• {Alice.}
    {……Alice!}
    What? …Who’s calling?
    {Alice…Alice! Alice-}
    I’m not Alice…
    {Alice! Alice, wake up. Hurry! Alice!}
    But I’m not Alice!!
    “ALOS!! Wake up! There’s a fire! FIRE!! Alos!!”
    Dormaline Alos Little’s eyes snapped open. In the warm sunlight pouring in from the skylight above her, the young woman’s body shook convulsively in a cold sweat under the ratty quilt. Her heart fluttered madly in her chest. The nightmare of hearing her Amah screaming for her to wake up replayed over and over in her mind as the English girl sat up and tried to control herself. She had had this reoccurring dream ever since she had boarded the air ship and left the country she was born in; the first nights she had woken up screaming and had cried the rest of the night in her English governess’s arms.
    She sighed- her body was going back to normal, as she could feel with her hand on her chest. Sitting in her bed, Dormaline looked around and wondered where she was. Yet it quickly came back to her on what her situation was. She was here to work. A frown spread across her face. She had never really WORKED before, per say- though her family wasn’t extravagantly rich, they did have a small household of native servants to do the mediocre chores. And she had watched them do their work when there was nothing better to do in that humid, large house, so the young woman DID get the gist of manual labor.
    Gifted with unbridled will under her meek, humble demeanor, she felt she could do anything she was put to do…but what, she thought gloomily, does a hatter’s assistant actually do? She didn’t suppose Mr. Carter would be a help in telling her.
    Mr. Carter….Dormaline’s face flushed in anger as she got out of her bed and nightgown, and into a skirt and a white blouse from her suitcases. That incompetent, ostentatious, blithering madman- she raved this silently while roughly shoving her pale arms into her sleeves- even somber, her would-be employer was a ridiculous, spoiled brat of a grown man. “Yet,” she muttered to herself and to her mirror’s reflection of a thin young woman with large brown eyes, “I refuse to have him drive me out of this building. If my cousin welcomes me, than I will stay.”
    With her extremely short, honey blonde hair neatly brushed on her head, and her outfit looking smart and plain, Miss Little briskly squeezed herself thorough the labyrinth of crates and covered furniture pieces that took up most of the attic’s space. Good Lord, she thought to herself as she nearly tripped on a rolled up rug on the floor and was stabbed in the stomach by the sharp corner of a table’s edge. If I have to trek thorough this jungle every morning just to get to breakfast …well, I simply won’t do it. Next chance I get, I’ll ask my cousin if I can reorganize this catastrophe.

    Dormaline followed the sweet, golden smell of breakfast down the attic's staircase. She opened the door at the end, and looked out at the second floor's hallway. It was as dark and dreary as before, the same in the bleak of night as in the light of dawn. The only difference was the skirt of angelic daylight at the bottom of each door, coming from a window in nearly each room. No pictures were hung in the hall. 'Odd,' remarked Dormy in her head. The least the duo of bachelors could do was put up a picture of thier relatives. How undecent!
    As Miss Little walked down the hall, she heard below from the tea shop the chinkling of breakfastware and the boisterous talk of the shop owners. Seems Richard had already forgiven Pat for her surprising arrival, and even the twins were shouting along wih thier brother's partner about how they were going to give a Mr. Davis 'a good slating about Waverton with his own hat blocks.' 'Bi-polar AND tempermental- yes, that fits the man exactly,' the orphaned young woman thought with a frown.
    A sliver of light on the floor caught Dormaline's attention, coming from the slightly ajar door in the middle of the hallway, infront of the main staircase. She stood in front of it for half a second, about to quench her curiousity and take a peep at the other rooms. Suddenly, the light blinked- someone inside had moved across the window's glare. Unthinkingly, Dormaline opened the door all the way, to meet this fifth resident of the shops' building.
    A girl, about the same age as Miss Little, was standing in front of a neatly made bed in the small room, her back to Dormaline. She wore the modest garb of a maid, complete with white apron and mousey brown hair in a neat bun on her head, under a white cap.
    She was in the process of collecting laundry, as was obvious by the basket of rumpled clothing at her feet, and a wrinkled white shirt in her arms. This shirt was what Dormaline caught her pressing to her chest desperately. Her nose was buried in its cotton-white creases, and her eyes were half-closed and distant.
    The sound of the door creaking frightened the maid- in a split second after Dormaline hit the door on a table by the doorway, she had snatched the shirt behind her back and taken an instinctive step back. Her heeled boots tipped over the basket, spilling its contents across the floor. She tore her horrified eyes from Miss Little to her basket; she pounced on it in a flushed, brisk fury.
    "Good...Good morning, Miss Little," the maid said stiffly, as she violently stuffed clothes into the wicker basket. "Isn't it a fine morn outside? I do hope you slept well."
    "W-Well, I would-" Before Dormalne could answer on whether she had slept well or hadn't, she had to close her mouth and quickly step aside as the maid dashed past her, full basket bouncing in her arms.
    "I'm sorry, but I must do the laundry now. Breakfast is downstairs- please get to it before it gets cold."
    The maid tripped down the stairs, and Dormaline watched the proud, flustered young woman until she was out of sight. 'How curious,' she thought, peering back at the bedroom. 'Quite an odd behaviour for a woman caught smelling a man's used shirt. She must be a haughty sort of woman...I wonder whose room this is.' Yet the bedroom in the middle of the building contained only beechwood furniture and held no trinkets or pictures of personal effects. Miss Little, after hesitating at the door and giving the room another once-over with her eyes, turned and left to go down the stairs.
    The first floor consisted of the hat and tea shop- this is true -and behind those shops were the storage and workrooms, possibly a pantry filled with drawers of different tea bags for Mr. Porter's shop, and a very large workroom for the hatter's business. Yet dividing the building were the stairs, that stood and stared before a blank wall that only held an impressionism painting of sunflowers in a pot.
    Under the steps was a closet for coats and hats, and on each side of the staircase, on the wall it inclined on, were two slapping doors. Miss Little later learned that the left door held the kitchen and the maid's room, and the right led out to the tiny yard outside, which held a ventilated shed and the entrance to the basement.
    "Ah! Cousin Dormy!'
    Miss Little, standing on the bottom step, pivoted her head around at the sound of the chorused call of her youngest cousins.