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Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 27, 2014 16:47:57 GMT -5
Book the FirstThe Mortmain Motet Snippet One There have been times in my life where what I thought I had known about an associate was all there was to know. Upon hearing of the demise of Harlan St. Just, embattled author of the previous volume of the volume you are holding in your hands, I hastened to investigate the circumstances in which he died. And in the course of those investigations I found that he had severely misrepresented certain moments of my life and work, though the general details are truthful. The story you will read continues from its previous installment where I bade Reuel Faraday to run from the City and to head for our headquarters in the Mortmain Mountains. I headed in the opposite direction to meet with Élise de la Serre and her order which once had my ancestor Dorian Snicket as its founder, though they were not Templars as St. Just would have had you believe, dear reader, and nor were they chauvinist. For Harlan had worked long and hard to further the schemes of our enemies as he posed to opposed them, and also to --------------------------as of now. A motet is a word which here means a musical composition of one to four voices, or the personages of those voices brought together for the performance. One voice might be high, unsure and fluttery while another may be pompous and obnoxious, and other personality traits in between. The voice of the City authorities was pompous and obnoxious, as were the authorities of V.F.D. during my apprenticehood in the Hinterlands long before I was fatally mistaken for Count Olaf, or so I had been told by a young time traveler from a future I never lived to see, a future in which I and my sister had been long dead, though the Baudelaires raised her daughter as their own and named her after their mother. The travails of my lost future glimmered in my mind and changed everything significantly. Knowing of my own coming demise on the trail of the Baudelaires, I began to formulate a plan in the event that I did reach the Village of Fowl Devotees, I would not be mistaken for Olaf, nor would I be arrested by Esmé Squalor or any other town police officer. I sent a letter to Hector informing him of my situation, to which he replied that I should take the next bus to V.F.D. at my earliest convenience, but that did not correlate with the future, so I had abandoned that prospect. I would go back to planning to sneak into the village when the three orphans arrived, but this time I would wear a disguise. I successfully reached the Baudelaires and hid out with Hector, and we managed to save the Quagmire children from confinement in the Fowl Fountain from the ingenious couplets left by Isadora Quagmire. I informed them that their brother Quigley had survived the fire. After that, the villagers led by Olaf and Esmé closed in on us, Hector and the Quagmires escaping by his sustainable hot air mobile home balloon, I and the Baudelaires on the run from Olaf (who had been revealed as Olaf as opposed to "Constable Verger" and Esmé Squalor following him). Were I not aware of my future, I would not have acted as I did, and the future in which I and my sister are deceased would remain and I would not be in the position to tell of Reuel Faraday's trek up the Mortmain Mountains and his passage along the passage leading to the Vernacularly Fastened Door, and the phrases I had given him to unlock it. I would not have been able to tell you of the suspicion which dogged him ever since his first footstep within the lobby, of the hushed looks he would receive in the V.F.D. Library, and of the crabbiness of the chefs as he ate one of their specialty dishes of eggplant wasabi with mozzarella gnocchi. The suspicion surrounding Reuel Faraday was that he had appeared at the scene of the recent Baudelaire fire with a strange police box, after which the police box disappeared into thin air with two bodies hauled off by a woman (or so the Volunteer Fowl Detectives, ravens, had reported). This is why Faraday was, once again, being interrogated. In an armchair with a mug of excellent Black Cat Coffee (Fitzgerald Feint was the coffee maker) to keep him awake and stimulated. It was more pleasant than the other one he had escaped from. The volunteers there frowned upon anything to do with time travel, and so they asked him everything related to Alighiero Mallansohn, his uncle Daniel Faraday (they noted the last name), where he was when he time traveled last, when he was where he time traveled last, where he had been when he his future self had time traveled latest, where he had been when his future self had time traveled lately, and other convoluted questions he somehow managed to answer over three refills of Black Cat Coffee, the coffee bags piling up around him. After the interrogation had ended and he was found not temporally guilty, the volunteers grew more relaxed around him. Faraday had taken to reading in the V.F.D. Library in one of the comfortable armchairs with Black Cat Coffee beans not far away, as he became Fitzgerald Feint's favorite customer. Feint had question marked shaped eyebrows like his relation Ellington Feint, and also had black hair and an unfathomable smile which meant anything at all according to the person. Faraday read my brother's accounts of Stain'd-by-the-Sea (and also the books recommended by my brother within the books), the history of the Baudelaire and Snicket families, the works of J.K. Rowling, the commonplace book of Eltaan Renefeso, Eltaan Renefeso's teenaged love letters to his one-time chaperone Jasmine French, the V.F.D. investigation into French's death, who as it turned out had been murdered by the Inhumane Society as a result of French and Renefeso's work on the Hangfire file, the contents of which had not found their way into the Library as of Faraday's arrival, and there were a motet of books on the shelves, and a motet of volunteers who would read them late at night or early in the morning, sipping on Black Cat Coffee mochas and frappuchinos, lattes and ginger snaps along with the plain Coffee. Just as there are a motet of volunteers, so is there a motet of villains, bystanders, and instigators and secret organizations, and there is a motet of notebooks and newspapers surrounding my hiding place in the underwater catalog near and under the long-burnt remains of the Hotel Denouement.
