Chapter 1 – The Storm at 18
The warehouse used to be a mausoleum for broken machines—hollowed-out forklifts, a graveyard of busted compressors, a line of rusted shelving that stretched like ribs into the dark. Now it breathed. Power bricks purred. Cooling fans whispered. LED strips washed the concrete in a cool aurora—white, then blue, then a moody bruised violet that looked like the sky right before thunder learns your name.
They came for the spectacle, the gossip, the kill. News vans on cracked asphalt. Tripods spidered across the floor. Boom mics drooped like eavesdroppers. You could smell it: hot plastic from camera housings, a tang of ozone from overclocked PCs, the citrus sting of industrial cleaner someone had used an hour too late. Beneath it all, the faint musk of motor oil hung around like a Teller family ghost that refused to leave.
Ivar Teller stood just offstage, thumb flicking his lighter open and shut in a fidget that sounded like a metronome for war. His reflection wavered in a pane of dark glass: black hair refusing to behave, leather jacket over a white shirt he'd already half untucked, green eyes too awake. The grin hovering at the corner of his mouth looked like trouble and a promise had a kid.
"You're vibrating," Louise Hoffman murmured.
She smoothed his collar like she was holstering a blade. Under the stage lights bleeding through the curtain, her eyes were antique gold: calm, appraising, annoyingly honest. Dark hair braided back. Black slacks, fitted blazer. If chaos could choose a human to love, it picked a woman who didn't blink at fire.
"I'm awake," he said.
"You're a storm warning," she corrected. "Which is useful, but also loud."
"That's the brand."
"Mm." She adjusted the lapel pin shaped like a jagged star. "Brand doesn't help when the first question is designed to draw blood."
"They always are."
Louise tipped her chin toward the crowd. "Spot the sharks?"
"Front row right. The one with the perfect hair and the dead eyes. He's already rehearsed three different ways to call me a child."
"And left?"
"Blogger with a spine. Hoodie, eyes like a street cat. He's here to believe. I invited him."
Louise's mouth ticked. "Of course you did."
He leaned closer, voice dropping. "You ready to watch me flip the table?"
"I came for the fireworks," she said softly. "I stayed for the man. Go give them both."
He wanted to kiss her, so he did—a brief burn that settled the shake inside his hands. She caught his face with one palm, thumb dragging a line along his cheekbone that said: remember who you are after the noise.
Then the emcee called his name—John Teller's other son, the prodigy, the problem—and Ivar stepped into the light.
The first flash popped like a small, polite explosion. Then another. And another. He squinted into it, let the white-hot rhythm hammer into a beat, and rode it. That was his trick. He didn't fight noise. He surfed it.
"Afternoon, Charming," he said into the mic. His voice filled the cavern in an unhurried drawl that belonged to nobody's idea of a Silicon Valley founder. "Afternoon, Los Angeles. San Francisco. New York. And the guy from Sacramento who pretended he wasn't coming but booked a motel anyway."
A ripple of laughter, grudging and interested. He spread his arms like a host welcoming the wolves to dinner.
"You heard a rumor: the Teller kid who got suspended for fighting, who finished high school at fourteen, who took degrees like they were dares, who should probably be dead or in prison by now—started a tech company." He nodded at the banner unfurled behind him. NORTHERN STAR ENTERTAINMENT & GAMING. The split star glowed like a broken halo. "Rumor's true. We ship early. We show up mean."
He clicked the remote. The screen behind him bloomed into the magnesium-white render of a console that looked like a concept car had mated with a fighter jet: beveled edges, side vents like gills, a flush optical bay framed by a lit star—no clowning, no plastic chrome.
"This is the Northern Star One," he said, and the room quieted the way a crowd does when it can smell a trick but wants to be seduced. "Same raw power as anything you think you're waiting for. Different philosophy. It runs cool. It's upgradable. It doesn't treat you like a criminal for wanting to mod. It plays nice with others."
He let the beat hang. Then he smiled because sharp things smile before they cut.
"And it costs half."
