For Harry Potter Michael, seated amidst the quiet ruins of his third-floor office, the act of weaving grand futures from the thin air of desperation was its own peculiar, potent narcotic. Spin a tale, feel the thrill. Keep spinning, and the high just keeps going.With saliva-flecked enthusiasm, he painted glorious tomorrows across the smoke-stained walls of the room. Under his gesticulating hands, the Territory of Meili—no longer the grubby 'Cinder Town'—blossomed in description. It would have wide, tree-lined boulevards (where would they get trees?). Its schools would echo with the diligent chatter of educated children (they had one partially literate old man). Workshops would hum with industry, forges would glow day and night (they had a single anvil and a bellows patched with lizard hide). In his fervent oration, this dust-blown outpost on the edge of oblivion began to rival, and then surpass, the glittering, pre-Collapse metropolises of legend. Shanghai? Mere practice for the glory of Meili!
And Zhang Tiezhu and his men, hardened by a lifetime of reality's sharpest edges, drank it in. The Kool-Aid was supersized, infused with the one flavor the Wasteland had banished: pure, uncut hope. Their blood, thick with the memory of gruel and thirst, stirred. A rational, dissenting voice in the back of their skulls whispered that not they, nor their sons, nor likely their sons' sons would see such a world. But if their calloused hands, their sweat, their stubborn will could bring even one percent, two percent of that dream to life… it would be a life worth the living. Their eyes, which had for so long measured the world in terms of immediate threats and scarce resources, now held a new, distant glimmer.
The talk concluded with Iron Pillar Zhang thumping his fist against his sternum. "At first light," he vowed, the words a solemn pact. "We bring them. The old, the young. All of them. They will be citizens of Meili." When Michael offered men, trucks, an escort for the journey, Zhang's face adopted a carefully constructed mask of sheepish gratitude. "No need to trouble your people, Lord. Perhaps… a few of the wheeled cycles? For those who cannot walk the distance?" The unspoken hung between them: We have a place. It is ours. Its secrets are our last possession.
Michael, the salesman who had learned to read a client's evasion before the first contract was drawn, simply nodded. He was no wide-eyed ideologue demanding full transparency. He had a dimensional closet in a lean-to and a trunk full of hemorrhoid cream that defied all explanation. Everyone in the Wasteland deserved a locked drawer for their soul. He agreed to ten bicycles, threw in the keys to the Wuling microvan, and added a twenty-kilo sack of rice and as much clean water as they could carry—fuel for the final journey to a new life.
Alone again, the silence of the office rushed in, a palpable thing. The grand visions evaporated, leaving behind the cold, hard ledger of the present. He slumped into his chair, the wood groaning in sympathy, and picked up a half-chewed biro. A procurement list. The bridge between the dream of Meili and its next, trembling step. His mind, however, was a crowded bazaar of needs, each vendor shouting louder than the last. Medicine! Bandages! Seeds! Tools! Wire! Nails! Books! Soap!
The pen hovered over a scrap of paper. Then, with a sound of pure frustration, he hurled it against the far wall. It bounced off a faded map of a continent that no longer existed. He buried his face in his hands, fingertips digging into his scalp where a tension headache was building a fortress.
The problem wasn't a lack of ideas. It was a surplus of reality. He dragged the cloth sack from under his desk, the spoils of the battle clinking inside. The haul was, by Wasteland standards, princely. He upended it. A cascade of metal rained onto the scarred desktop. The majority were bottle caps—thousands of them, a shimmering, useless hill of crimped steel. The irony was rich. Twenty years ago, the grain merchants of Vanaheim, seeking a durable, scarce token for small trade, had anointed these humble discs as currency. If the mighty Vanaheim accepted caps for bread, then caps were money. It was a system born of pure, pragmatic fiat.
And it was utterly worthless to Michael. He couldn't walk into a Yangcheng wholesaler and plunk down a sack of soda bottle tops. They'd call the men in white coats before he finished his sentence. Sifting through the metallic drivel, his fingers found the real prizes: thirty-one gold coins, warm and heavy. Twenty had come from Blackhand's belt, the final, weighty arrogance of the dead. At his world's prices, maybe ninety thousand yuan. A sum that had once seemed astronomical now felt pathetically finite. Next, a smaller pile of silver ten-gram pieces, over two hundred of them. The melt value was a pittance.
The grand Lord of Meili, the visionary who had just promised fields and forges and schools, stared at the paltry pile of real, translatable wealth. A cold, familiar squeeze of anxiety tightened around his chest. It was the same feeling that had plagued him before a big sales quarter, staring at an impossible target. The Miserable Yang, facing the music as the New Year's debt-collectors came knocking.
At that precise moment, approximately forty kilometers southwest of the nascent Territory of Meili, the object of Lord Michael's more personal and perplexing frustrations was also taking stock.
