Alice had a special friend, one who might well have been missing her since her journeys from England to Wonderland to Looking-Glass Land to Brobdingnag. This man was a church minister, named the Reverend Charles L Dodgson. However, Charles Dodgson had grown used to Alice’s absence a long time ago. Years earlier, the girl had reached adolescence, and had no longer been content to sit by the riverbank and listen to Dodgson’s imaginary stories about her, which had so captivated her when she had been a young child.

Dodgson’s stories had found a much wider audience, when they were published as novels and poems and short stories under the pen name by which he was known to children and adult readers alike: Lewis Carroll. Many lonely evenings were spent sitting at a desk lit only by candles, thinking up new stories and putting them to paper.

But with Alice’s departure from his life, Dodgson had missed the personal experience of telling his stories to a small audience of close friends: one or two, to be precise…

Until his loneliness was concluded with the arrival of Sylvie and Bruno.

It had all begun one day, around 18 months after Alice had stopped visiting Dodgson. He had been sitting at a workbench in his garden, making repairs to the Rectory Umbrella, in case the reign caught it and took it out of circulation. Walking out of his ferns had come two tiny people, who had introduced themselves as Sylvie and Bruno. They delighted to hear Dodgson’s stories, and he soon found that he was writing himself into adventures about them and calling his self-muse character “The Professor.”

One day he went out to the garden to greet Sylvie and Bruno again, and asked them which story they would like to hear.

“Tell us the one about the Hunting of the Snack,” said Bruno.

“I’ll bet it didn’t want to be eaten,” said Sylvie.

“Not snack, but Snark,” said Charles, “and I won’t be able to tell you that one until I get to the beginning of it.”

“But you’ve already started it,” said Bruno.

“I started it at the end,” said Charles, “I’m writing it backwards.”

“Isn’t it a bit hard to see the pages, with your hands behind you?” asked Sylvie.

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” said Charles, “Besides that, today I’d like to tell you a true story, about God.”

“No thanks,” said Sylvie, “The Rhetoric Response Sprites (a group of little folk from our own people) have explored the gardens of other ministers, and told us what they’ve overheard while they were sneaking through that U-shaped Tube in the garden of the minister in the next town. We don’t like what we’ve heard about this God of yours. In fact, we don’t even believe in Him.”

On the Island of Lilliput, teenaged Gary Gulliver was still searching for his father Thomas Gulliver, while Captain John Leech plotted to steal Gary’s treasure map from the boy and his dog Tagg. (Maybe a dog tag wasn’t the best place to hide it. LOL). In their latest adventure with his four regular Lilliputian friends Egar, Bunko, Flirtacia and Glum, Lilliputian lad Egar had been involved in rescuing Flirtacia from Leech, after awakening from a dream in which he had acquired super strength by eating a berry.

Up until that moment, Flirtacia had been preoccupied with her infatuation for Gary Gulliver. Yet now she fell head over heels in love with Egar, and the two of them were not so keen to go out on further escapades with Gulliver and Tagg. Instead, they began courting. Within weeks, Flirtacia was singing to Egar one moonlit night on the shores of the island:

“By the light of the Lilliput moon,

We’ll see Gulliver soon,

But I’ll never more swoon,

When he battles a goon.”