|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 7, 2014 1:22:10 GMT -5
Journal of Harlan St. Just
Month the Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Day the Third
I am presently returning from my year long absence in the Kierkegaard Mountains during which I resided with a community of scientific researchers led by Professor Alighiero Mallansohn, affectionately called Dante by his research team due to his prominent first name and his profound grasp of the Italian language due to his formative childhood in that country, having been raised on his namesake's greatest work. While there I received a letter which I was sharply admonished to never open or read while I was sojourning there. Only now on my return journey am I able to reveal its contents and the ramifications it entails. If you are familiar with the life story of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, then you would understand that he had a knowledgeable grasp on subjects "beyond the pale" both as mathematician and philosopher. His work The Looking Glass is evidence of his talent of simplifying the abstract and unknown phenomena of life into much more palatable concepts so as to be generally understood by a more eager and trusting audience. It is on this color (but not very much of it) that I begin my long and harrowing explication of just what I had gotten myself into when I chose to leave. It concerns a secret organization, which until the investigation of one Lemony Snicket (himself a life-long member of that organization), had remained shrouded in ever shifting mist, a phrase which here means "was a terribly confusing matter for everyone involved until they decided to quit the newspaper in a huff and go to the nearest café to gulp root beer floats down in order to drown away their newspaper-less occupations." That newspaper was The Daily Punctilio and the reporters who had quit in exasperation had been the only souls of life in an increasingly freezing cadaver of pointlessness. Their editor-in-chief, Astor Julienne, also the founder, was a cultured man and a very passionate upholder of literary democracy and the importance of the recording and preservation of knowledge down to the finest detail. Unfortunately, he had passed before the aforementioned reporters had quit, and only under the disappointing patronage of Eleanora Poe who was as oblivious as her brother. Indeed, you could trust a young girl to run The Daily Punctilio better than her. And that is not the least of it: Julienne's daughter, one Geraldine, had taken position as a reporter no sooner than his death. To return to the point, as it were, after a long tangent: DON'T PANIC, dear reader. In my reflections I have realized many things and these realizations have also generated more and more clarity and more and more quality of a thing unknown, which not even those who would seem to know even know, and probably never will. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are even conceived of in their philosophies. Fighting fire with fire is but one divisor in the great tables of values. There they were, concerned with setting and putting out fires when it is what they never even realized: that the world may also end in ice. This is how everything changed, and not for the better. This is what the letter showed me as it all came tumbling down into a final convergence within the devisings of my mind. The City, which had been my home for most of my life, was forever changed, and the letter in my shaking hands only proves to me that even the slightest and most minuscule amount of counted time whether by seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and even years, contains many possibilities and room for grave differences. And it is one difference that can make for a long series of unfortunate events; events whose effects will not cancel out until long after the damage is done. And it is the bad beginning of such that I leave for you, in the midst of a very sad occasion.
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Nov 7, 2014 3:02:15 GMT -5
You do make a habit of returning bearing gifts, Jacques, and I like it. Much is confusing at this point, but intentionally; we haven't even met our title character yet, and so I presume this forms a kind of introduction to what is to follow, a piece of mystifying context which I take it will one day become clearer, as it describes. You have some nice allusions down here - Carroll, Frost - and that rich simile of an "increasingly freezing cadaver of pointlessness." Bracing stuff.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 7, 2014 13:51:48 GMT -5
Thank you, as always. I've been thinking that my other work here has stalled into oblivion and I wished to infuse new blood into my universe by actually writing a story. It's in the same universe as the "Commonplace Notebook" series but I feel I want to provide another voice into the matter, one not as privy to the great secrets until he finds them or realizes them as he goes as opposed to a retrospective bookkeeping. I also wonder how I will be able to portray the future. I have been inspired lately by Mister M's plot arc. My arc is going to be different from his, obviously. I, too, am interested in time travel. I have a lot of ideas in my head and I need to plot them out.
|
|
|
Post by Isadora Is a Door on Nov 7, 2014 15:02:29 GMT -5
aw shucks
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 7, 2014 15:07:02 GMT -5
It's nothing.
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Nov 7, 2014 17:13:03 GMT -5
The paragraph breaks also are appreciated, by the way.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 7, 2014 20:49:36 GMT -5
You are welcome, Dante.
