"The Slippery Slope: Part One" Quiz

Answer: Jam the wheel

"For Beatrice-- When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. Now I am pretty lonely."

Like handshakes, house pets, and raw carrots, many things, as per Lemony Snicket, are preferable when not slippery, and the least preferable slippery thing is a slope. The phrase 'a slippery slope' refers to the way that even small, seemingly harmless actions can set you down a path to something horribly wrong. The Baudelaires are always on a slippery slope, it would seem.

Violet and Klaus, careening down a mountain road in the back of a runaway caravan, are quick to discover that slippery slopes can also be literal. Tying back her hair, Violet devises a plan to jam the wheel with an oar and use banners to create a drag chute. In a rare fortunate circumstance, Violet's plan works...at least until they plunge off a cliff.

Answer: With Count Olaf

Violet and Klaus manage to escape the caravan at the last moment, climbing out the back and up the side of the cliff before it plummets to the ground far below. Their lives? Saved. But it doesn't solve the fact that Count Olaf and his coterie have Sunny in their clutches.

Count Olaf, meanwhile, drives up through the mountains believing that he's triumphed over the orphans. With two believed to be dead and one stowed away in his glove compartment, there's nothing stopping him from claiming the inheritance once and for all...except for the supposed surviving Baudelaire parent. Nonetheless, it's all within his grasp.

As Lemony Snicket says, however, you need to watch your step when you're at the top of a moral threshold. After all, there's nowhere to go but down.

Answer: Eagles

Elsewhere in the mountains, Lemony Snicket's sister is pursued by two of Count Olaf's associates, a man with a beard but no hair and a woman with hair but no beard. Having run off with the Sugar Bowl, she has a critical piece of evidence associated with the unfortunate events that have transpired.

When she reaches the edge of a cliff, she falls off instead of facing them head on. Taking her specially-designed wing suit, she stays the course, even as trained eagles are sent to attack her, and she plunges into a hole in the icy Stricken Stream below.

She breaks her way out downriver and, chilled to the bone, the emerges to rest herself and the child in her pregnant belly. There's still a ways to go, however.

Answer: No

Count Olaf and his troupe reach the peak on top of Mount Fraught (literally and figuratively as he claims) anticipating V.F.D. headquarters to be waiting on the plateau there, but it turns out they may have taken the wrong turn earlier in their drive. Olaf's goal, to burn it down, seems to be a bit delayed.

He plans to take the evening to build camp and commit arson in the morning. By this, however, he means that his troupe will build camp. And by that, his troupe infers that the circus freaks they've added to their numbers and stowed away in the trunk of his car will build camp.

The freaks are less than impressed with the degradation of their mental health but head out to chop wood for a fire they're not allowed to warm up next to.

Answer: Smoke

Violet and Sunny reach the safe fork in the road that Count Olaf took to reach the summit but they take care to read the navigational signs and take the opposite route to the Valley of Four Drafts, the alleged site of V.F.D. Headquarters. The problem is that Violet locates a littered sarsaparilla bottle leading up to the summit, indicating that Count Olaf took the wrong route. Though the siblings seem to be split in their opinions at this crossroads, their choice is made for them when a swarm of snow gnats descends from the road above and starts to sting them.

They retreat down the road from which they came and into the woods lacking the snow gnats' one weakness-- smoke-- but they find a cave hidden in one of the cliff walls. It's enough to save them, if only because there's something inside that scares off the bugs.

The bugs are justified. Inside the cave is Carmelita Spats, out on a camping trip with the Snow Scouts.

Answer: A mask

On the peak of Mount Fraught, while Count Olaf tries to impart wisdom on his troupe (in an attempt to act as a mentor to them), Esme finds an open pack of cigarettes in the snow as though someone dropped them in an attempt to flee for their life. It's enough of a distraction that the troupe doesn't notice Sunny escaping her baby jail. They find her quickly and place her back into her igloo prison.

