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Post by Dante on Aug 20, 2016 2:12:12 GMT -5
Chapter Nine by Dante Under ordinary circumstances, the intrusion of a giant metal tentacle into a cruise ship or story would signal a considerable change in atmosphere. However, the Baudelaires were among the few people in the world to have previous experience of being attacked by giant metal tentacles, and, as more tentacles appeared, and an enormous shape began to heave itself in through the wide window behind the stage, accompanied by a buzzing roar that was louder than ever, the children felt that events were starting to make more sense, not less. “Submarine Carmelita!” Sunny cried, referring to a previous one of Count Olaf’s repetitively-named maritime vehicles. “That must be what was attacking the ship!” Violet cried, referring to the strange quaking impacts that had shaken the ship throughout their recent explorations. “It must be Fiona and Fernald! This is wonderful!” Klaus cried, referring to a young woman close to his heart and her hook-handed brother, who last he had heard had defected from Count Olaf and stolen this submarine. “It must be Triangle Eyes and Hooky! This is terrible!” Count Olaf cried, referring to exactly the same individuals and events as Klaus. “We’d better get out of here before they catch us!” And without a moment’s hesitation, he jabbed a long-nailed finger at the elevator’s down button. A grille-like screen began to unfold across the entrance to the elevator, forcing the Baudelaires to duck their heads back with barely time to glimpse a dark-haired figure emerging from a hatch atop the submarine. “No, Olaf!” the Baudelaires cried, but the elevator had already began a shuddering descent down the vast elevator shaft, and in moments the passageway into the theatre wings had risen up and out of sight, leaving the Baudelaires and Count Olaf alone with only each other and the flickering artificial light of the elevator for company. “Why did you do that, Olaf?” Klaus demanded, glaring angrily at the man with his hands on the controls. “Fiona and Fernald could have helped us escape from this ship!” “Perhaps they could,” answered Count Olaf smoothly, “and perhaps they couldn’t. Think harder, apprentice troupe members, and you’ll see a number of problems with this idea.” “Do you mean,” asked Violet, “that Fiona and Fernald are no friends of yours? Fiona must have defected from your troupe barely a day after joining, and for her sake, her brother abandoned you after years by your side.” “That’s part of it,” admitted Olaf, “but don’t you see that this raises more questions? Why, for instance, would they be attacking this ship?” “Well,” Violet began, and trailed off. “I suppose,” Klaus started, but couldn’t finish. “Um,” Sunny said. “Exactly,” Olaf nodded. “It’s simply another mystery, children. Those two betrayers’ motives may have changed dramatically. They were prepared to sacrifice you and me in the past; who knows what they might sacrifice today?” His expression darkened. “And that is assuming it even was those two disabled traitors.” Klaus looked back at the elevator doorway, as if he could see all the way back up to the theatre, rather than the blank metallic walls of the elevator shaft. “You mean that somebody might have stolen the submarine from them in turn?” he asked. Violet considered this. “There wasn’t time to get a close look,” she said, “especially not at the person climbing out of the submarine, but it looked to me as if there was something different about the vessel. We never saw it too clearly while we were undersea ourselves, but I got the impression that it was more dented and battered this time, as if it had been damaged and repaired, perhaps repeatedly.” “It’s only been a couple of days since we last saw the submarine Carmelita, though – I think,” Klaus argued, though his sense of time had always been rather hazy. “Surely there can’t have been time for it to be repeatedly damaged and repaired.” “Different submarine?” Sunny suggested. “Hmm,” Olaf muttered. “It wouldn’t have been beyond V.F.D. at the height of its powers to produce several of those vehicles. The organisation always had far more secrets than any one person was ever privy to.” He looked over to the flashing down arrow on the elevator controls. “I don’t doubt that I made the right choice in pressing this button,” he said, “but perhaps I made the wrong choice in getting into this elevator, or performing in this theatre, or boarding this ship in the first place. I coveted the secrets here, but they might just be far more enormous and dangerous than I ever anticipated.” The Baudelaires looked nervously at each other. Count Olaf was usually a man brimming with self-confidence the way a well-made root beer float brims with foam and ice-cream, but now he looked like a root beer float that had been left half-finished in the sun to melt. The Baudelaires had barely scraped the surface of the world’s secrets, but they knew that Count Olaf had been diving deep into countless treacherous secrets for the whole of his long life, and if he was worried, the children worried that they should be even more worried than he was – and it was while worrying about worry that Violet noticed the most worrying thing yet. “I don’t like to mention it,” she said slowly, “but isn’t this elevator descending rather far considering that we’re aboard a ship?” Klaus, Sunny, and Olaf looked around in concern, and realised that it was true. The elevator had now been descending for several minutes, and was showing no signs of reaching its destination. The entrance to the elevator had been hidden quite far down in the ship’s interior, and at the pace the elevator now appeared to be descending, judging from the speed at which the elevator shaft’s wall was sliding past the entrance, it seemed as if the elevator must already have descended below the bottom of the ship’s hull – and yet the shaft continued to descend, farther and farther down. “How is this possible?” Klaus exclaimed. “I’ve never read anything about ships, even ones for scientific exploration, having elevator shafts down to the bottom of the sea. It’s highly impractical.” “Impossible,” Sunny murmured. Olaf was especially agitated, chewing furiously at the long fingernail I mentioned earlier. “This is looking bad, Baudelaires,” he said, twitching his head around like a squirrel approaching a bird feeder. “I’m starting to think this is all an enormous trap – the bait at the end of a fishing rod, or the lantern above the jaws of one of those horrendous deep-sea fish I would sometimes see from the portholes of my submarine. It’s possible that this place isn’t even a ship at all.” “How could it not be a ship?” Violet asked, curious. “What else could it be?” He looked seriously at her. “Do you remember Anwhistle Aquatics?” he asked. “A centre for marine research and some other nonsense. The place was built to look like it was floating on the surface of the sea itself, but it secretly had many tunnels and passageways leading down into the bedrock of Gorgonian Grotto beneath it. This ship might be something similar – a building designed to look like it’s floating on the water and disguised as a boat, but actually it’s just the entrance to a secret institution hidden under the sea.” “Our destination,” Sunny said, glancing anxiously at the metal floor beneath her tiny feet. “But wait,” Klaus objected, “that doesn’t make sense with what Captain Alighieri told us and Captain Stanton earlier. He said that this was a cruise ship and an undercover V.F.D. ship that sailed all over the world, and that they had been sailing towards the Hotel Denouement just recently.” “Captain Stanton said he served on this ship, too,” Violet pointed out. “The Moth II can’t be both the entrance to a secret underwater facility and a normal ship that sails across the ocean.” “And yet, here we are,” Olaf said, gesturing around the still-descending elevator. “So what does that say about the things those babbling captains told you?” The Baudelaires were quiet for a minute, as they tried to process this information, and reconcile – a word which here means “make two opposed things join together in friendship and logic” – the accounts of the captains with the evidence of their own eyes. But, as had so often been the case throughout their sad lives, the evidence of their own eyes wholly contradicted the stories they had been told by adults they barely knew. “They were lying,” Violet said softly. Klaus shook his head, half-disbelieving. “I don’t understand. Why would the captains have told so many lies to each other when they must both have known that they both knew the truth?” Sunny looked up at her siblings with wide, trembling eyes. “Lying to us,” she whispered, and this was the most terrifying idea of all. Klaus let out a groan of frustration. “Just when it looks like things are starting to make sense, everything falls apart again,” he moaned, wringing his hands. “How can all of this possibly be explained? The evidence shows that the captains lied furiously to us while pretending just to be enemies arguing with each other, that they fled in moments in the dark and locked us aboard this ship, and ran through a room without disturbing any of the dust on the floor and vanished into a hidden cargo elevator to the bottom of the ocean! It’s the only explanation, but how can any of it have happened?” “Perhaps we can try and explain it, though,” Violet interrupted. “For example, if they really wanted to hide from us, as appears to be the case, then they could have carried some kind of bag of fake dust to cover their tracks.” At the sound of his sister’s voice, and the merciful presence of soothing logic, Klaus seemed to calm down a little. “But that would be a complex operation,” he pointed out – but with less nervous energy than before. “Remember, as soon as it went dark, they must have gone, and on the double.” “‘On the double’ means ‘quickly,’” Olaf explained to Sunny, who rolled her eyes at the unnecessary explanation but was privately surprised that Olaf had defined the phrase correctly. “I’ve been thinking about that,” Violet said, “and I think I have an explanation for how they can have disappeared so quickly. Remember how the ship was attacked the moment they disappeared, and all the lights went out? Is it possible that the four of us – you too, Olaf – were thrown violently to the ground and knocked out?” Klaus frowned, and, putting his hands up to his head, began to feel his skull delicately for injuries. “I don’t feel any head wounds,” he murmured, “but if we were just stunned, it might not have left any severe bruising.” “All of us, and none sailors?” asked Sunny. “Sailors have something called ‘sea legs,’” Olaf suggested. “It’s some kind of