There are two basic types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head. Mr. Poe was the leaping-and-babbling kind. Klaus and Sunny had never seen the banker move so quickly or talk in such a high-pitched voice. "Goodness!" he cried. "Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don't touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don't move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don't let it bite her!

Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!"

The Incredibly Deadly Viper listened patiently to Mr. Poe's speech, never taking its eyes off of Sunny, and when Mr. Poe paused to cough into his handkerchief, it leaned over and bit Sunny on the chin, right where it had bitten her when the two friends had first met. Klaus tried not to grin, but Dr. Lucafont gasped, Stephano stared, and Mr. Poe began leaping and babbling again.

"It's bitten her!" he cried. "It bit her! It bited her! Calm down! Get moving! Call an ambulance! Call the police! Call a scientist! Call my wife! This is terrible! This is awful! This is ghastly! This is phantasmagorical! This is-"

"This is nothing to worry about," Stephano interrupted smoothly.

"What do you mean, nothing to worry about?" Mr. Poe asked incredulously. "Sunny was just bitten by-what's the name of the snake, Klaus?"

"The Incredibly Deadly Viper," Klaus answered promptly.

"The Incredibly Deadly Viper!" Mr. Poe repeated, pointing to the snake as it held on to Sunny's chin with its teeth. Sunny gave another fake shriek of fear. "How can you say it's nothing to worry about?"

"Because the Incredibly Deadly Viper is completely harmless," Stephano said. "Calm yourself, Poe. The snake's name is a misnomer that Dr. Montgomery created for his own amusement."

"Are you sure?" Mr. Poe asked. His voice got a little lower, and he moved a bit more slowly as he began to calm down.

"Of course I'm sure," Stephano said, and Klaus recognized a look on his face he remembered from living at Count Olaf's. It was a look of sheer vanity, a word which here means "Count Olaf thinking he's the most incredible person who ever lived." When the Baudelaire orphans had been under Olaf's care, he had often acted this way, always happy to show off his skills, whether he was onstage with his atrocious theater company or up in his tower room making nasty plans. Stephano smiled, and continued to speak to Mr. Poe, eager to show off. "The snake is perfectly harmless-friendly, even. I read up on the Incredibly Deadly Viper, and many other snakes, in the library section of the Reptile Room as well as Dr. Montgomery's private papers."

Dr. Lucafont cleared his throat. "Uh, boss-" he said.

"Don't interrupt me, Dr. Lucafont," Stephano said. "I studied books on all the major species. I looked carefully at sketches and charts. I took careful notes and looked them over each night before I went to sleep. If I may say so, I consider myself to be quite the expert on snakes."

"Aha!" Sunny cried, disentangling herself from the Incredibly Deadly Viper.

"Sunny! You're unharmed!" Mr. Poe cried.

"Aha!" Sunny cried again, pointing at Stephano. The Incredibly Deadly Viper blinked its green eyes triumphantly.

Mr. Poe looked at Klaus, puzzled. "What does your sister mean by 'Aha'?" he asked.

Klaus sighed. He felt, sometimes, as if he had spent half his life explaining things to Mr. Poe. "By 'Aha,'" he said, "she means 'One minute' Stephano claims he knows nothing about snakes, the next he claims he is an expert! By 'Aha' she means 'Stephano has been lying to us.' By 'Aha' she means 'we've finally exposed his dishonesty to you!' By 'Aha' she means 'Aha!'"

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Violet was upstairs, surveying her bedroom with a critical eye. She took a deep breath, and then tied her hair in a ribbon, to keep it out of her eyes. As you and I and everyone who is familiar with Violet know, when she ties her hair back like that, it is because she needs to think up an invention. And right now she needed to think of one quickly.

Violet had realized, when her brother had talked about Stephano ordering them to carry his suitcase into the house, that the evidence she had been looking for was undoubtedly in that very suitcase. And now, while her siblings were distracting the adults in the Reptile Room, would be her only opportunity to open the suitcase and retrieve proof of Stephano's evil plot. But her aching shoulder was a reminder that she couldn't simply open the suitcase-it was locked, with a lock as shiny as Stephano's scheming eyes. I confess that if I were in Violet's place, with only a few minutes to open a locked suitcase, instead of on the deck of my friend Bela's yacht, writing this down, I probably would have given up hope. I would have sunk to the floor of the bedroom and pounded my fists against the carpet wondering why in the world life was so unfair and filled with inconveniences.

Luckily for the Baudelaires, however, Violet was made of sterner stuff, and she took a good look around her bedroom for anything that might help her. There wasn't much in the way of inventing materials. Violet longed for a good room in which to invent things, filled with wires and gears and all of the necessary equipment to invent really top-notch devices. Uncle Monty was in fact in possession of many of these supplies, but, to Violet's frustration as she thought of this, they were located in the Reptile Room. She looked at the pieces of butcher paper tacked to the wall, where she had hoped to sketch out inventions as she lived in Uncle Monty's house. The trouble had begun so quickly that Violet had only a few scribblings on one of the sheets, which she had written by the light of a floorlamp on her first night here. Violet's eyes traveled to the floorlamp as she remembered that evening, and when she reached the electric socket she had an idea.

We all know, of course, that we should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever fiddle around in any way with electric devices. Never.There are two reasons for this. One is that you can get electrocuted, which is not only deadly but very unpleasant, and the other is that you are not Violet Baudelaire, one of the few people in the world who know how to handle such things. And even Violet was very careful and nervous as she unplugged the lamp and took a long look at the plug itself. It might work.

Hoping that Klaus and Sunny were continuing to stall the adults successfully, Violet wiggled the two prongs of the plug this way and that until at last they came loose from their plastic casing. She now had two small metal strips. Violet then took one of the thumbtacks out of the butcher paper, letting the paper curl down the wall as if it were lazy. With the sharp end of the tack she poked and prodded the two pieces of metal until one was hooked around the other, and then forced the thumbtack between the two pieces so the sharp end stuck straight out. The result looked like a piece of metal you might not notice if it lay in the street, but in fact what Violet had made was a crude-the word "crude" here means "roughly made at the last minute" rather than "rude or ill-mannered"- lockpick. Lockpicks, as you probably know, are devices that work as if they were proper keys, usually used by bad guys to rob houses or escape from jail, but this was one of the rare times when a lockpick was being used by a good guy: Violet Baudelaire.