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Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 7, 2022 11:25:23 GMT -5
In his last post, a comment on someone's AsoUE fic (I think), he talked about "moving on" from the past and the dangers that arise when not doing so. 667 wouldn't have been 667 without him, or Linda, or Hermes for that matter. He is quite the stuff of legends, isn't he?
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Mar 7, 2022 22:01:24 GMT -5
Those were the days
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Mar 7, 2022 21:52:04 GMT -5
1. Orphan'd Omnibus 2. Hiss'd Homicide 3. Curdl'd Chaos 4. Maladaptive Malignity 5. Vain Violincello 6. Squalid Suspiration 7. Corvinary Crossings 8. Doctoral Deleteria 9. Fortune's Fiddlers 10. Ghost'd Ground 11. Fernald's Folly 12. Preludio della Penombra 13. Beatrice Beach'd
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Oct 20, 2021 2:38:46 GMT -5
Noble Enough
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Feb 17, 2021 18:33:26 GMT -5
Wtf? You are doing a PhD on the series? Wow! Anyway, welcome back! Hi! Yes, I managed to convince my supervisor that the books NEED to be studied, and I even got a scholarship to work on this project so I'm really hyped It's just difficult to organise everything in an academic way, and there is still so so much I have to read and think about... I've just started after all Excellent.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Aug 8, 2020 1:07:43 GMT -5
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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 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 Jacques Snicket on Jan 9, 2019 13:47:16 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).
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Jan 8, 2019 16:45:48 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 10
Daniel Faraday was running for his life as usual, a phrase which here means “he had been separated from Florence Zimmerman and Alighiero Mallahnson and was now trying to hide from the relentless pursuit of the Inhumane Society’s reckless and unscrupulous minions”. He had run from his enemies before, but he had always been alone. He had been alone ever since his adoptive family the Humes had perished, leaving him nothing but a charred inheritance. Theodora had found him and trained him in the ways of V.F.D., and then she had disappeared, never to be seen again. That was when Alexandra Radzinsky had taken a sinister interest in him and the ersatz sugar bowl that had once been in his possession, believing it to be the real sugar bowl. That was when he’d met Ivo Hardrada, the man who would later betray him, an act which would have led to his certain death had a time-traveling Count Olaf from the future of another timeline not selfishly intervened in the villainous squabble. Faraday had escaped with his life again, but that time there was something else at work, something else Mallahnson and his physicist uncle were at the center of. He had not died from Alexandra Radzinsky’s poisoned bullet. He ought to have been dead, yet he had survived, inexplicably. Somehow, time travel had made him an exception to the rule. But he was not alone anymore. He ran quicker. He was not alone. Florence. Florence was in danger. Mrs. Zimmerman, Florence: kind and elegant and beautiful and smart and pained and magnificent and indomitable —
He stopped. Listening for footsteps, the creaking of shadows, he settled for a brisk walk. They had been heading for the site of the TARDIS, hidden in the past in which they were in now. They had been trailed. The TARDIS was not there. Someone had taken it. But who? To when? Before they could figure it out, a massive army had swarmed them, the leader the same person he had seen in the vision, evoking a sad and dreary god who feasted on living nightmares.
Florence had wielded her umbrella both as shield and blaster. Mallahnson had pulled out what he called a “sonic screwdriver” that he’d borrowed from a friend of his a very long time ago. Faraday had not known what to do, or how to defend them, having no weapons on him, save his mind and his heart.
Assailed thus, they had been scattered, and now here he was, hiding like a coward when she was no match for the darkness he had awoken by traveling back to the burnt remains of the Baudelaire mansion. If anything happened to her, he would to the astonishment of all sound logic always hold himself responsible no matter what anybody else would try to tell him. Florence was his second chance. His redemption. He felt that if she were to die, it would be over, quantum exemption or not. Dellegaarde would win. Love would be for naught. The world would certainly grow more quiet, but not in the way he wanted. This quietude was dour and imposing, bereft of hope and the will to fight.
He looked back. The swarm of Inhumane Society members grew into focus, the silver I.S.’s on their robes glinting in the night like discordant cicadas. They chanted gloomily, dark magic flowing from them. Scream and run away, they said, daring him to scream and run away. Run, run run run run run run run, or die, die die die die die die die die die die. Their leader swept them aside, parting them like wisps of smoke. Yellow eyes glowed, framed by tawny hair. “Well well well, dearie. Look what we have here.”
Daniel blanched. He had heard of this man. Pyratinus Gold, known for making deals with prices and princes. “I told old Severus that the game would begin, and so it has.” Gold filed before his army like a general.
