Alice is in wonderland
Follow the white doll
The Forest of Magic, or the forest as it is laconically known, is the one and only forest in all of Gensokyo. In it endless trees block the sun, making this damp and dank forest prime land for the cultivation of magical / hallucinogenic mushrooms to grow without pause. Not to mention the man-eating plants and youkai, who prey on men daring or foolish enough to step foot into this forest. While this is fine for errant magicians looking for shrooms and isolation, the forest is not the place for any sane man to step foot in.
“Oh great. Where the hell is this place?” One such daring traveler happened to be Licorice, who had no recollection of how she managed to venture into the middle of the forest. Perhaps it was her mind going through another bout of convenient amnesia or, a more likely occurrence in Gensokyo, a fairy had led our heroine astray. No matter the cause, Licorice was sure that her present situation was not a favorable one to say the least. She knew not of the countless dangers as exposited in the opening paragraph, but her ever-so-sharp instincts told her that a forest in Gensokyo might not be open to visitors.
Venturing further, Licorice found an odd creature. It was a humanoid thing, much smaller than the child-sized fairies she had encountered being almost the size of a toddler, marching along the road. Approaching closer, our heroine appraised that this ‘thing’ in question looked like a small girl wearing a white dress. Her skin looked like it was made of porcelain or, to be more accurate, its skin was made of porcelain. For all our heroine knew, this might be a youkai made to look approachable to lost humans that’d eat her flesh right off when it noticed her, but Licorice decided to take a gamble in this difficult situation.
“Hey, miss.” Licorice trailed behind the doll, doing her best to catch its attention. “Hej? Hej! Kon’ičiva? Hello? Nihaú? Kúklička, eho?” On the contrary to our heroine’s expectations, this dolly seemed utterly disinterested in her. Not managing to garner attention for another minute or two, our heroine had ended up trailing this little living doll for quite a while. “Po djavolite, where is this?” She had ended up walking to a small Western European house, which looked unusually pristine for a structure in the middle of such a forest. Welp, whoever lives in here must be civilized enough to have their house be clean, so… Licorice knocked on the door. Gently at first, furiously at second, wildly at third.
Despite her wild attempts at catching the residents of the building, no one was to be seen except the doll that had flown off somewhere in the building. It was getting late, and as the night set in, our heroine decided that at least dying in a brightly lit house was better than being mauled in the dark outdoors. I gently open the door, to see… nothing much that’d make Licorice hang up or a hung up. The house seemed lived in, yet its resident(s) seemed to show no interest in someone breaking and entering. The indoors area was full of books, bottles, boxes of various description…
It was hard for Licorice to navigate through this maze of clutter. It got even harder when she suddenly encountered yet another doll marching throughout the place, one carrying a sharp needle that almost pierced her bare feet (being a civilized person, Licorice had taken off her shoes when entering a house). Looking down, up, left, right, forward and backwards, Licorice noticed that there were a whole lot more dolls marching and, more surprisingly, flying. Is this a house for sentient dolls? She got her answer when, from among the kúklička came a human-sized kúkla.
“Ah, I was curious…” The doll in front of her was a fairly tall one, with hair of gold and a dress of blue. She held an open book in front of her, her attention divided between the visitor and the book. “…a human? I sense no magic from you.”
“Yes, I’m a human.” There was an awkward silence between them as the doll returned to staring at the book, a silence that was so awkward that our heroine had to break it. “Umm… My name is Licorice Meidou by the way, what’s yours?”
“Alice. Alice Margatroid.” This Alice seemed to be a fervent follower of laconicism, with such fervor was her laconic nature that the ancient dwellers of Laconia would be crying tears of joy seeing the lack of words. Then they’d get quite confused as to how they ended up in Gensokyo, for Ancient Greece is a teeny tiny bit far away from Modern Japan, but that’s beside the point.
“Umm…” Licorice had found herself flabbergasted by such acts of fervent laconicism. “So, is it okay if I stay here?”
“…Yes.” Alice then proceeded to continue not caring about Licorice, finding herself a chair among the clutter and sitting down to continue reading.
Our heroine, upon closer inspection of this sitting ‘doll’, noticed that she was no doll at all.; it’s just that her skin had been so light as to look indistinguishable from the porcelain of the dolls. “What an odd girl…” Licorice couldn’t help but mutter a bit too audibly, to which Alice protested.
“Hm? I’m normal.” Our heroine seemed to have finally caught the attention of Alice.
“A normal human?” What kind of person lives in the middle of some creepy forest, in a house inhabited by even creepier dolls?
“No! I’m normal; not human.” She seemed to not be too happy to have her ordinary nature be questioned.
“Okay, okay. You’re normal.” Arguing with a stranger in the woods about the nature of humanity didn’t seem too productive. “So, is there anywhere I could lie down?”
“I only have one bed.” Alice flipped a page from her book. “For myself.”
“Right…” Finding somewhere to lie down among all the clutter didn’t look too possible either. All that was here was silence, creepy dolls, and a dusty atmosphere. Our heroine sat down¸ intending to maybe catch some shuteye, but the atmosphere unnerved her greatly. Just a lone girl, flipping the pages of some book, refusing to talk. Dolls flying around her. Dust. Clutter. The woods. Silence. A knock on the door.
“Yo, Alice!” The one barging into the room was a magician most ordinary. “Ya’ got any of them new books I could borrow?”
“No.” The strange girl of dolls paid no more mind to the second intruder either. The endless energy of Marisa seemed to crash and dissipate against the Great Wall of Not-Giving-a-Fuck erected by Alice. “Leave if you have no business.”
“Alright, alright.” Marisa intended to leave, only to notice something ordinary amongst the clutter. “Licorice?”
Licorice had been too depressed by the atmosphere to even care about Marisa’s entrance, as if the house had assimilated her. Suddenly, it hit her. What am I doing here?! “Miss Marisa! You have to help me out! Get me out, please!”
The ordinary magician was taken aback by the sudden burst of emotion. She wasn’t too unfamiliar with tales of human travelers ending up in Alice’s house, but she hadn’t gotten a chance to see a live example. “I mean, my broom has sum’ space. If ya’ don’t have problems with flight.”
Flying sounded better than spending all night in this house. “Alright, just get me out of here!”
Licorice’s first experience with flight was quite the experience, to say the least as dictated by the people of Laconia.
On a totally unrelated note, Reimu soon heard rumors of a bird youkai who had terrorized the people of the Human Village with its screams while it flew past the village. Try as she may, she was unable to ever locate this supposed youkai, and this incident remains a mystery to this day.