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Post by Dante on Nov 27, 2014 17:50:30 GMT -5
I did wonder if you really meant a motet, and you did; I'm impressed. Intriguing, too, to hear that the previous account was not necessarily accurate (or is this one not accurate? Or neither?), and that we now seem to be in full-on AU territory, treading into unknown canons. Is this the future Olaf came from? I suppose that's not for me to know, but I suspect I will be interested in what is to come next.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Dec 3, 2014 22:09:03 GMT -5
Snippet Two
Reuel Faraday was curled up the armchair asleep with a copy of Time Travel Minutiæ which had been written by his uncle Daniel Faraday as a result of his research on theoretical physics. Moonlight bathed his sleeping form and the small lamp table upon which rested a steaming mug of Black Cat Coffee left there by Fitzgerald Feint. He had been at the V.F.D. headquarters for about a month, eating the chefs' gourmets and lounging in the Library, and climbing to the upper levels to get air and view of the Mortmain Mountains. The Volunteer Fowl Detectives were in flight again. It was evening. The sun hung low on the red horizon steadily darkening.
"The night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one."
"Kit?" "Yes, my Reu."
"I've come up with a theory about your brother's involvement in a small town none dare to name."
"What of it, Reu?"
She kissed Faraday lightly on the cheek.
"That town is the birth place of the sinister duo, and the alleged origin of the Great Unknown." Kit Snicket shivered at the mention of that mystery. She had recalled a family story of Bertrand's concerning a deep and terrible secret passed down from one generation to the next. The sinister duo, like the Great Unknown itself, seemed to emanate something ancient and dreadful. Every attempt to categorize them had failed, except for their shared quality: an aura of menace so menacing that their very names were said to be cursed. It might also be said that the two were the embodiment of such a curse cast long ago beyond the first mists of history and life, so foreboding were they.
"Do you remember the first thing you said to me?" she asked.
"I wondered why the coffee was gone, and I mentioned that Feint had a strange habit of disappearing at odd hours," he replied.
Kit smiled and said, "And I said that you read like a tortoise, my Reu. Meeting you..." she grabbed his hand. He leaned into her.
And in such moments it is necessary to give my sister and the protagonist some degree of privacy as my brother did for the eldest Baudelaire sibling and the eldest Quagmire triplet while climbing up Mount Fraught with the former's specialized climbing invention, from the burnt ruins of the very headquarters in which a love was blooming, in his research and writings on the prodigies of Beatrice and Bertrand.
Several hours later (a phrase which here means "the author is bored to death by his own pacing and decided to skip ahead in his research to when interesting things happen"), Faraday was heading to the coffee room of the V.F.D. headquarters to acquire more Black Cat Coffee beans. As he entered the room he saw it was vacated, a word which here means "lacking a particular coffee maker who had a strange habit of making disappearances during odd hours, the latest of these disappearances happening to be for good this time". Faraday looked around the room. He had even taken the remaining cache of Black Cat Coffee beans, the existence of which only he knew about because he was the absentee coffee maker's favorite customer out of all the volunteers at headquarters. Where had Fitzgerald Feint gone this time? And then Faraday wondered why all the coffee was gone, and he wondered if the situation of the missing coffee was a metafictional reference to something else entirely, a phrase which here means "inspired by a certain pirate inquiring after the reason behind the absence of a certain liquor in its plenitude". He decided to ask Kit about it.
"Back when Lemony disappeared, much like our Mr. Feint, he had been tailing the trail of a notorious maritime organisation known as the F.F.P. The Female Finnish Pirates. Whether there was any rum involved is unknown, and perhaps never will be known."
She inclined her head down a little at the thought of our missing dead brother, but said brother was already hot on Count Olaf's trail, a phrase which here means "Lemony Snicket started to chronicle the lives of the three Baudelaire orphans due to their dead mother being his unrequited love interest (see Commedia, La Divina by Dante Alighieri and Mal, Les Fleurs du by Charles Baudelaire for more on the subject of Beatrice). Faraday placed his palm over hers, rubbing her fingers gently.
"He is still alive, Kit. I know it."
"How can you ever know that, Reu?" Kit replied, distraught.
"Not so long ago I was shot in the head with a poisoned bullet and woke up with no head wound. If I can survive death—assuming this isn't some extremely pleasant afterlife—so can Lemony. As it happens, the reports of both of our deaths are extremely exaggerated," he finished with a grin which seemed to lighten her mood. She pecked him on the cheek and embraced him warmly.
"You make me feel alive, my Reu," she mumbled into his shoulder, "Never leave me, my beautiful Reu."
"I don't intend to, my love."
They kissed.
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Post by Dante on Dec 4, 2014 4:33:54 GMT -5
Not a ship I saw coming. Kit seems incapable of falling in love with people who aren't going to get shot, but at least Reuel survived it - this time, anyway. I wonder if the F.F.P. are going to be fully involved with this story... Not nearly enough has been done with them in fanfiction. A turn by the sinister duo would be welcome, too.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Dec 9, 2014 0:52:40 GMT -5
03 Mortmain Motet
Time Travel Minutiæ fell to the floor. With a gasp, Reuel Faraday awoke in the middle of the night. Someone had shaken him awake. That someone was Kit Snicket. Faraday looked dazed and wondered if it had all been a dream. Cinnamon-scented lips quickly met his own.
