For the People's Welfare Lottery to expand across the United States, one truth never changed: America did not run on permission. It ran on interests.
Without American power standing behind it—bankers, brokers, political intermediaries, and newspaper owners capable of turning a scandal into yesterday's news—the Lottery was merely a foreign machine producing enormous profits on someone else's soil. Foreign enterprises were tolerated only while the people who mattered received a sufficient share.
The original arrangement had been straightforward and, in Oskar's opinion, almost generous. Twenty percent of American profits funded publicly visible welfare programmes. Another twenty percent went to the local partners whose influence kept the operation alive. The remaining sixty percent returned to the People's Welfare Lottery.
On paper, the division appeared fair.
In American politics, it looked almost provocative.
The men controlling access to banks, newspapers, legislatures, and regulatory offices were rarely satisfied with fairness. They wanted a larger share, and they wanted it before anyone else.
Oskar's most important allies in the American market were the Goldman banking family, particularly Henry Goldman.
Goldman was Jewish, sharp-eyed, ambitious, and modern in the manner of a financier who understood that information could be more valuable than property. His family had risen within a society that still placed social and religious barriers before Jewish businessmen, especially inside the older circles of American finance. Men such as Goldman could not afford sentimental illusions about how power operated. They survived and advanced by understanding risk, timing, alliances, and the precise value of every relationship.
They were excellent bankers because they understood that money was never merely money.
It was access.
Protection.
Influence.
Oskar had approached them for two reasons.
The first was blunt: they understood profit. Not in the shallow aristocratic sense of possessing money merely to spend it, but in the professional sense—controlling capital, recognising opportunity, measuring risk, and moving before everyone else understood that the market was about to change.
The second reason was more dangerous.
Oskar recognised the name.
He remembered it from history, from the other life in which he had watched the twentieth century unfold through books, documentaries, and financial records. Henry Goldman was not merely another wealthy banker. Men within his family and financial circle would become involved in the discussions that helped shape America's developing banking system during the years leading toward the Federal Reserve.
The year 1913 remained etched in Oskar's memory. He did not need to admire the institution that would emerge; he only needed to understand that American finance was about to change, and that those positioned near that transformation would gain immense power.
The Goldmans were his allies and his bridge to that power. They understood that the Lottery was more than a profitable business: it was a river of capital, a source of political influence, and a direct financial link to Europe. Their relationship with Oskar also gave them early access to new products, industries, and opportunities before the wider market saw them coming.
The arrangement benefited both sides. Oskar offered profit, prestige, valuable information, and exclusive access to AngelWorks prototypes and limited releases. Their wives and daughters displayed those products at dinners, clubs, and private gatherings, turning favouritism into advertising and curiosity into demand. The Goldmans and their associates, in return, protected the Lottery from hostile newspapers, ambitious regulators, and the countless administrative obstacles capable of destroying a foreign company without ever openly banning it.
Neither side mistook the arrangement for friendship. Oskar was valuable because he continued to produce wealth, while his American partners were valuable because they controlled access to the market.
That was the bargain.
It became far more expensive after Britain, France, and Russia moved against the People's Welfare Lottery. Once three major governments had successfully seized its offices and frozen its accounts, American rivals began circling as well. Politicians, financiers, newspaper owners, and domestic competitors suddenly discovered a patriotic concern over foreign money leaving the United States.
Until then, the American branch had survived because it was too profitable to destroy and because Oskar remained too useful to antagonise. There had always been complaints, demands for renegotiation, and carefully placed threats of investigation, but everyone involved was earning enough to tolerate the arrangement.
Now the balance had changed.
President William Howard Taft's administration preferred economic pressure to military confrontation and saw little reason to protect German interests when American law, domestic profit, and political advantage pointed in the same direction. Congress was less eager to provoke a major European power without a clear reward, but with Britain, France, and Russia already leading the attack, Germany appeared increasingly isolated. American politicians could demand concessions while trusting that Oskar would not risk driving the United States openly into the opposing camp over a lottery.
Oskar therefore chose survival over pride.
The American partners had previously received twenty percent of the profits. They would now receive forty. Oskar's own share would fall from sixty percent to forty, while the remaining twenty percent—officially reserved for public welfare—would also be placed under American control.
Even forty percent of the American market remained an ocean of money. If the United States closed its branch after Britain, France, and Russia, however, the Lottery would not merely be weakened. It would be crippled.
The American interests involved were delighted by the concession. Their share had doubled, and they had also gained control of the money intended for social programmes. On paper, those funds would still serve the public. In practice, much of it would disappear into private foundations, political organisations, contracting companies, and the pockets of men influential enough to stand near the flow.
A visible fraction would still reach the poor. There would be enough bread, shelter, and public charity to produce favourable newspaper stories and quiet the loudest reformers.
