Bottles rattled and one even rolled off the table as Oskar threw his hands wide.
"Hahaa, my man Karl, this problem isn't actually that difficult," he declared, fingers drumming on the wood.
Karl looked at him like a man watching someone casually announce, "We'll just punch God."
"I am very curious to hear that, Your Highness," he said. "How exactly is this 'not difficult'?"
Oskar leaned back with drunken confidence.
"Karl, our company will be called the German Welfare Lottery Company," he said. "The key word is welfare. Welfare lottery means we take part of the profit and use it for social welfare projects: food for people with no food, diapers for babies with no diapers, medical help for the poor, money for orphanages, maybe schools, that kind of thing."
He grinned.
"This way, we are not just gambling business. We are noble. Charitable. Helpful. Society will love us. Anyone who wants to attack us must think about public reaction, my man. We will be like saints."
Many times, prestige and fame were as good as armor. If everyone saw you as a benefactor—the guy who put roofs over orphans and soup in empty bowls—then knives and greedy hands had to be hidden very carefully.
Karl nodded slowly.
"Wow… that is actually a good idea, Your Highness," he admitted.
Oskar's grin widened.
"And the lottery market is already a big pie," he continued. "I am a prince, yes, but I cannot eat it all alone. So…" He tapped his chest, then pointed upward, vague but clear. "I will give a share of the profits to the royal family. Officially. Publicly."
He spread his hands.
"If the royal family earns money when we do, then we are not just some private company. We are a royally connected welfare project. People trust that. And anyone who wants to attack us is basically attacking the poor, the orphans, and the Kaiser's wallet. Not very smart, my man."
Karl's eyes lit up.
"With the royal family's support, high social prestige, and Your Highness's identity…" he nodded. "Yes. No one in Germany, no matter how reckless, would dare move against us openly. Especially if we are building a battleship as well. Then the army and navy will be behind us—unofficially, of course. That part we keep quiet."
Privately, someone might still try something. But that was a problem for future Oskar.
In Oskar's head, the profit split was already carved in stone:
20% of profits to social welfare.
20% to the royal family.
60% under his own control.
If he wanted to fulfill his promise to donate a battleship—and, if possible, more than one—he needed serious funds.
"Alright," Oskar said. "We do it this way. Tomorrow we register the company, find an office, and start preparations. Within three months, our lottery goes on sale."
Three months was not much. But he didn't have much. War, politics, history—everything in his head was a ticking timer.
Karl rubbed his temple.
"We should launch in North Germany first," he suggested. "If it succeeds there, moving into the South will be easier. And before anything else, we need to apply for a patent on this lottery format. Otherwise, they'll just copy it and sell it themselves."
Oskar nodded.
"First: company," he said. "Then: patents. We lock down the rules, the structure, the name. Double Color Ball is ours."
He pulled the passbook from his pocket and set it on the table.
"These are all my savings," he said. "Five million marks. This is our startup capital. If we use it carefully, it should be enough."
He looked at Karl.
"You will be the company's legal representative. I give you twenty percent of the shares. You handle the hard things. I come up with ideas."
Karl's eyes widened.
"Your Highness, it is my honor to work with you," he said. "But are you seriously making me do everything?" He sighed. "Still—this project should be profitable. Although if I hold so many shares without contributing any money, my conscience won't be at ease."
He reached into his jacket and took out a folded paper.
"This," he said, placing it on the table, "is my investment."
Oskar unfolded it and stared.
A cheque from Deutsche Bank.
Face value: one million marks.
"Karl," he said slowly, "where did you get so much money?"
Karl smiled, a little proud and a little guilty.
"Well, honestly," he said. "Some my father—His Excellency Jonarett—gave as startup capital. It seems he is cautiously supportive. But mostly… I have been saving parts of your allowance for quite some time now. Instead of letting you waste it. Sorry."
Oskar burst out laughing.
"Haha, my man! It seems Herr Jonarett is a wise man after all," he said, not fully catching the "stealing" part. "You are good man to save so much and not spend it all on foolish things."
He took a swig of alcohol, then hiccupped.
"However, Karl," he went on, "although you hold twenty percent of the company's shares, you will only receive ten percent of the total profits. The other forty percent will go to social welfare and the royal family."
"Of course, Your Highness," Karl said. "I understand. I am already more than satisfied with ten percent. If your projections are even half correct, that ten percent will be…" He shook his head. "Astronomical."
Three drawings a week.
Hundreds of millions of marks a year, if it worked.
Ten percent of that was more money than most nobles would ever see.
That night, Oskar passed out drunk in his smelly clothes, clutching Karl like a stuffed toy. Karl, equally drunk, snored into Oskar's chest, one tiny hand still gripping the diary.
The next day, Oskar woke up with a pounding head and no memory of how he'd ended up hugging a dwarf. Karl woke up with no memory of how he'd agreed to this life.
Then they both remembered the battleship.
That helped.
They dragged themselves out of bed, splashed some water on their faces (not enough, in Oskar's case), and went to register the company.
Privilege did its work. Oskar's smell did not help, but no one dared comment. Where a normal businessman might have waited weeks or months for permits, doors opened quickly for a Hohenzollern prince.