"Wake up, my Reu, we have a new lead," said Kit, firmly grabbing his hand.
It hadn't been a dream after all, had it? "Feint?"
"No, darling," Kit led him to the cartography room. "My brother."
"Lemony."
"No, my love. My other brother," Kit said in exasperation.
"Jacques."
"Yes. He was last seen approaching an old French town, St. Peregouille. He's been like this even before the Baudelaire mansion burnt down, heading off to different places as if he were in a hurry."
"Maybe he is. He told me that there was something coming. And he said he acted on behalf of a group dedicated to the safety of myself and the Baudelaire orphans, unless he was mentioning our organization, which would be very redundant of him."
"Yes. The Volunteer Fowl Detectives have been acting strangely as well. It began around a few months ago."
"When I arrived?"
"No, sometime before that." Kit pulled out a rolled up map from a shelf, unrolled it and placed it down. She traced a line with a pencil. "The Volunteer Fowl Detectives were patrolling from here," she indicated the location of the V.F.D. headquarters, "to here." She circled around a marshy area in which St. Peregouille lay.
"The ravens changed course to the Baudelaire mansion before I arrived?"
"Yes. That's the mysterious part, Reu," she sighed. "Could they have had some forewarning of your coming?"
Faraday thought about it, and said, "Perhaps they are sensitive to the space-time continuum. Circling over the exact spot of my future arrival before and after my arrival."
A light in Kit's eyes flared. "That is very possible, my love. In fact, there was a case long ago involving a certain S. Theodora Markson. She had no history here prior to joining V.F.D., making the worst out of fifty two available chaperones and chaperoning Lemony as her apprentice. He never told me what the S stood for."
"Sunny?" he asked. Theodora had not told him either, as it so happened.
Kit frowned. "Maybe. Bertrand was a previous apprentice of hers. The Baudelaire family custom is to name children after deceased friends and family."
"And I was her apprentice before him."
Kit gasped.
"From the future, my future, she had a sister who was a villain: Alexandra Radzinsky. She had her henchman gain my trust and sprang a trap, but her plans were foiled by a time traveling Count Olaf from an alternate past, whom I met in the Hotel Denouement's underwater catalog."
Kit nodded with a searching look. "Markson trained you in your future?"
"Yes, and then she disappeared. I think she time travelled back to before you and your brothers were born and joined V.F.D. then. I suspect my uncle Daniel Faraday informed her about time travel, which was why she trained me."
"This is a lot, my Reu. How was Dewey Denouement?"
"He was long dead by the time I got there."
Kit bowed her head low for a moment. Faraday held her hand.
In the distance, thunder pealed. "Thunder?" he mouthed to himself.
"What, love? There is no storm nearby. I don't hear anything," Kit said.
Faraday frowned as a sharp pain shot into his brain like lightning. A blood red circle with three smaller circles within. Runic characters. Red-haired woman in red surrounded by other figures. "The Sun Goddess!"
Just as sudden, the pain ended. He gripped his head. Kit massaged his forehead. "Are you alright, Reu?" He clasped her hand.
"I've just...had a...vision."
"A vision of what?"
"A red symbol. A woman in red. Something about a sun goddess..."
Kit gripped his hand, "A sun goddess?"
"It was just after I heard the thunder."
He looked at Kit, Kit at him. She searched awhile, taking in his face, his uncertainty, his confusion, his pain, his knowing, his tiredness, and she cupped his face and kissed him.
"You've just given me a lead, my Reu!" she was electrified.
"A lead," asked Faraday, "a lead to where?"
"Oh Reu, my dear heart," Kit said to him, "my brother was searching for the lost manuscripts of an Arno Baudelaire who was connected to a group known as the Society of the Sun Goddess, or the Illuminated Order of Solaria"
"Illuminated Order of Solaria?"
"They appear to have parted ways with their parent organization, the Illuminated Scribes, when Arno Baudelaire lived. Their deity was the sun goddess Solaria who was also a fire goddess."
Solaria...Sola Maria? Only the Mother...
"So it was matriarchal as opposed to patriarchal."
Kit shrugged, "That seems to fit with the sun goddess concept, as well as several of the Order's leaders being female."
"But what does all this have to do with the disappearance of Fitzgerald Feint?" That had been nagging at him for hours at a time. He wondered how the missing coffee brewer was connected to all of this. And then it occurred to him. He had heard reports of increased F.F.P. activity in the City when he appeared there by the freshly-burnt Baudelaire mansion mere months ago. The alternate Olaf and Hardrada had both been killed and Alexandra had made off with the time traveling police box. Was she somehow connected to the F.F.P.? And where did Mallansohn fit into this? The Sun Goddess.
It suddenly made sense. Jacques Snicket's "people" on whose behalf he had told him to flee the City, Feint's increasing erratic disappearances ever since he had arrived at headquarters, the ravens, and all the wrong questions he had yet to ask led to one conclusion: Fitzgerald Feint was a spy.
