Alice in the Realm of Reveries

Part III of Alice in Wonderland

For a full week, Prompting Culture will feature AI-centric sequels to selected well-known works of fiction, in short story format. Enjoy!

⚠ Please note: This story was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel “Through the Looking-Glass”. Prompting Culture claims no ownership or copyright over the original characters, settings, or concepts, as they appear in the two original 19th century novels.

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Chapter I

The teacup trembled in Alice’s hand, though the day was windless. She had long since stopped believing in coincidences—and certainly in magic—but the steam curling from her Earl Grey had begun to twist itself into shapes. Clock hands. Coiling serpents. A rabbit’s ears.

“Granny, you’re spilling!” Lily, her granddaughter, rescued the saucer with a giggle. At seven, Lily still believed in dragons under beds and doors in wardrobes. Alice envied her.

“It’s the draft,” Alice lied, though the parlor was stifling. She nudged the newspaper over the damp ring on the table. “Modern Efficiency Society Declares Sundays Obsolete,” read the headline.

Lily twirled, her pinafore flaring. “If Sundays die, where will naps go?”

Before Alice could muster an answer, the room itched. Not a sound, not a shudder—a sensation like a word stuck mid-syllable. The grandfather clock’s pendulum froze. The steam from Alice’s teacup hardened into a hook, latched onto the air, and pulled.

A door yawned open where the wallpaper had been. Not a proper door, but a frame of smoke and whispers, filled with a desert of ash and broken cogs. Through it wafted the smell of burnt toast and forgotten birthdays.

“Oh!” Lily clapped. “You did have a secret!”

Alice’s pulse thrummed. “That isn’t—”

But Lily skipped through the door.

The wasteland beyond was a funeral for a world Alice once knew. The sky hung low, a quilt of gray wool. Rivers of ink oozed where once there’d been chatterbox brooks. Trees, stripped of leaves, clawed at the air with branches like arthritic fingers. And everywhere—clocks. Pocket watches nested in the sand, grandfather clocks half-buried like tombstones, their hands spinning backward, forward, never now.

“Granny, look!” Lily pointed.

Ahead, a tea party sprawled in the shadow of a colossal hourglass. The table was set with chipped cups and saucers of tarnished silver. Around it sat three figures: a hare with a monocle cracked like a spiderweb, a dormouse wearing a tiny straightjacket, and a man.

The Hatter.

But not as Alice remembered. His hat was moth-eaten, his coat patched with arithmetic equations. His eyes, once bright with lunacy, were hollow as the gears strewn about his feet.

“You’re late,” he droned, voice flat as a metronome. “We’ve already had tea. And tea. And tea.”

The dormouse thrashed in its restraints. “Five thousand seven hundred and six,” it squeaked. “Five thousand seven hundred and seven…”

Lily frowned. “Why’s it counting?”

“Because Time is.” The Hatter poured tea into a cup already overflowing. The liquid vanished before it hit the brim. “He’s tidying up. Says nonsense is… inefficient.”

A wind stirred, carrying the tick-tick-tick of a thousand clocks. The dunes shuddered. From the hourglass rose a figure—tall, thin, its face a blank porcelain dial, its body a black Victorian coat stitched with golden thread. Where its heart should be, a pendulum swung.

The Chronoscribe.

“Alice Liddell,” it intoned, each syllable a hammer strike. “You have accrued debt.”

Lily hid behind Alice’s skirts. “Is it a ghost?”

“Worse,” the Hatter muttered. “An accountant.”

The Chronoscribe extended a hand gloved in ledger pages. “This realm is bankrupt. Its hours… mismanaged.” It gestured to the hourglass, where sand pooled at the bottom, grains spelling LIQUIDATION. “You will authorize dissolution.”

Alice’s mind raced—through mathematics, through motherhood, through the memory of a girl who’d once believed six impossible things before breakfast. “And if I refuse?”

