About 3 weeks ago Wiccanwitch535 posted this fic request: the current members were kids and found a photo of their parents when they were younger (the original concept art). They decide to reform the Mad T Party band and tour Underland before being scouted by Disney.
I had a little idea for it, but due to starting NaNo, and then failing NaNo, work, Disneyland Paris, I didn't have time to finish it up and post it until now. I'm really sorry!
In case you needed a refresher, the original concept art is here, or that's the first one I found so that's the picture they're referring to in this.
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"He'll get bored, soon enough."
"You've been saying that for months, Thackery," Alice told him as they watched Mally grabbing at the box in Tarrant's hands. "You said that when he first found that picture of the band, then when he first starting trying to get everyone together, then when Chess flounced off to the back-end of Tugley Wood and had to be convinced to come back... Mallymkun's not going to get bored of this. And now Tarrant's spent weeks making these outfits, he's not going to let Mally get bored of this." Thackery let out a quiet whine and grabbed an ear.
“I tried to get his mum to put him off the idea, but she only encouraged him...” Alice shook her head.
“Of course she did. She named her son after herself, for tea’s sake; do you really think she’d put him off starting up the Mad T Party band again? You know the whole band was her idea in the first place, don’t you?”
Thackery let his head fall onto the table with a bang, and only looked up when he heard a screech from the Dormouse a few seats down.
"What the ever-loving fuck is that?"
"It's your outfit, Mallymkun." Mally reached down and picked up the outfit, folded neatly and name tagged, from the top of the pile of clothes in the box.
"It's a dress, Tarrant," he said uneasily as it unfolded in his outstretched hands. A bundle of lace fell to the table with a soft thud. The redhead frowned, looked at the garment and then back at the Dormouse.
"It's what you asked for."
To prove his point, Tarrant pulled a crumpled picture from his back pocket; the same one Mally had leant him several weeks before, and held it out for inspection. The picture, one of the Mad T Party band their parents had made up long before any of them were born, had been found by Mally during spring cleaning and he’d all-but immediately come up with a plan to reform the band.
“The outfits,” Mally had told Tarrant with a very serious face and a very serious voice a little while before, “were one of the most important components of this band. No one would have cared about their Alice if her shoes had been boring. I mean, the singing was also a pretty big thing for her, I suppose… But think how good we’ll all look! Think of that hat! I’m sure you can manage this, right Tare? It won’t take you that long; a couple of weeks?”
The rest of the group around the tea table waited and watched Mally go over the conversation again in his head, and then pale and fall back into his chair. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the outfit his mother was wearing in the picture, or the necessary changes, had he? He'd just assumed, which was always a mistake with Tarrant.
Fuck.
"No, I-! I mean. I'm not a girl, am I?" he asked no one in particular with a weak laugh.
"Mallymkun is a girl's name," Thackery said quietly to himself, still playing with the fur on one ear.
"Whose side are you on?" The Dormouse hissed at him. The March Hare shrugged, eyes down, and let the ear go. Mally turned back to Tarrant, standing up to be level with the other man.
“Didn’t you just presume? You didn’t look at what she’s wearing and think ‘well, Mally should look good in that!’? Or did you?”
“No, but then again, when I looked at this March Hare,” he waved the paper in Mally’s direction, then nodded to the March Hare seated next to him, “‘Thackery Earwicket’ wasn’t the first thing that came to mind either.” The two stared at each other for a long while, waiting for the other to back down and give in to the other. Eventually Mally caved and flopped back down into his seat again.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Thackery whispered to Alice as Mallymkun made an exaggerated fuss of finding a comfortable position to sit. The blonde shrugged at him apologetically. She wasn’t entirely sure, but she knew exactly what Tarrant meant.
"Well I'm not wearing it. Ever. At all." There was a gasp from Mally’s left.
"But we're not going to be able to fulfil your dream of bringing the Mad T Party back if you don't, Mally," Chessur said with a smile. Mally turned his glare on him, but before he could say anything, Alice spoke up.
