Ali is a 13 year old girl living in Seattle, Washington, with her divorced mother, Emma, who is an Art Professor at the main campus of the University of Washington, and has a degree in Symbology.
Her Father and brother are living in Europe between London, Venice, Cairo, and Athens, as her father is a Archeologist.
One day, she receives a package from her father, who was unearthing the remains of a dorm from the 1800's. The package was a beautiful box, and in it contained a strange book of a different language.
A few months later, when Ali and Emma are visiting Emma's parents, Ail finds a strange box. She was studying marine animals in tide pools when she heard a heavy splash behind her. She begins to search for it, and find out that the pool is deep enough to dive into. As she swims, she thinks of it as a large, aquatic, rabbit hole, and that she is Alice, her namesake, chasing the rabbit. She suddenly realizes that she has swum too far and would die from lack of oxygen, but oddly, that does not happen. She reaches the bottom, and retrieves the object, which is a box. The sand has a key sticking out of the sand, and she takes it with her on return to the surface.
Ali hides it in her bedroom, and spends the rest of the day outdoors. Later that evening, while her family is playing cards, she decides to open the box. The box she found in the tide pool opens automatically once she finds which side faced up. The contents consist of a stuffed rabbit with a swirl on it's stomach, a strange crystal pda kind of thing, a cryptex/codex, a abacus, and another funny box. It has the same odd writing all over it and is nailed shut, so Ali goes to get a hammer. When she returns however, the rabbit is gone and so is her ice cream. The things she found first are lined up neatly, along with strange rocks. She notices that the comforter is shifting slightly and so she lifts it up and looks under the bed, and there is the rabbit, covering its ears, eyes shut, quivering under the bed. Its mouth is covered in chocolate sauce, and the empty ice cream bowl is next to it.