LoL Universe Indexing and Search

Posters across Noxus warn of a dangerous criminal, armed with a massive, blunted spear and borne atop a magical fiend, whose mere existence poses a threat to the safety and security of the entire nation. Even some within the steeled ranks of the Trifarian Legion have begun to worry that they will be sent after her to their almost certain deaths.

What kind of monster could be behind such heinous, unchecked destruction?

The simple answer is a sixteen-year-old girl.

The complicated one is unforgivable.

Rell was special from the moment of her birth—and fated to suffer for it. Born the daughter of a Noxian footsoldier and the heir to a fallen noble house, she enjoyed neither the trappings of wealth nor the gilded upbringing common to children of the lower aristocracy. Nevertheless, her parents had grand plans to mold her into someone who could shatter through Noxus’ dense political landscape. As Rell’s mother always said, “Excellence is measured in sacrifice.”

Rell’s unhappiness grew with time, sparking something unique within her—a magic unlike anything seen in centuries: the ability to manipulate metal. To Rell’s parents, this was something to be exploited—for Rell’s own sake, of course!—and they tried unsuccessfully to apprentice her with many powerful mages who might whisk their daughter into the political or military elite.

But someone else took notice of the young girl’s magic. Seeing in Rell a weapon who could one day face Noxus’ most hated, ancient foe, a certain pale woman visited the family with a dark bargain. Rell soon found herself the star pupil of a very special academy, hidden far from the capital and away from the council’s prying eyes. And though they rarely made appearances in her new boarding school, her mother and father never seemed more proud or more hopeful of their daughter’s future.

It seemed, at least for a moment, that perhaps Rell would be loved after all.

Then the true horrors began.

Rell was first forced into combat with another student when she was eight, and, afterward, a kind of magic sigil was painfully grafted into her arm, amplifying her powers so that she could become even stronger. Yet while this had been framed as a training exercise, Rell never saw the boy again. She never saw any of her opponents again.

Every day, she grew more powerful, honing her magic for martial combat. Her body became covered with sigils that amplified her magical abilities to impossible heights. In time, she could rip a vein of raw ore from deep out of the ground, twist the walls into deadly weapons, and superheat an opponent’s armor until it collapsed and crushed them. But her instructors desired even more from her—all in the hopes that Rell would be the most powerful soldier the empire had ever known.

On her sixteenth birthday, after a particularly barbaric duel, she’d finally had enough. Casting her instructors aside, Rell tore past the guards and ripped open the doors of a forbidden wing of the academy, discovering the true nature of her school: Every opponent she’d defeated had been Nullified—their magic forcibly extracted from them and placed into the very sigils covering Rell’s body—and left as emotionless puppets devoid of memories. This was the price of her power, and she could never give it back.

Worst of all was the headmistress who oversaw the procedures herself: Rell’s own mother. All of this had been for Rell, she said. After all... excellence is measured in sacrifice.

Rell raged.

To the small handful of faculty who survived her escape from the academy, it was like the earth had been torn open into a twisting whirlwind of razor-sharp slag. The building ripped itself apart, forming an impenetrable suit of black armor around Rell as she crushed those who stood before her, flattening seasoned soldiers with a lance heavier than a mountain. Bursting through the front gate on a steed made of rippling iron, she led as many of her classmates as she could to freedom—leaving the Rose scrambling to recover the Null and erase any trace of what their organization had done.

But it was far too late. Soon enough, the surviving faculty members began to die in increasingly public ways, and the Null could no longer be kept secret.

Rell is now a threat to Noxus, but not in the way the handbills proclaim. She is a self-styled defender of the meek, full of unchecked fury, distrustful of everyone, and merciless toward a government that turned a blind eye to years of suffering and abuse. Not because the empire was personally responsible—but because they stood by and did nothing.

Riding atop her iron steed, Rell’s eyes are set on nothing less than the complete destruction of Noxus and saving any children who, like her, survived the Black Rose academy.

And there is nothing in this world that can stop her.

Rell thought about the Null often.

She didn’t want to, of course. But the thoughts were intrusive and the road was long, and most of the time there wasn’t much to do besides drift back into those unhappy memories as she rode her shifting metal steed from one rumor to the next. Hours and hours of silence, and then, always, killing.

This time, she was far in the outskirts of Noxian territory, following whispers of another Null child being secreted over the border.

“Null.” Rell winced. Even the shape of that word hurt, and she silently swore to herself as she braced against nothing, shaking off the weight of it. Then the pain turned to anger. Then the anger turned to rage.

Noxus had made the Null—and made her. And now, in their immeasurable cowardice, the Noxians couldn’t bear to look. Better to take the Null far, far away, so Noxus could go back to being glorious.

Rell hated this ugly country, filled with its stupid, ugly people. She hated its bleak, strip-mined mountains, their ore gobbled up in Boram Darkwill’s foreign wars. She hated its cracked, rotten soil, used up for ration crops and then left exposed to the wind. Now the only thing that grew anywhere was the green-brown moss that seemed to cake every inch of uninhabited land, populated mostly by carnivorous lizards the size of a house.

What a hideous, naïve place, she thought. So obsessed with its meritocracies, so consumed by constant expansion, that it could not and would not see what it had already become. The Black Rose and their experiments were just a symptom of its deeper sickness. Rell would tear it all down—she’d save the Null, then destroy the Empire brick by brick, even if she had to do it alone. Just like she’d ripped apart the academy.

Then the boulder hit her, and for just a moment, everything was quiet.

Rell had not known many of her classmates long. Most of the promising ones had been forced to fight her in “exhibition matches” to “test her strength”. She didn’t realize until much, much later that whatever shape they were in after, the instructors whisked them away, extracting their magic with essence-absorbing, stone-like sigils and leaving them Null forever.

She remembered some of the kids, but the rest were a pastiche of faces punctuated by extreme pain, from the fights themselves, to the horrific, hours-long sigil grafting process that gave their power to her.

The other students very quickly grew to fear her—hate her, even... and in that way, Rell was always alone.

All save for one.

Gabriel was a boy whose soft eyes and kind voice were not a product of Noxus, but some other far-flung locale that Rell could only scarcely imagine. He understood Rell and had an odd magic that allowed him to shape dirt into tiny fauna—the animals and birds of his homeland, dancing and playing for Rell’s amusement. Though he seemed sad to be so far from his family, the two found comfort in each other’s friendship—Gabriel spending many of his nights comforting Rell as she recovered from the academy’s abuse.

It was simply a matter of time before they would face one another in combat, and while Rell seemed hopeful, Gabriel knew what was coming. Yet for a while, at least, the two could pretend.

Rell awoke to the din of a warband that cautiously approached her, checking if she was dead.

Unfortunately for them, she was not.

Rell rose with the shattered metal plates of her steed, her titanic lance finding her hand as raw, molten ore poured upward from the ground and into the monstrous weapon. Her mount reformed, pulsating with the heat of a thousand furnaces. Raw iron contorted into shape, seizing itself into the jagged silhouette of a stallion, and Rell leapt upon its back.

