pusillanimous- Violet Baudelaire x fem! reader

Chapter Fourteen

The sight of Phil's leg was the most grotesque thing I had ever seen, grotesque being a word which here means twisted, tangled, strained, and gory. Violet, Sunny, and I looked upon it as our stomachs turned. My head began to feel fuzzy and light. I looked away to the string machine, which was just as hopelessly disfigured as Phil's leg.

"Gee, Phil," another employee piped up, "I thought you'd say something more along the lines of 'AH! MY LEG! MY LEG!'"

"Oh, I'm alright," Phil said, cheery as ever. "Now, if someone could just help me up I'm sure I could get back to work."

"Don't be ridiculous, Phil, you need to get to a hospital!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, we have those coupons from last month, remember?" said another worker. "Fifty percent off on a cast at Ahab Memorial Hospital. Two of us can use them and get you all fixed up."

"This is a disaster!" yelled Foreman Flacutono. "The worst accident in the history of this lumber mill!"

"Oh, it's alright," began Phil. "I never liked my left leg much anyway."

"Not your leg, dummy! The string machine! Those cost an inordinate amount of money!"

The workers looked at eachother confused, several murmurs of "what does that mean?" echoing through the mill.

"It can mean many things," said Klaus. "'Irregular,' 'immoderate,' or 'disorderly.' When it comes to money, it's most likely to mean excessive. Foreman Flacutono means that the string machine costs a lot of money."

"Klaus!" shouted Violet." You're back!"

"What happened yesterday?" I said as we rushed to meet him.

"What happened here?" Klaus asked, looking down at Phil.

"You really don't remember what happened?" I asked.

"I certainly remember!" Foreman Flacutono yelled. "You smashed the string machine! You've put a complete stop to our stamping process! No coupons for anyone today!"
...

After work, an announcement over the intercom called Klaus to Dr. Orwell's office to pick up his glasses. This time, the Baudelaire sisters and I went with him. Once we got to the eye-shaped building, we simply stood there, not one of us making a move to go inside. After a while, Violet finally spoke.

"We don't have to go," she said. "We can run away and take the next train that comes in and ride it as far away as it goes. We know how to get a job now, we could support ourselves. Remember what we said after your mother died?" she turned to me, grabbing my hands. "About how if nothing else, we at least have eachother?"

"And if Olaf finds us again?" I said.

"Who would protect us from him?" Klaus finished.

"We'd protect ourselves, just like we always have," said Violet.

"When one of us is a baby and one of us can't see?" I countered.

She rolled her eyes at me, turning to Klaus. "We don't know what's going to happen to us in there. Just try to think, what happened in there yesterday?"

"The last thing I remember was trying to tell Phil not to take me in there. That's it. It's like part of my brain's been wiped clean. Like I was asleep from the time I walked in until the time I gave the definition of 'inordinate' in the mill earlier," he said.

"But you weren't asleep, you were walking around like a robot," said Violet.

"And then you caused that accident and hurt Phil," I said.

"But I don't remember those things," he said. "It's almost like I..."

Violet and I looked at eachother. "You what?" I asked.

"It's like I were hypnotized," he finished, wide-eyed. "That explains everything."

"I thought hypnosis was just a trope in scary movies," Violet said.

"Oh, no. I read the Encyclopedia Hypnotica last year, it talks about all kinds of cases of hypnosis throughout history. An ancient Egyptian king who would imitate a chicken when someone would shout the word 'ramses,' a Chinese merchant in the Ling dynasty who never learned how to play the violin but when someone shouted the word 'mao,' he would play like Nero-"

Sunny shouted something which meant "We don't have time for all of these stories, Klaus!"

He smiled. "Sorry. It's just that it was a very interesting book, and I'm excited that it's coming in handy."

I recalled reading the same book myself around three years ago.

"Well, did it say anything about how to stop yourself from being hypnotized?" asked Violet.

"If it did, I didn't read any of it. I only read about the famous cases of hypnosis."

"Hypnotists input two trigger words," I recalled. "One to put the hypnotized person into trance, and one to wake them from trance. We just have to find out what trigger words Dr. Orwell used on Klaus."

Klaus looked to the eye-shaped building and began walking toward it.

"You're going in?" Violet asked.

"What else are we going to do?" he responded.

I looked to the top of the eye-shaped building and thought for a moment. I thought a question that I was sure had been asked by countless people in countless places all over the world countless times before. The Baudelaires had asked it. Mr. Poe had asked it. Miss Josephine had asked it. Now, I was asking it for the first time I ever had.

Where is Count Olaf?

If you've been following my story so far, you know that anywhere the Baudelaire orphans go, Count Olaf is there. Lurking, plotting, and scheming to get his hands on their fortune. I guessed he was after mine now, too. Within days of arrival, he and his nefarious (a word which here means orphan-hating) troupe show up. Yet, so far, Olaf and his troupe have been nowhere to be seen. As we walked into the office of Dr. Orwell, I found the answer to my question.

Very nearby.