The rest would follow power.
That was how America worked. Money determined influence, and influence decided which moral concerns received attention. Those without either possessed little protection, and few people suffered more from that reality than children.
Across the United States, so-called Orphan Trains carried children away from the crowded cities and distributed them among rural families. Some were genuine orphans. Others still had living parents who were too poor, ill, absent, or powerless to prevent their removal. Officials described the programme as rescue: an opportunity to exchange urban poverty for fresh air, honest work, and a proper home.
Sometimes that promise was fulfilled.
In other cases, children were displayed before strangers, selected according to their health and usefulness, separated permanently from siblings and parents, or taken into households that valued them primarily as unpaid labour. Distance concealed mistreatment, while respectable language allowed indifference to masquerade as reform.
It was an early attempt at organised child welfare.
It was also deeply flawed.
Oskar disliked what became of the money he had originally intended to help people. He disliked the corruption, the hypocrisy, and the ease with which public compassion became another commodity to be divided among private interests.
But America was not his country.
Not yet, at least, and not his place to reform by force.
For the moment, it was a means to an end. American profit financed German factories, railways, power stations, housing, medicine, the Army, and the Navy. Every mark returned to Europe helped build the orderly, prosperous nation Oskar envisioned and strengthened the expanding system of states, industries, and institutions tied to Germany.
He could either accept the corruption and preserve the flow of capital or reject it and watch the entire American operation disappear.
He accepted it.
The concession achieved its purpose. With too many American bankers, businessmen, politicians, and charitable organisations now profiting from the Lottery's survival, the British pressure campaign stalled. Washington continued its investigation, but no decisive action followed. The American branch endured—damaged and considerably more expensive, but alive.
When confirmation reached Germany, Oskar and Karl allowed themselves a rare moment of relief.
For weeks, every telegram and financial report had seemed capable of bringing catastrophe. The Lottery had lost three major markets, Britain continued applying pressure abroad, and Oskar's private life had become almost as dangerous as his political one. At home waited three pregnant wives, exhausted and irritable but gradually softened by his attention and his stubborn refusal to retreat entirely into work.
The scandal surrounding Patricia also began to fade. Newspapers found fresher outrages, governments turned toward louder crises, and Britain had little desire to remind the world that a royal princess had fled abroad with her maid.
The Lottery had survived.
For the moment, the worst appeared to have passed.
Oskar remained far from satisfied.
He had come to believe that Patricia and Elise had used him. Whatever affection they felt, freedom had mattered more. He had been their escape, their source of money, and perhaps even part of the adventure they had wanted. By the time he recognised how thoroughly they had understood his weaknesses, he had already taken them aboard his ship, slept with them, and made himself vulnerable to whatever story they later chose to tell.
Yet even that humiliation was gradually overshadowed by the memory of Britain's naval display.
The sight returned to him whenever the world became quiet: endless grey hulls advancing beneath smoke, guns thundering across the water, and an empire that had ruled the seas for centuries announcing that it had no intention of surrendering its position peacefully.
Everything that followed—the seizure of the Lottery, the coordinated pressure, and the attempted expansion of that campaign into America—confirmed what the Naval Review had already told him.
The struggle was intensifying.
Britain and its allies would not stand aside while Germany rose. They would close markets, obstruct trade, pressure neutral governments, and use law as a weapon whenever armies were inconvenient. If financial and diplomatic force failed, they would eventually reach for steel.
Oskar did not welcome that reality, but he no longer pretended it might disappear through goodwill alone.
The established powers would permit Germany to exist.
They would not willingly allow it to lead.
If war came, therefore, Oskar would not fight for a temporary compromise or another fragile peace destined to collapse within a generation. Those who attacked Germany would be broken so completely that they could not simply recover, rearm, and attempt the same struggle twenty years later.
Not because he expected forgiveness.
Because he intended to leave them without the strength to threaten him again.
As the months passed, the naval arms race tightened like a wire drawn close to breaking.
Britain accelerated its construction programme, laying down hull after hull in an increasingly desperate effort to preserve naval supremacy through numbers. British admirals continued to assure themselves that they were building the finest warships afloat, but Oskar could see the weakness beneath their confidence.
They were producing mass without sufficient evolution.
Against Germany's newer designs, the Royal Navy risked becoming a mountain of steel resting upon foundations that were already beginning to age. Britain had made quantity into doctrine and trusted that a sufficiently large fleet could bury every technical disadvantage beneath shellfire.
Oskar did not believe it would save them.
Across the Atlantic, the United States stepped fully onto the naval stage. With the commissioning of its first dreadnoughts, USS Michigan and USS South Carolina, America announced that it intended to compete at the highest level.
