Wonderland
Stories from the World of Darkness

Wonderland is not a single story, but an overarching title for a series of stories and vignettes set in White Wolf's World of Darkness.

The World of Darkness is eerily like our world, but the decay and corruption already rife in our governments, corporations and individuals have taken an even greater toll there. Crime is perpetually on the rise, especially in the inner city. Gang warfare is commonplace and exceedingly violent, and the police are powerless to do anything about it. The environment is in shambles, and the few pristine wilderness areas are dangerous for their own reasons. Smog blankets the cities in a suffocating cloud while young men and women, sporting goth and punk styles, tattoos, piercings and self-mutilation in desperate rebellion against the stagnation around them, gyrate to mind-numbing music while high on the newest and most damaging illegal drugs available, sold to them by pushers who merely serve as middlemen for the corporations which manufacture them.

Everyone, from the homeless man to the abused child crying in her sleep, from the wealthiest CEO to the highest levels of government, feels a gnawing urge for something more, something perpetually out of reach, whether it is a sense of hope, a violent revolution, a rebirth of wonder and beauty, or simply an end to all this misery. Despite this, the World of Darkness looks more or less normal on the surface: people keep these longings to themselves, seeking release through drugs or music or money, and everyone generally trudges through each day's work or school as they do in our world.

The reasons for this dark urban landscape are numerous and varied, but much of the blame falls on a group of supernatural beings referred to collectively as Prodigals. The Prodigals are as diverse as humanity, and many nominally belong to the mass of mankind. They are beings of myth and legend, largely forgotten in this cynical age, and while the world's decline touches upon them as well, they maintain secret lives on the periphery of mankind, remaining hidden, trying to sustain the otherworldly existence they have known since the dawn of human civilization - if not earlier.

Vampires glide through the night, moving from shadow to shadow with a sardonic smile, amused by all the young "lost souls" writhing in the clubs and seeking their next taste of human blood. Werewolves prowl the few wild places left in the world, the shadowy forests and empty plains humanity fears to visit, waging a secret and horrific war against the decay. Wraiths, the restless ghosts of the dead, lurk on the edge of human awareness, seeking to regain contact with the living world they left behind. And more recently, demons - fallen angels cast down by God at the beginning of time - have begun to resurface, possessing the bodies of the weak and the desperate so they might continue their own wars, or perhaps seek redemption.

Of course, beauty and wonder survive in the World of Darkness. They're hanging on by a thread perhaps, but they're still there, and there are those Prodigals who crave nothing more than to bring them back to the forefront.

Mages and technomancers wage their own war for control over reality and the apotheosis of humanity, in which ancient magick and advanced science clash for supremacy. Beside them there are the Changelings, the survivors and exiles of the Fae, reborn into this world in mortal bodies to shelter their fragile magical souls from the smothering chill of disbelief. They long for nothing more than to restore the power of wonder and imagination in a world suffocating under rigid dogma and bloodless scientific theory. There are also the Amenti, also called Mummies, mortals who are resurrected and made immortal by ancient Egyptian magic, to fight the corruption and decay. And somewhere in the middle are "ordinary" men and women who have realized what monsters lurk around them and have taken up arms against them, becoming modern day demon-hunters.

To get a better idea of what the World of Darkness is like, you might check out the following books, films or music: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (especially "The Vampire Lestat", "Queen of the Damned" and "Memnoch the Devil") and other novels (notably "The Mummy - Ramses the Damned" and the Mayfair Witches series), The Matrix and The Matrix: Reloaded, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the comic book series Aria, several popular Wildstorm comic book series (especially Planetary), the well-known anime Serial Experiments Lain, the manga or anime (preferably the former) Angel Sanctuary, the Batman graphic novel Dark Knight Returns, the comic book series Fables, any number of David Lynch series and films (especially Twin Peaks), the Brandon Lee classic The Crow, the Highlander television series and first film, and any number of other horror or modern fantasy fiction.

Or, if you're curious about playing in the World of Darkness yourself via White Wolf's own role-playing games, you might visit your local book, comic or gaming store to check out the following titles. Elements from most of the White Wolf RPGs eventually appear throughout Wonderland, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming, Mummy: The Resurrection, Hunter: The Reckoning and Demon: The Fallen. White Wolf has recently discontinued these game lines in preparation of a new, revised World of Darkness, so you may have to check out used bookstores to find these books. Or stay tuned for the updated books, which will include Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening. You might also check out White Wolf's Dark Ages and Exalted game lines, though these are much more loosely connected to Wonderland and the modern World of Darkness.