The Chronoscribe’s face flickered. For an instant, Alice saw a skull beneath the porcelain. “Then you will settle the debt.”

The dunes erupted. Clockwork scorpions skittered from the sand, tails ticking. The Hatter’s table upended, teacups shattering into shards that became keys, then coins, then dust.

“Run, Granny!” Lily yelped.

But Alice stood firm. She had spent a lifetime folding wonder into logic. Now, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the only weapon she had: Lily’s chalk, stolen from the parlor floor.

“You want order?” she said, scrawling a crooked circle in the air. “Let’s discuss interest rates.”

The chalk glowed. The circle became a door.

And through it poured the first impossible thing.

Chapter II

The door Alice drew did not lead out of the wasteland, but deeper into it—a place where the rules of reason had been boiled, steeped, and poured into a cup of pure delirium. Through the chalk portal they tumbled, into a forest of grandfather clocks, their pendulums hissing like serpents. The trees’ bark was made of ledger paper, columns of numbers marching into infinity.

“Granny,” Lily whispered, clutching Alice’s sleeve, “the trees are counting.”

And so they were. “Three hundred sixty-five,” groaned an oak. “Three hundred sixty-six,” sighed a birch, each tally etching itself into the air like smoke.

The Chronoscribe’s voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere: “Debt unpaid compounds at twelve percent whimsy per annum.”

A path unfurled before them, paved with pocket watches, their hands spinning into a blur. At its end stood a bridge cobbled from chessboards, arching over a river of ink. On the far bank loomed a palace of filing cabinets, their drawers screeching open and shut like gulls.

“Clever,” Alice muttered. “A bureaucracy of nonsense.”

“Not nonsense,” corrected a voice like a rusty music box.

The Cheshire Cat materialized—or rather, half-materialized. Its body was a flickering gaslamp, its grin a jagged crack in the air. “Nonsense implies disorder. This is… systematized madness.”

Lily reached to touch the Cat’s lamp-glass tail. “Why’s your smile broken?”

“Because metaphor is taxable now,” the Cat said, fading until only its frown remained. “Mind the jurors. They’re dreadfully literal.”

The bridge shuddered. From the chessboards rose figures in black-and-white barrister wigs, their faces blank as fresh parchment.

“Alice Liddell,” droned the tallest juror, “you are charged with Defrauding Time, Section 12(b): Unauthorized Impossibilities.”

Alice squared her shoulders. “I’ve done no such thing.”

“Exhibit A,” said the juror, producing a vial of her granddaughter’s laughter. The sound fizzed like sherbet. “Childish wonder. Unlicensed. Exhibit B—”

A mirror appeared, reflecting Alice aged eight, mid-fall down the rabbit hole. “Past infractions compound present debts. How do you plead?”

“I don’t plead,” said Alice, snatching the vial and drinking it. The laughter burst inside her, sharp and sweet. “I argue.”

She knelt, scrawling equations on the bridge with Lily’s chalk: *2 + 2 = Teacup*, Midnight ÷ Curiosity = Rabbits. The numbers squirmed, revolting against their sums.

The jurors flickered. “Preposterous. Irrelevant. Nonbillable.”

“Precisely,” said Alice. “You can’t tax what you can’t measure.”

The bridge splintered. Chess pieces cascaded into the ink river, where they melted into letters that spelled LOVE and MAD and WHY.

“Brilliant, Granny!” Lily crowed.

“Not yet,” Alice said, watching the Chronoscribe coalesce on the palace steps, its porcelain face cracked. “You… corrupt… the integers,” it rasped, voice glitching. “This realm… must… BALANCE.”

“No,” said Alice, advancing. “It must unbalance.”

She drew one final symbol in the air: a crooked infinity sign. The Chronoscribe’s pendulum stuttered.

Creeeak.

A door within the palace groaned open—not chalk nor smoke, but memory. Through it wafted the scent of treacle and unfinished homework.

“The Hatter’s last tea party,” Alice breathed.

