The next morning, Oskar and Karl were summoned to the Kaiser's office for a quick emergency meeting.
Wilhelm II didn't bother with pleasantries.
He was behind his desk, eyes bright with anger, moustache twitching as if the hair itself disapproved. When he spoke, it came out like artillery—loud first, controlled only afterward.
"So, Oskar—my boy," he began, voice sharp with disbelief, "explain this to me."
He leaned forward, palms flat on the desk.
"If you truly had no hand in Princess Patricia vanishing from England and suddenly reappearing in Switzerland with more money to her name than a princess of her rank should ever touch…" His jaw tightened. "Then why, why, have the British chosen this moment to strike at us?"
His gaze locked onto Oskar, unblinking.
"Tell me who I'm supposed to be furious with. You… or them?" His voice rose. "And when will your immaturity finally fade and allow reason to enter your head?"
The words hung hot in the air.
Then, as quickly as the fury came, Wilhelm exhaled hard and sank back into his armchair, rubbing his face as if physically pushing the anger down into something usable.
"Ah—forget it," he muttered. "I already know the answer."
He looked up again, expression colder now, irritation sharpened into calculation.
"Tell me the only question that matters," Wilhelm II said. "How much have we lost?"
He leaned forward slightly.
"How badly has your lottery business been hit—what will the Crown lose in its share of revenue?"
Oskar didn't answer immediately, instead he fell into thought, his first worry being the navy.
For years he had kept the fleet moving forward with a low-interest loan of one hundred million marks per year, a quiet lifeline that allowed shipyards to plan, expand, and build without waiting on parliamentary delays. That money had come largely from the lottery—steady, predictable, politically convenient and easy to hide. His other revenues, drawn from the Oskar Industrial Group, were already committed elsewhere: rail, factories, energy, housing, the long, slow modernization of the Empire, and partially Africa as well, along with the 8th Army.
If the lottery bled too much, the navy would feel it first.
That was the danger.
"Father," Oskar said at last, breaking the silence, "the losses are… enormous."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't dramatize it. He didn't need to.
"According to Karl's calculations, direct losses alone exceed one hundred million marks. Our lottery assets in those countries have been seized outright." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "After losing the British, French, and Russian markets, total profits will fall by more than a third."
Wilhelm's fingers tightened on the armrest.
"And the Crown?" the Kaiser asked sharply.
"Your twenty-percent share will drop accordingly," Oskar answered. "We'll need to compensate through other revenue streams of we wish to keep our current level's of expenditure."
His expression darkened. Guilt weighed on him, but beneath it lay something sharper: worry about what came next.
Until now, his rise had felt almost effortless. Expansion after expansion. Reform after reform. Very few true setbacks.
This was different.
Britain, France, and Russia hadn't attacked him with armies or fleets.
They had used paper.
Administrative orders. Legal decrees. National bans on foreign lotteries.
A coordinated strike.
Wilhelm II surged to his feet.
"Despicable!" he roared. "Utterly despicable!"
His fist struck the desk, rattling papers.
"They call themselves civilized nations, and yet this is how they act—destroying markets, strangling free competition, hiding behind bureaucracy like cowards!"
He paced once, face flushed with anger.
"After all the good your work has brought to the world!" he continued. "Your First Aid book alone has already saved thousands—hundreds of thousands, Oskar—and will save countless more for generations. That alone should have bought us goodwill! Not even counting all the other inventions."
He laughed bitterly.
"But goodwill," Wilhelm snapped, "counts for nothing when envy and fear take its place."
Karl stood beside Oskar, unable to see the Kaiser properly from his height, but he felt the fury rolling through the room like heat.
This wasn't truly about money.
It was about what the action meant.
Oskar hadn't been caught smuggling a British princess. The lottery had operated openly, even generously, living up to its name as a People's Welfare Lottery.
None of that mattered.
In Britain, France, and Russia, there were men who hated Germany on principle alone—men who had waited patiently for years, watching, counting, searching for a pretext.
Now they had one.
No amount of goodwill could erase that reality. Especially not when rumors were already spreading of German battleships far ahead of their time, of steel and firepower that threatened to upend the balance they had grown comfortable enforcing.
Oskar remained silent.
What was there to say?
There were no words that could smooth this away. You could not make every nation like you while also making your own stronger. Prosperity was not created in a vacuum; it pressed against borders, markets, and influence. The world had only so much space, so many resources, and history had proven—again and again—that humanity never learned how to share them peacefully for long.
Progress invited resistance.
Power invited fear.
And fear always searched for a pretext.
