The mermaids were all laid out on the table, trapped in a fishing net. The Walrus was pouring salt on one of them, and the Carpenter was about to chop one of their heads off with a meat cleaver. As soon as Peter came in, however, they stopped in place and turned their gaze toward him.
"What's going on here?" Peter yelled.
"Oh, hello there, young lad," the Walrus began. Sweat was dripping down all over his face. "Well, you see, it's not quite as it looks. Really, we were just—"
Peter couldn't be bothered to hear the Walrus try to concoct some feeble excuse. He immediately whipped out his dagger and cut open the fishing net. All the mermaids leapt off the table and flopped out of the restaurant.
"Thank you, Peter!" one of the mermaids said.
"Yeah, you saved our lives!"
"We can't thank you enough!"
"It was nothing, girls," Peter said. "Now go on back into the lagoon where it's safe."
The mermaids flopped back to the lagoon and dived into the water.
In the restaurant, Peter swiped the Carpenter's meat cleaver, and he corralled the Walrus and the Carpenter into a corner.
"You two are monsters!" Alice yelled. "First, you ate those innocent oysters, and now you were trying to eat the mermaids?"
"Yeah, what she said," Peter said, gripping the two blades.
"Stay back!" the Walrus said. "You wouldn't kill us, boy, would you?"
"I don't know, why wouldn't I?" Peter nudged his dagger and the cleaver toward them. "You certainly would've had no problem killing the mermaids if I hadn't have stopped you."
The Walrus gulped. Then he said, "We'll do anything, boy. Just ask us, and it is done."
"Yes, anything!" the Carpenter said.
"Tell me where Nibs and Tootles went," Peter said.
"Who?" the Walrus said.
"The boy dressed as a rabbit and the boy dressed as a skunk. You didn't eat them, did you?"
"Oh, them. No, certainly not. Little boys taste horrible," the Walrus said. "Listen, to be entirely honest, I don't know where they went. One moment, they were running alongside us, the next moment, they were gone. We lost them somewhere in the jungle. Now, that's all we know. Please don't hurt us!"
Peter turned back toward Alice. "What do you say, Alice? What should we do with them?"
"I say we give them a taste of their own medicine!" Alice said, her face turning red. "I say we feed these two worthless creatures to a big, great, hungry shark!" And just as the words left her mouth, a huge shark with razor-sharp teeth materialized in midair, right above the Walrus and the Carpenter. The two of them yelped in shock, quivering underneath the waiting jaws of the creature. The shark fell toward them and swallowed them both whole with a single bite. Alice screamed at the gruesome sight, and the shark immediately vanished into thin air, along with its two ingested victims. "Oh, my goodness! What just happened?" Alice shrieked.
Peter stood awestruck for a moment. Then he said, "It seems like you created a shark from your own imagination, just like you were saying."
"Yes, I know I said that, but I didn't think a shark would actually appear!"
"I guess you don't know your own strength."
"I was rather angry, wasn't I? There was nothing I wanted to see more than those two getting swallowed up by a big shark."
"That must be it, then. You were so focused on wanting that to happen that you actually imagined it into existence. The more focused you are, the more powerful your imagination becomes! You really showed them, huh?" Peter chuckled.
"Well, those two just got what was coming to them," Alice said. "After all, they were trying to eat all the mermaids. The mermaids and I may not have gotten along, but they didn't deserve that. And besides, the Walrus and the Carpenter are just figments of my imagination. They're better off gone."
Peter, Alice, and Tink left the ramshackle restaurant and checked back with the mermaids at the lagoon. "How are you girls? Everything okay?" Peter asked.
"Yes, everything's okay now, Peter," a blonde mermaid said. "Thank you again for saving us."
"Yeah, we were completely helpless once that Walrus started playing his cane like a flute," another mermaid said. "He made us follow him, and we couldn't stop."
"We would've been their lunch if it hadn't been for you," a red-haired mermaid said.
"Aw, well, no need to thank me. Alice was the real hero back there," Peter said, gesturing to Alice. "She's the one who got rid of the Walrus and the Carpenter."
"Well, she was a little late on that, wasn't she?" one of the mermaids said, turning her nose up.
Alice rolled her eyes.
"Yeah, freeing us from the net was the real act of bravery back there," another mermaid said.
"Well… I was pretty brave back there, wasn't I?" Peter said. "Either way, I'm just glad you're all safe."
Tinker Bell said something in her jingly way of talking.
"What did she say, Peter?" a black-haired mermaid asked.
"She said you all would've been better off being eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter," Peter said, snickering.
The mermaids gasped and scoffed. "What a rude, little pixie!" one said.
"I, for one, think that she would be better off getting squashed like a bug!" another said.
The offended mermaids all dived back underwater.
"Eh, they'll get over it," Peter said. "They always do. Now, come on, we have to continue looking for the boys." Peter, Alice, and Tink made their way into the jungle. "I sure hope nothing bad happened to Nibs and Tootles," Peter said. "Or any of the other Lost Boys, for that matter. I would hate to see any of them get hurt."
"Don't worry, Peter. I'm sure they're all safe," Alice said. "And we'll find them soon enough."
"I hope you're right," Peter said. "'Cause if not, just remember that you'll be the one to blame."
"Me? I thought we agreed it wasn't my fault," Alice said.
"I don't know; I haven't decided yet," Peter said, pushing through trees and bushes along the jungle path.
Alice, being behind Peter, was constantly getting whacked in the face by branches as Peter let go of them. She hoped for his sake that it was just on accident.