Ryan Calloway walked into the Ashford City Television Station at 4:47 PM, camera bag over one shoulder, and went straight to the deputy director's office without stopping at his desk.
He didn't knock. Just pushed the door open, set the camera on the desk, and hit play.
"Sir. You need to see this."
Deputy Director Garrett Cole leaned back in his chair and watched the footage with the polite disinterest of a man humoring an employee he didn't particularly value. The expression lasted about ninety seconds. Then his brow furrowed. Then he paused the video, rewound it, and watched the same thirty-second segment again.
Then he looked up at Ryan with an expression that was less impressed and more concerned.
"Calloway. What am I looking at?"
"A working nuclear fusion reactor. Palm-sized. Built by a seventeen-year-old in a rented factory on the outskirts of the city. I watched ten industrial generators run off it for over an hour at full capacity. The footage is unedited."
Cole stared at him for a long time.
"You expect me to believe that a high school dropout — the same kid who's been all over the news for scamming his uncle and insulting his teachers — has single-handedly achieved nuclear fusion? Something that every government on the planet has failed to do with billions of marks in funding?"
"I was there, sir. I saw it with my own—"
"Calloway." Cole's voice went flat. "I brought you in here as a courtesy because of your uncle's connection to the station director. Don't repay that courtesy by trying to sell me fabricated footage."
"It's not fabricated—"
"A fusion reactor the size of a phone. Built by a teenager. In a warehouse." Cole ticked each point off on his fingers. "Do you hear yourself? This is either a scam or a science project that got out of hand. Either way, if we broadcast it and it turns out to be fake, this station becomes a national joke."
He pushed the camera back across the desk.
"Go home. Get some rest. We'll talk about your next assignment on Monday."
Ryan took the camera and left.
He spent the next three hours going office to office. The programming director. The head of news. The senior producer. He showed the footage to every person at the station with the authority to put it on air.
Not one of them believed him.
The responses ranged from dismissive ("Calloway, stick to what you're good at") to openly hostile ("Are you trying to get us sued? This is clearly staged") to patronizing ("Look, I understand you've been frustrated with your assignments, but fabricating stories isn't the answer").
By 8 PM, Ryan walked out of the station's front doors into the evening air and stood on the sidewalk for a long time.
The frustration wasn't new. He'd spent eight years swallowing this exact flavor of dismissal. But tonight it tasted different, because tonight he knew. He'd stood in that factory. He'd watched those generators spin up. He'd seen the numbers climb on ten screens simultaneously while a glowing disc the size of a dessert plate powered all of them without breaking a sweat.
It was real. And not a single person in that building would listen.
He got in his car, drove home, sat down at his kitchen table, and opened his laptop.
If the station wouldn't broadcast it, he'd do it himself.
Ryan Calloway had spent eight years as a bottom-tier reporter, but he hadn't spent those years doing nothing. The assignments nobody wanted had taken him to every corner of the media landscape. Local bloggers, independent journalists, social media creators, online news aggregators. He'd built relationships with all of them, because when you're the guy covering school fundraisers and ribbon-cuttings, the only people who return your calls are other people the industry has forgotten.
Those forgotten people had audiences. Small ones, individually. But networked together? Significant reach.
He also had savings. Not much. Eight years of a junior reporter's salary, minus rent, minus the money he sent home to his parents every month. But enough.
He uploaded the footage to every platform he had access to. Then he started making calls. Every contact. Every favor. Every relationship he'd built over nearly a decade of thankless work. He asked each of them to share the video, boost it, repost it, comment on it. He spent money on promotion where calls alone wouldn't cut it.
By 2 AM, his savings account was significantly lighter, his phone battery was dead, and his voice was raw.
He plugged in the phone, made a cup of coffee he was too tired to drink, and sat in front of his laptop watching the view counter.
It climbed.
Slowly at first. A few hundred. A thousand. Then faster. Five thousand. Twenty thousand. The algorithm caught the scent of engagement and started pushing the video into recommendation feeds. A hundred thousand. Half a million.
By sunrise, the counter read twenty million.
And it was still climbing.
Ryan hadn't slept, but he'd never been more awake in his life.
Twenty million views. The video of Ethan Mercer's press conference — filmed in a rented factory with one camera, two stools, and a workbench — had been seen by twenty million people overnight. The comment sections were a war zone: skeptics screaming "fake," believers screaming back, physicists and engineers weighing in with technical analysis, media outlets scrambling to figure out where the footage had come from.
