Hello, everyone! Here is the next chapter in this story. It will show some developments of the larger storyline as well as some new discoveries.
So, let's go.
DISCLAIMER: "Alice: Otherlands" is directed by American McGee and produced by Spicy Horse. All credit to things belonging to them and the "American McGee's Alice" video game series belong to their original creators. All other material in this story belongs to the story's author.
Onward!
As the Sun rises over Londerland, I watch the wall of clouds reflect the light and give off twinkling colors. The effect is nice to look at, but it is what lies beyond it that I really want to see. Until this misty barrier clears, on a date no one yet seems to know, reaching another place will be quite hard for anyone in Wonderland.
Hard, but not impossible. If Alice were here, she would show me the best way to do it.
Standing in front of the barrier out of Londerland, the wall extending beyond my view on either side of me, I focus on the image of Queensland as I remember it. When I was last there, it was a place in decay, ruined by long years of silence. A place governed by a ruler still holding onto their power with all their might. A place not for the faint of heart. That is where I want to go.
As I step into the mist, I keep my mental image of Queensland as the focus of my thoughts. After what feels like a few minutes of walking through chilling air, the image of a red heart appears on my path. I see it pulse and throb, waves of heat warming my body. I feel an urge to slow down, but I look away from the heart and keep walking forward.
The mist gets colder and colder the further I go, until I suddenly step into a warm space. Immediately, my feet slip out from beneath me. I snap my eyes open and spin my arms, but I still fall on my shoulder: specifically, I fall on the rook shoulder-guard that has appeared over my new sets of realm-specific clothes. The shoulder-guard absorbs the impact of my fall, and I slide down a slick stone surface for several seconds. I have enough coherence to get on my feet just when I reach the slope's bottom.
I cough when I taste Queensland's rotting aroma in my mouth. That much has not changed. Raising a hand to shield my breathing some, I take in the surroundings.
Surprisingly, I see the Queen's great castle close to my point of entry. The giant heart-spire that marks the castle's central point is broken down the middle, its right side missing and the left side sagging in place. However, the outer walls are a few minutes' walk away from me, and they look no more ravaged than when I was last here.
I take shallow breaths, lower my hands to my side, and walk towards the castle walls. No obvious entryway or gate appears before me. This is like the last time I was here, and I had to hunt for a place to get in with Alice. When I get close to the walls I look up, expecting to see Card Guards or flying Hearts on patrol or hunting. No such thing appears.
I skirt my fingers along the surface of the walls before starting to walk along them. The walls' surface feels sticky with unknown substances. I walk on a narrow pack of rock that sticks out from beneath the walls. I have to jump a few gaps but otherwise it is a stable journey. I avoid looking to my right, where deep pits and blackened holes lie beneath thin white clouds.
I soon find a heart-shaped gate that is as twice as tall and three times as wide as I am. Two Armored Card Guards, those tall and strong members of the Queen's undead servants, bar entrance into that gate. A pile of broken pillars leads to a walkway tilted down into a sweet-smelling darkness. As I take my fingers off the wall and approach the gate, the guards stiffen and ready their long, sharp spears. They look down at me with empty eye sockets, each taller than me and, from what I remember about them, ready to fight if necessary.
"I come in peace," I tell the Guards when I get close enough to speak, but not so close to risk a spear stabbing into my body. "The Queen has summoned me."
The Guards do not move. I get close enough to give them both the paper and its message, which the left Guard takes with one hand. Its spear held tightly in its other hand, this Guard starts reading both items. Even though it has no eyes, the Guard's mouth silently moves as if quietly reciting what it sees. When it finishes, it leans back and raises its spear from the stairway's entrance.
The other Guard raises its spear a few moments later. I give the Guards a short, "Thank you," before walking into the darkened entrance and down the first few steps.
That was easy. I hold my breath until I am out of the Guard's range again. Maybe too easy. If the Executioner is around here, I hope he no longer wants my head sliced off.
The path slopes down, further into darkness. The air grows warm and harder to breathe. I do not have night vision, so I have to walk slower and slower. It does not help that my memories of this place are vivid and terrifying. I can feel the inner walls of the passage moving as if alive, if only barely so. A living, breathing space that I have just intruded.
The FLESH is here. I must be careful.
I think back to my training in the Oriental Grove, how I should act when speaking to a superior person. I also remember my prior time with the Queen, which does not help me calm down. My heart beats quicker as I keep walking down a path I can no longer see, only feel beneath my boots. I breathe slowly, my fingers twitching on reflex. I want to grab something, but as I reach out into the darkness, I cannot tell what anything around me really is.
I hear something pop near me, like a bubble, just as my fingers scrape a bulbous surface. I stop walking and listen for that sound again. A sweet smell reaches my nostrils, and I feel it clog up my throat. In reflexive fear, I grope for some kind of handle or gap in what I picture to be walls of sticky, dripping FLESH. Thankfully, something opens up to my efforts, a gap which I fall through to escape the choking sweetness.