“So. Daniel Faraday. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Shake my hand?” The dealer held it out. A crooked grin leapt from his face, and Daniel remembered the vision he’d had in the Leek and Bong where death was everywhere. And the thought came to him that it would be just like that crooked grin to shamelessly and seamlessly rise in response to the deluge of carnage — the rites of a dreary god. He refused.
Pyratinus Gold glowered. “You dareth to refuseth me, thou foolish child?” A snarl as fierce as the Tasmanian dust storms spurted forth. “I am the one who single-handedly overthrew the great Empire of Septimania, I upended the fortunes of the city of Agrabah and left it a heap of dusted ruins and mausoleums, I stole the Blue Apples of Hyperborea, I led V.F.D. on the false trail of the sugar bowl, ever so hidden in plain sight, so secret and so covert and so mundane, that I was able to get them to trip over their own shoelaces on a wild arsonist chase. Yes, I set the schism into motion, and all schisms before and afterwards. I was taught by the Dark Lord Israphel himself and you, young fool, shall perish.” Lightning cackled from his eyes and his fiendishly laughing mouth, spreading to his fingertips. “Attack,” he said to his army, and withdrew out of sight in a crackle of dark energy.
The faceless Inhumane Society members drew flaming amethyst swords forged from the core of the deepest volcanic abscess under the surface of the crust, melded with the sparking meteorites from beyond the Kuiper Belt. They were feral creatures, slaves to an inhuman will, silhouettes of their former selves. They grinned in anticipation of battle. Lunging forward, they sped at Faraday, who whirled aside and took to his feet once more. They chanted dark psalms and firestarting folk songs, hymns to a villainous William Shakespeare.
They were gaining on him. A firestorm of fury raged in them. They were drawing dark powers from the flames of infernal prophecy, silent Janissaries before the spring. They pirouetted and gamboled like a festival of omens, giving launch to their inner atavistic impulses. Sleek and fleet of foot as could be, they put on a show of horror. The infernal rite had begun. Daniel Faraday stood, transfixed by the darkness. He was fading and the beast within him wrenched against its chains, waiting to be unleashed. The eyes narrowed as a purple flame shone about him. The grip was relaxed on him, and the Inhumane Society fled. “Come on, darling,” cried a very familiar dulcet tone. Florence had saved him.
————
He watched from the darkness as she had thwarted his attack on the boy, one with the shadows. His servants had fled before her. A dark sneer grew across his visage, firmly dour in its inhumanity. Florence Zimmerman had been a thorn in his side for far too long. Still, he would have Daniel Faraday, and he would make him into what his destiny demanded! The Master was calling. He would conceal himself until the time was right. He disappeared in a cacophony of lightning, scorching the earth around him.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 9, 2018 13:12:11 GMT -5
Is " dreary" a nod to the Gothic Archies? I enjoyed the humor at the end; it gave me a chuckle. Yes. I've had in mind a particular post in an old thread called "Fortunately Unfortunately" where the Baudelaires have been sent back from the Death Star (Return of the Jedi), (no one knew the Star Wars references) and find themselves at the charred remains of their home, with a robed choir slowly emerging singing "Dreary, Dreary" from the Gothic Archies book songtrack, like a scene in a play. Well, unless Florence Zimmerman is yet another villain in disguise, I take it from this that she did not actually mean to put poor Mr. Faraday through yet more horror and suffering. I guess that's just his lot in life! At least he seems to have come out of things with a better understanding of the situation. She does have a past with the enemies of the series, yes. Yes. I've had in mind a particular post in an old thread called "Fortunately Unfortunately" where the Baudelaires have been sent back from the Death Star (Return of the Jedi), (no one knew the Star Wars references) and find themselves at the charred remains of their home, with a robed choir slowly emerging singing "Dreary, Dreary" from the Gothic Archies book songtrack, like a scene in a play. Actually, to correct my past self, it was a thread called "Persnickety Pick Your Own Adventure" I was thinking of. Or another thread like it.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 8, 2018 23:08:47 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 09
They were all dead. The once-inhabited foyer of the Leek and Bong as now a pale reminder of its former joie de vive. Dark mist hovered over tables, arched backs arranged by the sudden and inexplicable throes of death dotted the scene. Misplaced limbs dangled carelessly over ridges, railings and floor rugs. It was as if a manic painter had used the corpses for some macabre masterpiece, utilizing the environment surrounding to create an unholy mise en scène for a play no one dared to name aloud for fear of blasphemy.
