🍁Nine Ancient Obelisks

It's clear how it works if you just think about it.


John ibn Zabiba Smith ran through dozens, even hundreds, of scenarios and plans in his head during his time in prison, but none of them came to fruition – neither the most nightmarish nor the most optimistic. It was clear how depressed his fellow inmates were, but apart from the harsh confinement itself, they weren't even tortured. He was absolutely certain that the Calcite cannibal – despite his feigned pseudo-nobility, which clearly wasn't his defining trait – would try to pressure him in this way. How Zibab himself would have to act in this situation in the end remains unclear. Should he continue to play the fool until the very end? Suppressing all compassion, which would be quite possible in a situation of complete failure. No one came for him; not that he expected it, it seemed obvious, except perhaps for a very small chance, but no more than that. He was expendable from the very beginning – and he realized this long before he took the oath. All that remained was to buy time – even if Asuguh didn't get what he was counting on, there was a chance that Calcite, and that butcher, would be deprived of it as well, and this not-so-constructive thought kept his mind focused. He had hated Calcite since childhood, and this experience did nothing to change that opinion.
As a last resort, if the situation with himself and his fellow inmates took a truly bad turn, he devised a desperate gambit, a kind of final squawk before his inevitable execution, which was aimed at leading the pursuit of the flower seller down a radically different path, blaming one of the "kings" for it, if such a concept was applicable in Calcite, and possibly saving the remaining prisoners. He didn't know for sure where she had disappeared to or with whose help (although the most obvious guess gnawed at his heart and mind), nor whether Ginza would believe it. He thought it was quite possible, but all the plans so far had suffered a fantastically large-scale failure, and it was unlikely that this trend would change. But the thought was comforting.

But it didn't come to that, so to the best of his ability, during the most tedious moments of his imprisonment, he did his best to encourage the inmates: he told silly and funny stories from his life – some invented, some not his own, some true, but not full of facts that could reveal something about himself, which was not always easy to do and required a lot of preliminary thought; he made checkers out of mud, drawing a board on the trampled floor and marking the white pieces with a scrap of cigarette paper that had somehow ended up in his pocket, and so on. As he himself would like to think – sometimes it worked, not least thanks to Scar, who turned out to be a very pleasant guy (it was good that he won the tournament, and not some of Ginza's lackeys or other less worthy individuals!); at other times, it caused obvious irritation among the more negatively inclined inmates. But... isn't cheerful irritation better than the apathy of the dying? And that was what he had to do – mostly out of guilt, but not only that, but also because, having shared a close space with these people, having observed their characters, having listened to and talked to them, he couldn't help but become attached to them. To the thoughtful, distrustful, but at the same time quite nice, pleasant, and fantastically human "witch-little-blonde" Erika (wasn't it her house he almost broke into a year ago? what an embarrassment it would be, thanks to Shiris and, I think, Hisoka, who saved him from this event; plus he absolutely forgave her for the color of her hair), to the straightforward, brash, but sincere and passionate "bar lover" Ushumgall (whose name he would surely learn in time, one way or another), to the "knights," as he called the group of guys who resembled Honor (he even completely suppressed any resentment towards the "nerd" Iliman, which he had after defeating Hisoka – the guy was naive and simple as two rems, and somehow this resonated with him and made him want to support him), and of course to Scar – a seasoned man with surprisingly soft, sentimental, and optimistic traits.
There was no doubt that this feeling was not mutual and that they all considered him an absolute scoundrel, a monster, a brute, and a bandit, but nevertheless. Some old, relic feeling from the time he was in a gang, with friends for whom you would give your life. Nothing else.

"I hope I never meet them again and that karma somehow rewards them positively. They have suffered enough for nothing because of me" – this gloomy thought was constantly in his head as he traveled to Sizki.
Shortly before arriving, sitting in a secluded corner, Genza carefully checks all his equipment again, every pocket, seam, piece of clothing and bag, every item, every strap with maximum methodicalness – does he feel anything strange or unusual here?
Upon exiting the platform, he takes a moment to breathe in the free Asuguh air, then studies the schedule of trains to other cities (+list of Sizki locations), smoking a Sizki – an absolutely forgotten concept – as unobtrusively as possible, listening and looking around, in case he can spot someone following him.

and Erika even found a long-lost monocle in her bag

😊