The room reacted like a body. A hiss, then a convulsion. Pens and tablets lifted. A voice in the middle row: "Half of whose MSRP?" Another: "Define 'upgradable' on a closed system." A third: "You can't beat BOM cost at that spec unless you're—"
"I'm not here to beat part cost," Ivar said gently, tilting the mic with two fingers as if coaxing it into a dance. "I'm here to beat a cartel."
That got them.
He paced, not because he was nervous—he loved pacing the way sharks love water. Motion made sense. "Here's what they've done. They sell you a locked box at a loss and make their money on a tax—licenses, storefront cut, accessories priced like jewelry. They segment communities with artificial walls. They trained you to believe fun is a subscription. I grew up watching men take a tax on everything because they could." He tapped his chest. "Outlaw blood learns to hate taxes."
Someone scoffed, too loud. "You're eighteen."
"Correct," he said without looking. "I'm also right."
He flicked his lighter open and shut. The tick was a pistol's half-cock. "Northern Star won't make money by starving players. We'll win by selling a lot to everyone. By not treating community as a product to be sliced. We'll price for the kid who mows lawns and the single mom who just wants to play with her daughter without choosing rent or joy."
A hand went up—older woman, no nonsense, gray streak like a lightning bolt in dark hair. "What's MSRP?"
He smiled. "Three ninety-nine."
The reaction wasn't a sound; it was a mood inversion. Shock flipped to fury; laughter flipped to interest. You could feel the investors pivot in their chairs, recalculating. The hoodie kid in the back whispered a prayer and texted his group chat like he'd found religion.
Someone barked, "You're lying." Someone else: "Vaporware." The dead-eyed front-row shark didn't speak. He watched.
Ivar nodded at the new slide: internal photos, a clean exploded view, modular bays color-coded like a science fair project designed by a race team. "We sourced smart. We built a supply chain that isn't allergic to ethics or volume. We're not chasing the bleeding edge of a benchmark nobody feels when they're laughing with friends. We're chasing reliability. And we're eliminating markup where it's tradition instead of sense."
A reporter with a voice trained for TV lowered her chin as if preparing to headbutt the podium. "How do you build a storefront and content library to compete with decades-old platforms?"
"You don't." He grinned. "You build a bridge. Our OS speaks more languages than your last three boyfriends. You want cross-play? We'll make it work. You want your library? Bring it, or we'll offer incentives to devs who will. We're not interested in trapping you. We're interested in inviting you."
A hand shot up—slick suit, hair you could land a plane on. "You're John Teller's son. Your father died in that world. Your brother runs with it. Is this just an expensive delay before you take the gavel?"
The room held its breath. The cruelty had been waiting to pounce. Ivar stepped down off the stage. His boots sounded like truth on the concrete. He stopped one pace from the suit and let the cameras get a clean side profile: the outlaw's jaw, the scholar's eyes.
"My father taught me the world is a story most men read off someone else's teleprompter," he said, voice soft enough that the microphones had to lean in. "I loved him. I learned from him. I chose to write my own pages. I don't need a gavel when I've got a pen."
He held the man's gaze until the blink came. Then he turned back to the crowd and let the grin return, easy and violent with joy.
"And because I know you're going to ask: Affordable gaming is the best version of gaming. That's not a slogan. That's a refusal. Put it on your front page." He looked at the hoodie kid in the back. "Put it on a t-shirt. Hell, carve it into your desk. I don't care. But when you say it, mean it."
The room didn't so much applaud as erupt. The sound wasn't approval; it was energy changing state. He rode it until the emcee tried to wrestle order back into the room, then he took five more questions—supply chain (real), warranty (generous), parental controls (flexible), online safety (teeth), dev split (friendly enough to cause an exodus). By the time he said thank you, three reporters looked dazed, two looked furious, and one—the lightning-bolt woman—looked like she was already writing a piece her editor would think was a love letter.
Backstage, the relative quiet slapped him. He hadn't noticed how hard his heart was running until the hush threw it against his ribs.
Louise was there with a bottle of water she'd stolen from a crate and zero patience for his swagger. "Drink," she said, thrusting it into his hand. "Your voice is chewing glass."
