Twisted Wonderland | Mickey's Print

11. Help

Drip...

Drip...

Drip...

Yuu put a hand to his head as he felt a little dizzy after hearing the heavy dripping sound for the third time.

"Yuu? Are you okay?" Ace asked him, forgetting for one second his anger. "You look pale."

"Yeah, I'm fine... I think. But I feel my head spin..."

"Really? You? Being the only one of us who doesn't have a collar!?" Grim asked indignantly.

"Maybe the fuss was too much for you," Deuce guessed. "Let's go to a clearer place. We can't go back there anyway."

They returned to the rose maze and Ace blurted out what he had been trying to hold: "Damn it! That little red tyrant! Does he think he's the Queen of Hearts!?"

"Apparently he represents her, so I guess he actually believes that," Yuu sighed.

Disappointed, Deuce shook his head with closed eyes. "Getting thrown out for disobeying the leader... I'm slowly drifting away from becoming a model student..."

Grim sat on the ground so he could bear the weight of his collar. "Ugh, this collar is heavy... and suffocating..."

"How elegant you look with those meowtching collars!" A shrill, purring voice exclaimed.

A floating head had appeared right next to Yuu, making him the first to yell and recoil in fright.

The other three did the same when they saw it too.

"Fgyaaaaa! A floating ghost head!!" Grim yelled as he hid behind Ace's legs.

"Oops, I forgot to make my body appear," he said without a hint of remorse from their shock.

The head was accompanied by the rest of his body, which gradually appeared. It was a young person taller than Ace and Deuce and looked older than the three of them. He had violet hair and a thick tail of the same color that perfectly matched his cat ears. His set of clothes consisted of a purple and lilac striped T-shirt similar to his tail, on top of him he wore a messy white shirt unbuttoned at the top. His jeans were adorned with colorful patches and his boots were purple.

Yuu had noticed that in Heartslabyul there were boys with ears and tails of rabbits, cats, and mice, so he supposed that he should be one of them. But his clothes seemed too different for him to be someone from Night Raven College.

"Wow, so you do have a body," Deuce commented, still in shock. "Who are you?"

"I'm Alchemi Alchemivich Pinka," the young boy replied, revealing two long fangs as he spoke. "I'm someone very enigmatic with magic that's both like a cat and like a purrrson."

The name sounded like a tongue twister and was difficult to understand the first time listening to it.

"Alche..." Ace tried to say in a daze, but his tongue got stuck. "Come again?"

It was clear that it wasn't the first time people reacted like that, so the cat-boy laughed with amusement.

"Heh, heh, heh. Everybody calls me Che'nya," he answered, giving a huge smile full of mischief. "At the very least, I'm of a very different level from the guys around here."

His intriguing smile and his mischievous, playful countenance gave Yuu back that feeling of familiarity, despite never having seen him in his life. Even the part where he had the print had itched again and, if with Professor Vargas he had felt disgusted, with Che'nya he felt a feeling of confusion and dizziness.