Snippet One.
Reuel Faraday was a young man who hated his name. His first name, to be precise. He assumed he had been named such after a prominent friend of his family, not that he knew much about them. Faraday, who liked to be called "Dan" or "Daniel" instead of "Reuel", was an orphan from a very early age. It had been when he was around four or five or six years into his life that his home had gone up in flames, taking his parents with it, or so he had been told. Young Faraday had been taken in by the Humes: Charlie and Elizabeth. What Faraday did know of his family was that they were practically a line of "geniuses" in whichever field they individually decided to work in. He had heard of an uncle named Daniel Faraday from his surrogate parents, an uncle who had died before he had been born, and he wished he was named after him instead, as they had spoken of him very highly. His uncle seemed to have been a fêted physicist, being the youngest Professor tenured at his Alma Mater. As fortune would have it, Daniel was Reuel Faraday's middle name as stated on the birth certificate produced after much questioning about the circumstances of his own birth. It was this reverence for his uncle that he carried throughout his days.
Reuel Daniel Faraday was currently being questioned by a barrage of dark suits in a darkened and squalid room lit overhead by a creaking, antique yellow lamp. If you have ever been interrogated, dear reader, it is not a very pleasant experience. You might be concerned of what might happen to you next once you have finished answering the questions of very scary and menacing men, or you might be worried whether one of them might suddenly lunge and spill that steaming cup of coffee onto your person in order to make you talk, or you might be worried whether your loved ones had known you were being interrogated and thought less of you because if it, or if they were pained by a pointless verbal dance due to your innocence which they had proved sometime before and which would have rendered any following interrogations of your non-existent guilt moot by definition. I can inform you that young Faraday, however apprehensive he might have been in that forbidding moment, would not go to prison and he would not be put on trial to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Instesd, he would manage to escape with his life. And his interrogators were not, as one might normally think, the police department. "We will not ask you again, Faraday. Where. Is. The. Sugar. Bowl!?" screeched the tall and smartly dressed woman who seemed to be their ringleader. Faraday, staring sardonically into her blazing eyes, refused. "Couldn't tell you. Even if I knew." His voice was quiet, yet firm. "You won't?" the woman hissed. Her eyebrows raged and her nostrils flared. She had the shadow of impending doom on her shadowed face. Faraday considered her and tilted his head in nonchalance. They endured a battle of stares lasting several seconds up to a minute before she slapped him with a yell and led her retinue out of the room. "You will give up your secrets, Faraday, even if we have to kill you!" "Good luck with that." Reuel Daniel Faraday, his face smarting from the slap, was planning his escape that very moment. If you have ever made an escape plan, then you would know that a good one requires a thorough knowledge of the environment in which you are held captive. In this case his slovenly captors were not very organized despite their leader's angry insistence upon competence. It is a wonder to me how she ever ended up with her current henchpeople, as it was to Faraday as he sat there thinking. What they had overlooked in their incompetence, but what he had caught notice of, was an opening in the concrete floor almost analogous to the surrounding finish. It seemed to him like a grate of sorts. Beyond the shut door he could hear the sounds of argument. The woman was screeching madly as she shot down each word of her minions with her biting fury. He knew there would not be much time before she returned to deal with him herself, and he did not want to be in that position. Luckily one of the others had thrown something, it seemed, and she went back to her shouting, giving him more time to loosen the trapdoor, revealing a musty vertical passageway down. Gingerly, he began to climb down the rusted rungs and started to replace the tile above him as the door to the room burst open with a yell of "FARADAY!" He was caught off guard, let the tile land on the entrance with a sharp clack, and fell the rest of the way down the passageway, hitting the floor of a long and damp tunnel with a thump. He could dimly hear commotion far above him as he lay sprawled in momentary pain, though he had broken no bones. As he rose, he panted slightly. He realized that if he wished to escape he would have to run for it along the tunnel until he was far far away from his enemies. Hearing clanging footfalls from the vertical shaft he had just fallen from, he began to run for his very life.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 8, 2014 1:46:42 GMT -5
Snippet Two
After intermittent rests counting no more than a few seconds and about an hour of frantic running, Faraday had come to the light at the end of the tunnel. It was a red neon light which read "EXIT" and it flickered evenly with a low hum as it cast a ghostly glow on the metal door under it. He turned the large rusted handle and pulled down, slowly opening the door. With a last look back from whence he came, he walked out the door, which swung itself shut after him. He was facing a railed staircase hewn out of stone, which he surmised was winding upward to some surface aperture. Freedom. He laughed silently as he climbed the steps, checking back behind him every moment or so, as if his enemies might have followed him there. After fifteen minutes he reached the end of it. The two shelter doors creaked heavily as he thrust them open, bathing him in the evening breeze.
