Singed

April 18, 2009

The twisted, unfathomable madman known across Runeterra as Singed began his life as an ordinary man in Piltover. As a child, he displayed a prodigious intellect and a boundless sense of curiosity. The principles and interactions of the natural world fascinated him, eventually leading him to pursue a scholarship at the prestigious University of Piltover.

It did not take long for his brilliance to be recognized.

Singed’s research into the natural sciences was impressive—groundbreaking even—but he found that Piltover’s attention had been stolen away ever since the discovery of hextech, and the opportunities the hybrid of magic and technology presented. Singed found himself on the outside looking in, seeing magic as a crutch leaned upon by those who were either incapable of understanding how the world worked, or simply didn’t care enough to find out. He became a vocal critic of what he saw as a new and ignorant fad within the university.

Singed instead delved into the chemical potential of alchemy, and despite the boon his intellect garnered for the field, his efforts earned him little more than the ridicule of his fellow academics. Before long, his funding had dried up, and he was forced out of the university, and out of Piltover. Singed had no choice but to begin a new life—in Zaun.

In the undercity, life was cheap, and the demand for innovation high. Singed was quickly able to find work in the emergent chemtech industries, lending his skills and relentless drive for a variety of increasingly unscrupulous clients. His experiments, often of questionable ethicality, cast a wide net: augmenting humans, animals, and even fusions of the two, among countless other endeavours. Nonetheless, he pushed his new field forward at an incredibly rapid pace, but often at the expense of his own health. Understanding better than anyone the chemical needs of a living body, he engineered stimulants that could keep him alert and working for weeks at a time, before he would collapse, shivering and feeble, and sleep for days on end.

Singed’s obsessive, tireless efforts as an alchymist meant he found no shortage of patrons and clients, eventually including even the warmasons of Noxus. The gossip was rampant across both Piltover and Zaun that the empire and their Grand General were on the verge of bankruptcy from paying Piltover’s extortionate tithes for military passage to the campaigns in northern Shurima, and soon they might be looking elsewhere for new, less expensive conquests. So long as they paid his fees, Singed didn’t care.

After years of smaller, off-and-on projects, Singed was approached by a Noxian military commander named Emystan, who contracted the alchymist to help her break the bitter stalemate of the war in Ionia. She needed a new kind of weapon from him, the like of which no one had ever seen before… and she could make him a wealthy man indeed.

Putting aside all other concerns, Singed poured all of his intellect, knowledge, and experience into the synthesis of this new weapon. The result of his efforts was an alchemical fire that was unstable, volatile, and utterly horrifying. When it was finally unleashed in Ionia against the enemies of Noxus, it burned hot enough to fracture stone, and tainted the earth around it with dense, metallic poisons so completely that almost nothing would grow there. Even Emystan’s own allies were appalled, though not quite enough to name her and Singed as war criminals.

Now, without any restraint for capital, materials, or even subjects to experiment upon, Singed nonetheless feels the weight of years upon him. His most recent work has taken a decidedly more biological angle, and of a far more dramatic scope. A recent exercise in the melding of animal, man, and machine left his laboratories in ruins, his face held together with filthy bandages, and his subject freely prowling the streets of Zaun, yet Singed remains undeterred.

He has already mastered the destruction of flesh, and thus now has turned to the preservation and transformation of it… and perhaps even the possibility that life need not end with an inescapable death.

More stories

Warwick

Warwick is a monster who hunts the gray alleys of Zaun. Transformed by agonizing experiments, his body is fused with an intricate system of chambers and pumps, machinery filling his veins with alchemical rage. Bursting out of the shadows, he preys upon those criminals who terrorize the city’s depths. Warwick is drawn to blood, and driven mad by its scent. None who spill it can escape him.
Though many think of Warwick as no more than a beast, buried beneath the fury lies the mind of a man—a gangster who put down his blade and took up a new name to live a better life. But no matter how hard he tried to move on, he could never escape the sins of his past.
Memories of that time come to Warwick in flashes before they’re inevitably lost, replaced by searing echoes of the days he spent strapped to a table in Singed’s lab, the mad chemist’s face looming above him.
His world a haze of pain, Warwick could not recall how he fell into Singed’s grasp… and even struggled to remember a time before the suffering began. The scientist patiently carved into him, installing pumps and hoses to inject chemicals into his veins, seeking what an alchemist always seeks: transmutation.
Singed would reveal his subject’s true nature—the deadly beast hidden within a “good man.”
The chemicals pumped into Warwick’s veins boosted his healing, allowing Singed to gradually and painfully reshape the man. When his hand was severed in the course of the experiment, Singed was able to reattach it, augmenting it with powerful, pneumatic claws, and bringing Warwick ever closer to his true potential.
A chemical chamber was installed on Warwick’s back and integrated with his nervous system. Whenever he felt rage, or hate, or fear, it would drive liquid fury deeper into his veins, fully awakening the beast within.
He was forced to endure it all, every cut of the mad chemist’s scalpel. Pain, Singed assured his subject, was necessary; it would prove to be the “great catalyst” of his transformation. Though the chemicals enabled Warwick’s body to heal through most of the physical damage, his mind was shattered by the unending agony.
Warwick struggled to recall a single memory from his past... All he could see was blood. But then he heard a little girl screaming. Screaming something he couldn’t understand. It sounded like a name.
He’d already forgotten his. He sensed that was for the best.
Pain soon overwhelmed all other thoughts. Blood was the only thing left.
Though his body and mind were broken after weeks on the slab, Warwick stubbornly resisted the chemicals transmuting him. Toxins leaked from his eyes in place of tears. He coughed up gobs of caustic phlegm that sizzled against his chest, before burning shallow holes in the floor of the lab. Restrained against the cold steel of the table, Warwick writhed in agony for hours on end, until his body finally gave out.
With the untimely death of his subject, Singed disposed of the corpse in a charnel pit deep in Zaun’s Sump, before turning his mind to the next experiment.
But death proved to be the true catalyst needed for Warwick’s transformation. As he lay cooling atop the pile of corpses, the chemicals could finally complete their work. The chamber on his back began to pump.
His body contorted unnaturally, bones bending and snapping, teeth growing, sinews tearing and then healing with a faint alchemical glow, dead flesh replaced by something new and powerful. By the time his heart started beating once again, the man Warwick had been and the lives he’d lived were gone.
He awoke to hunger. Everything hurt. Only one thing mattered.
He needed blood.
First, it was the blood of a nearby sump-scrapper, rooting through the charnel pile. And then a priestess of the Glorious Evolved, seeking a member of her flock. Then a Piltovan apprenta taking a shortcut, and a philter-faced merchant avoiding a gang, and a dram-dealer, and a tallyman, and a chem punk...
He set up a den not far from a place that itched at the back of his now-animal mind. There, he continued the slaughter, not caring who fell to his claws. So long as blood dripped from gnashing teeth, he would feel nothing but a smear of red on his conscience, the hunger in his gut overwhelming any concern for his random victims.
Yet, even as he surrendered to the beast, glimpses of his past began to haunt him. He saw a bearded man reflected in the eyes of a beggar as he tore out his throat. The other man looked somber, somehow familiar; there were scars on his arms. Sometimes, as he fed in dark alleys on stray gangers, the flash of knives would remind him of an old blade covered in blood. Blood passing from the blade to his hands. From his hands, to everything he touched. Sometimes, he remembered the girl again.
And still there was blood.
It had always been there, he realized, his entire life, and nothing he did could wash it off. He’d left so many scars that even if he didn’t remember his past, the city would. When he peered into the eyes of Zaun’s criminals—the gang bosses, murderers, and thieves—he saw himself. The chamber on his back would fill his body with hate. His claws tore out of his fingers.
He hunted.
No longer content to kill indiscriminately, Warwick now pursues those already covered in the stench of blood. Just as he was the day he was dragged to Singed’s door.
He still wonders if he’d truly wanted this. He can’t remember details, but he remembers enough. Enough to know Singed had been right all along—the good man had been a lie, before disaster had burned it away, revealing the truth.
He is Warwick. He is a killer.
And there are so many killers to hunt.
Ezreal

Born and raised in a wealthy neighborhood of Piltover, Ezreal was always a curious child. His parents were renowned archaeologists, so he became used to their long absences from the family home, often fantasizing about joining them on their travels. He loved hearing tales of high adventure, and shared their desire to fill in the blank spaces on every map.
He was often left in the care of his uncle, the esteemed Professor Lymere. The professor did not enjoy having to wrangle such a rash and unruly child, and assigned the strictest tutors to teach him subjects including advanced cartography, hextech mechanics, and the ancient histories of Runeterra. But the boy had a knack for simply absorbing information, and found studying a waste of time. He passed assessments easily, with little or no preparation, infuriating his uncle and giving himself more time to roam the university grounds. Ezreal took great pleasure in evading the campus wardens, navigating the tunnels beneath the lecture halls as easily as the library rooftops. He even practiced lockpicking, sneaking into his teachers’ offices and rearranging their belongings for his own amusement.
Whenever Ezreal’s parents returned to Piltover, his father in particular would tell him all they had seen, and their plans for future expeditions—none more ambitious and secretive than the search for the lost tomb of Ne’Zuk, a Shuriman tyrant who was said to be able to jump instantly from one place to another. If Ezreal’s father could learn whatever sorcery Ne’Zuk had possessed, he joked that wherever he was traveling, he would simply drop into Piltover for dinner with his son each night.
As the boy grew older, the time between his parents’ visits grew longer until, one year, they did not return at all. Professor Lymere tearfully admitted that they had most likely perished, somewhere out in the desert.
But Ezreal could not accept that. They had been too careful in their preparations. They must still be out there, somewhere…
Abandoning his reluctant studies, the budding explorer would strike out on his own. He knew, if he was ever to find his mother and father, he had to start with the final resting place of Ne’Zuk. He spent weeks secretly gathering supplies from the university—celestial diagrams, translations of runic sigils, guides on the burial rites of Shurima, and a pair of protective goggles. Leaving a note of farewell for his uncle, he snuck onto a supply ship bound for Nashramae.
Following his mother’s meticulous field notes, he crossed the Great Sai with merchant caravans heading south. For many months, he delved into cavernous ruins beneath the shifting sands, relishing the freedom of the unknown, facing unspeakable horrors that guarded hidden chambers. With each step, Ezreal imagined himself following his parents’ path, drawing ever closer to solving the mystery of their disappearance.
Finally, he managed what they evidently had not. Beneath the newer mausoleum of some unnamed emperor, he uncovered the tomb of Ne’Zuk.
The great sarcophagus lay empty, save for a gleaming bronze gauntlet, with a bright, crystalline matrix at its center. As soon as Ezreal laid his hands upon it, the tomb itself seemed to turn upon him, with cunningly wrought traps and wards laid down thousands of years ago. With scarcely a thought, he donned the gauntlet and blasted his way through, even teleporting the last hundred yards back to the hidden entrance before the whole structure collapsed in a plume of sand and masonry dust.
Breathing hard, Ezreal looked down at the gauntlet as it hummed along with his heartbeat. He could feel it siphoning and amplifying his own essence. This, he realized, was a fearsome weapon of a previous age. A weapon fit for a god-warrior of Shurima, and the perfect tool for an explorer.
Soon after returning to Piltover, Ezreal found himself bounding from adventure to adventure. From lost cities to mystical temples, his nose for treasure-seeking led him to places most university professors could only read about on maps, and his reputation began to grow. Naturally, to Ezreal’s mind, these tales rarely conveyed the true scope and scale of his exploits… but they did give him an idea. If he could make a name for himself as the greatest adventurer in the world, then his parents would surely return, and seek him out in person.
From the untamed borders of Noxus and Demacia, to the seedy depths of Zaun, and the frozen wilderness of the Freljord—Ezreal chases fame and glory, uncovering long-lost artifacts and solving the riddles of history. While some may dispute the details of his anecdotes, or call his methods into question, he never answers his critics.
After all, they’re clearly just jealous.
To Herd A Cat

