If they all agreed, they could change the business model or liquidate any part of the business they wanted to.
The minnows of Sherwood Forest actually owned GameShack.
Colleen’s stomach clenched.
This was bad.
This was very, very bad.
54
Backfired
Tristan
Tristan cracked his knuckles at his computer and sent his pre-written post.
His message appeared as a new post on the main forum and in the Small Pond room.
Time to make good on my promise. I will now buy all that stock from everyone for thirty-SIX cents per share.
Details to come within the next ten minutes about transferring the stock to my accounts.
Tristan felt good about this. Everybody was winning.
His post vanished.
“What the hell?” he yelled.
Where his post used to be, a grayed-out ghost of a message said, Removed by QueenMod.
Colleen had clicked his post and deleted it.
Tristan spun around in his chair. “What did you do?”
Colleen looked over the top of her computer at him. “Why should the minnows sell you that stock at even your generous offer of thirty-six cents a share, when if you look in GameShack’s cryptocurrency vault and do the math, they now own four CurieCoins per share, and CurieCoins are worth five hundred bucks each?”
Tristan had almost made it.
He’d almost survived this shithole of the last two months, ever since Mary Varvara Bell had dropped that damned extortion note in his mailbox.
He’d been reaching, grasping, just about to obtain the GameShack stock that he could then dump on Bell and be the hell done with her and White Holdings, Inc.
And now, this.
And from Colleen of all people.
He asked, “What the hell do you mean, they own the CurieCoins? That crypto is in the GameShack vault. It’s not theirs.”
“But our investors own well over half the stock, which is the majority of the voting shares. If they act as a group, they own GameShack outright.”
“But they’re not a group. They haven’t deposited their holdings in a central account. They’d have to sign proxy waivers to appoint someone as the leader of the group.”
Anjali piped up. “We were just learning about proxy waivers in my senior-level business class. I think I have a sample of one. I can just change the names on it for them.”
Tristan ran his hands through his hair and knotted his fists in it. “We don’t have time for this. I need to contact Bell right away and assure her that I have the stock in my possession. If you’re trying to squeeze me for more money, I can go up to thirty-eight cents a share. Those guys are all going to make a profit, no matter what. I’ll even pay their broker fees if they have any.”
“But the stock they own is worth more than that now,” Colleen said, scowling. “And I can’t let you scam them.”
“I’m not trying to scam them. I told them to buy a stock at a low price and what I’d pay for it, and I’m trying to make good on it. They’re buying low and selling higher. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do this?”
“I didn’t even think about it until I realized that we collectively own it. I was buying all that I could because I like money, but also to have more stock to make sure that you had enough to hand over to Mary Varvara Bell. To be clear, you can just have mine. I’ll sign them over to you right now for free.”
“I don’t want you to give me your shares. I want to stick to the plan where the minnows make at least a nice profit and most of them double their money or more, and I get out from under Mary Varvara Bell’s promissory note.”
Colleen continued, “And then I thought, wait a minute, if we control that much stock, then we own the whole company, and that includes the CurieCoins. And we can just vote to distribute the CC’s to the stockholders based on shares. And then I mathed to figure out how much that was, and it was a lot. Those CurieCoins are worth two thousand dollars per share. And a lot of those minnow-level investors just bought hundreds or thousands of shares.”
Her reasoning whirled around Tristan’s head. He was trying so damn hard not to freak out. He’d been so close. “Look, Colleen, I understand that you’re an ethical and moral person. I really do. But I have a person who’s trying to take away everything I’ve worked for my whole life and threatening to kill me, too. And then she’s going to kill my friends if they can’t do it. She’s going to murder Micah, Blaze, and Logan, my best friends that I have in the world. All I have to do to stop it is give her this stock, which I will pay these people for at the agreed-upon price and ensure them a profit. There is nothing unethical about giving these people money.”
“But they’re entitled to so much more.”
“No, they’re not. As far as we know, and even as far as I can conjecture, GameShack had no intention of distributing those CurieCoins to any of the stockholders. By that logic, we could liquidate the whole company and probably give them more than that, but that’s not what a stock is for. Owning a share of a stock is not the right to loot the company for that percentage of the company. It’s the opportunity to share in that percentage of the profit that they distribute to the shareholders. If you own a few shares of Best Buy stock, you can’t just walk into Best Buy, pick up a laptop, say ‘This is mine now,’ and walk out.”
“I know a lot of the people of Sherwood Forest, Tristan. They slide into my DM’s and tell me about how they can’t afford a babysitter or car repair to go to work. They aren’t investing a lot of money because they don’t have a lot of money. They’re taking what little bit they’ve been able to eke out and trying to build a little bit of wealth to make a better life for themselves and their kids. This kind of money would change their lives. This kind of money would change hundreds of people’s lives.”
“A dollar, a share,” Tristan said, trying anything to end this. “I’ll give them a dollar per share. They’ll at least triple their money. Won’t that help them out?”
“Yeah, but not when they could have ten thousand times that. Was this your plan all along? Did you think about the CurieCoins and plan to use the Sherwood Forest traders to buy all the stock for pennies on the dollar compared to what the price was last week, and then you’d buy it from them for thirty-five cents and cash out the crypto? Is there really a Mary Varvara Bell, or did you write that letter yourself?”
“Yes! And I wouldn’t do that. How would I know to do that? I didn’t know anything about that vault of cryptocurrency until we broke into your GameShack store.”
Anjali gasped. “You broke into her store?”
Colleen shushed her. “We didn’t steal anything. We just used their internet.”
“But still—”
Tristan needed to direct them back to the subject. “Colleen, these people are threatening to kill me if I don’t get them the stock shares, and then they’re going to go after my friends.”
The puzzle pieces of his life, which he’d thought were clicking together, scattered, and a yawning black void gaped. The gray emptiness of imminent death had been bad enough, but Colleen’s words and the thought that she didn’t care about him in the goddamn least were a boiling darkness taking over his mind.