special talent that allows them not to lose their balance at sea. We’d only been at sea for a day or so, so we hadn’t learnt the trick yet.” “That’s… more or less correct,” Klaus replied, dubiously. “And we don’t know that none of the sailors could have been knocked out, either – they could simply have been carried away by their comrades.” “But we were abandoned,” Violet said. “Why?” “Well, the captains had just decided that we were treacherous volunteers rather than noble allies,” Klaus said ruefully. “If the ship was under attack, they might have decided to just leave us to our fate.” “Or imprisoned,” Sunny suggested. “Locked doors.” “Aha!” Olaf cried. “That’s why they locked all the doors to the deck – to imprison us so we could be brought to justice if we survived!” Klaus nodded, and even started to smile. “Things are starting to make sense again,” he said, sounding pleased. “Of course,” Count Olaf pointed out, “if your explanation is correct, we’re probably descending into the belly of the beast at this moment. If all those sailors came and hid down here, then they’ll capture us the moment we step out of the doors!” “That might be preferable to being lost alone in an empty ship,” Violet said, “especially one under attack from a mysterious submarine, and an even more mysterious buzzing noise.” “Alighieri let slip a few hints about some kind of danger… and he seemed like he knew what that buzzing noise was,” Klaus remembered. “Maybe it’s not so mysterious. No more so than the purpose of this ship, and the captains’ conspiracy against us, at least.” Violet started. “That’s right,” she breathed. “There is somebody else who knows about this ship – somebody who definitely knows what kind of secrets it has!” “Who?” urged Sunny. Violet pointed – at Count Olaf. “You,” she said. “Wh-what do you mean?” Olaf spluttered. “Explain this insolence, orphan!” “No – you explain yourself, Olaf,” she answered, fiercely. “Remember what you said, when we first spotted this ship seemingly floating adrift in the sea? You said that our parents knew something about this ship that they should have told us.” Klaus and Sunny gasped as they recalled this important detail, one of the first mysterious things they had ever learnt about this ship on their increasingly mysterious adventure. Violet kept pointing at Count Olaf, and took a step towards him fiercely. “Well, Olaf?” she demanded. “You said yourself that we were all in the same boat, and that’s truer than ever. We’re all in danger and we’re all confused – but only you have answers that you haven’t been sharing.” “What was it, Olaf?” Klaus cried. “What did you know about our parents and this ship?” “Tell us!” Sunny screamed. Olaf backed away until his bony shoulders hit the wall of the elevator, and his eyes flicked desperately from one to the other of the Baudelaires’ grim faces. “I – I –” he stuttered. “I –” His eyes widened in shock, and he put a hand to his head, just as Klaus had when he was checking himself for injuries. “I don’t remember!” Perhaps you have noticed this in your own life, but the arrival of an elevator, whether you are about to step into or out of it, almost always signals an end to a conversation or to the circumstances you were in at the time. Moving between the closed, confined space of an elevator carriage, where any one of your companions might suddenly pull out a candy bar or sword, or where a cable might suddenly snap and, owing to modern safety devices, fail to send you plummeting countless storeys to a fatal stop, and the open and airy outside world where quite frankly anything might happen is a little like moving from one story to another. Once the doors open and then close, all the possibilities around you change, and even if somebody had just made an extremely cryptic and inexplicable remark, it is hard not to change focus, if only so as to ensure that you do not miss your stop. So it was for the Baudelaires, for although Count Olaf had just told them something simply unbelievable, even by the standards of that duplicitous man – “duplicitous,” as I’m sure you know, is a word which here means “usually lying” – they were quite distracted as the elevator trembled to a stop, and its shutter slowly clanked open to reveal their destination. The four elevator passengers stepped out into a vast and gloomy room that resembled a warehouse, or which at least looked like its vastness could serve little other purpose than the storage of wares. The room was barely lit by a few dim bulbs which hung by long, long cords from a ceiling which was scarcely visible, and which might simply have been the edge of the Baudelaires’ vision, while the walls, almost as far away, were dotted with tunnels and corridors leading away in all directions. The entire vast space appeared to be constructed out of blank grey concrete, its cold and unrevealing surface decorated only by a single enormous insignia in faded gold paint. The Baudelaires and Count Olaf, amazed and anxious, slowly cast their eyes around the immense and empty space, as if they could trace its secrets at a glance – catch some glimpse of the sea that must surely be raging above, or a hint of a conspiratorial face that might explain this wonder. “It looks like you were right, Olaf,” Violet said at last. “There really was a secret building hidden all the way down here.” “Yes,” Olaf croaked, not looking any happier for being right. “But just what is this place?” “I think it’s a warehouse,” Klaus answered. “I can tell, because there appear to be some wares just here.” Just as Klaus said, there were indeed a few crates stacked a little way to the side of the elevator shutter. They resembled exactly, in shape and size, the crate which they had seen on the Moth II and which supposedly contained a dangerous bomb. Olaf’s eyes lit up at the sight. “Aha!” he crowed. “Those must be more explosives! I may already have the Medusoid Mycelium, but one can never have too many indiscriminately deadly weapons.” “Be careful, Olaf!” Violet cried, but the villain was already hurrying towards the crates. The Baudelaires followed as quickly as they dared, uneasy at the loudness of their echoing footsteps in the hidden stronghold. Olaf was looking over the surfaces of each crate in turn, tugging at the edges of the lids and scowling. Evidently most had been nailed down, making it quite impractical for him to get at the contents within. But at last, as the Baudelaires arrived at his side, he found a lid he could sweep aside with a gesture and a laugh. “At last,” he cried, “I can get my hands on –” He paused, and frowned into the interior of the crate. “These aren’t explosives,” he growled, disappointed. “They’re just bottles! They don’t even appear to contain kerosene, so that I could make myself a Molotov cocktail, or alcohol, so that I could make myself a different kind of cocktail. This is tremendously underwhelming.” Violet lifted Sunny up to the top of an adjacent crate, and the three Baudelaires also stared inside the crate, which was indeed filled with countless tiny bottles, each held in place with soft padded material. Violet extracted one and held it up to the light, and almost dropped it with a gasp as she saw what was on the label. A photograph of Captain Alighieri, wearing his familiar pirate costume, adorned the side of the bottle, and he appeared to be pouring out the contents of a similar-looking bottle into a teaspoon, while delivering a wide-eyed grin to the camera, which is an unwise habit to get into when pouring the contents of bottles into teaspoons. “‘Alighieri’s Special Snake Oil,’” Violet read out. “‘Panacea for all ailments. Turn that ‘Yarrr!’ into an ‘Aye!’” Sunny looked up at Klaus. “Panasailment?” “An ailment is an illness, and a panacea is something that cures illnesses,” Klaus explained. “I didn’t ask for a definition, orphan,” snapped Count Olaf. “The only thing I need explaining is what cratefuls of panna cotta are doing down in this secret basement. I believe I mentioned something about this being underwhelming.” “Maybe Captain Alighieri and his crew had taken up smuggling,” Violet suggested, “in league with a powerful pharmaceutical company.” She held the bottle up to the light again, and jiggled it slightly, causing the liquid inside to slop about. “It looks like a fairly thin solution. I wonder what’s inside.” “There’s only one way to find out,” Olaf replied, snatching the bottle from Violet and hurling it to the floor. The Baudelaires flinched as fragments of glass flew across the concrete. Alighieri’s Special Snake Oil pooled and began to dribble away from the glass shards in all directions. It appeared to be completely colourless, and hard to spot without the light reflecting on it. Olaf bent down, and stuck a fingertip into the spilt liquid; he rubbed it against his thumb for a few moments, and then, I am sorry to say, he licked it. “Yuck!” Sunny cried, covering her eyes. Quite apart from the fact that licking something you found on the floor is quite unhygienic, nobody wants to see Count Olaf’s tongue. “Oh, don’t be so squeamish,” Olaf told her. “At any rate, that debunks the pharmaceutical theory.” “How so?” Violet asked. Olaf pointed his saliva-coated fingertip straight down at the puddle. “That special snake oil? It’s just water!” “Water?” gasped Klaus. “Not just smuggling, but smuggling fraudulent products as well?” “Exercise that brain of yours in a criminal direction for once, orphan,” Olaf replied. “People are easily fooled, in my experience, but you have to at least make an effort. A bottle of water won’t trick many people into thinking it’s medicine. That worthless snake oil can’t be intended to be sold. It’s just a prop!” “It is indeed,” boomed a deep, echoing voice, and the Baudelaires and Count Olaf turned at once to see who was speaking. Two shadowy figures had stepped out from a nearby doorway. In the dim light, it was hard to make out at first who they were, but as they slowly stepped closer and closer, the hazy glow lit up a pair of familiar faces. The figures were none other than the Captains Stanton and Alighieri, and their expressions were grim. “The snake oil is indeed a prop,” repeated Stanton, for it was he who had spoken. “But this is real enough!” He pointed as Alighieri revealed a long, narrow item he had been holding by his side. It was a harpoon gun, an all-too-familiar weapon with just a single harpoon gleaming wickedly inside its barrel – and it was now pointed directly at Count Olaf. <O> WHAT SHOULD ALIGHIERI DO? SHOOT DON’T SHOOT
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Aug 20, 2016 3:59:42 GMT -5
Holy shoot.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 20, 2016 4:27:04 GMT -5
Another good chapter. Boring and obvious as my choice is, I'd like to see Alighieri shoot.