She counted five opponents, including a minotaur perched on a pile of large, jagged stones—probably the same kind that hit her—and then one more. A thin man in a dusty white coat clumsily tried to escape across the vast nothing of Noxian wilderness.

Instructor Lukas. The man who’d brought Gabriel to the academy, and the man who took him away.

Though Rell would fight anyone who stood in her path, she had a special rule for her old instructors: no questions asked, and no answers given. She wouldn’t make an exception for this one.

Rell’s stallion charged forward as if it had escaped a dark, distant nightmare, and like the hammer of a scorned god, Rell’s lance slammed into the first soldier who stepped in her way. It was a weapon not made for piercing, but for crushing, and as the soldier’s eyes widened in horror, the last thing that went through his mind was his helmet.

A second fighter attempted to impale Rell’s mount, but her spear snapped between its steaming plates, and Rell swatted her far into the distance—a deformed lump of scrap metal and flesh landing several yards away.

Two crossbowmen, now much less confident than before, tried to beat a hasty retreat. Rell leapt into the air, her steed itself forming around her into a thick suit of impenetrable black armor, and she brought herself down upon them as the earth ripped open beneath her boundless rage.

The minotaur’s rocks may have worked in a sortie, but even his great hunks of volcanic stone shattered against Rell’s armor as she slowly marched toward him. A dark knight, utterly unstoppable, who felled the great creature with a single blow.

She turned her attention to her old instructor.

Lukas felt the gentle pull of his former student, before chunks of superheated slag ripped him from the mossy dirt and into a whirlwind of jagged debris surrounding Rell. It was a storm of metal, heat, and hatred, and all he could whimper before the end was a panicked “Gabriel’s at the camp!” Rell crushed Lukas instantly, his broken form pounded so deeply into the ground that even the basilisks would have trouble digging out his corpse.

Then the storm stopped, the slag fell away, and everything was quiet once more.

True to the instructor’s last words, Gabriel was concealed in a tent within a grassy ravine where the ground had given way and created a wide, shallow indentation in the land. The perfect place to hide a camp.

He was dead long before Rell found him. Malnutrition.

Nullification didn’t just steal the magic of its intended victim—it sundered their soul apart, leaving a glassy-eyed husk that didn’t want anything, barely spoke, couldn’t remember, and never dreamed. A small handful had to be fed, but some Rose-aligned warbands simply chose to neglect this task out of resentment for the job.

Rell looked at Gabriel... at the form wrapped in canvas who once made tiny animals leap from the ground to make her laugh when she was in pain. Digging her lance into the earth, she forced its dark metal out of her hand, then upward, then around him until his body was covered. A simple grave to mark her friend’s passing, but an indestructible one decorated with crude animals forever frozen in steel.

She closed her eyes as she rode off, trying to remember Gabriel as he once was, but all Rell could see were the basilisks feasting on the dead, and her fist closing around a pale woman’s throat.

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.

I’m going to die.

Every halting breath is agony. It feels like someone has torn open my chest with a rusty saw and filled the cavity with teeth. Because someone has.

He has.

I can’t look at what he’s done to me. I stare through watering eyes at a tiny vault light in the brick ceiling, desperate to see anything but what I’ve become. Beyond lies Zaun—my city—but of the thousands of bustling souls there, not one will have noticed I’m missing. No one is looking for the man I was before.

click

The recording device has clicked on, the wax cylinder turning steadily, and my breath catches again, this time against a sob. He speaks.

“Subject ‘Thinker’ is functionally impaired. Yet hearing and recognition still present.”

click

Between the tears in my eyes and the warping effect of the thick greenish glass of the observation window, the nameless man looks like a half-melted waxen nightmare. Sunken, mismatched eyes dripping across a contorted pallid face, the bandages over his mouth growing and shrinking as he restlessly paces behind the window to get a better look at my condition.

His good eye flicks from me to the source of a deep groan in the corner of my cell. I turn to look at a hulking form, rousing itself from unconsciousness. Glowing pipes and tubes snake around and through its forearms, making them more than double their already considerable size.

As I am now, withered and... changed, the brute could snap me in half without thinking.

click

“Subject ‘Breaker’ regained consciousness at six past fourth bell. Earlier than expected. Promising! Experiment begins at... seven past fourth bell.”

click

No. No, no! Not another experiment.

click

“Establishing the baseline. Subject Thinker, answer the following questions as quickly and as accurately as possible.”

“Wha—”

“First question: what is your full name?”

“I’m not doing this! Do you hear me? I demand you release me at once. I refuse to participate in whatever sick, twisted...” My words trail off.

click

He puts down the mouthpiece of his recording device, and moves to a set of valves at the edge of the window. Without even glancing at me or the thing in the corner, he spins one open, and high-pressure, ice-cold sump water slams me into the wall.

I think I’m screaming.

An eternity later, I’m trembling on atrophied hands and knees, gasping for air. I fumble at the floor, seeking purchase through the slowly draining water, when I somehow catch my wrist on something, and my elbow buckles reflexively, slamming me face first onto the ground.

I’m still for a moment, cradling my arm where the pain is hot and alien—then I feel movement between my chest and the floor. Sharp wriggling, like I’ve fallen on a Uloan scorpion and it’s about to claw through me to escape. I roll, but it follows me. It’s on me, on my bare skin, scratching and squirming, and the skittering noise repulses me. I’m kicking and clawing and yelling and desperately trying to get it off me!

“Tiresome.”

My hands are bloodied and there’s something wrong with my wrists and I can’t get the thing off me. It’s all barbs and claws and it’s like it’s burrowed into my—my chest.

The teeth in my chest.

I remember now. There isn’t an arachnid on me. He did this to me. He carved me up and turned me into something else, something with sucking fangs grafted onto each wrist, and two columns of hungry, flexing pincers from neck to waist. And he wants me to use them to bite the thing in here with me.

He’d once strapped us both down on a rusted iron gurney, needle moving quickly and without mercy as he joined us together. Then he waited. Waited for the “process” to start, for the instincts he’d given me through surgical and chemtech sins to kick in.

When it didn’t happen—when I wouldn’t do it—everything went black.

And now I am locked in this chamber with my intended “host”.

click

“Subject found initial stimulus unpleasant. Resuming baseline questions. If the Thinker subject does not state its full name—”

“Stop, I beg you. Have mercy!” I yell.

“Duration and intensity will be increased by a factor of two. Strike that—make it three.”

click

He’s looking right at me. If he’s smiling beneath those wraps, it doesn’t reach his eyes. He seizes the valve again, and I realize what’s next. There’s nothing to hide behind, nothing to grab a hold of, and as the pipes rumble, all I can do is curl up as small as I can, and take a deep breath.

