No, this will not be a recap of “Alice in Wonderland.” In fact, it is proving to be rather difficult: most of my stories are driven by character interaction. Once I focus in on Alicia Alvarez, alone, then there is much more exposition than I am used to.

That’s fine, I suppose. I often try to do something “different” when writing. That’s usually changing genres but in this case, I guess it will be my task to learn to write with only a single character.

Unless she meets something.

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“What the bleeding hell do you mean, ‘lost’!” Robert Hartmann shouted at his cousin Aurelia’s image on his laptop.  “My mother and brother were lost twenty years ago on that damned planet and now my granddaughter is missing?  What in the hell is going on over there!”

“Robbie, please…” she began.

“I know I’m just human and what kind of contempt that brings out in some of you,” he insulted her in his anger and fear, “and that Ally is one of you.  But she’s just turned fifteen!  What literally damned thing showed up this time?”

She waited until he caught his breath.

“Are you ready to listen, Robbie?”

“Yes.” From over the laptop on their dining room table, he saw the concern in the eyes of his wife, Nadia, and their first son, Maksim.  As Fyodor was much younger, he held his mother’s hand tightly to hear his father yell like this.

“Alicia is missing.  Not dead.  There was an accident in a mine in Tharsis.  Everyone is investigating,” Aurelia quickly explained.

“A cave in?” he demanded.

“No.  She fell down a hole.”

***

Cousin Kira had just told me to watch my step, Alicia Alvarez thought, continuing to slide down a tunnel not quite a meter in diameter.  A tunnel with unnaturally smooth walls.  She said the Russian miners were concerned with some of the irregularities they were finding and wanted her, as Midwife, to investigate.  I tagged along without asking mom and dad.

A short vertical drop before she was sliding at about a seventy degree angle.  A thought occurred and she pushed out with her boots and gloved hands.  It slowed her, but as the tunnel’s wall was not perfectly smooth, it began to abrade away the material.  She relented.

I cannot compromise the suit’s integrity, as it will take time to find and rescue me.  Poop.  I should have been keeping track of time since I fell; it would give me at least a guess how deep I’m going.

Another drop and another angle, but this even shallower, slowing her.

It would be a shame if this opens into a cavern with a fifty meter drop.  When they find my body, my family would be sad.

At that, she was out of the tunnel, free falling in total darkness.

“Ouch!” Alicia cried as her butt hit sand less than two seconds later.