A Series of Slightly More Fortunate Events

Chapter 1: The Fatal Fire - Quagmires

To Beatrice

You were 5'11": under six feet

Now you are six feet under

-Lemony Snicket

-Narrator-

Life seemed perfect for the Quagmires. They lived in a mansion, they all had talents that were useful and they were all intelligent. Although this would all change, you may want to put this book down and pretend that the Quagmires lived their whole lives in this mansion and never faced any problems. 

Quigley was the oldest child and liked cartography, he had maps of everywhere in the city and made a lot of maps. He had maps of the finite forest and maps of the hinterlands. Unfortunately all of his maps would be gone by the end of the day. And he would most likely be gone. He would often play with the Quagmire's pet dog, Quarf, who fortunately survived the fire and was found by a member of VFD and held onto for the Quagmires in the future. He was going to get a glass of water at the beginning of the fire. 

Isadora was the middle child and liked poetry, specifically rhyming couplets. She had written a lot of couplets and could easily write them whenever thinking of anything, sometimes she even thought of them without even trying to. At the beginning of the fire, Isadora was playing cards with Duncan in the living room. Those cards would soon be engulfed in flames. 

The Quagmire parents were named Quentin and Karen, they were both part of a secret organization called VFD. They had never told their children that and they probably never would. VFD was an organization that stood for Volunteer Fire Department. They were an organization formed by a man named Ishmael, however a divide was created because of a play, a tea set, and a box of poison darts. This was called the schism and it happened when a woman named Beatrice threw a poison dart at someone and hit the chief of the fire department and a man named Lemony Snicket took the blame. This was during the play called La Forza del Destino, in which characters fall in love, go to war, engage in duels, kill each other over one song and in the final scene a gun is dropped and it fires when it hits the ground and kills someone. The divide created the fire starting side, which would start fires literally and figuratively. They seemed to start fires of noble volunteers' homes. Which is exactly what happened here. 

The fire seemed like an accident, but it wasn't. A man with a beard, but no hair and a woman with hair, but no beard set the fire. 

When the fire started, Isadora's mother pulled up a rug and pushed her down into a passageway, her father pushed her down the hatch and she landed in a passageway. 

Duncan was in the living reading a book about journalism and his father grabbed him, and pushed him down the hatch. 

Quigley was going to get a drink of water and when he saw the fire, he immediately threw it into the fire and ran, he ran to a nearby fire station and there he met a man who said he was LS and brought him to the Mortmain Mountains. 

AN: I know this is a short chapter. But I don't know that much about the Quagmires. The next few chapters will be longer.