The blast of water hits so hard, so cold, the air is ripped from my lungs. I smash against surfaces I can’t identify, and up and down are meaningless. There’s a shooting pain from my ankle, and when the assault eventually ceases, I twist and drop to the floor. Once the heaving stops, I lie motionless, feeling weaker than I can ever remember as the last of the water drains from the room.

I’m going to die.

Slam. I flinch when my chem-doped cellmate smashes into the observation window. It is fury incarnate—huge, empowered fists hammering at the glass, incoherent primal yells tearing from its throat.

The glass, and the monster behind it, is unmoved.

Though each movement costs me dearly, I quietly drag myself to the other side of the floor, away from the raging beast called Breaker. It’s still smashing at the glass, knuckles bloodying, despite there being no sign of weakening the barrier. Stubborn or stupid, it keeps hitting. Even when its roaring diminishes and shifts to wordless sobs, those swollen fists won’t stop.

click

“Physical strength of subject ‘Breaker’ is within expected range of pneumatochem-muscular enhancements, but he exhibits limited to no problem-solving capabilities.”

click

Emotionlessly, our torturer taps on the glass opposite the smears from Breaker’s self-inflicted wounds. Then, with a scowl, he turns to look at me.

click

“Subject ‘Thinker’, on the other hand, may have been named hastil—”

“My name’s Hadri! Hadri Spillwether. I’m a person—not this ‘Thinker’ you keep calling me.” I reach out, desperate to touch some grain of empathy in my captor’s heart, no matter what fabrications I have to concoct. “I have a son! He’s... he’s two years old, and he must miss me terribly.”

“A son?” The bandaged man raises an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“L-Locke. Little Locke Spillwether—cute as a button and twice as—”

“Enough. You have no family. They perished from the same hereditary disease you yourself suffer from, characterized by accelerated aging and all the miserable infirmities that come with it. For the last thirteen years you’ve been making a nuisance of yourself to anyone who’d listen at the Zaun Academy of Sciences, seeking—no, begging for—a cure.”

His words hammer into me, cold and crushing like the water.

“And yet you repay my extraordinary gift with defiance and bad data.” Now he’s angry. “Your estimates give you five years left to live. More lies, but this time to yourself. You have three wretched years at best before you become a drooling invalid. And there’s no one to take care of you as you did your sister and father.”

There’s nothing I can say. He’s right. What little hope I had for finding a cure was just that: hope. The Academy wouldn’t help me—a swarming mass of the world’s finest minds, each unreachable and distant. Everyone had their own desperate or greedy agenda, and I was just another lost cause. Pitiful. Alone.

I’m going to die.

“But you need not die.”

My gaze snaps to his. I feel... revulsion? Loathing? Outrage? Hope. How dare he say such a thing. How dare he. How—

“How?” I choke out the question. I hate that I’ve asked it.

He doesn’t reply with words. He just slowly nods his head toward the hunched form of the thing I’m locked in with—toward Breaker. The brute is cradling his bleeding hands, rocking back and forth, avoiding eye contact with either of us. Maybe he’s incapable of speech. He’s at least three times my weight, all of it muscle, and that’s before whatever those augments on his arms are doing.

I remember when we were strapped down on the gurney. Similarly trapped together. Equally helpless despite his monstrously augmented strength. The bandaged man wants me to latch on to Breaker, to use him as a... support? A living prosthesis?

My own thoughts make me gag, and I dry heave as I scramble backward, away from Breaker.

“Disappointing.” Our torturer sounds bored. “Perhaps three years is still too remote a negative outcome for you, Thinker. Let me make it more compelling—in your weakened state, you’ll likely suffer multiple fractures each time I apply this negative stimulus. Within four more applications, I’d expect you’d be classifiable as only minimally mobile, and face down in the water, you’ll very slowly drown.”

He’s leering through the glass at me. “From previous observations, I’m led to believe it will be quite excruciating.”

click

The room’s too small. I can barely breathe. My heart is throwing itself against my ribcage like Breaker pummeling the observation window.

I look to Breaker and catch his gaze on me—he immediately looks away. There was little understanding in those eyes, but I saw shared fear and something akin to sympathy. It’s the first real human connection I’ve felt in years. Far more human than our captor.

Without turning to meet his cold, calculating stare, I ask, “And what happens if I do it? If I...?”

click

“Once an ectoparasitic melding is established, I’ll run tests on the nature of the pairing, on the extent of the parasite’s behavior-altering capabilities on the host and so on, and on the resilience of the resulting merged superorganism. The experiment will be concluded, and all this...” He waves airily at the chamber, the pipes and valves, the glass observation window. “All this will be done with.”

click

I nod absentmindedly, as if this is the most normal thing in the world, but my mind suddenly reels with realization. Testing the resilience of the organism. What a clean way to say torturing to death under a scalpel.

This is no cure—not for me. It’s a death sentence.

Finger width by finger width, I manage to pull myself to my feet, hugging the cold brick wall for support. I gasp and wobble for a moment—my ankle is broken already—before turning to face my enemy through the window.

“No.”

There’s a long pause. I can hear the sounds of Zaun—water dripping from the pipes, distant pumps, and the low, comforting rumble of never-sleeping machinery. At the very edge of my senses, I fancy I can hear fifth bell chiming.

I expect nothing of my captor. Still I’m surprised when he reaches out—

click

“Subject is... uncooperative.”

click

He spins the water valve to full strength.

Pain. The water hits like a mountain and slams me against the walls, ceiling, and floor without preference. I don’t know which is which anymore. There’s only noise. There’s only darkness. There’s only agony.

Then there’s light.

A flash so bright that the world behind my eyelids turns gold. A lung-hammering boom.

And then nothing.

I regain consciousness face down on the floor, battered and crushingly cold. I look up.

Something’s changed. Water still gushes out of the vents, though at a lower pressure. Light streams in from a hole punched near the ceiling. A way out? There are more flashes of yellow, followed by distant booms.

A keening wail pierces through the ringing in my ears. With horror, I realize it’s coming from Breaker—he’s cradling his face, blood weeping between his fingers. He charges into the wall, spins, and tumbles into the water.

The water. It’s rising.

In a panic, I try to drag myself closer to the hole, but I’m not moving. The fangs on my wrists rake across the stone beneath the water, setting my teeth on edge, but even with my aching fingers clawing at the floor, I make no headway.

I twist around to see if I’m caught on something, and blanch.

A slab of fallen debris—probably the exact piece that opened that treacherous escape route—is crushing my lower back. I kick at it, and nothing happens. I push it, and nothing happens. I try everything, squirming and screaming and flailing weakly. Slowly the block tumbles from me and splashes to the side. Around me, the rising waters flush red.

I can’t feel my legs.

“Experiment ends at... two, no, three past fifth bell.”

I turn just in time to watch the bandaged man walk away from the window and out of sight. A heartbeat later, the lights go out. The sudden explosions, my paralysis, or my defiance—I wonder which variable rendered his precious experiment worthless to him, worthy only of flushing.