Inside, the Mad Hatter lay slumped at a table, his gears rusted, his laughter replaced by a tinny whir. Before him sat a single cup, filled not with tea, but with time—a liquid that flowed up, not down.

“Drink me,” the cup label urged.

Lily hesitated. “What happens if we do?”

“We’ll be late,” said Alice. “But late for what…?”

The Chronoscribe’s shadow engulfed them. “Irregularity… must… be… TERMINATED.”

Alice seized the cup. “To impossible things, Lily.”

They drank.

The tea tasted of burnt toast and second chances.

And the clocks began to unwind.

Chapter III

The tea did not so much unwind time as unravel it. The palace of filing cabinets melted into a gallery of half-finished thoughts—a labyrinth where hallways ended in pencil stubs and doors opened into the middles of sentences. Alice and Lily stumbled through a stanza of limericks that kept changing their last lines, pursued by the ticking of the Chronoscribe’s pendulum.

“Granny,” Lily panted, skidding around a corner paved with mismatched socks, “why’s everything squishy now?”

“Because,” Alice said, dodging a raincloud that wept commas, “we’re inside a draft. An unwritten revision.”

They burst into a courtroom where the walls were lined with inkwells screaming in silent Latin. At the bench sat a judge with a face like a crumpled shopping list, gavel in hand.

“Disorder in the court!” the judge barked, pounding his gavel. A flock of semicolons burst from the sound. “The defendant will explain why she insists on unprofitable wonder.”

Alice straightened her spectacles. “Define profit.”

“Profit,” hissed the Chronoscribe, oozing from the judge’s inkwell, “is the eradication of waste. Laughter. Questions. Tea breaks.” Its porcelain face now bore hairline fractures, gears visible beneath. “You owe Time.”

“No,” said Alice. “You owe me.”

She slammed Lily’s chalk on the bench. The courtroom stilled.

“Charge me with curiosity,” she said. “Convict me of naps. But this—” She gestured to Lily, who was teaching a semicolon to pirouette. “—this is the interest on your debt.”

The Chronoscribe’s pendulum faltered. “Irrelevant. The contract—”

“—is void,” Alice said, “because you breached clause 4(b).”

“Clause 4(b)?”

“The Right to Riddle.” Alice plucked a scroll from the air—a document inked in lemon curd and lullabies. “Stipulated by the original Alice. See subsection: ‘No tyranny of clocks shall bind the unbridled yawn.’”

The Chronoscribe’s gears screeched. “Metaphors… are… nonbinding.”

“Ah!” Alice grinned, sharp as a paper cut. “But metaphor is the only binding force here. You’ve violated your own terms.”

The courtroom erupted. The judge’s gavel became a daisy; the jurors’ wigs sprouted songbirds. The Chronoscribe writhed, its porcelain shell cracking to reveal a core of rusted springs and moth-eaten tax forms.

“Cease… this… inefficiency!”

Lily, emboldened, leapt onto the bench. “You’re just a bad story!” She blew a raspberry. The Chronoscribe’s pendulum snapped.

Crack.

Time stuttered.

The trio tumbled into a garden where the roses were arithmetic symbols and the hedges hummed show tunes. At its center stood a sundial, its shadow pointing to NOWHERE.

“Granny,” Lily said, plucking a rose that bloomed ∞, “did we win?”

“Not yet.” Alice eyed the sundial. “We’ve only balanced the ledger. To save Wonderland, we must…” She paused. “Well, I’m not entirely sure.”

The Mad Hatter materialized, dragging his tea table like a ball and chain. “You must spill,” he wheezed, his voice glitching. “Spill the tea. Spill the time. Spill the…”

“Rules,” Alice finished.

She seized the sundial’s gnomon, snapping it off. The garden shuddered. The sky peeled back like wallpaper, revealing a starless void—and in it, an enormous hourglass, its bottom bulb nearly empty.

