Morning, Sunday. 1.12.03

Dawn. Still stuck. Sun's up, and building went immediately from pristine to burnt, just before demolition. Ghost girl appeared at the steps of building, then ran into it through the front door.

Went back into the forest to find MacHaggerty and to find way out. No trace of the priest, or the pathway out. Tried to track using snow to help us deduce size/shape of creature, and the direction it took. No luck--perhaps arboreal?

Met with a jaguar type thing lounging in treetops. Nice voice, clever, fond of word play, calls himself "The Cheshire." Yes, I actually wrote that--the thing talks. Greeted us with, "When did the prey become the hunters?" Took his picture (only his teeth showed), gave it to him. He gave us a pic of him with a girl (he said she was named Alice). Advised us that anything that hunts from the woods at night probably wouldn't be good to hunt back. Departed. Or, more appropriately, vanished.

Explored a bit. Discovered well is about 65 feet deep. Talked into it. Echo talked back, changed some words around to suit it. Cheshie made smartass remark about it.

Decided that if we were to explore the orphanage at all, daytime would be best time to do so. Got ready to go in the same way the ghost girl went. Started to cross the threshold, got greeted most unexpectedly by a lovely dominatrix dressed all in white.

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the arts and the origin of marvels."
--Franciso Goya

We didn't get started on the right foot. That is, I set my left foot down, and the blonde beauty before me lodged hers firmly in her mouth with the following words: "I own everything I see, and since I see you, you are mine."

I regarded her with an arched brow, and despite the way she was dressed (which was a delicious, though rather generic, look of Dominance), I doubted this woman would ever fashion a collar strong enough to stay around my neck and bind me to her. Thomas and I argued with her for a bit about the definition of ownership, and then the argument ended. Either by magic or some other enchantment, Thomas was forced to be mute (he was winning the argument, you see). I learned that she held the title of White Queen, and when I mentioned the Black Queen, she decreed that I should no longer speak of her, and so I couldn't. To my horror, any time I started formulating a sentence about the Black Queen, my words would turn to gibberish.

And in this state we were forced to walk along with her, and I was thinking that other than giving her a good spanking and shouting out, "You give Dom/mes everywhere a bad name!" the only other thing that would make me feel better was giving her pretty head a few good, hard kicks.

The hall we walked through was miraculously free of any sign of any decay at all, and we passed Mr. White on our way in. I narrowed my eyes at him as we walked by, and he opened a door that led to a bedroom. I entered, being forced to follow the Queen, and Thomas was taken elsewhere by Mr. White.

In a singsong voice, she cheerily intoned, "Lie down."

"I don't want to."

She gave a charming sigh, snapped her delicate fingers, and I was lying down.

Then she made me talk about myself. I told her all sorts of mundane things, and after a minute and twenty seconds, I ran out of things to say. She was already bored, I could tell, but wasn't yet satisfied. In that same voice that sounded of merrily twittering birds, she asked, "Do you like candles?" I furrowed my brow, wondering where the hell this line of questioning would lead.

"...I suppose you could say I do. I'm not particularly fond of them, but I don't actively dislike them."

"Well then, that's something you haven't said."

I sighed, seeing her point, and noting that she spoke it in a complete lack of guile. Again, everything's obvious after it happens.

After a few more moments of this, the door opened, and another woman, clad in a flowing white dress stepped in. Now this dark haired woman was stunning. The blonde turned, saw her, gasped, eeped in surprise, leapt up, and ran for a door that led, by all outward appearances, to a closet.

Immediately noting that I could now stand, I stood, relieved to have my own will back under my control. The dark haired woman must have noticed, because she gave a small smile and said in a soft and unhurried voice, "I apologize for her."

I blinked, surprised. "She said she was the White Queen, so why did she take off like that?"

It was her turn to be surprised, but when she spoke, her voice was gently teasing. "I am the White Queen. Couldn't you tell?"

I frowned slightly. "Well, I was just hoping that she wasn't really the Queen. Who is she, then?"

The half smile remained. "My jester.".

"...ah."

She continued, her voice sweetly languid. "I lent her my powers for the day, and sheís made quite a mess of things. Rest assured, she will be punished."