In the cave, Carmelita quickly recognizes the Baudelaires (those cake-sniffers!) and the word of their identity is quick to catch amongst the Snow Scouts if only because 'The Daily Punctilio' has been spreading the news of their awful exploits (especially in regards to the fire they set mere days earlier). They quickly cover their tracks by claiming to be mountain climbers, but they aren't let into the cave to join the most exclusive Snow Scout squad until a mysterious figure in a Very Furtive Disguise-- a fencing mask-- suggests they take a seat by the fire to warm themselves. This person reveals themselve to the Baudelaires as the third Quagmire sibling, Quigley.

Answer: False Spring

Lemony Snicket, in an attempt to explain Sunny Baudelaire's time on top of Mount Fraught, likens the youngest orphaned sibling to Cinderella, but while Cinderella had a fairy godmother, items at her disposal, a ball, a prince, and a seasonal gourd at the end, Sunny doesn't even have a happily ever after to look forward to. But what she does have is herself...and despite being a critical element of Count Olaf's plan to steal the Baudelaire fortune, it's clear that her presence is having an effect on the troupe. The Hook-Handed Man, of all people, makes her a warmer outfit and helps her clean up and get water for the camp.

In the cave, the Snow Scouts tell stories around the campfire and recite their alphabet pledge before Violet and Klaus learn of the group's reason for visiting Mount Fraught. Every year, the Snow Scouts celebrate False Spring, when the weather gets unusually warm before freezing again. The scouts dance at the peak before crowning the False Spring Queen. Usually, that ends up being Carmelita and it's not their democratic choice.

Quigley, encouraging the Baudelaires, recommends that they tell a Very Fascinating Drama. The pair discuss the possibilities of Vastly Frightening Danger and Vain Fashionable Divas and it's clear that they're on the same side. That evening, the Baudelaires are invited to stay with the scouts. When night falls, they plan to search for missing persons.

Answer: True

In the middle of the night, Kit Snicket comes across the carnival freaks as they plan for their futures and try to start a fire elsewhere on Mount Fraught. She helps them, but lets them know that there are dangerous people on the mountain. They should leave, she says, because they deserve better. When she runs off in an attempt to divert the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard, they don't pay her much mind. Instead, they kill the waiting freaks. Kit hears their screams at a distance and remains thankful it wasn't her, but when she realizes she may have lost the Sugar Bowl in her leap from the cliff, she realizes how dire things may have become.

Quigley, in the Snow Scouts' cave, wakes the Baudelaires from their sleep to show them something important-- a Vertical Flame Diversion in the cave ceiling. All they need to do is climb into it to find a secret entrance into V.F.D. Headquarters.

Answer: The Hook-Handed Man

In the morning, Count Olaf is first to awaken atop Mount Fraught and when he does he finds that Sunny has awakened, but not left the camp. In fact, she's up making breakfast. With the help of the Hook-Handed Man, she catches and cooks fresh salmon. During their time together, the Hook-Handed Man tells Sunny that, at least for her sake, he hopes one of her parents is still alive. Sunny succeeds in making breakfast (orange sorbet made from frozen orange juice, salmon sashimi, and toast tartare), but Olaf, believing Sunny to be trying to poison him, destroys the meal, much to his troupe's distaste.

The meal would have been interrupted anyways because the troupe would soon be overcome by 'an aura of menace' a term which, here, means 'a distinct feeling of evil that accompanies the arrival of certain people'. In this case, those people are the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard, Olaf's mentors, and they're there to remind him that he needs to reevaluate his goals. After all the efforts they took to keep the Quagmire parents in Peru, Esme and Olaf lost the Quagmire children. He needs to cease his failures. Olaf, of course, blames his troupe.

Answer: Aura of Menace

Somewhere near the Stricken Stream, Kit Snicket mourns the loss of the Sugar Bowl, but is met unexpectedly by none other than Mr. Poe, who fled after a bank robbery at Mulctuary Money Management and went hunting for the Baudelaires.

Lemony Snicket packs a suitcase and leaves out his apartment window when someone knocks at his door.

Violet, Klaus, and Quigley emerge through the Vertical Flame Diversion's trapdoor and find a doorway not unlike the one found beneath the ruins of their home. Once they open this Vernacularly-Fastened Door with puzzling phrases like 'SIR ISAAC NEWTON', 'PANTHERA LEO', and an elaboration on the central theme of "Anna Karenina", they emerge into V.F.D. Headquarters...only to find it recently burnt down by the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard.