For the People's Welfare Lottery to expand in the United States, one truth never changed:
Arica did not run on permission. It ran on interests.
Without local Arican power behind the operation—bankers, brokers, political fixers, newspaper n who could turn a "scandal" into a shrug—the Lottery was just a foreign machine printing money on soone else's soil. And foreign machines were tolerated only as long as the locals got their cut.
The original arrangent had been clean and, in Oskar's opinion, almost generous:
20% of Arican profits went to welfare programs (publicly visible, politically useful).
20% went to the local Arican partners (the real cost of staying alive).
60% returned to the People's Welfare Lottery itself.
On paper, it looked fair.
In Arican reality, it looked like a provocation.
Because the n who mattered didn't want "fair." They wanted more, and they wanted it first.
Oskar's biggest allies in that market—his most valuable shield—were the Goldman banking family.
Henry Goldman, Jewish, sharp-eyed, and utterly modern in the way only certain finance n were modern. His family's survival instincts had been honed by centuries of living inside other people's states, other people's laws, other people's tempers—learning early that morality was a luxury and leverage was oxygen. They were excellent bankers because they had to be. Sentint did not keep families alive; margins did.
Oskar had contacted them for two reasons.
The first was blunt: they loved money. Not in the childish way aristocrats loved it—spending. In the professional way—control. Information. Timing. Risk.
The second was more dangerous: Oskar knew the na.
From history, from the future, from that other life where he had watched the twentieth century unfold like a slow-motion collapse.
Henry Goldman was not just "a rich man." He was one of the n whose circle would be involved in the conversations that helped shape the coming Arican financial system—the Federal Reserve era. 1913 sat in Oskar's mind like a date carved into stone. He didn't need to worship it. He only needed to rember that the world would pivot around it.
So no—these people were not stupid. They recognized a good thing when they saw it. And the Lottery wasn't rely a profitable enterprise.
It was a river of money that could be redirected.
A lever that could be pulled.
A private pipeline into Europe.
And, just as importantly, a relationship with Oskar himself—access to his next move, his next product, his next disruption. For a banker, that was worth more than a dividend. It ant arriving before the market shook, not after.
The arrangent had been fruitful both ways.
Oskar gave them profit and prestige.
They gave him protection from the only thing more dangerous than armies:
administration.
Of course, Oskar wasn't naïve. He knew exactly what he was to them.
Not a friend.
A valuable asset.
And assets were loved only as long as they paid.
That was the bargain.
---
However now with pressure building from Britain and its allies—and with Arican war hawks always hunting excuses to inflate budgets and posture abroad—Oskar knew he had to move.
Until now, the Arican dostic powers had tolerated the Lottery's profit split for two simple reasons.
First, it was too profitable to destroy. Second, Oskar himself was too useful to antagonize openly.
They complained, of course. They always did. They demanded renegotiations, hinted at investigations, floated the word sovereignty whenever they wanted leverage. But in the end, they accepted the arrangent because everyone involved was getting paid—and paid well.
More importantly, they were receiving exclusive, advance access to AngelWorks products. Not the public versions. The prototypes. The limited runs. The things that turned heads.
Their wives and daughters wore them openly. Displayed them at dinners, charities, clubs. Flaunted them among friends who imdiately wanted to know where they ca from and how they could get them. What began as indulgence beca advertising. What began as favoritism beca demand.
It was a perfect loop.
Money flowed upward. Prestige flowed outward. The brand grew without spending a dollar on marketing.
A win for Oskar.
A win for his partners.
That changed the mont Britain, France, and Russia moved openly to block the People's Welfare Lottery.
Once the Lottery had been successfully strangled in three major markets, it beca a target rather than a curiosity. The scent of easy money spread through Arican circles like blood in water. Rival interests and political opportunists began circling at once, eager to seize the business under the banner of "protecting Arican markets."
If mishandled, the Arican branch could be shut down just as cleanly as the branches in Britain, France, and Russia.
The White House, under its new president William Howard Taft, favored economic pressure over military confrontation—and saw little reason to spare Germany's feelings if Arican law, leverage, and profit aligned. Seizing or restructuring the Lottery's U.S. revenues looked, to the executive branch, less like provocation and more like opportunity.
Congress saw it differently.
Fractured, donor-sensitive, and instinctively allergic to unnecessary foreign entanglents, it had no appetite for antagonizing a major European power when Arican money was already flowing. Offense without payoff was bad politics. Stability—with dividends—was better.
