01.135 Recruitment

Two days later (Saturday, June 4, 2022)

Estiatorio Milos, Midtown, New York, United States

“Everett Marr is a waste of space,” her father grunted.

Tommy Xu sat across from him with a slight smile on his face. Alistair Harris was a delight, there was no hypocrisy in him. He was good at making lots of money so that is what he did. He dressed and lived as was expected of someone like him, but only to the bare minimum and Xu could feel the layer of resentment at needing to bother with the niceties.

Everone watched as Alistair stabbed another piece of lamb with his fork and put it in his mouth and chewed, they waited for him to finish.

“We were co-investors in a REIT that went sideways. When I was doing my diligence on what went wrong, I found irregularities. Payments made to secure loans for another one of his businesses, something in military contracting. We are still in court about it, and it has been seven years.”

He stabbed another piece of meat, attacking them with the fork like he could dig the fork into Everett Marr. He waved it at them as he talked.

“More recently, he was involved in the recent unpleasantness at the capital. Him and Madeleine Senner. Both rich kid parasites that should have been strangled at birth.”

Charlie couldn’t resist, “The best time to strangle an oligarch is at birth, the next best time is now?”

Alistair pointedly looked at her, “And what do you think you are?”

“A not very self-made woman.” Charlie rebounded with, but she did seem chastened.

“So, Mr. Xu, if you are thinking about going into business with him, I wouldn’t.”

“Hardly. I, in fact, will be going into business against him.”

“Best not to have anything to do with him.” grumbled Alistair before putting in his next piece of meat.

“Why is she here?” Alistair was pointing at Ella. “I know my daughter works for you. I know she has been brokering all those strange buys you have been making. But my daughter’s friend,” he waved the fork in Ella’s direction, “has nothing to do with any of that.”

He paused and took a sip of beer. Ella sat with her wine glass calmly. It would take more than Alistair Harris to rattle her nowadays.

He went on, “I assume she is here because Everett Marr sent men for the attack on her home. What I want to know is why and how you are involved? And how my daughter is involved”

Ella considered what to tell him, he was well informed. In fact, very well informed. But before she had a chance, Xu laconically dropped a bomb on the table, “She is the boss.”

Alistair looked from Tommy Xu, perhaps the most famous hedge-fund financier in the world for those in the know, and Ella, coughing on her sip of wine.

“You are serious, aren’t you?” he said wonderingly. Alistair put his fork down and sat back and regarded Ella, who was now dabbing at the wine that she had spilled.

“Absolutely,” Xu said.

“Young miss. You must know I have everyone my daughter associates with looked into. Everyone. The report on you was that you were very intelligent, but unambitious in the ways that matter, and frankly not worth worrying about. I appreciated the moderating influence you had on her, but that was it.”

Charlie said, “Why dad, I didn’t know you cared.”

Alistair Harris’s judgement had found her wanting, Ella supposed. But Zaidu had excoriated her for months now, this was relatively mild.

“Damning me with faint praise,” she murmered gently. Still dabbing at the wine spot. She signalled to the waiter for some club soda.

Alistair frowned at the poise in her answer. She was perhaps too young for that sort of riposte.

“Then… you move out of that rathole apartment, disappear for months, were brought to a hospital in upstate New York with burn wounds by my daughter, disappear, your family gets attacked and then they disappear?”

“Just ’looking into’?” Ella roasted him gently.

“You are armed also,” he said, doggedly.

“I’m surprised your guards let me near you,” she said.

“And you know I have three bodyguards here,” he said.

“Don’t you mean four? The man across the street at the coffee shop has a very nice vantage point.”

He was nonplussed and actually lost his cool, “How do you know these things? Who are you, really?”

Ella couldn’t resist. She really couldn’t. She made him wait. “Why don’t we have dessert and we can discuss this privately?”

Alistair stewed impatiently while Ella took small, slow bites of her cheesecake. She even ordered an espresso after internally enjoying his impatience. He wasn’t used to being made to wait on anything. Plus, cheesecake after a week of military rations was amazing, she almost ordered another slice.

Ixus Capital, Midtown, Manhattan, New York, United States

They walked to Xu’s nearby office in silence. When they got there, Alistair Harris did not even take a single look out the oversized two-story windows overlooking Central Park.

“So what is going on?” he said.

Charlie was practically vibrating, “Can I? I want to! Me, me, me!”

Everyone rolled their eyes at that.

“So Dad,” and she paused dramatically there. “Magic is totally real. Ella is a princess. And Tommy here… He is a dragon! Voila!”

Charlie bowed like a stage performer and the flounced into her chair, “Any questions? Who wants a drink?”