Willing himself not to regurgitate, Faraday took a deep shaky breath. He slowly looked around. An aura of danger and imperceptible doom floated just beyond the tip of his tongue. He recalled faintly a similar feeling when he’d woken up outside the charred Baudelaire mansion. Jacques Snicket had warned him to flee, and so he had, on the wings of a destiny more convoluted than he had ever imagined. That destiny had led him here. He felt sick. Again, the urge to vomit came upon him, but he stifled it for the second time. He glanced over to the far table, where the two woman had sat mere seconds ago. Alive, well, and together.
There was an arresting silence now. It was as if the glow of a light had lost all intensity, despite remaining lit. The two women resembled sculptures in death. Their hands stretched out to reach the other, barely touching each other’s fingers. Slumped forward as if in crushing despair, tears still visible on their pale alabaster cheeks, eyes shut forever closed. They were dead. And nothing Alighiero Mallahnson did could bring them back, no quantum trick, no trip back into the past, no hope for the future. This is what will happen should you fail…
He whipped his head around. The whisper had come from nowhere, yet it seemed to him to emanate from his own mind. It had been distinctly feminine. He could not place whom it belonged to. He shook his head and took another measured look around. Dried blood caked the surfaces of the room. An acrid stench wafted to his nostrils, causing him to gag in revulsion. Find Diophantus Diogenes, the voice spoke again. Faraday started. Who was Diophantus Diogenes? Before he could think more, the atmosphere began to dim.
Dreary, dreary, dreary, dreary, dreary, dreary.....
The lamplights flickered. A cavernous pause bellowed like a cave troll. An eerie chorus mounted as the dark mists saturated the room, lending a magenta penumbra to the horrifying masque playing out in front of him. Black-robed figures materialized out of the shadows amongst the tables. Garroted voices intoned a morose dirge to a morose god. Drawn cowls hid their profiles in menacing silhouettes. A lightless fire spurted above them, purple like the hue of Florence Zimmerman’s accoutrements yet somehow more malicious.
An imposing figure, thick-set and full of power, stepped into the center of an invisible circle. He raised his big hands and called out to the Dread Darkness, eyes black as obsidian mirrors. It was an Elder Language he spoke, given to nocturnal soothsayers since the dawn of human consciousness from beyond the stars. Sound rang out, rattling the foundations of the world and upsetting the course of the planets in their celestial solar circumambulations. Heavy waters gushed outward from the middle where he stood, an infernal lightning post for the Netherworld to coalesce its writhing energies. Obscure tentacles of dark energy flailed wildly against the human circle, inky blackness suffocating the air like an oppressive curse.
Gemstone eyes flared in the darkness and an eldritch laugh thundered from the depths.
———————————
Coughing suddenly, Faraday awoke. Florence Zimmerman’s anxious face hovered above him, flanked by a discomfited Alighiero Mallahnson. “You were out for quite a while.” Florence’s voice was tinged with fear. Faraday rose slowly to his feet. They were in another room in another place. “What...what was that?” he asked her. A glimmer of horror in her eyes, she shook her head. “I transported us out of there. I shouldn’t have done that, knowing you haven’t gotten used to the way we travel. Dante here experienced an extreme bout of seasickness the first time we met.” Mallahnson stiffly turned away, ignoring her. She laughed softly at the memory, yet her face grew ashen. “I saw darkness rolling off of you, darling. What did I put you through?”
He recalled everybody dead in the Leek and Bong. The robed figures. The mist. The despair. “Everyone was dead.”
Mallahnson whipped his head around. “What?”
Faraday repeated himself. “Everyone was dead. I saw it as I see you now, Mrs. Zimmerman.”
“Florence, my darling, call me Florence,” she corrected abruptly, caressing his cheek. He continued.
“I saw them all dead. There were others, though, appearing out from the shadows, chanting a strange hymn.”
Florence paled considerably. “A strange hymn?”
Faraday nodded. “I heard only one word, though.”
“What word was that, dearest?”
“Dreary.”
“Darling, you are in danger.”
“Any more danger than I’m usually in?”
“This is worse,” interjected Mallahnson. “My experiments have been turning out...odd results. Broken time loops. Disappearances. And the diminution of Florence’s magic.”
“Which is why I’ve told you to be careful, Dante,” Florence lightly admonished him. “I won’t be there to help you every single time. You know that.”
“Does the name ‘Diophantus Diogenes’ mean anything to you?” Faraday asked.
Florence regarded him again with her concerned eyes. Mallahnson paced about in thought.
“Yes, it does,” Mallahnson finally answered, “he’s a doctor. Works at the Belled Cat Sanitarium. Or he used to. Why?”
“I was told that if I did not find him, everyone would be dead.”
“But he perished in a fire set by one of the Snickets.”
“No, you timey-wimey nitwit, it was Ellington Feint.”
“How do you know that, you old hag?”
