The mome raths outgrabe.

[angel_dylan]

After the incedent with the Caterpillar, they were all rather reluctant to eat anything, even the food that had come through the Gate with them from the island. As a result, Dylan was feeling a definite rumble in her tummy to match her growing paranoia that Tweedle Dee or Dum might suddenly spring from the bushes and start bopping them all on the

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[holden_mcneil]

Holden and Mark were sort of trailing off to the side of the group. Holden had kept mostly to himself all this time because he was more than a little freaked out about being with fictional people in a fictional place. But Mark seemed pretty normal, and best of all non-fictional.

If he hadn't known they were in Wonderland, the incident with the Caterpillar would have been a big fucking clue. He was just trying to decide how he was going to tell Banky about all this when they got back - cause he absolutely refused to think that they might not - when something caught his eye and he stopped.

It looked like... a smile. A smile just hanging there in midair, grinning from ear to ear (or what would be ear to ear if there were actually, you know, a face attached to it).

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he said, rolling his eyes. He elbowed Mark and pointed to the smile.

[olliegreenjeans]

"I mean, seriously. Green is a good color for a superhero. It's dark enough that it doesn't stand out at night. Dirt doesn't show up much on it. It harks back to Robin Hood, which is a cool thing, and it looks good on me. I mean, part of those flowers were green. Who are they to talk?" Yes, Ollie is still hung up on this.

Ollie noticed some people stopped and pointing at a... disembodied smile? Oh, now that was a good one.

"What the hell?"
[OOC: Ollie fashion complaints are up for anyone. Keep in mind that in the two days or so since the flowers, he's probably said this umpteen billion times. And if no one wants to pick up the role of listener, he's more than happy to complain to himself about it]

[unnerving_grin]

The smile widened--a definite grin--then widened more, and perhaps more, impossibly wide. More than a mouthful of teeth, incisors overlapping, and two faintly glowing eyes opening just above that endless grin. The rest unfolded suddenly as bone and sinew and blood, twisted over by ragged fur in dark stripes without pattern, just chaos followed by a long, curling tail.

The cat grinned at them, full body visible now. He might have been sprawled bonelessly over the limb of the nearest tree, except that he seemed to be nothing but bone, every skeletal inch defined beneath his fur. The metal ring pierced through one of his ears gleamed in the light of his eyes.

[make_creation]

At the jab from Holden Mark looked up, his eyebrows drawing up in his familiar 'whatthefuck' expression. "Uh..." he trailed off as the animal's body faded in-- except fade wasn't the word, grew was more like it, building up from the inside out till what grinned ferally at them from the nearby tree was unmistakably...

"The Cheshire cat," he said in a tone of flat disbelief, adding under his breath, "I have definitely had enough of this place. What the shit is next, croquet with the fucking playing cards?"

[wished_away]

Toby was startled by the Cheshire Cat, but there was really nothing for it. He watched the entity, not quite putting others between him and the figure as just trying to get out of sight. Not that it would entirely matter, seeing as there would quite a few more people than Alice to amuse the thing.

The blonde just had enough of Wonderland, interesting as it was. The last thing he needed was to look at the disturbing version of what he had only thought of as cuddly, pink, and purple.

[unnerving_grin]

The cat merely grinned at them all, his tail swaying back and forth, back and forth, just at the very tip. His eyes gleamed, whiskers faintly twitching, and he seemed to see all of them at once without so much as shifting his gaze.

At last he moved just his front paws, claws stretching out long and black and then retracting again. "Some people say it's impolite to stare," he finally said, staring unblinking at them all.

[scooby_leader]

"It's very respectable," Buffy said to playcate Ollie, her eyes searching for the next impossible situation, which literally appeared out of thin air. A huge, terrifying smile. One didn't have to know the books and poems to know that this was the Cheshire Cat. She looked over at Mark and laughed at his words, though she wasn't sure why, since they were obviously in this cracked out Wonderland

[unnerving_grin]

The cat regarded her with a steady gaze, Buffy's eyes reflected in his own. "Hello," he replied at length, a low and vaguely unpleasant purr rippling under his voice.

