" Janiceps," Sunny said to her siblings the next morning, as the Baudelaires walked along the coastal shelf. According to custom, the islanders were all storm scavenging, and here and there on the flat horizon, poking at the detritus of the storm. By " Janiceps," the youngest Baudelaire meant "I'm of two minds about living here," an expression which means that she couldn't decide if she liked the island colony or not.
"I know what you mean," Klaus said, who was carrying Sunny on his shoulders. "Life isn't very exciting here, but at least we're not in any danger."
"I suppose we should be grateful for that," Violet said, "even though life in the colony seems quite strict."
"Ishmael keeps saying he won't force us to do anything," Klaus said, "but everything feels a bit forced anyway."
"At least they forced Olaf away," Violet pointed out, "which is more than V.F.D. ever accomplished."
"Diaspora," Sunny said, which meant something like, "We live in such a distant place that the battle between V.F.D. and their enemies seems very far away."
"The only V.F.D. around here," Klaus said, leaning down to peer into a pool of water, "is our Very Flavorless Diet."
Violet smiled. "Not so long ago," she said, "we were desperate to reach the last safe place by Thursday. Now, everywhere we look is safe, and we have no idea what day it is."
"I still miss home," Sunny said.
"Me too," Klaus said. "For some reason I keep missing the library at Lucky Smells Lumbermill."
"Charles's library?" Violet asked, with an amazed smile. "It was a beautiful room, but it only had three books. Why on earth do you miss that place?"
"Three books are better than none," Klaus said. "The only thing I've read since we arrived here is my own commonplace book. I suggested to Ishmael that he could dictate a history of the colony to me, and that I'd write it down so the islanders would know about how this place came to be. Other colonists could write down their own stories, and eventually this island would have its own library. But Ishmael said that he wouldn't force me, but he didn't think it would be a good idea to write a book that would upset people with its descriptions of storms and castaways. I don't want to rock the boat, but I miss my research."
"I know what you mean," Violet said. "I keep missing Madame Lulu's fortune-telling tent."
"With all those phony magic tricks?" Klaus said.
"Her inventions were pretty ridiculous," Violet admitted, "but if I had those simple mechanical materials, I think I could make a simple water filtration system. If we could manufacture fresh water, the islanders wouldn't have to drink coconut cordial all day long. But Friday said that the drinking of the cordial was inveterate."
" No spine?" Sunny asked.
"She meant people had been drinking it for so long that they wouldn't want to stop," Violet said. "I don't want to rock the boat, but I miss working on inventions. What about you, Sunny? What do you miss?"
"Fountain," Sunny said.
"The Fowl Fountain, at the Village of Fowl Devotees?" Klaus asked.
"No," Sunny said, shaking her head."In city."
"The Fountain of Victorious Finance?" Violet asked. "Why on earth would you miss that?"
"First swim," Sunny said, and her siblings gasped.
"You can't remember that," Klaus said.
"You were just a few weeks old," Violet said. “I remember," Sunny said firmly, as the Baudelaires shook their heads in wonder. Sunny was talking about an afternoon long ago, during an unusually hot autumn in the city. The Baudelaire parents had some business to attend to, and brought along the children, promising to stop at the ice cream store on the way home. The family had arrived at the banking district, pausing to rest at the Fountain of Victorious Finance, and the Baudelaires' mother had hurried into a building with tall, curved towers poking out in all directions, while their father waited outside with the children. The hot weather made Sunny very cranky, and she began to fuss. To quiet her, the Baudelaires' father dipped her bare feet in the water, and Sunny had smiled so enthusiastically that he had begun to dunk Sunny's body, clothes and all, into the fountain, until the youngest Baudelaire was screaming with laughter. As you may know, the laughter of babies is often very contagious, and before long not only were Violet and Klaus also jumping into the fountain, but the Baudelaires' father, too, all of them laughing and laughing as Sunny grew more and more delighted. Soon the Baudelaires' mother came out of the building, and looked in astonishment for a moment at her soaking and giggling family, before putting down her pocketbook, kicking off her shoes, and joining them in the refreshing water. They laughed all the way home, each footstep a wet squish, and sat out on their front steps to dry in the sun. It was a wonderful day, but very long ago—so long ago Violet and Klaus had almost forgotten it themselves. But as Sunny reminded them, they could almost hear her newborn laughter, and see the incredulous looks of the bankers who were passing by.
"It's hard to believe," Violet said, "that our parents could laugh like that, when they were already involved with V.F.D. and all its troubles."
"The schism must have seemed a world away that day," Klaus said.
"And now," Sunny said, and her siblings nodded in agreement. With the morning sun blazing overhead, and the sea sparkling at the edge of the coastal shelf, their surroundings seemed as far from trouble and treachery as that afternoon in the Fountain of Victorious Finance. But trouble and treachery are rarely as far away as one thinks they are on the clearest of days. On that faraway afternoon in the banking district, for instance, trouble could be found in the corridors of the towered building, where the Baudelaires' mother was handed a weather report and a naval map that would reveal, when she studied them by candlelight that evening, far greater trouble than she had imagined, and treachery could be found just past the fountain, where a woman disguised as a pretzel vendor took a photograph of the laughing family, and slipped her camera into the coat pocket of a financial expert who was hurrying to a restaurant, where the coat-check boy would remove the camera and hide it in an enormous parfait glass of fruit that a certain playwright would order for dessert, only to have a quick-thinking waitress pretend that the cream in the zabaglione sauce had gone sour and dump the entire dish into a garbage can in the alley, where I had been sitting for hours, pretending to look for a lost puppy who was actually scurrying into the back entrance of the towered building, removing her disguise, and folding it into her handbag, and this morning on the coastal shelf was no different. The Baudelaires took a few more steps in silence, squinting into the sun, and then Sunny knocked gently on her brother's head and pointed out at the horizon. The three children looked carefully, and saw an object resting unevenly on the edge of the shelf, and this was trouble, even though it didn't look like trouble at the time. It was hard to say what it looked like, only that it was large, and square, and ragged, and the children hurried closer to get a better view. Violet led the way, stepping carefully around a few crabs snapping along the shelf, and Klaus followed behind, with Sunny still on his shoulders, and even when they reached the object they found it difficult to identify.
At first glance, the large, square, ragged object looked like a combination of everything the Baudelaires missed. It looked like a library, because the object seemed to be nothing more than stacks and stacks of books, piled neatly on top of one another in a huge cube. But it also looked like an invention, because wrapped around the cube of books, the way string is wrapped around a package, were thick straps that appeared to be made out of rubber, in varying shades of green, and on one side of the cube was affixed a large flap of battered wood. And it also looked like a fountain, as water was trickling out of it from all sides, leaking through the bloated pages of the books and splashing down to the sand of the coastal shelf. But although this was a very unusual sight, the children stared not at the cube but at something at the top of this strange contraption. It was a bare foot, hanging over the side of the cube as if there were someone sleeping on the top of all those books, and the Baudelaires could see, right on the ankle, a tattoo of an eye.