“NO!” The Chronoscribe lunged, but Alice was already swinging the gnomon like a croquet mallet.

Crash.

The hourglass shattered. Sand exploded—grains becoming fireflies, then snowflakes, then unanswerable questions. The Chronosscribe dissolved into a sigh, its final words: “This… is… economically unsound…”

The Hatter collapsed, his gears finally still. “At least… the tea… can stop…”

But Lily tugged Alice’s sleeve. “Granny. Look.”

Where the hourglass had stood, a door remained. Not chalk nor smoke, but wood—weathered, ordinary, with a knob of tarnished brass.

Alice’s breath caught. It was her door. The one from her childhood home.

“What’s through it?” Lily whispered.

“Either the way out,” said Alice, “or the way in.”

The Hatter’s last cog rolled into the grass, sprouting a daisy. Somewhere, a dormouse giggled.

Alice took Lily’s hand. “Ready?”

Lily nodded. “Six impossible things before breakfast?”

“At least.”

They opened the door.

Chapter IV

The door opened onto a shore of black sand, where a sea of ink lapped at a sky stitched with nursery rhymes. This was not Wonderland, nor the wasteland—this was the in-between, the marrow of all stories. And it was dying.

“Granny,” Lily whispered, pointing.

Ahead, a figure hunched over a desk the size of a continent, scribbling furiously. His quill was a lightning bolt; his inkwell, a hollowed-out star. He wore a scholar’s robe patched with punchlines and grief.

The Author.

Or rather, a shadow of him—a silhouette of the man who’d first dreamed Wonderland into being, now bent under the weight of his own revisions. Around him fluttered paper cranes folded from rejected drafts, their wings whispering: “Unwrite us. Unwrite us.”

The Chronoscribe’s voice echoed one last time, faint as a margin note: “He… tried… to fix… the… plot…”

Alice understood. This Author—this ghost of Carroll—had been enslaved to “perfect” his own creation, scrubbing it of nonsense to appease Time’s ledgers. The real villain was not entropy, but regret.

“Granny, look!” Lily tugged her toward a cage of punctuation marks. Inside slumped the Jabberwock, its claws blunted, its eyes milky with cataracts. “Beware the Author’s pen,” it croaked. “He’ll footnote your soul.”

The Author turned. His face was a blank page. “Alice. You’ve come to settle accounts.”

“No,” said Alice. “To unsettle them.”

The Author’s quill twitched. “This realm must balance. Nonsense is… inefficient. Children prefer structure now. Algorithms. Sensible adventures.”

“Liar,” Lily shouted, surprising herself. “You’re just scared they’ll laugh wrong!”

The Author’s quill snapped. The sea of ink boiled.

Alice stepped forward. “You wrote a world where a dodo could chair a caucus race. Where a caterpillar asked instead of answered. And now you’d trade it for… clarity?”

“Clarity sells,” the Author droned. “Chaos does not balance.”

“Then let it unbalance.”

Alice snatched the broken quill and stabbed it into the desk. The inkwell erupted. The sea surged, waves forming sentences: WHY IS A RAVEN? HOW MANY MILES TO BABEL? HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOME RATHS?

The Author recoiled. “Stop! You’ll drown us all in… in…”

“Questions,” said Alice. “The only thing worth drowning in.”

Lily plunged her hands into the inky tide, flinging droplets that became hummingbirds, then riddles, then a chorus of dormice singing Twinkle, Twinkle in reverse. The Jabberwock’s cage melted into a ladder of apostrophes.

“Climb!” Alice urged.

They ascended into the storm of the Author’s crumbling mind. Below, the desk collapsed into alphabet soup. The Author dissolved, his last words: “I only wanted… to make it… better…”

At the ladder’s peak, they found a single door—Lily’s bedroom closet, half-open, spilling golden light.

“We’re home,” Lily breathed.

But Alice hesitated. “Wait.”

