p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in 0in 0in 1.875in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 20pt;" span style="text-decoration: underline;"Prologue/span/p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 20pt;" /p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"My name is Lemony Snicket and as you probably know, I have dedicated my life to the mysterious story of the Baudelaire children, however they have now been missing for 12 years. Some people say that they assumed new names and they are still in the city. I however know where they are. In fact, a month ago I received a letter from a relative, a word which here means someone in your family, saying they had a story to share. I met them in a café and they introduced themselves as my niece Beatrice Baudelaire the second. She told me what happened when they left the island and what happened after that. This is the book I will be recording these events in. With this book, I will finally finish the tale of the Baudelaire orphans and I can finally rest. I remember that this is the last information I recored about the Baudelaire's. the three children climbed into the boat, and waited for the baby to crawl to the water's edge, where she could pull herself into a standing position by clinging to the back of the boat. Soon the coastal shelf would flood, and the Baudelaire orphans would be on their way, immersing themselves in the world and leaving this story forever. Even the baby clutching the boat, whose story had just begun, would soon vanish from this chronicle, after uttering just a few words./p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;""Vi!" she cried, which was her way of greeting Violet. "Kla! Sun!"/p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;""We wouldn't leave without you," Violet said, smiling down at the baby. "Come aboard," Klaus said, talking to her as if she were an adult./p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;""You little thing," Sunny said, using a term of endearment she had made/p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"up herself./p
p lang="en-AU" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"The baby paused, and looked at the back of the boat, where the nameplate had been affixed. She had no way of knowing this, of course, but the nameplate had been nailed to the back of the boat by a person standing on the very spot she was standing–at least, as far as my research has shown. The infant was standing on a spot in someone else's story, during a moment of her own, but she was thinking neither of the story far in the past nor of her own, which stretched into the future like the open sea. She was gazing at the nameplate, and her forehead was wrinkled in concentration. Finally, she uttered a word. The Baudelaire orphans gasped when they heard it, but they could not say for sure whether she was reading the word out loud or merely stating her own name, and indeed they never learned this. Perhaps this last word was the baby's first secret, joining the secrets the Baudelaires were keeping from the baby, and all the other secrets immersed in the world. Perhaps it is better not to know precisely what was meant by this word, as some things are better left in the great unknown. There are some words, of course, that are better left unsaid but not, I believed, the word uttered by my niece, a word which here means I thought that the story is over. Beatrice. The story of the Baudelaire's do not stop though. But it does get better./p