[color=f49ac2][Quickly, before Father fills his head with lies!]

“Wh—”

[Stop wasting time communicating with him, it’s pointless, when Father speaks he’ll listen!]

“…”

[Mortals do not have the capacity to discern truth from lies whence they hear his voice, fool!]

“Excuse me, young woman, but you need to learn your manners if you want people to listen.”[/color]

Alice, notably arguing with herself during a moment where she was trying to appear sane, could not hear the voice that Eti was hearing just as he—likely—could not hear hers but she could feel it there like the vibration of someone else swimming in a pool just out of your sight. She could even feeel the methodical cruelty behind it and she could see the little twinkle of defiance in Eti’s eyes as, true to the voice’s prediction, he decided to ignore her warning and press the comically out of place button in a world built of things comically out of place.

[i]HYUK HYUK HYUK[/i]

Nothing good and wholesome had ever laughed in such a vile way. The alien voice distorted the yarn-woven dimensions with each unsightly chuckle but such malice was universal. Vibrations rippled through Alice’s pink body in what she could only describe as an unsettling sensation, in her long life she’d fought many battles, but her natural body was made of stone. This, she imagined, is what a human felt—or would have felt like—in the brief moments before an explosion made their meat-sack body pop like a balloon. She was dizzy after listening to the voice laugh and were it not for the adhesive nature of grasp on the stone she might have tumbled from the clocktower in those moments where its trunk split in two and its laughter filled the air, its one evil clock eye wickedly happy just to be alive, a tongue of once plush-now sticky carpet lolling out into the naked air as if it could lick the sun up…

[color=f49ac2]“Oo-oo-oo… I’ve had just about enough of this.”[/color]

Alice had matured considerably since those days when she had first crafted her legend. Grown into a wise matriarch of a woman even if she had not technically grown at all. But part of her would always still be the rowdy young hero who thought with her fists before her head. Part of her would always have a little bit of a temper, as her free hand—one reaching for Eti, now reeled itself back back back. Until she could nearly feel the floor brushing her knuckles. In the span of a thought it had stretched all the way to the ground level and clenched into a fist such that by the time she already realized the impulse the react with violence it was already slingshotting into the side of the vile living clocktower’s stone face. 

[h1]WHALLOP[/hi]

Stone shattered and flung in every direction but only directly beneath her impugning fist. Leaving a dent in the shape of her knuckles around where the towers cheek would have been had it been a human, the rest of it reacted with a comical disregard for physics, slouching towards the side as a man who had just been knocked out did and sagging uncomfortably into the courtyard on the other side heedless of any little yarn people who it might have hurt along the way. And Alice was steaming mad. Still, I might add, very cute in that way which a cartoon character mimics the greater parts of a human while disregarding the bumps including swelled up cheeks and a furrowed brow, and literal steam pouring from her scalp.

[color=ed1c24]“Yo, lady! What’s the trap, and who set it? Who is ‘A” — the voice I’m hearing?”[/color]

[color=f49ac2]“A-a-aah… I’m sorry you had to see that,” Alice stammered out. “I really do not know for sure. Mister A is, who he is—what he is, I cannot tell you only that he is a real… a real troublemaker. He’s a naughty-naughty man but he is not an evil one. I suspect, I suspect that something vile has snuck into this play place of his and is using it to his advantage, what I cannot say.”[/color] Alice had no idea what a Cizran was, if this was even a Cizran, if this was not some vile part of Autun’s personality that had bubbled up or the vengeful ghost of an exiled civilization. Maybe, it was nothing so convoluted as that, maybe this was just a game but it was not fun. [color=f49ac2]“Regardless, the safest thing we can do is leave immediately. Things are quickly spiraling out of control and I do not know how long I can keep a handle on it…”[/color]

She said, as though she [b]had[/b] control of it right now. As if the little yarn people were not stampeding to be away, the ones she hadn’t inadvertently infected, as if there were not a small but growing number of yarn people with pink slime oozing out from between their seams slowly closing in Eti eager to grab a hold of him for their queen. To grab him. And if he lost a few limbs in the struggle to them that was just fine, limbs could easily be sown back on in this world, and the little pain that accompanied it would go a long way in making him more compliant later on. Alice would be mad. But [i]the voice[/i] promised them that her anger would be fleeting, she would forgive them, because heroes always forgave people anyways.