Curse him.

I pull myself to a sitting position against the debris, my blood now black in the dim Zaun light. It feels like the heat is being sucked out of my core, and I’m being frozen from the inside out. I have nothing left.

Sobbing. I hear sobbing from Breaker, a boulder of despair hunkered in the corner, the tubes on his arms creating their own faint green illumination.

I keep my voice low. “H-hey.”

His head snaps up. Black streaks surround his ruined eyes, underlit by what that monster behind the glass did to his arms. An expression of anguish and loss twists on his face as he frantically angles his head to listen.

“B-Breaker?” I’m shivering. It’s hard to get the words out. “Hey, I’m s-s-sorry I don’t know your real—”

Breaker rises, splashing and stumbling, his chemtech implants casting wild shadows. He charges toward me—I squeeze my eyes shut, awaiting the impact.

Suddenly I feel a hand, hot and enormous, on my head. I open my eyes, and Breaker is crouched in front of me, clumsily patting my face and shoulders, as if to make sure I’m real.

A distant flash through the gap in the ceiling, like amber lightning, illuminates him. Under the blood and swelling, he looks so innocent. So alone.

I’m going to die.

But maybe Breaker doesn’t have to.

“Breaker? B-Breaker, you ha-have to listen to... me.” He takes my hand and turns his head to point an ear my way. “There’s a way—a way out,” I tell him. “A hole in the ceiling. You w-want to get out of here, right?”

Still holding my hand, he nods so vigorously that he jerks my body back and forth. The pain is white hot against the ice cold filling me. I almost welcome it.

“Aah! All right. Good. L-listen. Listen! Now, you’re g-going to have to let go of my ha—”

His refusal is clear in his death grip on my fingers.

Water is now lapping against the column of weakly flexing barbs on my chest. They gnash, eager to latch on to a host, as if they know their intended target is near. But I’ll die before I do that to myself. Or Breaker.

With so much of my blood swirling in the water around me, I don’t have long. I have to hurry.

I bring up my other hand and gently unwrap his. “Y-you’re going to be fine, B-B-Breaker. I promise. I just need you to... to make sure it’s safe first.” Breathing’s harder now. “Y-you can do that for me? Then we can b-both get ou-out.”

Lies, but it’s enough to get him to release me.

I nudge his elbow, guiding him to stand. Stretching despite the pain, I give him a tiny shove forward, toward the blown-open gap.

I let my arms fall back into the ice-cold water, realizing that his was probably the last warmth I’ll ever feel.

“J-j-just listen to my voice. I’ll g-guide you!” The water’s at my neck now, and I’m shaking so much it’s hard to see straight. “Forward, just a few steps. Careful, th-there’s d-debris, and—” He smashes his shin into a fallen piece of wall and yelps. “All right, y-y-y-you’re all right. S-step up onto it. Good. Now r-reach out to the w-w-wall. Feel it? Good. That’s good. There are cracks between the bricks. Use them to cl-climb. Now reach up. Reach up, Breaker. That’s it—that’s the w-way out.”

I tilt my head back to get a breath of air, the water at my jaw. At least I can’t feel most of my body now.

“Climb, B-Breaker,” I gasp. Then I stretch my neck and splutter, “Goodb-b—”

The water’s over my face, and despite everything, I’m holding this last breath. My heart beats loud in my ears. It occurs to me that I like the sound of it. I’ll miss it.

My lungs start to burn. This is it. My heart roars. My numb arms thrash. My eyes flicker open and my chest heaves, hungry for air. I cough out part of that last breath and gobble a mouthful of bitter sump water.

There is only panic.

My hand hits something, and I instinctively try to push off from it. Up. Anywhere. But I’m caught. I can’t move. There’s no air and I can’t move. Suddenly my whole vision is taken up by Breaker’s face. No! Not him, too! I struggle, but there’s nothing. My body is giving up. I’m giving up. My vision narrows and darkens; grayness fills it. I see Breaker turning, and distantly hope he’ll make it.

Something’s wrong. Or right. I can’t tell. There’s warmth and movement. I feel myself being lifted up. My body convulses and my vision turns sharp for just one beat of my weakening heart. Through the water, I see the back of Breaker’s head. My chest, no, the things in my chest sense the spine pressed against them, and flex back to strike, stretching like a too-big yawn. A welcome pain.

No. Yes. No!

... I don’t want to die!

As the barbs in my chest clamp down, I plunge my fangs deep into the sides of his neck—

CRUNCH.

I/we live!

We’re still submerged, but our lungs are full of air (and empty). Our limbs are strong and powerful (and weak and broken). We can see again (like always).

I/we push off for the faint light through the water. I/we bring up our hand to shove a metal bar out of the way. Our hand is shockingly big, and farther left than we expected, and we almost overshoot. Adjust. We’ve got it now. It’s so easy to push. The bar goes flying back. We kick upward and swim toward the hole in the ceiling, pulling ourselves up the last distance. We flop onto the roof, outside.

Air.

We cough up the water in our lungs, while our other lungs breathe deeply.

No, not our lungs... my lungs. My hearts beat hard and fast. My minds reel.

I climb down the side of the building with my powerful arms. When my feet touch the ground, it seems at once far away and slightly closer, offset to the side. I can hear with a depth and precision I couldn’t have imagined.

It smells like we’re deep in Zaun. I’m surrounded by leaking containers and heaps of wriggling, sodden trash, in a courtyard behind an old factory. High above, some distance away, a segment of fallen tower is precariously leaning against a chasm wall, yellow flashes and rumbles still issuing from secondary explosions.

The source of my freedom. Of my creation.

I start at the sound of a piece of rubble falling from the cell wall behind me, and I’m reminded just how close I came to death. At his hands.

I can’t stay here (fear!).

Before I know it, I’m running.

It’s exhilarating. I’m shocked by how fast the world goes by, how easily my legs move. Quick as a flash, I duck down an alley. There’s a gate blocking my path, but I’ve already spotted an outcropping of pipes I can vault from, and a hanging railing I can use to swing over it.

Neither of my past selves could have done this, but I can. It’s so easy.

I land lightly, and barely slow down. The impact hurts—one of my spines is broken, but it’s distant, no longer a devastating injury. Now, my strengths complement each other, my weaknesses recognized and supported. I’ve never felt this way before—greater than I was, more complete. At ease with myself.

I lope onward, exiting the alleyway and running straight into a small crowd leaving a Church of the Glorious Evolved–a mass of mechanical legs, breather masks, extraneous metal arms, and other, stranger augments.

But each and every one of these unsettling, augment-obsessed cultists stops dead in their tracks to stare at me.

“He’s got something on his back,” a mechanical-eyed man says.

“What is that?” a woman with a back-mounted prosthetic lung asks.

“It’s feeding on him!” an unseen third hysterically yells from the rear of the crowd.

Expressions change from shock to revulsion. I back up, but I’m surrounded.