Alistair ignored her flippant answers and waited.

Ella looked at Xu, “Do you have a better way to explain it?”

Xu looked at her and gently nodded his head no, “I’ve done it thousands of times. I used to try different approaches. It didn’t matter.”

“Fine,” Ella stood up and her eyes began to glow, her tiara began to form, and even her clothes began to change. “Mr. Harris, you strike me as someone who cuts right to the heart of the matter.”

“Ella, your crown, it has two additional spiked things,” Charlie noted.

Ella glanced at her reflection in the mirror, “So it does.” Something to figure out later.

She turned back to Alistair Harris. “Your daughter told you the essential truth. Magic is returning to the world” She waved her hand and left a trail of sparkly lights that then slowly turned into a glowing image of Charlie. “Long ago, the world was a very different place. That world is returning. This world was called the Thousand Kingdoms, and through random chance, I am its crowned princess. Mr. Xu, here, is, in fact a dragon, a fuzanglong, and also my minister of finance.”

Ella stood there with her eyes glowing, an ethereal crown on her head, and a golden glowing dress. And waited, calmly with a half smile on her face.

Alistair Harris was not the sort of person to go into hysterics or denial. He sat back and regarded a glowing Ella. He looked at Xu, who winked at him, now with slitted reptile’s eyes.

Ella kept drawing in magic, her dress became more solid and more ornate, lace panels began to appear, the bodice developed patterning, and Ella began to feel something behind her.

“Charlotte, what is this?” Her father demanded.

Charlie, yanked from the normal status quo of being ignored by her father, jerked to attention, “Did someone say my name?”

“Charlotte.”

“Yes, father?” Charlie said sweetly

Alistair Harris looked at Tommy Xu as if to say, you hired this? However he paled perhaps when he remembered what Xu was supposed to be. The reptilian eyes didn’t help.

“Dad, everything I said is true. We accidentally stumbled onto it. That island off of Africa, probably that plane with dead people, and lots of crazy stuff all over. The dam is bursting and shit is about to go crazy.”

“And Everett Marr?”

“I believe it is my turn,” Xu cut in smoothly, “I have been making certain investments in anticipation of the return. Certain lands will become more valuable, disruption of existing supply chains will make certain commodities more valuable and of course…”

“…the hard trade,” Harris finished. “Defense stocks are through the roof. You?” Xu nodded. “I also noticed grain peaking, I thought it was because of the Ukraine war, but the sensitivity analysis never worked out. The disruption in trade would have had to be much greater.”

Charlie went over and pulled up something on one of the many screens on the wall.

“Here is probably about what you had.” Charlie pointed to the spreadsheet tab named ‘Assumptions’ and walked them through a variety of factors. She scrolled over to a tab called ‘Re-emergence’. “But here is the corrected model.” Alistair regarded the screen, cleanly laid out with a series of documented assumptions, ranges of numbers, and modelled financial impacts.

“Really?” he looked. “The entirety of North Dakotan wheat gone?”

“That is just the start.” Xu said.

“Look, I don’t know about magic, dragons, or her,” he gestured to Ella. “But I want in on these investments. It is what I know.” He looked pale and shaken, seeking comfort in numbers.

And Charlie looked at her dad and suddenly had an epiphany. Her dad had completely limited his conception of himself. It was such a narrow view, that he could brush over the return of magic to the world, dragons, world-changing events, so long as he made money. And the worst part is he knew that about himself and didn’t care.

It was a shakubuku, a redefining moment for her. Her father was a small man, instead of the towering giant that lived inside her head. She almost dropped her glass in shock.

“Mr. Harris,” Ella looked at him and spoke calmly, patiently, as if to a child, “that cannot be. As I see it, you have three choices here.”

Ella held up her fingers to count them off, “One, you wash your hands of it, to be swept up in whatever happens. Out of respect for Charlie, you won’t be left to twist in the wind if I can help, but survival is not the same as success.”

Ella’s voice became grim and foreboding for the second, “Two, you oppose me. I love Charlie as the sister I never had. I make no bones about it. But… I have no time for opposition.”

“Or third, you are in. But that means all the way. You can’t pick and choose and hedge. We need loyalty. We need human weapons and asset for what is to come. Someone who can’t be trusted, who can’t be counted on? They are worse than an enemy.”

Charlie doubted that her father had ever been spoken to like that. Not spoken to, dictated to. Ella was placid and calm, and… imperious. She had started to use a royal “we” occasionally, and Charlie suspected she didn’t even notice. Charlie wondered what would happen if her father said he would oppose Ella. But watching her father shift in his chair nervously, uncomfortably, was something she had never thought she would see.