Dana Luery Shaw

“Finally, I will show everyone what I am truly capable of.”
The professor flipped the first switch. A crackling light flashed in the laboratory, illuminating the gearwork tools scattered haphazardly across the floor, the notes and hand-drawn blueprints pasted over the dingy walls, and the thin layer of white hair dusted everywhere. The light glinted off his impish grin before fading into darkness.
“They all said I was mad. Mad!”
He paused. Well... come to think of it, I don’t believe the word “mad” was ever used. “Annoying” is more prevalent. “A dud.” “Disappointing.” “Never going to get tenure.”
Ah, yes, that was it.
“They said I would never get tenure! Tenure!” he shouted into the gloom. “That my inventions were merely expensive paperweights! Well... no more!”
He reached to flip the second switch, but it stuck a little. Probably from when Mauczka spilled coffee all over it. It took another three tries before it, too, fell before his awesome and terrible power. A low hum vibrated through the laboratory.
“For too long, I have been disrespected, my ambition unappreciated, and my work criminally underfunded by my so-called colleagues at the University of Piltover’s Engineering Department. Do they know how hard it is to climb up the ladder of academia without the support of a wealthy family or patron? Of course not! If they did, they would recognize the disadvantage I have had to overcome to rise through the ranks like... like cream atop milk!”
At those words, a happy trill sounded from the other side of the room, but the professor’s attention was entirely on flipping the third switch. The hum grew louder, and the lights began to flicker. A soft blue glow emanated from the opposite wall.
The machine. The professor’s pride and joy. The thing he would be forever remembered for. Ready, finally, after all these years of experimentation, of failure, of pulling out the last of his remaining hair, of starting again from scratch, over and over and over. Ready to be tested.
And with all three switches flipped, the machine was prepared to enter its second phase. The professor walked slowly across the room, savoring the feeling of superiority as he...
Wait. Where was Mauczka? She was supposed to be strapped into her chair.
“Oh, for... Mauczka? Mauczka!” He dropped to his hands and knees as he searched for her under his work bench. When he heard a soft mrrow from beneath the bed against the far wall, he sighed and peered under it. There lay Mauczka, the small white cat who was the professor’s truest companion, curled up just far enough away that he had to squirm halfway beneath the bed to grab her.
Mauczka kept him company while he worked in this abysmally small laboratory-slash-bedroomless apartment, and she always listened when he needed to rant about something inane his colleagues had done or said, often nodding along or offering a supportive chirp. All she asked was that he remember to feed her on time. When he didn’t, her keening whine would remind him. If he left her wailing for too long, the neighbors would pound on the door or send annoyed notes via pneuma-tube.
“Mauczka,” he said, his voice softening as he tried to place her in the harness again. Was she always this wiggly? “Mauczka, I need you to stay here. What about a treat?”
Mauczka eyed the professor warily as he reached into his pocket and offered her a small piece of the pastry he had been saving for when he was hungry. The wariness did not let up as she grabbed it from him and dropped it to the ground in her usual pre-eating ritual. Soon enough, though, she allowed him to strap her into the harness, making a pouty face when he replaced the brassy metal cap atop her head.
On the opposite side of the machine, the professor, buzzing with excitement, strapped himself into a similar harness and donned his own metal cap, covered in crystalline artifacts. He had spent the better part of a decade painstakingly researching them, scouring much of the world for the ones with the correct frequency resonance, then experimenting with them until he got the combination of their powers and intensities just right.
He could have finished in three years, had the dean given him proper funding. Of course, utilizing some of Zaun’s volatile technology might have helped speed things up as well, but that was unthinkable at the university.
The professor turned his attention back to the metal caps. Several of the artifacts lit up, while others beeped. “It’s all coming together now. When I pull this lever”—he gestured to the large lever built into the machine, practicing for his presentation to Dean Svopalit—“I will prove that the mind is not rooted in the body at all! That the brain is merely a housing for the mind! That the mind... can be easily switched between bodies, with no loss of identity. And everyone,” he added in a low mutter, “will see just how wrong they’ve been about me.”
Yes. Once he pulled this lever, no one would ever forget to include him in interdepartmental memos again. No one would mock his failed experiments, or refuse to let him teach the good classes, or give him the runaround for six months instead of letting him argue his case for why he deserved additional grant money.
Finally, Professor Andrej von Yipp would be given the appreciation he deserved.
Heart beating wildly, he pulled the lever. He felt a jolt travel through his body as his eyes rolled back in his head. Mauczka’s wail rang in his ears...
... and then he blinked, adjusting to a new brightness.
When did I turn the lights on?
He wondered if he had lost consciousness. He wondered how much time had passed. He... oh, goodness, what was that horrible smell?
Von Yipp’s nose twitched just before he sneezed, three times. But it didn’t sound right. Not only was it loud, hitting his ears harder than any time he’d sneezed before, but it was undeniably... adorable.
It was an adorable, tiny sneeze.
Von Yipp looked down at his hands... no, his paws... Mauczka’s paws...
“I’ve done it!” he tried to say, but it came out as a satisfied purr. Aha! I can only make cat sounds now. Touching his fuzzy little face with his new paws, von Yipp laughed—rather, he chittered—in delight. “I’ve successfully switched bodies with—”
He suddenly recognized the odor he smelled: smoke. Not good. Potentially very bad, in fact. He pushed the metal cap off his head and saw that several of the artifacts were beginning to fracture, melt, or sizzle into steam. And about half of them were irreplaceable, one-off pieces that could not be recreated.
“Oh gods,” cried von Yipp, the words coming out as a formless caterwaul. “We must switch back before the artifacts are destroyed!” He slid the cap back on his head, reached his paw over toward the lever—thoughtfully installed at a level suitable for a human inhabiting a cat’s body—and tried to pull it down.
It held fast.
Von Yipp stretched as far as he knew he could based on his experiences in a human body, and then he stretched even more. He slinked out of the harness and put all of his weight onto the lever. But it was metal and slippery, and he had no way of holding on to it without the cap slipping off.
“Drat!” he yowled. “This would be so much easier to operate with thumbs!”
That’s when he realized—his human body still had thumbs. He just happened not to be in it at the moment. Somebody was, though. And she could use those thumbs to pull the lever and switch them back before it was too late.
“Mauczka!” he trilled, hoping to catch her attention. He couldn’t see her on the other side of the machine. “Mauczka? Do you understand me?”
A scream was the only response. Von Yipp slid the cap off his head again and ran around to the front of the machine. There, he saw his human body leaning forward, straining against the harness, face panicked.
“I need to get out!” Mauczka shouted in von Yipp’s voice, sweat cascading down her balding head. “I don’t want to be in here!”
She’s already picked up human language, von Yipp thought as he stalked over to her. How very unusual. “You can press the button in the middle of the harness to release yourself!” he meowed, hoping she could comprehend.
Mauczka looked down at the harness in confusion. She tried to lower her head to the button, presumably to bite it, but this feat could not be achieved with von Yipp’s relatively inflexible body. “You do it!” she cried.
Oh good, von Yipp thought as he leapt onto her lap and pushed the button. At least she can understand me. The harness released Mauczka right away. She bent forward and tried to stand on her human hands and feet, but fell to the ground gracelessly, limbs akimbo.
“Now I need your help with this lever!” von Yipp wailed as he ran back to the cat side of the machine.
“No, I’ll be over here.”
“What?” von Yipp hissed. He whipped his head back to see Mauczka lying on the ground, unconcerned.
“I don’t want to get up.”
“You have to!” von Yipp spat at her. But then he felt a drip coming from above him, and...
Oh no. The thaumatic catalyzer had completely melted. He looked down at the floor and found shards of two other artifacts that had disintegrated. Even if Mauczka pulled the lever in record time, it wouldn’t be enough.
He sat on the ground beside the machine. I... I’m stuck in this cat body. Dismayed, von Yipp looked to Mauczka, who was trying and failing to crawl under the bed. And Mauczka... he realized with growing horror, is stuck in mine.
A wave of catastrophizing anxiety washed over him, culminating in spasms as he coughed up a disgusting hairball. Everyone would find out that von Yipp, for all his big talk about the invention that would change the course of history, had instead made himself a cat. What an idiot, they would say. He would never live it down. Forget about tenure—his colleagues would laugh him out of the Engineering Department. He’d have no money and no way to earn it. He’d lose the apartment and live as a stray cat on the streets, and be forced to learn to hunt rats down in Zaun...
There was no way forward.
It was during this awful epiphany that Mauczka screamed as loud as she could.
Von Yipp began to panic. Had his body been hurt? Would he lose an arm? A leg? An eye? Would there be anything left for him to return to one day? He sprinted over to Mauczka and jumped on her chest. “What?! What’s wrong with my body? What did you do to it?”
Mauczka stopped screaming. She looked von Yipp dead in the eye, then shouted, “HUNGRY!”
“Hungry?” He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or angry. “You’re screaming because you’re hungry?! That body wasn’t hungry last time I was in it!”
“I AM WASTING AWAY!” Mauczka wailed. “SKIN AND BONE! STARVED! CLOSE TO DEATH!”
“Shhh, shhh, calm down.” Von Yipp’s apartment was within university-owned housing, and it was the middle of the night. He could practically hear his neighbors striding angrily down the hallway to bang on his door and tell him to be quiet. “You can’t get food just by screaming!”
“Yes, I can,” Mauczka said, her voice returning to a whiny tenor. Ugh, have I always sounded like that? “It’s worked for me before. Why shouldn’t it work now?”
“Because usually I am the one who feeds you! But I can’t do that right now, so please, please, Mauczka, don’t—”
“DYING! UNDERFED! NEVER HAD A SINGLE BITE OF FOOD IN ALL MY LIFE!”
Von Yipp tried to think quickly, but it was difficult in this tiny apartment with a giant screaming person beside him. He’d thought his sneezing was loud, but this was simply unbearable. All of his senses were different, really. He could see much better in this low light than he could before, his whiskers caught the movement of every piece of dust, his nose pierced through the smells of sweat and oil to land upon something buttery and golden and...
“Mauczka! Your pocket! Check your right pocket!”
Mauczka thrust her hand into the pocket of von Yipp’s lab coat. It looked like she didn’t know how to use her new fingers—she kept them together as she swiped around, likely confused at her lack of claws. But she managed to pry the pastry out, and sniffed it delicately. “What’s this?”
“What’s... You already ate some of it!”
“Smells different,” she said with a shrug as she dropped the pastry on the ground. It was disturbing to watch his own body eat off the floor, tearing through a baked good like it was the innards of a rat. And he knew exactly how disgusting these floors were.
That was the crux of the problem: Mauczka, in von Yipp’s body, couldn’t help but act like the cat she truly was. It’s a vindication of my theory of the mind, he considered, though I wish I could enjoy it more. No, what von Yipp needed to focus on was making a plan.
He had a meeting with the dean in two days. He would have to appear before her, as normal as could be, and try to convince her to give him more money. Von Yipp knew there wasn’t a way to repair his machine during the lifespan of this cat body, so he would have to propose another project. Something new. Something that would make his transformation seem deliberate, designed to show off his genius in a unique and creative manner.
It would be a challenge, but not impossible. He just needed to help Mauczka act like a human during the meeting, and to hope that Dean Svopalit was in a good mood. With luck, he would be ready to astound his colleagues by the end of the semester!
Von Yipp watched Mauczka paw at the floor as she attempted to bury the rest of the pastry in the cold concrete. “Oh, Mauczka,” he mewled. “Did you enjoy that pastry?”
She flopped onto her back and stretched to show her belly. That’s probably a yes, von Yipp thought with a smile. At least, it was an approximation of a smile, as good as it got for a cat. Really, it was more of a sign of aggression. Sort of the opposite of a smile.
“I know where you can get more,” he purred. “But you’ll have to listen to me. And not like that time I tried to teach you to use a toilet. You’ll have to really listen.”
It was here that he realized he would need to teach Mauczka to use a toilet. But he shook that thought aside.
“Do you think you can do that?” He waited for a response. “Mauczka?”
Still nothing. And then, he heard the sound of a human body’s deep inhale.
“I’M! STILL! HUNGRY!”

The University of Piltover was one of the least peaceful places to pursue an education. The fault usually lay with the prestigious Engineering Department—lots of explosions, fires burning down half a wing of the dance department, and students and professors crashing their inventions into the structures around campus. The university wasn’t an ivory tower so much as a chaotic playground for people with talent and intelligence. That was what had drawn von Yipp in the first place, as a student and later as faculty.
That said, there were certain expectations of decorum. For example, there was unofficially a rule that the amount of damage a professor caused had to be matched by the importance of their invention. But the most well-known rule was that animals were not allowed on campus. This was a rule that Dean Svopalit had insisted upon, and she wielded considerable power.
Professor von Yipp’s post-machine-mishap plan for getting around this had involved Mauczka smuggling him in beneath a large overcoat, but he did not own one, and he didn’t have time to instruct her in the intricacies of commerce. None of his sweaters were quite large enough to conceal an adult cat, either.
And letting Mauczka run around in von Yipp’s body, unaccompanied? Out of the question. She couldn’t remember such simple pleasantries as “Lovely weather today, isn’t it?” or “please” or not knocking over mugs filled with hot coffee, so clearly she could not be trusted to have a complex conversation. If he could have rescheduled his meeting with the dean, he would have. But it had already taken months to find an opening in her schedule, and his plan had to move quickly, especially as he needed to explain the pivot away from his research from the last decade.
So instead, von Yipp attempted to ignore the astonished stares from students and faculty as Mauczka, in his body, sauntered onto campus with a cat on her shoulder. Well, “sauntered” was a generous term for her stumbling, halting gait. She had already bumped into more than one statue on the lush green courtyard between the brick and limestone buildings. Luckily, the sheer audacity of bringing an animal to campus meant that they were left well alone. No one wanted to be within firing range when the dean heard about this absurd abandonment of protocol.
One day, von Yipp mused as Mauczka finally reached the main building, there will be a grand statue of me out here.
“The Engineering Department is just up those stairs and through that door,” he said. “Do you remember how to open a door?”
“No.”
“With your thumbs, Mauczka. Use your thumb to help you grip the doorknob and turn it.”
“I don’t like them.”
“Your thumbs? But they’re so useful. How could you not—”
“They feel weird.”
“Well, you’re going to have to use them if you want to get your next pastry.” The only reliable way to get Mauczka to do anything she didn’t want to was, as ever, bribery.
When Mauczka reached the door, she extended both hands outward and tried to turn the knob without using her thumbs at all. Von Yipp sighed. This would have to do.
“The dean’s office is just down the hallway,” he trilled as they entered the bustling hall. He felt like he hadn’t been here in ages, but the smell of sulfur and grease, as well as that low static hum that came with any active hextech element, welcomed him back like an old friend. One good thing about his new senses was that these scents and sounds affected him more. He could almost feel himself tearing up before wondering if cats could cry.
Mauczka, however, did not enjoy the sight of dozens of students milling about. Luckily, one of the lessons she had actually absorbed was not to scream when she was displeased. Instead, she whispered, “Too many people. I don’t like it.”
“You have to walk through them. But don’t worry, they won’t step on your tail.”
And they didn’t. Certainly, they gaped at Mauczka with von Yipp perched atop her shoulder, but they did not approach. Mauczka, however, was still uncomfortable, and so she drew herself up to her fullest height and... hissed.
“Mauczka! People don’t hiss!” Von Yipp’s cat body couldn’t blush, yet his face felt very hot.
He couldn’t tell whether it was because a cat was meowing loudly in a place where no animal should be, or whether it was because a professor was hissing, but the students quickly cleared out of the hallway. With no further distractions, Mauczka located the dean’s office and opened the door to the large, plush, many-windowed room.
Dean Svopalit sat behind her oaken desk, gazing down with pursed lips at a research file. As Mauczka entered, the dean began to speak. “So. Von Yipp. Another extension, or is it an additional grant? Because I’m...”
She trailed off as soon as she looked up. Von Yipp could see the telltale signs of an angry and explosive lecture beginning to form, so he sought to cut it off. “Tell her... she looks... well rested?”
Instead, Mauczka leaned over the dean’s desk and blinked slowly. “Would you like a pastry?”
Of all the niceties for her to remember, von Yipp thought murderously, this would be the one that sticks.
Dean Svopalit, in a voice so quiet and scathing that von Yipp heard the end of his career in it, whispered, “Close. The door. Now.” As soon as the door was shut, he closed his eyes and pressed his ears flat against his head, waiting for the shouts that would inevitably follow...
... when he felt himself being lifted off Mauczka’s shoulder. Panicked, he began to wriggle—was the dean going to throw him out a window?
But he looked up into her face and saw the biggest smile he’d ever seen. “Who is this widdle girl?” she asked in a singsong voice as she rubbed her nose against the top of his cat head. “Who is this baby?”
Von Yipp, stunned, looked back at Mauczka, who was frowning at this gross mishandling of her cat body. “Well, for goodness sake, tell her my name!”
“Von Yipp,” she said.
Dean Svopalit shook her head with a dark chuckle. “Only you would name a cat after yourself, Andrej.”
“No, tell her your name!” von Yipp whined as the dean pressed her face into his fur. No wonder she didn’t allow animals on campus. This was embarrassing!
“Oh! Mauczka.”
“Mauczka!” the dean cooed, rubbing von Yipp’s cat cheeks while making little kissy faces. “My little Mauczka, so soft and so sweet!” After a few more minutes of petting the cat, she looked up at Mauczka sharply. “Not a word of this outside this room, von Yipp. You hear me?”
Mauczka nodded. Von Yipp purred in delight. “Perfect. We can tell her that she has to provide funding, or we’ll—”
“I know you’re here to talk about your invention,” Svopalit said. “To ask me for more funding for whatever has gone wrong. But I simply don’t have the time. You’ve wasted it by bringing this... this...” Von Yipp tried to make himself purr again, but it came out as a strangled yelp. “This chatty little angel into my office.”
“Mauczka, listen to me, and repeat what I say. Nod if you comprehend.”
Mauczka nodded, but the dean took this as a sign that she agreed with her. “Excellent, I am glad you understand.”
“Wait!” Mauczka cried as she listened to von Yipp’s frantic meows. “I... have been at this university for thirteen years, and—”
“And what have you done in that time? Prattled on, day in and day out, with nothing to show for it. Do you know how much you’ve cost me over the years, von Yipp?”
“Ugh, now she’s going to lecture me.”
“Now she’s going to lecture me,” repeated Mauczka. Von Yipp winced.
“At least one of us is doing some lecturing!” the dean said with a roll of her eyes. “When did you last teach a class? Some of us actually invest in this university, rather than constantly demanding that it invest in us.”
He perked up. “Would... teaching a class make the university more interested in investing in me? Because I could do that. Happily, as long as I have time to prepare.”
Mauczka relayed this to the dean, who grinned an evil grin.
“Well then. Professor Bunce had to drop his course load for some silly family obligations, something about someone being on their deathbed.”
Bunce? Von Yipp’s heart sank into his fuzzy little toes. No... surely, she can’t mean...
“Which means we need someone to teach his intro-level class.” She looked up over her spectacles pointedly.
“I hate teaching those first-year imbeciles! They don’t know anything. They’re not able to assist in my research. They’re... they’re children!”
The dean lifted von Yipp and handed him back to Mauczka. “Sounds like your Mauczka is a little cranky.”
Mauczka leaned down and whispered in von Yipp’s ear. “So... do I tell her you hate the children?”
“No! Tell her I’ll do the class!”
Mauczka gazed at the dean. “I’ll do the class.”
“Excellent.” Svopalit stood, gesturing toward the door. “It’s in Room Two-Seventeen. You’d better hurry.”
“Right now?!”
“Right now?”
“It’s just Intro to Hexographs, Andrej. Even Mauczka could teach it.”