“Well, Dante, since when did Kit Snicket suddenly acquire a taste for jazz music?”
“Point taken.”
“Ellington Feint?” Faraday asked. Where had he heard the name before? Then it clicked. The headquarters! A Fitzgerald Feint was the resident coffee brewer. He inwardly smacked himself for overlooking that. “There was a coffee brewer named Feint, but he disappeared sometime before the headquarters —” he stopped himself, the guilt rising in him anew. He bowed his head.
Florence went over to him. “What’s wrong?” she said, as if she could feel his pain. He was trembling. She cupped his face in her hands, lifted his head up, and brushed her thumbs at the edges of his eyes, opening them, and she tentatively held his gaze like the most fragile glass work. “Darling,” she pleaded.
“I helped her set so many fires...I thought it was for the greater good...I thought I was noble enough...” His face was haunted by guilt and sudden realization of the truth. His look was the epitome of defeat. “I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it.” He willed himself to be swallowed up by the ground beneath his feet. Finding himself still existing, he cursed mentally.
“I’m here, dearest, I’m here,” Florence whispered into his ear as she held him for some time. He melted into her embrace, hungry for the solace she offered, unaware of anything or anyone but her holding him close, her scent divine. His heart fluttered, punching a hole of hope through his despair. She kissed him softly and they turned to find Mallahnson conspicuously looking away from their general direction.
“I, uh, was just over here,” the physicist said, facing them at last, embarrassment on his scientific face. “Are we done with the kissy face, Florence?”
“Oh, don’t mind him, my darling,” she whispered to a red-faced Faraday, “he’s never been in love before.” She smiled at him warmly. He nearly swooned but for her steady hand.
“Not true! My first love was Newton’s Principia Mathematica.”
“And you wonder why I tell you to get out more.”
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Oct 13, 2018 13:21:18 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 08
“Harold, they’re adorable.”
The Leek and Bong was a rather peculiar inn as it was built and financed from the coffers of one of the laissez-faire Duncans from Mistral City across the Sargasso Sea. The place was meant to be in competition with the Horse and Crown elsewhere.
“Listen, Ethel, how many times have I told this to you, we’re adorable too.”
“We are not, Harold, don’t be ridiculous!”
“Well, it’s what we’re doing now. Being adorable.”
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
Mallahnson’s eyes were twinkling at the overheared argument between what surely was an old married couple who were arguing over another couple who were also assumed to be married despite the fact that they were both women.
The two were at another table, staring into each other’s eyes. The taller blonde was an elegant ghost of the past come to life, hair like soft sunlight, pearl earrings like stars, lips like rouge, eyes like icy blue. The other woman, a bit shorter, brunette, looked as if she had been newly born out of some cosmic wish the other woman had wordlessly spoken one night in the lonely confines of her sophistication, and it was as if she had had her wish granted, flung from space like a burning meteorite only to land at her feet, scorchless and immaculate, behind a busy shop counter in the middle of a glistening winter.
The two sat like that for what seemed to be an eternity as some unheard melody wafted between them like the scent of the finest perfume that only they could smell, a song that only they could hear. The ache of a thousand lifetimes spent without each other, or just one. Just one lifetime would be enough. Just one lifetime without the warmth of her touch, her smile, her laughter, her eyes. It was like a nightmare neither of them could wake from had been their lives before they had met each other.
“Therese, darling, whatever is the matter?” The soft voice dripped with concern like fresh dew off the morning breeze. Therese almost sobbed.
The older woman grabbed her shaking hand and lightly squeezed it, looking into her turmoiled hazel eyes, pleading grey into storming brown.
“I- I don’t know who I am anymore. I - I’m being torn apart,” quiet sobs gasp through her speech, and she wished more than ever than to disappear, to not burden her with yet another foolish outburst of emotion. The other woman could only look heartbroken as she continued in between her flowing tears. “I begged for you to come back to me after you left, everywhere I walked I could only see you, and my old life was cast away to some other era of which only faded photographs remain because I lost the only person who didn’t make me feel like I was a chore to be done, or something to be brought out when it was suited to somebody else, and for the first time I felt like I mattered, because you came into my life like a dream that was too good to be true.” Therese was shaking all over, a bitterness and a grief beyond words sizzled through her, and the other woman was powerless to do anything but watch her suffer.
“You broke my heart, Carol, and I know I should hate you for hurting me, but I can’t. I can’t deny my feelings for you, not anymore, not after what you put me through, and I know I should have never forgiven you for it, and I know I should never have agreed to meet you here in this strange…place…but ever since I’ve had the time to myself to sort out my selfish feelings for you, and I realized that I should never have gone with you in the first place, and my heart would not be broken, and your life would be happier without me in it!” She was sobbing wholly now, a crushed hope like a dampened sunrise.
