when alice was seven, she escaped through a mirror in the lab and stepped into wonderland. there, it was terrifying, but it was no worse than the place from which she'd came. she was raised in the hawkins laboratory, with no knowledge of her family, her true name, or that there was even a world outside of the lab's walls. she called it 'the cold place', 'the white place', which is why such a miraculous, strange place such as the upside-down became her 'wonderland'. and once she was there, alice refused to go back. she believed that the entirety of the other world was only the lab, and here, she was free.
surviving in the upside-down was hard for a seven-year-old. there were monsters, cruel and terrifying, that would do anything in their power to kill and eat her—but alice was determined in a way that was unusual for such a young child. she spent eleven years there, against every single odd, clinging to life out of sheer stubbornness and spite and bitterness alone. she learned how to fight them, learned how to survive without staying in one place for too long, and though at first her lungs and heart suffered from the alien wonderland air, she grew accustomed to it over the years. in a way, alice became the newest, most fearsome monster there.
rarely, alice thought about the cold place, because she prefered it in her wonderland. it may have hurt and scarred and nearly killed her, but never would she go back to that life in doctors' rooms and white dormitories. alice was okay at surviving on her own; she was good at it.
until she notices a corruption forming in wonderland—one that stems from the existence of a new and horrifying monster—that forces her out and through another mirror. if she'd been expecting the cold place when she went through the flipside, she'd be frighteningly wrong—for there was no cold place waiting on the other side, but a boy with long, floppy brown hair no older than her brushing his teeth and hardly expecting a dirty girl to climb out of his bathroom mirror.