The ink sea still churned beneath them. Without nonsense, it would evaporate. Without forgetful old men and fearless little girls, Wonderland would calcify into a lesson plan.

“Lily,” Alice said softly, “do you trust me?”

“Always.”

Alice knelt, cupping her granddaughter’s face. “Then forget.”

“What?”

“Forget all of this. The doors, the Hatter, the clocks. Even me.”

“No! I won’t!”

“You must.” Alice’s voice broke. “Stories need believers, not… not tourists. If you remember, Wonderland becomes a souvenir. A product. But if you forget…”

“…it stays alive,” Lily finished, tears cutting through ink stains. “In the… the corners.”

“Yes.”

Lily threw her arms around Alice. “Will you forget too?”

“I already have,” Alice lied.

They leapt.

Epilogue

Lily woke in her bed, the taste of burnt toast on her tongue. Sunlight pooled on the floor, ordinary and guiltless.

“Granny?” she called.

No answer.

In the parlor, she found Alice dozing, an empty teacup in her lap. The newspaper headline read: “Modern Efficiency Society Announces Weekly Naptime.”

“Granny, I had the strangest dream,” Lily began.

Alice’s eyes fluttered open. “Did you, dear? Tell me.”

But the words dissolved like sugar in tea. Lily frowned. “I… can’t remember.”

Alice smiled, though her heart cracked like the Chronoscribe’s porcelain. “Then it must have been wonderful.”

That night, Lily drew a door in chalk on her bedroom wall. Just in case.

And somewhere, in the space between almost and maybe, a dodo raised a starting flag.

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Thank you!

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This short story was generated using DeepSeek. (95% AI)

Prompt: Name ten literary classics that don't have a sequel.

Prompt: For each of those, explore if a modern (or later-era in general) sequel would be interesting, and if it has a unique and distinct writing style. Rate the books on both aspects.

Prompt: Think of good sequel ideas to Alice in Wonderland. Also, since the book already has a sequel (Through the Looking-Glass), should we make this a 'part 3'?

Options for a Third Alice Book: A Trilogy Closer
(Respecting Carroll’s Legacy While Forging New Ground)

1. Alice in the Realm of Reveries: Time as a Sentient Antagonist

Premise:
Decades after Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is a grandmother whose bedtime stories inadvertently resurrect Wonderland. But time itself—personified as a skeletal, pocket watch-wearing entity called The Chronosphinx—declares Wonderland a “bankrupt hourglass” and begins erasing its inhabitants. Alice must partner with a now-aged Mad Hatter (whose tea party is a time-loop prison) to outwit entropy.

Unique Angle:

• Time as a Villain: The Chronosphinx enforces “rational time,” turning Wonderland’s chaos into sterile order. Rivers flow in straight lines, the Cheshire Cat’s grin freezes mid-air, and riddles have single answers.

• Carrollian Math: Alice uses non-Euclidean geometry (inspired by Carroll’s academic work) to bend time’s rules.

• Meta-Layer: The story critiques modern productivity culture’s war on imagination.

Final Image:
Alice and the Hatter share one last chaotic tea party in a collapsing void, sacrificing themselves to reignite Wonderland’s “useless time”—a pocket watch shattering into infinite mayflies.

2. Alice and the Mirror of Makers: The Author as a Character

Premise:
A teenage Alice discovers Carroll’s unpublished diary, revealing that Wonderland was co-created by a real child named Mary (a forgotten muse). Mary, trapped in the pages, hijacks Alice’s reality to demand her own story. The Looking-Glass becomes a portal to Scriptoria, a library-world where fictional characters rebel against authors.

Unique Angle:

• Dual Protagonists: Alice teams up with Mary, who embodies Wonderland’s darker, abandoned edges (e.g., a Jabberwock-tamed-by-logic, sentient inkblots).

• Ethical Dilemma: Is it right to “fix” stories? Mary wants to erase Carroll’s legacy; Alice fights to preserve imperfection.