"I still don't understand how it's going to work,” she said tiredly. This was, after all, not the first time she’d pointed this out. Despite what she’d just told Thackery, she still had a faint hope that Mally could be persuaded to forget the whole thing. “Our parents did it, and it was successful. For a time. Then people got bored and stopped caring. What’s the point in trying to bring back something that stopped being popular years ago? Time in Underland might be a bit dodgy but we’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who’ll believe we’re our parents after all this time.” Mally shook his head energetically. Alice was half-worried it was going to fall off and roll away.
“I had an idea! We’re not going to be exactly the same! We’ll take the name and a few other ideas – some clothes, for example – but there’s going to be one crucial difference.” The Dormouse held up a finger for emphasis, and the group looked from him to it and back to him.
“We’ll have a male Dormouse in a very short dress?” Chessur guessed eventually. Mally stuck his tongue out at him.
“No! We’re going to be doing songs from Overland.” There was silence; not the response that Mally had hoped for.
“… Songs from Overland?” Alice managed to repeat eventually. Mally nodded his head enthusiastically. “And where are you getting these songs from?”
“Nivens,” the Dormouse said simply.
“Nivens?”
“Nivens.”
“What kind of songs?” Mally shrugged.
“All kinds. Anything. As long as someone likes it.”
“Every time he comes back from that place, we get yet another story about how something nearly ate him. You’re expecting him to come back alive, in one piece and with enough new music to make this worth it? Music we’ll be able to learn, at that.” Absalom cut in from the back of the group.
The Caterpillar had been the least-enthusiastic when Mally had first suggested the whole idea, even more so than Alice or Thackery. Mainly because there had been no Caterpillar in the original Mad T Party band. Although at least that had meant no misunderstandings with his clothes…
“Of course,” Mally said. “Just like I’m expecting Thack to get up on stage and not vomit, and Tarrant to get through a song without being distracted and forgetting his words. How hard can it be?” Mally shrugged, arms thrown wide, and then turned back to Tarrant. “I can pass the dress over to one of my sisters, if you want. I’m not wearing it. But I have one or two ideas of what I can wear.”
“Does it involve a hat?” he asked hopefully, giving the dress he’d made one last glance.
“No, Tarrant. No hats.”
Alice and Thackery watched the two of them plot before turning to face each other.
“It worries me when he says that,” Alice said quietly. She reached over and pulled the box of clothes closer, looking down at the mass of blue and ruffles that made up her own dress. She could spot some green netting underneath.
“What, ‘does it involve a hat’?”
“No, ‘how hard can it be?’” Thackery didn’t answer for a bit and instead watched Alice examine her outfit as he chewed at a thumbnail.
“I doubt we’ll get past the first rehearsal before he gets bored. It’ll be fine,” he said eventually, although not as confidently as before. The blonde sighed at the familiar words and rolled her eyes.
“And if he doesn’t?”
Thackery leant forward and took another look at the picture of the original band that was lying on the table. Looking back to Alice, he shrugged, still looking a tad uneasy.
“It’s a copy of a cover band based on something that’s based on Alice in Wonderland. How well do you really think that’s going to do?”
So I've got about 8,000 words to do to get back on track, a plot I no longer give two fucks about and a main character who can fall down a rabbit hole and not come back, as far as I'm concernedI'm sorry I love Alice but I've forgotten how to writeher.
I also have a large amount of chocolate and a lot of tea, though, so this is the last-ditch attempt to catch up. Or I give up and go cry in the corner.
Wiccanwitch535: I do have that ficlet for you, it just needs a bit more work before I can post it! It seems to have run away from me, it was only going to be a few paragraphs...
soooooooo... guys that thing we talked about doing!
Skype or Google Hangouts (whichever we all can figure out haha, but really Skype free group voice chat only, Google free group voice/video but idk if everyone's connections will handle all the vid load), Friday the 9th @ 7pm PST
i propose the first book - Alanna: The First Adventure (SotL1) because Pika's just reading her for the first time now and should finish by that time.