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Post by Dante on Dec 9, 2014 3:28:31 GMT -5
Are some of the plot threads starting to come together here? At the very least, the parties involved are starting to become more aware of each other. Theodora as a time-traveller adds some much-needed mystery to her characterisation (though I suspect we may get some of that in canon, too), though as for Fitzgerald Feint I wonder just how he ties into the existing Feint family. I'm sure it's relevant; everything else seems to be, which is part of why everything is so obscure in this story, especially with the addition of both mysticism and science-fiction laws.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 17, 2016 0:01:38 GMT -5
I've been gone for a while. But I've started writing again recently. I'll post the next chapter when I finish it.
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Post by Dante on Sept 17, 2016 2:49:13 GMT -5
Good luck, Jacques. I should reread the first part to prepare myself.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 17, 2016 12:17:40 GMT -5
04 Mortmain Motet
Severus Snape stood freezing as he neared the burnt ruins of the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Drafts. The Stricken Stream had long since frozen over, leaving ashen fossils in the ice as the only evidence of the terrible inferno set thirty years before by the sinister duo and their aura of menace. He had downed the last of his heating droughts an hour ago and bitterly simmered that he had run out. In his hand was a paper that said, "WINTER IS COMING" with V.F.D. eyes all over. He had found that in the long-charred remains of the Baudelaire mansion, given to him by a foppish taxidermist who might have been Hangfire the Second for all he knew. Apparently this was some enormous prank played on him by someone who loved to push his buttons. The next time he saw Pyratinus Gold he would kill him if it was the last thing he ever did. He had sworn to the gods, in any event. Speaking of winter, the Snow Scouts were nearby. Snape was nauseous. Speaking of gods, they were mocking him. Speaking of events, he hated False Spring.
"A is for Amazing! B is for Bonus! C is for Celebrate! D is for Delicious! E is for Eager! F is for Felicity! G is for Geometry!..." The Snow Scouts were singing their own version of the Snow Scout alphabet song. They were dressed as Snowmen with their bulgy parkas. "I'm a Little Snowman, short and stout, here is my carrot, here is my xylophone..." It was maddening. Then, Odin sprang up from the snowy refuse and laughed, his eye spinning wildly and cackling with lightning. Ravens began to perch upon Snape's shoulders as they cawed in his face.
A flash of light twinkled above him. "Fall asleep on the job, Severus?" Snape sneered as he rose from the floor. Gold was there, silently mocking as always. An eternity of light speed filled the gap between them. "The target," Snape demanded. Black eyes scanned blue-grey. A shallow shiver of fear. No. He needed to go deeper. Quivering. Eyes widening. Jaw slackening. Fists clenching. Gallows swinging. He was nearly there. Yellow droplets from his ravaged eyes. Rims enlarging. He tried. The Legilimens was too much. He gave a hollow gasp and flailed backwards, limp in a half death that came with aggressive mind sifting. Severus Snape huffed in satisfaction; he had gotten what he wanted. With a subtle smirk, the cowled Slytherin swept out of the shop, a suave swish of a cloak. Pyratinus Gold should have let him invade his mind without resistance. Why did they have to make it so difficult for themselves?
And what was with that strange dream? Surely his Occlumency shields were stable enough to deflect unwanted interference from his mind, magical or mundane. Not even the Dark Lord had been able to get a general impression of his guarded thoughts. Just those surface impressions he allowed the Dark Lord to perceive to remain in his game, to play his part well, as he always did. A rather peculiar post-graduation occupation to be done for the Headmaster who would never have sent him if he were not capable. As to Hangfire's reluctance to give him information, Snape settled his mind onto their shared organisation. Information was its trade and its members were able researchers. Why they had even considered Gold for membership, with his ridiculous notions of magic prices, was beyond all reason even if Gold was unnaturally gifted in investigations.
Fitzgerald Feint was waiting for something. Something that not even he would have known, in all his years of spy work, to expect. There are some people who fare well by not being expected by anyone, and those who desire to be expected. The former includes a trio of red-garbed showmen who are proud of the fact that nobody ever expected them. Not even they expected themselves. The early days of the City's theatre program had ensured that thespians would be well trained to take on a number of various roles, to convince the audience and themselves that they were what they seemed to be for their allotted time on stage. He had been told to await a certain J.S. who would ply him with a sealed envelope concerning the scientist Alighiero "Dante" Mallansohn's time sensitive experiments.
Feint had been particularly on the sly, a phrase which here means "utilising his position as V.F.D. coffee man to spy on the activities of a time traveler named Faraday and his relationship with Kit Snicket", before he had fled the Valley of Four Drafts through an intricate set of cave tunnels excavated by the leaders of the Snow Scouts to ensure efficient travel to and from Snow Scout caves, caves like the one in which Quigley Quagmire had revealed himself to the elder Baudelaire children.
Feint was very anxious, as he had overheard the time traveler and Snicket talk about his home town, that ancient place from where the sinister duo first arose, and where I was being held captive at this moment. He had heard bedtime tales of the Bombinating Beast from the cooing mouth of Ellington herself. She had taught him all she knew, for she was his mother. She had disappeared one night and never returned. Fitzgerald had accepted this, having a faint idea of where the elder Feint had gone and why. Now he was following in her feint steps, a phrase which here means "fleeing from his post as a spy". And he was waiting for J.S. as my sister would have waited for news of Dewey Denouement had our timeline not been changed. It is not certain that I would be the one for which he was waiting, as I had nothing conclusive on the Mallansohn family or their experiments.
