Chapter 4 — The First Meeting Fiasco

Ethan

Ethan Blake leaned over the small, wobbly card table in the building’s cramped lobby, staring at the disaster zone he’d unintentionally created. Flyers were strewn across the surface, some featuring hastily drawn doodles of megaphones and fists that he’d started and abandoned mid-sketch. The marker he’d used to craft his “master plan” had bled through the cheap paper, leaving a faint Rorschach blot on the table that seemed to mock him. The room around him buzzed with overlapping conversations, the chatter ricocheting off the scratched walls and worn linoleum floor. Mismatched folding chairs, which he’d painstakingly set up earlier, now sat scattered in disarray as tenants milled about.