Conte Cruel October #4: The Man Who Caught Them All
Conte Cruel October continues with one that’s completely broken my constraints on length but this is more about the exercise than the word count. I suppose I should state that any similarity to living people in these works is entirely what you read into it.
He thought securing the inital $100,000 loan would be the hardest part of entering the world of trading card speculation, but soon he realized the real challenge was finding compentent, trustworthy help.
Austere flouresence groaned to life with a heavy click. Row by row, an endless sea of sealed TCG products flickered into view. This was his becoming. More precious than gold and infinitely more destructible, cards were the prospector’s bet in the 21st century. Due to the unreliable nature of hired help, today would be the start of an emergency audit. Days prior he’d discovered that many of the warehouse personel had helped themselves to the bulk boxes of booster packs, a transgression as profane as desecrating a church.
This was his temple. Temp controlled, sorted, and locked away in hopes of driving up prices and ultimately dominating the market. The new religion was very much the same as the old, only now one did not have to pretend that the goal was anything other than realized gains.
But where to start? Truly self-made men had to be accountable and take over the jobs that could not be entrusted to lesser men. But as he stood in the atrium with aisles stretching far as the eye could see, he did have to admit that many of those lesser men happened to be forklift certified. He was not, but it was a trivial skill to learn for a man as clever as he was.
Bulk packs should be where he starts, he decided, before moving on to bundles and trainer boxes, eventually making his way to sealed booster boxes and the various flatbox products… In the throes of contemplation his excellent business intellect disregarded the minor collision the forklift had with a corner. Nothing noticeably shifted, not that he noticed.
Just as he feared! The inventory showd that there should be 8 open gaylords of bulk boosters but only 6 sat in the stacks. This was a potential loss of nearly 30,000 packs and sent what he thought was a minor bit of theft well into the territory of grand larceny. Auditing the entire warehouse would take weeks, if not months. Months he now angrily vowed to work alone to keep ungrateful fingers away from his goods.
He crackled with rage as he forced the forklift into drive and flew down the aisle back toward the atrium. Cell reception this deep in was nonexistent and the only balm for his anger was setting carceral gears in motion. Distracted by a fantasy where his betrayers plead for mercy at the hands of the state he cut a corner too close yet again. What previously had been a minor glancing blow now violently shifted a support beam inward by a foot.
His last thought was of how long this would all take to clean up, one abruptly terminated by a misplaced gaylord and nearly 800 pounds of Pokemon cards crashing down upon his head.