The new area I step into has a brightness to it. I carefully open my eyes to find the light in here comes from a series of small gemstones in what appears to be the ceiling. These gems stick out amongst the red, wiggling ceiling made from thousands upon thousands of thin tendrils. I swallow hard and look away from that sight. On the other side of this space from me is a gate shaped like a sideways mouth, teeth and all. When I lock my eyes onto it, it splits apart and slides open, saliva dangling between the two halves before falling to the floor.
The mouth opens to welcome new food.
I quickly approach the gate, ready to burst through with my mists if it tries to bite me. Luckily, it does not do so, and I step onto a stone path mostly covered with red tentacles. The path curves up and to the right, leading to a larger central walkway. The air grows even more humid, almost oppressing in its heaviness. The extra weight does not slow me down as I go to the central path; I know where I am now.
This is the Red Queen's space. And there, appearing out of the shadows as I blink in that direction, is the Queen herself.
The great monarch sits on a throne of reddened flesh, limbs and twisted bones forming her seat of power. This time, she has the face of an older woman with deep wrinkles along her cheeks and a pointed nose. Her eyes radiate a bright red, contrasting sharply with her pale white skin and sunken cheeks. A small crown of golden bones floats above her head by an unseen hand.
Last I saw this monarch, she had taken on the form of Alice Liddle's sister, Lizzie. I do not want to know how many identities she can assume and twist to her own needs.
When I get close enough on the pathway to speak comfortably to her, I bow to the Queen. I then kneel on the flesh-covered floor, and keep my eyes down, out of simultaneous respect and fear of her becoming irked at me. "Your Majesty," I announce with my head slightly raised, "I have arrived."
"Liberator. You responded quickly enough to my summons." The Queen speaks calmly, no clear mark of anger in her tone or inflections. "I trust there were no impediments to your journey?"
"None, Your Majesty." None worth talking about, at least.
The Queen hums, a soothing sound from so intimidating a figure. I hear the scratching of her fingernails on the corner of her throne. "Stand up," she commands me, and I do so. "You have been summoned here," she continues, "to aid in a threat to my domain."
I keep my head down, but my eyes look to both sides of the throne room. I can see tentacles moving in the dimmed spaces. "Something else is able to pass through the mist walls?" I ask.
"Correct. Several things, all working together. They are tearing through the soil of this land, uprooting monuments, destroying long-lost sanctums. And then they burn whatever they have found to ash."
Fire. I shiver at the thought of fire used as a weapon. Even with my Fire Whip, something I had gained from Queensland itself, I still feel some fear to that element. Fire was what killed Alice Liddel's family. Fire destroyed her life forever.
The Queen remains quiet. I risk looking at her and see her brooding on her throne, leaning back against the bony surface. Her hands curl into fists, her eyes appearing glazed over or distant. She seems to be waiting for me to speak.
I slowly inhale before I ask, "What would you have me do about this, Your Majesty?"
The Queen does not appear irritated by my looking at her royal visage, or asking an obvious question. "Despite what I have already sensed," she admits, "I cannot truly define these creatures through my own power, nor interfere with them. They remain near the border, burning as they go, but they will certainly move closer at some point. Conquerors amass their forces before charging into enemy territory."
The red-robed monarch pauses, and then straightens up to her full height. "You, Liberator, are to scout out these forces before they choose to harm my innermost sanctum."
This is not what I had expected to hear. I want more details, but I know I must be careful of my words.
"Shall I have anything to record this trip with, Your Majesty? Having evidence of what I find would help us remember what is out there."
"You shall be aided by my Guards. That is all the help you will need."
The Queen says this with complete confidence. I do not feel that confidence myself.
"What if I have to face these threats head-on?" Will my strength and weapons be enough then?
"Use your own judgement to survive. You have proven you have at least that quality to rely on."
In other words, I realize, I am on my own with whatever forces I am given. That does not make me feel comfortable. A serious threat requires a serious response. Does the Queen think this is not really a serious matter?
I inhale, and then exhale, slowly. Rational thoughts come back to me. The Queen is here, and she can feel what it going on out there. She has already proven this by sensing these thing's efforts. She will know what will happen to me out there, to some extent. I will not be alone.
I can do this.
I bow again to the Queen. "I will do as you command, Your Majesty." The throne room's tentacles shift along the dark walls in response to my acceptance. The air smells a bit sweeter when I take a breath.
"Depart at once," orders the Queen. "Travel towards the mist walls. Take nothing but information, leave nothing but threats."
I nod, not really thinking about the Queen's word choice, and leave immediately. Traveling up the passages of FLESH is easier than going down; a small blessing from the Queen, I suppose. If she wanted me to stay longer, she would have kept me down there by force. I am happy she did not, this time.
