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Post by Dante on Jan 9, 2019 14:23:58 GMT -5
I too enjoyed the reference to the Gothic Archies. And the sonic screwdriver! I had a student who was obsessed with Dr. Who, so I know about the sonic screwdriver. I probably missed this as I am new, but is Daniel Faraday the character from Lost? He is very much inspired by him. He is also inspired by another 667er's ("Mr. erm", as he is known as now as he once went by "Mister M.") character David Faraday in his works here (AnotherSOUE, The Man Who Tried To Kill Dante, and The Rise). This tale continues to be yet more allusive than I ever realised.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Jan 26, 2019 1:59:47 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 11
Ellington Feint kicked a loose flagstone down the main road. Apparently the idiots in charge of Dark Avenue had made the neglect of roads and thoroughfares in, which meant that she had to deal with the sheer absence of road maintenance. Her menacing superior, Dellegaarde, had set her to this dismal task of getting rid of Florence Zimmerman, a witch with prodigious skill and no shortage of conscience, she noted with irritation. Zimmerman was powerful. More powerful than even Dellegaarde, which the latter would never admit to anyone, but Ellington knew what to make of the things that went unsaid. She banked her plans on them. Ever since she had been young, she had known something of the proclivities of her father Armstrong Feint. She had known that he’d had to make half-truths so as to protect her from the consequences of his life. He’d tried to give her a good life and he’d cherished her as the most precious thing in the world. He had read her stories, played her music, showed her nature, and everything a doting father would share with a daughter he was proud of. She did regret what she’d had to do, following her father’s death at the hands of Lemony Snicket, that impetuous boy who was fond of escaping chaperoned supervision with his brother and sister. She had cared for him once, before the things he’d left unsaid erupted into a storm of loss and fury. She was standing in the darkness of Dark Avenue, set to meet a contact (there were sure a lot of contacts in their business, it seemed, she thought) whose identity was predetermined by the higher-ups.
“Blast fashion, I say,” harrumphed a gravelly voice. “Blast it all to Hell!”
Ellington turned. There in the non-light stood someone she’d thought never to see again: Veblen Squalor, an old professor who once taught at Prufrock under an assumed name. He was known to have vocally protested his nephew Jerome’s marriage to Esmé Gigi Genevieve as he thought that her love for fashion would cause his nephew to slip from the high ideas of his father Salinger Squalor. But Veblen Squalor soon sported a menacing grin; his very teeth were elongated knives of shadow piercing whatever unfortunate prey fell into its gaping maw of total annihilation. Ellington almost screamed, but for the warning in her heart like a whisper from a vanquished foe recoiling through the chasm of a tunnel of aggression and sparks rushing against the conclaves of the forge of its fiery velocity. A Faceless One stood in front of her, pulsating with eldritch purpose, clues to the nature of the wrathful flames shining like a lantern in the gnarled hands of a questing cynic searching for a human being in the dusted streets of the cities of prosperity and approbation. Unbidden from darkness visible, the Death Seer of Hades, fell servant of the Dark Lord Israphel, an infinite regress of cruelty and malice.
Through a shroud of mist the voice of the Faceless One spoke. “Thine hour approaches, and Snicket weeps for naught.”
She understood. Beatrice. The mother of the three Baudelaire orphans who, for being loved by Lemony, had earned her eternal enmity. The perilous being nodded and sniffed the ionized crackle of her anger upon the pensive air. A blare filled her ears, and she suddenly saw the boy and Florence Zimmerman in embrace, and a dark rage blasted through her being. She hated Zimmerman for making him happy, she hated the purple witch who had a conscience and the memory of her father’s death overwhelmed her. “Enough!” she cried out suddenly to empty space. The Faceless One was gone. Splayed on the ground before her, astoundingly cold, was the body of Florence Zimmerman. Ellington Feint gasped in the wake of her own fury coursing through her. The witch was ghastly white, a phrase which here means “she was dead.” But it was Lemony’s Beatrice who lay cold and dead, not Zimmerman, and she was dumbfounded, a word which here means “she did not know what was happening and was very exasperated and confused by all of this.” The darkness of Dark Avenue flitted like a weighted curtain around her and she saw the face of her son, Fitzgerald Feint, gasping in terrified surprise as the laughter of Quintus Dellegaarde pealed aloud like discordant silver bells, brazen bells. What a world of treachery their dissonance foretells!
