The Second Slippery Slope

This AU fanfiction explores what would have happened if the Baudelaires and Quigley had trapped Esmé Squalor as they originally planned. It contains spoilers for The Slippery Slope and the Unauthorized Autobiography. Disclaimer: none of the characters belong to me.

----------- Part 1

All that night, while they were digging the deep dark pit, Violet, Klaus,and Quigley had had many qualms (which here means "guilty feeling about how villainous is to try to trap someone in a deep dark pit, even someone as wicked as Esmé Squalor"). If only the fire had not been so sooty, smudging out the motto of the V.F.D. on the library arch, they might have had second thoughts.

"Maybe this is important," Klaus said, pointing up at the archway. All three looked up and read the two words that were still unsmudged underneath the large letters that spelled "V.F.D. Library."

"Quiet here," Quigley read. "What do you think it means?"

"It's probably just telling people to be quiet in the library," said Violet. "And now we'd better be quiet ourselves, or Esmé will hear us and not fall into our trap."

And so, the three children failed to have second thoughts and therefore took a step onto a second slippery slope that changed their lives forever. When I say "slippery slope" in this case, I am not referring to a rocky surface covered in ice such as the one Esmé was sledding down to her fate, but to the principle that after doing one wrong thing it becomes easier to do a worse one, and then another worse still, and so on.

For example, someone once told me that if I start writing theater criticism in order to pass messages to a secret society, the next thing I knew I would be writing secret messages in anthropomorphic treatises (which here means "long books about a wee little elf and his talking forest friends"), and after that I'd be hiding messages in stories about the miserable lives of children while running from the law.

It was a fallacious (which here means "silly") argument, because each step doesn't necessarily lead to the next. But in my case the person was absolutely right.

And likewise I am right when I say that their decision to trap Esmé was a step down a slippery slope from which there was no return. You may want to stop reading this story right now and imagine that the Baudelaires warned Esmé away from the trap and found some other way of saving Sunny. Don't say you weren't warned, because you were.

They waited quietly behind the arch and heard the footsteps of Esmé approach, then her little scream of delight as she found what she thought were fashionable green cigarettes, then a crashing noise and a louder scream, and then a strange muffled "Mmph! Mmmph!" sound.

Klaus ran out and peered down into the pit.

"We didn't make the pit wide enough," Klaus said. "Her enormous skirt got caught on the sides and pulled up over her head. I'm not sure she can breathe!"

"Oh no!" cried Violet. She and Quigley ran to the edge and looked in too.

"Do you smell smoke?" Quigley asked. "I do."

"The Verdant Flammable Devices!" said Violet. "She picked them up before she fell in. Now they're down there with her. I hope..."

But it was too late to hope. With a sudden roar, the flame-colored dress was engulfed in a mass of genuine scorching flame!

As the muffled screams of Esmé came to their ears, the children realized that they had indeed fought fire with fire.