Von Yipp despaired as Mauczka tried and failed to hold a piece of chalk, and thus could not write his name on the board. This is going to be excruciating. Quickly, he meowed instructions, things for Mauczka to say.
“I,” she said with her back to all the students in the cavernous lecture hall, “am Professor von Yipp, and I will be teaching you for the rest of this sem... s... this term.”
She can’t handle the word “semester,” von Yipp thought with dread. She can’t write my name yet, let alone draw the graphic representations she’ll need to use in these proofs. How is she going to teach this class?
Luckily, these were first years, idiots who barely knew what hexographs were. They were also seemingly too busy staring at the cat yowling on the desk to notice that their professor couldn’t write.
“Mauczka, follow the shapes I’m making with my paws. Try to copy that on the board.” He traced out his name on the desk, letter by letter. Mauczka stared, gears visibly turning in her head, as she wrote a gross approximation of Professor von Yipp on the board, chalk held between her palms.
This took six full minutes.
Sweat gathering between his paws, von Yipp turned to the class to see one brave student raising her hand. He directed Mauczka to call on her.
“Professor von Yipp,” the student began, “I wanted to make sure you knew where we left off. When Professor Bunce left, he had just finished speaking to us on quadrillic hexographs.”
“Quad... hmm, yes, I see.” Mauczka glanced at von Yipp, who urged her to continue. “Where we left off,” she said, blankly.
The student stood, her notebook in her hands. “The hexograph tracks the state of vibrational frequency in the magic powering a hextech drive,” she recited. “Correctly reading the oscillations allows us to better understand the way a specific crystal will interact with...” She frowned. “Are you... listening?”
Von Yipp yowled as Mauczka tried to curl into a ball beside the lectern, laying her head down in her hands. “What are you doing?! You have to teach!”
“How do you ever sleep when your back is so... not flexible?” Mauczka whispered as she turned onto her back, unconcerned.
“Mauczka!!”
Mauczka cleared her throat. “I’m resting my eyes,” she said loudly, so the students could all hear. “If you’re so boring that you make me fall asleep, you...”
“You’ll get a failing grade.” Surprisingly, this was not the worst teaching approach von Yipp had ever encountered.
“Yeah, you’ll get a failing grade,” Mauczka said.
A gasp rippled through the room, and the students whispered to each other. With his enhanced cat hearing, von Yipp heard snippets:
“I knew this was a difficult class, but...”
“There must be some reason for this.”
“Maybe... he’s trying to teach us how to present in an engaging way.”
“So we can get funding for our experiments?”
“Yes, that’s it! No professor would be this... callous, otherwise.”
Von Yipp shook his head at their naivete. They would be disabused of that notion quickly.
Mauczka urged the student to continue with an impatient wave of her hand. “Keep going about your... quid... hex... thing.”
With an audible gulp, the student began to recite again, this time with bigger hand motions and metaphors. Von Yipp kept an eye on Mauczka. He had to make her listen—this charade needed to go on for months, and a cat couldn’t bribe a human adult with pastries while people watched. I must find another way to motivate her.
When the student finished, Mauczka opened an eye and nodded. “Good, uh, explaining. Well done. You can all go now. More next time.”
There was supposed to be a full hour of lecture, but none of the students mentioned it. They bolted out of the classroom, relieved that they were not asked to entertain this strange new professor.
“Can we go home now?” Mauczka whined as the last student left. “I’m hungry.”
“Fine,” said von Yipp, taking his place on her shoulder as she bumped into yet another wall. If things continue on like this, how long can we keep this up?

Over the next few weeks, von Yipp struggled to adjust to life as a cat. He felt small, powerless, at the mercy of something much larger and less intelligent than himself. As a university professor, none of these feelings were new, but they were certainly magnified now.
Mauczka was... still a cat, but her attention span and level of care seemed to have gone up. She had learned how to pronounce some of the more difficult terminology. With von Yipp’s help, she explained away her awkward penmanship as the result of a summer injury, and she seemed to enjoy giving students caustic feedback when they answered a question incorrectly. He wondered whether her progress was because her mind inhabited a human brain, and whether the structure of the brain actually did have an effect on how the mind functioned.
He still felt entirely like himself, though. Still as whip-smart and ambitious as ever. Von Yipp needed to find a way to reveal himself as a cat to his colleagues, one that would impress and intimidate, and he was just as driven to succeed in this endeavor as he’d ever been. Until then, they had to continue pretending everything was normal.
Which was why the little things Mauczka refused to do bothered him so much. They had a long road ahead, and even the smallest missteps could cost them.
“Your nails are filthy and disgustingly long,” he hissed. “You have to cut them.”
“Why can’t I just scratch things until the long parts fall off?”
“Because human nails don’t work that way. You’d be left with a bunch of bleeding fingers.”
“So I don’t cut them. No big deal.”
Von Yipp struggled to think of a reason why Mauczka would have to cut them beyond “the students will complain to the dean about your hygiene soon,” as that didn’t seem to faze her. She had been just as reluctant to have her claws trimmed when they were in their original bodies, and treats were even less effective now that she could get them for herself. He was beginning to feel desperate.
“You’ll... you’ll go to jail!” he blurted out.
“Okay.”
“You don’t want to go to jail. Your cat body would starve to death while you were gone.”
“I don’t know what jail is.”
Von Yipp sighed. “Think of how much you hate it when I pick you up and hug you.”
“Horrible,” she said with a shudder. She nodded at the machine, still taking up a considerable amount of space in the apartment. “The only thing I hate more is that harness.”
“Jail is worse than the harness.”
Mauczka rolled her eyes. “I will not go to jail. And if I do, I’ll just... wiggle out of it. Like I always do.”
Von Yipp was getting a headache. “Jail is not something you can wiggle out of.”
“Sure it is.”
“No!” he spat. “It’s not! You’ll go to jail for... not trimming your nails, and the wardens will give you food you don’t like—”
“So I’ll cry.”
“They won’t care, Mauczka!”
“You always cared when I cried.”
“Because you’re a cat!”
“So?” Mauczka asked flatly.
“So you’re in a human body now! You’re not cute anymore!”
Mauczka gasped, eyes wide. Evidently this was a revelation to her. “I’m not?”
“No.”
“Because I’m in your...?”
“Yes.”
“So I can’t...?”
“You can’t get away with whatever you want anymore.”
Mauczka stared into the distance, brow furrowed in thought. Von Yipp wondered if he’d gone too far. But she needed to realize there were different rules for when you were cute and tiny and fluffy. You might be less powerful in some ways, but in other ways, you called all the shots.
An interesting thought.
Mauczka walked over to the machine. Some parts of it were shiny enough that she could see her reflection—and she was not happy with what she saw. She pulled at her cheeks and frowned. “I’m... hideous! Change me back!”
Rude. But perhaps she finally understood what it meant to inhabit von Yipp’s balding, prematurely aged body. “I already told you that I can’t do that. We don’t have the proper crystals. So you have to listen to me if you don’t want to... to go to jail.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “I’ll trim my nails.”
“And wash your hair.”
“With water?! We didn’t agree to that!”
This was going to be a long night.

A month and a half later, the dean’s calendar finally opened up. Mauczka and von Yipp went once again to her office, and let her coo over the cat body with the door firmly shut.
“I have heard some reports from your students,” Dean Svopalit said.
But Mauczka changed the subject. She and von Yipp had been rehearsing this speech for a full week now. “IhopeyouhaveseenthatIamcommittedtothisuniversity,” she said in one go. “AndnowIfeelthatIdeservethefundingforanewprojectofmine.” She took a deep, gasping breath. “Soifyouwouldbesokindastogivemeyourstampofapproval—”
“Slow down, von Yipp. I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”
Mauczka looked to von Yipp for approval. He gave her a small nod. “I... hope...” she began, going as slowly as she could, “you... have... seen... that...”
“Enough.” The dean looked annoyed. “From your midterm reviews, it sounds like things are going reasonably well. A few complaints, but it’s just an intro-level class. No one really cares so long as there’s a warm body up front. It’s basically babysitting.” Von Yipp mewed his agreement. “Now. You’ve mentioned that you want funding for a new project.”
Mauczka nodded.
“Perhaps that will be good for you,” the dean continued. “You’ve been tinkering for long enough on your ‘theory of the mind’ machine, or whatever you call it. I’m glad you’re finally admitting defeat. It was foolish to even attempt. In any case, you have the paperwork filled out? The grant proposals written?”
Another meow from a fuming von Yipp, and Mauczka nodded again. They had been practicing writing, with Mauczka following the lines von Yipp made with his paw. She wasn’t good, by any means, but it was practically legible now. Even so, it had taken weeks to fill out the paperwork by hand, as the clacking keys of the typograph scared Mauczka and gave von Yipp migraines.
“And you’ve recruited the graduate students to work on it?”
Von Yipp stared. Graduate students were not recruited until after a project had been approved. Historically, von Yipp had difficulty getting anyone to help him—something about his “abysmal track record” and how working with him was akin to “setting your resume on fire.” Clearly, Svopalit was trying to give him the runaround. Again.
“Uh...”
“No grad students yet? Oh, well, I guess you’ll have to go find some.” Dean Svopalit smiled as she patted a thick stack of folders beside her. “But be warned, most of the good ones have already been taken.”