Carol was stunned, her grey eyes brimming with unshed tears and a maelstrom of emotion brewing across her face. “Please don’t say that, dearest. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I never should have left you like that. I never should have left you at all. I can’t stand you like this, Therese.”
“I want to be free of this pain,” Therese whispered. “I am so in love with you that I can’t bear another moment without you. I would have died for you, Carol, had you wanted me to. I would do anything for you.”
Carol dropped the cutlery in her remaining hand and rushed over to her, grabbing her into a desparate embrace, tears flowing down her ivory cheeks, and kissed her hard. “God damn you, Harge,” Carol breathed to herself as she kissed Therese’s tears away. “I love you, Therese,” holding her close, caressing her gently as if she were the last rose in existence. “I will always be here for you, I’ll never leave you again, my beautiful angel, I promise you.”
“I am yours forever, always and forever. I’ve been so selfish and you don’t deserve that, Carol, you don’t deserve me. I took your family from you. I took your life from you.”
“It’s not about deserve. I took what you gave willingly. And I gave of myself to you willingly. I love you, my darling, and I will never stop loving you. Besides Rindy, what I had before you was hardly what anyone could call a life. I would do it all over again, Therese, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in heaven and in hell, to be with you.”
Therese was gazing at her. The pain still welled in her eyes, but there was something else there, too. It was like the eye of a damaged hurricane, steady, yet fragile. “Oh, Carol -”
She regarded Therese warmly, a fire of protectiveness blazing in her grey eyes. “You’ve done nothing to make it up to me for. It is I who need to make it up to you, my darling.”
Therese softened.
“What was this place again?”
“This? The Leek and Bong. Isn’t that awful.”
Away from that secluded spot in the corner, Alighiero Mallahnson looked on wistfully. He turned to Faraday. “I knew I was right to come here. I just knew it.”
“What was that all about?”
“A little experiment of mine. You see, before I found you, I had gone to this very establishment sometime in your future and placed something there. A slip of paper with the words ‘one mint julep’. Isaac Newton once theorized about ‘spooky action at a distance’ when it came to gravity’s effects. He had stumbled upon what we now know as the curvature of space and time. It is the same with the sub-atomic. In my line of work, distances and times do not matter at all. It is instantaneous. Previously when I ran this experiment, I had left a scarf here, and when I went back in time to this place, they had a terrible fight and they never reconciled. They were over. But something changed. I don’t know what, but something changed in space and time.”
Faraday was mystified by this. He knew that his adventures had been unusual and fraught with trials and tribulations. And his heart had been tested just as surely as had the hearts of the two women at the corner table. But had he come out better for it, as they had for what seemed to be this time around? Then a surge of unpleasantness washed over him when he thought of Mallahnson’s “experiment”. It rankled him. Love wasn’t something you could run tests on. It was personal and subjective, ineffable and undefinable. “Don’t toy with their hearts,” he said to Mallahnson with finality, thinking of Theodora. Thinking of Kit.
“They deserve to be happy, in each other’s arms.” Faraday felt lost as he said this.
Mallahnson had the decency to be ashamed, at least it showed on his face. “I’m sorry, Daniel. I was never good at this, you know, emotions.”
“But why else are we here?”
“Oh. I’m waiting for a contact. You see, I left another message, this time in the past but not too far, telling her to meet us here.”
Faraday suddenly had an image of a woman in purple. He shook his head slightly, as if in half-remembrance. He’d seen her before. Somehow. It eluded him.
“Her name’s Florence. Florence Zimmerman. She’s a magician by trade, having lost her family in the war. I hear she’s made a new friend. Jonathan Barnavelt. Another magician. Eccentric fellow. But then again she’s eccentric herself, so it was bound to happen sometime.”
“What was bound to happen? Alighiero, you sly fox, is that you?”
Faraday turned, and there she was. Elegant and stately, clad in purple carrying her purple umbrella, she smiled cheekily, eyes dancing with curiosity. “Who’s this, Dante?”
“A spitting image of his uncle.”
“Hello there, young man.”
“Hello.”
“Do you like magic?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m sure you’ll like it when I do this.”
When he finally turned, what Faraday saw made his blood run cold.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 26, 2018 15:52:54 GMT -5
Deleterious Diagnosis 07
A bright whirlwind surrounded the pair as they traversed the environs of spacetime. Sound was wooshing backwards and time seemed to go taut, stretching everything into infinity and snapping back into nothing all at once. It was a trillion lifetimes, and it was no time at all. An eerie sky rushed within and without, with dark stars emblazoned on a field of stark white. Existence shrunk and expanded as one living leviathan sustaining the cycles of all.