Yet with Britain, France, and Russia leading the charge, Arican politicians felt safer. Germany was already fighting to counter the Entente's pressure. Germany could not afford to force the United States into the enemy camp—not over a lottery, not over profit margins, not when the larger strategic contest was tightening by the year.
So Oskar chose the only rational option.
He would rather surrender a portion of profit than allow the situation to rot into total loss. Even forty percent of the Arican market was still an ocean of money.
And yet forty percent of sothing was better than one hundred percent of nothing.
Because if the Arican branch fell too…
the Lottery would not rely be wounded.
It would be crippled.
Thankfully the Arican dostic powers were more than satisfied with the compromise extracted from the People's Welfare Lottery.
An additional twenty percent of the profits was already double what they had received before. Better still, the Lottery had agreed to hand over the funds originally earmarked for social welfare as well. On paper, the money would still "serve the public." In practice, it flowed straight into private hands.
A token fraction would be spent where it was most visible—just enough bread, just enough charity, just enough noise to quiet the streets.
That was how Arica worked.
Money ruled. Influence followed money. And the poor—especially the poorest—had little claim on either. In this era, the most vulnerable of all were children. Orphans, or those rely assud to be orphans, were loaded onto so-called Orphan Trains and sent out of the great industrial cities into the countryside. Officially, it was reform. Opportunity. A better life.
In reality, children were often separated from families who never saw them again, auctioned off in small towns like livestock, absorbed into harsh labor, or quietly exploited under the protection of distance and indifference.
It was an early attempt at organized child welfare.
It was also a deeply broken one.
Against that backdrop, the Arican partners saw no moral conflict at all. Profit was the point. Everything else was decoration.
Still—luckily for Germany—Oskar's concession achieved its imdiate goal.
The British pressure campaign in the United States stalled. Without a clean legal excuse and with too many Arican interests now invested in the Lottery's continued operation, Washington hesitated. The Arican branch of the People's Welfare Lottery weathered the storm.
Bruised.
But alive.
When the news reached Germany, Oskar and Karl allowed themselves sothing rare.
Relief.
For weeks they had lived under constant pressure—political, financial, and personal. Every decision felt like it balanced on the edge of catastrophe. And beyond the spreadsheets and telegrams waited Oskar's private life: three pregnant wives, exhausted and irritable, yet still, sohow, softened by his presence—by his touch, his attention, his stubborn refusal to retreat entirely into work.
The scandal surrounding Princess Patricia faded, at least for the mont. Newspapers found fresher distractions. Governnts turned to louder crises.
The Lottery survived.
And as the months passed, it beca clear that—for now—the worst had been endured.
Still, Oskar was not pleased. Britain's display of naval might—their so-called Naval Review—refused to leave Oskar's thoughts.
It replayed itself again and again in his mind: the thunder of guns, the endless grey hulls, the confidence of a power that had ruled the seas for centuries and had no intention of stepping aside quietly. Coupled with everything that had followed—the lotteries, the pressure, the coordinated moves—it made one thing painfully clear.
The ga was heating up.
Britain and its allies were not going to sit quietly and watch Germany rise. They would interfere. They would strangle markets, block routes, lean on weaker states, and smile while doing it. And if pressure failed—if leverage ran out—they would reach for steel.
Oskar did not like that reality.
But he had stopped pretending it would go away.
The world had made its position clear: Germany would be allowed to exist, but never to dominate. Never to lead. Never to decide the future on its own terms.
So Oskar made his peace with what followed.
If war ca, it would not be a contest of restraint or rcy. Those who dared to challenge him would be broken so thoroughly that resistance would cease to be an option—not because they were forgiven, but because they would no longer possess the strength to try again.
As the months passed, the naval arms race tightened like a drawn wire.
Britain accelerated its shipbuilding program, laying down hull after hull in a desperate bid to preserve supremacy through sheer numbers. They told themselves they were building the finest warships afloat. In truth, Oskar could see the flaw clearly: mass without evolution. Against Germany's new designs, Britain's fleet was becoming a mountain of steel built on increasingly outdated foundations.
Quantity as doctrine.
It would not save them.
Across the Atlantic, the United States stepped fully onto the stage. With the commissioning of its first dreadnoughts—USS Michigan and USS South Carolina—Arica declared its intention to compete at the highest level. Backed by staggering natural wealth, imnse industrial capacity, and the strategic luxury of distance, the Aricans poured energy into naval developnt with quiet confidence. They lagged behind Europe in certain technologies, but in resources and montum they were unmatched.
It would not be long before they beca the world's third-largest navy.
Germany, anwhile, moved with cold precision.