"Fitzgerald Feint" a gruff voice said. "You are late."
"I left as soon as I was able. That dratted chef kept force feeding me his delicious home made tortellini recipe. Almost like he thought I was in danger of starving to death."
"He tried to keep you, Feint. You fool."
The voice had a body, which had clothing, which had a lapel, which had the initials "I.S." in silver. Mangy hair and mangy beard and mangy mustache, Quintus Dellegaarde was an impending sense of doom upon all who beheld him. Some had thought of giving him the job of bearer of bad news and sad occasions. They had a point.
"You're not J.S."
Dellegaarde sniffed nonchalantly.
"I've heard of you, so you can't be J.S."
"I am disappointed in you, Feint, for not looking beyond the letter of your assignment. Maybe I am J.S. Maybe I was J.S. all along. Or maybe I invented J.S. A figment of my own thought." A sense of gleeful gumption.
"I have traveled far and wide, Fitzgerald Feint, and done many things."
Silence hung in the air like a fragile thread, a pulsing anxiety threatening to bubble up to the surface, knowing the air of legend surrounding Quintus Dellegaarde. He had set his own mansion on fire and had killed his parents Quartus and Tertia in the blaze. He was frightening, though not as frightening as the man with a beard but no hair or the woman with hair but no beard.
"Of course, sir."
"You're in luck, Fitzgerald Feint."
"What?"
"I can take you to Mallansohn himself."
"How?"
"Very simple." His eyes gleamed. "I am his guardian."
Fitzgerald Feint nearly fainted. Mallansohn was a prodigy?
Dellegaarde seemed to read his face. "Yes he is. And a useful one at that."
"What is his age?"
Dellegaarde spat on the ground and grumbled. "Hell if I know. He keeps evading me on the subject."
Feint wondered what Mallansohn was up to. He had heard the disapproving sighs within the Headquarters of the Mortmain Mountains, and their dislike of something as finicky as time travel. He could understand why. When the Baudelaire mansion burned down, the Volunteer Fowl Detectives were unusually touchy in their flight pattern. Word of a blue police box had reached the ears of his mysterious superiors, and of the time traveler who had come to the Headquarters. His name was Faraday, which caused a blink in his memory about a physicist by that name, a physicist who had been heavily invested in time travel. Perhaps that Faraday had taught Mallansohn or Mallansohn had done it all himself.
Dellegaarde broke him from his thoughts like an unscrupulous count named Olaf. "Move your feet, Feint. We haven't got all day."
Fitzgerald Feint was feeling unsettled. Very, very, very unsettled, as he followed the doom filled legend in front of him. He wondered if he would ever get to make coffee again, but he forced that traitorous thought down as he made steps closer to meeting the man behind the time machine behind the story.
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Post by Dante on Sept 17, 2016 15:34:57 GMT -5
Well, this chapter certainly twists and turns. I applaud your ambition in taking hold of and drawing together all these threads of different fictions and storylines, and continue to look forward to seeing the completed tapestry.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 18, 2016 21:53:08 GMT -5
05 Mortmain Motet
Long before the earliest Baudelaire appeared in the records of history, long before the first volunteer put out the first fire, and long before the Norsemen had settled the coastal areas adjoining Briny Beach, there was an accomplished duelist who was very proficient with knives named Telchar Snicket, after the sharpness of his knife blades and of his wit. Telchar Snicket, the first of the Snickets, had been born in a time of mass upheaval, after the fall of the Hinterland Territories, of which his surname-less family were ardent upholders. Growing up in those dark days he learned knife fighting as a defense against the constant raids done by the Mulctuary hordes across the sea. What modest livings his parents had had were swept and stolen away by the unflinching marauders. Telchar's mother and father perished in the defense of their community when Telchar was but a blacksmith's apprentice.
After his parents' death and the destruction of their community, Telchar gathered companions along the lawless roads and through the duels along the way, in which the sharpness of his knives earned him victory after victory, earning him the last name of Snicket. Together they righted wrongs and rectified injustices, setting up the first Volunteer Defense Force service in the history of the City. It was only later that Telchar Snicket's descendants were involved in founding the Volunteer Fire Department and its first schism.
I pondered greatly of my ancestor as I was being held captive in that small town none dared to name by the man I knew as Count Olaf. We had never gotten along at the Headquarters, as there was little love lost between him and my brother. Olaf had his shiny eyes on Beatrice ever since they were young children, especially after she had once told him that he would fail. Olaf loved challenges back then as he did now, which is why he sought to pursue her, a phrase which here means "burn down her mansion and steal her fortune and make her his wife." My brother and his friend Bertrand were understandably incensed by Olaf's treacherous scheme, which he tried again, in Faraday's original timeline, with Beatrice's most clever and ingenious daughter Violet, who takes after her famous aunt Hypatia Baudelaire.
"At last I've captured you, Snicket. I've been waiting a long time for this," Olaf wheezed triumphantly.
It was a ramshackle place: picture frames littered everywhere, crawling dust along the floor, spiderless cobwebs floated on the ceiling, distant creaks wormed into itching ears like snow gnat babel fish, and an overall sense of doom pervading the memories of a wholesome study.