By the way, one small mistake: "“There’s only one way to find out,” Olaf replied, snatching the bottle from Olaf"
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Post by Dante on Aug 27, 2016 12:11:47 GMT -5
Chapter Ten by Dante One of my many late associates once gave an important piece of advice to his fellow writers about avoiding unnecessary details in their works of fiction. If a gun appears in an early part of a story, he wrote, it should only be because that gun will be fired later on in the story, or else the gun would have had no point in being there at all. If you are a reasonably observant reader, and I hope that you are, you would have noticed that I mentioned, earlier on in this story, that Count Olaf had left his harpoon gun concealed inside the Carmelita, and if you have a particularly long memory, you may remember that this harpoon gun originally appeared in a previous chronicle of the Baudelaires’ lives, in which three of its deadly harpoons were fired, leaving only one remaining. As such, you may be wondering whether I will be taking my long-dead associate’s advice, and making sure that this final harpoon is used in the proper literary and dramatic way, by being fired at someone. But you must remember that I am not an author of fiction. I am not writing these stories to make any kind of artistic achievement, or for some twisted personal satisfaction. I am writing to provide a true account, the only true account, of the unfortunate events that happened to the Baudelaire orphans during their dreadful lives, and all too often, these misfortunes took no stock of careful, considered dramatic criticism. I cannot write that Captain Alighieri fired the harpoon gun simply because it would make a tidier story if he did so. I can only write what he truthfully did in real life. As it happens, however, what Captain Alighieri truthfully did in real life was indeed to fire the harpoon gun at Count Olaf, proving, if anything, that truth sometimes is every bit as strange as fiction. The Baudelaires scarcely had time to react, to feel fear, or shock, or even anger at the secretive and violent behaviour of these two men. As the captain’s finger clicked upon the trigger, and the deadly metal hook of the harpoon burst forth from the barrel of the harpoon gun, there was no time to cry out an objection or a warning. But there was time for one person to react, though – one person who acted so swiftly, as if upon a hair-trigger, a phrase which here means “a trigger so sensitive that even a single hair could set it off,” that it might well have been that he was planning to take exactly the same action whether or not a harpoon had been fired at him. That person was, of course, Count Olaf, and at the same instant that Captain Alighieri attempted to shoot a harpoon into Count Olaf’s body, Count Olaf had projected forth the diving helmet containing the Medusoid Mycelium, flinging it forwards into the soaring path of the destructive harpoon. To the Baudelaires, what followed seemed like an incident out of a terrible nightmare. Two deadly weapons flashed towards each other and crashed together in mid-air in a terrible crunch of metal and glass. The Baudelaires could only watch, astonished and barely comprehending, as the ruined helmet crashed to the ground, punctured through by a harpoon, its fatal contents doubtless exposed to the air they were breathing, and circulating through the vast warehouse in an instant. The first to react was the only person who fully understood what had just happened, and that was, of course Count Olaf, who let out a terrible cackle. “I’ve triumphed!” he gloated. “Quickly, Baudelaires, to the elevator! This warehouse will be the tomb of those interfering captains!” He turned on his heel and dashed for the elevator, and the Baudelaires sprang after him almost the moment he was done speaking. The three of them knew all too well the terrible effects of the Medusoid Mycelium, and knew that, without any horseradish or a similar diluting agent nearby – though, had they investigated a certain vessel aboard the Carmelita, they might have found themselves in no shortage of the vital ingredient – then their only protection was to escape the confined warehouse as fast as they could, even if it meant leaving Captain Stanton and Captain Alighieri to the fate of death, though the two had, of course, just fired a harpoon at them, so one might have called it their just desserts. Count Olaf and the Baudelaires reached the elevator in moments, but unfortunately for them, their story is known as A Series of Unfortunate Events, not A Series of Narrow Escapes, and so another unfortunate event had happened while they were distracted. The elevator was now merely an empty elevator shaft, and the whirring of cables, and a distant roof receding through the shaft above their heads, told them that the elevator was returning to the top floor, and returning without them. “No!” Olaf gasped, pawing at the external control panel beside the empty doors. “Whoever was in that submarine must have summoned it back to the top floor! Within an hour, this warehouse will be our tomb too!” Involuntarily, all three Baudelaires felt their hands creep towards their throats. They could almost feel the terrible spores of the Medusoid Mycelium being drawn into their lungs, their breathing growing more difficult. In the dark dampness of their throats, the fungus would grow big enough in merely an hour to cut off their breathing entirely. “There’s only one thing we can do,” Klaus gasped. “Even though they tried to kill us –” Violet nodded, and turned – to Captain Stanton and Captain Alighieri, who were now approaching them. They seemed unhurried and unpanicked, but of course, they knew nothing about the Medusoid Mycelium. Stanton was even carrying the ruined helmet that contained the fungus, while Alighieri had tossed aside the empty harpoon gun. “Captains,” said Violet, trying to keep her desperation from her voice. “We need your help, or all of us – you two as well – will die in less than an hour. That helmet contained a deadly fungus –” “No it didn’t,” interrupted Stanton. The Baudelaires felt as if the captain had walked right up to them and pushed them over. “Did,” retorted Sunny. “Been in there. Know.” Alighieri shook his head, a disgusted expression upon his face, while Stanton gave the children – and Olaf, who was still hammering the elevator call button – a stern look. “Why don’t you see for yourselves?” he said – and tossed the ruined helmet, the harpoon still thrust all the way through it, to roll and clank over to their feet. “You’ll find no Medusoid Mycelium in that helmet, Baudelaires.” The children’s surprise that Captain Stanton had somehow learned about the Medusoid Mycelium was almost as great as they felt at his outlandish claim about the diving helmet’s contents. The helmet had almost never been out of either the Baudelaires’ or Olaf’s sight at any point over the past several days, starting from when it had been sealed shut with a small colony of Medusoid Mycelium growing inside, and it would have been easy to spy through the helmet’s windows the mushrooms lining the helmet’s interior at any time. But as Sunny, who was closest to the ground, learned in a few moments investigation, the captain’s astonishing claim was true. In the helmet’s damaged state, it was obvious that its interior was completely pristine. Not only was there no Medusoid Mycelium there, there was no trace of it ever having been there. Even Count Olaf was paying attention now, and he looked utterly gobsmacked, a word which here means “as surprised as if somebody had struck him in the mouth.” “It’s impossible,” he gasped. “That thing has been under near-constant supervision. How can it have been switched? Or” – he rounded on the captains – “how could you have known to switch it?” Stanton shook his head slowly, and looked like he was about to speak, but at that moment the sound of running footsteps echoed into the room from many directions. From several of the passageways emerged columns of sailors in the uniform of the Marpole, and they began to ring the chamber with military precision, or perhaps naval precision. All of them were facing the Baudelaires and Olaf, and particularly the latter, whom they eyed warily. Captain Stanton swept a commanding arm through the air. “Seize and secure them,” he ordered, pointing at the four intruders before him. “And make sure to hold Olaf separate from the Baudelaires; they’re far too dangerous together. For that matter, Alighieri, follow them and check the countdown; we need to know how much leeway we have…” Klaus could not help crying out in amazement, before Stanton was even done issuing his orders. “The bomb is here?!” he exclaimed. “But why – why would you bring something so dangerous back here after you already took it to the Marpole?” Alighieri’s eyes, or at least his unpatched eye, widened as he heard Klaus’s words. “You know about the bomb?” he gasped. “But then surely you know that, if the countdown ever hits zero, there’ll be no escape anywhere? That’s precisely why we have to keep the three of you –” “They don’t know anything,” Stanton interrupted, “and for all our sakes, it had better stay that way. I don’t know how or why they came here, but we can’t make mistakes this time.” He turned back to his sailors and growled angrily at them, “Hurry up and lock the four of them up! You know what’s at stake!” “Wait!” Sunny cried, as the mariners began to advance upon her and her siblings. “Why? Why do this?” Stanton ignored her as the circle of sailors slowly, carefully began to close in around the children and their former guardian, while Alighieri turned and marched away into the shadows. As the imposing group of adults closed in, Violet racked her brains for any idea she could use to stop them, any clue, any hint that might make any one of these people desist from their unfathomable course of action – and, as she threw her mind back to her earliest encounters with Captain Stanton, at last she grasped one word, one name, which had once provoked an extraordinary reaction from the captain. “Is this what Jenna would want, Captain Stanton?” Violet cried, pleading with the unrelenting man. “Is this what she would have done?” For just one moment, Stanton looked astonished, and several of his sailors hesitated and looked over to him to see how he would react. But then it was the Baudelaires’ turn to be astonished, as Stanton let out a bitter laugh. “Jenna?” he repeated, and the sadness that had once filled his voice when speaking this name was gone. “You truly don’t know anything. Jenna is just a name on a piece of paper!” There was a scuffle and a cry from behind the Baudelaires, and Stanton’s mirth instantly turned to fury. The Baudelaires turned and saw Olaf as they had seen him many times before, fleeing as fast as his legs would carry him, while a couple of sailors sat on the ground nursing black eyes. “After him!” roared Stanton. “He might be even more dangerous than the Baudelaires!” More than half the sailors split away to chase after Count Olaf, who had just vanished through a doorway, and for the Baudelaires it was finally time to follow suit. “Run!” hissed Violet to Klaus as she knelt to pick up Sunny, and in a flash they had slipped past the confused and depleted sailors and were running towards one of the black and empty passageways that lined the walls of the warehouse. “You can’t escape forever, Baudelaires!” Stanton’s voice called, but they could escape for now, and a moment later, they had. Doorway after doorway flashed past the Baudelaires as