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[Alexandr Korol]

Even film a video if you want — however you like. So that everyone knows that you have this.” What is it? What exactly do I have? Why? It wasn’t clear. The papyrus had no energy at all, but that metallic object, of course, was emitting something — it felt charged, like it radiated something. But what is it? Why? For what purpose? To show it to whom? But that was the case. Maybe this will be revealed later, so I figure, why not. In fact, everything that happened in the first volume of “Alternative History” was so quick and fleeting, but you could say that’s the whole story — it just gets explained in great detail in the volumes that follow. And later I gave the papyrus back to him, and the rod too. Just after some time I said, “Thanks for letting me hold on to these. Might as well let you keep them.” And he said, “Okay.” I don’t know what it was, but he said that the papyrus was supposedly a real museum artifact, and that some woman — someone who worked with artifacts or archaeology — either gave it to him as a thank-you or he convinced her to give it to him. Something like that. And the rod — someone made it. Why, how, what he read about it, how it works — I don’t know. He said something about plus and minus. It just sat at my place, and that’s all.