A Series of Freakish Events!

The Bad Beginning

Our story starts on a cold, windy morning. A cold windy morning is not a place you would usually expect to find the start of a story, but, on a cold windy morning, three children, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, stood, sat and crawled on the small shore of Briny Beach.

Violet, the eldest Baudelaire, was skimming rocks in to the ocean, and thinking about how to get them back. Klaus, the middle Baudelaire, and only boy, was studying a nearby rock pool. And Sunny, the youngest Baudelaire, barely a toddler, a word which here means, 'older than a baby, yet younger than a child and has little to do with toddling,' was sat at Violet's feet, breaking rocks. The three Baudelaires were ordinary children, young, polite, and astoundingly rich, but they had a secret. This secret should remain, as secrets should, secret, but I am afraid, something I am a lot of the time, that without the knowledge of this secret this story will make no sense.

For Violet Baudelaire was skimming rocks in to the ocean, and thinking about how to get them back, but Violet found that thinking about getting a rock back, or anything else moving really, would usually make it so. And Klaus Baudelaire was studying a nearby rock pool but he found that staring at a person would allow him to read their thoughts, and sea anemones had very little brain functions so he could stare at them for hours on end and get no more than 'swish, swish'. And Sunny Baudelaire was sat at Violet's feet, breaking rocks but she found that staring at an object would cause it to break in half. They kept this secret from everybody, even their parents, for if it ever got out, who knows what might happen?

So the three Baudelaire children, clever as they were, played, ignorant of what was happening around them. That was, of course, they saw Mr Poe waking towards them. Mr Poe was a friend of the family, a phrase that here means 'rather over weight banker, with a nasty cough'.

"Children," he said, a tone, which made the Baudelaires shudder, "I am afraid I have some bad news for you all. Your mansion... your home, has been engulfed in flames, taking cough everything and... I'm sorry Baudelaires, everyone you hold dear with it." Mr Poe stopped and sobbed through a fit of coughing. Though strangely the Baudelaires did not. They could believe that Mr Poe was telling the truth. But, I'm sad to say, as I will be sad to say all throughout this sad tale, he was.