Its shipbuilding program advanced without disruption. The König-class battleships and Dörlinger-class battlecruisers rose on schedule, steel following blueprint exactly as Oskar intended. Even further ahead, the next generation already existed—Bavarian-class battleships and Mackensen-class battlecruisers—drawn, calculated, and waiting.
Construction would begin in 1911.
And by 1914, they would be ready.
Of course, other nations were building fleets as well—France among them. But if war ca, the French Navy would be bound to the diterranean, guarding colonial routes and containing Austria-Hungary. Russia, for all its size, lacked the reach to matter at sea in the opening phase.
For Germany, that reality reduced the equation to a single opponent.
Britain alone mattered.
---
Thus the year crept onward—rcifully, without the kind of crisis that made headlines and widows.
In German Caroon, Oskar's three Bauxi towns continued to grow on schedule. Disease remained the ever-present enemy, but not an unbeatable one—fire, drainage, smoke, quarantines, clean water, and stubborn German logistics did what prayers could not. There was resentnt, of course. There always was. But with the Duala holding the southern corridor and the Fulɓe keeping the grassland lid tight in the north, the worst unrest never gained enough oxygen to beco a blaze. The corridor held. The red earth began to move.
When winter ca, Germany turned its attention to Christmas—trees, candles, hymns, the familiar rituals that made an empire feel like a ho. Oskar, at Karl's insistence and at the personal invitation of Switzerland's leadership, returned to Switzerland with his household again.
Partly for rest. Partly for diplomacy.
And partly because Oskar had acquired sothing there that amused him far more than he admitted: a new alpine resort and a small "sporting" workshop he wanted inspected in person.
The "new sport" was, on paper, ridiculous.
Not skis—those already existed.
But a single broad board ant to glide on snow like a controlled fall, strapped at the feet and steered with weight and nerve. In Oskar's old life this kind of thing would not beco common until the 1960s. Here, he simply dragged the idea backward through ti, had craftsn build prototypes, and then watched half of Switzerland call him insane while the other half called it genius.
He had not been eager to return to Switzerland.
Not because of the mountains or the cold, but because he feared—quite sincerely—running into Patricia and Elise again. Fate, however, proved rciful for once. The two won despised winter and had already fled south earlier in the year, chasing warmth to the very edge of Europe. They had settled in Sagres, where the Atlantic t sun-bleached cliffs and winter was little more than a rumor.
There, they were spending the season far from snow and scandal.
Word had also reached Oskar, quietly and without ceremony, that both were pregnant.
He accepted the news with a mixture of disbelief, weary amusent, and resignation. He had only lain with them once, and yet that was enough it seed. His seed, it seed, was as stubborn as the rest of him—once planted, it refused to vanish quietly. Another small, inconvenient reminder that whatever had remade him had not done so halfway.
Just one more mildly absurd, faintly alarming proof that he was no longer bound by ordinary expectations.
He sighed, shook his head, and let the thought go.
There were already more children under his roof than most n saw in a lifeti.
He didn't know whether to laugh or swear.
He did both, privately.
Switzerland, however, was a success.
His children treated the mountains like a new kingdom. Snow beca a battlefield for gas and dares. And the resort's guests—nobles, bankers, ministers, tourists—couldn't decide what was more shocking: the giant Crown Prince laughing in the snow, or the silver-haired, violet-eyed children racing down slopes like little creatures of legend.
Imperiel—now old enough to lead the pack with the confidence of a tiny field marshal—made the strongest impression. And beside him, Karl's eldest, Durin, refused to be outdone. The two boys turned the new "snow board" into a competition so fierce the adults began placing bets like it was a cavalry match.
Tanya laughed until her cheeks hurt. Anna watched with the steady warmth of a woman who had learned to enjoy chaos when it was harmless. Gunderlinde clapped with such earnest delight she looked, for a mont, like the shy girl she had been before palaces made everything heavy.
For a brief while, the world felt… light.
Then Switzerland ended, as all holidays did. The household returned to Potsdam. Schedules tightened. Letters arrived. The machinery of state resud its grind.
And the year rolled over into 1911.
In February, Oskar gained another batch of children—five in total—delivered into the world with the kind of attention most people never received in a lifeti. Nas were chosen, announced, recorded like blessings written in ink.
Anna's twin girls ca quiet and calm, as if observing life before committing to it: Floriel and Liliel.
Tanya's twin boys arrived furious at existence itself, red-faced and indignant as if the world had offended them by being cold: Grel and Gael.
And last—most symbolically for the old order—Gunderlinde gave birth to a healthy baby girl: Adelheidel.
