Chapter II: Explanation, Please?

The King of Hearts awoke in the middle of a prodigious snore as he heard somebody yell the word "-this!" He opened his eyes, sitting upright, as he saw a group of Card Guards pop up. He raised an eyebrow as he watched them push two strange figures into the cell to his immediate left: one was a strange looking man covered in question marks and dressed in a safari-esque outfit, the other was a young lady with a fair shade of braided brown hair who was dressed in black, wearing a backpack and covered in pins and buttons. A few other Cards held his bride, who was struggling and snarling as she was carried past the King's cell and placed in the cell to his right.

The man—naturally, the Doctor—fell to the floor, then bounced right back up as the Cards locked the cell and promptly vanished. He shook the bars, and sighed as he noted the futility of this particular action. The Doctor then moved back and sat down on a bench to concentrate. The King, who was slumped on a bench in his own cell, scooted towards them.

"Excuse us, sir...this probably isn't a good time for this...but, then again, you ARE Time, aren't you?"

The Doctor sighed.

"Yes, that's me, but I'm getting dreadfully tired of people reminding me..."

"Our apologies."

"Who are you?" asked the girl, eyeing him suspiciously.

The King smiled.

"We are the King of Hearts...or, at least, we were..."

"RELEASE ME AT ONCE!" the Queen screamed, as she threw herself against the bars of her own cell. "LET ME OUT OF HERE, OR IT'S OFF WITH ALL YOUR HEADS, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I AM THE QUEEN OF WONDERLAND! LET ME OUT!"

The King groaned.

"Ugh...marriage. It's like a deck of cards: you start off with diamonds and hearts, but, by the end, all you want is a club and a spade! Shut up!"

"Silence, you insolent man!" snapped the Queen, leering at him. "If not for these bars, I'd take your head off myself!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes, leaning his chin on his umbrella thoughtfully.

"What a delightful couple they make," he mumbled.

"Let go!" growled a new voice. "Stop! I command you to stop!"

The Doctor smirked.

"Well, if it isn't the Knave of Hearts. It appears your plan has collapsed in on itself, like a perilous house of cards."

The Knave did not answer as the Cards holding him pushed him to a cell across from the King's. The King smiled triumphantly.

"Well, look who decided to join our little party," he said, sneeringly. "Did things not go according to your plan, foul Knave?"

"Hold your tongue," the Knave growled. "You're just as stuck as I am."

The King promptly fell silent.

Ace pulled on the bars herself, testing them...

"It's no good, Ace," the Doctor said. "These bars are nothing that a concentrrrated combustible couldn't handle, however the impact of the blast would not fare well for the inhabitants behind said bars."

"So...no Nitro 9, then?"

The Doctor smiled wryly and shook his head.

Ace sighed as she sat down on the bench beside the Doctor, removing her backpack and placing it on the ground.

"Well," she said after a moment, "It looks like we won't be going anywhere anytime soon, so..."

The Doctor looked at Ace's expectant face, and sighed again.

"Oh, very well," he muttered, and took a deep storytelling breath.

"Ace, what do you want to know first?"

"What's going on here? More specifically, what was the Mad Hatter talking about, and what is this place exactly?"

"Well, you see...a long time ago, on my home planet, Gallifrey, there was a renegade Time Lord whose sole creeds were deprrravity and chaos; he rejoiced in altering the time stream, and delighted in the infinite potential to bend countless histories to his will. At first, there was nothing major, with no serious harm brought upon the fabric of time: crush a butterfly here, kill a dinosaur there, the odd presidential assassination...but, unfortunately, he grew bored of such petty things."

"Petty?!"

"From his standpoint, yes. He needed greater amusement, a constant sense of fun...and what could be more fun, he thought, then shaping the universe to fit his own twisted philosophies? Imagine a universe where the laws of physics were governed by the whim of a madman; no logic, no reasoning. Pure and undiluted anarchy. And to achieve this, his ultimate goal, he decided he would travel to the very point where all of creation was made, the very beginning of the universe, and alter the course of events, with no regard to the obvious consequences and unthinkable damage that this course of action would do not only to himself, but to everything that has ever been. In essence, he would murder time itself."

"Wicked..."