A note to existing White Wolf players, other gamers and the curious: The world of Wonderland, while remaining close to the official World of Darkness, reflects my own ideas and peculiarities. Changelings, for instance, are not the whimsical, childlike beings they're often portrayed as in White Wolf canon. I try to give them every ounce of depth and grittiness I can without robbing their otherworldly, magical flair. And the Kindred, who feature prominently in Wonderland as in the official World of Darkness, tend to resemble the Anne Rice version of vampires even more so than those of Vampire: The Masquerade. I'm also less familiar with some games, like Werewolf than I perhaps should be. To get an idea of how I write the World of Darkness, you can check out the Declarations of Style and the Portraits, which offer short vignettes or articles pertaining to the setting, themes and characters I use.

Beware: Wonderland is a High Angst Zone.

The Protagonists.

Unfortunately, Wonderland is a constantly evolving, often scattershot affair full of vignettes, short stories and ongoing tales where many important pieces are missing, largely because the original stories were written to supplement the cross-genre World of Darkness chronicle my own gaming group was running at the time. Also, jargon from the various White Wolf games is often bandied about, so while every effort is generally made to ease the reader into it, new readers may find the whole thing confusing. I'm making an effort to reorganize the Wonderland section to make it easier to follow the overall story, but for now a general synopsis will have to do.

In general, Wonderland takes place in the current post-2000 era, and concerns itself largely with the events leading up to the "end of the world", the epic battle of Armageddon or Ragnarok, which takes place around 2007 to 2009. To this end, it follows a group of characters based largely out of Denton, Texas (the site of my group's chronicle) from their entrance into the wider world of the Prodigals to their ultimate roles in the Time of Judgment. Four characters feature most prominently here, and it is around them that Wonderland as a whole tends to move, often in a convoluted fashion.

The first is Ariel Kildare, more properly known as Lady Ariel Kildare of House Liam, who is most notable by her absence in the story. In ancient times, when the world was young and magic thrived, Ariel was a forest nymph, a seductive elfin creature who kept to her woods and streams, occasionally ensnaring mortal men and women for her own pleasures. Eventually, it was this fascination with humans which led Ariel out into the wider world, and over the course of millennia, she gradually evolved beyond her fey origins to become a wandering bard, a fearless explorer, and a knight of the Sidhe-dominated Fae courts. In the 14^th century, Ariel fell in love with a mage and former priest named Nicolas.

As mortal disbelief in magic and mystery came to dominate the Old World, the Fae on Earth were forced to either flee back to their home realm of Arcadia and never return or take on the Changeling Way to remain behind as exiles. The Changeling Way essentially made the Fae a hybrid race, Fae souls housed in human bodies, and Ariel chose to become a Changeling out of love for humanity and for Nicolas. They and many others fought in a massive battle at a place called Lago de Como in the Italian Alps, a castle guarding one of the last magical paths to Arcadia, defending it against a horde of monstrous Fae seeking to flee Earth at the expense of their cousins. In the end, Ariel and Nicolas were both killed, and Ariel's magic sword, Never, was stolen.

Of course, thanks to the Changeling Way, Ariel later reincarnated into numerous human lifetimes, each of which gradually awoke to the reality of their Fae self and magic. The most recent of these features quite prominently in Wonderland, namely Katherine Ducote. When Wonderland begins, Katherine believes herself to be a normal human being, and she is Asleep to both her true self and the Prodigals' existence. She has long been unconsciously aware of Ariel, however, and the tension between her Sleeping and Fae selves, as well as the gloomy mundane world she's grown up in, have conspired to make her a withdrawn, lonely woman who is increasingly at odds with herself and the world. However, through a chance encounter with a fellow college student, Daniel Vera, with whom Katherine falls in love, she gradually begins to Awaken to her true self via a painful, schizophrenic transformation called the Chrysalis.

Tragically, Ariel is on the cusp of full Awakening when Katherine is attacked by a vampire named Billy, who gives her the Embrace that transforms her into a vampire. It seems Billy has a grudge against her older brother and a group of their friends whom Katherine hasn't seen in years, who have long since Awakened as Prodigals and kept their distance to avoid entangling her in their secret lives. These include her brother, the Sidhe knight Lanthinel Devir; her closest friend and almost-boyfriend in high school, the Mage Stephen Truncali, and Andrew Pierce, who has also been made a vampire against his will. Stephen and several other Prodigals have their own business, the Better Tomorrow Group, based in Denton, which works publicly to make life better for everyone while acting as a front for the group's secret battles against demons, vampires and other enemies.