Someone shoves me from behind. I try to tell them to stop.

“Pleas— —eave me— —lone.”
“—ASE. LEA— —E ALO—”

The words tumble out on top of each other, issuing from two mouths. I’ve never heard my new voice before, and it sounds both familiar and strange. The Evolved don’t seem to understand. A rock flies past my head.

“STOP-op. I HAVE-haven’t done anything-THING to you-YOU,” I beg. My words are still out of sync—it’s like talking through an echo. My voice won’t do what I want, and these people won’t listen!

A yellow-haired man steps forward from the group, attaching a heavy hammer-like prosthetic to his augmented wrist. He raises it to attack.

“I said leave me alone!” It’s my true voice. Clear as a bell—harmonious in the discord. But words won’t help me now.

Frantic, I look around and find a steam pipe near me, bridging the alleyway from above. Just before my would-be attacker strikes, I leap up, hauling the pipe down to block. The hammer pierces it, and scalding vapor blasts into his face. He falls backward, screaming.

I hear their yells and threats as I run away. I don’t know where I’m going as I charge down the dark cobblestone streets. I run past tenement blocks and corner stores, past a pair of stilt-walking chem-jacks and a spring merchant. I take stairs and corners at speed. I’m sprinting across one of the smaller bridges, iron clanging beneath my boots, when I catch a half-familiar whiff from one of the street vendors. I duck behind an empty stall and inhale deeply.

From a distant corner of my mind, I remember the smell—I remember coming here with... with Mama. She’d give me two washers for the porridge lady, and I’d carry a steaming bowl home.

Home. My eyes well up at the thought. Somewhere I can hide, somewhere I can rest, somewhere safe.

It’s not far from here!

This time, I’m running with heartsick purpose. Up three flights of stone steps on the chasm side, past the old broken glasshouse, then down two streets to the edge of the Factorywood.

Before I know it, I arrive at what was once my home. A charred husk remains, long since abandoned. My mind tries to make sense of it. This was my home (no, it wasn’t). I lived here with my mama and brother (no, I didn’t). She’d painted the walls yellow and said it was liquid sunshine (I’ve never been here).

I carefully make my way up warped stairs sodden from countless rainstorms. The railing feels familiar (alien) to my hand.

I push open the ruin of the door, and my vision swims. My happy memories of bright smiles clash with the reality of burnt remains and debris. Tears stream down my faces. Something terrible happened here, but I can’t remember.

The door to the back room has long fallen from its hinges, and the roof is collapsed in, but my eyes are drawn to the left corner, where I once slept—a small cot lies blackened with soot. I approach, and for the first time, I read the name scratched into the wall beside it:

“Palo.”

That’s me. My name is Hadri—I mean, Palo. I was both, but the me that lived here, that was Palo. Hadri’s mother died in childbirth, but Palo was raised by his mama.

What happened? An accident? An attack? Did Mama anger the wrong chem-baron? Did... did I do something without realizing?

Mama’s desk is a drenched wreck, but something glints in the pile of wood. Her hand mirror. It’s cracked, likely from the heat. I pick it up. When I was Hadri, I couldn’t bring myself to look at what the bandaged man had turned me into, but that was a lifetime ago. I’m different in so many ways, and I have to know.

I look.

A nightmare looks back. A beaten, bloodied, and blinded man stands there—forearms encircled and pierced by glowing green tubes and cables. Hooked on to his back is a sickly parasite, its shriveled arms wrapped around his neck, their syringe-like fangs barely concealed. Its withered legs dangle uselessly. Bloodshot, beady eyes peer from behind the man’s shoulder, widening in horror at what they see.

Revulsion washes over me. I drop the mirror, and my largest hands scramble to tear the parasite from its host. I’m hideous. (I’m smart now!) I’m just a failed experiment. (I’m better now!) No one could ever love me. (I love my new self!) I’ll always be alone. (I don’t want to be alone!)

Alone. I was so alone.

The bitter loneliness of two lives hits me, and I throw back my heads and howl. No one person should ever feel this. No one person can. I howl for losses doubled, and losses shared. I howl in sympathy for myself, and for the depth of loss in another. Across Zaun, I hear others take up the cry—animals, humans, and something in between—who for one moment, paradoxically, are together in their loneliness.

I collapse to my knees, my feet uselessly brushing against the floor behind me.

I will live. Not as Palo or Hadri. Not as Breaker or Thinker. I’m both, or all of them. I’m better this way.

I tear one of the half-burned curtains from the wall and throw it over my shoulders, careful not to obscure my vision.

My memories are too strange, too complex, too confusing. I can’t stay here. I walk out the door and down the steps as I try to decide where a monster like me can possibly go.

click

“In spite of, or perhaps due to, unexpected and explosive complications, stage one of the host experiment has finally completed.”

click

I freeze. My captor stands on the narrow street in front of the house, a pneumatic-powered dart gun leveled at me. Vials on his belt clink menacingly, filled with unknown liquids (it burns!), and a bag on his back suggests he has many more terrible things at hand.

He did this to me.

I can feel the fury swell in both of my chests, my hearts thumping against each other with just ribcages between them. I take an instinctual step toward him.

“I don’t think so!” he warns. He casually flicks the dart thrower to the side, pulls the trigger, and spears a large viridian beetle straight through. I watch, horrified, as the liquid in the dart releases into its body, dissolving it almost immediately, its screams all too audible in my four ears.

His gun is already reloaded, and it’s aimed at me again. I raise two of my hands.

click

“The following questions are for the Thinker entity. Answer quickly, or I’ll apply motivational pressures.”

“What?”

“Quiet. First question: what is your full name?”

The dart gun doesn’t waver as his long, stained finger hovers over the recording device’s switch.

“Hadri Spillwether.” I look around for a way out. Somewhere to run. Anything.

“Good. Next question. What was your father’s name?”

My father? I didn’t know my—wait, no, I did have a father. I looked after him when the disease worsened. His name... his name was...

“Hurry up. Answer the question!” the bandaged man demanded.

“Arvon! Arvon Spillwether!” I sounded more relieved than I expected. More desperate.

“Hmph. Faster! Where did you live? What was your profession? What did I call myself when we first met at the Academy?”

“Here! I lived he—no, wait. I... I don’t... Four-five-one! Room four-five-one at the Smellbloom Lodging House! Profession? I... Was I a clerk? I can’t... I don’t remember. It was so long ago!” I’m sweating, shaking my heads. It’s all mixed up.

click

“Pathetic. What a waste. Devolved into some sort of gestalt entity, contaminating the purity of the primary mind. Unsuitable for further exploration,” he mutters. Then he turns on his heel and starts to walk away.

I feel my faces scrunch into masks of pure rage.

He made me what I am. He set my house ablaze with chemical fire—I remember now how it burned. He exploited my hope for a cure.

And now, he will pay.