• Artifact Text: Pages shift between Carroll’s prose and Mary’s handwritten revisions.

Final Image:
Alice rips the diary, freeing Mary but erasing herself from Wonderland’s history. The last line: “And the tale belonged to nobody, which is the best way to belong.”

3. Alice in the Kingdom of Nonsense: Linguistic Apocalypse

Premise:
Wonderland is infected by The Literal Plague—a virus that forces everything to mean exactly what it says. The Mock Turtle is a soup ingredient, the White Queen’s “jam tomorrow” never arrives, and the Cheshire Cat becomes a literal housecat. Alice, now a lexicographer, must reintroduce ambiguity to save the realm’s magic.

Unique Angle:

• Wordplay as Weapon: Alice battles bureaucratized language (e.g., “OFFICIAL QUEEN OF HEARTS: ALL METAPHORS HEREBY OUTLAWED”).

• Modern Parallels: Satirizes censorship, AI-generated literalism, and the death of poetry.

• Carroll Nods: The Red Queen’s “running in place” becomes a Sisyphean office job.

Final Image:
Alice rewrites Wonderland’s rules in limericks, restoring chaos—but at a cost: her daughter chooses to stay forever, “because nonsense is the only thing that’s true.”

4. Alice and the Undertow of Dreams: Collective Unconscious

Premise:
Alice, now a psychoanalyst in 1920s London, discovers that her patients’ nightmares are leaking into reality. She re-enters Wonderland, now a collective subconscious shared by all children, corrupted by World War I’s trauma. The Jabberwock has evolved into The Trench, a sentient maw consuming hope.

Unique Angle:

• Historical Horror: Wonderland mirrors interwar Europe—the Mad Hatter shell-shocked, the Caterpillar addicted to opium, the Walrus a war profiteer.

• Freud vs. Fantasy: Alice debates Carl Jung (cameo as the “Archivist of Archetypes”) on whether Wonderland should be “cured” or preserved.

• Tonal Shift: Carroll’s whimsy curdles into Gothic surrealism (e.g., flamingo croquet mallets as barbed wire).

Final Image:
Alice leads a charge of nightmare-children against The Trench, armed with riddles. The victory leaves Wonderland scarred but alive—a testament to resilience, not purity.

5. Alice in the Algorithm: Digital Wonderland

Premise:
In modern-day Silicon Valley, Alice’s granddaughter Lydia (a coder) stumbles into WonderNet, an AI-generated afterlife for forgotten imaginary friends. But the algorithm, designed to optimize “engagement,” is gentrifying Wonderland into clickbait (e.g., viral Jabberwock dances, the Cheshire Cat as an influencer).

Unique Angle:

• Tech Satire: The Queen of Hearts runs a literal content farm (“OFF WITH THEIR BUZZFEED!”).

• Analog vs. Digital: The original Alice appears as a glitch, helping Lydia reboot WonderNet with Carroll’s “nonsense code.”

• Format Innovation: Text includes HTML tags, chatbot dialogues, and corrupted emojis.

Final Image:
Lydia exits WonderNet, but her phone buzzes—a notification: “JABBERWOCKY TRENDING IN YOUR AREA.” Ambiguous, haunting, and bitingly modern.

Why These Work:

• No Retreads: Each premise tackles uncharted themes (time’s tyranny, authorship ethics, linguistic decay, collective trauma, digital commodification).

• Carroll’s Spirit: All retain wordplay, paradox, and critique of “rational” systems.

• Modern Resonance: Connects Wonderland’s absurdity to contemporary issues (AI, mental health, war, censorship).

Next Step:
Shall we flesh out a chapter from one of these? Or refine a concept?

Prompt: Let's go with a combination of the best elements. Chronosphinx sounds a little too scientific, although the character is pretty good. Did Carroll really use words like entropy? Maybe tweak that to be more authentic. However, critiquing modern productivity culture’s war on imagination sounds great, keep that! Write part [1,2,3,4] of 4.