Within a week, the German Welfare Lottery Company was a legal entity.
Alongside that, patent applications began to move—sped up by gentle pressure, polite visits, and the magic phrase: "His Royal Highness."
The patents were not just for Double Color Ball. Oskar, thinking ahead, also filed for other lottery formats from his old world—Super Lotto variants, other number combinations, payout structures—anything he remembered clearly enough to redraw as a "novel game."
If this world wanted to play with numbers for money, they were going to go through him.
Next, Karl began hiring.
Clerks to handle accounts and tickets.
Lawyers to navigate regulations.
Regional managers to oversee distribution.
Advertising people—the rare few who understood how to write headlines that made people feel something.
For the tickets themselves, Oskar insisted on professionalism… when he was actually present.
Most days, he slipped away to the local Turnhalle and gymnasium. He spent hours doing pull-ups, parallel bar exercises, trying to master a one-handed handstand and eventually a full split—always in his Prussian uniform. To him, it was like armor and costume in one. He refused to take it off, even as people edged away from the sweaty prince doing advanced gymnastics in a field-gray coat.
Meanwhile, Karl did the real work.
He contracted a reputable printing firm to produce the tickets. Together with their lawyers and a friendly banker, they designed:
tickets with serial numbers
secret marks and watermarks
special anti-forgery patterns
Each ticket was printed in duplicate:
One part given to the buyer.
One part kept and archived by the company.
Sales would stop six hours before each draw. All archived ticket halves from around the country would be transported back to Berlin under guard.
No mysterious "late winners." No easy fraud.
"We are selling hope," Oskar said. "If people suspect cheating, hope dies. Then business dies."
Karl shuddered. "And if the state suspects cheating," he added, "we die."
To promote the lottery, Oskar did what his streamer brain knew best:
He spammed.
Advertisements went into every major newspaper they could afford:
"WANT TO GET RICH OVERNIGHT AND HELP FILL SOMEONE'S BOWL OF SOUP?"
"PLAY DOUBLE COLOR BALL – FIRST PRIZE FIVE MILLION MARKS! AND NO, WE ARE NOT MESSING WITH YOU!"
"A NEW LIFE FOR JUST ONE TICKET!"
The style was loud by 1904 standards.
Big fonts.
Huge numbers.
Slogans like:
"CHANGE YOUR DESTINY – DO OR DO NOT, THERE IS NO TRY."
"FORTUNE SMILES ON THE BRAVE."
The cost was brutal.
Each full-page ad was like tearing a strip out of Oskar's five million mark heart. The company's money poured out like water. In a few weeks, millions had evaporated into printing, office rents, salaries, and aggressive promotion.
Karl watched the balance sheets with increasing panic.
"Your Highness," he said one night, "our cash reserves are shrinking at a terrifying rate."
"Yes, my man," Oskar said calmly. "But our name is growing at terrifying rate too. Good trade. Soon everyone will want our colored balls. People like balls."
Karl stared at him.
"That is… an unfortunate way to phrase it, Your Highness."
He wasn't wrong, though.
By the time the lottery was ready to launch, everyone had heard of Double Color Ball.
Oskar even liked to explain it this way to anyone who would listen:
"In this time," he'd say, "normal worker earns maybe eight hundred marks a year. Five million marks is like six thousand years of wages. Or enough to buy over twenty-one million kilos of bread. One win, and your great-great-great-great-grandchildren still don't have to work, my man."
In beer halls in Hamburg, men joked about buying "that crazy new welfare ticket" just once.
In cafés in Berlin, students argued nonsense strategies with the seriousness of philosophers.
In quiet villages, old men and housewives who had never bought a ticket in their lives whispered about "the five million prize."
For people who'd never see more than a few thousand marks in their entire lifetime, the idea of five million was so absurd it might as well have been divine.
Time passed. Preparations tightened. Distribution grew.
Originally, Oskar and Karl had planned to start only in North Germany, test the waters, then expand.
The advertising had other ideas.
By the time the first shipment of tickets left the printers, demand had already spread to South Germany. Vendor requests poured in from Munich, Stuttgart, Freiburg—everywhere that people were poor enough to dream and rich enough to buy a ticket.
On 18 November 1904, the Double Color Ball tickets of the German Welfare Lottery Company went on sale across Germany.
From the moment the sales points opened, lines formed.
In Berlin, queues stretched down the street in front of kiosks and shops with the new blue-and-red "Welfare Lottery" sign.
In Kiel, sailors and dockworkers joked as they bought strips of tickets in between loading coal.
In small towns, people stood in line in their Sunday best for the chance to buy a slip of paper that might change everything.
The first day's numbers blew past even Oskar's wildest optimism.
The sale of the Double Color Ball was not just a success.
It was a phenomenon.
And somewhere in a hotel room in Berlin, a sweaty, exhausted prince with terrible German stared at the first reports, saw Karl's ecstatic face, and thought:
Damn. I really have to start learning German. I have no idea what any of this says. But…
He looked at the lines of figures again.
(…we are definitely one step closer to that battleship, my man.)