ACT I — SEEDS OF INFLUENCE
The Making of Elias
CHAPTER 1: THE BOY IN THE CROWD
There are boys who wait for the world to call them by name. Elias Korrin wasn't one of them.
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The assembly hall smelled of sweat, stale fabric, and rusted ceiling fans that clicked like broken metronomes. Light filtered through fractured windows, casting stripes of gold and dust across rows of restless teenagers in fading uniforms. Somewhere near the front, a girl was laughing too loud—covering up the silence of a boy who had forgotten the next line of his speech.
Elias Korrin sat at the back.
His arms were crossed, his jaw still, his gaze fixed. Not on the stage, exactly. On the boy fumbling behind the podium—stammering through promises of better cafeteria meals and more student freedom as though the student council had ever mattered. Elias watched not the words, but the patterns. The shifting posture of the crowd. The small winces, the careful claps, the moments where eyes rolled in sync.
This, he thought, was the shape of persuasion.
The applause, when it finally came, was a mercy, not approval. The next candidate strutted up. This one louder. More confident. He called for reform. Accountability. Elias could already feel the room warming to him, though the words were emptier than the last. It wasn't the message. It was the voice. The posture. The illusion of conviction.
Elias didn't envy them. He studied them.
He wasn't there to run. That had never been the plan. This assembly was just one more obligation in a school system designed to contain young minds, not sharpen them. Still, something had drawn him here. A pull. A pressure in his chest he couldn't define. It felt like gravity shifting sideways. Like the world was tilting its head toward him.
And then… the lights flickered.
Just once. Barely noticeable. But Elias noticed.
A beat later, the projector sputtered and died mid-speech. Confusion rippled across the audience. Laughter, whistles. Then, a sound from a phone in the second row—a notification. Then two more. And more. A video was circulating.
The second candidate, the confident one, froze as murmurs grew louder. Students leaned toward their phones. Elias could hear the hiss of whispers and the sharp gasp from the boy on stage as someone played the clip aloud.
It was him. Recorded secretly days before. A private conversation. Ugly things. Arrogant, crude jokes about his rivals. Disdain for the "idiots" who'd vote for him. The crowd turned fast. Like wolves catching scent. By the time a teacher rushed to cut the speakers, the damage had calcified into judgment.
The confident boy fled the stage.
And somewhere in the electric chaos, Elias smiled.
Not from cruelty.
From clarity.
---
They would say later it was sabotage. Someone had hacked into the school's server. Others claimed the video was fake—AI-generated, maybe. But deep down, everyone believed it. The mask had slipped, and nothing kills faster than exposed pretense.
What no one knew—not even Elias—was that the video hadn't leaked by chance. It had been planted. Timed. Executed. Someone with reach, resources, and a reason had played the hand.
And Elias was its target—not in ruin, but in recognition.
That night, Elias walked home alone beneath a blood-orange sky. His home was tucked deep in the old quarters of the city—where cables dangled like vines and the smell of smoke was part of the air. The kind of neighborhood where boys like him were expected to survive, not ascend.
The sun dipped as he reached the iron gate, creaking open with his usual patience. He passed his mother in the kitchen, who barely looked up from her counting—bills on the counter, receipts in a cracked folder. Her eyes were always tired lately. His father was at the hospital again, chest collapsing on itself after another coughing fit.
It was strange, Elias thought, how reality had such little regard for potential.
And yet...
That night, he sat in bed, legs folded, the day's events looping in his mind. He replayed the speech. The leak. The collapse. The way the room had turned—fast, merciless, but precise. He realized how power moved when no one claimed it, and how easily those who wore its costume could be unmasked.
He remembered the look in the confident boy's eyes—pride transmuting into terror.
And then he thought of the flicker.
The projector. The timing. The subtle rhythm of events.
No one else would've noticed. But Elias wasn't like the others.
---
He reached for his journal. Not the one given by the school—he had burned that one years ago—but the one he kept under the bed. In it, he recorded patterns. Lessons. Observations. Not emotions. Never emotions.
Tonight, he wrote:
"The crowd believes not in truth, but in timing.
Power isn't earned—it's seized in moments of silence."
He underlined it twice.
And just as he was about to close the journal, his pho
ne buzzed. Unknown number. One message.
"You saw it too. That's good. — T.F.F."