Fifty-two, six-foot-two, mountain-sturdy, cigar lit. Patriarch of the McNeal Wind Energy Dynasty and commander of the four-level V2T network. He doesn't try to beat the chaos — he taught his whole family to harvest it.
Uncle Buster runs the Mount Hood Cascade Casino — "Let's Get High Together" — as a legitimate entertainment business and a revolutionary energy-capture facility at the same time. The games aren't decoration; they're instruments. Every table is tuned to harvest a different kind of turbulence, atmospheric or emotional. He sits the floor with a cigar and a field notebook, and where everyone else sees a lucky streak, Buster sees data.
He's the patriarch of the McNeal Wind Energy Dynasty and commander of the whole four-level V2T system — mountain casino, coastal lighthouse, surface farms, underground lab. The dynasty is organized by elevation, one McNeal per altitude, and the founding doctrine is pure Buster: you cannot predict chaos, but you can absolutely build infrastructure to harvest it.
Benjamin walked in with $2,847 in coffee money and rode a twenty-three-win streak at Wind Speed Roulette — surfing mountain winds in "strange attractor" behavior, patterns that look random but aren't, calling every shift on pure intuition he didn't understand. His enthusiasm threw off micro-vortexes that ran the casino's V2T capture at 140% capacity. The pot climbed to $73,847.
Then the wind pivoted — 26.4 knots northwest to 31.2 knots east-southeast in two heartbeats, a phase transition that happens maybe twice a year. Benjamin lost everything in two spins. And the sigh he let out powered three Sigh Slot Machines at once, tripped the overflow-storage protocols, and set off atmospheric sensors. The floor manager called for a "McNeal Disappointment Capture System" on the spot. Buster just took his nephew three levels down.
That's the whole McNeal philosophy in one reading on a monitor. Benjamin stared at his own disappointment still registering on sensors three levels up and had the epiphany that built an industry: politicians work exactly like mountain wind — chaotic, unpredictable, generating massive hot air with every speech. Six months later he was running the first political hot-air capture system in Alexandria, pulling 8–12 kW continuous off a single fiscal-responsibility speech.
Buster doesn't separate winning from losing, or weather from feeling. A gust, a groan, a jackpot, a heartbreak — it's all turbulence, and turbulence is fuel. The casino floor is a wager either way: bet on the wind, bet on the streak, bet on yourself — and win or lose, your sigh, your cheer, your exhale all flow down the conduits to SIGHSTONE. Every sigh, every breath, goes in the pool. The house doesn't need you to lose. It just needs you to feel something, and feed it back into the mountain.
One family, one network, three elevations — each casino a node, each McNeal a commander of their own altitude.
In this story
Same region · Pacific Northwest
The wider net
The methodology