] Blake Hazar — 10:33 AM — 24 AUG 2316 [
Blake walked down the stairs from the alley into his basement home. It didn't qualify as a house anymore—nor did many people's abodes. Over the past hundred years, as Beasts, Demons, and Spirit Animals became common and the world's population fell to thirty million (fifteen million in the Western Hemisphere), people were forced to live closer together; rural life had all but vanished.
Blake, his girlfriend Karina, and their friend Bjorn shared the basement unit. Unlike many nearby homes, the below‑street space let them expand, and the three of them were in the middle of an active addition. As TOTEs—unregistered, yes, but capable—they could remove sections of the earth's crust to make room for their projects.
Blake was in his element—literally. An Elemental TOTE with no recorded grade when he opened his Third Eye, he could bend earth within roughly a twenty‑meter radius. At first he could coax only a few kilos of stone to move; with practice he trained his magic like a muscle and now commanded nearly a ton of solid rock, increasingly precise in shaping it.
After entering the dwelling, Blake moved through the meticulously kept facade of a one‑bedroom, one‑bath apartment to the fridge. He flipped a latch above it, wheeled the appliance aside, and revealed a trapdoor in the floor. Using the compressed‑air sliders, he lifted it easily; a dimly lit stair led down to a black metal door. He went inside, closed the trapdoor behind him, then pulled a rope to roll the fridge back into place.
He smiled as he reached the door and opened it into an entirely different world. In the living room Karina spun between a whirl of music and cleaning, headphones on as she danced toward the laundry room. From deeper in the house came loud cracking and the groan of shifting rock. Assuming it was Bjorn, Blake went to join him and help dig out the next room.
Blake felt at home moving through their living space of color and clutter: old posters, records, and art projects lined the walls. Plush sofas and mismatched armchairs circled a large feed monitor that morphed into a diner‑esque kitchen, and finally he reached an earthen doorway. The cracking, breaking, and groaning of the earth had grown louder as he approached.
He stepped through the earthen doorway and found Bjorn with his back to him, mid‑swing. Average height with short, dark hair, Bjorn was using his magic to smash the rock and soil ahead of him. Like Blake and Karina, he was an unregistered TOTE—but his power didn't fit the usual labels; they assumed it was a Reality type. He manifested a semi‑translucent kite‑shield roughly two meters tall; nothing the three friends had tried could penetrate it.
Bjorn could hurl the shield with terrifying speed and force inside a roughly three‑meter sphere of influence. He was doing exactly that as Blake entered the half‑finished room.
Blake flexed, focused, and worked the earth. Within minutes he compacted soil and stone into a tidy five‑by‑five‑meter chamber. Bjorn stopped swinging and turned, laughing at Blake's handiwork. They hadn't opened a new room in a while; Bjorn hadn't seen Blake push past small tricks in some time.
"You could've told me you didn't need help," Bjorn sputtered. "I wasted time and energy."
Blake leaned back against the new wall, grinning. "I did need your help. I could barely compact all that on my own — you smashing it just before I came actually saved me time. Anyway, Liam pinged my CAD earlier; he said he'll be here by two a.m."
"Fuck yeah, dude," Bjorn said. "I'm excited. You think he'll be ready when he gets here?"
Blake laughed. "If anyone's ready, it's him. But he's been a TOTE longer than any of us — he might give us one hell of a training arc."
The last time Liam had been on leave was two years ago. He'd brought Ether in his pocket dimension and taught them what he could about centering reality. Since then contact had been limited to CAD messages—heavily monitored, so they rarely discussed TOTE matters. Liam didn't even know for sure whether they'd all fully opened their Third Eyes.
Blake and Liam had been best friends since kindergarten, fantasizing about freedom, magic, and plans. Liam was the first to acquire Ether and finish the process; he helped them procure a rare, non‑Conquered sample from the AFF. That made their magic harder to trace—Conquered Ether left a signature demons could track, but innate "gifts" did not always.
As a kid Blake had toyed with a theory: Conquered Ether and raw Ether weren't the same. Conquered Ether acted like an effectively infinite source tied to the splits demons spawned from, while raw Ether was finite—the scraps and relics wars had been fought over. School had drilled a different story into him—Ether as some kind of cycle—but the textbook explanations never sat right. Demons weren't mere precipitation of Ether's power; reality felt messier than any water‑cycle metaphor.
From Blake's research and experience, raw Ether and Conquered Ether manifest very differently. Raw Ether feels organic—an inward growth that unfolds across axes of skill and self, guiding a TOTE toward a truer, broader version of themselves. Conquered Ether, by contrast, behaves like a boiler: tightly structured, externally driven, and hungry—its use incentivizes accumulation and escalation, turning power into a competitive struggle for more.
Blake followed Bjorn out of the new room and headed for the living area to join Karina at the feed monitor. Excitement warmed him—Liam's plan had him fully on board. For two years they'd been preparing to attempt what most called impossible. Now it was almost time; he wondered how many of them were truly ready.