The putter of the Xiaomaoluscooter, once a buzzing symbol of improbable mobility, gave a final, consumptive shudder and died. The sound didn't fade; it was simply amputated, leaving a ringing silence in the vast, empty darkness of the badlands. Jinx—Audra, the Steel Rose—didn't curse, didn't kick the tires. She simply guided the now-silent vehicle off the faint animal track and into a thicket of thorny, man-high scrub. With practiced efficiency, she camouflaged it with loose brush. It wasn't broken. It was empty. The tank she'd siphoned from the Lord's stores weeks ago, and the precious half-liter she'd traded a good knife for, were gone. The machine, devoid of the magical fluid that gave it life, was now just a collection of plastic and metal, heavier than it was worth. She left it without a backward glance.
Her entire warband—the Steel Roses—were gone. Scattered to the four winds: dead on a wall, captured in the dust, or worse, sworn to the banner of the black-haired interloper. The dissolution of the gang she'd built from nothing sparked not a single ember of grief in her chest. The blonde, deceptively sweet-faced young woman leaning against a rusted girder was, to her core, a creature of profound and polished self-interest. An orphan of the wastes learned early: sentiment was a currency that bought only graves.
By six, scavenging in the toxic ruins with other urchins, she'd seen the full spectrum of human ugliness enacted over a crust of moldy bread or a mouthful of suspicious water. She knew her trajectory: use the pretty face that was both curse and asset, become a tavern girl in some flyspeck settlement, trade her youth for temporary security, and fade into a worn-out drudge. It was the script.
Then, at six, the script burned. She met Lilith 'Venomtail' Viper, the most feared rogue west of the Great Crack. The woman had taken one look at the scrawny, too-clever blonde child and seen… something. An apprentice. Under Lilith, Jinx ate until she was sick. She remembered the old woman's hard slap knocking a half-eaten tuber from her hands, the gruff command: "Stop, idiot. Your stomach will split."At ten, she watched from a rain barrel as the guards of Vanaheim strung her mentor up on the city walls. The 'Venomtail' jerked and danced for a long time before the crows grew bold. Jinx, already a First-Rank rogue with instincts sharper than her stolen knives, melted into the sewage runoff and didn't stop running until Cinder Town was a smudge on the horizon. The Steel Roses were built not from ambition, but from the simple need to be the one giving orders, not taking them.
So the loss of the gang? A setback. A change of scenery. Her fingers traced the subtle, humming energy just beneath her breastbone. Her Aura, tested and strained in the battle, felt… different. Fuller. A pot at the rolling boil. The breakthrough to the Fourth Rank was close. A shimmering, tangible threshold. With that power… old accounts could be settled. Vanaheim's walls no longer seemed so high.
Joining the raider coalition had merely been a final fundraising effort before that reckoning. A little capital for the journey, for bribes, for good steel. Its failure was inconvenient, not catastrophic.
At the edge of the ruins, her fingers found a specific crack in a collapsed factory wall. She pried a concrete slab aside, the motion smooth and silent, and vanished into the earth. Minutes later, she emerged. A small, oilcloth-wrapped bundle was tied across her back. In her hands was a sleek, if dusty, mountain bike, its tires still holding air—another pre-Collapse relic meticulously preserved. She swung a leg over it and pushed off, the wheels crunching on gravel. The stars were a vast, icy spill above, and she navigated by them, turning the bike north-west, towards the distant, hated glow of Vanaheim.
Yet, as the miles fell away under the silent, spinning wheels, her head kept turning, of its own volition, to glance back over her shoulder into the immense, black nothingness where Meili lay. And each time, the same, unbidden thought surfaced, like a stubborn weed through cracked pavement: Harry Potter Michael.
The man was an idiot. A glorious, confounding idiot. His 'Dragon's Claw' pantomime, his stumbling Mandarin, the way he'd tackled her like a drunken miner rather than fight with any style. He governed with the naive enthusiasm of a child building a sandcastle, oblivious to the tide. He was everything the Wasteland should have eaten alive on his first day.
And yet.
He had givenwater. Not sold. Given.He had fought for a pile of mud-bricks and desperate people as if it were a kingdom. There was a light in him, a stupid, indefatigable, infuriating light that had nothing to do with Aura and everything to do with… something else. Something she had no name for. It was a splinter in her mind, a grain of sand in the oyster of her cynicism, and it itched. In the vast, star-chilled solitude of her journey, the memory of his weight pinning her down, the taste of his blood in her mouth, the sheer, ridiculous sincerityin his eyes when he promised his people a future… it didn't fade. It deepened.
She pedaled harder, as if speed could outrun a thought. But the Territory of Meili, and its preposterously-named lord, had already carved a niche in the geography of her life, and she had absolutely no idea what to do about it.