Alice of Wonderland

Alice Marianne Lewis is a time-displaced Earthling whose adventures in Wonderland have been documented across all five ages and the Wander Years in between. Appearing variously as a seven-year-old girl, a seventeen-year-old teenager, and twenty-seven-year old woman, she has played a pivotal role in the history of the Eden.

Several roles, actually.

From crying the Sea of Tears into existence at the dawn of time to antagonizing Queen Frieda Jacobs near the end of the Second Age, from her exploits as a freedom fighter during the tyrannical rule of Emperor Bradar Codlacke to her singing with The Seven Voices to reboot reality, Lewis has certainly earned the nickname “Alice of Wonderland.”

Biography

Childhood

Alice was born in Oxford, England on April 1, 1858, during the Earth-666 iteration of reality. Her Edenian birth year is a matter of some debate, given that she has appeared at various ages across the entire history of this purgatorial paradise, but most scholars place it in the year 107, using the date of her original reality’s collapse as a starting point.

Her early life was uneventful. As the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist and his wife, she grew up with the comforts of the upper class: a nanny to care for her, a governess to teach her, a walled garden to daydream in, and a pet cat to dote upon.

And two perpetually absent parents. Let’s not forget about that.

Her rather mundane existence came to an end, however, when she followed a white rabbit down its hole and narrowly avoided The Calamity which brought her universe to an end.

And yet, tumbling down a rabbit hole was not without its challenges—especially for a curious child like Alice. You see, unlike a wormhole, which connects just two points in spacetime, a rabbit hole is full of endless branching tunnels to entice the traveler, to distract them from ever reaching their destination—to, in some cases, make them forget they ever had a destination at all.

The first time Alice appeared in what would come to be known as Wonderland, it was just after the goddess Phina had finished creating the place. Flustered by her misadventures in the rabbit hole, she wept and wept until she found herself swimming in a pool of her own tears. Then, after fighting her way to shore—and not realizing that she was emerging from the sea 300 years after she started—a relieved Alice ran a race alongside several talking animals to dry herself off.

Her relief didn’t last long, however, as she was soon approached by the very same white rabbit she’d followed down the hole. And though she was prepared to be very cross with this fluffy gentleman in the waistcoat, she was flabbergasted when he spoke to her as if they’d known each other for years. “Why, Mary Ann,” he said to her, addressing her with an awkward pronunciation of her middle name, “what are you doing out here?”

This was just the beginning of a series of mind-bending encounters made possible by the fact that Alice kept falling down rabbit holes, and that she only sometimes remembered what she’d done as she moved from one time to the next. In this particular instance, she hadn’t yet spent years serving as the white rabbit’s housemaid. But she would, eventually. And when she did, she soon figured out, she would use her middle name.

The events making up the remainder of Alice’s childhood will be familiar to those of you who have read the works of the Earthling author Lewis Carroll, but to sum up: she had a chat with a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a tea party with a hare and a deranged milliner, played a bit of croquet with the Queen of Hearts, and was called as a witness during a trial over the matter of some pilfered pastries.

After the trial, after being pardoned by the King of Hearts, Alice wandered east. She wandered and wandered—crossing paths briefly with the Neverlandian hero Peter Pan—and then she wandered some more, until she crossed out of Wonderland altogether and entered The Reek. And it was there that Alice Lewis encountered the most peculiar thing she’d seen so far in this magical land: a replica of London, just as it had been in the world she’d known before the rabbit hole.

She would spend the next ten years of her life in that place, minus a brief trip into the future she took through a looking glass.

Adolescence

Alice’s early adolescence, much like her early childhood, was uneventful. The only thing odd thing she observed in those days was the tendency for the children around her to never grow up. And for a good, long while, she brushed this off. She didn’t let it bother her. But she fell in love with a classmate at thirteen and that girl stayed the same age for four years in a row, that was too much. Alice fled Reekian London, hoping against hope to find a way home. She leapt down another rabbit hole and popped up in the Wonderland of ten years prior. And while for most people this might have seemed like a curse of some sort, Alice saw it as an opportunity.

Rechristening herself Marianne (her middle name), she took a position in the household of the white rabbit and hoped against hope that the daft Wonderlanders would not recognize her as the girl who had been banished. The rabbit’s position as Sage of Saltgate would keep him close to the Queen of Hearts, and Alice reasoned that if anyone knew a way to escape Wonderland it would be the queen.

And so it was that Alice passed into adulthood, only occasionally tumbling down rabbit holes in her quest to find a way home.

Adulthood

In the year 311, on her eighteenth birthday, Alice was found out by Queen Frieda Jacobs and the two did battle for the second time (if you count their battle in the courtroom as the first time, which most historians do). This time, however, the weapons were not words but swords. And the outmatched Alice, realizing she was outmatched, escaped down a rabbit hole to make sure she was better prepared the next time.

She found herself now in the far-flung future of Eden, during a time when a Reekian Representative to The Council of Five had declared himself Emperor of Eden and the peoples of this world were united against him. For nine years, she fought as part of the resistance, training herself for the fight she knew was waiting for her in the past—a battle which was shrouded in mystery, even in the extensive histories found within the Edenian Athenæum. Then, as a battle-tested twenty-seven-year-old badass, she leapt down a rabbit hole one last time.

Her fight with Queen Frieda at the end of the Second Age and her singing as part of the Seven Voices would mark the end of Alice Lewis’ life as a person, but it was these events which would cement her legendary status.

It is these events which will be chronicled in the trilogy of graphic novels beginning with The Blood of Seven Queens.