His tail twitched, and he abruptly arched the bony curve of his spine, stretching and yawning until his whiskers bristled. His jaws opened impossibly wide, gaping wider and wider, nearly past all reasonable expectations of anatomy...until he closed them again into the same grin and curled back up on the branch.

[self_named]

"Ollie, I swear to God. We know. You look fantastic in green. It's slimming and heroic. Now I'm beggin' ya to-"

Oh. Cat.

Duo was thoroughly, thoroughly perturbed. There weren't a lot of animals on L2- you had to be wealthy to own pets- though there had been some vermin and a limited number of stray cats.

This cat was not like those cats. Entirely. Still, with every reason to say "fuck reality (since it's clearly done the same to me)" and go hide someplace, Duo instead sidled up to the tree, his own grin sliding onto his face. In another life, they could have been kindred spirits. And Duo hid best out in the open.

"Pardon us," he said, "We surely didn't mean to show a lack of etiquette. But you're quite an impressive cat, and where we're from, we don't get the privilege of seeing anythin' like you. You wouldn't," he added, "Happen to have any idea as to where we could go to get back to where we're from, would you?"

[strange_fancy]

Polly had been rather less indulgent of Ollie's complaints, and had been up next to him muttering "If you don't shut the hells up about your clothes, drkadzijo-" when the Thing had appeared.

Polly had seen cats. She refused to think of this as a cat. Even apart from the part where it appeared bit by bit out of thin air.

So she cocked her horse-bow. In all probability, it wouldn't do much good if the Thing wanted to hurt them, but it was comforting, and she felt... well, partly like she had after Towering, partly like she had in the cellar full of zombies, and partly like she had when she'd been ten years old and had gotten into the inn's beer.

[unnerving_grin]

Grinner a little wider in response to Duo's grin, the cat flipped the long bones of his tail and licked a forepaw, eyes slitting shut for just a moment, then opening again, perhaps a bit wider.

"That entirely depends," grinned the cat, staring at Duo, "on where you came from. Unless you don't mind going backwards to go forwards. But that would be a very long shortcut." He punctuated the word with another stretch of his back.

[angel_dylan]

Oh, no fucking way.

Dylan knew it was impolite to stare. She knew, too, that the Cat likely wouldn't appreciate the staring. Yet she couldn't help it. She'd seen a lot of creepy shit in her twenty-six years, but nothing matched that. It made her want to throw up and shoot it and run away screaming all at the same time, but all she could do was... stare.

"Fuck me," she whispered under her breath.

[unnerving_grin]

The cat's ear twitched, setting the metal ring swaying for a moment, and he stared at Dylan instead. He had not blinked once since his first appearance. "If you don't know where you've come from, and you don't know where you're going, it doesn't much matter which way you go," he purred, and continued to grin.

He began to fade, or maybe unravel, the tip of his tail coming apart first, the rest of his tail following bone by bone.

[olliegreenjeans]

"Hold it right there!" Ollie points and glares at the cat-thing. "I'm from pissed-off-ville and I'm going to kick some bony, blue, disappearing cat ass if I don't get some answers and right now!"

Ollie takes two steps forward. He thinks about poking it in it's chest, but decides that he like his fingers. "We've been wandering around this place for days, and we want to get back home. Now you better tell us how, catnip breath, or..."

Ollie trails off for a second. How do you threaten a cat? Bath? No, that's a dog. Vacuum cleaner? Don't have one...

"...or I will personally take it upon myself to declaw you, fluffy."

[unnerving_grin]

Eyes and grin widening together, the cat paused in the midst of his disappearing act, but seemed to think it unnecessary to rematerialize the missing half of his tail.

"Yelling isn't very productive," he said, paws shifting on the branch, leaving long and rending marks in the bark of the tree. "You can't go back. To get out, you'll have to go further in."

[make_creation]

Mark was seriously freaked out to the point of almost being scared, and wrapped his arms around himself, giving the cat-thing a defensive look.

"Further in where?" he asked nervously. "Which way do we go to get out? To get back to the island, I mean?" He had to remember to ask the right questions-- it was like that movie with the maze and David Bowie, the one he vaguely remembered having taken his sister's kid to go see.