You search tirelessly, in every sense of the word, a litany of exhaustion riddles your bones. But what was the alternative, what came next after giving up? You couldn’t stop your search, couldn’t live with your parents forever, nor did you want to. No one will touch you with a ten-foot pole, it makes no sense, you did everything you were supposed to: go to school, get good grades, so why then?

Two years in, reaching a new level of fatigue, you come across the conglomerate online, run by some sort of confederacy you did not understand at first. They’re looking for people like you: people at the bottom of rock bottom. It doesn’t even matter that they want to exploit you, the stipend offered turns your eyes into Naira signs. Just like that, you’re an intern, with some outside the box thinking, the conglomerate bigwigs pitch a way to give interns and Junior staff more responsibility, have them come up with some cost-efficient avenues at boosting company profits, image and whatnot.

You’re at an impasse with ideas; this was supposed to be a run-errands-around-the-office type of gig. The others hunker down, so eventually, you do too. An alliance is suggested, and you are glad for it, the idea workshop section in you had been running on fumes – a symptom of

your gross lack of motivation brought on by long-term unemployment.

One of the interns approaches the alliance with a pitch, an idea so ludicrous that you think to yourself ‘they must have scraped the bottom of the barrel for this one.’ But time goes by, the ludicrous idea intern not only is praised for his absurd methods, he is given acontract: three years.

You simply must know how he did it. You meet him about it, he is forthcoming, wants to bring you on board. Your blood is ice, your heart rate dangerously high, you’d had a feeling he was completely insane, but this confirms it for you.

Apparently the ludicrous idea intern serves a deity called The Insatiable, which grants incentivized miracles, collecting misfortune and good fortunes alike, then divvying them up for their followers. The Intern describes to you in great detail the intricacies of the whole operation, the implications to the concepts of good and evil, karma, and how The Insatiable topples them all like nothing.

The Insatiable, his intrepid figure, master, deity, feeds on the fortunes and fates of those brought before it, gives luck to those who serve them, and keeps a percentage of the fortunes – good or bad - for themself.

The offerings have their fortunes essentially turned upside down; a sort of vice-versa arrangement wherein the people leave afterwards to lead lives with extreme disadvantage and misery and never knowing the briefest of respite, dying abjectly miserable if the opposite had been what they’d originally been accustomed to.

In simple terms, if your life had been going good (maybe only with mild bumps in the road, here and there), your fortunes immediately change to the complete negative, terrible life with lots of bumps in the road - lots and lots and vice-versa.The Intern believes that the blood obtainment (that was what he called it even though none was ever shed) is a means to an end with the goal to provide the conglomerate

an avenue to improve its holdings.

Now the confederacy running the conglomerate, despite only allowed limited operations in the country, was experiencing a by-product of good fortunes courtesy of the ‘shed bloods’, and well on its way to being less sub-par; essentially still mediocre, but not nearly so abundantly as its subsidiaries in other parts of the continent where the Confederacy had ties and holdings.

Here, they thrived and they had the ludicrous idea intern to be indebted to. This, you know to be fact, it gets the gears in your head rolling.

Good fortune is something you could really use in your life, but you did need to sleep at night, and you needed proof, without which, you’d need to have the Intern instituted in a mental health facility. You go to him with these concerns, and he accepts the compromise: the presentation of proof would be brought in a fortnight.

You think in a fortnight you’ll never see him again because he’s been admitted into an asylum, but he delivers. Irrefutable: a woman orphaned at three, framed for murder at nineteen, lost an arm due to a prison incident that left the appendage infected was apparently abducted by the Intern, presented before The Insatiable.

He brings you news footage; the woman is the recipient of cutting-edge prosthetic tech., with advancements in Nano-technology hither to undreamt of, seamlessly re-connecting her severed nerves, it’d be like she’d never lost the arm.

With a waitlist of candidates consistent of the wealthiest individuals the world has ever seen, a prosthetic that might as well have been made of gold considering the estimated price of the thing, it is therefore not too far-fetched to you that this seems an unlikely twist of fate especially given that she’d received it from the Japanese manufacturers completely for free and as they put it ‘out of charity’. No one is that lucky, there must be a catch.

Your unfulfilled satisfaction had been anticipated by The Intern, he’d brought along other forms of proof - stories of people who’d been down on their luck, miraculously and abruptly living their dreams.

The Intern has a dossier, it contains simulated projections of what degree of luck (good or bad) the offerings’ had before and after being presented to the

Insatiable, these people had been tracked, abducted and returned to their new and improved (sometimes) lives.

You want in, you need to be part of this. However, making relatively happy lives miserable is the one part that doesn’t sit right with you. There needed to be a precisemethodology in selecting candidates that would mitigate this concern of yours.

“The blood obtainment has to only change lives for the better,” you say to the ludicrous Idea Intern.

“No problem,” he responds nonchalantly. “So do you want to join?”

You nod, and handshakes are exchanged.

A symptom of serving the Insatiable - aside from the incentivized miracles – is a removal of obstacles, anything that hinders your progression within the conglomerate doesn’t even find its way close enough to be a problem to you, so you’re offered a contract,as well.

The blood obtainment presents tributes living mediocre and ‘unlucky’ lives to the Insatiable and you endeavour to see to it that it does, researching the subjects thoroughly.

There is a rise in rags-to-riches stories in the nation, it causes something to scratch

at the back of your mind; what was off? You were making people happier. You realize it’s The Insatiable.

You stand before them, blindfolded, as seeing them is the catalyst for the fortune-inversion, they convey their dissatisfaction, and you’re able to understand the fragile balance you have upset. They needed the negative as much as the positive polarity of fortunes, ballasts on both scales.

You had to get imaginative; otherwise they’d take matters into their own hands. For the large offerings of positive fortune inversion, you needed to counterweigh with negative.

You’d have to break your own rule, cause innocent people’s lives to deteriorate. Why do you even need to? This is much bigger than the conglomerate and the confederacy now.

You return to the Insatiable, alone in the cave that is their home, blindfold off, eyes shut, no offerings. You convey your concerns, and decision, the agreement to be reached.

You, alone, would take on the misfortune owed to them and adopt a dogma that prevents such a problem from presenting itself ever again; to find candidates deserving of having their fortunes negated for a time then inverted again and again.

The Insatiable conveys their lack of certainty that this will even work, to which you smile and convey of course it will, it’s been happening since the beginning of time. In all men exists a finite amount of misfortune, and a finite amount of luck. You can’t have one without the other, so you open your eyes, laugh hysterically then cry repeatedly. When you close them, you feel the change, the misery you are so familiar with.

You open your eyes again and scream, the sight of the Insatiable is inconceivable to the human mind. Your eyes close and you welcome the enveloping warmth of contentment.

The experiment works.

The blood obtainment is perfected, The Insatiable couldn’t be more exultant, and neither could the conglomerate, the world. You climb the corporate ladder, incorporate the blood obtainment and your relationship with the Insatiable into its proficiency, leading it into a new sphere of avant-gardism. It spills into other things; conglomerates, governments, households, you and your compatriots control the world, a deep state with a very closely guarded secret: supervising the delicate fragility of fortune and its spillover onto humanity.