Kit Snicket had not been gone for a long time, when Duncan Quagmire began to think that perhaps it hadn't been such a good idea to stay behind. Still, he and his siblings had always been too curious. The Great Unknown was... well, unknown. So it attracted them. Especially him, the journalist.
All in all, it had not been a particularly good day overall, except for one part. It had begun amazingly, after he and Isadora discovered their brother, Quigley, was not dead. He imagined there would have been a lot of hugging and possibly crying, but at that moment, six large eagles with cruelly sharp beaks had appeared, and proceeded to attempt to puncture the balloons of the self-sustaining hot air balloon home they had lived in for the past few months. They'd been doing a good job fighting them off, but then the Queequeg had appeared, they'd turned to look at it, and the devious eagles took their chance. In a moment the remains of the self-sustaining hot air balloon home had crashed into the approching Queequeg and they were all in the water.
And that was when the question mark-shaped thing had appeared, deep under the water, but somehow Duncan saw it.
So they had stayed behind, rejecting probable safety for the dangerous intruige of the great unknown, quite literally.
But now, as he looked around, at the quickly growing question mark which could carry great danger or save them, he began to think that they might not make it out of this. For the normally optimistic triplet, this was strangely morbid, but unfortunately it seemed warranted. He was thinking what could be his last thoughts, so he thought of the past, for the future was uncertain.
A fire. The Orphan Shack. An awful girl named Carmelita. So far not cheerful. Three other orphans. Friends. Six hour violin recitals made bearable by friends. Until those friends were in danger. A plot. A pair of glasses through which he could blurrily see a girl's face. V.F.D.
A dark, fake elevator shaft. An inventor, looking back at him as she ascended upwards. A statue of a red herring, not such a red herring after all. A tall, pitch black tower, with only his sister for company. A fountain shaped like a crow. Isadora writing frantically before the real crows fled. Bright light, and the girl's face again. An unraveling ladder. A self sustaining hot air balloon home. Now he was back to the present. But through it all, he saw the girl. He did not wish for her to be there with him, for she then would suffer the same fate as he, whether good or bad, but he did miss her.
A few metres away, he saw his long-lost sibling, Quigley, staring at him. Duncan looked at Quigley, and Quigley looked at Duncan. One if them said a word, neither knew who. Then they went underwater, and he remembered no more.
Kit Snicket, on her raft of books, saw the triplets go underwater, but before that, a boy called out a name. It was a name she had heard before, but what she wondered was which of the brothers had said it.
Violet.