Breathing in relief and exhaustion, he collapsed next to a tree root at the edge of the voluminous forest next to the opening of the now closed passageway. Reuel Faraday had outrun his captors who seemed to think he knew where the sugar bowl was. He was miles away from them on the other side of the area. They had been led on wild goose chases before, a phrase which here means "deceived into thinking many times that the object they wished to acquire was in the keeping of someone whom their target knew professionally." Never had he once come across the real thing, though. He had helped with the placement of a decoy in a certain tea set containing valuable information crucial to a certain secret organization of which he was still not familiar with even though he had been a member since he had been a small child.
There was a woman who had taught him everything he knew, but she had disappeared from his life after he had learned everything he could from her. The most remarkable thing he remembered about her was her hair: dark, unkempt, and wavy like disheveled yarn. Theodora had been a most critical woman who had often spoken disapprovingly concerning her last student, but she had taken a liking to him. As it turned out, she hadn't liked his own first name either. Due to that, his gratitude towards her was enormous. He wondered where she was now, if she was even alive. He remembered her exasperated expression framed by her wild hair, and he realized he was missing her terribly. He had never told her, of course, of his deep and affectionate regard for her bordering on infatuation, part of which had been from apprentice to chaperone. He had had no wish to displease her nor derail their then work at hand for the organization they were part of. Another part was the fierce love and devotion of young man towards older woman in a way that seemed to evoke a beauty only found within the great unrequited poems of myth and legend.
She had marked him with her no-nonsense manner and agitated verve. She was his ideal and the lighthouse of his teenage years. She had kept him focused, and that was a reassurance in a world gone mad. Hence, he had never tired of hearing her suggestions and alternatives and critiques. He had trusted her alone out of everyone else in their organization. And I know for a fact, dear reader, that his trust in her had not been misplaced at all.
Shaking his head lightly, he gazed into the dark forest. A point of fire winked from within the wood, and Faraday tensed up. Rustling footsteps neared him as he realized who it was. "Are you who I think you are?" "I didn't realize this was a sad occasion." "Faraday." "Ivo. What news?" The lanky man nodded curtly, gripping an oil lantern. He was nearing middle age and his hairs were starting to grey. "Alexandra Radzinsky is having a right old fit with you escaping her clutches," he laughed. Ivo Hardrada had been on a secret mission in which he had infiltrated the ranks of the woman who had previously captured but had failed to keep Faraday. "Was it you who threw something out there while I was in that room?" A quick nod. "She seemed to think I knew where it was." "She has been known to jump to conclusions," Ivo mused. Faraday thought for a moment. Alexandra Radzinsky was indeed known to go off into rabid flights of vicious fancy whenever the sugar bowl was mentioned to her face. It was as if she had been primed for it. "That place where I was held contained a passageway which runs all the way to this very spot." Faraday was pacing slowly, still lost in thought. "Why hasn't she known of this? She never noticed until I was well under way escaping." Ivo scrunched his eyebrows. "She can't have planned for it, though. Her rage was real, or it seemed so to me." "Exactly. Her blind spot, when she is clinched all on the sugar bowl." Faraday stopped. "The place was very derelict, don't you think?" Ivo nodded.
If you have ever been somewhere in a building or an old museum, you might have been wondering what sort of purpose the building had before housing its current layout. A very long time before you were born there was a bookstore in the City where a wealthy man in a pinstripe suit took his young charge to every weekend with his two other charges in tow. The young charges are long gone, and their guardian was presumed dead in a devastating hotel fire which involved the young charges significantly. That bookstore was replaced by a shady café known to lace its root beer floats with high traces of wormwood with varying allergic reactions from its frequenters. As it so happens, dear reader, the place of Reuel Faraday's temporary capture had once been the residence of Alighiero Mallansohn.
