Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was once held as common knowledge that reflective surfaces were windows into another world. Time and science has brought us to understand that it is merely the collection and refraction of light off a highly polished surface. Simple and painfully normal. We walk through our house a mirror or two in almost every room. We see only ourselves and our things. The after math of a rainy day presents us with small reflecting pools that show the clearing sky above. Mundane really, and so droll. It wasn't always this way though. In that time I spoke of before men would gaze into polished obsidian and bronze for hours trying to see that was going on in that realm. And they saw things, terrible things. Through those small windows they saw the Sublime.... Consequently, it drove them mad. The world of Dreams and Nightmares has exsisted for so long as the world of men. Reflecting pools and dreams had been their only means of accessing it before. But as men poured into the Craft of Mirror making they were not only making windows into this world, but doors. They call it the Mirror Realm, a land as expansive and varied as the collective imagination of humanity.

These doors, however, were more for useful for us than the humans. For the first time the citizens of the Mirror realm had direct access to the human world. Many of us figured out the use of mirrors quickly, others by accident. Human's seemed to lack the ability to cross the threshold. Unless of course they are an Alice... She was young when she came to our world. A very strong door was in her family's home. It was strange, the Mirror Realm its self seems to be in some form concious of its own exsistance. When Alice did but pass the door the Mirror Realm in its entirety reacted to the human, desiering her. By sending a messenger to tempt the young lady in. Curious, as all children are, she followed. The glass posed no more of a barrier to her pale hands than did an open door way. Many have read of her account, children mostly, as adults tend to discount such tales. The Lady Alice did not return to her home though. The story found its way back to the human realm by other means. In the mirror realm she was much more than human and she was much more than anything that lived there. Through her adventures she became wise and brave and beyond powerful. She became the queen of the Mirror Realm, no power higher. Under her rule the doors to the human world were almost all closed. She understood the danger of the creatures she found in this new world and the chaos they could reek in the human world. Not all doors could be closed however. Some remain. Those mirrors which were created with the most fervor and desire of the humans who crafted them to see the world beyond the glass, stayed open.

The doorways are owned and kept now by some of the most powerful nobles in the mirror realm. There are ten mirrors that are known to exsist. It is possible that there are more. Those who have them are able to draw power from the human world to keep their influence in the Mirror Realm. At the moment, the most powerful of the rulers, and this is under Queen Alice. Is the Queen of Hearts. The red queen has dominon over most of the Mirror Realm, as her's is the oldest and most wide spread of all the influences. From where she gets her power it is not known, but it is known that those who denie her will quickly dissapear, this not an easy task. Natives of the Mirror Realm are unable to be killed by normal means such as pistol dueling or swordplay. They may dissapear for a time, an inconvinence, but not leathal in the human sense.

Speaking of humans, Alice was not the only one to have the ability to cross the threshold. There are certain humans who are inborn with a natural affinity for the Mirror Realm, as if they were made to be part of it in the first place. Generally, they are reffered to as 'An Alice'. The Alice's abilites are varried. Some of them are so strong in their affinity that the Mirror Realm draws them to its self, others, the much more common veriety, can simply enter and exit the Mirror Realm at will. Humans of any kind can enter the Mirror Realm provided that they are brough there by a native of it. Once there however they cannot leave without the aid of the same or another citizen of the Realm.

Power is an on going struggle for those who live in the Mirror Realm. To get it, to wield it, to make alliances or break them. It is not a wonder with so many lands and so many kings and queens vying for more control. Power is gained in the most part from humans. For example, many years ago the Knave of Hearts sought to over throw his mother. It was rumored the she was cold to the affectionate boy and was often cruel to him. This was only a rumor though, one that should not be repeated if you should desire to keep your head. To gather what power he needed he would slip into the human world and find some young and lovely lady and catch her fancy. He was a beautiful man and was easily able to entice women to follow him into the mirror realm. There he created a false world that was always better than the one his victim had left. Gradually he would convince them that this life was truth and the one they left was nothing but a dream. When they accepted it he would eat their memories and their past. He did this for years in secret keeping his humans hidden around the kingdom until he had enough power to overthrow the queen. It did not last though. The Prince King, as he had begun to call himself, fell in love. He desired the stability and love of a family of his own. However, the woman rejected him, his world and his magic. It left him weak and unstable enough for the queen to escape and banish her son into the human world.


You may have noticed that I left off the story of the Prince of Hearts being banished to he human world. The story did not end there though, hardly. In the late 1800's he appeared, wondering the world as a toy maker. He was so lonely that he took and desirous of a child of his own that he did all in his power to make all children he met smile. However, it was not so simple. He was a creature of the realm in which humans deposit their nightmares and children deposit their dreams. Parents regarded him with mistrust and child with awe, which only served to make parents more uncomfortable. The Prince settled into his lonely life. It drained on him, causing him to age in appearance into his thirties. Being alone drove him mad, but a quiet sort of mad hat you don't see on the outside and is not noticed until it is too late.

This was a long time ago for me, when I was human. It was the day of my parent's funeral. I ran from he ceremony to escape the gossip of the adults who looked at me with unforgiving eyes. You see I was an oddity in that time. I had hair too long and thick for a child my age and I was too small and thin, with large eyes and pale white skin. Children were supposed to be rosy and plump with tight curls high on their head. I was not so pretty and honestly not so wanted. The mother and father I lost were anything but to me. I hardly knew them, and so I ran... right into the arms of a kind stranger. He was the doll maker, all in the town knew of him, but few had seen him and certainly not me, what with having been locked away in a dark wing of my family's mannor. He took me inside his shop and wiped away my tears and the was the beginning.