The passages of Queensland's innards are too similar for me to mark specific places, so I eventually emerge somewhere along the castle's walls and into the greater wastes beyond. The ground around the exit I take starts to break open at that moment, and four Card Guards—two colored red and white, two black and white—crawl out of the ground very close to me. Dirt slides off their withered card-shaped bodies and the hoods covering most of their bare skulls.
The Guards greet me with low hisses. I nervously bow back to them, not wanting to say anything. When I pick a direction, knowing it will lead to the mist-walls, the Guards follow my lead with no complaints.
We walk in a tight group, the Guards flanking me on either side and behind as I hold point position. I use my mist powers to jump across large gaps, but the Guards simply climb like spiders across the surface of any nearby walls or cliff faces. It looks eerie the first few times—I had forgotten how large their claws could go and how powerful their impact was. They have to climb quite often to follow the broken and crumbling paths I lead them on.
I start to think I am being a bad leader because we are going so slowly. The thought that we are still heading towards the mist walls gives me a bit of comfort. Eventually, we will get there.
Eventually, we do indeed get close enough to the mist wall to see it. When I see that landmark on the horizon, I also see traces of darker smoke closer to my position. The sight of smoke leads me to think of fire, which brings back what the Queen had said about these intruders' methods. I slip over to a nearby raised archway, all that remains of some old building, and try to signal the Guards to come over to me.
The Guards walk on all four of their skeletal limbs to move faster. They get over to my creeped-out self in just a few seconds.
"We should be near the intruders now," I whisper while looking into each pair of empty eye sockets before me. "I know you are all undead but I still need you to be quiet, okay?"
The Guards hiss back their acceptance. Well, I think it is acceptance; I cannot tell from their skeletal faces if they agree with me or not. But they do not object when we stay closer together, moving from one broken piece of sculpture to another.
I keep my sights trained on the smoke, and as it grows larger and more prominent, I grow more worried about our chances of success. Even with the Guards supporting me, we could still be in deep trouble.
When I peek over the edge of a crater about five times my size, I see the flash of something black and metallic nearby. I duck back down, count to five, and then peek over again. The thing I saw earlier is joined by several other, similar things, all moving around a nearby level patch of ground. My second look reveals the presence of five machines with bulky bodies, each walking on at least two clanking legs.
The machines are all colored black and have different sizes of gold markings on their chassis. Each machine also sports large blades that break up dirt and blood, stone and pus with ease. They move in lines, passing by each other but never crossing paths.
"Robots?" I murmur aloud, keeping my mouth below the crater's lip. The only being I know who commands machines like this is the Mad Hatter. Is the Hatter behind this?
I look to the Guards for some kind of confirmation. They are to my left, and only one of them is looking over the crater's edge. None of them appear interested, concerned, or responsive in any way to this discovery. I look back to the robots to figure out my own clues, and I come up with my own answer when I see the robots do not have a visible space for any pilots inside their flattened, box-like tops.
Those aren't the Hatters' robots. There aren't even any Madcaps piloting them.
The sight of a Madcap skeleton inside a broken robot's body comes back to me; Alice and I saw that together when we had first entered the Hatter's Domain. These robots have too much of their bodies filled with their tools to have any pilots controlling them. That brings up another question: how are they operating if not under someone's immediate control?
The robots' blades uncover something black beneath the ground, a coagulated liquid that is too dark and goopy to be dried blood. When the robots that uncover it notice what they have found, they step back and let out short blaring sounds. I duck down behind the crater and summon the Automaton Hammer in case of a fight, and the blaring continues. After many heartbeats go by, a second blaring noise comes from farther away, in the same direction as the mist wall.
I crawl to the right side of the crater's rim and peek over again. The robots are standing in a circle around their discovery, but all of them are facing the mist wall. I take this chance to step out of the crater and dart to a new hiding place, a long slab of rock put on its side and left to rot away. The Card Guards stay in the crater, moving to the lip but not looking over it. Two of them flex their clawed fingers as I look at them.
I look back at the robots to see new robots walking towards them; they have the same color scheme as the first ones, but instead of blades, these ones have long tubes connecting metal containers on their backs to where a wrist would be for a human. The first robots step away from the pile as the new robots approach it. There are three of these new robots, and each of them has four jagged legs pounding into the ground as they move.
Before the robots do anything else, they all step to either side of an approaching person. This is certainly a person to my eyes; they wear large black body armor, they walk as a person does, and they are smaller than the machines. The person's armor has several pointed spots, the person's face covered by a helmet save for what looks like a grille or vent in the upper area. A place for eyes, I suspect.