He obeyed. She watched the tendons in his throat as he swallowed, an intimacy he felt even with the crowd groaning like a distant sea.
"You didn't explode," she said, almost surprised.
"I prefer surgical detonations."
"Mm. You were good."
"Tell me."
"You were very good," she amended. "And you know it. Which is dangerous."
He leaned close; the grin sharpened. "I'm dangerous because I'm right."
"You're dangerous because you're beloved," she said, soft and scalpel-true. "That's a razor. Don't shave with it drunk."
He kissed her forehead because anything else would have made his hands shake. "Stay."
"I'm not going anywhere."
They waited together until the tide of bodies receded. The hoodie kid hovered at the curtain, unsure, until Ivar croaked, "You. Get in here."
The kid stumbled forward, eyes enormous. "Mr. Teller, sir—"
"Ivar."
"I—uh—my friends said if this was a stunt they'd roast me, but—" He shoved his phone out with trembling hands, the pre-order screen open and glowing like a relic. "It didn't crash. I got one."
Ivar took the phone and whistled at the order code: a six-digit integer that meant the servers were already numbering into ridiculousness. "What's your handle?"
The kid flushed. "_PantslessPaladin."
"God-tier name," Ivar declared. "Tell your friends the storm's real. And when you unbox, send me your first boot video."
"Send you—how—?"
Ivar put his personal burner number into the kid's contact with a smile Louise would later call a reckless gift. "Don't abuse it."
The kid nodded so hard he invented new muscles. "Y-yes. Thank you. Sir. I mean—"
"Go home before a cameraman interviews your soul."
The kid fled, already screaming into a Discord call about how reality had gone supple.
Louise arched an eyebrow. "Personal number?"
"Selective chaos builds cults," he said.
"And cult leaders get arrested."
"Not if they ship."
She didn't smile, but something in her loosened. "Then ship."
---
The afternoon burned down to blunt amber. The phones would not stop. PR pings, investor pings, a voicemail from a late-night host asking for a segment where he'd pretend to hate Ivar but love him three minutes later. The Northern Star servers threw smoke signals: orders in the tens of thousands; wishlist numbers climbing like a graph player two had set to easy mode.
In a conference room that still smelled like the last tenant's industrial mop, five investors appeared on a tablet screen in a neat grid of suspicion. Their backgrounds were expensive and sterile. Their smiles were not.
A woman in a white blouse led. "Mr. Teller, congratulations on the noise. As you know, noise isn't revenue."
"Sometimes it is," he said. "Ask a stadium."
"We think your pricing is suicidal."
"I think your yachts are."
Silence. Then a man with the kind of glasses that are more signal than tool leaned forward till his forehead was a semaphore. "Your BOM estimate is fantasy."
"We designed with supply in mind," Ivar said easily. "Our margins assume volume because we intend to sell to people you forgot existed. We're not chasing a gilded niche. We're building a platform."
"Your storefront revenue will be anemic if you allow open ecosystems," the white blouse said.
"Short term," he agreed. "Long term, we'll move enough units to make discoverability a currency. We'll take a fair cut, and we'll earn it with tools that don't treat devs like indentured servants."
"You're eighteen."
"You're observant."
"Where did you learn this?" Glasses pressed.
"Books," he said. "Building PCs for people who couldn't afford a prebuilt. Watching men in leather vests talk about taxes and leverage without knowing they were teaching me economics. Also, I'm not alone." He rotated the tablet so they could see through the glass into the pit: a half-dozen engineers arguing over thermal envelopes like they were discussing gossip, a QA lead methodically trying to break a pre-production unit with the monastic focus of a monk, two community managers already reverse-engineering their way into hearts.
"This team is not ornamental," Ivar said. "They're my proof."
White blouse steepled her fingers. "We want board seats."
"Pass."
"We want preferential share classes."
"Pass."
"You're insolent."
"I'm a storm," he said pleasantly. "Which is worse."
