Ryan Calloway drove for forty-five minutes before the GPS led him off the main road and onto a cracked industrial access lane flanked by weeds and rusted chain-link fencing.
The factory was at the end of the lane. A squat, corrugated-metal building with water stains running down the walls and a loading dock that hadn't seen a truck in years. The surrounding buildings were either boarded up or abandoned entirely.
Ryan parked, killed the engine, and sat there for a moment.
He'd covered press conferences in hotel ballrooms. Conference centers. Corporate headquarters with marble lobbies and espresso machines. This was, without question, the saddest venue he'd ever been sent to.
"What were you expecting, Calloway?" he muttered, grabbing his camera bag from the passenger seat. "He's a seventeen-year-old high school dropout. Be grateful there's a building at all."
He pushed open the factory door and stepped inside.
The space was larger than it looked from outside — maybe three thousand square feet — but every inch was packed with equipment. Workbenches, generators, instruments he couldn't identify, cabling that ran across the floor in thick bundles. The air smelled like solder and instant noodles and the particular staleness that accumulates when someone has been living in a room for too long.
Ryan picked his way through the maze of equipment, looking for anything resembling a stage, a podium, or a press area. He found none.
"Hello?"
His voice echoed off the metal walls.
A beat of silence. Then a head popped up from behind a piece of machinery — dark hair, tired eyes, a smear of grease across one cheek — and a grin split the kid's face like he'd just won the lottery.
"You came! You're here for the press conference, right?"
Ryan blinked. "...Yes."
The grin widened. Ethan Mercer slid out from under the equipment with the fluid ease of someone who'd spent weeks navigating this space by muscle memory alone.
"Awesome. Follow me — I'll take you to the press area."
Ryan had seen Ethan's photos in the media coverage. The image that had been circulated — pulled from his school file, probably — showed a thin, unsmiling kid with shadows under his eyes. The person in front of him was thinner, more tired, and significantly greasier, but the energy was completely different. There was a sharpness to him. An intensity that didn't match the "problem youth" narrative at all.
Ryan followed him to a corner of the factory where two rows of metal stools faced a workbench. No backdrop. No microphone. No branding. Just stools and a bench.
"Find a seat anywhere. We'll get started in a few minutes."
Ryan sat down on a stool that wobbled slightly and set up his tripod. He was beginning to wonder if this whole thing was an elaborate prank when the factory door opened again and Frank Holloway walked in.
Ethan spotted him and immediately launched into complaints.
"Uncle Frank, what happened to 'I'll get you an audience'? It's been two hours and we've got one guy."
Frank, already defensive, fired back: "You've got some nerve blaming me. Your name is radioactive right now. When reporters hear 'Ethan Mercer,' they react like someone said 'plague.' You're lucky anyone showed up at all!"
Ryan, sitting on his wobbly stool between them, raised a hand.
"For what it's worth... the student is right about the situation. No reporter wants to risk offending Ashford Prep or getting dragged by the public for covering you sympathetically."
He paused.
"And honestly? The only reason I'm here is because your uncle's connections reached my station director."
The candor hung in the air for a moment. Then Ethan laughed — a short, genuine sound that surprised Ryan.
"Fair enough. One camera's all I need."
He checked his watch. The scheduled start time had come and gone. Nobody else was walking through that door.
Fine. One reporter. One camera. Let's make it count.
He closed the factory doors, ran a hand through his hair to push the worst of it out of his face, and straightened his clothes. He was about to be on camera. Couldn't look completely feral.
When he turned back to face Ryan, the grinning kid was gone. In his place was someone older. Steadier. A person who understood exactly what he was about to do and had no doubts about any of it.
"Mr. Calloway. Please keep the camera rolling for the entire duration. No interruptions."
Ryan's hand paused on the record button.
"What I'm about to show you is something I've spent years developing. Thousands of hours of research, testing, and refinement."