"So, One-Brow," said Olaf ironically, a word meaning that Olaf was one to talk considering that he also had one eyebrow, "you will give to me the whereabouts of your sister and the Faraday brat."
I remembered why I wasn't with Élise's organisation in St. Peregouille. Olaf had somehow captured us and was holding us here, in this town that none dared to name. I had told the Faraday boy to flee the City. So he had reached Headquarters safely and gotten close with my sister. I smiled absent-mindedly, the trace of a laugh on my lips. Then, looking at Olaf, I frowned and said, "Is he who you think he is? Is she who you think she is?"
Olaf growled. "What do you mean, Snicket...."
"I am telling you that your premises are built on sand."
Olaf's eyebrow both raised and furrowed, which is quite an accomplished feat. "But I saw them with my own two eyes, Snicket. I was skulking around the area myself. I saw the blue box after I set Beatrice and Bertrand's ridiculous mansion on fire and made three orphans of their insufferable children. I saw an older version of myself die. I saw the Faraday brat get shot in the back of the head. I haven't even taken custody of those orphans yet so I can steal their fortune!" Olaf's shiny eyes were glinting with a barely concealed madness. The madness of having seen the results of time travel up close.
I did recall a change in my sister, a change which seemed tenuous with the arrival of Faraday from another time. Even before, there were hints of a different Kit. At then I did not understand why. Perhaps, now, I did. Something about Faraday was affecting time, but what?
"Fire, Snicket," Olaf said. "I have always loved fire. Fire is the solution to every problem!" Shiny eyes glaring. "You will tell me the truth, Snicket, or I will burn you alive in this deserted cottage."
"Well then," I said, realising that there were no ropes tying me to the unsteady chair. I stood up and pushed Olaf into the cottage's tiny alcove beneath the hat rack. Olaf gave a yell, then struck a match and threw it, climbing over broken glass to the outside swamp. I followed, intent on tackling him, coughing from the smoke.
"You'll never take me alive!" shouted Olaf with his characteristic wheeze, a wheeze flattened by running. He threw lit matches behind him, hoping I would be caught in the blaze. One of them singed my own eyebrow, and another burned slightly at my greatcoat. I tripped and ducked and leaped over the wooden fire-starters as their caster gained ground ahead of me.
We were on a leaf strewn path now, shadows of a dim hamlet distant before us. Olaf had run out of matches and was doing his best to run as fast as he could, into that little hamlet none dared to name.
Olaf disappeared into the fog. A nameless menace drew down upon me. Darkness came, and stole my sight. I was blind in the deep. And then I tumbled from my perch when a gravelly dark voice spoke.
I have seen your heart, and it is mine.
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Post by Dante on Sept 19, 2016 7:13:22 GMT -5
A slightly more contained chapter this time; it's nice to see some interaction between Olaf and Jacques - really, between anyone and Jacques, as canon doesn't really do enough with him. I enjoyed the furthest history of the Snickets and V.F.D.; it feels not far off something Snicket himself would write.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 20, 2016 20:45:21 GMT -5
06 Mortmain Motet
Daniel Faraday awoke with a start. He had fallen asleep in one of the V.F.D. library armchairs again. This was the, what, twelfth time he had dosed off? Kit was nowhere to be seen. Week-old bags of Black Cat Coffee grind littered the table nearest to him, purposeless without a coffee man to brew them. Time Travel Minutiæ was once again splayed open upon the floor, its pages bent and creased beyond presentability.
It was a quiet night at Headquarters. The waterfall could be heard roaring behind the paned glass of the kitchen window. Peace coaxed him into falling back asleep, but he resisted the urge to go under the night's soothing shroud. A painful afterthought prickled in the back of his head like a submerged warning. He thought of Kit and their relationship, and that it had been too good to be true. Too much of a coincidence, too much of a kismet. It was as if they were suddenly meant to be where they weren't before.
Some part of him was so sure this was just a pleasant dream that had been dreamt for far too long. He wondered if he would ever truly wake from his sweet nightmares. He would see Kit in front of him, eyes red in grief and rage, holding onto him as she sobbed. And then she would withdraw from him with a snarl, violently pushing him away while saying, "You did this. You let him die. You helped Olaf. I loved you, my dearest …æ." And others consisted of Theodora being insanely ridiculous. In one of them she and a receptionist had been throwing some sort of absurd party with confetti and hats and everything and she kept telling someone called Lemony to be sensible and to leave adults to adult things.
And in yet others he could see nothingness before him. Then came the underwater catalog, and the blue police box. A flash of light coming from an odd silver pen floating aimlessly in space. A sentient lightsaber spoon named Dave and a towel named Colin going on epic adventures. An unpopular administrator of a quirky forum. Someone who died at the end. Intellecteers who were also Jedi. A giant sucking sound. A horde of Viking longboats with fencing blades, the scream of a forlorn creature. Shattered metal that sang like glass. Guttural incantations. Foolishness. A tall man with slits for nostrils, and slits for eyes. Cat hair. Lots and lots of cat hair. Insanity tea. An endless maze made up of mirrors, a stellar chorus, a woman made of chrome, a masked warrior slashing with a crimson sword that breathed fire, yelling about someone named Stannis...there has been an awakening......
