8th day of Christmas: Uzbekistan

By Sir Wintrust - Published 2019-12-20

It was indeed a grand building. It was laced with pearls and beads, being a colatial palace of splendor. We approached with caution. We could not risk being spotted, so we dressed up as ghosts, and limited our numbers. The first to enter was an intern, dressed in a traditional my-interns-keep escaping attire, he was “heavy, locked chains wrapped around his body”. As a random and definitely not important fact, He actually resembled the mall Santa from before, except much more pale. He entered the house and found a male resident sleeping. He awoke him. Our plan called for him telling him that he needs to stop with the christmas spirit, but there was a fatal miscommunication. He instead was talking about how his mistakes in life lead to sadness and restraint in the afterlife, and how they need to accept the christmas spirit in order to thrive. It was a really bad miscommunication, but it was forgiven. No harm was done as the occupant simply dismissed our first assassin as a feature of indigestion. We had lost our first attack, so we were more aggressive with our next attempt. We wanted to prove santa wrong, we wanted him to come willingly, or else he could be martyred. We found a fine clothing vendor, who was selling his wares out of a small nook in a building. The nook was covered in all of the supplies we would need to dress in some new clothes, as our previous suits were spoiled by the boat ride. The first guy we sent in was wearing a fine set of white clothes, with a funny looking hat, that reminded Gerald Fitz of fire. We sent him in with the goal of telling him about how Christmas was a horrible time of suffering and pain. Luck was not with us that night as tragic miscommunication struck again. He tried to tell the man of the value of killing Christmas through the story of a child that did not get presents, instead getting dastardly sick, but the man was confused. He must've thought we were referring to the cold and marred christmases of his past, because he said he did not want to see more of his past. Our man was great at improvisation, and he responded with an ominous saying about the past was going to haunt him, he definitely was getting his Christmas bonus this year. The man was terrified, which we thought we could use to his advantage. We dressed up as giant effigy of santa clause. We intended to scare him with this alter ego. It didn’t work, he assumed we were here to make him remember the spirit of christmas, and he said he didn’t really care. We didn’t know how to respond to him, so we left to replan, and that's when we thought of it. Santa brings death to the children, so let's dress up as the specter of death. We grabbed an intern and hung him in a dark black cloak. We snuck in and headed towards the bedroom. We hid in the shadows, making stealth our friend. We approached our target, emerging from the shadows with our cloak and scythe. He started to panic, saying he knows what we would show him. This was odd because we did not plan to show him anything, but it did not matter. He told us he would “change” and he ran off screaming into the night about christmas. We had, once again, lost the forbeyer of christmas. We would not let him escape us again

We tried to follow him, but it was no use. He was skipping and jumping with immeasurable speed. We searched his house for clues. We found letters, but they were encrypted, completely unbreakable by everyone who was with us.  It looked like this:

"Yana bir marta o'g'lim menga quloq solmadi. U meni tark etish uchun g'arbiy Shimoliy Amerikaga ketdi. U hech narsa qila olmaydi. U deyarli qashshoq va azob chekadi. Uning biznes uchun hech qanday ma'nosi yo'q. U menga itoat qilishni o'rganadi”

This completely unbreakable English cypher was beyond our skills. We theorised it might be a new language, but that is unreasonable as Santa only knows English. He probably has to pay translators to get the messages of non-english children. It is probably a complex substitution cypher, where even the grammar is changed. We had no hope of understanding any of his weird person possessions. In the master bedroom we saw pictures with him and the decoy Santa we captured at the mall, a prayer rug for an abrahamic religion, A veil, Two different copies of the Quran, some aromatic flowers. In a bedroom, we found soccer memorabilia, weirdly also written in that odd cypher, a small set of toys, mostly wooden, which stand out the otherwise modern and expensive house. There were some old pieces of art, which also contained more of that cypher. A small pocket Uzbek-English dictionary and a small wooden cross with a quote from the book of Matthew proudly engraved. All of this worthless and meaningless junk told us nothing to the character of the big S himself or where he might of ran off to. Hope was slowly slipping away