My Infinite Investment System

Chapter 2: Qualified Disaster

Three cameras waited for Ryan to say whether he was Mika Santos’s creditor, while the biggest stream had already labelled him Mystery Suit in pink letters across the bottom of the frame.

"Neither one applies," he said, keeping a finger beside the certification mark and his voice easy, "but your contractor is moving medical equipment under the same recovery code as a fog machine."

The supervisor turned the clipboard away and called somebody whose answer dropped his voice by half, while the crew kept carrying Northstar’s furniture toward the truck.

"Congratulations, Mystery Suit, you just bought my organs five more minutes," Mika said, catching his sleeve, "so come inside before the internet decides we’re married."

She pulled him through the stripped entrance, then let go of him beside a bar that somebody had covered in repossession stickers.

Empty brackets marked where the speakers had been.

Two employees watched their famous employer bring an unknown man in during an active financial disaster, then went back to pretending they hadn’t.

"Who sent you?" Mika asked, the camera smile gone the moment the door shut, "the lender, my old guild, a gossip page, or an ex-client who thinks public humiliation counts as networking?"

"Nobody sent me," Ryan said, "I audited hunter medical procurement until about four hours ago."

"The past tense sounds expensive," she said, eyebrow up.

"It got expensive very fast," he replied, with a smile that had nothing in it.

The gold interface came back while Mika circled him and judged the suit, the empty badge clip, then the total absence of a weapon with roughly equal suspicion.

[Adaptive Role Determination Complete]

[Standard Hero Path Rejected]

[Adapted Role Assigned: Investor]

’Investor,’ Ryan thought, reading it twice to be sure, ’it looked at a fired analyst with nine hundred dollars and picked comedy.’

[Converting Hero Resources To Investment Capital]

[Available Investment Capital: ∞]

[Personal Withdrawal: Invalid Use Of Growth Energy]

Infinite money sat behind his eyes, so the first thing he tried to buy was the cheapest sandwich on the bar menu.

[Proposed Investment: One Sandwich]

[Rejected: Host Consumption Is Not A Qualified Growth Target]

Rent produced a rejection, then transport produced another one.

The core scan he’d skipped after collapsing came back with a whole paragraph of explanation attached, which somehow made it worse.

’Unlimited resources,’ Ryan thought, ’with the spending instincts of a trust fund written by somebody who hated the beneficiary.’

"You keep looking at me, then mentally leaving the room," Mika said, pouring two glasses of water without asking, "and if you’re doing arithmetic about my body, I usually charge for that."

A translucent profile opened across her before he could answer.

[Party Candidate Reclassified: Investment Target]

[Preliminary Scan Running]

[Age: 25]

[Public Rank: B]

[Stable Output: D]

[Core Condition: Critical]

He didn’t trust software that had failed during its own installation, so he watched her instead, catching the delay before her left shoulder followed the rest of her toward the bar.

A pink spark crawled over her knuckles, weakened near the wrist, then died under the black cuff.

"Your left-side discharge is failing somewhere between your collarbone and your elbow," Ryan said, keeping his voice down.

The two employees found reasons to be much further away, and the teasing went out of Mika’s face like somebody had turned a switch.

"That has never been public," she said, eyes very steady on his.

"The spark was public," he replied, nodding toward the entrance, "your jacket hides a medical lead port, the regulator out there is calibrated for a lightning core, then your left shoulder moves a beat after the rest of you."

Mika leaned onto the bar until the perfume cut through the charge in the air.

"You notice a remarkable amount," she said, tone light again in a way that did not reach her eyes, "for a man who completely missed me flirting with him."

"I noticed," Ryan said, watching the hand under the jacket, "the medical problem had a shorter deadline."

Her real smile showed up for the first time, quick and sharp, considerably more dangerous than the version she’d been running outside.

"So there’s a deadline after which you become responsive," Mika said, watching his face, "that sounds conservative, but I can work with it."

An employee hurried in with a phone before Ryan could answer, holding up a clip titled ’B-rank nightlife princess gets evicted live’.

