# Tall tales and long odds

> *IgorV: Волчар с миней?! Bro, srsly? LMAO*
> 
> *KatyaL: Волчар возвращн? With its минй?!*
> 
> *randomguy1337: Chigura again? lol haven't herd in awhile*
> 
> *MishaD: So its all bout Chigura now? Lmaoo.*
> 
> *IgorV: Another Chigura thery? C'mon... 😂*
> 
> *fnorsch: Pryidite k nashemu Discordu dlya Роблокс! Ekspertiz y obsuzhdny!*
> 
> *MishaD: Chigura tales never gt old do they? 😆*

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a quaint village that skirted the edge of a vast dark forest, nestled between foothills. The villagers' sheep fed on the grass near the fringe of the woods, watched over during the long summer days by a young child with sharp eyes and a natural proclivity for discerning patterns and focusing on details, perhaps at the expense of his ability to communicate — not that he couldn't speak, and not that anything he said was wrong, just that when he did speak, many of the villagers felt, for reasons they couldn't themselves understand, that he should be kept away.  
  
One morning among mornings, while the village was still awakening, the young shepherd led his sheep to the forest's edge. As he watched over his flock, a glimmer in the grass caught his eye. He approached and found a small coin nestled among the dewy blades. Because his mind was the way that it was, he effortlessly noticed the coin showing heads. He left it where it lay, for no reason he could quite justify.  
  
That evening, the boy mentioned the coin to his mother, who just smiled warmly as she tucked him into bed, her soft voice thrumming as she recounted old fables until he could cling on no longer.

* * *

A few months later, while guiding the sheep over the foothills, the boy found his gaze drawn towards the forest, though he couldn't understand why.

Suddenly, a chill gripped him as a dark form seemed to materialize from the backdrop of the woods, its faceless focus falling on the boy's flock. Though his instincts whispered "wolf," his eyes struggled to make any sense of this... entity. It appeared more an amorphous blur, an enigmatic void, wasted potential for sense, akin to a flaw in a tapestry.

Heart racing, muscles poised to carry him shouting and screaming back down the road to the village, the boy watched as the figure suddenly retreated, melting into the forest. Doubt clouded his mind for a moment, but as he cautiously investigated the spot, two coins lay there: one displaying heads, the other tails.

With the immediate danger dissipated, he hurried to the village, to warn the farmers about the presence in the woods. Drawn by his claims, villagers began to gather around him. Shown only the coins as evidence, dismissive murmurs swirled among them. But the boy insisted, shoving out his hand with the coins more insistently, as though it might change their minds. 

At the back of the crowd, and elder clucked softly, and immediately all present fell quiet.

> "*Ah, the fable of the Chigura. This one I have not heard in the longest time. The shadowy figure who throws a coin to determine the fate of the world. Heads we live, tails we die. Old and told. *
> 
> *Remember, friends, if there were such a thing as Chigura, we would all be dead by now, for it would throw tails as surely as the sun rises each day. Well, not as surely as that, roughly half as surely, probably. But if the Chigura existed, we would not be here to tell such stories and our shepherds would sleep soundly at night.*

He looked disapprovingly at the boy's mother, and the crowd respectfully filtered away, leaving the boy and his coins to blink back bitter tears.

When the crowd had all left, the boy shouted at the old man:

> *"I know what I saw! It already threw tails, one of the coins I found was tails!"*
> 
> *"Well, then, it REALLY isn't a Chigura, or we'd all be dead, wouldn't we, since it threw tails?"*
> 
> *"It's real, I saw it. It wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before!"*
> 
> *"I believe you, son. But whatever you saw, it can't hurt us the way the story says it would, or it would already have done so."*

* * *

It was many months before the figure appeared again, but when it did, it came this time openly carrying a coin. It flipped the coin skyward and seemed to observe the outcome, before disappearing into the woods. The shepherd boy, certain now, bolted to the village shouting at anyone he could see, *"The shadow! The Chigura! It's returned with its coin! It's flipping the coin like in the stories! It's flipping the coin for us!"*

Yet, to his dismay, his warnings were met with guffaws and jest, not a search party as he had hoped. Picking his way back along the treeline, the boy found the coin, showing heads, of course.