The name "Ethan Mercer" was the number-one trending topic across every major platform in the Republic of Valoria.
Ryan was still staring at the screen when his phone rang.
The caller ID read: Deputy Director — Ashford City TV.
Garrett Cole.
Ryan picked up.
"CALLOWAY!"
The volume nearly blew out his speaker.
"Do you have ANY idea what you've done?! Going behind the station's back to release footage — footage shot on station equipment, on a station assignment — to social media?!"
"Do you understand the liability? The reputational risk? If that video turns out to be—"
"It's not fake."
"—fabricated, the blowback will — what?"
"It's not fake, sir. I told you that yesterday. I told everyone at the station yesterday. Nobody listened."
Silence on the other end. Then Cole's voice came back, colder now. More controlled.
"Calloway, regardless of whether the content is real or not, you violated station protocol by releasing footage without authorization. Effective immediately, you're demoted to intern reporter. Report to—"
"No."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Excuse me?"
"I said no." Ryan's voice was steady. Quiet. The voice of a man who'd made his decision hours ago and was only now saying it out loud. "Forget the demotion. I'm done. I've spent seven years being exploited as the guy who does everyone's grunt work because I don't have the right last name or the right connections."
"Today you don't need to demote me. I quit."
"But remember this, Director Cole. There's going to come a day — soon — when you'll wish you'd listened to me. And on that day, I want you to think about this phone call."
He hung up.
The phone rang again immediately. Ryan declined the call, blocked the number, and set the phone face-down on the table.
Then he picked it back up, because another call was coming in. Unknown number, local area code.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Ryan. It's me. You left your number on your business card."
Ethan Mercer's voice came through the speaker, and Ryan felt the tension in his shoulders release for the first time in twenty-four hours.
"Mr. Mercer! I posted the video for you. It's at twenty million and counting."
On the other end, Ethan laughed. Linda had woken him up at dawn, shoving her phone in his face with the video already playing, the view counter ticking upward like a stopwatch.
He'd spent the first ten minutes reading comments. The internet was split down the middle. Half the commenters thought it was an elaborate hoax. The other half were cautiously losing their minds.
"There's no way a teenager built a fusion reactor. This is viral marketing for some movie."
"I'm a third-year physics graduate student and I've watched this video frame by frame. The generator output data is consistent with genuine high-capacity operation. If this is fake, it's the most sophisticated fake I've ever seen."
"This is the same 'black sheep' kid from Ashford Prep? The one Thornton called a delinquent on live TV? LOL."
"Everyone calling this fake — explain the generators. Ten industrial units running simultaneously for over an hour. You can't stage that with a battery pack and some LED lights."
The skeptics were loud, but Ethan wasn't worried about them. He was thinking about the people who weren't commenting. The quiet ones. The academics, the government researchers, the defense ministry analysts who would watch this footage and recognize — even through the low resolution and shaky framing — that the physics was real.
Because laypeople argued about whether a video was fake. Experts argued about the implications if it wasn't.
And for technology this significant, even a one-in-ten-thousand chance of it being legitimate would be enough to trigger a government response. Inspectors. Verification teams. Official channels.
Once the state confirmed the reactor was real, the rest would take care of itself.
"Ryan." Ethan's voice pulled the reporter out of whatever anxious spiral he'd been descending into. "I know what you did to make this happen. The connections, the money, the risk. I want you to know that I don't take that lightly."
On the other end, Ryan was quiet for a moment.
"Also," Ethan added, "drop the 'Mr. Mercer' thing. It makes me feel like I'm forty. Just call me Ethan."
Ryan laughed. It was a tired, raw sound, but it was genuine.
"Only if you stop calling me 'Mr. Calloway.' It's Ryan."
"Deal."
A pause. Then Ethan said, more seriously:
"Ryan, what you did last night — going against your station, spending your own money, putting your career on the line for footage that everyone told you was fake — that's not something most people would do. Most people would've filed the story away and moved on."
"You didn't. And I won't forget that."
It was a simple statement. No dramatic promises, no flowery language. But Ryan, sitting at his kitchen table with an empty coffee cup and a resignation still ringing in his ears, felt the weight of it settle into his chest.
He'd burned every bridge at the station. His savings were gutted. His career in traditional media was, in all likelihood, over.
But he had twenty million views, a phone full of messages from outlets begging for an interview, and the direct number of the kid who'd just built the most important piece of technology in human history.
For the first time in eight years, Ryan Calloway felt like a journalist.
For every 500 Powerstones a bonus chapter.