1951 Vegas Vin's Neon Empire
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A flash fiction piece set before the events of Vegas Viking. This story is not in the books — consider it a window into a moment that shaped everything that came after.
The wind along Highway 91 tasted of old fire, a flavor Vin recognized across millennia: charred sagebrush, hot metal, the faint ozone of harnessed power. He stood with his shoes in the loose gravel, collar high against the dusk, and watched mortals wrestle a steel skeleton into the sky. A diesel crane strained, its rigging shivering as the sign frame rose. A flatbed idled nearby, its cargo of neon tubing laid out like the bones of some new, synthetic god. This was what he had come to see—not the casino itself, but the raw, desperate faith of the men building it.
Vin had stopped walking three minutes ago, and hadn't moved since.
The scene imprinted itself on him: the pendulum-smooth swing of the rising frame, the guide wires snapping taut and trembling with the strain. The mortal on the scaffold braced his knees and whistled tunelessly through his teeth, his hope so raw it was almost a physical force. Each detail was a line of power, tethering the men to their machine and to the fragile thing they were trying to make stand.
On impulse, Vin stepped off the gravel and onto the crusted dirt. He moved closer to the transformer box at the corner of the construction lot, close enough to feel its subsonic hum through his shoes and up the ladder of his bones. He stood beside it — not in the way, but within the zone of danger that safety workers would have flagged with caution tape if anyone cared to notice. He raised his right hand until the heel of his palm faced the box, fingers loose, the air between them already tightening with heat he hadn't generated.
The transformer vibrated with a current that was almost music. It stuttered on startup, then settled into a thrumming stability that felt, to Vin, like a carnival magician's cheap illusion. It wasn't the wild, living force of the old world—not the vaulting charge of an unclouded sky, or the raw power that tasted like iron and revelation—but it was a passable echo. He let the energy play against his palm, calibrating its rhythm and push, feeling the small ways this hobbled voltage nudged at his physical senses.
They were wiring the entire desert, these mortals. Every new casino, every transformer box humming on its concrete pad, every mile of copper buried beneath the sand — they were building him a battery without knowing it. The thought pleased him in a way he did not bother to examine.
At that moment, a worker crouched and sparked a welding torch. Blue-white light erupted, so bright Vin felt its heat on his skin. In that searing flash, the world bleached to hard edges and harder shadows. And the shadow he cast on the ground behind him did not align with the body he wore. It was broader, denser, the silhouette of a man with the shoulders of an ancient hero, a posture measured by the weight of worlds. The face in the shadow was not his own: its profile had the set of Vili—the ghost that shadowed him on good days and tormented him on the bad.
He did not turn. He let the flash sear his retinas, let the afterimage float in his vision as the torch's hum snapped off. His jaw tightened once and released. As twilight returned, his shadow shrank back to match the outline he presented—clean, professional, nothing that required explanation.
The workers had not noticed. They kept shouting, repositioning the sign's base, one man scraping his boot along a strip of rebar with a hollow metallic rasp. The kid on the scaffold pumped his fist as the frame locked upright. Laughter broke out, a flash of pride. The sky behind them deepened from orange to violet; he felt the air on his skin grow cooler, less forgiving.
Vin dropped his hand, though the transformer's hum lingered in his flesh. It was a child's chemistry set compared to the battlefield of his past, but he held onto the feeling. Sometimes you learned more from the failed experiments than from the victories. He had stood in the shadow of the Colosseum when the mortar was still wet, had watched Constantinople rise from a mudflat into a city that glittered like a second sun. Each time, the same feeling — this low, electric certainty that something was about to become permanent. Vegas had it. Vegas had it in abundance.
He watched the men congratulate each other, their movements mapped with fatigue. They built things knowing the desert would sandblast every surface, that their work would be torn down within a decade. Yet they persisted. The boy on the scaffold lingered, beaming with a pure, stupid pride in having put something bigger than himself into the world. Vin watched that pride, and in the privacy of his own face, a slow, tightly regulated smile formed. It was not a friendly expression, but a confirmation, an internal click: Yes, this would do. This would be enough.
He rolled his collar down, straightened his shirt, and turned away from the sign crew to regard the full width of the Strip. No continuous line of neon yet, but the older joints flickered on one by one, each announcing itself in clashing colors and illegible fonts. Further down the highway, scaffolding wrapped the skeletons of future hotels and fantasy amusements; black mesh tarps billowed in the wind, catching the last light. The city was still being invented, hour by hour, by men who thought they were building casinos.
He let his gaze drift south, past the construction noise and the borrowed light, to a specific patch of desert that the developers hadn't reached yet. Unremarkable ground to anyone else — flat, pale, stubbled with creosote. But Vin felt what lay beneath it the way he felt weather coming: a low, certain pressure, old beyond the desert's memory. Tunnels. Chambers. A network carved by no human hand, running deep under the caliche and ancient stone. He had found it three days ago, following a pull he hadn't felt since the old world. It had been waiting a long time. So had he.
That was where he would build.
Not a casino. Something that would outlast every neon sign on this strip by a thousand years, something sunk into the earth itself, anchored to what was already there. The mortals would see a tower of glass and ambition. They would never know what the tower stood on.
He stood for a long moment, letting the site's noise fade behind him as he looked beyond the city's edge to the wide, undisturbed desert. There was no question. This was open ground, a tabula rasa, perfect soil — and beneath it, something that had been waiting since before these mortals' gods were young. He would build something here that no one would ever tear down, and the anticipation of it warmed him the way only true purpose ever could.
He left the construction lot without a word, his shadow in lockstep. As he walked the shoulder of Highway 91, the last glimmer of sun bled from the sky. Behind him, the new sign glowed for the very first time. He had warriors to wake and an empire to forge in this mortal dust.
Want to know what Vin built — and who he built it for?