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Nov 8, 2014 4:57:56 GMT -5
You've been reading ATWQ, I see; it's always a pleasure to see ATWQ put an appearance in in fanfiction, as it's quite underappreciated in that respect. I also notice some parallels to your previous work. This is promising.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 8, 2014 12:46:56 GMT -5
I've been scanning the discussion threads of ATWQ and child threads of "Ridiculously Wrong Questions" for the general gist of it. Only have the first book. I did like what I read about Lemony's speech and the beautiful essence of what V.F.D. ought to be in ?3 and Theodora's apprentice before Lemony (I had no idea she had had an apprentice who was favorable to her, yet I wrote the same sort of thing) came along, and after his "rival", and I liked that she has redeeming qualities. I, too, really hope she does not perish in ?4, but that is what time travel is for, right?
She disappeared after training Faraday, but to where? Or a better question might be, to when.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 8, 2014 18:43:11 GMT -5
Snippet Three
Severus Snape was a willowy young man with dark greasy hair which fell to his shoulders, which like the rest of his person was clothed with imposing black clothes save for his pale face and hands. He was disinterestedly sipping bitter tea laced with even bitterer wormwood. He would be meeting an associate due to the contents of the week-old telegram currently hanging in his hand. The table pot was simmering heavily as he poured himself another flagon of Bitter Bitter Tea, un-originally named after the flowery and ramshackle café he was sitting in: "Bitter Bitter Tea Time", well aware of the fact that his table pot had been spiked with a more lethal dosage of powdered wormwood than was the already strong usual dosage. As it so happened, Severus Snape was genetically immune to most poisons and so he drank it down with an arched eyebrow, silently mocking the old and freckled waiter who at that moment rushed back behind the counter to check on sales, or, more likely, to inform whomever had hired him to poison Severus Snape that the deed had been botched, a word which here means "foiled due to the target's unprecedented natural resistance to a very powerful powder lethal in gargantuan tablespoons." Now, dear reader, poison was not the only thing young Severus was resistant to. He was also resistant to the ploys of fools, such as the obnoxious banker from the table adjacent to his wishing to sell golden banknotes which, I am sure you are well aware, is not a practice prerequisite to good financial management. After sending him off with a slicing word, he decided to check the time. Not just any time, but Bitter Bitter Tea time. Upon glancing at the rickety wall clock, Severus read through the telegram again, looked back at the clock. According to it, it was half-past five. He then glanced at the sparse menu which only contained the words "Bitter Bitter Tea Time's Bitter Bitter Tea With Bitter Bitter Bitter Wormwood." Its overall design appeared to have been commissioned by the Department of Redundancy Department, a fledgling ink and stationery service bureau based in a city he had never been to, but to which he would soon journey in the coming days, a phrase which here means "he would be there very very soon". On that menu he found no timing whatsoever. Everything was a repetitive, perpetual jumble, and to Severus that wasn't very sensible at all. Clearly those were intended errors, or the entire tea shop had been plucked out of a bad Victorian penny dreadful. He did not like to dwell on such things, for his associate had been waylaid sometime before, and he had a far away city to visit. With a curt nod at the dumbfounded Bitter Bitter Doorman, he swept out into the street.
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Nov 9, 2014 5:10:42 GMT -5
Severus Snape, it's safe to say, was not on my list of characters to expect to turn up in a Lemony Snicket fanfic. Despite having done the very same thing myself. I see that he retains something like his potions specialism, at least. I shall wish him luck in not being assassinated in the future of this story, although his canon origins don't bode well in that respect.
|
|
|
Post by Jacques Snicket on Nov 9, 2014 15:32:48 GMT -5
When did you insert a non Snicket character into one of your stories? My memory's a bit dim at the moment on that.
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Nov 9, 2014 17:19:10 GMT -5
When did you insert a non Snicket character into one of your stories? My memory's a bit dim at the moment on that. Pay a visit, if you have the time, to The Arcane Academy.
|
|
|
Post by Teleram on Nov 9, 2014 22:19:59 GMT -5
This is pretty great.
|
|