The potency of the unlabeled, throat-scorching liquor, procured for a pittance in another world, continued to astound Michael. Angiv and his crew of aerial traders did not so much wake up the next morning as they gradually reconstituted themselves from a state of profound insensibility. The sun was already high, casting sharp, guilty beams through the grimy office window, when they finally stirred, groaning and clutching their heads as if holding their skulls together. The atmosphere in the room was thick with the sour-sweet smell of hangover and regret.
A communal bowl of fragrant, steaming rice porridge, consumed with the reverence of a healing ritual, did much to settle rebellious stomachs and clear foggy minds. In its comforting wake, a brittle but polite cordiality settled over the room. The business of diesel could no longer be postponed.
When Michael, leaning back in his creaking chair with an air of casual magnanimity, named his price—"Ten gold pieces per jerry can, fifteen liters a can"—the effect on the gnomish mechanist was immediate and profound. Angiv's jaw, previously set in a wary line, went slack. His bushy russet eyebrows shot up towards his hairline, and the blood seemed to drain from his face, leaving it the color of old parchment. It wasn't shock at the expense; it was stupefaction at the sheer, unbelievable cheapness of it. A voice, shrill and avaricious, screamed in the back of his mind. Ten? Ten?!Back in Karatown, even at thirty a can, there'd be a bidding war! He could double his money, triple it, just by flying a few hundred kilometers west! The carefully cultivated tales of woe he'd slurred out last night—the rampaging lake piranhas, the cowering fisher-folk, the looming famine—all his performative misery, was suddenly rendered absurd. This 'Harry Potter' was either a saint, an idiot, or sitting on a lake of the stuff himself.
Old Gimpy, sipping a cup of bitter herbal tea in the corner with a knowing, wrinkled smirk, caught Michael's eye and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. Told you he was playing a part, that nod said.
Driven by a greed so potent it cut through the last vestiges of his headache, Angiv moved with startling speed. His small, grease-stained hands dove into the depths of his canvas trousers, fumbling in a concealed pocket. He hauled out a heavy leather pouch, its weight making a solid thunkas he placed it on the desk. Michael couldn't help a fleeting, incredulous thought: how did the little man walk with that thing nestled… there? It looked heavy enough to throw off anyone's balance, let alone someone of his stature.
"Fifteen cans!" Angiv blurted, his voice hoarse. "No—twenty! We'll take twenty!" With trembling fingers, he fished out three lone, gleaming gold coins from the pouch's mouth—his last personal reserves—and then shoved the entire, bulging sack across the scarred wooden desk towards Michael as if it were red-hot. The gesture was one of terrified urgency, a fear that this madman might come to his senses at any second.
Michael, affecting nonchalance, picked up the pouch. It was satisfyingly heavy, cool and gritty against his palm. He loosened the drawstring and upended it. A glorious, jangling cataract of gold poured onto the desktop, ringing a clear, bright song of wealth. The morning light caught the coins, setting a small pool of molten sunshine shimmering before him. Each bore the serene, unfamiliar profile of some elven queen, her hair flowing into intricate, alien script. The sight, the sound, the sheer weightof it, was profoundly intoxicating. He counted them twice, the metallic clicks under his fingertip a better melody than any music. Two hundred. Two hundred little suns.
A quick mental calculation, the numbers flitting behind his eyes. Two hundred coins… sixty grand, easy. Maybe more. Twenty cans of diesel… three hundred liters… cost me, what, eighteen hundred bucks from that shady guy off the I-94?The profit margin was so vast it felt less like commerce and more like alchemy. A quiet, smug satisfaction warmed him. Sure, the protagonists in those web novels he'd skimmed back in his old life routinely racked up thousand-to-one returns, but this? A clean three-hundred-fold profit felt solid. Real. A man should know when to be content, he told himself, the ghost of his more scrupulous past offering a faint, approving nod.
Content, however, did not mean complacent. His eyes flicked to the three lonely coins Angiv had set aside. A true businessman left no gold behind. He leaned forward, his expression shifting from magnate to confidante.
"Angiv, my friend," he began, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rumble. "That 'Firewater' from last night… acquired a taste for it? Harsh on the way down, but it puts a furnace in your belly, doesn't it? Of course, a man can't live on liquor alone. Tell you what. I've got something miraculous. 'Drunkard's Peanuts.' Salty, spicy, crisp. One handful, and you'll drink twice as much without even feeling it. And that's just the start. I've got warehouses full of curiosities. Care for a look?"
Angiv, his resistance melted by the gold-traded euphoria and the lingering demon of hangover, merely swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "…Lead the way," he croaked.
The transaction, when finally concluded, left both parties with the serene, glowing conviction that they had utterly and completely bested the other.
The men from Karatown had emptied their collective purse of its last silver bit (leaving only useless bottle caps, which Sweetwater Gulch oddly refused). In return, they had secured twenty jerry cans of precious diesel, five plastic water bottles filled with the miraculous, soul-searing baijiu, and twenty packets each of a terrifyingly addictive red-stringed snack called "Demon Twists" and the promised "Drunkard's Peanuts." Furthermore, they had discovered "Fortune Rice," a self-heating meal in a bag that promised a different, always-delicious experience every time. The only thing that had prevented them from buying out the entire stock was the pathetic weight limit of their gyrocopters. Overload them by a single kilogram, and they'd be taxiing forever, never achieving lift-off.