Heraclitus had been correct, as had Thales: all was fire and water and all states of form in between them, dancing energy, pulsating, moving forever, spiraling and rising and falling, simmering and condensing, forming and dying, amassing and dissipating. Life itself was a mere bubble in the ordered chaos of the Flux, which the Greeks had named Rhea, the Ever-Flowing One, Mother of Gods and Men, Nyx, the Night, and the Babylonians had named Tiamat, the Great Deep. Out of the Flowing arose a Spinning Star tapering itself into a panentheistic diamond. This was the First Sun, the Pythagorean Heart of the Universe, the Goddess of Which Faraday had seen glimpses of in his visions, and was now experiencing first hand with an almost-as-legendary Alighiero Mallahnson. They were in Her Realm now, silently, passengers on the Great Barque of Ra sailing through the Cosmic River of the Birth of Light from the Great Womb of the All-Encompassing Darkness. It was a Darkness reminiscent of the aura of menace surrounding the higher villains involved in the war against V.F.D., and its schism into "pro-water" and "pro-fire" sides. Yet this Darkness was not threatening, and neither was the Fire that arose forth from it. Both Fire and Water were "gentle", and sustained one another in their great dance.
Countless histories streamed past like a melody, its notes arranged in the symphony of cause and effect, interrelation and reciprocity, a grand orchestra conducted since before the ardent yearning of the first stars themselves. From Light burst Fire, and from Fire burst Warmth, and from Warmth burst Life. And Life begot Death, Death begot Life anew, and the Waters came forth from the furnace of Fire, and the Water was condensed from the supernal quantum Darkness out of which Light was made. And they sailed through the birth of the universe, a tale of balance and imbalance, and alighted upon an open area on a cloudless night, and the universe contracted in a flash of light.
In the deep, he dreamed of Kit Snicket. Only, Kit Snicket was not Kit Snicket, and the Black Cat Coffee shop was deserted in the afternoon, a dry musk of coffee beans in the air, and somebody tied up within a secret compartment behind the cupboard. He dreamed of fire, and of Kit Snicket running from that fire as it consumed the V.F.D. Library along with the rest of the Headquarters, and he dreamed of question-marked eyebrows that were laughing as the fire and smoke rose. He dreamed of Count Olaf in the underwater catalog of the Hotel Denouement. He dreamed of the blue police box, and of Alexandra Radzinsky who had taken it and left him for dead. He dreamed of the Mortmain Mountains, and the great snows of winters past. And he dreamed of an indomitable and elegant woman clad in purple, wielding a cane with its gem aglow in a strange battle against sentient pumpkins whose eyes burnt with the unholy flames of Israphel the Dark Lord, and of a foreboding house with a clock in its walls, ticking back to —
He gasped like a fish out of water when he woke. A haze clouded his vision, and he had an acute coughing fit when he tried to stand up. “Easy there, lad,” Alighiero Mallahnson bent in his view, looking over him. “Quantum dislocation is a common side-affect to the method we have just used. Take a moment.” Faraday nodded weakly, still disoriented, staring blankly into wherever they were now, his breathing subsiding to a more manageable state. “We are here.” They were along a road in a clearing, with the smoke of a tiny hamlet close by, edging into view. Mallahnson stretched his arms, enveloping the day in a theatrical sweep. “We are heading to a very good establishment. A quaint little stop-off.”
“The Horse and Crown?”
“No. The Leek and Bong. I’m good friends with the proprietor.”
“Oh my days...”
——————————————————
Ellington Feint glowered in her disguise. That fool of a boy was not coming. She realized it might come to this, that he’d found out who she really was before she’d intended. As it was, he was now a liability to her plans. She could take no chances. In the days of her son she’d taught him to always have a contingency plan. She wondered about Fitzgerald and what he was doing now. She had a funny feeling, but pushed it down. The air crackled with demented intensity and black void. The shadows deepened and the lights quailed for fear. This was the heat death of the universe. Quintus Dellegaarde was here.
“Your son is dead, Feint.”
She nodded, blankly. “You killed him?”
“Indeed. He was too dangerous to be left alive.”
“Dangerous?”
“Yes. A trait he acquired from you. You are unfathomable, Feint, and Lord Israphel abhors a vaccuum. You seem to play both sides like a saxophone, but I know where your heart truly lies. In the wild. With your dead father. With Lemony Snicket. With the Bombinating Beast.”
“He hurt me. He ruined my life.”
