Um, Alice?

        Once upon a time there was a girl named Alice. She was a smart obedient girl, who always listened to her parents, and did her homework on time. She was her parents jewel, and the pride of her town. A straight A student, with community service up the kazoo, and always with a kind word.
         Then Alice turned 13, changed her name to Lucile, dyed her hair black, started listening to sugarcult, and overall changed a little. Now that’s not to say that she wasn’t obedient, just that she didn’t always do all of what she was told. For example, if you told her to go mow the lawn, she wouldn’t attack you with the lawnmower. No no, nothing like that. Lucile would just take the lawnmower, half heartedly mow half the lawn, stick a firecracker next to the engine, and leave for the mall. Nothing that bad you see.
         Now on one of these occasions, while Lucile was heading off to the mall, after having completed a house chore rather questionably, she had a very odd experience. She was just walking in a meadow (“Now why in the world we have to live out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do or see, that I cant quite understand”), when she saw a rather odd hamster. It wasn’t odd in the numerical sense, merely in the sense that it was dressed in some tiny black armor and was toting a submachine gun. Now Lucile had seen some pretty interesting things in nature (though if you had asked her she would have quickly assured you that they all bored her to tears, or at least smudged makeup), but she had never before seen a wild hamster quite like this. However, they were having a mega-sale at Hot Topic, so she attempted to ignore the hamster and continue on her way.
         The hamster, however, would not stand for it, “You look like one of those evil dice people to me, better take you in” stated the hamster with an authoritative air. This was another first for Lucile, but Hot Topic had opened five minutes ago, and everyone knows that the Goth hello kitties sold out in the first hour, so she tried to continue on her way. This plan was unfortunately disrupted when the hamster grabbed a net from somewhere, threw it around her, and started to drag her off. “You know, the watches don’t like it when people are late, and you are most certainly going to make me late”, said the hamster. “What in the world is this nutter going on about?” thought Lucile, but her thoughts were interrupted by the hamster trying to stuff her into a hamster hole. (Now the reader may here protest that there is no such thing as a hamster hole, but one must ask themselves why they readily accept the idea of a talking armor clad hamster, but not a hamster hole. Now please be quiet and allow me to continue). The hamster was much agitated by the physical labor of dragging and stuffing Lucile (thirteen year old girls don’t weigh what they once did) and by the fact that time was rapidly passing, though that may have just have been caused by his watch being fast. Thus he decided that Lucile was much too large, and without further ado, he stabbed her with a sword.
         Oh please don’t worry; the only people who get seriously hurt in this story are ones that we don’t hear about. It ends up that the hamster’s sword was a magical sword (in my experience, this is the preferred type among talking violent hamsters), and as a minor byproduct of making Lucile feel a bit queer, it made her rather small. Due to the discomfort that accompanies size change, Lucile didn’t notice that the net shrunk with her, a detail that has been the matter of much speculation since Lucile’s little adventure. Now that Lucile was of a more opportune size, the hamster had no difficultly dragging her down the hole.
         After quite a bit of jostling and discomfort, the odd duo emerged in a clearing full of tents. “Where are we?” was Lucile’s question, but the hamster ignored her, and proceeded up to a heavily guarded gate. “Henry? What in the world do you have there Henry?” asked the guardsman. “I’m not entirely sure, I found her up above, and wanted to bring her in for questioning”, was Henry’s response (if you can’t figure out who Henry is, then you don’t deserve to understand this story). The guard shot another suspicious look Lucile’s way, and let them through. “Well everyone seems to be delighted to see me” grumbled Lucile to herself. Henry dragged her towards a huge circle in the ground. When they got closer, Lucile realized that wasn’t just a circle, it was a sundial like she had seen in the textbooks. Henry dropped her a few feet away, then slowly approached, bowed, and started talking to the sundial, “O reverent one. O wise ticker, I have brought a girl down from the surface, and wise to know what to do with her”. Much to Lucile’s surprise, the sundial lifted itself up, and the minute and hour hands opened up into eyes. “Aren’t girls usually a bit larger?” he asked, but before Lucile could say anything, Henry quickly assured him, “She’s probably just a bit smaller than normal, you know how wired upper world things are”. The sundial nodded wisely at this, looked for a bit more at Lucile, and calmly stated that the only real thing to do would be to chop off her head.
