"My name is Alice."

"You're a girl, aren't you, Alice?"

"Of course!"

"A human girl?"

"And what is wrong with that?" Alice asked, having noticed that the badger was actually a mixture of a man and a badger.

"Nothing… it's just that… well…" pontificated the Badgerman, "and after all… there aren't that many… that is to say… if I may be so impolite… there aren't many… well, it's just that there aren't many human girls around these days."

"Why ever not?" asked Alice, rather worried by this news.

"Oh murder!" screamed Captain Ramshackle, all of a sudden. "Whatever am I to do now? Murder, murder, murder! The Jigsaw Murder!"

"Whatever's the matter?" asked Alice, quite alarmed at the outburst.

"There's been a spidercide and the Civil Serpents are trying to put the blame for it on me." The Badgerman threw his paws into the air with this statement. "I didn't have an alibi, you see?" (Alice wasn't sure what a spider's side had to do with anything, and she imagined that Ali Bi must be some relative, a cousin say, of Ali Baba, the poor woodcutter in the Arabian fable who discovered the magic words "open sesame", which allowed him to enter the cave of treasures. But if this was true, she couldn't for the life of her work out why a badger should need the relative of an Arabian woodcutter in order to prove his innocence. And anyway, shouldn't he have said Ali Bibi?) "I fear that the Civil Serpents will soon arrest me," the badger was now saying. "Oh, troubleness! And all because of a certain piece missing from a silly jigsaw."

Alice was curious at hearing this news, mainly because she had tried and failed to complete a jigsaw that very same morning. (If it was still that very same morning, of course.) "What do you mean by a Jigsaw Murder?" she asked.

"May I welcome you, Alice, to my humble abode," the Badgerman replied, calming himself and totally ignoring Alice's question. Alice greeted the Badgerman in return, took a little sup from her unlightened cup, and then looked around the room she had found herself in: Captain Ramshackle's humble abode was suffering from extreme untidiness.