I’m four paces away from him. Now two. Then he spins on the spot and smashes a vial of something at my feet. I barely take another step when I find that my boots are glued fast to the ground. He’s two fingertips out of my reach, and I claw at the air uselessly.

“So much for being a Thinker,” he says. “I really was too optimistic. I certainly won’t make that mistake again.”

He takes a long step backward, and turns to head down a narrow alleyway. Leven Wynd—I remember it clearly. The second he’s out of sight, I hunker down and quickly untie my laces, loosening them enough to step out of my boots. With one strong leap, I’m padding barefoot after him down the wynd.

It’s dark in the alley, but my hearing is sharpened. I can hear him at the end of the first turn, still muttering to himself about subjects and sources. It stinks here, and I try not to think about what I’m stepping in as I navigate past the narrow gaps and boarded-up doorways. By the time I reach the corner, he’s halfway down the next stretch, barely visible in the gloom and the smog. I lean down to wrench a broken pipe from the ground as a weapon, and feel a rush as I straighten.

He’s gone.

Impossible! I lope onward, checking doorways as I go. The air is nasty, and I try to muffle my coughs with my curtain, but I can only cover one mouth. I’m getting dizzy, and I turn around to look back the way I came. It’s hazy—too hazy.

He’s using some kind of gas! I wrap the curtain around one of my mouths and bury the other into my shoulder, trying to breathe as little as possible. This is a trap.

I try to stagger back toward home—the corner looks farther away than I remember. I need to make it. I start to run, but one of the doors—red, metal, and spiked—suddenly opens, smashing into my face. I fall.

My limbs, all of them feel so heavy. So heavy. I think I’m crushing myself with my own weight on my back, but it’s already so hard to breathe.

I’m going to die.

The bandaged man stands over me. Tears streaming from my faces, I look up at my murderer, and I remember.

Overlaid upon his face, I see a face from before—with tinted glasses and a clean-shaven jaw. When I first met him, years ago, he strode down the hallway from lab to lecture hall, master of his environment, looked upon with admiration, envy, and something I hadn’t recognized (fear!). In his wake was the faintest scent of cologne. He had stopped and looked at me—not with pity, as I was used to, but with a shadow of excitement and anticipation. He’d introduced himself.

“Singed. You said you were Professor SIN-Singed.”

The harmony drops from my voices, and in my last moment, I am alone again.

Crushingly, painfully, deeply alone.

Singed scrambles madly among his things, desperately searching for something. A cure? A mercy?

His recording device. He clicks it on and drops to his haunches to observe.

“Oh, well done, Thinker Four. That puts you... yes... more answers than even Thinker Two! You’ve been most helpful.”

He clicks off his recording device.

It’s the last thing I hear.

Jayce is a brilliant inventor who has pledged his life to the defense of Piltover and its unyielding pursuit of progress. With his transforming hextech hammer in hand, Jayce uses his strength, courage, and considerable intelligence to protect his hometown. While revered throughout the city as a hero, he hasn’t taken well to the attention it brings. Still, Jayce’s heart is in the right place, and even those who envy his natural skills are grateful for his protection in the City of Progress.

A native son of Piltover, Jayce was raised to believe in the principles that made the city great: Invention. Discovery. Not going to Zaun if you could help it. With a knack for understanding machinery, Jayce earned the honor of being the youngest apprenta to ever be offered patronage by Clan Giopara, one of Piltover’s most respected ruling clans. Utterly unsurprised, Jayce took the offer, and spent most of his early years constructing potential hextech devices and designing transformable multi-tools for Piltover’s working class: a wrench that transformed into a prybar, a pickaxe that could morph into a shovel, a hammer that could turn into a demolition beam, if only it had a sufficiently powerful battery. Everything Jayce touched put his contemporaries to shame.

Most things came easy to Jayce, and he could never understand why his peers had so much trouble with what, to him, were simple concepts. As a result, nearly everyone who worked alongside Jayce found him arrogant, dismissive, and unwilling to slow his pace to help his colleagues catch up. As time went on, his patience became shorter, while at the same time, a chasm grew between decorum, charm, and Jayce’s natural demeanor.

Only one person ever managed to match Jayce’s intelligence while also maintaining a healthy indifference to his superior attitude.

His name was Viktor.

The two met at a mandatory Progress Day party, and immediately bonded over how little either of them wanted to be there. They started working together shortly after. Viktor expanded Jayce’s intellectual horizons and challenged many of his assumptions. While Jayce sought to improve humanity via versatile technology, Viktor sought to solve problems inherent to humanity itself, such as physical decay or illogical prejudices. They constantly argued with one another, but their conflicts never got personal – though their methods were different, the two colleagues knew their ultimate goals were very much the same. More than that, they both knew what it was like to be ostracized by their colleagues: Viktor because of his unconventional thinking, Jayce because of his rudeness.

Together, Jayce and Viktor invented a mechanized construction suit for Piltover’s dockworkers – something hearty enough to enhance the wearer’s strength, but light enough that its wearer wouldn’t immediately drown upon falling overboard. However, the two reached an impasse when Viktor’s design for the next version of the suit included a chemtech implant that would increase the wearer’s strength output by tenfold, while also preventing them from getting tired, panicking, or disobeying instructions from their superiors. While Viktor considered this feature a brilliant means of reducing the frequency of construction accidents, Jayce found its indifference toward free will immoral. The two nearly came to blows over the design and ultimately, after Jayce warned the academy of Viktor’s invention, Viktor was stripped of his honors and ostracized from Piltover’s scientific community.

Viktor was the closest thing Jayce had ever really had to a friend, and distraught over their falling-out, went back to working on his own. He grew more insular. His patience toward others grew even thinner.

As Jayce studied in solitude, Clan Giopara’s explorers discovered a raw, blue crystal deep within the Shuriman desert. Though Jayce volunteered to experiment on it (specifically by suggesting the clan’s other scholars wouldn’t be smart enough to get anything out of it), his lack of tact in doing so prompted Clan Giopara to give it to their better-mannered scholars as a form of punishment. Yet, after many months, the scholars reached a unanimous conclusion: the crystal was worthless. A power-drained hunk of rock. The disappointed clan leaders finally handed the crystal over to Jayce, assuming that even he, with his remarkable intelligence, wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it.

Something inside the crystal called to Jayce. No, more than that – it sang to him. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew the Shuriman gem still held mysteries yet to be discovered.

He spent many months running every variety of test on the crystal. He braced it into a cogwheel centrifuge; he superheated it and deep-froze it; he tinkered, and observed, and hypothesized, and beat his head against his copper pantograph. Quite simply, Jayce wasn’t used to working hard: this damned crystal was the first thing that had ever resisted his considerable mental aptitude. For the first time, he realized how his peers must have felt, trying so hard to solve a problem, only to bump against your own limitations. It felt frustrating. It felt unfair.

And it probably felt much, much worse if you were working alongside an arrogant inventor who dismissed your every effort.