I wondered at this (the dates were a bit off for the old English tradition of the Feast of Fools), but before I could voice any question or complaint, Mr. White walked in with Thomas leashed and quietly in tow. My jaw dropped open...I would never have thought that Thomas would acquiesce to being collared by anyone, let alone a complete stranger.

After a moment, she spoke again, her words a lazy swirl. "Is this yours?"

I blinked again and started, but allowed my gaze to remain on the stock-still and silent Thomas. "Is what mine?"

She regarded me rather curiously for a moment before she answered. "Why, this." She motioned to Thomas, who had still not spoken a word.

Upon seeing her gesture, I frowned in rather obvious annoyance. What is it with these people and issues of possession? "He is a friend and traveling companion, if that's what you mean, but I certainly don't own him."

She thought about that for a moment. "Ah. I rather got the feeling that he thinks he belongs more to you than he does to us." Mr. White (curiously also silent throughout this exchange) removed Thomas' collar, and Thomas walked to my side of the room. "I again apologize for the intrusion into your life, but I had to make sure he was properly trained, you see. I find that when men aren't properly trained, they misbehave--peeing on couches, and that sort of thing."

I burst into a fit of giggles, and those giggles grew into full laughs as I imagined such an unheard of thing. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but do the men of your realm invariably have that inclination?"

She gave a dazzling full smile then. "Well, not peeing on couches, precisely." My laughter subsided, and she watched me for a moment before resuming. "We'll set you up in a room, although...this room will do nicely." And here her eyes roamed the room we were in. "Mr. White can be rather clever sometimes." She looked at me again and finally added, "I'm sure you must be rather hungry, so we'll give you an hour, and we'll see you in the banquet hall."

Without giving me a chance to thank her for her hospitality, she turned, and she and Mr. White both left the room, leaving me with Thomas.

"Well, that was weird. I didnít think youíd ever wear a collar, Thomas."

"They put it on me, and I was docile. I didn't have a choice."

"Well, I wanna know what's up with our room...why else would she say that Mr. White was clever in choosing this particular one? Is it tapped, or something? What's on the ceiling?"

Another familiar voice wafted down to both our ears, and a wide, dangerously pointy-toothed grin materialized right where I was looking. The teeth moved, and his words hung melodic upon the air. "Paint, perhaps?"

Hmmph. Clever kitty.

Quite suddenly, I remembered the Queen's jester, and immediately strode over to where she supposedly hid, and pulled the closet door open. What I saw was not a closet with a wardrobe, but a long shaft that dropped downwards right into a mass of hungrily licking tongues of flame. I blinked. I know the Queen mentioned something about punishment, but, Christ, I didn't think she was referring to incineration! I shut the door, and hurriedly thought of other things.

We did have an hour. We could do nothing else but try to spend it in a way that would allow us to plan our next move.

"The regular course was reeling and writhing of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of arithmetic--ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision."
-- The Mock Turtle, Lewis Carrollís Through the Looking Glass

The Banquet, Part I

I got tired pretty quickly of just sitting there, and the Cheshire was beginning to seriously annoy me with his needless banter. I swear, the creature can string together English words and somehow deprive them of all meaning so quickly and thoroughly that you'd think he was speaking another language!

I proposed that we go explore the rest of the .. place. (I had no idea what kind of place we were actually in...is it still the orphanage? or is it now a castle of some sort? or what?) And while Thomas didn't openly agree, he didn't disagree, either. I opened the door that was supposed to lead to a hallway, and was shocked to find instead a massive banquet hall with placement settings already on the long table. Serving girls bustled about so hurriedly that they appeared not to have noticed our arrival at all. I began to make my way to the other side of the large room, where the White Queen and Mr. White were sitting, when a loud voice bellowed out in a rough Cockney, "Oi! 'Oo're thaye?!"

The White Queen merely smiled soothingly and told Her Highness that we were her guests. If one listened carefully, one could almost hear the complacency drip from her otherwise regal voice. The other woman, the Red Queen, as I've come to learn, retorted, "Roight; 'ave 'em set on yer end o' t'table--I 'ont want 'em by me!"

Charming.

As requested, Thomas and I made our way over to the White Queenís side of the table, and after noting Mr. White's presence, I asked the White Queen if I might speak with him. She tilted her head slightly and gave a disarming half smile, as if thoroughly amused by my request. She gave her permission, and as I rose to speak with him, I gave myself a swift mental kick for the fondness I already started to develop for the inviting curvature of her lips.