After a moment of standing before the pile of black goop, the armored person steps back and waves one of their hands over the pile. The new robots step forward and open their hands. This reveals large metal holes inside each hand. Out of those holes comes a hissing sound, and then orange flames burst out to lick and scorch the piles. I instinctively duck down at the sight of the fire, and it takes a great deal of courage for me to force my legs to rise and let me see what they are burning away.
Even as the flames lick at the goop, I cannot tell what it is. Pus-covered structures? Some desecrated monuments of the former White Queen and King? I squint my eyes to look again, and then I see something bubbling in the pile. Only liquids bubble under extreme heat. As I mull this over, some of the bubbles pop with audible bursts of sound.
A dank aroma flicks over my nostrils, coming from the flames. I squint my eyes and catch a tiny arm poking out from in the fire, thin and shriveling before my eyes. Then I see the chipped face of a porcelain doll mask with a familiar sad expression.
That's an Insidious Ruin's mask. My skin suddenly feels cold. They're burning the Dollmaker's Ruin!
This is bad. I can feel my heart thundering in my ears, my stress is so high. The robots are burning away the Red Queen's land to get to lost traces of Ruin. They don't care about the land above what they find. The Queen must know about this, at once!
I spin in the direction of the Guards. At the same moment, a shadow leans over the crater they are in. I look up to see another of those fire-bearing robots standing just to the far left of the crater, its hands open and ready to unleash their payload. I hear the echo of its footsteps, the Guards unaware of the threat beside them. How had it—?!
I shout to the Guards, but it is already too late. With a short, "Fssssh," and then a louder, "Foom!" the Guards are set ablaze. I hear their howls as I watch their decayed bodies light up in seconds, their limbs and sunken faces turning into ash. It all happens extremely fast, and as the ash piles up a single thought hammers itself into reality.
They're dead. I am next.
The robot above the crater emits a trumpeting sound that rises and falls in pitch. Then it angles its hands to point in my direction. A second trumpeting sound comes from in front of me, and as I turn around again, I see two metal blades dig beneath the rock I am hiding behind and quickly lift it off the ground.
I run away, but the flame-wielding robot is faster; it leaps across the crater and lands hard on its four legs, aiming its hands right at me.
Two streams of fire burst from the closest one's nozzles and envelop me as I flee. I turn my body into mist and teleport away. Then I do it again, and again, and again, but the pain never recedes. The mists that compose my body repair whatever they can get to when I am solid, but I don't stay solid for more than a few seconds at a time. Finally, I collapse on a pile of loosened cobblestones.
Through my pain, I can see the armored person walking towards me. How did he move so fast? Wait, how far did I get away from the robots?
I try to look around. I see the same crater from earlier to my nearby left. I'm still in the same place I was before. I didn't go anywhere far; I just teleported at random. That's how they found me!
Stupid, stupid, stupid me!
The armored person walks right up to my sizzling body. I can see shades of white light inside the grille covering their face. They make a throaty sound: laughter. They're laughing at me.
"A force of the dead led by a living soul." The same bit of laughter comes again from this person, their voice sounding like a man's with something choking up their throat. "The Queen truly is mad."
The man raises a black boot. My eyes focus on it enough to see the grit and gunk over metal plates designed to mimic a human foot. Then the boot presses down on my neck, leaving me to think about other things than the man's taste in fashion.
"I know you have allies," the man tells me. "You shall show, and tell, the others about me. I desire a Herald."
The man raises his left hand, and the image of a Clubs suit flashes in the air, changing into a two-handed club made of blackened metal with several spikes along the wider end. Fear rushes through me at the sight of the weapon, but my body is too burnt up to turn into mist. The pain is too strong.
I manage to get out the words, "Who are you?", but I do not have any intimidation in my voice.
"The Queen called me Knave." He draws his hand back, raising the club high. "You, and all of Wonderland, will soon call me Savior."
"Wait," I plead as the man turns me onto my back with a simple push of his boot, "I can't give your message if I'm dead!"
"You won't die here. Unfortunately."
The club comes down on my chest, breaking open the burnt skin and spilling blood. I scream, twisting beneath him, but his boot presses down on my neck even harder to keep me in place. The club goes up again, and I manage to take in a shuddering breath.
"Relax," the Knave tells me as his boot moves so the front part of his foot is against my throat. He presses down so hard with that part that I lose any ability to speak beyond gurgling.
Another blow comes down, right in the same area. I feel something break there as I shriek through bile and blood in my throat. I feel my body start to break apart, my "Unleashed" state triggering instinctively. I push my limbs out and forward, pressing against the dirt and decay. I crawl forward, and that creates more pain, but I get away.
The Knave curses. His club does not hit me again, leaving me my total focus to scrabble away from him, his club, and the robots that are burning Wonderland to ash.
Alright, that's all for now.
As usual, any constructive criticism, feedback, and comments are appreciated.
Draconos is taking off!