Jayce realized that despite how dismissive he’d been toward his fellow scholars, none of them ever gave up. None of them ever stopped seeking the very things that defined Piltover: Progress. Discovery. If they wouldn’t give up, Jayce decided, he wouldn’t either.

And maybe he’d try to be nicer.

Maybe.

Jayce approached the problem from a completely different angle. Rather than trying to experiment on the crystal as a whole, he wondered, why not run more invasive experiments on a smaller shard? Jayce chiseled off a piece of the crystal and suspended it in a liquid alloy. As he sent a voltaic current through the liquid metal, Jayce’s eardrums nearly shattered from the booming baritone note that blasted from the shard. Heat radiated from the crystal and, with a flash, it glowed bright enough to nearly blind him. This was unexpected. This was potentially dangerous. But this was progress. Jayce couldn’t erase the smile from his face as he worked well through the night, into the dawn.

The next day, Jayce was surprised to find his old friend Viktor on his doorstep. Alerted by the massive power spike from the crystal shard, Viktor had a simple proposition.

Since his expulsion from the Piltovan scientific community, Viktor had commenced work on a secret project in Zaun. He’d finally learned how to achieve his dream – how to eradicate disease, hunger, hatred. If Jayce joined him, the two would accomplish more than anyone from Piltover or Zaun could have dreamed of: they’d save humanity from itself.

Jayce had heard a monologue like this before from Viktor. He never liked where it led.

Viktor told Jayce that he only needed one thing for his Glorious Evolution – a power source like Jayce’s crystal. Jayce disagreed, informing Viktor that what he truly needed was a moral compass. Viktor, who had long grown tired of Jayce’s rudeness, leapt upon him, grabbed the crystal and knocked Jayce unconscious with it. When Jayce awoke hours later, he noticed that though the Shuriman crystal was gone Viktor hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the smaller shard.

Jayce knew whatever Viktor was planning, he would only resort to these measures if he were close to completion. Even though he didn’t know what Viktor’s Glorious Evolution consisted of, it probably didn’t have a lot of respect for the free will of others. Without wasting a second, Jayce retrieved the suspended shard and installed it into a massive, transforming hammer – a demolitions invention he’d abandoned years ago for lack of a strong enough battery to power it. Though he had no idea where Viktor might have taken the crystal, he could feel the hextech hammer vibrate, pulling him not north, south, east or west, but down, toward the undercity of Zaun.

The shard, eager to be reunited with the crystal from which it was chiseled, eventually led Jayce to a warehouse in the depths of the sump. Within the cavernous building, Jayce found something horrifying. Dozens of corpses, their skulls sawed open and hollowed out, their brains transplanted into an army of immobile metal soldiers, hooked up to the now-pulsing crystal.

This was the first step in Viktor’s Glorious Evolution.

Jayce’s stride grew less confident as he approached Viktor. He and Viktor had not always seen eye to eye, but this was something else entirely. For the first time, it occurred to Jayce that he might have to kill his old friend.

He called out to Viktor, flinching as the army of robots stood to attention. Jayce asked him to look around – to see what he was doing. Whatever this was – this Evolution – wasn’t the progress they fought for in their youths. He even, to Viktor’s surprise, apologized for acting like such a jerk.

Viktor sighed. He had only two words in response: “Kill him.”

The automatons sprinted toward Jayce, breaking free of the wires connecting them to the crystal and introducing Jayce to another new emotion: panic. He gripped the hammer tight, realizing he’d never actually used it before. When the first golem was within reach, he swung as hard as he could, feeling the shard’s energy surge through his muscles, accelerating the hammer’s movement until Jayce was worried it might fly out of his hands.

It slammed into the automaton, all but exploding it into a hail of metal. Despite the obliteration of their comrade, the other machines didn’t even pause as they rushed at Jayce, trying to pummel him into unconsciousness.

Jayce analyzed the formation of the mechanical wave coming at him and attempted to quickly calculate how to take out the largest number of them with the fewest amount of swings. It was pointless; they were on him before he could swing even once. As he fell to the ground under a storm of their blows, Jayce saw Viktor looking on, not with triumph, but with sadness. He’d outsmarted Jayce and ensured humanity’s future, but he knew that future came at a cost: he couldn’t let his old friend live. Jayce vanished under a sea of swinging metal limbs.

That’s when Jayce, for the first time in his life, decided to stop thinking and just break stuff.

No longer caring for his own safety, Jayce used every last bit of strength he had to break free from Viktor’s automatons. He sprinted to the glowing crystal, and struck it with all of the hextech-enhanced force his hammer could muster, crushing the mystical object.

Viktor cried out in horror as the crystal shattered to fragments, the shockwave blasting them all backward as the army of automatons collapsed lifelessly to the floor. The very foundations of the warehouse shook, and Jayce barely managed to escape before the entire building toppled.

Viktor’s body was never found.

Upon his return to Piltover, Jayce informed his clan masters of Viktor’s nefarious plans. Soon, Jayce found himself a topic of discussion in both Zaun and Piltover alike. Hailed for his quick thinking in a time of crisis, Jayce became a beloved figure (at least, amongst those who hadn’t met him), earning himself a nickname: the Defender of Tomorrow.

Jayce cared little for the adoration of his fellow Piltovans, but took the nickname to heart. He knew that Viktor was still out there, plotting his revenge. One day – maybe someday soon – an awful lot of trouble was headed for Piltover.

And Jayce would be waiting.

A brilliant yet eccentric yordle scientist, Professor Cecil B. Heimerdinger is lauded as one of the most innovative minds and esteemed inventors Piltover has ever seen. Relentless in his work to the point of neurotic obsession, he is fascinated by mysteries that have confounded his contemporaries for decades, and thrives on answering the universe’s most impenetrable questions. Though his theories often appear opaque and esoteric, Heimerdinger believes knowledge should be shared, and is devoted to teaching all who desire it.

“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.

Okay, Zaun. I’m here, I’m fuzzy, and I’m ready to explode stuff.

All that time up there in Piltover serving high-quality pyrotechnics to ungrateful snoots, Heimerdinger making me hide behind that dumb glamour, never allowed to do what I want... It’s left me with a thirst for KA-BOOM!

But was Jinx right? Is the gloomy, stinking undercity teeming with whizz-bang potential?

Let’s see what we’ve got here. What am I looking at? Nondescript building, nondescript building, slightly bigger nondescript building, an explosives factory, another nondescript building, nondes—WAIT, WHAT?

Explosives factory?! Dreams can come true!

I’m not crying. That’s just the Zaun Gray gettin’ all up in my eyes.

Man, the things they must have in there... But it looks so normal. Dull, even. No flashing lights, no sparkling signs... just a rundown pile of bricks and ironwork. It’s like no one even cares how bombs are made. And it’s quiet... GASP! They must have it soundproofed because of all the live bomb testing! I’ve gotta get in there! Ooh, I bet there’s a super secret passageway or maybe you have to blow the front wall off or—

Oh, wait, there’s the door.