Professor von Yipp did have an office at the university, technically. Technically, in that it was once a lavatory, but the pipes stopped working several years ago. It still smelled of sewage on hot days. And it was so small that it could barely fit a desk and a person in it at the same time. But it had his name upon the door, so it would do for now.
Unfortunately, the office was too small for the door to close when faced with the addition of a second chair, so the graduate student interviews took place with the chair in the middle of the doorway. The back legs were easily jostled by anyone walking past, but von Yipp would not let this inconvenience bother him too much. Not more than having to jump through this hoop in the first place, or the fact that the dean was operating under the completely false assumption that his machine hadn’t worked, when it had.
“Ask her about a time when completing the experiment was more important than following protocol or ethical standards,” he urged Mauczka. It was the most important question in the interview, and all two of the previous interviewees had answered poorly.
The young woman in front of him frowned and shifted in her seat, the scrolled papers in her lap rustling. “Well,” she said slowly, her eyes flitting up to von Yipp’s cat face with discomfort. “I suppose I’d have to say... never. An experiment that doesn’t follow protocol is one where the results can be easily called into question, and I strive to—”
Blah blah blah, the rest of what she had to say didn’t matter. Von Yipp already knew she was out. But he had Mauczka finish the interview and kindly inform her that they would let her know within two weeks whether she had secured the position. The young woman shrugged, seemingly no longer interested, before she stood to leave.
Mauczka pushed the next file toward von Yipp. “This is the last one? Then we can go get pastries?” Really, he would need to have a discussion with her about nutrition at some point. His human body was beginning to look pallid and undernourished from eating a pastry-based diet.
Von Yipp scanned the page. “That can’t be right. It says we’ve double-booked. Just... ask one of them to come back tomorrow.”
Two sets of footsteps clambered down the hall. Two men, one with a long face and a thick mustache, the other with big sideburns and a mug of steaming tea, stopped in front of von Yipp’s door. The mustachioed one glanced down at the chair. “I’ll stand,” he said gruffly, gesturing for the man with the sideburns to take a seat. He did so, setting his mug down on von Yipp’s desk.
Mauczka looked at them. “My mistake, I’ve double-booked us. Would one of you—”
“You haven’t,” said the seated man, his face stony.
“We’re a package deal, we are,” the man with the mustache said lightly. “Jakubb and Natyaz Batadel.” He gestured between them as he spoke, indicating that he was Jakubb and the man with the sideburns was Natyaz.
“Ah, brothers. I see. Well, ask them about their work.”
The Batadel brothers spoke guardedly about their studies—not unusual, since the university students had to take care that their ideas were not stolen. But they sounded talented enough. Now, for the real test.
“Tell me about a time when completing the experiment was more important than following protocol or ethical standards.”
The brothers exchanged a look. Jakubb cleared his throat, but Natyaz broke in to answer. “There was a part we needed that was not available anywhere in Piltover. So we went and got it elsewhere.”
“That doesn’t sound like a breach of protocol,” Mauczka replied at von Yipp’s urging.
“It was chemtech,” Jakubb said quietly. The words hung in the air.
Von Yipp blinked. Chemtech, from Zaun, was... not well regarded in Piltover. It was banned from the university in order to keep Piltovan scientific endeavors unsullied. There were plenty of inventions in the department that exploded, but adding in volatile Zaunite chemicals would make already unstable machines even more dangerous.
“What in the world did they need chemtech for?” von Yipp wondered aloud.
Mauczka asked the question, and Jakubb shrugged. “We were creating something that we wanted only one person to be able to operate. We were investigating what makes each person unique, and... how much a person can change while remaining themselves.”
“Ah. Interesting...”
At the end of the interview, Mauczka prepared to give them both the standard “we’ll be in touch” line, but von Yipp stopped her. “Tell them they’ve got the job.”
Mauczka looked at the brothers, considering, as Natyaz took another sip of tea. She locked eyes with him and asked, “How is your drink?”
He blinked in surprise as he put down the mug. “It’s good,” he said, “but it’s a little cold now. I’ll probably just—”
Without breaking eye contact, Mauczka slowly pushed the mug off the side of the desk. It fell to the ground and shattered, tea spilling all over the floor.
Von Yipp, amused by this impromptu test, watched the brothers to see how they’d respond to such behavior from a professor.
Neither Jakubb nor Natyaz batted an eye.
“You’ve got the job,” Mauczka said.
Jakubb nodded. “And what... is the job?”
“I’ll tell you more when we get our approvals.”

“The Batadel brothers?” the dean asked, annoyed. “They were nearly suspended last semester.”
“But they weren’t.”
“They were not allowed to sign up for the more advanced courses.”
“So they have more time than the average graduate student to work on my project.”
With a frustrated wave of her hands, Dean Svopalit tossed the Batadel files on her desk. “Fine. But you were supposed to have more information to me about this big project by now, von Yipp.”
“I am working on typing up the abstract. It will be with you by...” Mauczka trailed off.
“By when?”
She had been doing so well. Von Yipp, seated on Mauczka’s shoulder, was barely a word or two ahead of her, telling her how to respond to the dean, and she was getting so good at relaying his words almost exactly.
But he saw the problem immediately, as it was also becoming difficult for his new cat body to ignore. The sun was peeking through the gorgeous window that overlooked the nice side of campus. And every time the dean moved her hands, the sunlight reflected off the timepiece on her wrist. It was hard not to chase after the tiny dot of light, but he managed to contain himself. Mauczka, however, was thoroughly distracted.
The dean tried to follow Mauczka’s eyes to see what she was looking at, but quickly gave up. “You come into my office again and again, Andrej, to plead for funds for a project that will supposedly ‘change everything’, when we’ve all seen that’s past your capabilities,” she said in a low voice. “And you can’t even give me your full attention while you beg for my help.”
“I...” Mauczka tried to pull herself away from the bouncing light, but to no avail.
“You are... actually mad, aren’t you?” The dean stood and leaned over the desk menacingly, trying to make eye contact with Mauczka. “Because I can’t understand why you would waste my time and what’s left of my goodwill like this. I’m tired of funneling money into your ego-driven projects and seeing nothing come of it. Not usable data, not salvageable discoveries, nothing. And to top that off,” she said, raising her voice, “you insist on shrouding your ideas in mystery. You seem to think that the drama of the reveal is more important than proper oversight. I am here to tell you: It. Is. Not.”
Von Yipp could feel the growl begin in the back of his throat, and before he knew it, he had lunged, claws outstretched, toward the dean. Mauczka blinked back into reality just long enough to restrain him.
The dean sniffed. “I’ll need you to get rid of your cat.”
“What?!”
“She’s cute, I’ll give her that. But you cannot seem to heed my rule about animals on campus, which is an outward sign of disrespect. And I will not tolerate it from you.”
If von Yipp were in his human body, he would have started yelling or throwing things. This wasn’t fair. How was he supposed to show what he could do, to finally earn the respect of his colleagues, when he was stymied at every turn by an unwilling dean?
He extended a single claw and scratched at her desk.
“Keep your animal off my desk!” Svopalit shrieked as she lifted von Yipp’s cat body by the scruff of the neck. “This is an antique. It... it...”
The dean was silenced by what she saw.
Into the lacquered wood, von Yipp had carved:
I am v
He no longer cared if he gave the game away. So his colleagues would know what had happened, and he’d be laughed out of the university. Fine. At least the dean would have to go to work every day and see how wrong she was about him when she sat down at this desk. He knew what he was doing. His machines worked, and worked beautifully! How dare she talk about things she knew nothing about? Von Yipp was a genius. He knew it in his tiny cat bones.
If only he had been able to finish writing his name!
She stared at it, and stared, and stared. “Von Yipp,” she said softly.
A cloud moved in front of the sun, freeing Mauczka from the bouncing light’s beautiful tyranny. “Dean Svopalit.”
“You... didn’t tell me... that you were working on animal intelligence!” she squealed. “No wonder Mauczka’s been accompanying you everywhere.”
“Uh.”
“What else can she do?”
Von Yipp was taken aback by this sudden turn, but he’d be damned if he let it go to waste. “Mauczka, ask me what fifty-two times twenty-one is.”
“Uh, Mauczka, what is fifty-two times twenty-one?”
Taking pleasure in destroying the dean’s desk further, von Yipp carved 1092 into it. The dean gasped and clapped her hands.
“Why, this is remarkable, Andrej! We’ve been trying and failing to enhance animal intelligence for years, but you...” She paused and looked at the human in front of her. “You’ve done something no one else could. And with a dramatic reveal, no less! I was... I was wrong about you.”
She extended her hand for a handshake. Mauczka stared at it, unsure of what to do.
“Shake her hand! You’ve seen me do it before.”
Mauczka slapped her palm against the dean’s, still refusing to use her thumb to make a firm grip.
“Now,” said Dean Svopalit, nonplussed as she sat behind her desk once again. “Let’s talk funding.”