* * *

Day after day, the boy tended to his sheep, but with a newfound purpose. For years, whenever the shadowy figure materialized, the boy would wait, observing from the safety of distance, then scurry forward to observe and jot down the faces showing on the scattered coins. It was usually months between appearances, except once when it was two weeks, and in some years, the figure didn't appear at all. 

At night, after pretending to fall asleep, the bow would pull out the notepad and stare at the scant data he had painstakingly recorded.

> \[Х\]—\[Г Х Г\]—\[Г Х Г \]—\[Х\]—\[Г Х\]—\[Х Г\]—\[Г Г Х\]—\[Х Г\]—\[Г Х\]—\[Х\]—\[Х\]

* * *

One chilly morning, the figure reappeared. 

Quickly creeping closer with a daring borne of a curiosity stronger than anything he'd ever known, the boy spied on the proceedings, heart racing, as the creature methodically flipped a coin, six times in a row. 

The surroundings seeming to darken with each coin flip. By the second, it was as though the boy had a sudden headache. The third was many times worse, as though the sky itself were tired and sore. The fourth was many times worse again, as though ink were streaming from the tip of every leaf and every blade of grass and muddying everything, melting every edge into the grey shimmering slop beneath. By the fifth, it was ten times worse yet again, and he could see the cloud of swirling darkness had reached even the village, blotting out the sun across the entire valley.

As the sixth coin twirled, the world seemed to pause for what seemed an eternity. The landing too brought a silent moment. The figure, now radiating a deep and disappointed sigh, seemed to hesitate briefly before vanishing into the forest, as light flooded back in all at once and the oppressive weight lifted as though it had never been.

Drawn in a daze to the spot, the boy found the five coins: one head and five tails. He pocketed them, turning back towards the village with a mind buzzing with questions he already knew nobody would hear.

But when he returned to the village, he found everyone already standing in the square, visibly panicked and shouting amongst themselves. He pushed to the front, brandishing the six coins and saying "six coins, and with every coin, it got worse. You all felt it, didn't you?! You saw it?"

Indeed they had, and that's why this story has a happy ending. Shocked by what they'd felt and seen, the villagers were spurred into action, and put their heads together to come up with a plan to save themselves from the Chigura, and the plan worked. 

Stop asking me about the specifics of the villagers' plan, my child, focus on the bigger picture[^9u72shkc7ti]. My god you're just like the shepherd sometimes...

We know a fact that none of these villagers could ever know: if the Chigura throws six tails, the world ends. If it throws five, it shadows the village and scares everyone who lives there, they get motivated and they solve the problem. If it throws four or fewer, it scares the boy and his sheep, and nobody ever listens to him until it finally throws six and the world ends.

> *fnorsch: Опять? Журба мне скажет?*
> 
> *randomguy1337: Lol, он вечно заблудится! Always 1 звяк.*
> 
> *420BlazeIt: Чудак, really? What u think our Chigura number is then?*

[^9u72shkc7ti]: Ugh, ok, fine, If you must know, they invented airplanes and airdropped billions of coins with heads on both sides of them onto the forest, and mandated the same in their own money supply, destroying any coins with tails on the other side. This worked, somehow, apparently because Chiguras can't mint coins, and can't tell the difference anyway, so they'll happily pick up a two-headed coin and do their little menacing thing with it regardless. What? No, I don't want to talk about the essence of 'tailness' in a coin and whether it's even possible to have a coin with two heads, I want you to go to sleep. No, seriously, I'm going to have to stop reading you these bedtime stories if you're going to keep getting wound up like this every time. No, no, it's good that you ask so many questions. It's good. Ok lights out, sleep well darling.