Upon reaching Mr. White, I encountered a slight problem: Mr. White was, apparently, mute.

I handed him one of my spiral notebooks and a pen so that I might actually get answers to the questions that I definitely wanted to ask him. No fuckin' way was I gonna let him get away from this Q&A session when he was right there just before Thomas and I were whisked away, and he obviously knows this world.

I asked bunches of questions, and didn't get much back in terms of answers. (Well, I got lots of info, but not much of it was particularly useful.) I did get that men weren't allowed to speak in the White Queen's presence, Mr. White gets sent to and summoned from our Earth by the White Queen's will, and the thing we encountered in the woods might be a "grendel" (yes, like in Beowulf). Lastly, to my question of, "do you have any particular warnings to give us about this world" his rather bland written reply was merely, "Be careful." Yeah. That was so lucid, I could cry.

I returned to my seat somewhat dejected, but was greeted by that enchanting--and, by now, warmly familiar--smile. And the White Queen appears to miss nothing that occurs in her domain, because, even though Mr. White and I were a little way off for privacy, her first words were, "And now, do you have any questions for me?"

I asked her immediately, and fought the urge to rest my gaze upon that devilish mouth. "How do I get home?" That's the 64 million dollar question; might as well start the session off with a bang.

She leaned forward to speak, and, as always, her slow but deliberate voice took on that air that surrounded me in a sweet languor, and made me feel all sleepy and stupid. Her words, her eyes, her whole demeanor seemed to whisper soft, half formed hints at tantalizing secrets, secrets that I could conceivably get at if only I could see through this haze of fuzzy perception. I abandoned all hope of such accomplishments, because it was taking effort just to focus on her words, there was no way I was going to crack the riddles behind them if I had to struggle to grasp the words themselves.

I don't remember word for word what she said, but I did get a good sense of the following:

1. For me to get home, I'd have to have permission to leave from the person who rules the domain I'm currently in. Or, I could become a person of power myself, and thus not need anyone else's permission.

2. The White Queen is allied with both the Red and Black Queens, but only the White and Red Queens are my allies. I've not met her yet, but I get the feeling that the Black Queen is someone I definitely want (or need) to avoid.

3. Getting the permission to leave would be a tricky thing, because either Queen who grants my request would risk the ire of the Black Queen. Obviously, the White Queen's estimations of the Red Queen are painfully low. "I can set up an audience with the Red Queen for you, if you'd like--that's why she's here," she drawled with that infernally beguiling half-smile.

When I asked why she thought the Red Queen would grant my request when she herself wouldn't do it, she answered, "Because the Red Queen is stupid enough that she just might do it. If you go to talk to her now, it might shut her up and keep her occupied until the food gets here." To my look of nervousness, she said, "She is a simple woman; stroke her the right way, and she's yours."

I furrowed my brow at this: If I have to climb to get into a position of power, certainly the Red Queen had to, as well. And if she did, I don't think she stayed there by being stupid. Hell, if becoming a person of power were that simple, there'd be more than a mere three queens. Hmmm. I think I've found a chink in her translucent, alabaster perfection. Still, she was a lot more forthcoming with details than I had expected...but I still got the feeling that within her words and actions lay greater riddles, and they and their answers hid just under my nose, but I just wasn't picking up on what they were.

To change the subject, I asked about her preference for male silence. She answered that she's never heard a clever thing come out of the mouths of men, and I replied that she might want to chat with Thomas for a bit to see if her mind can be changed about that.

Then, with a heavy sigh, I started to head over to the Red Queen. The White Queen murmured a wish of luck, and I felt like hell. I mentioned something about losing my head if I said something wrong, but the White Queen assured me with no small amount of pride and command that "You will not lose your head in my hall."

Still, in the books, wasn't the Red Queen the one with a penchant for beheading people? No, wait, the Red Queen was the other chess woman. The Queen of Hearts, from the pack of cards, liked lopping off heads. The Black Queen didn't exist in the books, but the Queen of Hearts was red. Oh, this was all so scary and kinda corny at the same time, I didn't know what to think anymore.

I tried to imagine the loud, rather round and squat Red Queen as a metaphorical queen of hearts, the object of lust and affection for fawning male and female harems. I succeeded a tad too well...so I suppressed a shudder and continued moving down along the table.

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