Hang on, what’s this?

You’ve gotta be kidding me! Why? How? How could this sacred place no longer be in use? How could anyone be so disrespectful of the creation of lovely explosives and shut it down forever and—what is that noise?

Huh, I’m pretty sure locks aren’t supposed to be all mangled like that. Looks like this door’s been busted open. Let me poke my head around...

I appear to be looking at a pair of disgruntled young humans. Not bombs. Humans. In an empty room. I may be losing interest. They haven’t seen me, at least.

“This sucks,” one of them says. He looks as disappointed as I feel. “You said this place was full of bombs. Well, we’ve searched every corner, and there’s nothing here!”

Stop it now, kid. This hurts.

The other one kicks over an empty crate. “How was I supposed to know they cleared it out?!”

Did neither of them read the sign? I swear, humans never look—

“Whatever,” the first one sighs. Whoa. I wasn’t done thinking my thought. Rude. “I’m bored. Let’s go.”

Not before me—I’m not ready to have my fur ruffled today. See ya, kids!

Man, I can’t believe this. My first venture out in the undercity and I find a bomb factory! Entirely committed to making bombs! That could’ve been home. But no, instead it was the home of shattered dreams.

I’ve gotta do something about this. Yeah. Yes. That’s it. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what it was made for...

I’M GONNA FILL THAT PLACE WITH BOMBS!

Oh, hey! Welcome to my lab. Well, Jinx’s lab. She’s letting me crash here while I find my feet in Zaun. She thinks I only exist in her head, so I guess I’m not taking up too much room. Besides, with all her scrap heaps and bits of junk everywhere, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only thing with fur running around this place.

What, these? Just some hexplosives I’m working on. My own design, of course.

These bad boys are gonna give that old factory the send-off it deserves. Let it go out with some dignity.

I can’t leave it as I found it earlier, waiting for another innocent incendiary enthusiast to come along, get them all excited, and then rip their heart right out without so much as a spark. It was a real emotional rollercoaster.

No, I’ll spruce the place up with my own devices, and then they’re gonna go off one after the other like little fireworks. Flash! Bang! Tssss! Flash! Bang! Tssss! Over and over until the whole place crumbles down in a huge explodey mess.

I call them “Chain Smokers”.

Almost done. I just take this bit here, and this thing here, and... Perfection.

Let’s go blow stuff up!

Okay, I’m back in the building. Come on, “KEEP OUT” sign, you had one job.

My little Chain Smokers are all laid out, ready to show their papa what they can do.

But Ziggs, I hear you say, how are you going to appreciate the products of all your talents if you can’t see them in action? My thoughts exactly. So I’ve got an extra treat for us all: I’m gonna blow the front wall off first!

This big one here’s the Party Popper, and it’s going to create the ultimate peephole!

Alrighty, time to push the button! Three... two... one... Big baddaboom!

...in sixty seconds.

What? I’ve gotta get out of here first—I don’t want to blow myself up!

Come on, come on, come on, I’m ready now! Got this nice pile of junk to hide behind. Perfect viewing distance. And... explode!

Nope. Forty seconds left. Turns out crossing the street doesn’t take that long.

Hey, why did the yordle cross—Oh no, what’re those kids doing back here?! They’re gonna get themselves a faceful of wall if they don’t move soon. Move. Move!

They’re not moving. They’re spray painting the wall. For the love of...

“Hey!” I call from behind the junkpile. “You kids! Get away from there!”

Yeah, that got their attention. A real Ziggs, out in the wild. They’re still standing there, though.

“What? You never seen a yordle before? Seriously, though, you need to move! You’re gonna get hurt!”

Are they...? They are! They’re laughing at me! Well, maybe I’ll just leave them to get exploded, after all! Jinx sure would.

Ohhhhhh, right. Jinx is a psychopath.

Ah! Ten seconds!

And I’m running. I’m running straight at those little sump-punks. Better to be tackled by a yordle than crushed by a building. That’s what I always say.

They’re not laughing anymore. The bigger one’s opening its mouth. “What’re you do—”

“No time! Move!”

BOOM!

We hit the other side of the street just as the wall goes up.

Yes! Bombs away!

Flash! Bang! Tssss! Flash! Bang! Tssss!

It’s mesmerising. Little lightning bolts striking every surface. Bricks tumbling down. Smoke pouring out, clouding all the locals who’ve come out to watch.

Flash! Bang! Tssss!

Wait, why are all these people staring at me instead of my art?

Flash! Bang! Tssss!

The roof is now completely caved in. It’s magical. No, I told you before, it’s the Gray! I’m not crying.

Flash! Bang! Tssss! Flash! Bang! Tsssssssss.

Haha! Yes! I can’t help it. I’m doing my happy dance. That was perfect!

Those two kids are looking at me like I just slapped their grandmother. I guess Zaunites are more used to collapsing buildings than gleeful furballs.

Whatever. I’m going in for a closer look.

My Chain Smokers performed just as they should; what was once a solid structure is now a blackened heap of rubble. That useless “KEEP OUT” sign is poking out from under a smashed roof tile. I’m gonna pick it up, a little souvenir for the lab.

Flash! Bang!

Gah! One of those sneaky little hexplosives waited for me to have a front-row seat. I think I’m on fire but—

“Wheeeeeee!”

—I’m flying through the air—

“Aaaaahahahahahaaaa!”

—trailing smoke—

“Oh, it burns! And tickles! But mostly burns! Hahahahahaha!”

—and all eyes are on this furry rocket.

“See, kids? Now that’s how you make bombs!”

Even amongst yordles, Rumble was always the runt of the litter. As such, he was used to being bullied. In order to survive, he had to be scrappier and more resourceful than his peers. He developed a quick temper and a reputation for getting even, no matter who crossed him. This made him something of a loner, but he didn't mind. He liked to tinker, preferring the company of gadgets, and he could usually be found rummaging through the junkyard.

Rumble showed great potential as a mechanic, and his teachers recommended him for enrollment at the Yordle Academy of Science and Progress in Piltover. He may very well have become one of Heimerdinger's esteemed proteges, but Rumble refused to go. He believed that Heimerdinger and his associates were ''sellouts,'' trading superior yordle technology to humans for nothing more than a pat on the head while yordles remained the butt of their jokes.

When a group of human graduates from the Yordle Academy sailed to Bandle City to visit the place where their mentor was born and raised, Rumble couldn't resist the temptation to see them face-to-face (so to speak). He only intended to get a good look at the humans, but four hours and several choice words later, he returned home bruised and bloodied with an earful about how he was an embarrassment to ''enlightened'' yordles like Heimerdinger.

The next morning, Rumble left Bandle City without a word, and wasn't seen again for months. When he returned, he was at the helm of a clanking, mechanized monstrosity. He marched it to the center of town amidst dumbfounded onlookers and there announced that he would show the world what yordle-tech was really capable of achieving.

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.