Author's Note: After reading ASOUE fanfics for a while I thought I'd give it a shot myself. Set after Book Thirteen. My own idea of a Book Fourteen. *Holds for applause*

Disclaimer: I am not Lemony Snicket. I do not own ASOUE or any of its characters. I have never claimed ownership of them, despite what it said in 'The Daily Punctilio' last year.

---

Unless you are from Ancient Rome, or simply someone who has read a lot of books, you are probably not familiar with the language of Latin. There is a Latin term that I would like to use, but I may have to translate it as most Ancient Romans are long since dead and most well-read people have fallen victims to fires. The term is 'caveat lector'. Like other Latin phrases, such as 'ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt', which translates as 'the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling' and 'dum spiro spero', which translates as 'while I breathe, I hope', this phrase is still used on this day, if you look hard enough. It means 'let the reader beware'. It is simply impossible to think of a phrase which applies to this book more than 'caveat lector'. Before I begin to describe what horrible problems the Baudelaire orphans will face, I will give you one last warning. Even if you have survived the first thirteen volumes of this series, I can't promise that you'll survive this one. They were just appetizers. The word 'appetizer' usually refers to a small portion of a food or drink served before or at the beginning of a meal to stimulate the desire to eat. In this case, it means that the first thirteen books describe only the beginning of the Baudelaire orphan's troubles. If you thought that THE END was the end of the end, then you were wrong, for the end is never the end and THE END was only the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning. I hope you have fallen asleep from that last sentence, so you do not have to read the rest of this story, because you'll soon realise that there is evil out there far worse than the now-deceased Count Olaf. I repeat one last time:

Caveat lector.

It was Decision Day at the island when Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire left with Beatrice, the daughter of Kit Snicket, who asked the Baudelaire to take care of her before Kit's death. They have stayed at the island for a year and since their parents had been killed in a fire, it was the first year of peace that they ever got to enjoy. According to my sources, it may have also been their last year of peace. This peace ended abruptly and suddenly as Klaus pointed ahead of their boat. All four passengers looked and immediately saw it. It was a storm, but it wasn't only a storm. It was a deadly storm.

"Look! It's a storm!", Klaus exclaimed.

"It's not only a storm. It's a deadly storm", added Violet.

A brief silence occurred. The boat was now too close to the storm for Violet to invent a way to turn the boat around. Her inventing skills were useless in this situation. Klaus thought about the books he had read on storms and the books he had read about boats, but he couldn't think of anything useful. His knowledge was useless in this situation. Sunny was sure that she could fix a delicious Mexican dish called arroz con pollo, but it would have done no good, except for preventing the orphans from having to face the storm on empty stomachs. Her cooking abilities were useless in this situation.

"What do we do?", asked Sunny, having to shout over the fierce waves that grew closer and closer. The Baudelaires (plus Beatrice) had almost entered the storm.

"I don't know. I don't think there's anything we can do", answered Violet.

"Maybe we don't have to do anything. We can see where the storm takes us. That's how we got to the island in the first place," Klaus said doubtfully.

"Or we could capsize", added Sunny. They were all aware of that possibility, but none of them wanted to think about it.

"It's a risk we'll have to take. There's nothing else we can do except for being passive", admitted Klaus. "Sometimes, you can't escape fate. There's a Latin phrase that means the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling, but I can't remember what it is."

"Scared", said Beatrice. After months of research, I am still unaware of what the daughter of Kit Snicket and Dewey Denouement actually meant. I have put more and more babies onto boats that were entering storms, but none of them said anything. All they did was cry. However, my guess would be that she meant something along the lines of 'I am scared'.

The storm got fiercer and fiercer and the boat rocked more and more. Klaus had to hold onto his glasses so that they would not fall into the water. Violet held onto her hair-ribbon tightly in fear of losing it. Sunny held on to Beatrice in fear of losing her, even though she wasn't much older than Beatrice herself and was equally at risk of falling off the boat. In fact all of them were at risk of falling. They all knew that the boat could capsize. As an old associate of mine named Murphy once said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy is gone now. He died in a fire that destroyed an entire dairy, but his law lives on. There was a lot that could have went wrong. It all did.

Violet, Klaus, Sunny and Beatrice all took one last breath of air before the boat was turned completely upside-down and later began to be torn apart.

Caveat Lector.