“Just like we’ve practiced. Hold the pencil, follow the movement of my paws, and replicate what I’m doing.”
“I’ll try.” Mauczka had already lost several pencils under the bed, and von Yipp did not feel like fishing them out for her.
It took hours of careful sketching, erasing, restarting... but eventually, Mauczka had produced a reasonable approximation of what they would need to build. Von Yipp looked at it with pride.
With her help, with the dean’s funding, with the Batadel brothers’ assistance... von Yipp would show them all what a real scientist could do. And these blueprints would be the first step toward making that a reality.
Cue the dramatic reveal.
The Catastrophe Exosuit.
Animal intelligence, indeed.
Illaoi

Illaoi’s powerful physique is dwarfed only by her indomitable faith. As the prophet of the Great Kraken, she uses a huge, golden idol to rip her foes’ spirits from their bodies and shatter their perception of reality. All who challenge the “Truth Bearer of Nagakabouros” soon discover Illaoi never battles alone - the god of the Serpent Isles fights by her side.
All who encounter Illaoi are struck by her presence. An intense woman, the priestess is fully committed to the experience of living. She takes what she wants, destroys what she hates, and revels in everything she loves.
However, to truly know Illaoi you must understand the religion she has devoted her life to. Nagakabouros, the deity of her faith, is usually depicted as an enormous serpent head with tentacles spiraling around it in endless motion, with no beginning and no end. Also called The Mother Serpent, The Great Kraken, or even The Bearded Lady, Nagakabouros is the Serpent Isles’ god of life, ocean storms, and motion. (The literal translation of its name is “the unending monster that drives the sea and sky.”) Central to the religion’s theology are three tenets: every spirit was born to serve the universe; desire was built into every living being by the universe; the universe only moves toward its destiny when living creatures chase their desires.
Lesser priestesses are tasked with maintaining temples, calling holy serpents, and teaching people the ways of Nagakabouros. As the religion’s Truth Bearer, Illaoi’s role is to serve the god directly by unblocking the flow of the universe. To this end, she has two sacred responsibilities.
The first duty of a Truth Bearer is to be the spearhead in the war against undeath. Having fallen outside of the normal flow of the universe, the undead are considered an abomination against Nagakabouros. While it is the responsibility of every priestess of the Kraken to protect the indigenous population from the Harrowing, a Truth Bearer directly engages its most powerful spirits and drives the Black Mist back.
Second, Illaoi is tasked with seeking out individuals of great potential and challenging them with the Test of Nagakabouros. This task is the burden Illaoi’s title reflects. With her massive, holy relic, The Eye of God, the Truth Bearer strips the subject’s spirit from their body then forces them to stand against her to prove their worth. She does this knowing those who fail will be completely annihilated, for the great Kraken has no tolerance for cowardice, doubt, or restraint. But destruction is never the goal. Survivors of the ordeal are forever changed and often find the will to pursue their true destiny.
Though Illaoi is the most powerful and respected Truth Bearer in a hundred generations, it is where she has broken the traditions of her faith that speaks the most about her. Having completed her training as a Truth Bearer, and at the height of her power, Illaoi left the golden temples of Buhru for the squalor of nearby Bilgewater.
The pirate city is the only place foreigners are permitted on the Serpent Isles, viewed as a fetid gutter by Illaoi’s people. Previous Truth Bearers ignored the city and viewed the arriving foreigners as little better than untouchables. Illaoi broke with tradition when she chose to protect residents of Bilgewater from the Harrowing, or even more controversially when she decided that some of its residents had souls worthy of the great test. Despite this, only a handful of temples have been opened in the city, and very few paylangi (islander slang for residents of mainlander descent) have ever been permitted inside. Regardless, it is Illaoi who has brought the widespread awareness of the Mother Serpent to Bilgewater, and it is her indomitable spirit that has brought her religion into favor there.
Rumors persist that Bilgewater’s most bloodthirsty and infamous pirate had his heart broken by the towering priestess. To anyone who has ever met her, this is no surprise. Illaoi’s rough manner belies subtle intelligence, strength, and a magnetic confidence.
Many seek Illaoi’s favor and welcome her to Bilgewater... yet everyone fears being tested by the Kraken’s Prophet.
“There can be no rest. We are the motion.”
—From The Twenty Wisdoms of Nagakabouros
Bard

It is said that most inhabitants of the celestial realm see their home as a wondrous and vivid tapestry, woven with prismatic threads of purest starlight. However, for one prodigious entity, the intangible and everlasting beauty of this dimension is not seen, but heard—for Bard, a troubadour as enigmatic as he is eternal, the wondrous firmament is a symphony of mystic, ambrosial music.
In the beginning, Bard had drifted without purpose or perspective through a silent cosmos, but with a deep sense of anticipation that something miraculous would eventually come to fill it. Fate did not disappoint, and with the forging of the first stars, the silence was broken and the first rapturous notes of creation rang in Bard’s ear.
He traveled the swirling harmonies between the stars, along with the tiniest wisps of residual inspiration and thought left over from their birth. These semitonal, incomplete motes of energy—or meeps—were drawn to him whenever he added his own voice to the cosmic opus, forever ringing in one perfect accord.
This was not his masterpiece, yet he gloried in it all the same.
But after a measureless interval, a dissonance began to creep in. It was so small at first, Bard might have missed it, but the ever-doting meeps drew his attention to a failed dynamic shift here, an unexpected syncopation there, and even the growing absence of sound where, before, sound had been.
Bard scoured the celestial realm for clues, until he discovered the source. It was the most curious of things—a world with a song all of its own.
Driven by unknown magic, the music produced by Runeterra was as primitive, unevolved, and chaotic as the mortal beings that lived there… and yet it had an inherent beauty, like the rolling thunder of a storm, or the melodious knocking of wooden chimes in the wind that precedes it. Bard would have merely appreciated it for what it was, but unfortunately this particular song had gone far beyond a mere counterpoint to the celestial whole, and was becoming destructive. Something had to be done.
Touching down in the First Lands of Ionia, Bard and his attendant meeps crossed into the material realm. All at once, his ears became like eyes, and he fashioned himself a simple body from the trinkets and fabrics of a traveling shawm-player’s wagon, including a beguiling mask—circular, with three holes in the face.
He walked the world for an age, confusing and delighting those he encountered along the way, and found the state of things far more complex than he had first imagined. Many objects of wild and unpredictable power seemed to have made their way erroneously into Runeterra, and were disrupting the natural cosmic order of things. Casting his gaze back to the heavens, Bard deduced that some other power within the celestial realm was at work here… though to what end, he could not guess.
Regardless, he has taken to the role of caretaker, retrieving anything out of place and returning it to where it can do no further harm. Though this may be only the first step in bringing the universe back in tune, it may also be the only way this world can be saved from what lies beyond it.
And Bard is not blind to the future. He can see a great conflict approaching—one fought not in any single realm, but in all—and awaits the time when he must finally pick a side.
Viktor

