Half an hour later, the scene inside Andrew's office was one of profound anticlimax. The newly installed Lord of Cinder Town, the great Harry Potter Michael, sat in the dead man's worn leather chair, his fingers steepled before his face, his expression a carefully composed mask of cold fury. Before him, spread across the scarred desktop like the sad wares of a junk dealer, was the sum total of a warlord's legacy.
The silence in the room was thick, broken only by the ragged breathing of the assembled staff—John, Lynda, Faye, and a now-obsequious Old Gimpy—who stood in a nervous semi-circle, awaiting their new master's verdict. The air still held the faint, metallic scent of blood and the sour tang of fear.
Michael's voice, when it finally came, was dangerously low, each word clipped and precise, betraying the simmering anger beneath the calm facade. "Allow me to clarify," he said, his gaze sweeping over the pathetic hoard. "This collection of debris… this assortment of discards… is, according to you, the entirety of Andrew's personal wealth? The treasure upon which his power rested?"
He did not wait for an answer. The dam of his frustration broke. With a sudden, violent motion, he snatched the nearest cloth sack—the one heavy with the dull clink of bottle caps—and hurled it against the wall with all his strength. The bag burst on impact with a dry, rattling explosion, sending a shower of dull metal caps skittering and bouncing across the wooden floor, a cascade of worthless ambition.
Everyone flinched. John's broad shoulders hunched. Lynda and Faye exchanged a terrified glance. The sound was the perfect echo of Michael's shattered expectations.
In the lush daydreams that had sustained him during the perilous journey, Andrew's coffers had gleamed with the promise of instant salvation: fat bars of gold, glittering gemstones, anything dense and precious that could be smuggled back to his world and transformed into a lifeline. He'd envisioned a treasure trove that could erase the debt to Brother Dong in one stroke, elevating him from the humiliated "A-Biao" to someone of substance, perhaps even a figure of respect.
Reality, as it so often did, offered a crueler, more derisive bounty.
Guided by John's knowledge, they had first ransacked the room, overturning drawers and shelves, finding little. The focus had shifted to the squat, dented metal safe in the corner. Forcing it open had required effort and time, building a sense of tantalizing anticipation. When the door finally swung wide, Michael had leaned forward, heart pounding, only to be met with a sight that nearly stopped it altogether. The safe's interior was meticulously organized, a shrine to utter worthlessness.
The core holdings were the bottle caps, neatly stacked in cloth rolls, the foundation of a currency that was a joke anywhere else. The supporting assets were a study in wasteland pragmatism:
A single-action revolver, its cylinder empty, its blued steel worn to a dull grey.
Three cans of food, their paper labels long gone, their metal exteriors a uniform, ominous black.
A small drawstring pouch containing about five dozen spent brass cartridge casings, a promise of future ammunition that required another dozen miracles to fulfill.
A half-consumed bottle of something claiming to be Chateau Lafite Rothschild, 1982, its liquid the color of old rust, its cork crumbling at the touch. It looked less like a vintage wine and more like a biological hazard.
A stack of crackling vellum scrolls, their surfaces covered in wild, unreadable sigils and frantic, nonsensical lines that suggested either madness or a forgotten language.
And, with an irony so perfect it felt like a personal insult, a small bundle of toilet paper, pristine and carefully preserved. Histoilet paper. The very sheets he'd traded for the pleasure of her company and a knock on the head.
This was it. The sum total of power in Cinder Town. In the brutal economy of the wasteland, it represented food, defense, currency, and even a grotesque parody of luxury. But to Michael, a man straddling two worlds, it was a heap of useless junk. The revolver was a museum piece. The black cans were inedible mysteries. The casings were trash. The "wine" was poison. The scrolls were kindling. The bottle caps were… bottle caps. A universe of desperation, distilled into a sad little pile on a desk.
As he sat glowering, Old Gimpy caught Faye the Foxkin's eye, his head jerking in a barely perceptible nod. Taking the cue, Faye swayed forward, her movements fluid and practiced. She positioned herself behind Michael's chair, her delicate, if faintly grimy, hands coming to rest on his tense shoulders. Her fingers began to knead the knotted muscles with surprising strength. The touch, intimate and disarming, forced some of the rigidity from his frame.
When she sensed him soften a fraction, she leaned close, her voice a silken murmur by his ear. "Esteemed Lord Harry Potter, this is indeed the full measure of Andrew's holdings. To one of your… evident affluence… it may seem modest. But here, in these lands, such things constitute a fortune. A trove that could sustain a man in comfort for many seasons."
"Hmm?" Michael grunted, the sound both a question and a reluctant admission of the massage's effect.