Wilhelm II broke the silence.
"Enough," Wilhelm II said, voice suddenly cold. "Karl—open it."
Karl blinked, then moved at once, pulling the heavy door wide.
Outside waited Count Tirpitz and several other senior figures—men with grey hair and hard eyes, veterans of crises that had never truly ended, only changed shape. They stepped into the office already charged with anger, the kind that did not need explanation.
For a moment the room became too full—too many uniforms, too many ribbons, too many egos held barely in check.
Then the voices began to rise.
"We must lodge a formal protest," Kiderlen-Waechter said immediately, crisp as a paper edge. "Britain, France, and Russia have interfered openly with a German enterprise. If we allow this to pass without response, we invite more of it."
He did not say the rest aloud, but everyone in the room understood it: the civil ministries had invested themselves in Oskar's machine. If Oskar's projects could be strangled by foreign decrees, then the Empire's internal stability—the very thing the bureaucrats lived for—was at risk.
Bülow exhaled through his nose, expression tight.
"Protests will be filed," the Chancellor said, "and then ignored." His voice was calmer than Wilhelm's, but that calm carried its own force. "They did this because they know precisely how we will react. They will drown us in excuses, delays, and legal smoke."
He leaned forward slightly.
"Our relationship with them is already clear," Bülow continued. "If war is coming—and it may be—then they do not fear offending us now. Not in the way they would have feared it twenty years ago."
Tirpitz's gaze flicked from one man to another.
"Still," he said, controlled but urgent, "are we to swallow it? Do nothing? Accept that they can cut revenue streams at will?"
A brief silence settled, heavy and unpleasant.
Because the truth was simple: Britain, France, and Russia had struck Germany where it hurt most safely—through administration, markets, and international pressure. And Germany, for all its steel and pride, could not march an army into London over lottery permits.
Not without lighting the fuse on the entire continent.
Wilhelm's fingers tightened on the armrest. Oskar could see it—the Emperor's instincts pulling toward violence, toward decisive action, toward a satisfying punishment that would quiet the taste of insult in the mouth.
But Bülow's face did not change.
Not prepared, his eyes seemed to say. Not now.
Oskar finally spoke, partly because he had to—partly because he saw Tirpitz's worry sharpening into something dangerous.
"Your Excellency," Oskar said to the navy minister, "the Navy's funding will not be affected."
Tirpitz's head turned, sharp.
Oskar held his gaze.
"Yes, we've been hit," Oskar admitted. "Hard. But the shipbuilding program remains prioritized. The annual loan continues. If we have to shift money elsewhere to compensate, we will."
He didn't glance at Karl, but he felt Karl's presence beside him like a ledger waiting to open.
"And Karl and I already have alternative profit paths," Oskar added, voice steady. "Faster ones. Cleaner ones. We will not allow Britain's paperwork to decide our naval future."
Tirpitz's shoulders eased by a fraction—relief visible even through discipline.
Then Karl spoke.
And when Karl spoke, the room always changed temperature.
"If I may," Karl said quietly.
Everyone looked down toward him. It was absurd how often the tallest men in the Empire had to angle their attention downward to listen to the shortest.
Karl's voice was calm, but his eyes were not.
"Right now, we have no clean method of justice," he said. "Not without starting something we are not ready to finish." He let that land. "So we swallow the insult."
A few men bristled, but Karl continued before they could interrupt.
"However," he said, and there it was—the blade in the sentence, "we do not forget."
He looked at Wilhelm.
"If Britain, France, and Russia are willing to do this openly, then they have chosen the rules of the future." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "So I propose we simply record the losses precisely—and when a future war comes, and when the opportunity exists, we demand repayment not once… but many times over."
The room went still.
Even Wilhelm.
Oskar raised an eyebrow. He wasn't shocked—Karl had never been a man to repay harm with kindness—but hearing it spoken so plainly in the Kaiser's office was something else.
Wilhelm II's eyes narrowed, the anger reorganizing itself into something colder and more useful.
"Well," he said slowly, "that at least makes sense."
He straightened.
"We will remember this," Wilhelm declared, looking around the room. "Every mark. Every decree. Every insult disguised as law."
His voice hardened.
"If their actions have cost us over one hundred million marks, then when the day comes—when it comes—we will demand ten times that and more." He slapped the desk once. "A billion marks in compensation, at minimum. Alongside whatever else victory allows."
A chorus of approval followed immediately, men echoing the Emperor as if agreement itself could heal the sting.
"That's right."
"They must be punished."
"They must pay."