         Now this wasn’t a very pleasant thought for Lucile, who was rather fond of her head, so she protested, “But clock doohickey, I have done nothing, and I have a rather dire need to retain my head”. “I’m not entirely sure to whom you are taking to, there is nobody named clock doohickey here, however you are being quite absurd. Of course you don’t need your head. It will sting for a bit, but probably grow back in a month” said the most magnificent, wonderful, time telling, lord sundial. The sundial then proceeded to order Henry to take her out of the net, so that he could get a good swing at her. As Lucile very much doubted his reassurance that head cutting wasn’t that bad, she instead took this opportunity to run into the woods. “Why that girl must not be wound just right. Though she is pretty fast. Oh well, SOMEONE CATCH HER!!” yelled the sundial.
         An odd phenomenon that has been observed in many youths Lucile’s age was in progress here. In gym class, you would be surprised to see Lucile and her friends going more than 1 MPH. However, if Hot Topic was about to close, she would ran faster than a cheetah with its tail on fire. (While to my knowledge no one has ever clocked the speed of a cheetah with its tail on fire, I'm sure one can imagine it would be fairly rapid.) Similarly, as she was now being chased by a group of violent sentient clocks, she ran quite quickly.
         Several minutes later, Lucile collapsed to the ground panting. She was pretty sure she had lost the clocks; the infernal ticking had finally stopped. She got up to look around, and discovered she was deep in a forest. Now this is perfectly reasonable, since she had been running into a forest to escape, but Lucile hadn’t really noticed until now. She also noticed that this was a particularly odd forest. For one, you couldn’t see the sky above the foliage, yet it was perfectly bright. Also, the trees were a peculiar shade of green, somewhere between purple and red, but with really a much more orange tint. And watching her with little beady eyes, there was a small boar.
         “What is the name of the trespasser who dares enter my forest? And answer truthfully, I can smell a lie from a mile away!” growled the boar. This took Lucile a bit of time to figure out, but she finally answered, “You mean me? Oh my name is Lucile” at this the boar growled and made a threatening gesture with its tail, “Ah, I guess my real name is, um, Alice”. This satisfied the boar, or at least kept him from eating Lucile. They stood there staring at each other, until Lucile finally got up the courage to ask him how to get out of the forest. He seemed quite insulted that she wanted to leave, but highly pointed his tusks in a certain direction. Relived by this fairly straightforward answer, Lucile set off towards where the boar was pointing. The boar didn’t seem to be done though, as he also set off in the direction his tusks were pointing. This perturbed Lucile a bit, but it perturbed her even more when the boar started disappearing from the tail forward. Finally the tusks were the only part left, and continued to float next to her.
         After about a half an hour of walking, Lucile emerged in a meadow that looked exactly the same as the clock’s meadow, with one distinct difference; where there used to be a multitude of tents, there was now a huge inch-worm sitting on a mushroom. Lucile slowly approached the inch-worm, who was drinking out of a huge tea cup, and timidly asked, “Um, mister inch-worm, do you happen to know how to get back to the surface?” “WHAT DID YOU CALL ME!?!” roared the inch-worm, “INCH-WORM?! I AM I TWELVE FEET LONG-WORM!” Lucile hastily apologized, and the worm continued, “Well, I suppose that you didn’t know. Now on the subject of returning to the surface. You are obviously not from down here, so to have gotten down here you must have been out of your mind. Any idea of how this could have happened?”. “Um, the milk smelled a bit rancid this morning, but I was in a hurry” answered Lucile. “That would do it. Since you came here on a chemical, you have to get out on one. Want to try the mushroom? I personally prefer it in tea, but it could be eaten straight” said the worm. Lucile hesitated, but then shrugged, and ate some of the mushroom. At first Lucile started feeling slow, but after twenty minutes, she saw what she needed. “Why there is a nice elevator right there, I wonder how I could have missed it before” thought Lucile. Thus she walked towards it, and hoped on.
         She woke up feeling a little groggy, and found that she was lying in the field where this whole adventure had started. “Well I’m happy that over with. Maybe I can still get something from Hot…. Is that toad riding a bike?”