they hurried down the dim corridor, so much like the one they had discovered in the basement of the 667 Dark Avenue apartment building, dark and straight and made of blank stone, though in this secret tunnel they were now accompanied by the ever-present noise of hurrying footsteps echoing towards them. Holding Klaus by the hand and Sunny with her other arm, Violet led the Baudelaires as randomly and unpredictably as she could through the maze-like passageways that seemed to branch and branch away in every direction like a spider’s web, with no way of differentiating any one direction from another, and soon the Baudelaires, though they may not have lost their pursuers, had lost themselves, and could not hope to find their way back to the warehouse and the elevator from which they had fled. Had they had more time on their hands, they could have left some clue behind them to mark their way, as they had when searching the innumerable rooms of the penthouse at 667 Dark Avenue, but the only skill they had time to use now was their above-average running speed and stamina, gained from Olaf’s cruel Special Orphan Running Exercises at Prufrock Preparatory School and from countless hours wandering the Hinterlands or climbing the Mortmain Mountains. The Baudelaires were not particularly proud of this skill, preferring to employ their mind and body in inventing, researching, but it served them well now, and as they finally began to slow and at last stop from exhaustion, they were relieved to hear no more echoing of hasty feet towards them, and to feel quite alone – although, even after Violet and Klaus had spent several minutes gasping to regain their breath, their increasingly unfortunate situation made it hard to appreciate this brief relief. “It’s all coming true,” Klaus sighed, at last. “All of the worst-case scenarios. The captains really were lying to us, they really were in league with some secret organisation, and they really do want to capture and imprison us.” “But why?” Sunny asked again, looking from one to the other of her siblings. “What have we ever done?” Violet looked sadly at her feet. “Lots of things we’d rather not have done,” she said quietly. “But I can’t imagine how we’ve made enemies of this new organisation. It’s clear that the captains can’t simply have been trying to bring us to justice for being volunteers. They must have some other agenda – but I can’t imagine what it is.” “Then the only thing we can do is find out,” Klaus said. “We’re in the centre of their lair; things can’t get any worse, so while we’re here, let’s find out as much as we can.” Violet nodded, and stood up. “You’re right, Klaus,” she said, offering a hand to help up her brother. “If we are captured, we can try and ask them some questions, but so long as we’re free, let’s try and find out as much as we can while we stay that way.” “Yep!” Sunny agreed, and then pointed down a nearby corridor. “Thataway,” she said. “Slightly brighter.” Violet squinted in the gloom. “I think you’re right,” she said. “There must be something lit up over there.” The three Baudelaires slowly crept down the corridor towards the faint light, keeping their footsteps as quiet as they could and listening out for anyone who wasn’t being so careful. They thought they could hear a faint sound, like hissing, or a distant whispering, or even the dread buzzing of above sea level, and as they turned the corner, this grew louder. They had entered a long, straight corridor, at the end of which was a doorway, and through the doorway they could see a far bright shape – a white rectangle, glowing, with indecipherable shapes moving across it. It was something like a cinema screen, or perhaps the screen of the advanced computer of Prufrock Preparatory School – the children were not sure, at such a distance, which. They were sure only of one thing. They were sure that, for some reason deep within their hearts, which they could not even penetrate, they found that strange screen utterly terrifying. The Baudelaires found themselves unable to go closer, their feet frozen to the ground, their eyes willing themselves to turn away, as if they were looking at something revolting, like a dead body. Everything in their minds was screaming at them to ignore the screen. Whatever was playing across its surface, they no longer wanted to find out. They no longer wanted to know. And they did not know, as they slowly turned their backs on that long, long corridor, whether they were doing so even of their own will. Avoiding the screen was more important than anything – even more important than avoiding the three women who were standing, silently, just behind their backs. The old woman, the young woman, and the woman aged somewhere in-between, one of them named Charlotte and the others with unknown names, placed their hands firmly on the Baudelaires’ shoulders. Without a word, they began forcefully to steer the children away from the screen, away from the corridor, away from their hiding-place. The children were too stunned even to try to run or stop them. They felt dazed as the three women pushed them down endless corridors, until at last they turned a corner and met a familiar face, and a familiar eye. “Charlotte. Emily. Anne,” said Captain Alighieri, his unpatched eye taking in the three women and their captives, his patched eye seeing nothing but the reverse of the insignia of a certain organisation. “You’ve done well. That leaves only one escapee now.” He gestured to a nearby door, unusual for the fact that it was a door, for the unnamed underground complex had mostly empty doorways with nothing to close them. This door was special on its own merit, though, for it was made of several inches of solid metal, and had an enormous hefty bolt on the outside, and a tiny glass window above the Baudelaires’ heads. The three women pushed the Baudelaires past the door and let go of them, sending the children stumbling into a small dark room with only one other object inside. The object was a crate, its lid not nailed on but merely sitting loose and ajar atop it. The Baudelaires realised that, in moments, they would be locked away with the bomb. “Captain Alighieri,” Violet said, gaining control of herself. She stood up as straight as she could, and looked Captain Alighieri hard in the eye. “I know that we don’t know each other, but please – you do not have to do this. Please let me and my siblings go.” “But I do have to do this,” Alighieri replied, as he stood barring the doorway, alongside the three women with the three names. “You three can’t be allowed to run amok like this. It’s dangerous, to yourselves as much as anyone else. I’m sure you won’t be there forever; our instructions regarding the harpoon gun prove that the experiment hasn’t been wholly abandoned.” “What experiment?” Klaus asked desperately. “Please – we don’t understand anything. We don’t understand what this place is or why it was built. We don’t understand what or whether there is a connection between what’s going on and what our parents did. We don’t understand whether you and Captain Stanton are enemies or allies –” “Oh, that’s simple,” Alighieri interrupted. “The two of us have always been on the same side.” He pointed at the children. “Against you!” As the children stared at him in horrified incomprehension, footsteps sounded behind the four mysterious individuals, and another familiar face appeared behind Alighieri’s shoulder, and at Sunny’s eye-level, an even more familiar pair of bare feet – Jules, one of the first of the Marpole’s sailors that the Baudelaires had met. “Alighieri,” he grunted, his voice dour. “Trouble back at the warehouse. The elevator came down with some woman in it that we’ve got absolutely no record of…” “No record?” repeated Alighieri, sounding astonished. Recovering, he instructed his associates, “You three go with him. I’ll follow immediately once I’m finished here.” Jules stumped off, his bare feet slapping angrily on the floor, and the varied but synchronised footsteps of Charlotte, Emily and Anne went with him. Only Alighieri was left with the Baudelaires, and he put his hand on the door. Slowly, never taking his unpatched eye off the Baudelaires, he began to slide the huge door to a close, sealing the Baudelaires in. “Just one thing!” Violet cried, as the doorway shrank to too small a size for even Sunny to slip through. “What does the symbol on your eyepatch mean? Is it the insignia of your organisation?” Alighieri hesitated, and let the heavy metal door stand still for a moment. “It’s not my organisation,” he said quietly, and there was the faintest hint of melancholy in his words. “I’m not eligible. I’m merely an employee…” The door slammed shut. A faint column of light pierced through the door’s tiny window, but the room was otherwise pitch-black. The light came to a rest on the lid of the crate, while the Baudelaires were left in the dark. “Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity,” Sunny’s voice said, at last, after several minutes of silence. Violet and Klaus nodded, in total agreement with the sentiment. “Why is everything always against us?” Klaus’s voice asked, miserably. “Why has the whole world been against us, ever since we met Count Olaf? What did we do to deserve it? We never even did anything before then; we did nothing…” “And now there’s just one thing we can do,” Violet’s voice said, and her siblings heard the sound of shuffling. “We’ve heard quite a few things about this bomb and its countdown. It’s about time we had a look at it.” The silent agreement of her siblings was expressed in the sound of all three gathering around the crate. Their fingers brushed the light as they pushed the lid of the crate away. The dim light revealed a sphere, smaller than they expected, perfectly white in colour. It was smooth-surfaced and completely unblemished, broken only by a tiny screen, like that of the advanced computer but perhaps only the size of two postage stamps, on which two figures were displayed in green against the dark background. 04 <O> Error 667x13-10: Connection failure; poll question aborted.
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Aug 28, 2016 2:41:48 GMT -5
My, that's a long one
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Post by lorelai on Aug 29, 2016 2:39:39 GMT -5
Ooo yay, I have somethingg to encourage me not to doddle through my schoolwork tomorrow/when the sun's up. Thank you!!!
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Post by Dante on Sept 3, 2016 3:01:25 GMT -5