Then, to Oskar's surprise, a map was laid out.
Soon the meeting slipped into something darker—an imperial fever dream—where men leaned over inked borders and spoke of nations as if they were chess pieces. Fingers traced rivers. Pencils circled provinces. Voices rose and fell over which lands could be seized outright, which should be left to puppet rulers, and which were valuable only for what lay beneath their soil.
Coal. Iron. Grain. Ports. Rail junctions. Population centers.
All of it, of course, rested on a single unspoken condition:
Germany would win.
Without that, it was nothing but dreaming.
And yet, despite the gravity of it—despite the weight of knowing how close the world already stood to catastrophe—Oskar found himself pulled into the maps and arguments all the same. Borders and supply lines had a way of doing that. They demanded attention.
Especially when the talk turned east.
Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus—names that meant more to him than they should have. Not because he was Prussian, but because in another life he had spent years studying those regions obsessively: resources, terrain, rivers, weather, resistance movements.
To many in the room, lands east of the Dnieper looked tempting—rich soil, coal seams, industry. But Oskar knew better. Populations there would not accept separation easily, not from their language, not from their idea of homeland. West of the river lay different peoples, no less stubborn, some willing to fight until nothing remained but memory.
Poles. Cossacks. Belarusians. Russians.
No one accepted foreign rule easily.
The debate continued—annexation versus puppets, borders that could be held versus borders that would bleed—while Karl quietly turned conquest into numbers, Wilhelm II stroked his moustache in thought, and Tirpitz drifted into speculation about how vast the German navy might become if Britain itself were ever broken.
And as voices argued and maps filled with lines, Oskar felt the strange, uneasy pull of it all.
This was how war began—with men around a table, drawing lines on a map as if the world were a game.
---
The following day, the German government lodged formal protests over the seizure of the People's Welfare Lottery Company by Britain, France, and Russia.
As expected, nothing came of it.
The three governments stalled, buried Berlin in legal language, and delayed responses until the answers became meaningless. Worse, they moved quickly to consolidate their gains. In each country, state-backed lottery companies were established almost overnight, absorbing the seized infrastructure and customer base with bureaucratic efficiency.
It was clear this had not been improvised.
They had been waiting for an excuse.
The loss of the British, French, and Russian markets alone dealt a heavy blow to the lottery's profits. But the damage did not stop there.
Within days, word arrived from the American branch.
Washington was "reviewing regulatory compliance."
A familiar phrase.
Behind it lay something far more dangerous: coordinated pressure, quietly encouraged from across the Atlantic.
The American market was enormous—larger, in fact, than the lottery's domestic German operations. Profits from the United States had already surpassed those from within the Empire itself. Losing America, after already losing Britain, France, and Russia, would not merely hurt the People's Welfare Lottery.
It would cripple it.
Karl stood beside Oskar, his expression darker than Oskar had ever seen it.
"Our intelligence indicates British involvement," Karl said bluntly. "They are stirring resentment. Encouraging those envious of our profits. Pushing the narrative that we are foreign parasites draining American money."
Oskar exhaled slowly.
"So they're taking it global," he said. "Efficient."
"Vicious," Karl corrected. "And calculated."
Oskar said nothing for a moment.
Americans were not driven by loyalty or ideology. They were driven by margins. By leverage. By who benefited most from the arrangement.
Which meant there was still a way through.
"Karl," Oskar said finally, "inform our partners in the United States that we are revising the profit distribution starting next month."
Karl stiffened slightly. "How much?"
"Originally, we retained sixty percent," Oskar continued evenly. "Reduce that by twenty."
Karl's eyes widened.
"We keep forty," Oskar went on. "They receive forty. And the remaining twenty percent is allocated—by them—directly into welfare programs."
Karl frowned deeply. "Your Highness… that's a massive concession. If we let them handle the welfare allocation, they'll swallow it whole. Those people don't have a bottom line."
"I know," Oskar said calmly.
He turned, meeting Karl's gaze without hesitation.
"But forty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing. If we lose America, we lose the company. If we keep America, we survive."
He paused, then added quietly, "And survival buys us time."
Karl clenched his jaw. He hated it. He hated yielding ground to people he knew would exploit it.
But he understood the math.
After a moment, he nodded.
"…Very well," Karl said. "I'll send the word."
Oskar leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing as his thoughts moved beyond lotteries and profit splits.
Let Britain play its game.
Let America count its margins.
The People's Welfare Lottery would bend—for now.
And when the time came to stand straight again, those who had pushed would learn what it meant to lean too hard on something that refused to break.