He had woken up in a gasping, tearful state after having those nightmares, and his heart broke when Kit comforted him. He told her of his nightmares and she held him, shielding him from his deepest fear. Bags became prominent under his eyes, day after day. It became so bad, he could not speak anymore, for his fears were all too near. Day and night he wilted before her eyes, clinging onto her like a lifeline. She understood. His fear was eating him alive. Fear of losing her. Fear of betraying her. Fear of insanity. Fear of absurdity.
She was asleep in the armchair next to him, peaceful and wispy, her reading glasses perched gingerly upon the bridge of her nose, tresses flowing upon her forehead. She was sheltered from his turmoil in the thin and filmy gauze of moonlight striking her resting skin. But she didn't understand. The devils were inside the walls.
The devils were inside his fingernails, too. They were inside his skin, and Daniel Faraday was not used to having devils inside of his skin. They were inside Kit's hair. They were the worms that ate into every pleasant thought he had. They were coagulating. They were becoming fierce. They had brought about the insanity of the ruler of a seafaring empire. They were crawling everywhere on every surface. They were relentless. Centipedes with horns and forked tails like in the old pirate stories. They would creep him out to death. Creep him out of his very skin. He felt his bones buzz and itch with a powdery aftertaste.
The ghosts of the past called out to him, hurling abuse after abuse. Even the books came to life and mocked him and his unnaturally pallid skin. He began to bleed gold droplets from his eyes. He knew this because he looked into a mirror. Kit's hair giggled. Insanity stared down at him. His gormless sight imploded in on itself. Count Olaf began to taunt him with a lit match, which transformed into Kit Snicket running into a sewer, which turned into a grinning pair of sunglasses. His madness was compounding. V.F.D. was a sideshow. The flowers were evil. Beatrice Baudelaire was a monstrous dragonfly. His own memories poured out like limpid water. He laughed as if he hadn't laughed in a long time. His voice became booming and ringing. He conducted his mad orchestra of bearded fire trucks. He was becoming something weird. Droning pauses issued from his vocal box.
He was becoming a Cyberman. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. He felt constricted by a Burmese python, the scales actually the remnants of some racy memoir written by a coat hanger. He dissolved into his own eyeballs and awoke with a snap of the moon.
He spent a minute to reconfigure himself. He was still at Headquarters. Kit was still sleeping in the armchair beside his. Quietude filled the air. The night was gentle once more. His gaze fell once again on Time Travel Minutiæ, which was again splayed open on the floor. He reached for the book and read a passage. He read it again. And again. And again. The dreams he'd been having. There was a rational explanation after all! He was not native to this timeline. His psyche did not agree with his being here, or something did not agree with it.
He read onward, his uncle's words an illumination before his eyes. He had figured it out already. Long before anybody else. Long before even Mallansohn. He nudged Kit's sleeping shoulder.
"Mmmmmmm?" she was not ready to wake up yet.
He lowered his voice down to a whisper, "I've realised something, Kit. Something germane!"
That woke her up immediately. "Germane, love?"
"My dreams."
"Oh?"
"I'm not going crazy after all."
"I didn't think you were in the first place, Reu."
"I don't belong here. Everyone knows that." He was excited.
"I think you belong here. With me."
"I'm never going to leave you, Kit. I promise."
The hint of a tear. "You know I don't like it when you make promises you can't keep..."
"I'll keep them for you, I always will."
A kiss full of distraught yearning, despair, and raw need.
"My dreams," he gasped as they pulled apart. "Something is causing them. Something amorphous. Something that I suspect is tied to the Great Unknown. Something that wants to stop me. Something that wants me out of the way."
Kit's eyes widened. "Something that knows why I'm here."
"What are we going to do? Jacques hasn't answered my letters, and Lemony is out there somewhere. Charles hasn't returned with the maps. What if something happens to them? To you?" Her eyes were pleading.
Daniel Faraday felt a swell of devotion towards Kit rise up inside his heart. "I won't let anything happen to me that I don't intend to let happen to me."
"Reu?"
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"I know."
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Post by Dante on Sept 21, 2016 4:29:02 GMT -5
A compellingly insane nightmare sequence - but some of those flashbacks instead gave me a rush of nostalgia.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 10, 2016 15:58:49 GMT -5
07 Mortmain Motet
"I am not a free man, I am a number!"
This had gone on for years. Quaint and scrunchy, Cloacus Vermilly eyed his alabaster rook lazily. He was preparing to castle, and he had lost a majority of his pieces already to the obsidian knights of Coriolanus Nightleaf, who was a lithe and imposing man of indeterminate age. A pock marked growl sounded from him as his knight overcame the last of the alabaster bishops. He then tapped his piece on the board in systematic bursts, throwing Vermilly out of his head. It was the same thing. Over and over and over. "I am not a free man, I am a number!" in Morse Code had a very odd shelf life. They were not your regular chess match watchwords. They were obviously a code for something else, a phrase which here means "something that would be revealed very, very soon."
