🎀 Wisteria 🎀

- I appreciate people who say things as they are. What's the tragedy?

— We were hunting Heckelian monkeys, — the man replied, then paused for a moment, thinking about something, and quickly corrected himself, — I mean, monkeys... Mammals... Primates, uh...
— He probably understood that anyway, — the masked guy interjected, — he's probably not stupid.
— These monkeys, named after the region where they originated, are very aggressive, have a habit of attacking travelers, destroying fields, etc., so we organized a competition to eliminate them — whoever kills the most pests will be the winner of the tournament. At first, everything went well, the competitions were without serious injuries, and the participants and the few spectators who dared to go beyond the imperial walls had fun and were interested, but not everything went as planned. At some point, the king of the Heckelian monkeys appeared, a special subspecies of these primates that, as we previously assumed, was extinct, and everything went wrong...
— Well, in short, then there were a lot of corpses, and people lost interest in the hunt, not to mention certain restrictions that the government imposed on us as a result.

Added 2 minutes ago

-- Huh? What? -- Valdemar turned on his stool and stared at the guards with dull, bloodshot eyes. This is how vampire stories are born - it's just very diligent scribes working without daylight. -- I, Valdemar Karafa... Ugh.
He lightly patted himself on the cheeks, trying to shake off the stupor.
-- What day is it?.. What time is it?

— March 18th, half past four. — The guard looked sympathetically at the exhausted prisoner. — If you want, you can rest in your cell for another hour or two, or maybe even sleep until tomorrow.