As a horrified and confused newborn vampire, Katherine is dropped in Stephen's lap by Billy, a gruesome gift to taunt and torment he and his friends in Denton. Steph turns Katherine over to Andrew for her education into the society of vampires, who call themselves Kindred, and her story begins in earnest. Throughout Wonderland, Katherine is constantly struggling to reconcile her nature as an undead, blood-drinking predator with her essential humanity. Ultimately, she hopes to return to life and perhaps to regain her true heritage as one of the Fae. This isn't an easy thing to do, obviously. Her path is a tortured one, leading from Denton to the deserts of Mexico, to siring her own childe vampire, Michelle Avoyelles, whom she falls in love with, to the streets of New York City, and finally back to her friends in Denton.

Ultimately, of course, Katherine not only escapes the Curse of Cain, the progenitor of all vampires who was cursed by God in ancient times, but she Awakens as Ariel - though she may not be exactly what Katherine and her friends expected.

Meanwhile, Kelly Brooke enters the scene. She is thoroughly British and has been in America - which she quietly adores, though she outwardly disdains it - for several years, having attended university in Arizona. Kelly is a puzzle to everyone who meets her, an enigma of a woman who prefers anachronistic dress and the company of ghosts over that of her peers. Since childhood, she has been "gifted" (some would say cursed) with the ability to see wraiths and the dark reflection of the living world, Sheol, which the Restless Dead inhabit. As a child, her "imaginary friends" were ghosts, and she spent all her free time reading weird and fantastic tales, particularly those of Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Wells, cultivating an aloof, Victorian goth persona. As an adolescent girl, she was possessed by an evil, twisted wraith called a spectre, who forced her to commit any number of insane, violent and self-destructive acts.

In fact, if it weren't for her father, the lovably eccentric English architect Douglas Brooke, who encouraged his daughter's interest in science fiction and mystery, Kelly probably would've committed suicide and had done with it years ago. As it was, her family - especially her austere and religious mother - considered the poor girl insane. Kelly was hospitalized repeatedly and placed on anti-psychotic medication for her "schizophrenia", but her torture didn't end until her friends among the Dead rose up and destroyed the marauding spectre, sending his soul into Oblivion. Nonetheless, the experience left Kelly with deep scars, and taken together with dark memories of being a wraith herself in a past life, she grew up to become a lovely but emotionally damaged young woman.

By the time Kelly arrived in college, she had begun to accept her mother's opinion, having learned to suppress her awareness of spirits and trying desperately to pretend it really was "all in her head". Sadly, the more she tried to ignore the reality of the situation, the more Kelly succumbed to genuine schizophrenia. When her father died of a heart attack, however, the young woman's curiosity about the disposition of his soul led her to dabble in the old spiritualism and "magic" she spent so many years reading about. Kelly's makeshift séance inadvertently invited another spectre like the one which once tormented her, however, and it was only the intervention of a mage named John Dawson that she was freed from its influence. Dawson, a student of the Order of Hermes and a researcher for the shadowy Arcanum, took Kelly under his wing and instructed her in the ways of true magick.

When Kelly arrives in Wonderland, she is a true Mage like Stephen Truncali, whom she almost immediately befriends, and before long she has fallen in with the Better Tomorrow Group of Denton as a researcher, antiquarian and mystic. Ultimately, however, Kelly is bound to a fate she has always dreaded, whose origins stretch back into ancient times, to choices she made in a past life, and to a pact she once made with a demon called Pinem'e.

Pinem'e is also of interest to our last protagonist and the latest addition to Wonderland, the fallen angel named Rociel. At the beginning of time, Rociel was among the Host of Heaven, the Angels created by God to spin Creation into being and oversee its evolution. Like Pinem'e, Rociel was an archangel in the House of Dawn, the Heralds who carried the will of God to the other orders of the Host, of whom Lucifer was the greatest and the being nearest to God in power in all of existence. The creation of humanity, however, set ominous events in motion, for while the Angels were commanded (some would say "programmed") to love humans, who unlike them possessed a spark of God's own divine essence (i.e., a soul), they were also forbidden from making themselves known to mankind. For millennia the Angels watched as the first humans - simple creatures little better than clever animals - dwelled in blissful innocence.

Or ignorance, as the fallen angels later argued. While humans had limitless potential, possessing a spark of the divine fire, they were completely unaware of it. Many came to feel that God was deliberately keeping mankind in ignorance and allowing their potential to go untapped. Others argued that humanity should discover the power on its own, without outside interference. As time wore on, this division deepened until finally a host of Angels, led by Lucifer, presented themselves to humans and effectively handed them the keys to the kingdom. They forced enlightenment upon mankind, gifting them with all the knowledge at the Angel's disposal. Although Lucifer and his host acted out of love for humanity, their betrayal earned them the full wrath of God, who cursed them as fallen angels - demons - and demanded that they surrender to face judgment.