The kid's voice was calm, measured, and completely devoid of the bravado Ryan had expected. This wasn't a teenager playing scientist. This was someone who knew.
"Because what happens next — what you're about to witness — is the beginning of a new era."
Ryan pressed record.
"Hello. My name is Ethan Mercer. I'm a student from Ashford City, and today, I'm holding a press conference."
He stood behind the workbench, camera pointed at him, one reporter in the audience. The most pathetic press event in the history of Northvale Province.
And Ethan delivered it like he was addressing the United Nations.
"I imagine some of you watching this will be skeptical. What could a high school student possibly have to present? What could he have built that's worth anyone's time?"
"I understand the doubt. So I'll keep the introduction short and let the work speak for itself."
He moved to the center of the bench.
"As everyone knows, since the mid-twentieth century, humanity has lived in the nuclear age. But our application of nuclear energy remains in its infancy. Fission reactors are massive, expensive, and require extraordinary infrastructure to operate safely."
"The fundamental challenge has never been whether nuclear energy works. It's always been about scale. How do you shrink something that requires a building-sized facility into something practical? Something portable? Something that changes the equation entirely?"
He paused. Let the question sit.
"Today, I'm going to answer that question."
Behind the camera, Ryan Calloway felt his pulse quicken.
He was a layman. Physics had been his worst subject in school, and he couldn't have explained nuclear fission if someone held a gun to his head. But he understood the implications of what this kid was claiming.
If Ethan Mercer had actually miniaturized a nuclear reactor — if he'd solved the problem that had stumped research teams with billion-mark budgets and decades of institutional expertise — then this wasn't a press conference. It was a historical event.
But that was a very, very big if.
Ethan reached under the workbench and lifted a cloth-covered object onto the surface. He looked at the camera one more time.
Then he pulled the cloth away.
The small nuclear reactor sat on the bench, emitting a soft, steady, pale blue glow. It was no larger than a dessert plate — maybe ten centimeters in diameter. Compact. Elegant. Quietly, impossibly alive.
"A small nuclear reactor," Ethan said. "That's my answer."
Ryan stared.
His brain, which had been prepared for disappointment — prepared for some half-baked science fair project, a glorified battery, an embarrassing misunderstanding of basic physics — crashed headfirst into reality and couldn't process the collision.
"That's... that's a reactor?" His voice came out higher than intended. "How can it be that small?"
He knew — everyone knew — that miniaturization research was ongoing worldwide. The smallest functional fission reactor currently in existence was installed in nuclear submarines, and even that was over ten meters in diameter. It required an ocean's worth of seawater for cooling and a crew of specialists to operate.
The object on the bench in front of him was a hundred times smaller. It was sitting on a workbench in a rented factory. And it was glowing.
"Mr. Mercer — what's the energy output of this device?"
Ethan held up a hand. Patience.
"Approximately five hundred million kilowatt-hours. To put that in terms everyone can understand: that's enough electricity to power an average county for about a month."
"—"
Ryan forgot to breathe.
Five hundred million kilowatt-hours. From something the size of his hand. Built by a seventeen-year-old in a rented warehouse on the outskirts of Ashford City.
His journalistic training kicked in before his shock fully subsided, and he asked the next question on pure autopilot:
"Can you walk us through how it works? The basic principles?"
But even as the words left his mouth, something was happening inside Ryan Calloway that he hadn't felt in years.
The spark.
The one he'd carried with him out of Hartwell University. The one that had driven him into journalism in the first place — the belief that somewhere out there, a story was waiting that would matter. That would change things. That would be worth telling.
He'd buried that spark under eight years of ribbon-cuttings and fundraiser coverage and career disappointment. Buried it so deep he'd forgotten it was there.
But it was there now. Burning.
Because Ryan Calloway — the reporter nobody wanted, covering the story nobody asked for — was beginning to realize that he might be sitting on the biggest scoop in the history of Valorian journalism.
And he was the only one in the room.
For every 500 Powerstones a bonus chapter.