Drake

Drake is an infamous 14-year-old hacker from Zone 1 and a frenemy to Scillia. He is extremely smart but prefers to stay quiet in his hacker lair. Most see him as a dangerous outcast. The only times he goes out are to go to school, to mine the Great Filters for loot, and to hang out with his small circle of friends.

Drake is the system-seer — the one who notices the coopetition structure of Veris, who reverse-engineers the Lisk's attention patterns, who uses the word "garbage collected" clinically while others can barely say "collected" without flinching. He sees Line 2 of the Tablet — "none of this is real" — as confirmation that the entire world is exploitable code. He is fascinated by the Great Filters not for their riches but because they're the seams where different world versions overlap, and seams can be hacked.

He has a complicated relationship with the Origin Tablet. He respects its cryptographic legitimacy — a zero hash means computational resources beyond conceptualization — but treats it as a system specification, not scripture. He's tried to crack the Noumenon. He failed. This bothers him more than he admits.

He calls himself the "sigma oni-chan" and his confidence far exceeds his actual abilities. His ultimate goal is to hack the bitemark — reverse-engineer how the Lisk selects who to render at full resolution, and give himself supernal abilities without the Lisk's leash.