ELAN

Elan is the magical, psychokinetic energy the damned use to manipulate The Ether, which is composed of ambient nanobots in the atmosphere.  They don't quite understand that's what they're doing, they just view it as magic.  By tapping into energy reserves they carry around themselves, they use Elan, Ether, psychokinesis, microkinesis, nanobots to manipulate matter.  When working and moving Elan they visualize everything as composed of small cubes, and they move these cubes into new positions and new shapes to obtain a desired effect.  Drills, whips, beams, hammers, platforms, shields, swords, scalpels, umbrellas and claws and a million other things.  It's all a matter of arranging the cubes into a proper shape or arrangement.

An engineer visualizes this "building blocks" view of reality as "the Blue" short for the blueprint, and it resembles a sort of heat vision, infrared spectrum of light they can see, showing them the movement of Elan and the matter they can break apart and manipulate.

Different specialized engineer breeds/schools are only able to manipulate certain kinds of matter, however, and they can only see the shape breakdown of that particular type of matter.  Some only see stone, some only water, some only plant life, some only the dead, some only their own soul, radiating Elan from their stomach.  Some rogue engineers can see everything, and splatter globs of pure Elan all over the place, smashing the area to pieces.

A further issue is that manipulating the blocks causes some of it to rub off on the wielder.  The bigger the movements, the more of this dust accumulates, warping the body in ways that are damaging.  Forming a conduit with matter causes it to flow back into the wielder.  Simple things like shields and scrying and cloaks, basic utilities do not do much harm to the wielder.  But big movements do.

The source of all Elan is Heck City.  It is generated by the minds trapped in the Cauldron at the bottom level, crushed and squeezed like grapes or olives in a press.  As Heck City grows, it requires more energy to sustain itself, and grows heavier on the cauldron, crushing it. It flows out through their calcified remains in the physical world, which are collected in massive warehouse vaults.  Characters called Moon Men can collect enormous amounts of this stuff, and their only power is to take and to give it and move it around.  They are the only ones who can move massive quantities around, and like everything else, some are more gifted at managing these sums than others.  Some village bankers just keep a little around.  On the other end of the spectrum are enormously fat money managers carrying an entire vault's worth of elan.

These individuals can get it from the physical word, from vaults.  Or they can get it in Heck City from other bankers being led to them by a seer guide, transfering the collected elan from the vault to the mobile banker.  He'll then wake up with more elan to distribute, or, vice verse to give to the bank which they take back and deposit into the vault.

Engineers, seers, and regular folk go to their local banker to get elan, and he will invest their corporeal with Elan.  They pay for it with coinage, hard currency.  Bonded engineers of course get distributed whatever they need in order to do their work with vouchers.  Sponsored seers get it this way too.  This Elan is burned away by using it, until its gone.  If one has no money, but desperately needs Elan (which everyone does!) they are allowed to buy indulgences, AKA credit, and acquire Elan that way, essentially going negative on balance.  The vault the banker belongs to records the balance on the contract and holds it.  When the individual dies owing, the vault lays claim to their soul.  This balance must be repaid but it quickly becomes impossible to do so as more debt is piled up.  When people die owing this balance of Elan, their contract stipulates they must go to the Cauldron and pay it back with interest.

Like any commodity, the cash value of Elan goes up and down, but mostly it just goes up, like the cost of living.  Wages, and money making power stays flat or goes down for most.  So for most, and many, and the underclass referred to as The Less, they have no way to afford an essential utility, and automatically go into debt to afford basic life functions like sleep.  THe system is rigged against them, to bind them to the ship's mast in the cauldron, whipped for eternity to power the system they are deprived of, for the benefit of the powerful.  They become in themselves a commodity to be traded.  Their lives are a security instrument.

For the warrior class, Elan comes into play as a magical strength augmentation.  Banks or other moneyed institutions can "invest" in an enobled Knight (ennoblement is connotated with investment), and most Knights have a breed of parasite that can receive this investment.  The tradeoff is that investment plops a physical weight on the knight.  Investment can be 30 pounds, 50 pounds.  At the very high end it can be 200 pounds of destructive kinetic power, and many Dycortique armor suits require huge amounts of investment just to function and move around.  The very insane and rich and powerful will be bloated with 1000 pounds of investment, their muscles swelling to cope over the long term with the strength needed to carry an extra 1000 pounds.  This enables them to wield massive, heavy weaponry.  Full size rail cannons.  Depleted Uranium swords and axes.  Lances half the length of a telephone pole.