AlNel in Murderland
Written by Crisis Project
Note: IT'S ALIIIIIIIIVE!
Warnings: blood, violence, unabashed carnivorous activities.
Disclaimer: Star Ocean 3 belongs to Tri-Ace/Ubisoft/Square-Enix. Alice in Wonderland belongs to Lewis Carroll.
The Pros of Going Vegan
Whack – crab shell - squelch – fish eye – flump – bird wing – pop – crab eggs – bff!
Stars whipped through the backs of her closed eyes as the impact from hitting the beach on her shoulder and ribs made Nel groan. Peering blearily through clumped strands of her crimson hair almost set on fire by the sunset's rays, she looked around and carefully unravelled herself from the hedgehog imitation she'd been doing on the way down the tower of seafood.
"Blondie?"
The croak would have made an adolescent toad proud. As it was, she could hardly hear herself over the crash of the molten ocean surf. She'd thought she'd seen a bit of the brat's blue dress in one of the trenches, sticking out like a sore thumb among all the blood.
Tired as she was, Nel would have to take the girl home with her. While she'd been climbing the inside of the Seafood Tower (multiple times, as gizzards and entrails didn't make the best footholds, as she'd discovered), she'd debated about just leaving the walking blonde catastrophe here. Let her stew in her own mess, as she so clearly desired to. Surely Nel would be in grave danger if she hung around such a tactless brat much longer.
A frown tugged at her lips (or perhaps just gravity, she was having such a tough time fighting it) as she remembered how firmly her conscience had resisted that idea. Hanging around Fayt the Boy Wonder had sanded down her habits of war and demanded kindness be her first tactic. If that failed, then all else was fair. Including abandonment.
"Blondie!"
"Manemishashish!"
The answering call was faint, but had been carried on the chilly breeze over the eye-level heaps of meat chowder. Eyeing the sun as it dipped lower and lower, Nel briskly set off, trying to rub herself warm with muscles made of limp seaweed and chattering teeth.
A right at the legless emu, over the glassy-eyed sardines, another right at the torn left half of a gigantic goldfish, and the center path in the cross between the shrivelled octopi led her straight to Blondie.
As she'd gotten closer, a strange, indecently loud and over-enthusiastic slurping had increased in volume. As Nel approached the squatting girl (with her white pantaloons for everyone to see) she could see that the slurping was in fact issuing from between the girl's pretty little rosebud lips as she sucked the tender white meat from a crab leg like a professional noodle-slurper from China.
"What?" Nel croaked coldly, fingering her dagger handles.
Having caught sight of Nel, Blondie swallowed and burped, then smiled. "My name is Alice Liddell. Not 'Blondie,' though I must say I do think it's a cute nickname. Can I call you Pinky?"
"No. And what were you thinking?" Nel croaked with forced calm. The tip of her dagger flashed in the weakening sunlight, glimmering just a few inches from the button nose of the girl (a little extra authority never hurts). Her hand was trembling though, a result from the combination of the raw stench of meat and tang of blood affronting her nostrils and sheer exhaustion. The squelching, sucking noises did nothing to ease her comfort.
"About what?" Alice asked, peering up at the taller woman from underneath her ruffled blond hair. Nel noticed distantly with disgust that bits of meat were sticking out from her pearly white children's teeth, and juice and blood were dribbling down her chin to spot her white apron. Discarded bones stripped clean of meat were scattered around her black heels.
"Why were you frolicking with those crazy sea creatures? What in Apris's name were you doing?"
A high-pitched chitter distracted her from the beginning of her rant and she zipped her eyes to where the source of the noise came from. A line of baby crabs were streaming down from the gaping belly of their giantess mother, which meant that they each in turn were the size of a small dog. A tug on her hand startled Nel into letting go of her blade after a split second of debate – Alice didn't seem able to comprehend that if she tugged any harder, she'd get cut while holding the blade-end of the dagger.
