After the End
Before you shall continue reading this, I should let you know that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children. They were charming, resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky. Almost everything that had happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair.
After the Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny plus Beatrice Baudelaire the second (who they now consider to be a younger sibling), set sail away from the island they had been living on for the past year. They were looking forward to a new beginning, although they had no idea where to start. They were in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a boat and Klaus' knowledge on tidal charts that he had researched over a year ago during his stay in Captain Widdershins' submarine, so he had forgotten. However, the Baudelaire's were very intelligent and knew that they could find their way home in the dead of night.
"Radius!" Sunny shrieked, holding a compass in the air to show her older sister Violet. Sunny's vocabulary had expanded an inordinate amount speaking of her being 4 years old now and not an infant. The compass was in rough shape and was going bonkers – a word which here means the needles and hands were out of control – therefore, Sunny was hoping that her older sister Violet might be able to fix the compass. Violet Baudelaire was very mechanically minded, and hopefully the compass might help the Baudelaire's and Beatrice find their way home. Violet started to tie her hair up, in preparation of repairing the compass, with the ribbon Kit Snicket lent to her when the Baudelaire orphans were disguised as concierges at the hotel Dénouement. Anyone who knew Violet Baudelaire well enough knew that when she tied her hair up, it meant that the wires, gears, and pulleys of her inventing brain were tingling, but she was quickly interrupted by her younger brother Klaus yelling "HOME!" while looking into his spyglass. His sisters stood up as fast as they could (of course with Beatrice in Violet's arm), and as they got closer, they got deeper and deeper into the mist of a familiar area, an area that started their unfortunate cycle: Briny Beach.
As Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire pulled the boat up to the shore with Beatrice napping in the boat, the Baudelaire's had mixed feelings about arriving at Briny Beach. They remembered when they heard the terrible news that started their series of unfortunate events because the way that sadness works is one of the greatest mysteries of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.
The Baudelaire orphans walked up to a payphone, although they didn't have any money and the only number they knew was Mr. Poe, and I don't think anyone would want to contact Mr. Poe if they had a choice. Mr. Poe was a banker who oversaw the orphan's affairs, but he didn't do much as he was always busy at the bank with his new promotion, and was always interrupting conversations with him by coughing. However, the Baudelaire's had no choice, and they searched the beach for a coin to call Mr. Poe. The beach was quite large, so Klaus used his spyglass to scan the beach -a word which here means to look over the beach in order to find a coin- and luckily, they found one. Once the Baudelaire's dialed Mr. Poe's number and they heard the words "Mulctuary Money Management, this is Mr. Poe, head of- *cough cough*-orphan affairs, how may I help you today?" If you were the Baudelaire's, you would be able to hear the banker on the other line still coughing. Sunny Baudelaire could even picture him wheezing into his white handkerchief, but she doubted that he would still have the same one after more than a year, but Mr. Poe can be very unpredictable, so you never know.