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Post by Dante on Jan 26, 2019 6:17:18 GMT -5
I think your opening paragraph is a pretty strong analysis of Ellington's character through the motif of things left unsaid; it feels quite Snickety. Less Snickety is where it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle how much of the story is literal and how much purely hallucinatory, though perhaps the distinction doesn't matter. Your style has a tendency towards run-on sentences and extended metaphors; it may not be strictly approved by the literary establishment, but I enjoy it when it appears.
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Post by Foxy on Jan 26, 2019 10:14:10 GMT -5
Veblen Squalor, an old professor who once taught at Prufrock under an assumed name. Oh man, I don't even have a guess who that is, but I love the reference to Prufrock Prep! I also was amused by what you wrote about it being in to have dilapidated roads.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Apr 12, 2019 23:26:37 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 12
The Temple of Authorial Intent of the Death of the Author jutted like a black serif from the Kierkegaard mountains in the middle of a ferocious snow storm. Towering crenellations, morose and somber before the cloud bank, set like words in masonry, defying authorial intent. In a description of non-description, the world negates itself.
“Save for the Will of the Author, we would be cancelled out in the sea of chaos and ideas of His mind, swirling like the breaking waves of a tempestuous nightmare, the nightmare at the source of our present difficulties in finding a rational explanation to all of this.” At that point, someone rose up from the crowd, stirring and resolute.
“So what do you propose, Doctor Diogenes, about the fact that the Author is dead?” Diophantus Diogenes stared from the lectern in silence for a second, a crease in his brow. He said, “How do you know the Author is dead, Walsingham?”
The other scoffed like a broken wind pipe. “How do I know the Author’s dead? It’s in the name of this very place, so how do you know the Author is not dead, Doctor?”
Since Diogenes had a doctorate not only in doctoring but also in literature, which is the Author’s express will for the plotline while supposedly being dead, he thought up an answer that had stricken him like lightning. There once was a pale man with greasy hair, and he was a lost traveler seeking direction. He had been given a mission by the headmaster of his former school. A mission of utmost secrecy and importance: to spy on the Inhumane Society, particularly its connections with a certain Pyratinus Gold who served as Hangfire’s double. Gold could mimic the voice of any person, animal or inanimate object. That was why the headmaster had sent him, to watch him, to keep tabs on him and steer him away from an alliance with Lord Voldemort. But the Female Finnish Pirates had tried to stop him, and now the Dark Lord Israphel had returned from the depths of the Place Where The Schism Began. It had been by Israphel’s voice and discordant music that Hangfire had been corrupted. The cosmic, overarching schism that defined and inhabited every subsequent schism since. Israphel reveled in the bitterness and resentment afflicting Ellington Feint, the Daughter of Hangfire, and had risen up his dread servant Quintus Dellegaarde to irrevocably bind her to the Darkness forever: to destroy the heart of the Faraday boy. At first she’d set out to deceive him, use him until he’d served his purpose in the burning of the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Drafts. She had captured Kit, convinced Jacques yet soon Jacques had left, making himself scarce the way his brother had countless times before. Lemony Snicket was like a ghost, a phrase which here meant, “the Snicket whom she hated above all else was always ten steps ahead of her, as if aware of her roving hunger.” Yet the boy had somehow ceased to be her tool. It was just as well.
The young man Faraday had passed through many trials, trials designed from the outset to cause the schism to recur in his heart by first causing S. Theodora Markson to up and leave him in the future, their present, for their past. It was her fear that the agent of the Enemy exploited, a fear which was not sensible at all but the opposite: insanity. And it had been insanity that had parted them and it had been insanity again which had parted Kit Snicket from the time traveler by the byzantine feints of Ellington Feint in her quest to bestow the terror of her soul onto he who had murdered her father in cold blood so long ago on a running train, with a bombinating beast nestled in his pocket, striving off into the Great Unknown called the future. For there and then a schism had been wrought in the life of Lemony Snicket and those who were with him that day. And now her plan was to deal the final blow to Daniel Faraday once and for all: to kill Florence Zimmerman in a way that he would be powerless to save her.