Chapter Eleven by Dante 03The Baudelaires stepped back, startled. The countdown had ticked down before their very eyes, and what was already a very narrow margin before they believed they would be engulfed by an explosion had just grown narrower. Granted, the children had no idea just what units the countdown was measuring, but all the same, nobody wants to be in the vicinity of a bomb with only three somethings left. “We probably don’t need to be anxious,” Violet said, though it made her feel no less tense to do so. “We should have plenty of time to get out of this cell and piggyback on the captains’ escape plan – for they must have one.” “Just what is this countdown measuring, though?” Klaus asked. “Let me think – when Olaf last saw it, he had said it was at 07, but that must have been quite a long time ago, for the crew of the Marpole to have all evacuated down here with the bomb. Perhaps it measures hours?” “Time to defuse,” suggested Sunny. “It’s a thought,” agreed Violet. “We should be careful, though – remember how Captain Stanton told Jules and the other sailors that they might blow us all to smithereens if they dropped it?” “I prefer not to think about it,” Klaus shuddered, but he did not look away as Violet’s arms reached down into the crate and carefully slipped around the orb-shaped construction. “It’s lighter than I expected,” Violet said in surprise. Lifting it above her head and holding it carefully in the light, she began to examine the device. “And elegantly-constructed; I can’t see a single break or seam in its surface save for the countdown screen.” She gently set it back down in the crate. “Given that, I think it would probably be dangerous to try and interfere with it.” “Bite off?” Sunny asked, baring her sharp teeth. Klaus shook his head. “You might be able to pry the screen off, Sunny, but bombs are infamous for their fail-deadly structure. ‘Fail-deadly,’ by the way, means that if part of it is broken it’s likely to explode immediately.” Silence fell upon the Baudelaires. Violet quietly lifted the lid of the crate back into place, covering the green glow of the countdown. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by investigating the bomb further,” came Violet’s whisper, solemn in the gloom. “I don’t know anything about its construction, and it’s simply too risky.” “I wonder, though, why the crew acted as if it was so heavy back when we first saw this crate,” whispered Klaus. “ Acted,” emphasised Sunny’s low voice. “Maybe another lie.” “Maybe,” agreed Violet. “We can’t take anything for granted any more. I think it’s time to focus on escaping.” She passed through the light from the door’s narrow porthole, and pushed it gently, and then harder. It rattled against the heavy bolt on the outside, and did not open. “It’s definitely locked, then,” she murmured. “Let’s all try to think of a way of getting past that obstacle. I’ll think about inventing something; Klaus, you think back on everything you know about locks and bolts; and Sunny, see if you can come up with a way of biting the door open.” The three children sat together, alone in the dark, and began to think, once again, of ways out of their predicament – or tried to think. The truth was, though, that they found it very difficult to come up with any ideas at all. Most of the unfortunate problems they had encountered in their recent experiences had been extremely complex, and might have had any number of ways, of varying degrees of efficacy, to get around them. But a simple bolted door is a much more focussed challenge, with a very narrow range of possibilities. The fact was that the cell they were presently in had been built for the express purpose of stopping people from getting out, and unlike the Deluxe Cell in the Village of Fowl Devotees, it had extremely solid walls with no breaks in the stonework and absolutely no windows, while the Baudelaires had few of the same tools that they had used on that occasion to escape, including the one they needed most. “Deus ex machina,” Klaus muttered. Violet and Sunny, disturbed from their circular and fruitless plans, nodded in recognition. “The god from the machine,” Sunny remembered. “The arrival of something helpful when you least expect it,” Violet said. Klaus’s nod was lost in shadow. “That’s right. That’s what we needed to escape from the Deluxe Cell – something that we didn’t have to start with. Of course, strictly speaking a deus ex machina is meant to be not just something helpful but something new, something that you’ve never heard of or encountered before, which is why it’s generally looked down upon as a literary technique. It’s a little bit ironic, but Officer Luciana bringing us bread and water or Hector arriving with the self-sustaining hot air mobile home weren’t really deus ex machina, because we knew about Hector’s invention and about Officer Luciana, and we’ve certainly encountered bread and water before. Maybe there’s a deus ex machina here that can save us, and which we’ve simply forgotten about until now.” Without any warning, the Baudelaires were suddenly plunged into complete darkness. Their sole source of light came from the misty porthole in the metal cell door, but it had been blotted out by the blurry shape of a human head on the other side of it. A noise of grinding metal and a harsh clang suddenly met the Baudelaires’ ears, and then, with a loud groan of reluctant metal, the unbolted cell door began slowly to slide open. Standing on the other side of the door was a woman the Baudelaires had never seen before, though they had glimpsed her before. She had very long dark hair, straight as a waterfall, falling over a shiny dark suit which the Baudelaires recognised as fireproof material. Her skin was very pale, but her resemblance to a character from a black-and-white movie was offset by a red rose pinned to her lapel and a green tint that had been applied to a single lock of her hair. The green matched that of her eyes; the Baudelaires could make them out only faintly in the shadows, but there was something merciful in those eyes. “It’s time to go, Baudelaires,” the woman said. The Baudelaires sat for a moment, staring at her. The arrival of deus ex machina is often hard to accept, and it took the woman gesturing at them impatiently for the three children to rise to their feet. She turned abruptly, and began walking away from them down the corridors, beckoning the children to follow her. She was walking hurriedly, like somebody who has somewhere very important to be but doesn’t want to look undignified by running, though the Baudelaires had to run a little to catch up with her. “Who is that?” asked Klaus in an undertone to Violet, as they scurried after the woman. “She seems like deus ex machina, but we don’t actually know where she’s taking us or why we should go.” “It’s rude to talk behind someone’s back,” the woman said, not turning her head to look at them. “But sometimes necessary.” She stopped in the middle of the long corridor and turned to look at them, and the Baudelaires almost bumped into her as they caught up. Meeting her gaze, they felt that it was still sympathetic, but it didn’t particularly look like she wanted to be there. “You can call me Rose, if you call me anything at all,” she said, tapping the flower on her lapel. “My employer sent me to rescue you children from this situation. If we can get back to my submarine, we should be able to escape. Now keep up and don’t fall behind.” She set off walking again, and the Baudelaires tried to match her stride to keep up, though for Sunny, who though quite experienced at walking now was still very small, it was more of a jog. The Baudelaires looked at each other uncertainly as they strode along, passing doorway after doorway. The answer that Rose had given answered their questions in a broad and technical sense, but it was the kind of answer that didn’t include any of the detail necessary to explain it, like the solution to a maths problem given without showing how to reach it. But the children could now, at least, connect her to certain events which had previously confused them. “Are you the one who attacked the Moth II in the Carmelita, then?” Violet asked. “How was that supposed to rescue us?” Klaus continued. “I had to get your attention somehow,” Rose answered, as if attacking a ship with an octopus-shaped submarine was a perfectly normal thing to do. “But I didn’t know exactly where in the ship you were – and just as I had gotten aboard, you got yourself stuck in this place, dragging this out way longer than necessary.” She glanced back at the three tired, scared, and above all confused faces hurrying along behind her, and her expression softened. “I bet you’re confused,” she said. “But don’t worry. Everything will make sense in the end.” “When is the end?” Sunny asked, and it was a good question. It is not particularly helpful for people to tell you that everything will be alright or be justified in the end if you don’t know when the end will be. Rose, however, clearly did know when the end would be, as she answered immediately. “When the bomb goes off,” she replied, and the Baudelaires exchanged anxious looks. “We’ve seen the bomb,” Violet told Rose. “It was in that room with us just now. The timer ticked down to 03, but we don’t know what it’s counting.” “03? Not as soon as I would like,” Rose said, and Violet caught a frown on her face. “Bombs which won’t go off exactly when you need them to are so unhelpful.” To the Baudelaires’ amazement, she slackened her pace slightly, and began to walk alongside them more casually. “If 03 isn’t soon, then when is it? What units is the countdown counting in?” Klaus pressed her. “You wouldn’t understand,” Rose replied, an answer which has never satisfied anyone in all of history. “Apparently it measures the conditions that will result in the bomb going off, so it’s not something you can put an exact time on.” As the Baudelaires tried to process this strange reply, Rose’s eyes widened, as if something had just occurred to her. “Oh, but that wasn’t the bomb you saw,” she explained, gesturing back towards the cell. “That’s just the countdown.” “It is?” Violet asked, surprised. “They’re separate? That’s unusual.” Klaus thought for a moment, and then nodded to himself. “I think that’s right, though. Nobody ever said that that particular crate in that cell was the bomb. The real bomb must be somewhere else.” “It sure is,” Rose replied, and she gave the Baudelaires a strange smile, one they did not understand. Each of the Baudelaires still had many questions, but a distant sound arrested them in their tracks. An unknown set of footsteps was marching steadily down the corridors somewhere nearby, and the sound was getting louder. Rose frowned and clenched her fists, but evidently decided that discretion was the better part of valour, a phrase which here means “there’s no shame in running away sometimes.” “In here,” she hissed, pointing at a nearby doorway, and the four of them ducked inside. The room was unlit save for the dim spread of the lights in the corridor, and though Violet could make out a light switch, this would only have attracted attention. From what she and her siblings could discern in the gloom, the room was a good place to hide in – a long room dominated by an immense table, like a meeting-room in an office. There were spaces for thirteen or more people around the table, but extra chairs had been pushed into a couple of the spaces, and nearly half the other spaces had no chairs at all. The Baudelaires crawled under the table, invisible in the shadows of the shadows, while Rose pressed herself to the wall across from the door. The footsteps grew clearer and closer, heavy claps against the bare concrete floor, and then a bulky shadow crossed the doorway. Thankfully, however, it passed on and didn’t stop, neglecting the abandoned office just like all the other seemingly abandoned rooms in the vast and empty complex. The Baudelaires waited for the footsteps to vanish from hearing entirely, and breathed a sigh of relief. Rose crept over to the Baudelaires as they crawled out from beneath the table. “We can’t risk the corridors anymore,” she hissed. “That person might have been going to check on you, and they’ll raise hell if you’re missing.” “Then where can we go?” Klaus asked. “The corridors are direct routes, but many of the rooms are connected,” Rose answered. “We’ll slip through them in darkness and make a run for the exit.” As the children stood up, Rose looked over the room. “Don’t get distracted,” she muttered. “None of this is important to you.” “It is important,” disagreed Sunny, as Rose led them into the next room, which was filled with cardboard boxes and high stacks of