Lions don’t lie down easily, Alistair blustered, “And if I told my bodyguards to take you down?”

Ella smiled beatifically, calmly, “They are welcome to try. But I will have them skinned alive, quite literally. It will not be the first time it will have been done in my name.”

And now Charlie truly shuddered. Jade had dreamed of this, this undercurrent of ruthlessness which had always been there. Ella’s disdain of irrationality, for lack of scientific thought. But now, it was horribly alien and terrible. And it was pointed at her father. She didn’t know how to feel about that.

“But we will not go there. Walk away instead,” Ella said. “You can survive on your wits, you may even succeed as you have in the past. After all, knowing even this? It is already a huge advantage. Plus I am sure you memorized a lot of Charlie’s modelling already, but she will not provide you with more of Xu’s knowledge.” Ella have a hard look to Charlie who nodded hesitantly.

Alistair Harris stared at his daughter’s friend. No damnit, Eleanor. She didn’t even seem to notice the crown that was quite solid on her head, three peaks on her head. The white glowing eyes which had cast the room into stark relief. The long golden dress that continued to change, to grow more ornate, more real, even as Alistair watched. It was already the realest thing he had ever seen. And those glowing eyes were horrifying…

He wouldn’t oppose her. When Charlotte had taken a job with Xu, Alistair had gone back to his initial competitive intelligence about Tommy Xu. Then he had dug deeper, putting half his firm onto it and spending money like water. Tommy Xu, who was calmly sitting across from Alistair, was far, far more than he let on. He was a giant in a world filled with mice. Alistair Harris made no bones about it, he was probably in the top 500 people in the world in wealth, but Tommy Xu made that achievement the equivalent of standing on a pebble looking up at Everest. Alistair might literally be sitting in a room with the owner of a fifth of the world’s wealth.

And this Ella, she stood there and wasn’t afraid of him at all. Not even the slightest bit. He was nothing but a potential asset to be used or discarded.

And what about his choices? He realized he had none. In this new world, fortunes would be made and lost. The old order would be dsimantled, that was how it happened. They pushed too hard, they failed to adapt.

He stood up from the chair. “I guess I am in.”

“I should have you on your knees swearing fealty or something,” Ella said, “but gestures are meaningless. Action is everything.”

And that was a sentiment even Alistair Harris could get behind.

Ella began firing off commands, “Alistair, you will bring your fund to Xu in a public merger of near equals. Xu is the boss though. Xu, give Alistair the intelligence he needs to start making the right commodity plays since that is his strength. Make sure additional consideration is made for military logistics and supplying my troops for extended campaigns - the same as we have been doing but accelerated. I also want food sources stashed for relief efforts. If you can feed every human on Earth, that won’t be enough, but try and get there.”

“Yes Jindal-Witten-taizi,” said Xu as he bowed to her.

“Now let’s talk about Everett Marr…”

Charlotte sat in the office with Ella, “Did you threaten to skin my father?”

Ella looked at her dearest friend and smiled, not the smile she had been using in that room, but the one she used with friends, “Charlie, what did I actually say?”

“That…” Damn it. “That if he ordered his guards to attack you, you would skin them.”

“Charlie, you know I wouldn’t harm him. If for no other reason than he is your dad.”

“But you would skin his guards?”

“Ummm… no. That was a bluff. Look…” Ella went over and poured a drink from Xu’s stash and downed it like, well… like Charlie would. She wasn’t being entirely honest.

“I am not going to lie to you. If he had ordered his men to attack, they would all be dead now.” Ella hesitated but then plunged onwards, “In fact, I gave that order to my detail on the way here.”

She sat down across from Charlie, “But I don’t feel the need to indulge in pointless cruelty.”

Charlie wanted to ask, would Ella engage in cruelty if it had a point? But she knew the answer, Ella never spoke carelessly.

“Will your father be loyal?”

“Yes.” Charlie said, there was no doubt in her mind. If money was on the line, he would. “But… I think he knows Xu is richer than him, and that may lead to problems.”

“Well, good thing you are there to direct his rivalry into positive directions.”

Ella went and got a glass of water next and sat sipping it. She mused, “I would rather people compete for recognition of service rather than wealth. But how to get from here to there?”

Taizi - I am really not sure if this is the right title, since traditional chinese doesn’t have princesses that can be formal successors as far as I can tell. Wu Zetian, the only Chinese Empress, had the title Hou which translates to Imperial Consort actually. But Ella is crowned in her own right, so I hope I got this one right. And yes, I do spend this much time on throwaway words. Anyone a chinese classicist that can help me out here?