And as Diophantus Diogenes grasped his insight, he spoke. “If the Author is dead, then Who is writing this story?”
Walsingham gaped like a great big fish. He gaped and gaped until he could gape no more. He run out wildly to the stable off to the side of the Temple, hurriedly unhitched his horse and took off like a madman. He had to warn the docent of the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin at once. This changed everything. But as he rode on, he was pursued in the wintry night.
Members of the Inhumane Society twirled and pirouetted and leapt and bounded and gained on the fleeing spymaster. Insane orchestral and choral music blared forth from some hidden source, suffusing everything with the madness of the tempo. Dark fire sprung up on all sides, trapping him. Atavistic cries drowned out the light of the stars.
“Drink in the hymns of the Stygian horror, and the glorious abandon in which we serve Israphel, the Dark Lord and our Infernal Master, the Eldritch One of the Deep, the Baptismal Font of Inhumanity, the Waters of Oblivion’s Fire, the Hunger of Want, the Fall of the House of Usher. We shall chant the madness of the Abyss in summoning the Dreary Dreamer from His Sorrowful Seas!”
The insane music swelled into a crescendo of taunting and bravado as the snow flurries intensified into a blizzard. The heights straightened to attention at the command of a spectral conductor, the echoing noise of space deepening with the eerie chorus of the awakening of human consciousness by a black monolith aeons and aeons ago in the uncharted past of the Earth, a hymn that wafted to Jupiter and its moons and the final alignment before the birth of the Star Child out of the womb of an ancient promise that was meant to be fulfilled, much prophesied in the forgotten corners of the universe to come to pass with great devastation and loss. And so it was that Walsingham grasped tendrils of the Great Mystery, substantial enough to enthrall, yet not enough to fully satisfy.
The Inhumane Society burned with the light of a thousand voices darkened by the dulcet dulcimer of the realization of the Gaping Maw that consumes all who venture into it. And upon his head lay a crown of onyx tinged with jealousy and iron. Walsingham saw this in his mind, a place as cavernous as the grains of sand resting like a treasure hoard on the shining shores of the winding sea.
They conjured ropes to bind him with and carried him off like a disgruntled and highly argumentative treasure chest. They dragged him on their backs like a lugging beast of the hunt, grunting under the strain, grumbling loaded curses long passed out of the annals of Man written in the blood, sweat, and tears of millennia upon millennia of the series of unfortunate events tipping the balance of existence into an aberrant state of disarray. The philosopher Pyrites of Samos had spoken of such a concept, though overshadowed by his love of gilded oratory on the divine nature of gold as opposed to the other metals, and his works were at the forefront of Walsingham’s captive mind, captive to fear and terror of the unknown which the Inhumane Society expertly awoke in their foes to bolster the lust for barbarity that would claw through the lies of civilized society and belie them and kick them under foot like the meanest motes of sand and dust under the boots of a proud conquerer. Gold was the greatest metal, Walsingham realized, yet it too had ersatz substitutes, for was that not what Pyrites’ name meant? And the Author had seen fit to maintain that name passed to him from his parents, no doubt, thinking on Diogenes’ shocking and mind-numbing rebuttal. The Alleged Virgin was no longer Alleged. Something..... everything..... nothing at all..... had changed.