"Wasn't it, though? Thankfully, the Time Lords were able to stop him in his tracks, and quickly captured him. Naturally, their first thought for a fitting punishment was execution...but perhaps regrettably, in retrospect, they opted against it, in an effort to move away from the Dark Times of our world, before the age of Rassilon. They instead decided to move him into an...er...institution, much like its prrredecessor prrrison planet, Shada, where not only would he would be imprisoned, but where he might be able be rrrehabilitated. The particular Time Lord who captured this renegade escorted him to this place...but the bitter madman vowed revenge, swearing only hatred toward his captor, and all those affiliated with him."

"And...that renegade...was the Mad Hatter?"

"Rrright."

"And by 'his captor,' you mean yourself?"

"Time Lords rarely do their own dirty work," the Doctor answered cryptically.

"...Well, anyway, my next question is about-"

"The Time Lock? Lewis Carroll's 'Wonderland'? They are very much connected. Well, you see, following the Hatter's imprisonment, other inmates were soon brought here. Beings from other worlds and realms that were considered to be too dangerous, to themselves or others, or often times both were all brought here. These insane beings could not possibly coexist with their own species, let alone an outside race, so the Madhouse became a home for such unstable creatures. Some would come to the Madhouse voluntarily...but such cases were often the exception rrrather than the rule. A majority of inmates were plucked out of their respective time zones and rrrelocated here. But this would hardly last, as the Madhouse was condemned when a scandal arose: a young lad from Earth was transported—accidentally, mind you—to this asylum by a wayward Time Scoop..."

"Eh?"

"The means by which the High Council transported inmates onto this forsaken sphere; leftover technology from the Dark Times."

"Oh."

"Yes...anyway, this imaginative, but hardly insane, little boy, was probably lucky to survive the madness of this world; a Cheshire Cat who's more interested in tearing flesh than giving directions, a rrraving Mad Hatter and his motley crew, and a Queen who...well..."

A wordless shriek from the Queen's cell finished the Doctor's sentence for him.

"Ahem...anyway, when this was reported to the High Council, they decided to do something rrradical, rrremarkable, and rrrather unheard of...something that no Time Lord had dreamed of doing before, and would likely never do again..."

"What's that?"

"They took action."

"Very funny."

"I thought so. But, back to the matter at hand: to avoid such a thing from ever happening again, the Time Lock was put in place, sealing this world for all eternity. That is, of course, after the child was removed safely and returned to Earth. Just in time, I might add, as the whole pack of cards, so to speak, had risen up to arms at the Queen's command."

"Let me guess: that boy was Lewis Carroll."

"Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, yes; it's no wonder he became a mathematician in his later years. Given the track rrrecord you humans have, it seemed almost inevitable in an effort to try and make what little sense he could of his life after the madness he witnessed..."

"But, then, how come nobody has ever heard of this? I mean, I'm guessing no one reported a missing persons, or asked..."

Ace stopped when the Doctor looked her in the eye with the most dull, frank expression she had ever seen.

"...What?"

"Ace...if a young boy had told you he'd been to a world of living playing cards, talking animals, endless afternoons, and fairy-tale creatures, how would you have reacted?"

"...ah. Right..."

"Hmph."

"So what about the Time Lock? What exactly does that do?"

"A Time Lock, Ace, is a state of perpetual endlessness; time is frozen in its tracks around a particular place in space and time, and lasts like that forevermore...or, at least, until the Time Lock is broken. Nothing can get in, and nothing can get out; in theory that is."

"But, professor...if nothing can get in, or out, how'd we end up here in the first place?"

"The machine under the Queen's throne. As I said, it created a Rabbit Hole, as the Time Lords nicknamed it—a nickname Lewis Carroll undoubtedly heard during his travels. It's basically an artificial wormhole, very crude and very short-lived, but also very powerful. That was what snatched up the TARDIS, and brought us here."

"And that's bad...right?"

"Exceedingly. Think of the Time Lock as a bubble, Ace; if something pierced through that bubble, what would happen?"

"The bubble would burst."

"Prrrecisely."

"So, basically, we're trapped inside the universe's biggest looney bin, and we need to find a way out before all the other nuts do!"

"OI! We heard that, you fiends!" snapped the King.

"That's the bottom line, I suppose, yes," the Doctor said with a nod.

"So, what now?"

"Well, first and foremost, we'll have to get out of this dungeon..."