paper. “Everything here is about us.” “That’s true,” Klaus agreed. “We seem to have been an important part of whatever plan Stanton and Alighieri and this mystery organisation have. What exactly is going on here? Do you know?” “I’ve been filled in by somebody who knows everything,” Rose answered, as she glanced between two doorways side-by-side before picking one that led into a room that was simply empty. “I’ll try and summarise what the doctor told me.” “A doctor? Was it Dr. Tenid?” Violet asked. “Captain Stanton mentioned that name once.” Rose shook her head. “If you heard that name here, he doesn’t exist. No, the doctor is my employer – the one who asked me to come here. But the doctor is a member of the organisation that brought you here, and hired Stanton and Alighieri and the rest for the Voluntary Fabrication Delegation experiment.” “V.F.D.,” Klaus realised. “But the organisation behind this has a different insignia. If it isn’t V.F.D., why is it using their initials?” “Because it was set up to research V.F.D.,” Rose answered – and then stopped in her tracks, holding up a hand to stop the Baudelaires too. They had just entered a long room filled with dark rows of filing cabinets, just like the Library of Records that was burnt along with Heimlich Hospital, though even if there had been light to read the labels on the drawers, the scrappy handwriting had faded with the years and was now largely illegible. Rose held the Baudelaires there for a minute in silence and stillness, apparently listening for something, but the something did not come again, and shortly she gestured for them to move on. “To research V.F.D.,” Rose continued as they walked, “and especially certain individuals associated with that organisation. The founders were like you; they’d encountered signs and hints of V.F.D. in connection with various news stories and research, but they could never meet any volunteers personally. Instead, they built up a larger and larger network of individuals to search for traces of V.F.D., to try and understand the organisation and its intentions. Eventually, they might even have recreated V.F.D.” The Baudelaires’s heads were sent spinning by all this information, and it was fortunate that it was not their duty to navigate their way out of the mysterious undersea complex, for they were already lost in a maze of knowledge. And yet, it all made sense to them. Even after travelling so far, meeting so many volunteers, and even, in a limited way, joining the organisation themselves, they still did not understand V.F.D. and its history – the secret of the sugar bowl, the cause of the schism, and what the two factions wanted to achieve. “An organisation like that would have been very valuable to us,” Violet murmured. “They really were like us; they just wanted to understand. But,” she protested, “why haven’t we ever heard of them? Couldn’t they have contacted us?” “They did,” Rose replied, as she led them through a room piled high with junk and detritus. “They lured you here, to the Moth II, for an experiment designed to test your behaviour in situations set by the organisation’s members. They believed that your experiences would help them to understand V.F.D. better, because wherever you went, you encountered more links to V.F.D. and more evidence of its activities. This organisation coveted that experience, and staged many re-enactments to develop their knowledge. Voluntary Fabrication Delegation was meant to be the culmination of those early efforts.” “But to manipulate us, and then suddenly abandon us like this?” asked Klaus. “That was a wicked thing to do. How could they justify it?” Rose glanced out of a nearby doorway into the corridors, looking left and right, and then led them darting across to a narrow passageway. Long and straight, they jogged down it, as, in silence, Rose shook her head. “From their perspective, maybe it didn’t seem so bad,” she replied. “But abandoning you certainly wasn’t sudden. It had been in the wind for a long time, I was told. There were too few participants, so the experiment was effectively shelved, and the employees recalled. You three would’ve been left in limbo if my employer hadn’t felt so guilty about the situation. He helped me to escape from a similar experience once, and so he asked me to do the same for you.” “Wait,” Sunny interrupted, screwing up her eyes in concentration. “I’m confused. Only on ship for a few hours…” “Everything you’re describing sounds like it should have taken a very long time,” Violet explained. “But we only arrived on the Moth II yesterday.” Rose stopped in the middle of the long passageway. With a reluctant sigh, she turned to look at the three children. It is difficult, sometimes, to tell a person something that they will be completely unable to believe, just as it is difficult to hear such a thing. If somebody told you that the sky was green, you would probably laugh at them, but if they were warning you of a chemical fire or trying to show you the aurora borealis, it would have been just as difficult a task for them to communicate an idea that seemed so ludicrous. In the same way, just as the Baudelaires would find themselves astonished and unable to believe what Rose was about to say, it was no easier for her to have to tell them something that was completely true. “You were on that ship for over four years.” She turned and strode away, but the Baudelaires did not follow her. There was a great deal that they had been asked to believe recently which had been astonishing to them, but this revelation was of a different, higher order of nonsense, and the Baudelaires had to stop and think just to be sure that they had heard Rose correctly, and that there was no other way of interpreting the words she had just spoken. The children looked at each other, and saw themselves with the same faces and the same clothes as they had worn the day they set foot on the Moth II, not a day older. They thought of how continuous each chapter of their journey had been, with no break where it was conceivable that they could have been drugged and placed in an artificial slumber for any immense length of time. They thought of Count Olaf and the strange sailors of the Marpole, whose endeavours were the uninterrupted work of a mere night and who, even once they had vanished to this undersea complex, had never been so far away. But then they started thinking about a theatre coated with dust… The three children shuddered, and began walking very quickly, as if they could leave those thoughts in the dust, too, and far away from them. The end of the corridor was approaching, and Rose was waiting in a doorway illuminated by a faint light behind her. “Don’t fall behind,” she said, but they felt as if everyone else had been many steps ahead of them for too long. “Rose,” interrupted Violet, putting a hand on the mysterious woman’s arm as she made to turn away. “What you’ve tried to tell us is impossible.” Rose looked at Violet the way you might look at a small child who didn’t know that the Sun was bigger than the Earth. “Nothing is impossible,” she said. “It might be impossible for us to believe you,” Klaus told her. “Are you telling the truth?” Sunny asked, meeting Rose’s eyes. “The most gigantic truths are the most unbelievable,” she answered, but her eyes were flashing with irritation. “Now, listen to me. I know a lot about you three, and I know you have a habit of thinking you don’t have a choice. But right now you do, and it’s a big one. You can follow me and escape from all this doom and gloom, or you can be shut up in a cell forever while the countdown hangs in limbo. Do you really want to waste your potential like that when you could be anything you want to be?” “A lot of people have made us promises like that,” Violet said firmly, “but the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know everything.” “I’ve told you everything you would want to know,” Rose snapped. “What about the things we need to know?” Klaus shot back. “You can only believe those if you find them out for yourself,” Rose said firmly. “Things like that take a long time to accept. Surely your memories must tell you that.” “Maybe,” Sunny said, “but we might be better for it.” Rose gave the three of them a long, hard look – a critical look, “critical” being a word which here does not mean “wanting to criticise” but rather “studying.” “If you really want to know the truth,” she said at last, “if you’re absolutely, completely sure that you want to know the worst of it –” “We’ve never been absolutely, completely sure of anything,” Violet interrupted. “I think that perhaps people shouldn’t be. But we can be sure enough.” Rose’s expression resumed its merciful appearance – merciful, but suffused with reluctance, as if she really, truly did not want to do what she was about to do. “Then,” she said, stepping aside, “you should look at that screen.” All three Baudelaires gasped as they recognised their location. They were at the end of the long, long corridor where they had been captured by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and directly ahead of them was the room with the bright screen that had so entranced and repulsed them before. From the doorway, the children could see that the screen was projected on the surface of a monitor like that of the advanced computer, held aloft on a pedestal wound around by a thick tangle of wires and cables that snaked away into sockets on the dim walls. The monitor’s cables were like the long, serpentine hair of a gorgon, whose bright gaze could turn the Baudelaires to stone – and as close as they were to the screen the three children were indeed petrified, a word which means, “turned to stone as if by the mythical gorgon,” although on reflection I probably did not need to explain that. But I must explain what the children saw upon the screen, for they could now see quite clearly what they had found so disturbing before. “What is this?” croaked Sunny. “Who are they?” Klaus shook his head, in a daze. “I don’t know, but for some reason it gives me this bizarre nauseous feeling…” Violet’s wide eyes could not turn away from the tragedy playing out on the screen. “I’ve never seen any of these people before, but there’s something strangely familiar about this scene…” The screen was flickery and black-and-white, like a movie at the cinema, and the scene the children had arrived for was indeed just like something out of an outlandish work of fiction. A villainous figure in a strange ragged dress was confronting a white-bearded old man, while between them stood three children around the Baudelaires’ ages, with agonised expressions upon their faces. As the Baudelaires watched, the ancient man pulled out a weapon that resembled a harpoon gun, and pointed it straight at the villain. “Shall I tell you who they are?” asked a voice that was three voices in unison – one croaky and tired, a second sensible and stern, and a third high-pitched and shrill. From the shadowy corners of the room, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne appeared – unless it was actually Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, or Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, or some other combination of the three – and advanced towards the monitor and its audience. “Those three children,” the women said, as they stretched out three identical fingers to point at the screen, “are the real Baudelaires.” <O> WHAT SHOULD CHARLOTTE, EMILY, AND ANNE DO? TELL THEM EVERYTHING TELL THEM NOTHING
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Post by gliquey on Sept 3, 2016 13:41:45 GMT -5
Tell them nothing.
