Since I am about to join the narrative for the first time in person, I hope the readers will forgive me a long digression, which here means "boring the readers by going over the past instead of getting on with the story." If you get too bored you can always skip to the next chapter.
I arrived at the Briny Beach early on Tuesday morning, disguised as a trash bag blowing along the beach in the wind, which was a good disguise because there were many of these blowing about.
Kit was already there (she had survived being shot at by Mr. Poe and a car crash by means of a bulletproof vest and a driver's side airbag). Quigley Quagmire arrived a few minutes later in another of our taxis.
Together we searched the submarine the Baudelaires had left beached in the sand. We pieced together the woeful tale of what happened to the Baudelaires in the grim Gorgonic Grotto. From evidence left by Count Olaf when he looted the ship, I deduced the Baudelaire's capture and subsequent escape. From notes Klaus had left in the margins of "Mushroom Minutiae" I deduced Sunny's infection, and from the opened tin of wasabi I deduced her cure. I'm quite good at deduction, which here means "guessing."
(I also deduced that the V.F.D. had replanted the Gorgonic Grotto since the days of the fire, using spores from one of the Visitable Fungoid Ditches mentioned in Chapter 39 of "Mushroom Minutiae." The new tin of wasabi could only have been left in the grotto by someone tending the mushrooms recently. This made me terribly sad. I wrote a note to my publishers while inside the submarine but it was almost completely washed out with ocean water and my tears)
Quigley was horrified that the Baudelaires had failed to decode his Verse Fluctuation Declaration and had gone off with Mr. Poe instead of with Kit. So was I; and I was very much afraid my next book would be quite short, along the lines of "The Baudelaires were killed. The End."
We retired to an apartment my sister had rented under an assumed name, and with Quigley's help I finished up the "The Slippery Slope" and got well into the writing of "The Grim Grotto" (I write very fast). Then I took a break from writing because Kit wanted me to try to find a test tube in a room she had filled with sand (it was a V.F.D. training refresher exercise). I was lucky and found it in twenty-seven minutes.
After an excellent lunch, which included a chilled salad of sliced mango, black beans, chopped celery mixed with black pepper, lime juice, and olive oil (a recipe that Kit shared with our late cousin Isabella, the mother of the Baudelaires), I went out and hid the thirteen chapters of "The Slippery Slope" in thirteen different places as I had written my publishers that I would. I also mailed them the still-damp note from the submarine, promising them "The Grim Grotto" would be done soon. I returned to Kit's apartment and by midnight I was half finished with "The Grim Grotto" and had figured out a complicated means of delivering it also.
On Wednesday, Kit, Quigley and I checked into the Hotel Denouement on Lousy Lane, into a room without ugly curtains, with a fine view overlooking the Grim River. There were so many agents in disguise in the lobby that the place looked like a costume contest at a science fiction convention. Right after checking in, we headed to the hotel laundry room to check out a rumor that the sugar bowl was hidden there, but fortunately we spotted the Man with a Beard and No Hair lurking nearby and realized it was a trap. A few minutes later, we heard the distressing news that the cabal had the sugar bowl.
During the day I tried over and over to send messages out the hotel room window to my publisher by carrier crow. The truce protected everyone inside the Last Safe Place, but unfortunately not the messengers I sent out. Eagles kept attacking my crows and ripping the messages out of their claws, leaving only scraps of paper to be delivered to the editor. I finally gave up, hoping they would be wise enough to deduce (guess) where to find the next manuscript once I finished it.
Kit, Quigley, and our other agents were busy all day preparing the weapons they had brought in case the truce broke down on Thursday. Some of them looked like cannisters of poison gas disguised as fire extinguishers, others like killer robot gerbils. I sincerely hoped we would not have to use them.
We had a tense hour in the evening when Kit accidently inhaled a poisonous spore after we had run out of horseradish. I was obliged to go down to the hotel dining room and order a chef's salad with spicy croutons. I was not sure on which side of the schism the waiter's loyalties lay, but he proved to be more noble than wicked and I managed to find, at the bottom of the bowl, one wasabi-flavored crouton that saved Kit's life.
By early morning the truce was in full effect and I was able to smuggle out the finished book, "The Grim Grotto", along with new instructions for my publisher in a batch of encoded sandwiches.
(Now that everyone is bored and has stopped reading I can hide a message to the survivors of the V.F.D. -- WARNING: do not under any circumstances return to the Hotel Denouement, whether to look for lost sugar bowls or lost comrades. The danger is still far too great! L.S.)