They conferred off-camera in a whisper Ivar could still hear. Louise watched him from the end of the table with a look that asked whether he wanted allies or chew toys. He made a small gesture. She exhaled and answered by sliding him a printed sheet—S-terms they'd drafted for the kind of money they could stomach.
When the investors reappeared, white blouse had swapped insults for the delicate smile of a cobra. "Fine. A pilot tranche. Two million, contingent on meeting a forty-thousand unit preorder floor in seven days and a third-party audit of your supply claims."
He didn't look at Louise. He didn't have to. "Deal," he said, "with one note. It's not a floor. It's a joke. You'll wire before audit finishes or you'll lose your line to a competitor who can smell wind."
"Confidence is charming at eighteen," glasses said.
"It's efficient at scale," Ivar said.
They signed the intent. The call ended. Louise dropped into the chair beside him and only then allowed herself the smallest of victory grins.
"Forty thousand?" she said. "You monster."
He tilted the tablet so she could see the live number. It ticked, and ticked, and rolled. "We'll cross that by tomorrow lunch."
"Hubris."
"Data."
She kicked his boot under the table—light, affectionate violence. "When this works, you're going to be intolerable."
"I'm already intolerable."
"You're going to be worse."
"Promise?"
She leaned in so her hair swung forward and made a curtain between them and the world. "I promise to stop you before you forget you're human."
He touched her cheek. The noise around them returned to full volume: Slack pings, a forklift beep from the loading dock, laughter that didn't sound tired yet.
"Good," he said. "Because tomorrow I'm going to call Stan Lee."
Louise blinked. "You're going to what?"
"Buy Marvel," he said, like he was ordering coffee. "All of it. No fractures. No begging studios. One universe. Ours."
She stared at him with a long, surgical silence. "You know he's not the only pen on that contract."
"Yeah," he said, eyes going bright. "But he's the soul. I can get souls to move."
She shook her head as if dislodging the last reasons not to love him. "And Fox?"
"After Marvel," he said. "Or before, if their board keeps hemorrhaging. Then the CW. Then everything else. Titans and Doom Patrol in the same yard as Arrow and Flash, no more sandboxes with fences. Constantine sitting at the weird kids' table with Lucifer. I'm done watching good stories live as orphans."
"You're eighteen," she said again, but there was laughter in it now.
"You keep saying that like it's an apology."
"It's a warning."
"Noted."
He pushed back from the table. "Come on. Let's walk."
---
Charming's evening light went long and honey-colored, turning the warehouse lot into a postcard written by someone lying about how easy life is. The Northern Star banner on the front corrugation made a shiver of shadow like a ship's sail. On the far side of the chain-link fence, kids had pressed their faces to the diamonds to gawk at the future: a console box on a pallet; a man with too much hair and the wrong smile waving like a pirate; a woman who looked like she knew where all the bodies were buried and had made peace with it.
Jax was leaning on Ivar's bike, boot heel braced on the curb, cigarette burning to a stubborn needle. He had a way of looking tired even when he wasn't, like his bones remembered grief on their own.
"So," Jax said without moving. "You went and did it."
"I do things," Ivar said.
"I saw the stream. Half my crew did too. Clay laughed. Bobby said you might be the devil."
"Bobby's usually right."
Jax finally turned his head. The brothers looked at each other like a mirror had learned to argue. "You ready for what happens when the men you're poking decide to poke back?"
"I've been poked by worse."
"Don't say that near Mom," Jax deadpanned, then sighed. "I mean it, though. They'll try to bury you. Lawsuits. Blacklists. Smear campaigns."
"They'll try," Ivar said. "I'm loud on purpose."
Jax flicked ash, watched it snow. "You look happy."
"I am."
"Dad would've—" Jax stopped, swallowed. "He would've liked your speech about the pen."
"He would've liked your gavel more."
Jax smiled without humor. "He would've told both of us to beware Gemma."
"Always," Ivar said, and they both laughed, brittle and fond.
"You going to come by later?" Jax asked.
"Not tonight," Ivar said. "I'm trying not to mix gasoline and caviar until I know which one I'm selling."
"That doesn't even make sense."
"It does in my head."
