HORNS (BoyXBoy)

Chapter 176

Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Six

One hundred and twenty-two years ago, in the year 1951, Alice in Wonderland was released by Disney Studios. It was and still is considered a timeless masterpiece. I'd watched it for the first time two years ago, the year 2071, and I only did so because Aerin told me I'd fall in love with it. 

Which, of course, I absolutely had.

I'd been so amused and entertained by the janky animation and the zany plot that my tail had gotten rug burn from wagging so hard. In a nutshell, Alice in Wonderland was about a little blonde girl in a pretty blue dress who'd followed a talking white rabbit and had wound up tumbling down a massive hole at the base of a tree. She'd fallen for ages, tumbling around and around, and had then started to float down into the void using her skirt as a parachute.

The whole premise of the film was that Alice wound up completely lost in a strange world with even stranger plants and animals, such as mushrooms that could change her body's size from insanely large to microscopically small, smoking caterpillars getting high, unusual oysters, talking walruses--all of these things came together to make a very trippy story.

Alice spent the entire film trying to find her way home until she inevitably met the Queen of Hearts, a tyrannical, spoiled, and almost childlike woman who executed anyone and everyone that rubbed her the wrong way. 

Thinking about it now gave me chills.

Memories of watching the film plagued my mind as I followed Wok down the hall, because a lot of what I'd already seen was eerily similar to Disney's classic depiction of Wonderland. I mean, really--I'd already encountered giant mushrooms, glowing fungi and plants that lit up the darkness like beacons, gargantuan trees, magic, and huge castles of unfathomable size. There were also multitudes of strange-looking faeries, animals that no longer existed up on the surface world--such as wooly mammoths and sabretooth tigers--and... well... bigoted royalty. 

Just like the Queen of Hearts, only... not as lethal.

A lot of what I've seen here actually resembles the world shown in Alice in Wonderland, I silently muttered, staring at the mossy wooden floor passing under my hooves. Even the faery rings they use for teleportation. The black, empty void with no sensation aside from falling could have been where the scene showing her tumble down that weird hole came from. Bellog told me that Alice was a real little girl who was spirited away by a pooka, but still, its strange how stuff like this bled into human culture and became a fantasy experience. Alice's life here was literally turned into a fairy tale that people can sit back and enjoy, globally, but... it's kinda scary to think that all old fairy tales like hers might have some truth to them. Maybe I should ask Bash if--

"Are you all right, Honored Guest?" Wokka suddenly asked, snapping me out of my thoughts; l jerked my head up to see the little imp peering at me over his shoulder.

"Uh... yeah, why?" I cautiously asked, reminded that his kind had mild telepathic abilities.

"You have simply been quiet since we discussed my master's hypotheses about the origin of lycanthropes and vampires," he curiously noted. "Is something troubling you?"

"Er, no, it's nothing like that," I reassured with a shrug; my hands were ensconced in my frontal hoodie pocket but the scrutiny he gave me made me fiddle with my claws. "It's just... I dunno, I'm trying to wrap my head around everything I've seen so far down here. I mean, we're inside of a hallway made entirely out of a plant. For me, it all seems a little... I dunno, crazy?"