The herald of a new age of technology, Viktor has devoted his life to the advancement of humankind. An idealist who seeks to lift people to a new level of understanding, he believes that only by embracing a glorious evolution of technology can humanity’s full potential be realized. With a body augmented by steel and science, Viktor is zealous in his pursuit of this bright future.
Viktor was born in Zaun on the borders of the Entresol level, and, encouraged by his artisan parents, discovered a passion for invention and building. He devoted every waking minute to his studies, hating to interrupt his work even to eat or sleep. Even worse was having to rapidly relocate if there was a nearby chemical spill, accidental detonation or incoming chem-cloud. Abandoning his work, even for a short time, was anathema to Viktor.
In a bid to impose a level of order and certainty on his world, Viktor researched Zaun’s many accidents and came to realize that almost all of them were the result of human error, not mechanical failure. He offered his services to the local businesses, developing inventions that made them far safer working environments. Most turned him away, but one - the Fredersen Chem-forge - took a chance on this earnest young man.
Viktor’s inventions in automation reduced the number of accidents in the forge to zero within a month. Soon, other establishments sought his work and Viktor’s designs became common in Zaun, improving production with every innovation that removed human error from a process. Eventually, at the age of nineteen, he was surprised to be offered a place in Zaun’s prestigious Academy of Techmaturgy. But Viktor’s work had attracted the eye of Professor Stanwick of Piltover, who convinced him to leave Zaun and travel to Piltover’s academy instead. There, he could work in the most advanced laboratories and gain access to all the resources the City of Progress could offer. Thrilled to be singled out, Viktor accepted his offer and took up residence in Piltover, where he refined his craft and sought to perfect his theorems in ways that would benefit everyone.
Viktor worked with Piltover’s best and brightest; including an insufferable genius named Jayce. The two were equally matched in intellect, but where Viktor was methodical, logical and thorough, Jayce was flamboyant and arrogant. The two worked together frequently, but never truly became friends. Often, the two would butt heads over their perceptions of intuition vs logic in the process of invention, but a level of mutual respect developed as each saw the flawed brilliance in the other.
In the midst of his studies in Piltover, a major chem-spill devastated entire districts of Zaun, and Viktor returned home to offer his help in the rescue efforts. By grafting a sophisticated series of cognitive loops upon existing automata-technology, he crafted a custom-built golem, Blitzcrank, to help in the clean-up. Blitzcrank was instrumental in saving scores of lives and appeared to develop a level of sentience beyond anything Viktor had envisioned.
Even with the spill contained, Viktor remained in Zaun to help those afflicted by the released toxins. With the golem’s help, he attempted to use his techmaturgical brilliance to save those whose lives had been blighted by the spill. Their attempt was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing more deaths, and the two parted ways. Though Viktor was distraught at the loss of life in Zaun, the work taught him a great deal about the merging of human anatomy with technology and how mortal anatomy could be enhanced with technology.
When Viktor returned to Piltover, weeks later, it was to find that Professor Stanwick had held a symposium on Blitzcrank and presented Viktor’s researches as his own. Viktor lodged formal complaints with the masters of the college, but his impassioned claim that he had designed Blitzcrank fell on deaf ears. He turned to Jayce to verify his claims, but his fellow student refused to speak up, further widening the rift between them, and the matter was decided in Professor Stanwick’s favor.
Bitter, but resigned, Viktor returned to his studies, knowing that his ultimate goal of making people’s lives better and enhancing humanity was more important than one stolen project and a bruised ego. He continued to excel, finding ever new ways to eliminate human error and weakness from his work, a facet of his researches that came to dominate his thinking. He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration - a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as the source of human ingenuity and creativity.
This came to a head during a reluctant collaboration with Jayce to improve the diving suits used to keep Piltover’s docks clear of underwater debris and lingering chemical waste. Viktor and Jayce’s enhanced suits allowed the wearer to go deeper, remain underwater for longer, and lift heavier weights. But many wearers claimed they saw phantom corpse lights in the depths or suffered from chem-induced hallucinations. When divers experienced such symptoms, they panicked and often got themselves or their fellow divers killed. Viktor saw the problem was not technical, but with the wearer’s nerves unraveling in the inky depths. He devised a chem-shunt helm that allowed an operator on the surface to bypass the wearer’s fear response and, effectively, control the diver. A heated discussion between Viktor and Jayce on free will and mental enslavement turned bitter - almost violent - and the two vowed never to work together again.
Jayce reported the incident to the college masters, and Viktor was censured for violating basic human dignity - though, in his eyes, his work would have saved many lives. He was expelled from the college, and retreated to his old laboratory in Zaun, disgusted by the narrow-minded perceptions of Piltover’s inhabitants. Alone in the depths, Viktor sank into a deep depression, enduring a traumatic period of introspection for many weeks. He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that, once again, human emotion and weakness had stood in his way. He had been trying to help, to enhance people beyond their natural capabilities to avoid error and save lives. Revelation came when he realized that he too had succumbed to such emotions, allowing his naive belief that good intentions could overcome ingrained prejudice to blind him to human failings. Viktor knew he could not expect others to follow where he did not go first, so, in secret, he operated on himself to remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.
When the surgery was done, almost no trace of the young man who had traveled to Piltover remained. He had supplanted the majority of his anatomy with mechanical augmentations, but his personality had also changed. His idealistic hope to better society was refined into an obsession with what he called the Glorious Evolution. Viktor now saw himself as the pioneer of Valoran's future - an idealized dream where man would renounce flesh in favor of superior hextech augmentations. This would free humanity from fatal errors and suffering, though Viktor knew it was a task that would not be completed easily or quickly.
He threw himself into this great work with a vengeance. He used technological augmentations to help rebuild Zaunites injured in accidents, perfected breathing mechanisms, and worked tirelessly to reduce human inefficiency by decoupling physicality from emotion. His work saved hundreds of lives, yet seeking Viktor’s help could be dangerous, as his solutions often brought unexpected consequences.
But if you were desperate, Viktor was the man you went to.
Some in Zaun, hearing fragments of his philosophy and seeing the successes of his work, saw him as a messianic figure. Viktor couldn’t care less for them, viewing their quasi-religious cult as an aberration; yet another reason to eliminate emotional foibles and the belief in that which could not be empirically proven.
After a toxic event in the Sump saw hundreds of men and women in the Factorywood transformed into rabid psychotics, Viktor was forced to use a powerful soporific to sedate the victims and bring them back to his labs to try and undo the damage. The toxins had begun to eat away portions of their brains, but Viktor was able to slow the degenerative process by opening up their craniums and employing machinery to slowly filter their bloodstreams of poison. The technology available to him wasn’t up to the task, and Viktor knew many people were going to die unless he found a way to greatly enhance his purgative machinery.
As he fought to save these people, he detected a surge in hextech energy from Piltover and saw immediately that this could give him the power he needed. He followed the powerful energy surge to its source.
Jayce’s lab.
Viktor demanded Jayce hand over the source of this power, a pulsing crystal from the Shuriman desert. But his former colleague refused, leaving Viktor no option but to take it by force. He returned to Zaun and hooked the strange crystal to his machinery, readying a steam golem host for each afflicted person in case their body gave out under the stress of the procedure. Empowered by the new crystal, Viktor’s machines went to work and, gradually, the damage from the toxins began to reverse. His work would save these people - in a manner of speaking - and had Viktor retained more than a fragment of his humanity, he might have celebrated. As it was, the barest hint of a smile was all he allowed himself.
Before the process could complete, a vengeful Jayce burst in and started smashing the laboratory with an energized hammer. Knowing an arrogant fool like Jayce would never listen to reason, Viktor ordered the automatons to kill Jayce. The battle was ferocious, and only ended when Jayce shattered the crystal Viktor had taken, bringing the entire warehouse down in an avalanche of steel and stone, thus ending the existence of those Viktor was trying to save. And for this, Jayce returned to Piltover, feted as a hero.
Viktor escaped the destruction of the laboratory, and returned to his mission of bettering humanity by ridding it of its destructive emotional impulses. In Viktor’s mind, Jayce’s impetuous attack only proved the truth of his cause and strengthened his desire to unburden humanity of the failings of flesh. Viktor did send chem-augmented thugs to raid Jayce’s laboratory not long afterward. This was - Viktor told himself - not for revenge, but to learn if there were any more shards of the Shuriman crystal he could use for the advancement of mankind. The raid was unsuccessful, however, and Viktor thought no more of Jayce.
Instead, he intensified his efforts to find ways in which humanity could be shepherded beyond their emotional weaknesses and brought into a new, more reasoned stage of their evolution. Such researches sometimes transgress the boundaries of what would be considered ethical in Piltover (and Zaun), but they are all necessary steps in bringing about Viktor’s Glorious Evolution.
Kindred

Separate, but never parted, Kindred represents the twin essences of death. Lamb’s bow offers a swift release from the mortal realm for those who accept their fate. Wolf hunts down those who run from their end, delivering violent finality within his crushing jaws. Though interpretations of Kindred’s nature vary across Runeterra, every mortal must choose the true face of their death.
Kindred is the white embrace of nothingness and the gnashing of teeth in the dark. Shepherd and the butcher, poet and the primitive, they are one and both. When caught on the edge of life, louder than any trumpeting horn, it is the hammering pulse at one’s throat that calls Kindred to their hunt. Stand and greet Lamb’s silvered bow and her arrows will lay you down swiftly. If you refuse her, Wolf will join you for his merry hunt, where every chase runs to its brutal end.
For as long as its people have known death, Kindred has stalked Valoran. When the final moment comes, it is said a true Demacian will turn to Lamb, taking the arrow, while through the shadowed streets of Noxus, Wolf leads the hunt. In the snows of the Freljord, before going off to fight, some warbands “kiss the Wolf,” vowing to honor his chase with the blood of their enemies. After each Harrowing, the town of Bilgewater gathers to celebrate its survivors and honor those granted a true death by Lamb and Wolf.
Denying Kindred is to deny the natural order of things. There are but a wretched few who have eluded these hunters. This perverse escape is no sanctuary, for it only holds a waking nightmare. Kindred waits for those locked in the undeath of the Shadow Isles, for they know all will eventually fall to Lamb’s bow or Wolf’s teeth.
The earliest dated appearance of the eternal hunters is from a pair of ancient masks, carved by unknown hands into the gravesites of people long-forgotten. But to this day, Lamb and Wolf remain together, and they are always Kindred.
Zac