"Eeheehaha!"
And yet another split second later, Nel knew she had made the wrong choice.
With an ear-splitting shriek of glee, the blonde savage launched herself onto the straggler of the line of baby crabs and proceeded to merrily beat its head into the sand before Nel could lift a finger. The others kicked up their speed a knot to the pounding surf while their sibling was coldly reduced to catatonic twitching. What happened to her sprained ankle? Nel wondered faintly. Then she started debating about the pros of going vegetarian, or even vegan. And for a woman who enjoyed her protein, that was saying something in light of the scene before her.
"You see," Alice said after she'd swallowed her first bite of tender crab-brain, "the mouse was telling me about the Caucas-race and that everyone got a prize if they raced in it. The Dodo was kind enough to volunteer and be the judge, and held one in my honour because I'd never been in a Caucas-race before. It was so exciting! The most fun since I left my governess!" She pried off a piece of the crab's back shell and poked through the meat with the dagger tip, searching for choice bits. "Then they told me that since I was new, I had to give them prizes!" she huffed, flinging her knotted, spun-gold hair out of her face, getting bits of her most recent victim in it.
"So you decided to give them the Supersize-Me cookies which you knew would make them bigger," Nel deadpanned, easing down to sit on a boulder nearby. As often as she had battled, it wasn't her custom to sit on her slain opponents. Besides, they were probably still body-temperature, and feeling their residual life force sapping away underneath her tush would creep her out like no one's business.
Alice shrugged a slender shoulder. "They were all I had ma'am."
"Do not ma'am me," Nel admonished. The bit of (insanely savage) fluff had to be eleven or twelve, give or take a year. Definitely not old or young enough to start ma'aming her. "You said you've left your governess?"
Alice nodded, drops from her chin scattering down her chest and creating bulls-eyes on her frilly apron. "We were going over my lessons by the prettiest apple tree in the garden, when I saw the white rabbit. I wasn't going to stay, not when she was reading from a book with no pictures in it! And he was wearing a tweed vest!"
"And that's all the reasoning you needed to leave your teacher and chase the poor creature down into that fathoms-deep pit," Nel said sarcastically, watching her suck out the crab's eyes through her puckered lips like tapioca. "You could have died, or seriously injured yourself. Didn't your governess or your parents teach you to never follow strangers, or play in dangerous areas?"
"Yes, but the white rabbit had a watch, and he kept saying he was late for something! I'd never met a talking rabbit before – not even my kitty, Diana, talks to me!" Alice exclaimed, licking her fingers.
"You have a cat, and you still threw that black cat at the mob earlier," Nel muttered, swiping sand off of her skin and wringing bits of her clothing free of saltwater.
"Oh no," Alice objected, her cerulean eyes wide and the roasted duckling she'd started on forgotten in her lap, "I threw a little man. I thought he could help me, see, since he said he could!"
Nel stared. "No," she said slowly, "that was a black cat. You threw it just after you twisted your ankle."
"It was a little man, with black and yellow hair," Alice said defiantly.
The little girl promptly returned to her gorging as Nel sat on the boulder, shivering from the cold and wondering if Alice were crazy. Or mentally subnormal. Like one of those homeless vagrants who wander through various cities garbling at the air or their bottles wrapped in brown paper bags with conviction.
"Do you know where we are, then?" Nel asked, with a faint air of grasping at straws.
"We're in the White Rabbit's world," Alice said matter-of-factly, flossing bits of downy duckling feathers from her teeth with a loose thread. She looked rather like a cat wiping its dinner satisfyingly off with her paws. "We need to get a move on if we're to find him again."
"We are not chasing after Vanilla –" you gluttonous carnivore, "-because we have to find out where we are and how we're going to get back," Nel said firmly.
Alice stood up and a cascade of bones and bits of shell hit the sand by her black heels. "I don't want vanilla, I want to know where the White Rabbit is going. And no one's around here. We're not going to find answers by staying here, so we might as well explore the forest."
