Caricatures of 

real estate

 

moguls

liked to shout "location! location!! location!!!" while shaking people's hands and jumping on stage and dancing poorly.

The Wolf

didn't spend his days thinking about location. That wasn't his job. He was about reducing surface area. Reducing exposure.

How many people in the world knew who he was. And from this subset, how many knew that he was their enemy?

He had once believed that the key to protecting himself was through an iron fist grip on the limited amount of people who knew him. Following some events, he's changed his mind. People driven by fear may give you a sense of control during the easy times, but when things got really tough, then no amount of fear could get these people to act in the right way. They would either become paralyzed or do very unwise things. All out of fear.

He now believed it was all about trust. He picked the right people and trusted them. He didn't tell them that he trusted them. He didn't put stupid posters up on the wall with depictions of "trust". He simply trusted them. And they felt it. And they trusted him back.

There was nothing wrong with fear however. It just had to come from a different source. Not from him. Instead he had to be the redemption from fear. He had to be their 

God

to the 

devil

. Then they would sacrifice everything for what else could they do?

"Do not force someone into doing something. Make something the only thing that they can do." was The Wolf's motto.

After a few calm, prosperous years, the first domino was tipping over, and now Richard "The Hawk" Gardner was doing the only thing he could do. This would involve several others doing the same: doing the only thing they can do.

Some people would win. Some would lose. Some just money, some money and reputation, but some would lose a lot more than money and reputation. They would lose the only thing that they could truly call their own.

Money. Reputation. None of it was ever owned by a person. Such can be attributed to them. And they may reap the bounty that comes from having the world attribute such to them. But they never owned it. At the end of the day it could be taken from them in a moment.

Understanding this, is what made The Wolf The Wolf.

Regular people might consider him heartless. What they failed to understand was just how much of life was

sacrifice

. They had been led to believe that everyone could get along and be happy, if it just weren't for the people in power making their greedy decisions.

And they could continue believing this because they worked under people, outsourcing such decisions to the few above them. They could continue thinking that a

utopia

was just over the next horizon... if only we got the right hero. They thought this but they no longer believed it these days it seemed. People had little trust in anything. They ran around scared from one epiphany to another, hoping that they had finally reached "happily ever after", not connecting the dots. That such a fairy tale was in fact a fairy tale that they had been sold as a child. They never saw in a serious way: what life actually was.

In the previous decade The Wolf had believed that people could be helped. They could be taught to see life in it's true form rather than casting their childish projections onto it. He thought he could help people. This decade he believed there was no helping people. He had only wanted to help out of serving his 

ego

. His ego had led him to believe that he would be a "good" person if he were to help people in these ways.

And because he was driven by ego, it upset him when a person he was trying to "help" failed. He would go through phases of trying to "help" and then trying to actively not "help" for years until one day he finally saw life, himself, for the first time.

This is when he no longer wanted to help. But not in a rebellious way in reaction to his "help" not working. But in realization that there was no helping. Because he could finally see.

That people were going to do the only thing they could do.