I had never known what a father's love could be but for three years the doll maker showed me. Through what I now understand as magic he was able to produce documentation to make himself my legal guardian. He saved me from my family's advisors who had planned to ship me off to a nunnery, freeing them to take all of my parent's vast estate for themselves. Even with the fortune that was rightfully mine we lived simply. We moved to London and kept a lovely shop that was fairly well known. He made dolls and I learned to manage the store. I was seven that last year. My father was becoming quiet and tense, he stopped talking to me so much as he used to and when he looked at me there was always sadness in his eyes. He was afraid of loosing me, that I would grow up soon and leave him behind. He was too attached to the bright days we had already spent together and could not for anything let me go.

The idea must have struck him one winter day when I brought him tea. He touched my face in a gesture of fatherly affection as he often did, but he had accidently smeared wet clay onto my cheek. From that moment he became frantic, excited, unhinged really. In a very large crate that he kept but never opened he pulled out it. The doorway. It was an ancient mirror, heavy and framed in high relief gold, two feet wide and seven feet tall. I had never seen anything like it. He put his hand just above the glass and though I could not see what was happening from my hiding place in he other room he seemed to change. My thin and exshaused looking father changed into a regal elegant man who held power in his very form. I was so confused, but he lovingly hushed my curiosity and made tea for me. It was purple and sweet, but I had never seen any tea like it before. He was quite admit that I drink the whole cup and when I did he set me down on the bed saying that I should lay down. I did as my father bid, by this time very worried. Was I sick? He only hushed me until I fell into a deep sleep.

The worst memory of my existence is when I next woke. The pain that I was in the last moments of firing in the kiln as the porcelain hardened... I, I cannot re count this to you, and you hardly have he right to know anyway. What I will say is that my father had, through his art and through the magic he had turned me into a doll. A perfect beautiful child that he could love forever... and I hated him for it. I despised him with every waking moment. He had betrayed me, but without him, I would not be able to exist in my new form. Time passed and I could not continue to hate him forever, he begged my forgiveness with many tears. What he had done had poisoned me. I was no longer the pure and innocent child that had loved him so dearly as my father. I was a doll, a poisoned beauty and so, I was no longer Alice Elizabeth Crane, but Arsenic first of the poisoned dolls, Queen of Living Dolls.

I was the first but not the last. When mine and my father's relationship had been restored we travled back to the Mirror Realm, his exile was forgiven and his mother, my grandmother, welcomed us both with open arms. We built our own kingdom, the land of dolls. My father and I would travel back and forth to the human world, opening a shop here or their and selling his art. It was quite fun, traveling back and forth between our Castle in the Mirror realm and our dusty shop in the human world. The second sister to join us was Strychnine a sweet darkhaired sister. She joined our family and we continued to travel as we pleased. Then there were the twins, Hemlock, who never woke up and Sarin whom we wish never had woken up.

Sarin was wild, she had woken just as the firing began. We could not stop it though, it would have killed her and now I see that perhaps it would have been the kindest thing to do. It caused her to loose her mind. She came out of the kiln with this vacant look in her icy eyes. The havoc she caused was irreparable. So much as to expose our existence to the humans. We were trying to flee when the Human's caught us. Our father shoved us through the mirror and smashed it behind us, sacrificing himself to save us. The three of us, for Hemlock was stolen from us, vowed to find our father and rescue him from the humans.

We spent years searching the human world. During which time I figured out how to draw power from humans. I could make a deal with a human in which they would give me their mortality and their potential future. In return they would be turned into a living doll like my self and come to live in the doll kingdom. They are not turned in the painful way in which my sisters and I were. Their's is a gradual change that happens as slowly or as quickly as they like. It doesn't hurt and when it is complete they will have ageless immortality in a magical realm. As one from guess from this description most human's accepted. This practice replenish's my power and that of my sister's as we were covered in the same clay. Strychnine did not agree with this practice and rather enjoyed helping humans when she could. However, she found that she was also bound with this magic to turn humans. This bothered her so that she left us.

Sarin was working on perfecting her power as well. She was sick and her powers echoed it. By touching anyone she could cause the intense crippling pain in any place where she had made contact with their skin. She was strong even more so the Strychnine and I and incredibly fast. She began to wreek havoc on our people and our kingdom and then finally in the human world. She found her way to Strychnine and tried to entice her into a fight, burning down several houses in he town where Strychnine resided. Sarin locked our sister in a box and threw her into the burning buildings. Something had to be done, and so, when Strychnine escaped her bonds she came home to find me. Together we bound Sarin and locked her in the basement of her own house in the doll kingdom.

Strychnine returned home as well, living near me in her own house in the doll kingdom. Things have been quite quiet sense then... or they were. One can hardly account for neighbors. The Puppet Master appeared out of nowhere with great power. He was an Alice, unlike any we had ever seen. He began to build his own kingdom with his marionettes and not only that he began to steal the dolls from my kingdom, tempting them away with false promises and entwining them in his strings. He constantly seeks my hand assuring me that our kingdoms were meant to be one. I hardly think so. "A doll is just a marionette without strings~" he always says. I however, refuse to take any attention from him or give it! He can keep his filthy strings to himself.