“And so you set out to ruin his sister. It all began in that train cell. Impressive, Feint.” He laughed, a dark echo of things to come, when the Dark Lord arose once more with power and might to enslave all to his will.
“Why are you here?”
“Why am I here, indeed,” Dellegaarde was made of stone. He drew a poison dart from the inside of his coat, seething with the insanity of pure evil.
“You will prove to me that you are useful, or you will meet your son’s fate.”
Unnatural hatred glowered from within the depths of an ancient hunger. The hate was swelling in Ellington now, fed by this eldritch source beyond the stars. Her eyes began to flame black purple and her skin began to decay. She was flushed with death, yet she did not die. She felt him jab the poison dart, and a riotous fury erupted as she burned the poison out of her system. She hissed like a snake, basking in her anger and the utter power it gave her.
“You dare...”
“Yes, I dare, Feint. I dare because I alone am worthy to dare. You have proven yourself up to the task.”
“And that task is?”
“I have a new mission for you. You will find Florence Zimmerman and incapacitate her. Subdue her magic.”
A flicker of fear passed her face as if she remembered something. “She is very powerful.”
“Yes...indeed. Deal with her, Ellington Feint, and you shall have your revenge.”
“Where will I find her?”
“Your puppet and Mallahnson will lead you to her.”
“That boy is no longer my puppet. He is a liability.”
“Are you blind, Ellington Feint? Have you forgotten the face of your father already?”
Ellington wavered, and said, “No, I have not.”
“Do not lie to me, Ellington Feint.”
Dellegaarde regarded her with one last, icy look, and turned away into the black mist to utter one last thing:
“I shall remember this.”
Ellington Feint waited, and at last she was alone.
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Post by Jacques Snicket on Sept 12, 2018 0:07:46 GMT -5
For Linda Rhaldeen. In Memoriam. Rest in peace, Bright Star of 667.
Deleterious Diagnosis 06
The pleading and the pealing of the bells sounded across the cold air as a mass of people crowded around an ornate funeral casket. The city of Winnipeg was in mourning. Various dignitaries from around the world, from sunlit sultanates in the Sahara to the anchoritic anaerobic aeries of the Antarctic. The pallbearers were like stately elms shadowing a landscape filled with the now diminished treasures of a memory of the blooming summer. Cavalcades of municipal knights and pages followed in the dreary wake like a gnarled ghost ship gliding through the mists, a phrase which here means, "it was a very very very very very very very sad and melancholic day". The Duchess of Winnipeg, Lenore R., had perished in a fire that destroyed her entire mansion. As attentive readers may recall from the first book of another series, and who no doubt know exactly what "perished" means, "perished" is a word which here means "killed". All that remained were her ashes, once upon a gray, cloudless night in May.
Now, dear reader, there was something that was not once upon a gray, cloudless night in May, nor any other night, and that was the wild and unkempt hair of S. Theodora Markson. Her hair was currently residing on her head, and her head was residing on the rest of her body. Strangely for a funeral, she was attired like an airwoman, with leather jacket, pants, boots, and a wild and unkempt goggle cap to go with her wild and unkempt hair, which was usually when she was driving a roadster. "Why are we here, Theodora?" a young Daniel Reuel Faraday asked his wildly- and unkemptly-haired chaperone. "We are here to drop a secret message off into the late Duchess's casket, my young apprentice." She sniffed the air redundantly, a word which here means "she sniffed the air". Faraday wondered why she was being so sniffy all of a sudden, as if there were a cake in the air in front of her that only she could sniff. Accordingly, the only words on his lips were disguised as a cough, "Carmelita Spats."
Theodora whipped her wild hair in a whiplash of wildness so fast that any other hair on any other person would have died immediately of follicle-snapping. "What was that?" she sharply probed, knowing full well what he has said. He grew red in the already freezing cold, and his laughter became a pelting of snowballs, and he pecked her on the cheek. Theodora was no doubt surprised at this, and lightly hit him. "This....is...a...funeral," she ellipsised for emphasis, though her eyes and her smile were warm. "Carmelita has become something of an urban legend for those who attend Prufrock Preparatory School," he told Theodora, who looked to the side, eyes closed. "Yes, my apprentice, I remember hearing about her, though we weren't in the same classes. I rarely left my dormitory, anyway, except to go to the library. I remember the Baudelaires as well, and those Quagmire siblings, all without homes, without parents, and most unfortunately, without chaperones." Her mood went downcast like a sudden monsoon. Faraday took her trembling hand in his and kissed her hand, her knuckles, her fingers. "I have you, Theodora, as my chaperone, and I wouldn't have chosen anybody else." He meant it, and she knew he meant it, and at that she drew him into a very tight tear-filled embrace. "This is not very sensible, my dear boy, but sometimes sense and sensibility have to take a day off. Look at me, being miserable..."