Zac is the product of a toxic spill that ran through a chemtech seam and pooled in an isolated cavern deep in Zaun’s Sump. Despite such humble origins, Zac has grown from primordial ooze into a thinking being who dwells in the city’s pipes, occasionally emerging to help those who cannot help themselves or to rebuild the broken infrastructure of Zaun.
A group of Zaunite children first encountered Zac when they were out skimming rocks over a sump pool and some of the stones were thrown back. The “Returning Pool” became well-known to Zaun’s Sump dwellers, and eventually drew the attention of a shadowy cabal of chemtech alchymists. Over the protests of the local residents, the alchymists pumped the contents of the pool into vats and carried the substance back to their laboratories for experimentation.
Via a series of experiments designed to test negative and positive reinforcement techniques, the alchymists discovered the coagulate mass within the pool appeared to have psychotropic tendencies. Simply put, it mirrored whatever stimulus was provided to it. If treated well, it responded with childlike glee and playfulness, but when its response to pain and aggression were tested, the alchymists lost numerous augmented sump-scrappers in the ensuing destruction.
Most of the alchymists attributed this to nothing more than a simple reflex response, but two among their number weren’t so sure. They questioned the morality of experiments that seemed entirely driven to produce a creature of unmatched aggression. When the pair dug further, they discovered the project was being funded by Saito Takeda, a Chem-Baron with a notoriously violent temperament and reputation for bloody gang warfare. The implication was clear; Takeda sought to develop a fighter who could shrug off mortal wounds, squeeze into places humans could not and who would obey any command. They also discovered the project’s true name; the Zaun Amorphous Combatant.
As they pondered the best course of action, the two dissenting alchymists saw more than just a mirroring of whatever stimulus was applied to the viscous gel. They saw behaviors manifest without any obvious stimulus - behaviors consistent with sentience. They came to know the creature as Zac and concluded that he exhibited the behaviors of a thinking, feeling being. They brought their findings to the spindle-limbed leader of their research team, but their concerns were ignored.
Unwilling to let the matter drop, they began their own covert efforts to counter the violent teachings of the rest of their team. They sought to show Zac right from wrong, exposing him to acts of altruism and generosity. Their efforts bore fruit, with Zac showing sadness when one of the researchers hurt her hand and reacting badly when another killed a rat in the laboratory. Eventually, they could no longer tolerate the cruel experiments being done to Zac by their fellow alchymists.
One night, during Zaun’s Progress Day remembrances, when the laboratory was empty, they drained Zac into a wheeled septic tank and dragged him to a far distant part of Zaun. When their act was later discovered, the footsoldiers of Baron Takeda sought them out. But Zaun is a big place, and the researchers were able to hide from their pursuers. They had thought to give Zac his freedom, but Zac did not want to be released, for he now considered the two researchers his family. They alone had shown him kindness, and he wanted to learn more from them. In truth, they were pleased by his reaction, for they had become so fond of Zac that they considered him their adoptive son.
To stay hidden from Takeda’s men, they changed their identities and appearance, taking up residence in a remote part of the Sump, far from prying eyes. Zac learned to mimic their voices, and quickly adapted to shift his gelatinous mass into the required shapes to form sound. He lived alongside his adoptive parents for many years, hiding when necessary in sump pools or in the cracks in the cliffside rocks. His ‘parents’ told Zac of the world in which he lived, how it could be beautiful and full of wonder. They showed him the moon rise over the Sun Gates, the play of rainbow light on the stained glass roofs of Zaun’s commercia halls, and the bustling, vibrant beauty of their city’s heart. They also explained how the world could be cruel and harsh, and Zac learned that people were sometimes mean and unkind, hateful and prejudiced. Zac rejected such behaviors and helped his parents where he could as they used their skills to aid the people around them without attracting undue attention.
They did what they could to treat the sick, mend broken machinery or otherwise put their chem-knowledge to benign use. These were golden years for Zac, and he roamed Zaun through its almost limitless network of pipes and through the many cracks in its bedrock. As much as Zac was a sentient being, too much stimulus from his environment could sometimes overwhelm his senses and cause him to temporarily absorb the dominant emotions around him, for good or ill. Oft-times he couldn’t help getting involved in aiding the oppressed and downtrodden against thuggish bullies; leading to rumors of his presence spreading through Zaun. Though the majority of tales were of him helping, others attributed destructive events to Zac; a factory destroyed or a crevasse ripping open in a Sump neighborhood.
Eventually, those rumors reached the ears of Saito Takeda, and he sent a band of augmented thugs to retrieve what he saw as his property. His alchymists had been attempting - without success - to replicate the process that had created Zac from droplets left behind in his vat. Takeda wanted the creature returned, and his augmented heavies surrounded Zac’s parents’ home and attacked. They fought back, for they were chemtech researchers and not without esoteric means of defending themselves, but their defiance could not last forever and eventually they were killed, despite Takeda’s order that they be taken alive.
Zac had been exploring subterranean seams far below Zaun, but sensed his parents’ distress and raced back through the pipes of the city to the rescue. He arrived too late to save them, and the fury that overwhelmed him upon seeing their bodies was unmatched by anything the baron’s men had ever seen. Zac attacked in a ferocious display of stretching, smashing, and crushing. In his grief and anger, he demolished dozens of nearby dwellings, and by the time the battle was over, all the augmented thugs were dead.
When the heightened emotions of battle drained from Zac’s consciousness, he was overcome with remorse for the homes he had destroyed, and vowed to continue the good work done by his parents. He helped rebuild what he had destroyed, but as soon as the work was done, he vanished into Zaun’s vast network of pipes.
Now Zac lives alone, dwelling in the tunnels and caverns threading Zaun, and bathing in the emotions of the city’s inhabitants. Sometimes this enriches him, but other times it saddens him as he takes on both the good and bad of the city. He has become something of an urban legend among the people of Zaun, a mysterious creature that sometimes emerges from cracks in the rock or a section of damaged pipework. Most times this is to help those in need, but in times of trouble, when the city’s moods turn grim, his appearance can be cause for trepidation.
Riven

Built on perpetual conflict, Noxus has never had a shortage of war orphans. Her father lost to an unnamed battle and her mother to the girl’s own stubborn birth, Riven was raised on a farm run by the empire on the rocky hillsides of Trevale.
Physical strength and ferocious will kept the children alive and working on the hard scrap of land, but Riven hungered for more than simply bread on the table. She watched conscriptors from regional warbands visiting the farms, year after year, and in them, she saw a chance at the life she dreamed of. When she finally pledged the empire her strength, she knew Noxus would embrace her as the daughter she longed to be.
Riven proved a natural soldier. Young as she was, her years of hard labor allowed her to quickly master the weight of a longsword taller than herself. Her new family was forged in the heat of battle, and Riven saw her bond to her brothers- and sisters-in-arms as unbreakable.
So exceptional was her dedication to the empire, that Boram Darkwill himself recognized her with a runic blade of dark metal, enchanted by a pale sorceress within his court. The weapon was heavier than a kite shield and nearly as broad—perfectly suited to Riven’s tastes.
Not long after, the warhosts set sail for Ionia as part of the long-planned Noxian invasion.
As this new war dragged on, it became clear that Ionia would not kneel. Riven’s unit was assigned to escort another warband making its way through the embattled province of Navori. The warband’s leader, Emystan, had employed a Zaunite alchymist, eager to test a new kind of weapon. Across countless campaigns, Riven would gladly have given her life for Noxus, but now she saw something awry in these other soldiers—something that made her deeply uncomfortable. The fragile amphorae they carried on their wagons had no purpose on any battlefield she could imagine...
The two warbands met increasingly fierce resistance, as if even the land itself sought to defy them. During a heavy rain storm, with mud pouring down the hillsides, Riven and her warriors were stranded with their deadly cargo—and it was then that the Ionian fighters revealed themselves. Seeing the danger, Riven called to Emystan for support.
The only answer she received was a flaming arrow, fired out from the ridgeline, and Riven understood this was no longer a war to expand the borders of Noxus. It was to be a complete annihilation of the enemy, no matter the cost.
The wagon was hit straight on. Instinctively, Riven drew her sword, but it was too late to protect anyone but herself. Chemical fire burst from the ruptured containers, and screams filled the night—both Ionian and Noxian falling victim to an agonizing, gruesome death. Shielded from the scorching, poisonous mists by the magic of her blade, she bore unwilling witness to scenes of horror and betrayal that would haunt her forever.
For Riven, memories of the hours that followed come only in fragments, and nightmares. She bound her wounds. She mourned the dead. But, most of all, she came to hate the sword that saved her life. The words carved into its surface mocked her, reminding her of all she had lost. She would find a way to break it, severing her last tie to Noxus, before the dawn.
But when the blade was finally shattered, still she found no peace.
Stripped of the faith and conviction that had bolstered her entire life, Riven chose to exile herself, wandering Ionia’s battle-scarred landscape. When she finally returned to the village where she had broken the sword, it was revealed that her self-destructive needs had cost the life of their most revered elder... and yet Ionia embraced her with forgiveness.
Noxus was not nearly so merciful. Although the empire had long since withdrawn from the First Lands, it had not forgotten about Riven, or her runic blade. After fighting fiercely against those sent to bring her to justice, she refused to let any more Ionian blood be shed on her account, and surrendered herself to the charges of desertion leveled against her.
As she returns to Noxus in chains, Riven remains haunted. Though Darkwill is no more, and the empire is rumored to have evolved, she is uncertain what will become of her, or whether she will ever be made whole again.
Aurelion Sol

The appearance of a comet in the night sky is often said to portend upheaval and unrest. Under the auspices of such fiery harbingers, new empires rise, old cultures fall, and even the stars themselves may vanish from the heavens…
The truth is, perhaps, more unsettling.
The almighty being known as Aurelion Sol was already ancient before the rise of the mortal races of Runeterra. Born in the first breath of creation, he and those like him roamed the vast nothingness of a pristine celestial realm, seeking to fill this canvas of incalculable breadth with marvels whose twinkling spectra would bring fulfillment and delight to all who witnessed them.
As he wandered, Aurelion Sol seldom encountered any equals. The eternal Aspects were dispassionate and incurious things, contributing little to existence, content only to compose amusingly self-centered philosophies on the nature of creation.
But then, bathed in the light of a fairly unremarkable sun he had crafted eons earlier, he discovered something. A world. New realms.
He did not know who had created this world, or why—only that it had not been him.
The Aspects, who seemed unusually invested in it, implored him to come closer. There was life here, and magic, and fledgling civilizations that cried out for guidance from beings greater than themselves. Flattered by this new audience to his supreme majesty, Aurelion Sol descended to bask in their adulation, in the form of a vast and terrible dragon from the stars.
The tiny inhabitants of the insignificant land of Targon named him for the golden light of the sun he had gifted them, and the Aspects commanded them to bring forth a suitable offering in return. The mortals climbed to the peak of their tallest mountain, and presented him with a splendorous crown, crafted with careful and cunning magic, and etched with the inscrutable patterns of the celestial realm.
From the moment it touched Aurelion Sol’s brow, he knew this was no gift at all.
The accursed thing clamped in place with unimaginable force, enough that even he could not remove it, and he could feel his knowledge of the sun and its creation being stolen and scrutinized by intelligences vastly inferior to his own. Worse still, the power of the crown hurled him back into the heavens, and prevented him from getting any closer to that world again.
Instead, he was forced to watch as the duplicitous Aspects of Targon set the mortals to work in the construction of a great, gleaming disc. With this, they channeled his celestial power to raise up immortal god-warriors, for some unknown conflict that was apparently still to come.
Outraged, Aurelion Sol could see other stars fading across the firmament for lack of care and maintenance, and he strained to break free of the crown’s control. It was he who had birthed their light into the universe! Why must he be shackled, now, by the Aspects and their lowly pawns? He roared with glee when the Sun Disc failed… only to see a second, more powerful one take its place. Eventually, resigned to his fate, he saw the god-warriors cast down their rivals, then chittering creatures of pure darkness, and eventually each other.
Then, in little more than the blink of a star dragon’s eye, the world was ravaged by a succession of sorcerous catastrophes, and Aurelion Sol finally knew that Targon and the hated Aspects were all but defenseless. As he cautiously circled back, he realized the magic that bound him was weakening. Flecks of gold began to fall from his crown, each one blazing across the skies like a comet.
Driven by the tantalizing possibilities of freedom and revenge, Aurelion Sol now regards Runeterra with simmering, eternal fury. Surely, it is here, upon this world, that the cosmic balance will tip in his favor once more—and with it, the universe itself shall bear witness to the fate of those who dare steal the power of a star forger.

Related Champions

Singed

the Mad Chemist

Singed

More stories

Warwick

Ezreal

To Herd A Cat

Illaoi

Bard

Viktor

Kindred

Zac

Riven

Aurelion Sol

Related Champions

Singed