Jax stubbed his cigarette on his boot sole, put a hand on Ivar's neck, squeezed the way men who don't say words say the words anyway. "Don't die, little brother."
"I'm older by seven minutes."
"Feels like seven years."
"Feels like seven lives."
They stood like that for a breath longer than either of them would admit, then Jax let go and the air flowed again. He nodded at Louise. "You're the adult here."
"Terrifying, isn't it?" she said.
"Thank you for keeping him from catching fire."
"I let him catch," she said. "Then I decide what we roast."
Jax smirked and swung a leg over his bike. "Call me when the number rolls past stupid."
"It's past stupid," Ivar said. "We're in immoral."
"Good," Jax said, kickstarting the engine. "Immoral looks good on you."
He roared off with the sound of a choice going one way while another choice goes the other.
Louise slipped her arm through Ivar's. "You didn't tell him about Marvel."
"I'll tell him when the ink is dry."
"You'll tell him when the headline hits," she corrected.
"Also true."
They ambled the perimeter while the evening turned to that blue that makes you lonely if you let it. Inside, the team cheered at something—another threshold, another graph doing a vertical trick. Outside, a kid on a BMX executed a wobbling wheelie for the sheer religious joy of being ten.
"You looked like you were born there today," Louise said.
"Where?"
"On that stage. In that crossfire. It didn't take anything from you."
"It gave me back a part I'd left in the dark," he said, surprised to hear it, more surprised to find it true.
"Which part?"
"The one that didn't apologize for wanting everything."
She squeezed his arm. "Promise me something."
"Expensive promises only."
"Keep making it for them," she said, chin tipping toward the fence where the kids had been. "Not for the men inside the cameras."
"That's the whole play," he said. "If I ever start designing for a yacht, burn the yacht."
"With you on it?"
"Depends on the upholstery."
She bumped him with her hip. "Storm."
He bumped her back. "Anchor."
---
By midnight the warehouse smelled like victory and cheap pizza, which are cousins. Someone had brought in a speaker and committed a crime against classic rock until an engineer threatened to pull the building's main breaker. The preorder counter crawled across a second projector—no spin, no confidential wrapper. Ivar wanted the room to see the number climb, to feel ownership in each digit.
A developer from Fresno with a tattoo sleeve of 8-bit sprites shook his hand like he was testing grip strength for sport. A QA analyst with chipped black nail polish teared up telling him her little brother could finally buy a console without pawning his skateboard. The community lead, a woman whose laugh could cut rope, pitched a launch-day charity stream that would funnel units to children's hospitals and libraries. "We'll call it Open Play," she said. "You like?"
"I love," he said, and meant it.
Around one a.m., he sneaked away to the mezzanine—really just a catwalk with a delusion of grandeur—so he could listen to the human machine run without him. He pulled out a notebook because typing would have felt like a sin and wrote:
NS One: ship window lock; don't slip.
Open Play program—fund it like it matters (it does).
Call Stan. Personal. No handlers.
Fox: scout board fracture; find the director who hates them most.
CW: list of shows to greenlight on takeover (Arrow, Flash, Supernatural expansion, Vampire Diaries, Grimm).
DC: unify TV; Titans + Doom Patrol + Constantine; cast Batwoman with someone who scares me (Megan?).
Marvel: one world. No splinters. X-Men belong at the table from the start.
Louise: Rogue. Not because she's mine—but because she's right. Build for her.
Motto everywhere. Not as ad copy—as architecture.
He stopped there, studied the list, and felt something old uncoil—anger reshaped into purpose, grief hammered into a tool. Teller boys inherited the storm. He'd just decided what to flood.
His phone buzzed. Not a PR ping. Not an investor. A number he labeled JAX because names mattered even when you pretended they didn't.
u good? the text read.
Ivar took a photo of the preorder counter and sent it: 041,387 and climbing. Then: tell Clay his yacht upholstery is in danger.
Jax's reply was an emoji that managed to be a smirk.