“A great battle is on the horizon, Master Faraday,” said the keen-eyed proprietor of a clock shop. Rim-wired spectacles gazed down a long old nose, a splinter of wonder in his ancient eyes. “It has long been foretold, yet kept secret, lest the people scream and run away for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time, for even the wisest amongst us cannot tell when the great battle will commence.” The clocks chimed at the hour, and Faraday looked around. Florence and Alighiero were less startled, though. They had passed by many times before. As the chiming subsided, a particular mahogany-backed horologue almost whispered to him. It’s face showed a full moon and seven stars twinkling around it. Light reflected, seeming to him as if the clockmaker had somehow captured the stars themselves. Embossed in gold, the stars circled the silver moon as a sun is orbited by planets. The voice of the proprietor broke through his reveries. “I know Diophantus Diogenes, my stars, yes. Brilliant mind. Shame he wasted it on becoming a doctor.” Florence smiled. Alighiero was pensive, looking in Faraday’s direction. “Which make is that one?” he asked, pointing. Surprise welled in the proprietor’s eyes. “Funny you should ask, as it’s not one of mine.” Faraday turned back, curious. “It’s not?” Florence said. The proprietor shook his head. “No. If it were mine it would carry my distinct signature.” He went over to a workbench in the back and picked up a gear. He showed it to them. Etched in the metal there were two initials, small enough to be seen: AD. The proprietor then pointed back to the mahogany-backed clock and said, “This one was crafted by a man I only met once, and that was before the Great Fire of Rivendell. The silver you see here is the real thing. The gold, though, is pyrite. The hands are of quartz, and the face carved out of obsidian mined from the deep igneous quarries of Morris Peak. It is a magnificent masterpiece.”
“But who built it?” Faraday asked. The proprietor smiled. “Oh, no, young master. Not built. Recovered.”
“How -“
“Darling, something’s wrong.” Florence had taken his hand and grasped it firmly in her own.
Alighiero withdrew the sonic screwdriver, tense. The proprietor had vanished, footsteps like a ship’s wake on the water into some adjoined attic area above them. “We should follow him,” Florence said. And so they raced to the attic, the shadows coalescing outside the shop.
The proprietor now bent over a small box in an alcove, wrenching out a crossbow and a sword. Green robes with eyes and question marks were also in the box, as was a black banner with a white swan furled messily. Mallahnson was in awe. “I thought they were lost forever after the Fall of 667 Dark Avenue to the Randoms! Where is the biro pen that went with them?” The biro pen that went with them was floating around in the dark caverns of space from where it had been dropped from the TARDIS one time. The proprietor jumped a bit, surprised at their presence, and said, “The biro pen has been lost to time, unfortunately. Legend tells it was last seen in the hands of the fabled Emperor of the Internet, famed for his purple lightsaber which he had kept at the displeasure of his master who reigned before him.”
“What is this ‘Internet’?” asked Faraday.
“It is another realm, subtle yet touching our own reality, a world between worlds. Its essence is known as the Code, and it has an analogous function to magic in this world, underlying and manifesting itself in various forms, from subtle to gross, from fire to water and everything in between. At certain times, entry can be gained to it, where only an impenetrable barrier stood between the contact of realms. The shadows that amass outside are from this other realm, bent to serve Israphel’s dark will. In the Internet Israphel would be a Haxx0r Lord. For it is because of the Haxx0rs that the Intellecteers are all but extinct. And it is because of Israphel that the Haxx0rs arose and broke the ancient balance of the Code.”
Faraday could again appreciate the weight and the destiny of the eternal conflict that raged around him. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, to stumble into this greater tale that seemed to span the ages. How did the proprietor know all of this? “How do you know all of this, sir? How do you know of these legends?”
The proprietor seemed small in the dim light of the attic. He wore a sad and shy smile. “I have not been entirely honest with you. My name is Auguste Dupin.”
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Post by Foxy on Apr 15, 2019 13:00:52 GMT -5
There is so much I like about this new installment. "The Author is dead" reminds me of the Composer is Dead, which is one of my favorite picture books. I also love the doctor's response to the student and its parallels to "If there's nothing out there, then what made that noise?" I liked the imagery you used when you described the clock. I wonder who the "Emperor of the Internet" with his purple light saber is. I only know of one purple light saber wielding Jedi.
The ending is interesting!
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Post by Dante on Apr 15, 2019 14:50:41 GMT -5
Why Jacques, you've been reading my early work! Or remembering it, at least. I'm flattered. Those were the days, weren't they?
I enjoyed this chapter tremendously. I like the way you fully interweave the metafiction of the story into its own plot, the analysis and criticism of the plot into its own plot; that's the kind of joyously meta flair that I can really appreciate. You're on fire when it comes to weaving your themes and motifs into your world, too; the self-repetition, mirroring, nested images and cycles of recursion are, fittingly, not un-Snicketesque.
We're nearing the end of this volume now. It's been quite an undertaking. Good luck.
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