The fact that they had long since run out of actual currency for these luxuries was brushed aside with a magnanimous wave from Harry Potter. He allowed them to take it on credit. Such trust! In the cut-throat Barrens, it was almost a spiritual experience. As a final, personal gift, the generous Mayor pressed a small, unmarked tube into Angiv's hand. "For… tenderareas," Michael whispered with a wink that suggested vast, unspoken realms of experience. "A balm. The relief is… indescribable. Try it."
Angiv, clutching the tube as if it were a holy relic, felt a lump of gratitude in his throat. The diesel alone would make him a hero in Edward's eyes. The rest? Pure, glorious profit. This trip to the backwater formerly known as Cinder Town had been the luckiest break of his life.
Michael, for his part, watched them load their loot with the benevolent air of a king observing grateful subjects. Whether the cost of the traded goods was one thousand or two thousand of his old-world dollars was irrelevant arithmetic. The result was a bag of gold worth sixty thousand. His Detroit-depleted coffers were no longer echoing. The next supply run was funded. As for moving over ten kilograms of gold in his world? He shrugged mentally. The shadow economy of precious metals could swallow ten times that without a burp. A single mid-tier jewelry chain's workshop would consume it in a week, no questions asked.
Thus, in a haze of mutual admiration and prospective wealth, the two parties ambled out of the main gate, chatting and laughing like old comrades. The harsh noon sun beat down on the dusty clearing just inside the palisade where, on Michael's instruction, the three gyrocopters had been parked for safekeeping. Guarded location, he'd reasoned. Safe from sticky-fingered urchins.
The laughter died in their throats, frozen by the sight that met them.
Angiv's legs, which had been bearing him forward on a cloud of triumph, simply dissolved. He sat down hard in the dirt with a soft umpf, all the color draining from his face once more, but this time for a very different reason. His mouth opened, but for a second, no sound emerged. He looked like a man in a trance, witnessing a deeply personal, slow-motion catastrophe. Then the air left his lungs in a long, wounded, utterly despairing wail.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
The three gyrocopters—the marvelous, rickety, freedom-giving sky-trikes—were no more. In their place was an organized chaos of components spread across large, stained tarps. The main rotor blades lay in a neat row like giant metal feathers. The engine blocks, naked and intricate, sat surrounded by tiny kingdoms of pistons, valves, and crankshafts. Wires coiled like colorful snakes. It was a dissection, performed with a terrifying, methodical precision.
And at the heart of this mechanical graveyard stood the anatomists. Jolly, the enigmatic woman who called Michael 'Ba-Ba,' her face a charming canvas of smudges and streaks of black oil, was peering intently into the guts of a carburetor with the focus of a scholar. Beside her, acting as a chirpy, grease-monkey apprentice, was little Annie, her golden hair tied back, her hands and cheeks decorated with similar dark tributes to industry. A toolbox, looted from Gimpy's workshop no doubt, lay open between them.
Hearing the approach, they both looked up. Seeing Michael, their faces lit up with identical, radiant, utterly guileless smiles. It was the smile of children presenting a carefully, if messily, made birthday card. A smile of pure, proud accomplishment.
Every furious, blistering, profanity-laden curse that had surged into Michael's throat hit an immovable wall of those two besmirched, beaming faces and choked into silence.
The explanation, when pieced together from the mortified guards, was simple. The women, busy tending the wounded and the Mayor's household, had lost track of Jolly. Jolly, in her wandering, had found a kindred spirit in the curious Annie. Exploring, they had discovered the "big toys" by the gate. And Jolly, upon seeing anything with gears and pistons, was apparently compelled by a force as natural as gravity to take it apart to see how it worked.
The guards, for their part, had been paralyzed by a diplomatic crisis. The relationship between the formidable, full-grown woman and the young Mayor was… unconventional. The constant, childish "Ba-Ba" was clearly not literal. The only logical conclusion, reached in hushed, knowing tones, was that it was some exotic, private game. A role for the bedroom, perhaps. Who were they to interfere with the Mayor's… peculiar pleasures? So when Jolly had blinked her large eyes at them and promised, with serene confidence, "Jolly can put it back. Better." they had exchanged glances, shrugged, and found something very interesting to look at on the distant horizon. It wasn't their place to question. Surely the Mayor would understand.
Now, as Michael stared at the heartbreaking tableau—the shattered dreams of flight represented by a thousand scattered parts, the devastated gnome sitting in the dust as if his soul had departed, and the two "mechanics" beaming at him, awaiting praise—he understood all too well. He took a deep, steadying breath, the dry, dusty air doing little to cool the sudden, frantic calculation now whirring in his mind. Damage control. It began with turning to the ashen-faced Angiv, placing a hand on his shuddering shoulder, and speaking in the calm, grave tones of a man accepting a colossal, idiotically unavoidable burden.
"Angiv. My friend. Look at me. This… is what we in the business call an 'unforeseen logistical incident.' But we are men of our word. Sweetwater Gulch stands by its deals, and its… accidents. We will make this right. You have my solemn vow."