The Americans remained behind Europe in several technologies, but they possessed advantages no European power could easily match: immense natural wealth, extraordinary industrial potential, and the strategic luxury of distance. Protected by two oceans and supplied by a continent, they could afford to learn from the mistakes of others before committing their full strength.
It would not be long before the United States possessed the third-largest navy in the world.
Germany, meanwhile, advanced with cold precision.
The shipbuilding programme continued without disruption. The König-class battleships and Dörlinger-class battlecruisers rose according to schedule, steel following blueprint almost exactly as Oskar intended. Beyond them, the next generation already existed upon drawing boards and calculation tables: the Bavarian-class battleships and Mackensen-class battlecruisers.
Construction would begin in 1911.
By 1914, they would be ready.
Other nations continued building fleets of their own, France among them, but Oskar did not regard them as Germany's principal concern. If war came, the French Navy would be tied largely to the Mediterranean, guarding colonial routes and containing Austria-Hungary. Russia, for all its size, lacked the reach and readiness to matter decisively at sea during the opening phase of a European conflict.
For Germany, the naval equation therefore narrowed to one opponent.
Britain alone mattered.
The remainder of 1910 passed without the sort of crisis that filled newspapers and graveyards.
In German Cameroon, Oskar's three Bauxi towns continued expanding according to plan. Disease remained the greatest enemy, but it was no longer treated as an unknowable curse. Fire, drainage, smoke, quarantine, clean water, medicine, and stubborn German logistics accomplished what prayer alone never could.
Resentment remained, as it always did beneath foreign rule and rapid change. Yet with the Duala holding the southern corridor and the Fulɓe maintaining order across the northern grasslands, unrest never gathered enough strength to become a general uprising.
The corridor held.
Roads stretched across the red earth. Camps became settlements, settlements became towns, and the machinery of Oskar's African ambitions continued moving inland.
When winter arrived, Germany turned toward Christmas. Trees appeared in public squares and drawing rooms. Candles burned beneath garlands, hymns echoed through churches, and familiar rituals made the vast machinery of the Empire feel briefly like a home.
At Karl's insistence, and following a personal invitation from the Swiss leadership, Oskar returned to Switzerland with his household.
The journey served several purposes. It was partly a holiday, partly an exercise in diplomacy, and partly an opportunity for Oskar to inspect a new alpine resort and the small sporting workshop attached to it.
The workshop's principal invention appeared ridiculous on paper.
It was not a ski. Those already existed.
It was a single broad board designed to slide across snow like a controlled fall, the rider's feet secured to its surface and the descent governed by balance, weight, and nerve. In Oskar's former life, such devices would not become common until the latter half of the century.
Here, he had simply pulled the idea backward through time.
Swiss craftsmen built the prototypes. Oskar tested them, broke several, adjusted the bindings, and watched as half the country declared him insane while the other half began wondering whether insanity might be commercially valuable.
He had not been eager to return to Switzerland.
The mountains and cold did not trouble him. Patricia and Elise did.
He had no desire to encounter either woman after everything that had happened aboard Nassau. Fate, however, showed him rare mercy. Both women despised winter and had already travelled south, chasing warmth to the edge of Europe.
They had settled near Sagres, where the Atlantic crashed against sun-bleached cliffs and winter existed mostly as an unpleasant rumour.
There, far from snow, royal supervision, and German scandal, they spent the season in comfort.
Quiet word also reached Oskar that both women were pregnant.
He received the news with disbelief, weary amusement, and resignation. He had been with them only during that single disastrous crossing, yet apparently that had been enough. His fertility was proving as stubborn as every other unnatural part of him. Once his seed was planted, it appeared remarkably unwilling to disappear without consequence.
It was another absurd and faintly alarming reminder that whatever had remade him had done so thoroughly.
Oskar sighed, shook his head, and tried to put the matter aside.
There were already more children beneath his roof than many men met during an entire lifetime. He did not know whether to laugh or swear.
In private, he did both.
Switzerland nevertheless proved a success.
His children treated the mountains as though they had discovered an unexplored kingdom. Snow became ammunition, battleground, building material, and the foundation for increasingly dangerous games. The resort's guests—nobles, ministers, bankers, officers, and wealthy tourists—could not decide what shocked them more: the enormous German Crown Prince laughing openly in the snow, or his silver-haired, violet-eyed children racing down the slopes like creatures escaped from some northern legend.
Imperiel, now old enough to command the others with the confidence of a miniature field marshal, attracted the greatest attention. Karl's eldest son, Durin, refused to be outdone. The two boys turned Oskar's new snow board into a contest so fierce that the adults began wagering upon them as though watching a cavalry race.