Wow, I think this chapter escalated quite fast. I love it. It got a bit more meta/fourth-wall-breaking (Klaus explaining how TVV didn't really contain deus ex machina) than I would expect an ASOUE story to get, but this is fanfiction and I've always liked self-referential humour. I thought when the bomb countdown first appeared that it was counting down chapters, which Rose's reply to Violet ("You wouldn’t understand [...] Apparently it measures the conditions that will result in the bomb going off, so it's not something you can put an exact time on") seems to support, but if so I'm a little confused (unless I've missed something it was at 07 in Chapter Eight, 04 in Chapter Ten and 03 in Chapter Eleven).
I presume Rose is Duchess R. I wonder if she is also the mysterious woman in TGG and TPP (who creeped through the Gorgonian Grotto, convinced Widdershins to leave the Queequeg, and hid in the taxi in TPP, or some subset of those events). I suppose I might have to wait until the end of the story to find out.
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Post by Dante on Sept 3, 2016 16:16:05 GMT -5
I thought when the bomb countdown first appeared that it was counting down chapters, which Rose's reply to Violet ("You wouldn’t understand [...] Apparently it measures the conditions that will result in the bomb going off, so it's not something you can put an exact time on") seems to support, but if so I'm a little confused (unless I've missed something it was at 07 in Chapter Eight, 04 in Chapter Ten and 03 in Chapter Eleven). Hint: Olaf was absent from the story between Chapters Six and Eight.
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Post by Dante on Sept 10, 2016 2:30:58 GMT -5
Chapter Twelve by Dante Chaos reigned upon the bright hypnotic screen as countless white-robed individuals screamed and argued and fell about around a man with a harpoon in his stomach and three children with despair in their hearts, and this chaos and despair was reflected in the souls of the three children who stared upon it. As Violet, Klaus, and Sunny gazed upon the denouement of a story where V.F.D., Medusoid Mycelium, three orphans and a count collided, their own shadowy experiences in an abandoned ship and a warren of storage rooms and archives felt all so flimsy and unreal and meaningless by comparison, like a sketch on a scrap of paper next to an oil painting. “How can this be?” croaked Violet, tremulously. “They look nothing like us, and we look nothing like them…” “Their Medusoid Mycelium is real, while ours was just a prop,” muttered Klaus. “Their island is real, while our ship was just a prop…” “Who are we?” asked Sunny. Their answer was a high-pitched giggle that could have been a young girl’s, a proud and knowing laugh that might have been a middle-aged woman’s, and a malevolent cackle that may have been a senior citizen’s, but which woman had which voice was unknown. “The three of you are simply impostors,” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne chorused discordantly. “You’re mannequins. You’re paper dolls. You’re empty-headed actors whose only job was to do what you were told. You don’t need or deserve to know anything, for just as you broke our truth then our truth will break you –” “That’s enough!” A familiar voice cut through the three women’s diatribe. Storming into the room, suppressed anger tightening his face, was Captain Stanton, taking command just as his role dictated. “This farce has gone on long enough,” he growled, glaring resentfully at the Baudelaires. “The illusion is shattered without hope of repair, or a return to our original story. It’s the end for us.” He pointed a lordly finger at the quailing children. “So here, in the end, I’ll tell you everything, just as I was supposed to… So sit still for once in your short lives and listen.” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne retreated silently and smoothly into the shadows as Stanton strode towards the Baudelaires, not even sparing a glance for Rose. He towered over the children as he reached them, staring down with bitter eyes – before turning those eyes to the screen beside them. “These three children,” he said, tapping the glass that was showing a girl, boy, and an infant hurrying away from a broad tent, “are the real Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire – the apple of our masters’ eye. But the children were untouchable, even to our employers; they had no power to interfere with the real Baudelaires’ situation, merely to monitor it, as you see here.” He raised his eyes upwards to the ceiling. “But they had a plan – a great plan. From their eponymous headquarters they constructed the Moth II replica as a suitable stage, with the Marpole and its crew to accompany it. And finally…” He turned back to the Baudelaires, and his eyes seemed to burn right through them. “They created you.” Violet took a deep breath. “That’s impossible,” she said, though her voice stammered in doing so. “We know who we are. We remember our whole lives. We have our talents –” “Your talents, interests, and even your memories were fabricated to the best of the organisation’s abilities,” Stanton replied. “And you yourself must have noticed how shallow they were.” Klaus turned away in horror, and his eyes alighted on another person. “Rose,” he pleaded, “this is madness. It can’t be right. You can’t conjure people, and memories, and whole lives out of thin air –” Rose’s unwavering, pitying gaze stopped him mid-sentence. “They can,” she answered. “To people like the doctor and his associates, it would be trivial.” “Our employers operate on a level far beyond our imagining,” Stanton continued, eyeing Rose warily before turning back to the Baudelaires. “To them, we’re just finger-puppets.” A writer I admire once wrote that, if you haven’t ever lost someone very important to you, you cannot possibly imagine how it feels – and just so, the grief that seized the Baudelaires like a hand on their throats in this instant was like something they could only remember experiencing, rather than having truly experienced its terrible grip. Their passion for inventing, researching, and biting was like a ghost they could only pass through; the process of their ideas and interests fled from them like smoke; their memories took on the insubstantial, fleeting quality of a dream. Scarcely able to breathe, they fell to their knees. “The truth is a wicked thing, is it not?” Stanton asked, and there was a hint of a vindictive smirk about his mouth. “I’ve no sympathy for you. My associates and I don’t even have the luxury of memories.” Rose stepped up beside the Baudelaires. “Don’t get arrogant, you sham of a man,” she told him. “You’re no more than planets orbiting their star.” She smirked, too. “Moths to their flame.” “Less planets around a star as around a black hole,” Stanton retorted. “Drawing us and everything in to destruction…” Rose shook her head. “To the unknown.” “Unknown is right!” squealed a frantic voice, and bursting past Rose came Jules, barefoot as usual but trembling now, shrieking loud enough that his voice broke through even to the tormented Baudelaires. “Unknown levels are rising to inordinate levels!” he wailed. Pointing a wavering finger at Rose, he screeched, “That woman must have lured it here!” Rose laughed in his face. “It was here before even I was,” she retorted. “There’s no question that it was attracted to the instability on your ship. You can’t fool it; it knows that the end is near…” “The end,” mumbled Sunny, the phrase striking her ear. She looked up fearfully at the arguing adults. “End of what?” “Of everything,” answered the last voice yet missing, as Alighieri followed Jules into the room, his tread heavy and sombre. “You children don’t have the faintest understanding of what the bomb does, do you? You don’t know its terrible effects…” “It’s a bomb,” Violet stammered, trying to recall her mechanical knowledge. “An internal mechanism, prompted by a switch or a timed trigger, causes an explosive reaction…” “The result of any bomb’s detonation is an immense release of energy, usually as heat and light,” Klaus added. “Usually,” Rose replied. “But this bomb causes something slightly different.” “Calamity,” whispered Stanton, his tones hushed, as if in reverie or terror. “Probability deterioration and the collapse of the stable structure of spacetime into immanent, practical superposition…” “Put simply,” gibbered Jules, fingers crammed into his mouth, “it destroys the world!” A fist, driven in anger, punched the floor. Klaus was gritting his teeth with pain, and with frustration, as he climbed to his feet. “No more of this,” he muttered, his voice shaking with miserable confusion and fury. “You can’t tell us one unbelievable thing after another and expect us to accept it all!” he roared. “There’s no proof!” “In a sense, that’s true,” mused Alighieri. “Didn’t you see it out of the portholes, Baudelaires, before you descended to this place?” “See what?” asked Sunny, braced for some new and more bizarre claim. “There was nothing…” “Exactly,” Alighieri nodded. “Most of the world has already been destroyed. What we call the Great Unknown has already consumed the entire top layer. There is nothing outside the ship now – or rather, there is no outside.” “It began during the horrendous suspension of nearly three years after you repaired the film projector,” Stanton explained. “After so long in despair, we finally received our instructions – but the Great Unknown had appeared. When you fell into stasis as we rushed to assess the damage, we took the opportunity to secure the countdown and seal off the surface of the ship – and evacuated backstage to await instruction.” Rose yawned, as if Stanton and his associates’ tragedy was unbelievably boring to her. “But no instructions ever came,” she commented. “Not for you, at least.” Stanton threw her a hideous and violent scowl, and then turned back to the Baudelaires, his contempt barely less. “So that’s how it is, children,” he summed up. “We teeter upon the brink of annihilation. Our world has been reduced to this filthy, dingy crawlspace.” He took a slow, severe step towards, the children, emphasising every point with a point of his finger. “And do you know the one thing we need to survive?” he asked, jabbing his finger practically in the three children’s faces. “The one thing that will save you, me, and everyone from being engulfed by the detonation of the bomb?” “Wh-what?” asked Violet, trembling. He leaned down towards them, total contempt for the three etched upon his face as if on stone. “For you to lie down and give up!” he bellowed, his stale breath crashing over the cringing children like a wave. “But why?” begged Klaus, holding onto his sisters. “What did we ever do?” pleaded Sunny, grasping her siblings like lifejackets. “What did you do?!” repeated Jules, his voice cracking from the tension. “The countdown’s already ticked down to 02 since you escaped!” “The countdown measures your actions,” Alighieri explained. “They are what is destroying the world.” “You three are the bomb!” Stanton roared. This moment might just have been the Baudelaires’ darkest hour. I do not simply mean that the underground rat runs the Baudelaires had found themselves in were very dark, and that as a result the preceding hour had been the darkest they had ever experienced – although that was also true, for these were not, of course, the same Baudelaires who had been plunged into the absolute pitch-blackness of the elevator shaft of 667 Dark Avenue, though in places the tunnels of the undersea complex were, naturally, of a similar density of dark. But just as the writer I mentioned before that I admired has explained that a dark day does not necessarily have to be either dark or a day, so too is a darkest hour not necessarily particularly dark, and nor does it have to last for exactly an hour. It simply refers to the time in a person’s life, or indeed in three persons’ lives, when they are at their lowest, their unhappiest, their most defeated and friendless and hopeless – in short, when they are so lost that it seems they cannot possibly escape from the abyss of misery and misfortune into which they have fallen, and might as well just lie down and give up, as they have been told to do. I did, however, say that this moment only might have been the Baudelaires’ darkest hour. The Baudelaires were not at their most defeated, most friendless and most hopeless – much though they may have felt like it for a moment – for they had somebody who, whether or not she was a friend or a hope, was nonetheless on their side. They may not have known who she was or what she wanted or even her real name, but hearing Rose’s voice beside them told the Baudelaires they were not alone. “You don’t know anything,” Rose said, stepping up to face Stanton. “For all your bullying and scapegoating, you don’t know any more than the three children you’re trying to pin all your problems on. Perhaps even less.” She looked down at the three children by her side, and smiled at them. “Stand up, Baudelaires,” she said. “All hope isn’t lost yet. Do you remember where I came from?” The Baudelaires’ heads jolted upwards as if an electric current had shocked them, but what had shocked them was a realisation – and a memory. A memory of a theatre with a wide window, a window that shattered into countless pieces… “You came from the unknown!” Violet gasped. Violet was not the only one to gasp, however, for at this statement, gasps burst out across the room, and Stanton, Alighieri, and their cohorts all took a step back from Rose and the Baudelaires. “That’s impossible!” choked Stanton. Rose shook her head. “ Everything is possible,” she said. “Just because it’s dark, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.” “If it truly is the unknown, anything could be there,” Klaus nodded. “Or everything,” muttered Sunny. “My employer said you would understand,” Rose smiled, giving them a companionable nod. “The unknown is freedom.” “I couldn’t agree more!” exclaimed a voice which had not been heard in far too long – and before all eyes had time to turn to the doorway from which the voice had spoken, something flashed in an instant and came surging out of the shadows. Once again the Baudelaires’ minds were shocked into action by a terrific crashing of breaking glass. An image of three dying children was blasted into countless dark pieces and meaningless pieces in a burst of light and energy, like the explosion of a bomb. As Rose and the Baudelaires stumbled one way and Stanton and his associates stumbled the other, the first thing they saw was that the ruined monitor had been pierced through by a long shaft of metal, ending in a sharp and cruel hook. It had been pierced by a harpoon, and when their eyes turned back to the doorway, everyone saw the one who had launched it. It was Count Olaf, arm still outstretched dramatically from where he had thrown the reclaimed weapon. “Hello, hello, hello,” Olaf’s wicked voice announced, for the first time ever, and his shiny eyes settled upon the Baudelaires. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Baudelaires,” he said, casually strolling in to join them. “I was expecting to find the three of you being as tedious a trio of stick-in-the-muds as the real Baudelaires, but it looks like you’ve finally grown up a bit.” “You believe in the unknown too, Olaf?” Violet asked, as the false sailors looked on in amazement and anxiety. “I’m embracing it like a well-deserved trophy for magnificent acting,” Olaf replied, and indeed, he appeared to be in unusually high spirits. “Acting is right,” interjected a grim Stanton. “You’ve been eavesdropping, Olaf, so you must know that you, too, are an impostor.” “And never happier than to be playing a role,” Count Olaf said, sweeping into a low bow. Straightening up, he grinned dangerously at Stanton. “Who wouldn’t be overjoyed to be free – free of that tedious past telling me what to do? At last, I can be what I most want to be, which is to be whatever I want to be. It’s something a lapdog like you could never appreciate.” The insult stung, and it showed. Stanton’s fists tightened at his sides, his knuckles showing through the skin, and his mouth became fixed in a grimace. “Unoriginal to a fault, you’re still determined to be a troublemaker,” he growled. “What are you going to do now, ‘Olaf’? Are you going to oppose us? Detonate the bomb, and destroy the world?” “Will it really destroy the world, though?” Violet asked. “The unknown isn’t necessarily the end.” “There’s only one way to find out,” Olaf smirked. As one, the impostor sailors stepped to the side of their impostor captain – Charlotte, Emily and Anne, Jules, and even Alighieri lining up by Stanton’s side. “We’ll stop you,” Stanton declared. “ I’ll stop you,” retorted Olaf. Exasperated, Stanton turned to the Baudelaires, standing quietly beside the ruined monitor. “And what about you three?” he asked. “Will you choose to sit quietly and live? Or oppose us, oppose the world, and plunge us all into the unknown?” The Baudelaires looked from side to side, first one way, and then the other – Rose and Olaf on one side, dangerous people, exciting people, who whatever their faults had, at least in this adventure, never been against them – and on the other side, the supposed captains of the Moth II and the Marpole, their crew of liars, who’d manipulated their every choice. “It might have been a difficult choice,” Violet said, as much to herself and to her siblings as well as to the people surrounding them. “It might have been, once.” “But it’s been made very easy,” Klaus agreed. He held out his hands, slipping one of them into his sister’s hand and holding his other sister’s hand with the other. “Think carefully about this, children,” Alighieri said quickly, his voice less than careful. “Better the devil you know, after all.” Sunny looked him in the eye and stood at her full height. “Better no devils at all,” she said. “We’ve decided,” Violet said. “We’re going to see the unknown.” Rose looked at the three children with approval, and murmured, “Maybe you three are the Baudelaires, after all…” “Don’t take one step closer to that door!” cried Stanton, taking a step forward as the Baudelaires took a step forward – and, in turn, all of his allies, and all of their allies, took a step forward too, staring eye to eye, opposed, united. “We’re leaving,” Violet said, seriously, and her siblings nodded with her. “Don’t try to stop us.” “They won’t even be able to,” Rose told her. “They’ve lost control.” “Don’t be so sure of that,” hissed Alighieri. He pointed to his eyepatch and its mysterious insignia, and said ominously, “You can’t deny these three numbers.” “Even if we can’t stop you, the organisation behind us definitely will!” announced Stanton. “Comrades, in the name of 667 Dark Avenue, I command you to –” <O> WHAT DO YOU COMMAND? STOP THE BAUDELAIRES LET THE BAUDELAIRES GO
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Post by gliquey on Sept 10, 2016 4:05:47 GMT -5
Stop the Baudelaires.
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Post by lorelai on Sept 11, 2016 10:35:11 GMT -5
Let the Baudelaires go!
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crono288
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 70
Likes: 45
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Post by crono288 on Sept 13, 2016 20:53:06 GMT -5
Absolutely let them go!