Flush with their own power and the adoration of humanity, the Fallen flatly refused and a terrible, world-spanning war began, the War of Wrath, in which thousands if not millions of humans were killed and Creation was laid waste. During this time, the Demons built wondrous temple-cities where fallen angels and mortals lived together in harmony, sharing knowledge of magic and technology. But the horror of the War and condemnation by their Creator left many of the Fallen deeply scarred, Rociel included. Having lost his identity and the love of his Creator, and forced to endure a seemingly endless war whose atrocities mounted daily, Rociel fell to madness. Seeking an escape, he preyed upon mortals, raping them for what pleasures of the flesh he could experience while forcing them to love him unconditionally, leaving scores of humans, their minds and bodies shattered, in his wake. Rociel soon became an insane, degenerate being tortured by his own self-loathing.

And while the collected faith of mankind sustained the fallen angels for a time, they were sorely outmatched, and after several millennia the Demons were defeated, thanks largely to treachery against Lucifer and humanity by a group of fallen angels - including Rociel. The Fallen were rounded up and imprisoned by God in the vast emptiness of the Abyss to await final judgment, where untold thousands of years of sensory deprivation and isolation drove Rociel and his fellows completely insane. Only recently, with Armageddon approaching, have the fallen angels returned to Earth. In 2006, Rociel, his spirit shattered, found himself above Dallas, Texas, facing destruction if he didn't find an anchor for himself in the world. He discovered one in the form of Alison Drake, a classical cellist and rock music singer who was bleeding to death after being shot by muggers, with whom he merged, body and soul.

Fortunately, becoming human (or half-human) through Alison has eased Rociel's torment, and finding herself in the alien yet familiar modern world, she has sought redemption in the eyes of humanity and Lucifer. To this end she recruits Alison's rock band, Delphi, to get her message out to the masses and to inspire them the only way she knows how in this jaded age - through the theater of a rock star! Along the way, she meets a Changeling named Liam, with whom she finds herself falling in love, and encounters another Demon, Alexiel, who has gone completely and utterly off the deep end. And, of course, she finds herself getting deeply entangled in the lives of those in Denton.

The Stories.

So what's it all about?

Wonderland is a tragic romance set against a backdrop of horror. Callous murder and savage bloodshed are commonplace, and each of the suffering heroines is flawed, often in some deeply troubling - even monstrous - ways. Yet it's also a world of strange, dark beauty, where miracles and magic are always there to be discovered in the dust, and where the courtly elegance of bygone ages lives on with solemn grace. It's a world of love and eroticism, highly charged with meaning, whether between two mortals clinging to each other in a harsh world or in the grotesquely sensual blood play of two vampires. Most of all, nothing is ordinary. Everything resonates with meaning, with some struggling passion, and every action sends out ripples which touch the lives of everyone else.

More importantly, however, Wonderland is an excuse to write about fantastic experiences and philosophical questions that are of interest to me.

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a monster? Is it possible to redeem oneself for even the greatest atrocities? What is gender? What is sexuality? What does it mean to live forever? How might someone's psyche evolve over thousands of years? What is the relationship between choice (or chance) and fate? What does it really mean to have faith in something? What is it like to exist outside of human society? What is our connection to the earth and the world around us? What does it mean to be a ghost? To be an animal? A murderer? What's it like to fly under your own power? What's it like to crave and survive upon the blood of your own species? How do trauma and horror change people? What does it mean to be insane? To lose everything you know and love? To lose your future? To lose yourself? How do great events affect people, and how do a few rise to the occasion?

Basically, what's this whole life thing about anyway?

After all, people adore movies, comic books and fantasy stories not just for the escapism, but because it's easier to explore the human condition when it's on a large scale, and especially when it's not bound to the tired, overly familiar rhythms of the mundane world. You can say a lot about psychology and spirituality in straight fiction, granted, and perhaps realism is even superior at doing so, since it's something we can all connect to from personal experience. But deep issues tend to get lost in the minutia of ordinary life, and oftentimes it takes an element of the otherworldly to remind us of the dreams, passions and nightmares we knew as children but have since buried for us to get by in the world. As in the World of Darkness, the mystical is crushed by the mundane, and we're constantly in danger of losing the part of ourselves that dreams, loves, believes - those things which truly make us human.

But I digress.

Ultimately, Wonderland is about seeking redemption and fulfilling one's destiny, overcoming one's own flaws, and in the process become truly human. Katherine Ducote searches for a way to become human and regain the life which has been stolen from her. This mirrors Rociel's revolutionary quest for redemption in service to humanity, by which she seeks to rise above the madness and bitterness which have so long consumed her. Similarly, Kelly Brooke finds herself struggling not only for sanity and to be part of the world around her, but also against a dark fate she never knew she had! Even Ariel finds herself traveling an unexpected "Shining Path", torn between the humanity she has always longed to be part of and the completion of a purpose which may destroy them.