Faraday wrapped his arm around her, their faces almost touching. "You won't lose me, Theodora. I promise." She softly sighed, "Don't make promises you can't keep, my most exquisite apprentice, a phrase which here means 'I care about you very much, even though it is not sensible to do so'. But you bring sense to my sensibility, my darling apprentice." They remained this way for moments, until a curt interruption rudely ahemed itself. It was Quintus Dellegaarde, the most malicious maliciousness that ever maliced anyone ever, a phrase which here means "more frightening than the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard".
"Feeling sentimental, Markson? The Duchess was long overdue, in my opinion." He was icy cold like a stalactite dagger poised above an unwary reindeer. Dellegaarde sneered the death of worlds. "And you, little whelp Faraday, you think you have the courage to face the days, the months, and the years ahead? Think you can keep her poor bleeding heart together? Think you can help her maintain her oh-so-sensible exterior? Thou young fool." Taunting them, breathing fire from his nostrils, he grinned an unholy grin. "Because one day I shall destroy your happiness, Daniel Faraday, and I shall destroy your heart, S. Theodora Markson." He took out a white handkerchief which had a monogram on it that flashed too quickly to see, then he stowed it out of sight. Chuckling in an arsonistic rumble, Dellegaarde loomed around and strode off into the unknown snow drifts now surrounding the burial. Daniel and Theodora looked into each others' misty eyes in fear, love, hope, adoration, protectiveness, devotion, desperation, and newfound grief, all without any trace of sense or sensibility to be found. And then their lips met.
Daniel Faraday's eyes blinked back a torrent of tears as he stood in the burnt ruins of her residence. Theodora. The woman who'd trained him. Loved him as far as she had dared to love him back, still afraid of what others in their organization might have thought. She was sensible in that way, and in the way that she was not sensible. A hidden recess of raw, untamed power roared anew in the depths of his broken heart. And then he thought about what he and Kit had done, all the fires, all the lies, all the treachery, and, yes, all the villainy they had committed in the name of opposing villainy. What would Theodora think of him now? She would never have burned down Headquarters. She would never have lied to Jacques Snicket. She would never have asked him to help her do something villainous. She would never have lied to him. For the first time in a very long æon, a phrase which here means "not since Theodora first disappeared out of his life", Faraday knelt in the ashes and wept openly. She was gone, and it was all his fault.
Silent footfalls graced the environment of Faraday's sorrow and latent redemption. It was quiet, at first, but he looked up to regard the newcomer, and was startled by a faint remembrance he'd had somewhere. The man was tall, wearing an emerald pinstripe suit and pants, and wore a top hat on his flaming red hair. Faraday gaped at him in awe.
"The name's Alighiero Mallahnson, though I prefer to go by Dante after the great Maestro himself. You must be Daniel Faraday. I was a friend of your uncle, and seeing as you share his name, I could not help but take an interest in you, my lad."
Mallahnson paused, a catchy glint in his ever-amazed emerald eyes. "I've come to ask your help, you see. You have a peculiar grasp on quantum mechanics and time travel, which would explain your survival thus far."
"My survival?"
"Yes, your survival. Do you remember when you first came here?"
"In a blue police box underneath the pond of the Hotel Denouement."
"You also met Count Olaf, who did some reality-jumping as well."
"How did you know?"
"I invented the TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. I should know, shouldn't I?"
"My uncle never wrote about a TARDIS."
"That's because he had to keep it a secret, or else countless villains and enemies of truth, science and knowledge might get their grubby little three-dimensional hands on it! Do you have Time Travel Minutiæ?"
Faraday nodded, and handed him the book. "Your uncle had a secret copy printed just for us that would contain the coded location of the TARDIS in development. Now, due to some strange fluke, we had to build it in the past for concealment. There is no better concealment than the footnotes of the history of mankind, the places and spaces that are often overlooked and unnoticed when the great tales are being written."
"But how far in the past? And won't we need the TARDIS again? It disappeared on me at the ruined Baudelaire mansion with an enemy of mine who thinks I'm dead, and I don't know what she's done with it."
Mallahnson flicked his chin in thought. "Yes. How indeed..." He brightened. "But we don't need it. I have here in my hands something called a Portkey which ordinarily will take you anywhere else in space, but I have modified it to transport people across space and time." He held a cracked ring out on his palm. "When I activate this, we both need to be touching it in order to be transported." With a slim piece of what looked like polished wood, he tapped it and it hummed softly with glowing energy.
"How far in the past exactly are we going?"
"To the birthplace of Telchar Snicket."
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