"Boss, it crossed twelve thousand," the young bartender said, "and the comments think the suit is either your secret accountant or your emergency boyfriend."

{secret accountant. those are accountant shoes}

{nobody bring up the shoes again}

"Evicted is legally inaccurate, and that thumbnail makes my left eye look smaller," Mika said, taking the phone, "the relationship theories may continue until they become useful."

{that thumbnail is doing her dirty tbh}

She went back outside and raised the stream where the supervisor could see the viewer count, standing so the lens caught her good side while her body hid the tremor in the other arm.

"Fourteen thousand people are watching you decide whether medical equipment belongs next to a fog machine," she said, loud enough for every microphone on the barrier, "so please take your time, because they adore suspense."

The supervisor ordered a serial review, and contractors began photographing labels they had ignored all afternoon.

{is nobody going to mention the sparks}

’Thirty seconds,’ Ryan thought, watching her turn humiliation into armour, ’and she hates every second of it.’

When one viewer accused her of staging the whole repossession, Mika pinned the comment, added the lender’s visible truck number, then invited the company account to confirm whether it had volunteered as production staff.

The company stayed silent while the viewer count doubled around its own truck.

Back at the bar, Ryan set the seizure list beside the maintenance log, and found three full pages protecting the mirrored throne against one incorrect line covering the regulator.

"Your throne has better legal protection than your heart," he said, without looking up from the log.

"The throne has contributed more to this crisis than several investors I know," Mika replied as the prop went past the doorway wrapped in padded cloth.

The regulator history showed a lightning calibration eleven months back, then a factory reset logged four days before the club loan absorbed it as collateral.

Somebody had erased its medical purpose quietly, right before the financing closed.

"Whoever structured this knew the injury would cut your earnings," Ryan said, tone flattening, "so they priced your failure first, then took the building as protection."

Pink current crawled under her collar until she closed a fist around the edge of the bar.

"My old guild clinic ran three stabilisation cycles and billed for five," Mika said, voice gone flat, "then when I left, they kept the scans while the debt followed me out."

The interface sped up and folded the injury, the financing, then the regulator history into one final block.

[Name: Mika Santos]

[Age: 25]

[Public Rank: B]

[Stable Output: D]

[Potential: SSS]

[Core Condition: Critical]

[Minimum Viable Investment: $900,000]

Ryan looked from the potential rating to the injury that turned every discharge into a coin flip, then at his banking app underneath both.

’Nine hundred thousand,’ he thought, ’and it says minimum like that’s a comfort.’

"You interrupted my repossession, diagnosed a secret injury, and now you’re staring like a balance sheet appeared behind my jacket," Mika said, arms folding, "so what exactly do you want?"

"Right now, to know whether the number I’m looking at is real," Ryan said, holding her eyes.

"And if it is?" she asked, watching him now instead of the room.

"Then I find nine hundred thousand dollars," Ryan said, quietly.

She went very still, in the way people do when a conversation stops being entertaining.

"From where," Mika said. It was not a question so much as a test with one wrong answer already prepared.

"I can’t tell you that," he replied.

"Of course you can’t," Mika said, her voice going somewhere colder.

"I know how it sounds," he said, without any expression at all.

"You have no idea how it sounds," she said, "I’ve had that sentence delivered to me by three men in nicer suits, and every one of them was somebody’s errand."

’She’s not wrong to think it,’ Ryan thought, ’she’s just wrong.’

"Then don’t take my word for anything," he said, meeting her eyes without trying to sell certainty he didn’t have, "assume I have nothing until something proves otherwise. My name’s Ryan Keller."

"Mika Santos," she answered with a courtesy so formal it was almost mocking, gesturing at her own face on the club wall, the trending stream, then three surviving sponsor placards, "I hate to make a mysterious man carry the introductions alone."

"I had narrowed it down," Ryan said, almost smiling.

The number stayed between them while the crew waited outside and the light under her collar got brighter.

He put his balance on the bar next to it, all nine hundred dollars and seventeen cents of it, so she could see both figures before either of them pretended hope was a plan.

"I found the price," he said, voice level, "we’re short by almost all of it."