Tanya laughed until her cheeks hurt. Anna watched with the quiet warmth of a woman who had learned to enjoy chaos whenever it remained harmless. Gunderlinde clapped with such earnest delight that, for a moment, she resembled the shy young woman she had been before palaces and dynastic expectations made everything heavy.
For a little while, the world felt light.
Then the holiday ended, as holidays always did.
The household returned to Potsdam. Schedules tightened, letters accumulated, ministers began appearing at inconvenient hours, and the machinery of state resumed its endless grinding.
The year turned.
In February 1911, Oskar welcomed five more children into the world.
Anna's twin daughters arrived quiet and composed, as though they intended to observe life carefully before deciding what they thought of it. They were named Floriel and Liliel.
Tanya's twin boys entered the world furious, red-faced, and loudly offended by the cold. They were named Grel and Gael.
Gunderlinde delivered the final child of that winter's flood: a healthy daughter named Adelheidel, whose birth carried particular symbolic importance for Bavaria and the older dynastic order.
All five bore the same strange family traits as Oskar's other children. Their hair was pale and already tending toward silver, while their eyes possessed that unnaturally vivid violet hue that made courtiers whisper and priests stare longer than politeness permitted.
With those births, the number of children beneath the Potsdam roof climbed into absurdity. Oskar now had thirteen within his immediate household, fourteen if Cecilie's daughter was included. If Bertha's two sons were counted as well, the number rose higher still, though Oskar had deliberately kept Bertha at a distance in recent months and allowed that particular complication to remain dormant.
He occasionally wondered whether he would soon possess more children than years.
Yet whenever he looked across the palace gardens and saw nurses, toys, and little violet-eyed figures racing between the adults like living myths, he could not deny the truth.
He was happy.
His wives were happy.
Wilhelm II and Augusta, already grandparents many times over, remained openly delighted. They doted upon Oskar's children with particular pride, as though their sheer number and strangeness offered proof that destiny had marked their family for something greater.
Beyond the palace walls, however, the international atmosphere continued tightening.
The quarrel between the Central Powers and the Entente was no longer confined to hostile speeches and newspaper columns. It could be felt in naval budgets, commercial regulations, military timetables, and the way diplomats continued smiling while their eyes grew steadily colder.
Anyone listening carefully could hear it.
The footsteps of war.
Then Morocco flared again.
On 21 May 1911, growing unrest and tribal revolt threatened Fez, the old imperial capital, and placed Sultan Abdelhafid's government in serious danger. France responded by sending troops, officially to restore order and protect European lives, property, and commercial interests.
Berlin regarded that explanation with deep suspicion.
Morocco had already brought Europe close to war six years earlier. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 had preserved Moroccan independence in name, but France and Spain received broad policing responsibilities while the European powers secured access to the country's customs, banking system, trade, and public contracts.
The settlement had calmed the immediate crisis without resolving the struggle beneath it.
France wanted Morocco firmly within its sphere of influence. French banks had extended large loans to the Sultan's government, while French companies sought ports, railways, mining concessions, and privileged access to the Moroccan market. Spain held ambitions of its own along the northern coast and regarded parts of the country as belonging naturally within its influence.
German commercial interests were smaller, but Berlin considered the principle far more important than their immediate value. Germany had accepted the Algeciras settlement on the understanding that Morocco would remain formally independent and open to international trade. If France could march troops into Fez, expand its authority, and gradually exclude foreign competitors, then the so-called open door would exist only until Paris found it inconvenient.
What France described as a temporary intervention therefore appeared to Germany as the beginning of permanent occupation.
Britain's position only deepened Berlin's unease. London had already recognised France's special interests in Morocco, and every increase in French control strengthened the Entente while further isolating Germany. If Berlin protested too forcefully, Britain could accuse it of threatening peace. If it remained silent, France would gain another strategic and commercial victory without paying any meaningful price.
The crisis was therefore about far more than the safety of Fez.
It concerned markets, prestige, alliances, and whether Germany still possessed the power to defend its interests beyond its own borders.
When reports of the French advance reached Potsdam, Wilhelm II summoned his ministers and military advisers. The atmosphere inside the palace hardened almost immediately. Kiderlen-Waechter warned that France intended to transform emergency policing into political control. Bülow spoke of the danger to German trade and prestige. Tirpitz listened while officers outlined which German vessels were already serving near African waters and how quickly others might be dispatched.
No order had yet been given.
Sending troops would be difficult and dangerously provocative. Sending a major squadron could transform a colonial dispute into a direct confrontation with France and perhaps Britain.
But doing nothing carried dangers of its own.
For the first time, the possibility of sending a German warship to Morocco entered the discussion—not yet as a decision, but as a warning taking shape inside the minds of the men gathered around the Kaiser's table.