Another buzz—unknown number. He almost ignored it. He didn't. The text was a grainy selfie from a bedroom lit only by a monitor: hoodie kid, cheeks wet, a Northern Star confirmation email open on screen like a benediction. _PantslessPaladin: sorry to text late. i just—thank you. i've never been able to afford launch. ever. my little sister and i… yeah. thank you.
Ivar typed, erased, typed, erased, then finally sent: Make her the first profile on the box. Name it after her. Tell me what she thinks the first time she beats you at something.
Three dots bloomed and vanished. Then: she will followed by a heart he pretended didn't warm his hands.
He put the phone away and stared down at his people moving like a colony of bright ants on a mission nobody would respect until it swallowed their picnic.
"Hey."
Louise's voice, soft enough that it didn't startle. She stood at the top of the stairs with two paper cups of coffee and a look that said she'd been watching long enough to learn a new thing about him.
"Stole these from a producer who thought they were his," she said, passing him one.
"You're a menace."
"I'm your menace."
He blew on the coffee and grimaced. "This is legally mud."
"Then drink it like you deserve."
They stood shoulder to shoulder, the kind of silence that happens only when the day has run out of excuses to talk. Below, the laughter tilted tired. Somebody whooped when the counter rolled to 045,000. Somebody else put on a song that had been in the background of every summer they'd ever loved.
"You scared?" Louise asked finally.
"Yeah," he said, and surprised himself by not lying. "Not of failing. Of forgetting why."
"And why?"
He gestured with his chin toward the production floor. "Them. Kids at the fence. Jax when he lets himself want something he was told he couldn't. You, when you look at me like I'm real."
"You are real," she said.
"Most days I feel like a trick."
"Then marry the trick to a purpose," she said, as if that was the whole craft of being a decent god.
He finished the coffee, hissed, and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. "Tomorrow we lock the BOM. Day after I piss off a man in a tie. Day after that I call a legend and see if he answers a kid from Charming."
"And tonight?"
"Tonight I try to sleep before my brain throws a parade."
"Will you?"
"No."
She smiled against his shoulder. "Good."
He looked at her profile—the line of her nose, the stubborn mouth that had taught him how to listen to no one but the truth—and let himself say the thing he'd been staging in pieces for weeks. "I'm going to put you in a suit and let you break hearts."
She laughed. "That's a Thursday."
"Leather, not wool. Hood not pearls. Power that steals power. Southern drawl that could bruise a god."
She went still. "You're serious."
"Rogue," he said, the word a coin clicked cleanly on a table. "You, or I don't do it."
"You can't—"
"I can. And I will. And if I'm wrong, you'll tell me, and I'll listen."
She stared at him for a long time, then shook her head slowly, smile growing like a dawn. "I hate how much I believe you."
"Same."
"Say it again."
"Rogue."
"Again."
"Rogue," he said, and the third time made it a contract he'd keep even if the sky argued.
They finished the coffees and dumped the cups and went downstairs to let the team see their faces one more time before night did what night does.
At the exit, he turned back and looked at the banner—NORTHERN STAR—and pictured it on a studio lot, on a theater marquee, on a controller in a kid's hands, on a lawyer's cease-and-desist he'd frame and hang in the bathroom for the comedy. He pictured the other banners he'd buy or burn. He pictured a devil in a nightclub shaking hands with a con man in a trench coat while a girl in fishnets laughed and a man in a red suit swung through a skyline where a school for gifted kids stood on a hill. He pictured all of it together, not parceled out like a will.
"Tomorrow," he said to nobody but the air. "We widen the storm."
Louise squeezed his fingers once, an anchor finding its bite.
They stepped into the California night that smelled like dust and victory. Somewhere a coyote yipped like a drunk uncle. Somewhere else, a kid told his little sister that their console would be here by Christmas. Inside the warehouse, a counter rolled to 047,002, 047,003, 047,004, patient as tide, ruthless as weather.
Ivar Teller got on his bike, engine coughing into a purr, leather gripping muscle, a familiar home he wasn't abandoning so much as repurposing. He revved once for joy and once for grief and once because noise is a kind of blessing in a world that asks you to be small.
Then he and Louise rode toward morning.
---
End of Chapter 1.