} Abandon Logic In Case of Emergency { ALICE [open]

Character wanted: The Baker from "The Hunting of the Snark"
Potential name: The orphans call her "Candle-ends", but her name is actually Florin Monroe. She has no idea of this fact. She's fifteen.
Ideas for character:

"There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
And the clothes he had bought for the trip.

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
With his name painted clearly on each:
But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
They were all left behind on the beach.

The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pair of boots—but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name."

When Florin knocked on the door of the orphanage at the age of eight, alone, stinking, and piled in an extraordinary number of layers of clothes, it would have been impossible to say there wasn't something severely wrong with her. If her wide, unfocused eyes and violently trembling hands didn't give it away, then her messily shaved head and the fact all she would say to the caretakers was the word "out" must have. Although over her first few months at the orphanage she began to say more and more, and also started to react to the stimuli around her in the way a baby would, the shaking never went out of her hands and she could still never quite explain where she had come from, or what had happened to her. Had they known, they surely would have understood this, rather than constantly cornering Florin (who they just addressed with "hey" or "you" seeing as they still didn't know her name) and trying to force the information out of her. The only thing she seemed to respond to were distinctive smells - the scent of rosemary would often make her start singing under her breath and the odour of burning sugar or hair would cause her to yell intently and bat away some invisible insects only she could see around her head. What got the most useful reaction, however, was the smell of baking bread, and piece by piece the caretakers were able to put her story together simply by encouraging her to bake, something she took to quickly. What they found chilled them to the core, and made them regret ever pushing Florin to do anything she didn't want to do.

For her whole life, Florin had been able to see the Snarks when no one else could. They didn't exactly look like anything to her - rather, they looked like everything. That was what was so difficult about finding them once she heard them talking to her. Under the Snarks' gentle instructions, the young girl would carry out the steps they told her to in order to hunt them down, no matter the cost or the logic of them. Her parents certainly worried as Florin constructed castles out of household objects on her bedroom floor, or set elaborate traps which would never spring out of twine and small pieces of glass and stone, or dropped salt water into her eyes until they were shot red as blood to help her see the unseeable; but they were too afraid that her delusions might become dangerous to them to worry whether they were dangerous to her. Her mother particularly, a superstitious woman, thought that when Florin remarked that she could only drink rainwater for the rest of the week to keep the Boojums away, it was a sign that the Devil Himself was in her body - and so she stayed as far away from the possessed child as she could. Perhaps part of her knew that the cause of these imaginings might have been the morphling she took secretly (and illegally) to ease the fierce pain while she was pregnant, but she would never admit it. Instead, she pretended to be intensely concerned from afar - suggesting that she and her husband put their measly funds together to afford a doctor (or a priest, if the mother got her way) to get whatever demons were bothering their daughter out of her head.

The Snarks weren't wrong when they warned Florin that her parents were plotting to do a terrible thing to her. In District Eight, after all, properly qualified doctors are hard to come by, and for as low a price as the Monroes could afford the feat was surely improbable. The man they finally settled on had dirt under his fingernails and a crate of wires and bolts rather than liquids and syringes as the parents would have hoped to see. His specialism, he told them, was in matters of the brain - and although he had never treated a patient this young before, he could absolutely guarantee one hunnert percent that she would come to no unnecessary harm. Later, as he tied Florin with rubber belts to the wooden chair held on insulated blocks away from the floor, and sheared her hair off roughly as she screamed and cried and begged and cursed, he would repeat that fact - all her suffering was necessary, one hunnert percent, in order to free her of the sickness in her mind. Her mind, of course, wasn't sick - it was living and thriving even as he stuck the small padded electrodes to her temples and her bald scalp, and carefully twisted the far ends of their wires into the empty lightbulb socket that hung from the ceiling. Her father had already left the room in tears; her mother calmly whispered "out" at the demons as she tied rosemary sprigs to her wrists and around her collar, as the doctor had told her to do to jolt her back to consciousness after the treatment was complete. Nothing could prepare any of them - Florin most of all - for the feeling when the electricity closed its vice around her brain, and the "therapy" began.

By the time she had stopped convulsing, eyes rolled back in her head, saliva dripping freely down her chin, neck and fingers twitching uncontrollably, Florin knew nothing but the smells of rosemary and her own urine as it pooled on the chair and soaked into her clothes. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the Snarks still called out to her, but they were all but eradicated now. Instead, all she could hear was her own instinctive urge of flight, telling her desperately, over and over again, run. It took three days after they laid her in her bed and waited for her to regain full awareness, cured, for her to act on her instinct. The "doctor" had, of course, disappeared, and although her parents visited her room often they didn't stay for long. They now had leftover electricity to be afraid of (as the doctor had warned them in order to escape with his fee and equipment unacosted) as well as the demons that remained inside her head. Florin, however, remained almost motionless, apart from the twitching in her spine and her shaking hands, which furled and unfurled without instruction. Finally, it was her mother's last word to her which gave Florin the chance to escape (though it wasn't escape that she really wanted, only freedom from her fear and pain). Her parents had to lean in closer to her dry lips than they had dared come previously in order to work out that what she was saying was "Out". To Florin, all it was was the last thing she could remember, but her parents saw it as a celebration-worthy sign of healing. Terrified of the alternative consequences, they pulled her delicately from her bed, and wrapped her naked body in seven or eight coats to protect her from the cold outside as they took her to get the fresh air she was clearly asking for. Their hands remained gripped around her wrists, not daring to touch her convulsing fists, until Florin murmured "out" again, tugging herself away from the people who she understood had forced this torture on her. They let her wander free towards the edge of the steep riverbank that their house was positioned next to, blinded by their own pride and satisfaction in their new daughter to see what was inevitable going to happen next.

The blessed river, as Florin tumbled down the bank and into it, pulled around and under the water but insulated by her many coats, carried her straight to the door of the orphanage. She continued to murmur "out, out" even as her parents' screams were dissolved into the breeze. In the silence, the Snarks began to fill her head again, reassuring her that she would soon be safe.

---

In the seven years since, Florin has found her place very much on the peripheral of the orphanage's Wonderland inhabitants. Due to the early encouragement by the caretakers in order to find out her story, and its peaceful orderedness, Florin has become an adept baker - and since she never had a name many of the other chldren just call her "The Baker" when talking about her. The most observant and the sneakiest of the children would know what happened to Florin by finding her file in the orphanage administration room (though this doesn't contian a name) and some would certainly have spread rumours of it to the other children.

Since her speech and sense returned to her, she has begun to get on best with the White Rabbit, who empathises with how she has forgotten much of her personal history. The Rabbit comes up with many fond nicknames for her. The Queen of Hearts terrifies her (naturally), especially since her threads of being beheaded remind Florin of the feeling of losing her hair at the hands of the sinister doctor. Because the Mad Hatter listens intently to Florin's tales of the Snarks and how to find them, the girl finds him to be a trusted confidant. Florin would never touch alcohol or drugs, understanding as she grew older that it was those things that caused her mother to put her through what she did, and so she tries to stay away from Alice and the Caterpillar, even though she admires them and is interested by them.

The only existence of her name is on census records, due to her parents submitting her for the Reaping every year. Seeing as they have no idea where she went, and the orphanage tends to want to protect its children from whatever dark past might be following them, the latter never registered her as being under their care. Therefore, seeing as her parents are still her legal guardians (and the only people who now know her name) they're the ones who put her on the census, excusing her absence during Peacekeeper investigations with whatever excuses they can muster. They hope that, if the child is ever Reaped, they will be able to pressure another girl into volunteering, and reclaim their daughter as their own again.