"if there's nothing out there — then what was that noise?"

ernest is often presumed to be on friendly terms with some of the other defected volunteers of his generation, but the actual truth is that he dislikes them all immensely. olaf’s histrionic tendencies and penchant for self-pity drive him up the wall, esme is such a narcissist and a horrific snob, and georgina thinks she’s just so much cleverer than she really is. this makes for a very lonely existence.

frank and ernest both smoke, all day, full time, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. neither of them have ever had any desire to quit. running a hotel is stressful, after all. dewey, however, has never smoked. it’s one of a few secret ways you might tell him apart from his brothers; he’s the only one who never smells of it.

beatrice is an only child who is also orphaned at a young age — her mother dies before she can ever remember her and her father dies when she is still a young child. the organisation raises her, through a chaperone who lives close to olaf’s family home and allows them to play together regularly.

georgina has never once had a romantic attachment to someone who didn’t betray her in the end — from her affair with an already-married josephine anwhistle, to bertrand baudelaire who destroyed her career, to olaf who tried to drown her and destroyed her career again — until esme. unfortunately, this means she is always waiting for that other shoe to drop.

beatrice and bertrand had been friends but not interested in one another romantically until they jointly took on their opera night mission. they became close suddenly afterwards, partly because they could form comforting excuses and platitudes for each other at the same time as truly understanding the guilt they both carried and the absolute horror of what they had done. if we weren’t good enough people, we wouldn’t care so much. we didn’t have any real choice. it was for the greater good, wasn’t it? do you still dream about it sometimes too?

the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard were one assigned as partners for a particularly traumatic vfd mission in their youth. that shared trauma led them to a lifetime symbiotic partnership and shared hatred of the organisation they grew up in.