Alice in Uni-Land

This post is up very late. Let me make it up to you. Here's a story I wrote last year for a prompt I got off of r/writingprompts: "Alice and wonderland but from the perspective of a university student doped up on caffeine and a massive lack of sleep."

A little something to entertain you with.

Alice stared down at her biology textbook as the clock ticked its way past 2am. The evolution of lagomorphs blurred into a puddle of text and diagrams. It grew bigger and muddier as her head dropped ever closer to the page.

She jerked awake and reached for her notebook. But it wasn’t there. Her dorm room had vanished as well. She now found herself in a forest, and she wasn’t alone.

There was a rabbit. Well, an anatomical drawing of a rabbit, come to life. Its skeleton and muscles were visible, but it didn’t seem to mind. It seemed rather preoccupied with the time.

“I’m late!” it shrieked in a high voice.

“For…?” Alice asked. This wasn’t the time to wonder why rabbits were talking.

“My exam! Oh gosh, oh dear, I’ll fail for sure!” With that the rabbit hurried away down the path.

“Wait!” Alice called out, following it through the trees. “Can you tell me where I—” But the rabbit had vanished. “—am.”

“Where do you want to be?” a voice asked from above her.

Alice looked up to see a skeletal cat sitting on a tree branch. “What? Well, I don’t know exactly.”

“Then it doesn’t really, matter, does it?” the cat replied.

Alice frowned. “No, it matters. I have to go. I have to study.”

“For a test?” the cat asked, stretching lazily on the branch.

“Yes.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? Just keep going, you’ll get there.” As the cat spoke, it began to disappear, beginning at the end of its caudal vertebrae, until only its skull remained.

Alice looked down the path. It divided into two branches. “This way, or that way?”

“Yes,” the cat’s floating canines replied, and vanished.

“Well, that was helpful,” Alice muttered. She picked the right path and kept walking.

After a while, she came to a garden. A severe looking woman was engaged in a game of croquet against a man with an eyepatch. As Alice approached, the man knocked the woman’s ball off into the bushes.

She hurled her mallet at him. “F!”

He ducked the mallet. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, Jack, when I say F, I mean—!” She stopped, noticing Alice. “Who are you?”

“Me? Oh, no one, I’m just—”

“No one? Well then why are you interrupting my game?” the woman demanded.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to get out of here.”

The woman glared at her. “Back the way you came, I should think.”

“But I—”

“F!”

“You can’t—”

“F!”

Alice held up her hands. “Fine, fine, I’m going.” She headed back down the path, but none of it seemed familiar. Was this not the way she had come?

The path ended at a clearing where a picnic table had a half-finished game of beer pong. At the far end was a guy in a flat bill hat.

He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Hey, my friends kinda ditched me. You, uh, wanna play a game?”

“No, I really need to be going. I have a lot of studying to do.”

“Studying? You spend all your time learning, you’re gonna end up not knowing anything.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

He shrugged. “Does it have to?”

“Look, can you just tell me how to get out of here?”

“Sure. But you’re gonna need this. It’ll wake you up.” He reached into a cooler and pulled out an energy drink. He tossed it to Alice, but she missed on the catch and it smacked her in the forehead.

Her head jerked back and she woke up on her biology textbook. An anatomical drawing of a rabbit ignored the fact that its insides were showing, but looked a little concerned about the time.

I'll see you next week.