Fatty Bobsticks

Diary

Fatty Bobsticks climbed to the palace roof not to meditate like some old ronin ghost but to prove, once and for all, that he was nobody's sequel, least of all Fat Bob's, whose shadow still trailed him like an unpaid debt. There he found The Degen Scholar cross-legged among the roof tiles, robes stained with sake and something greener, muttering charts that hadn't existed since the Muromachi era, and between them, scattered like koi flakes, a small hoard of glinting coins. Fatty puffed his chest, declared himself the rightful finder by sheer force of personality, and began stuffing his sleeves before noticing the Scholar's eyes had gone wide and glassy, fixed on some invisible floor price only he could see. He tried, briefly, to be disciplined about it, counting the coins twice, resolving to split them fairly, meditating for a full four seconds before the greed and the giggling took over completely. In the end he pocketed the loot, bowed with theatrical grace to a man now barking prophecies at the moon, and swaggered off insisting loudly, to absolutely no one, that this triumph was his and his alone, not Fat Bob's, never Fat Bob's, though somewhere behind him the shadow just laughed.