All of them, like the others, bore the family's strange mark—light hair tending toward silver, eyes too vivid to feel natural, violet like storm glass. Another handful of children that made courtiers whisper and priests stare too long.
With that single winter's flood, the child count under the Potsdam roof climbed into absurdity. Counting the household alone, Oskar now had thirteen little ones beneath one set of ceilings—fourteen if one included Cecilie's girl as well. And if one counted Bertha's two… the number crept higher still, even if Oskar had kept Bertha at arm's length in recent months, forcing that particular complication to remain dormant.
He sotis wondered, with a strange half-amusent and half-dread, whether he would soon have more children than years.
And yet—when he looked at the palace gardens filled with laughter, nurses, toys, and little violet-eyed shadows running between the adults like living myths—
he couldn't deny it.
He was happy.
His wives were happy.
And Wilhelm II and Augusta—already grandparents many tis over—were openly delighted all the sa. They doted on Oskar's children with a particular pride, as if the sheer strangeness of them proved sothing about destiny.
---
As the months passed, the international atmosphere tightened. The quarrel between the Central Powers and the Entente was no longer a debate in newspapers—it was pressure you could feel in administrative decrees, naval budgets, and the way diplomats stopped smiling with their eyes.
Everyone could hear it, if they listened closely enough:
the footsteps of war.
Then Morocco flared again.
On 21 May 1911, unrest and tribal revolt around the Sultan's authority boiled over, and France moved troops into Fez, the old imperial capital—officially to "restore order" and protect European lives and property.
But everyone in Berlin understood what that truly ant.
Fez wasn't just a city. It was a lever.
France's move was not simply about stability—it was about turning "temporary intervention" into permanent control, step by step, until Morocco's independence was only a word used in treaties.
Six years earlier, Morocco had already nearly dragged Europe into war. The Algeciras Conference (1906) had produced a diplomatic compromise: Morocco remained "independent" on paper, but France and Spain were given major policing roles, and European powers gained structured economic access—customs, finance fraworks, and the infamous international banking arrangents that turned Moroccan sovereignty into a balance sheet.
That was the real heart of Morocco:
not flags—
but money.
French and Spanish firms wanted preferential access, contracts, and ports. German comrcial interests—smaller but politically symbolic—wanted the "open door" preserved, because if France could lock Morocco down, it would prove Germany could be pushed out of any market by force dressed as policing.
And Britain, watching from the side, understood perfectly: every crisis that isolated Germany made the Entente stronger.
So when French soldiers marched into Fez, Berlin didn't see a riot being contained.
Berlin saw a test.
A deliberate pressure point.
A move made with the confidence that Germany would either swallow it… or react and look like the aggressor.
Wilhelm II reacted exactly as history trained him to react.
"The French are despicable!" he roared within his palace. "A blatant violation of the agreent. This ti the Empire will not back down!"
In the last Moroccan crisis, compromise had cost him prestige. This ti he would not allow France to take another step without Germany making noise loud enough for the world to hear.
"The lives and property of our rchants and expatriates in Morocco—and the Empire's interests—are not to be treated as optional," Wilhelm snapped. "Tirpitz—dispatch a warship."
"Yes, Your Majesty," Tirpitz answered at once.
Everyone in the room understood what that ant.
Not war.
Not yet.
But steel on the horizon—a signal that Germany still had teeth.
And Oskar, despite his dislike of provocation for its own sake, agreed with the logic.
Not because he wanted a war—he didn't—but because Germany was reaching the point where politeness alone stopped being enough. If the Empire ant to survive the decade ahead, it had to teach the world a simple lesson:
provoking Germany had a price.
In his old life he'd watched two kinds of power dominate the modern world.
China's kind—so essential to trade that offending it beca economically painful.
Arica's kind—so militarily overwhelming that challenging it beca terrifying.
Oskar's plan had always been to forge Germany into a hybrid of both: indispensable to the world's prosperity and too dangerous to gamble against. Not beloved. Not morally admired.
Simply untouchable.
And now, Morocco—small on the map, enormous in consequence—had seemingly beco a testing ground.
A controlled clash. A asured shove. A chance to see whether the world still treated Germany as a nation that could be cornered with paperwork and "police actions"… or whether it had begun to treat Germany as sothing else entirely.
A power you did not bluff.
A power you did not casually humiliate.
So yes—send the warship.
Let the ssage be unmistakable:
Back down, or pay for the step you just took.
Now Oskar would watch what happened next—not with excitent, but with the cold focus of a man running an experint whose failure would cost tens of millions of lives.
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