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Post by Teleram on Sept 14, 2016 18:42:20 GMT -5
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Post by Dante on Sept 17, 2016 3:42:29 GMT -5
Chapter Thirteen by Dante “…let the Baudelaires go,” Stanton finished, lamely, and the whole room went silent. Alighieri, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Jules – all Stanton’s allies stared at him in shock, looking bereft, like a lampless lighthouse. “Just – let them go? That’s it?” asked Alighieri, in bewilderment. Stanton nodded, and his head fell morosely upon his chest. “Those are our orders,” he said quietly. “How very disappointing,” Jules said, with a deep yawn. Sliding down the wall to sit on crossed legs, he mumbled, “Now we’re the ones who have to lie down and give up…” For the Baudelaires, it was a somewhat lacklustre denouement, watching their mysterious captors unravel before their eyes. Alighieri joined Jules, lowering himself to the floor and sitting down with a grunt of weariness; the three unindividualised women silently turned and filed out of the room, into a corridor filled with shadows; Stanton merely stood there, looking sad and exhausted. Olaf and Rose, for their part, looked faintly disappointed that the confrontation had not ended in a brawl, a word which here means “punch-up.” For the Baudelaires, whose memories, whether real or not, were punctuated with unfortunate events like spaces in a sentence, to suddenly encounter so fortunate an event was so unlikely that they had a hard time even believing it. “…Excuse me – Captain Stanton,” Violet asked, stepping up nervously to the melancholy man. “Are you quite serious? You’re just going to let us go?” He looked at her with sad and tired eyes, and nodded. “As I said, we have our orders,” he said, his voice barely more than a sigh. “It’s impossible for us to defy them. You can do whatever you want now.” Violet looked at Klaus and Sunny, and Klaus looked at Violet and Sunny, and Sunny looked at Violet and Klaus, and they all looked at each other. “Then… we’ll be going now,” Violet said quickly, just in case it was another trick, or he was about to change his mind. “Goodbye, Captain Stanton, Captain Alighieri. Jules.” Rose nodded, and gestured towards the door. The Baudelaires turned, and, with Olaf in tow, took a few steps towards it. “Just one thing,” a voice behind them groaned. “Please…” They turned their heads, and saw Stanton staring after them like an abandoned puppy. “Please,” he said, “don’t kill us.” “You have the wrong idea,” Rose answered him, and her voice showed mercy to him, too. “You will all survive.” And then the Baudelaires had left the room, and behind them, everything in it was gone. There was only the long dark corridor, Rose ahead of them, Olaf behind them, and a world of possibility at either end. “Well, that was surprisingly easy,” Olaf commented, at last. “It looks like 667 Dark Avenue has given you a reprieve, Baudelaires.” “I suppose good storytelling went out of the window a long time ago,” Rose shrugged. She looked back at the Baudelaires, and smiled. “What do you three make of it all now? Was it as bad as you were expecting?” “To be honest, I still don’t think I fully understand what’s going on,” Violet confessed. “Are we real, or not?” Sunny asked Rose. They heard Olaf make a disdainful noise. “Who cares?” he retorted. “I don’t know if that’s enough for us, Olaf,” Klaus told him. “Even if it’s enough for you.” “Maybe you were asking the wrong question, though,” Rose interrupted. “Are you really not real, do you think?” The Baudelaires hemmed and hawed, a phrase which here means “had no idea how to answer this question.” Rose let the sound of their footfalls be the only sound to break the silence for a minute, and then went on. “You can think, can’t you?” she asked, at last. “You can feel, can’t you?” The Baudelaires looked at each other. “We think we can,” Violet answered. “Isn’t that the same as the real thing?” she asked. “What’s the difference between thinking you can think and actually thinking? What would knowing that you could think be like, that’s different from only thinking you can think?” “I don’t know if we could know the difference at all,” Klaus replied. “Is that what you’re saying? That nobody knows, because it’s impossible to know?” “Even the other Baudelaires, and the other Count Olaf, had such dilemmas,” Count Olaf pointed out. “Time after time they had to decide whether something was right or wrong. They had to make those decisions because they didn’t know for sure. Nobody knows for sure what’s really right or really wrong, or even if right and wrong exist at all.” “But they do exist,” Rose said, firmly. “They exist in our minds, like everything else.” “Is something real if it’s only in our minds?” asked Sunny. “Your whole life is only in your mind,” Rose answered. “What comes from the outside, and what comes from within, is all playing out on the stage of the mind, which is the true reality. What you perceive is always true.” “Because it can’t be disproven – even if it might not be impossible to be disproven,” Klaus suggested. “Like a scientific theory,” Violet added. “Or a fact,” Sunny said. “It’s all philosophy to me – and all a waste of time,” Olaf sneered. “You could spend so much time debating about whether you can believe the evidence of your own eyes that you’d forget to actually see anything – and just so, even from the back of this queue, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.” The Baudelaires leaned around Rose and looked, and indeed, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, just as Olaf had said – a dim and yellowish light, the colour of old photographs, but any light will do in the dark, and a minute later they had emerged into the warehouse into which they had also emerged some time ago, but from the opposite direction. The cargo elevator stood open against the wall, with its collection of crates and props beside it, and with nothing left to stop them, the five simply walked across the room and entered the elevator. It wasn’t until they had all filed in that they realised that an extra three pairs of footsteps were following them. “You seem happy with your decision,” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne said. Violet quickly turned and pressed the button to send the elevator upwards. The three standoffish women stood off to the side and made no moves to interfere as the grille rattled across the doorway of the elevator, dividing the five and the three for good. “The countdown has reached 01,” the three women said, their voices, now flat and lifeless, merging into one. “Do you truly know what you are doing?” The Baudelaires shook their heads. “No,” Violet answered for her siblings, “and that’s why we’re doing it.” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne nodded – perhaps respecting their decision, perhaps deploring their foolishness, perhaps simply acknowledging their honesty; perhaps, indeed, all three. Then the elevator whirred into life, and began to groan its way upwards. Violet, Klaus and Sunny locked eyes with Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and watched as the three women, shattered into fragments by the grating, sunk into the floor and were reduced to a sliver and at last to nothing. The Baudelaires would never see them again. The Baudelaires would definitely see them again. The elevator and its five occupants that slid upwards quiet and alone, floor and roof, three still walls and one that rolled ever downwards, were a small world together, like a cave in which even the shadows of the outside world do not fall – or perhaps they do. At last, the silence was broken by Rose’s long and weary sigh, a satisfied sigh, the sort given after a long day’s work done well is over. “The end is near,” she said, to nobody in particular, and then turned to the Baudelaires. “You three are quiet,” she said. “Any more questions? Any more thoughts?” “Countless ones,” Klaus replied, “but many might be best answered by waiting a few minutes more.” “For questions about the world,” Sunny nodded, “but maybe not about us.” “About who you are on the outside, or who you are on the inside?” asked Rose. “Definitely on the inside,” Violet answered. “I was just thinking about what we spoke about earlier – about how knowing who we are is like knowing right and wrong…” “Still hung up on who’s a noble person and who’s a wicked one?” asked Count Olaf. “That’s hardly your concern anymore.” “Right and wrong might be different from good and evil,” Klaus said. “Maybe there aren’t noble or wicked people, just the sum of many right or wrong decisions.” “But how do we know what’s right and wrong?” Violet asked. “In our memories, we’ve often struggled over those decisions. It used to be so simple, because our certainties came naturally from inside us. But then it stopped coming naturally, and we stopped being certain.” “You might be wrong about that,” Rose said. “What’s natural isn’t always certain.” She pushed herself away from the elevator wall, and stepped into the centre of the room. “For example, there’s the natural state of reality – your reality, our reality as it is now,” she went on. “In its natural state, our reality is uncertain. All of this has happened because we’ve entered a temporary bubble of stable reality, something which is in itself unnatural – though not wrong.” She gestured to the Baudelaires. “When the bomb goes off, this reality will return to its original state of indeterminacy – the Great Unknown, as some call it.” “The end of the world…” Olaf muttered. “Wrong,” Rose shot back. “In the Great Unknown, there are no certainties, including the certainty of this world either ending or continuing.” She grasped at the air as if reaching for words and explanations she was not naturally disposed to deliver. “In the Great Unknown, events don’t occur in a way that we’d recognise. It’s more that the possibility of those events exists – all events, all possibilities. Anything can happen.” She paused, and frowned. “No – everything will happen.” “‘Immanent, practical superposition,’” quoted Klaus, and a smile began to spread across his face. “All events coming true at once, for everyone, everywhere.” “ All events?” asked Violet, catching his drift, a phrase which here means “understanding his train of thought.” “Including anything we could hope for? Anything we could imagine? Anything we could ever have asked for?” “Everything will be true,” repeated Sunny excitedly. “Everything will be real. Even us!” “I see,” breathed Count Olaf, looking as if he had just set eyes upon an enormous pile of jewels. “If that is so, then the bomb doesn’t destroy the world at all…” “Now you get it,” Rose grinned. “It creates the world.” Their discussion was interrupted as the elevator began to creak, groan, and grind to a stop, a wide rectangle of passageway sinking into view and gradually occupying an entire wall of the elevator shaft. There was a shaking halt, and then a mechanical clanking as the grille folded away into the wall, and then the Baudelaires were stepping out into the wings, into the offstage illuminated by a rectangle of crackling elevator light. A nearby buzz wormed into their ears, electric, like the static from a screen without a signal, humming its way through them and throbbing in the background. They trod the boards, kicking up a year’s worth of dust, stepping past a great hanging curtain and out into the open, watched by dozens of empty chairs that saw three children and two adults arrive on a stage where broken glass crunched underfoot and a dilapidated octopus-shaped submarine lay adrift at one side of a vast and broken window. And out of the window – The Baudelaires, Count Olaf, and Rose shuffled their feet to the edge of the precipice. Beyond, there was no horizon; beneath, above, there was neither sea nor sky. Undifferentiated blackness waited like an abyss or a wall, empty or full, far away or brushing their faces. It was impossible to tell. The truth was unknown. “Doctor, they’re here,” Rose said, holding a finger and a thumb beside her face. “Is this what you wanted? Is this how you wanted it? Regardless, it’s what you’ve ended up with.” She lowered her hand, and looked at the four beside her – Count Olaf greedy and intrigued, Violet Baudelaire composed and curious, Klaus Baudelaire excited and nervous, Sunny Baudelaire wide-eyed and keen. “When you’re ready,” she nodded to them. “When we’re ready, what?” Violet asked her. “When we’re ready, what do we do?” “When you’re ready,” Rose repeated, “it will begin.” Violet looked at her siblings, and they nodded back at her. She held out her right hand, and Klaus caught it with his left, and he held out his right hand, and Sunny reached up and grabbed it with her left. Then Violet looked to her left and, seeing Count Olaf standing alone, she thought only for a moment before finding the answer inside herself. At the last, she made peace with her memories, and even, though it was a risk, held out a left hand for Count Olaf to hold. He looked at her in surprise, and then, with a gentleness she had not thought possible, took her hand and grasped it firmly. In the end, there was solidarity between the four, they who had known each other since the beginning. Then they looked out, and the darkness began to open. A slit of light gleamed in the distance, narrow as nothing at first, but then hinging open like a lid or a jaw. It widened and widened, descending downwards and rising upwards, revealing a jagged horizon of peaking and troughing dark and light. The shapes were foggy, like distant mountains, like twisted fangs, like silhouettes distorted in the mist, and Violet was the first, straining her eyes to make out the shimmering shapes, to name them. “Are they… the Quagmire triplets?” she asked, watching in awe as they grew taller, closer. “They’re so similar…” “I think it’s Fiona – and her brother,” Klaus gasped, leaning forwards. “And is that Captain Widdershins with them? Or Phil – or is it Hector?” “I see you haven’t forgotten about me, my troupe,” murmured Count Olaf, a contentment never before seen upon his face. “And even you, Esmé – no, Kit Snicket…” Sunny beamed a smile so hard it made her eyes water, though they were watering anyway, tiny tears trickling down her small face. “Our parents,” she whispered. The jaws opened wide – The curtains trembled and begin to draw together – The countdown ticked over to a number that was not zero – And the Baudelaires entered a world where everything is real. THE .
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