Nightleaf's parents were long dead, having been killed in a freakish circus accident. Young Coriolanus saw them die at Caligari Carnival when the lions mauled them to bits and pieces, and became rather fond of lions (or at least those who weren't Volunteer Feline Detectives). Nightleaf became insane in his pursuit of murder-by-lions, so he had lured daredevils to the lion pit and watched in schadenfreudic glee as they fell in. It is said that Nightleaf had lion blood in him, after it was discovered that one of his parents was a feline. Nightleaf certainly had the mane to boot in his younger years, but insanity had made him a frail old thing without a mane to speak of. The pungent smell of white roses filled the stale airways. Ratatat tap tap tap tap tap. "Coriolanus, enough!" barked Cloacus Vermilly as he flung the chess board off the table with pieces flying everywhere. He arose to full height and landed a blow upon Nightleaf's feint face.
Dreary, dreary, dreary, dreary...
Nightleaf was mumbling absently, eyes white with an fiery glaze.
Dreary, dreary, dreary, dreary...
His mouth went O-shaped, a word which here means "he let out a terrified gasp".
I SEE HIM HE IS HERE I SEE HIM HE IS HERE I SEE HIM HE IS HERE I SEE HIM HE IS HERE
Vermilly was frozen, helpless. He had no idea what was going on.
YOUR HEART YOUR HEART YOUR HEART HE IS AFTER YOUR HEART HE IS AFTER YOUR HEART YOUR HEART YOUR HEART HE WILL TAKE OVER YOUR SOUL
Strange glyphs appeared on the walls. They looked like lines of congealed slime after a haruspex's bloody divining ritual. The runes shifted like lightning in midair, Nightleaf's face of terror glowing keenly in the dark. Vermilly made to yell, to cry for help, but he had no mouth. He made to run away, to escape, but had no legs. He made to pray, but had no soul with which to pray—
I AM YOUR BEGINNING. I AM YOUR END. Something boomed out of the depths of time itself. I AM THE GROUND. I AM THE ETERNAL ABYSS. I AM THE INKY BLACK SKY. I AM THE PSYCHOPOMP OF MORGOTH. Nightleaf's gaping maw burned with infernal fury. His eyes were discs of anti-matter. His pauses took three thousand years to settle in. I CREATED THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE. I MADE THE OCEANS BOIL INTO SMOKE. I DESTROYED COUNTLESS AEONS OF LIFE. I AM THE END OF ALL WORLDS. ALL WILL SURRENDER TO THE VOID. I AM THE HERALD OF CHAOS AND FLAME. I AM FIRE. I AM DEATH.
Suddenly everything went back to normal. Nightleaf, however, was no longer living. There he lay, sprawled and made of dust. A breeze wafted its way into the room and blew his remains away into nothingness.
"Alas. 'Tis a solitary sport now." Kicking aside various chessmen strewn about the floor, Cloacus Vermilly strode over to the door, opened it, and left. He had a message to deliver to the two with the auras of menace and it was urgent that he deliver it now and not later. The Master had revealed Himself to him at last. He would be fully ordained soon enough.
"Do you have it with you?"
Severus Snape stood waiting before the charred remains of the Baudelaire mansion. He had the message that was slipped into his hand while on the run from the Female Finnish Pirates. Four days later he was here at last. He swept his gaze around him, searching for unusualities. A flash of light blinded his onyx-black eyes. A young man dressed up like Matt Smith's Doctor Who (a phrase which here means, "someone who was a Ravenclaw at Hogwarts") stood amidst the remains of the fire. "Alighiero Mallahnson," he held out a hand for Severus to shake. He just stared. "Surprised to see me, Severus?"
The black-clad Potioneer thrusted the note to the time traveller. Mallahnson smiled. "Oh, he's a wily one, Severus."
"Who?"
"You'll see. In time."
"When?"
"Can't tell you. Would cause a paradox. Fickle things, paradoxes."
"Alright." This was, suffice it to say, very odd.
Mallahnson went on, "I once knew a fellow. Very smart. He had a box, you see. But not just any box......"
Severus was wondering where this was going as the time traveler was talking.
"...and the box is larger on the inside than the outside, making it most useful for a good number of things."
"Like a magic bag of holding?"
"Like a what? Nevermind, I know what you mean. I've had one of those myself. Made of demiguise skin. Quaint little thing."
Severus audibly gasped. No one had ever been able to skin a demiguise and live to tell the tale. Whoever had sold this strange man the pouch was someone with the wherewithal and the power. But that was not why he was here.
Severus coughed. Mallahnson stopped mid-gesture.
"Oh, right. Apologies, Severus. Now listen. The man you're working with? Yes, he is connected to Hangfire. Very long ago he was born, and very long ago he was inducted into the darkness which none dare to name."
"Pyratinus Gold."
"Yes. It was he who was the informant who brought down the reputation of Lemony Snicket from within the ranks of the organization itself. He always loved to fool others that some have taken to calling him Fool's Gold when in conversation. Which reminds me," he lowered his voice. "He had no parents."
"What?"
"He just appeared out of thin air as an infant. Which is actually quite normal for some of the more unsavory parts of the universe."
There was no mansion of Golds' parents to have been burnt down. It made him an anomaly. He had been villainous from the start.
"This," said Severus, "changes everything."
Some years ago and a thousand miles away, Daniel Faraday woke up.
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