Chapter Text
Olivia Caliban does not like trouble, she prefers to be in company of silence, a good book to read, and perhaps, a bitter cup of tea. Like her library, her world was quiet. It wasn’t until she decided to pick up a book titled, “The Incomplete History of Secret Organizations.”
Her life was about to change, but not in the way she thought it would. After she witnessed the horrible atrocity that was Vice Principal Nero’s attempted expulsion of the Baudelaire children, she tried to once again escape to her place of comfort, a world of literature, stories upon stories. She burst out of the auditorium with rage building up inside her. She wanted to scream and curse at the top of her lungs about how unfair the world was being to such kind and intelligent children for she had also received the same treatment as a child and as an adult.
Instead, Olivia chose to say the only words she trusted herself to say without causing a scene in an empty hallway,
“In a world too often governed by corruption and arrogance, it can be difficult to stay true to one’s philosophical and literary principles.”
She headed for the library but stopped in her tracks. She dropped her hairpin which she originally planned to use to break into the library. She didn’t need to break in because the library door was left unlocked.
It was left unlocked.
She took a step closer, her heart dropped to her stomach in shock at the sight. Her library, her precious library, was destroyed, the books were strewn all over the floor, pages ripped out, covers peeled and scratched off. Some of the shelves have been knocked down, a sign that once said, “Goodie, goodie, books!” Now read, “Die, die, books!”
Olivia tried to convince herself she was having a hellish nightmare of some sort but the tears from her eyes threatened to pour, her vision started to blur, her glasses began to fog. Her heart began to break into pieces that pierced her soul. She couldn’t bear to see the shambled state of the place she once called home. Olivia wanted to cry and fall to the ground but it would never bring back her precious library to the heaven it once was.
She let her mind wander into the memories of her early days at Prufrock when she was simply a student. She remembers being raised by the librarian who taught her everything about library science and supported her interests in reading unlike her previous guardians. Olivia never had a real home, she was always moving from one guardian to another eventually being sent to boarding school. Olivia’s high school days seemed distant, she would try to reach out to recall but it felt like she was trying to catch a puff of smoke to materialize in her hands. She couldn’t remember her friends, she couldn’t remember what it was like being a child.
Olivia took off her black cat eye glasses and cleaned them with the end of her cream white blouse. Her tears rolled down her cheeks like waterfalls off a mountain. She fell to her knees, finally giving up her tough facade. She silently cried, curled up in a ball, clutching a loose book from a discarded shelf.
She had lost another home.
The minutes that felt like hours had gone by, her vision returned to normal, a rather peculiar book on the glassy marbled floor caught her eye’s attention. She picked herself up to examine the unfamiliar book. Underneath the rubble of her library cart that used to contain books from different sections a black, rectangle hardbound book with the title, “The Incomplete History of Secret Organizations” in bold gold letters remained, unbothered and untouched. The book felt heavy literally and figuratively, not just because of its weight, but because of how much unlearned information, uncovered secrets and several important annotations in the margins that were supposed to answer any questions the Baudelaires could have had.
Olivia did not know this and was definitely not the person intended to find the book, but whatever, or whoever in the distant future was certainly and utmost grateful that it landed in her hands instead.
She bent down and sat on the floor with a sense of curiosity. She lifted its heavy cover and unearthed the secrets within its pages. As she turned the pages, the words seemed to fly out of them. It was unlike any book Olivia had ever read in her entire life. She hadn’t read anything else that could compare to the oddness of the book. It was filled with cryptic messages and histories of very fraudulent dilemmas.
She learned that they were taken away from their parents as “Neophytes” as the peculiar organization called them. She felt pity for the children who were taken away at such young ages from their parents to fight the literal and figurative forces of the world. Olivia kept going, she kept reading the rest of its unfortunate contents.
She read through long, dark chapters about a secret organization destroyed by a schism that tore it apart from the inside. Families, and friends, separated by the sides of a war they did not want to fight. Enemies formed from bonds that were meant to last a lifetime, vanishing in a cloud of smoke. All the lives lost, that could never be brought back. She learned about a tragic night at an opera, and the various fiery deaths that followed within the margins of a page entitled, “Sugar Bowl.”
One page stood out to her the most, a section of it had been dedicated to a man with glasses and a cowboy hat named “Ike Anwhistle.” It dictated that he had just surpassed the current record for the most nominations for “Most Nominated Volunteer” with 99 nominations surpassing the previous holder, Jacques Snicket.
Jacques Snicket
Olivia reread the name once more.
Jacques Snicket
Now why did that name sound so familiar?