What followed was a gentle, nervous education. In halting sentences, led by John and embellished by the others, they explained the stark hierarchy of value in their broken world. Food and clean water were supreme, the ultimate hard currency. Weapons and ammunition were a close second, the keys to acquiring and defending the first. Pre-Collapse luxuries—like smooth paper, unspoiled medicine, or strong liquor—were treasures traded to distant, powerful enclaves for survival essentials. Gold, in the form of coins, still held sway in high-level trade, but baubles like jewels were worthless, frivolous in the face of starvation. Cinder Town was a backwater; the real flow of goods moved between these larger settlements and the roving merchant caravans.
Andrew hadn't been hoarding trinkets; he'd been managing a brutal, pragmatic portfolio. The can caps were his liquid capital, the literal small change of the apocalypse. A hundred caps might buy a single gold coin, but finding that exchange here was a fantasy.
The realization settled over Michael like a shroud. He had, technically, just come into possession of the local seat of power and its associated wealth. He had won. Yet the victory felt like ash. This pile of "fortune" did nothing to bridge the chasm of debt yawning beneath him in his own world. There was no surge of triumph, only the cold, hollow taste of irrelevance.
After a period of brooding silence in the office, Michael forcibly straightened his back. Wallowing wouldn't pump water or pay debts. "John. Zach. With me," he commanded, his voice regaining a measure of its earlier authority. He needed to survey his new domain, to understand the tangible assets beyond the insulting contents of the safe.
His first stop was the heart of Cinder Town: the well house. It was a small, fortified structure, a testament to the value of what it protected. Even during the height of Jaunysmoke's assault, Andrew had kept two guards posted here, a clear statement of priorities.
Michael peered into the dark, cool maw of the well. The bottom was invisible, swallowed by darkness even in the daytime. "Depth? Output?" he asked John.
The minotaur, now a fount of practical knowledge, answered readily. "Approximately one hundred and fifty meters, Lord. Fifty buckets per day without strain. Perhaps one hundred if pumped dry, but the source would need days to recover."
Michael eyed the wooden bucket. Twenty liters. So, his domain produced a thousand liters of potable water daily. A vital resource, yet when mentally divided among the hundreds of hollow-eyed souls he'd seen in the settlement, it felt desperately thin. This water was life for the townsfolk, and also the capital used to trade with scavengers for salvage, which in turn would be bartered with passing caravans for the food that sustained his new, small regime. It was a fragile, circular economy of survival.
As they left the well house, Michael issued an order that seemed absurd to his pragmatic lieutenant. "From today's allotment, set aside two buckets. Purified. For Lynda and Faye. For… ablutions."
John's brow furrowed, confusion warring with obedience. "As you command, Lord," he rumbled, though the concept of using precious water for mere washing clearly baffled him.
Michael spent the next hour walking the perimeter of Cinder Town, a grim procession with a minotaur and an ogre in tow. It was a tour of squalor and precarious safety. John explained the basic social contract: three caps per month for the dubious privilege of sleeping within the wobbly perimeter wall. For food and water, you traded your labor or your scavenged finds. It was subsistence, a life of squeezing moisture from a stone.
The mention of caps again grated on Michael's nerves. He hatedthe caps. They symbolized everything his wasteland wealth couldn't solve. In a flash of perverse, cathartic generosity, he stopped and addressed a small, gathered crowd of wary residents. "People of Cinder Town! To mark this new beginning, I, in my benevolence, declare this month's residency fee waived! A gift from your new Lord, Harry Potter Michael!"
For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then, a ragged, disbelieving cheer rose from the crowd. The sound was raw and alive, cutting through the usual lethargy. For the first time, Michael saw them not as a faceless, struggling mass, but as individuals—gaunt, scarred, but momentarily unburdened. It was a small, cheap power, but it was real.
That evening, he hosted a private feast in the shuttered tavern. He distributed ten caps to each of his core followers—John, Lynda, Faye, even Old Gimpy—as both reward and promise of future wages. Their reactions were ones of stunned, almost tearful gratitude. To them, accustomed to Andrew's transactional harshness, this was unheard-of largesse. Their loyalty, he could see, solidified in that moment.
What they didn't see was the cold calculus behind his generosity. He was spending a currency that was useless to him, buying loyalty and stability with tokens that were abundant in his other world. He had stabilized his foothold in the wasteland, built a crude but functional power base.
But as he sat at the head of the crude table, the sounds of forced merriment around him, the truth was inescapable. He had built a castle in a world of dust. His throne was a broken chair. His treasury was a pile of scrap. And in the world that truly mattered, the world with the debt and the collectors and the crushing weight of failure, none of it made the slightest bit of difference. The victory was hollow, and the silence of his real life waited for him on the other side of the green, mocking light.