The older woman carefully chewed on her lip as she debated. The looming storm was approaching, the sun was setting and consequently so was the temperature, and there was no one else in sight. The forest would offer some protection from the weather and they could find firewood there. They could even prop a large bit of giant crab shell as a lean-to and stuff their clothes full of feathers for extra warmth, so long as they kept close to the murder scene. In the morning they could set off to gather information on where they were and how to get back home.
"Alright, we'll pitch camp in the forest edge," Nel consented, easing up on her creaking feet. "We'll be spending the night here, since night's setting fast. If you listen to my instructions we'll be warm in a trice, understood?"
After the girl had bowed to her authority and returned her dagger, they had set about finding and plucking birds naked, Nel feeling like a grave robber. The soft downy feathers were stuffed unceremoniously up shirts, shoved into each bra cup, shoes, and even their underwear until they were padded like fencing dummies. They also carried a hollowed-out shell to lean against a tree with a dense canopy to ward off the drizzle.
"Remember, don't go too far and only get dry branches for the fire – the wet ones won't catch," called Nel after Alice's retreating back, vanishing into the shadows stretched between the trunks of the trees.
Nel herself turned in the opposite direction and walked the short distance to the beach, illuminated faintly by the last vestigial rays of the sun as it drowned gracefully into the swelling water.
Hunger wrung her belly and the thirst was causing her a headache. Reluctantly, Nel started chewing on a duck wing as she carved strips of meat from a jawless tuna fish, stowing it in Alice's apron to be smoked and preserved for later rations.
Grimly she worked, losing herself in eating and tearing, slowly warming up. Crabs, fish, jellyfish, birds of different feathers steadily drifted before her eyes as she collected their meals for the next couple days. No knowing how much they'd need, but hopefully not for long. Remembering the black cat's paw which had been by her foot in the Seafood Tower, she shuddered and hoped that the rest of the black cat wouldn't cross her vision.
She'd been picking through the meat for a while when she glimpsed some movement out of the corner of her eye. Whipping her head around and gripping her daggers, she stood silently as a dark figure stumbled out of the waves and drunkenly wove up the beach, farther away from her.
Is it another fish? She wondered. Gently laying down the bulging apron onto the sand, she raised her free hand and muttered the incantation for fire.
The orange flame streaked from her extended fingers to land a yard to the left of the figure. It flared before smudging itself out in the sand, but not before it had cast the figure in stark relief.
Even at this distance, the pale, carved face of Albel the Wicked frozen in a bared snarl burned itself into her retinas. Lanks of his wet hair matted his face, the details of his clothing lost as her eyes drifted to where his right hand was clutching – the mangled remains of his left arm, a raw and bleeding stump severed just below the shoulder.
The moment was broken when the light flared out and died, though it took another moment for Nel to unfreeze.
"Wai – Nox? Albel! Albel?"
She broke off at a run, apron and meat forgotten as she ran and leapt over corpses, temporarily and ironically blinded by her bit of light. By the time she'd huffed over to the approximate spot where the fire had committed suicide, he'd gone.
Summoning back the fire, but commanding it to sit in her palm this time, Nel looked around as sweat dripped down uncomfortably from her temples to below her neckline, acting as a glue for the itchy feathers to stick to her overheated skin. Footsteps in the sand, definitely larger than hers, ended just a foot beside the hull of a giant sea snail.
"Albel?" She called, now starting to doubt herself. His name hung as a foggy breath in front of her before it, too, faded away like her certainty.
Nothing answered. All she saw were the glinting red eyes of a black cat as it looked over its shoulder at her before limping away into the dark.
Yes, this story is somewhat still alive. Call it in a state of undecided comatose (coma? Is that right?), if you will. It occasionally sleepwalks and raids your fridge when you least expect it. What does it eat? Your reviews! FEED THE BEAST!