Chapter Text
Things are a mess. Messy. There’s no doubt about that, really. It’s always someone’s fault. Not yours, but somebody’s. You could track the blame till you reach the wrong side of the sunset but you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.
What, you’re gonna shoot holes in my story already? At least wait till you’ve gotten to the good meat. This is a romantic ballad, after all. You like those, don’t you? The ones without the endings, that go on and on and on…
I should probably set our scene. Lone armed gunslinger, weathered woman of a hundred old scores. She walks with earned swagger and easy prowess. Concealed under her cloak, a too-big right-handed weapon (courtesy of yours truly) swings like a murder tool.
This woman is not a romantic. She has a trail of bodies– satisfied women, broken men. On her left hip, an iron with seven bullets. Four of those she intends to use on the remaining members of the Council.
Anyways, she’s good at cleaning up messes, that’s for sure. And no one’s a bigger mess than my sister. This proficiency doesn’t make her any more merciful.
The place is a dump like all other places. Her smoke dies in a puddle. Sevika creaks up the stairs, and boy is she angry, getting angrier by the minute. I gave her instruction and direction but who knows what’s steering her. She bangs on the door and gets no response, so she lets herself in, the lock snapping like a child’s bone.
Grime-fuzzed window, dark room the size of a lobster trap. The hearth burns, a fire-hazard without anyone to tend to it. Bottles like tally-marks. Blood-dried garments. The stuff of youthful waste.
Vi’s on the cot, a nasty sex-appeal, covered in bandages and sweat like a dying dreaming soldier. But no, just sleeping, a forearm over her eyes like the crybaby she is. She looks like Sevika’s last woman, blown out, deflated.
The bedframe rattles when Sevika kicks it and Violet shudders awake like from a bad pill, like a seizure recovery. Her heads lifting, her forearms trying and failing, eyes unfocused, refocusing, closing.
“Morning, sunshine,” Sevika says.
Ting… ting… ting… sproing! Vi’s up, not awake, demanding total abject performance from exhausted muscles, and her forearm presses Sevika’s neck like a guillotine. She’s learned from last time, she’s bigger too, and Sevika notices this without disregard.
“You,” Vi snarls.
“Me,” Sevika agrees. Calmly, she takes Vi’s arm, bends it at an awkward, splayed angle; grabs her throat– it was like grabbing a chicken’s gawky windpipe– and slams the girl into the bed. The legs pop off like pegs. The mattress depresses into the floor.
“You’re gonna listen because I’m out of patience,” Sevika says. Her cloak has whispered to the floor like snakeskin. Her arm ends in a cloistered claw, an unwieldy lopsided crustacean, like the claptrap junk crabs by the polluted lakes. Metal teeth dig into Vi and she’s thinking, cursing: Jinx.
“I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to,” Sevika says. “Things are bad out there. I know you know. I don’t know if you care. You’ve decided to stick your head in the dirt.”
Vi wheezes a protest and the claw tightens. Starburst halos behind her eyes. I know what that feels like, sis.
“I need Jinx,” Sevika says in her ear. Vi’s teeth show, lips peeled back. She’s something when she’s worked up like this. “She’s going to end this war.”
Vi croaks. “That new piece-of-shit arm? I know my sister made that for you. It’s not yours, not really. You can’t control her.”
Quick as a spring-loaded rattlesnake, Vi had grabbed the lever on Sevika’s, and the slots were spinning, determining fate and inventing probabilities. They stare at the flashing colors and buzzy installments in an uncomprehending truce.
The panel flips: sly pull of a grin.
The furthermost one: lips slit open, cracked and peeling.
The middle: fanged teeth, completed expression.
Sevika’s eyes widen, something on her lips, maybe run, when Vi brings her elbow down on the delicate ball joint on the arm and it folds just enough for her to slip out from the grasp.
(If you’re sensitive to violence against furniture, please be advised).
It’s a whirlwind. The bed snaps. The punching bag flails. The hearth disconnects from the ceiling. Coals scatter. The mirror records a fractured carnage, of gnashing jaws and a quick-footed turncoat rat and the bearlike maul. Her arm is eating everything, a snapping foam-mouthed hound, dying of hunger, crazy with hunger.
Sevika swipes at our hero and knocks her through that darkened window into the raging city. Cut and caught by glass and clotheslines, Vi lands in a heap of sodden musty undergarments left out too long. She clambers to her feet, fighting several concussions and her signature hangover.
Across the street, in the shattered stained-glass window of the apartment, Sevika stands like fantasies of the Devil. Dark and handsome and deathly.
Outmatched, outgunned. Vi staggers through the alleyway, bursting into the gym next door where she would train with Loris for her upcoming fights. Several people nod to her but the majority quickly turn their heads; the way she walks is trouble and she’s got the Devil behind her.
Woman’s locker room. She fits right in with her chest bindings. People tighten their fists with gauze, conversation floats idly, hot musk of bodies. Vi spins the code and pounds open her locker.
The doors to the gym burst open. Steel-toe boots clink lightly like dropped coins. The terrible claw swings like a stowed rifle. Sweaty punching bags spin like cattle meat. Sevika considers an appeal but she wants this. And Vi needs this.
Ting… ting… ting… SPROING!
A punching bag explodes. In the needle-spray of sand, a big fat cartoon fist hurtles.
Wide-shot: front of the gym, adjacent building. Sevika crashes into the wall, a wild projectile. She climbs to her feet from a lean-to of crushed timber and sawdust, thinking I’m getting too old for this.
Vi walks alone in the street, her oversized gloves vibrating with mismanaged tipsy power. Steam jets from them. Shirtless, with that careless bright-eyed look, she’s the spitting image of a younger Vander.
“There she is,” Sevika says. There’s the girl who held that bridge. She raises her arm, the extra-dangerous one, and grabs the lever.
“I want that arm,” Vi says and flattens the perspective, clapping the margins and pulling the wide-shot into a close-up. Now up-close, she swings. Sevika barely slips it, the force of the haymaker wind spinning both of them around.
Vi turns her recovery into a brutal uppercut, and Sevika lets go of the lever to block, jam the giant fist, but even with her face protected, the shattering punch launches her through the already-weakened wall.
Where are we? Chickens clamor in flurrying panic. People crowd around the arena, shouting, betting on the roosters. A microcosm of the pitfights next door, arguably a more intense spectator sport. Vi’s following up, stepping on heads and shoulders, stirring up complaints and death-threats. Growling up expletives, Sevika pulls her level. The slots clatter in jangling unstable laughter.
A billowing gout of fire rolls over where Vi is. Everyone’s scattering, the chickens are ablaze, white burning pages, roasting feathers, people batting at smoldering clothes, dropping and rolling.
The flush of fire dies. In the wake of ember and scorchmarks on the dirt floor, Vi is gone. It’s impossible. She’s skipped. The framing doesn’t suit her. This context and medium doesn’t suit her. And my sister’s never been probable.
The gauntlet crashes into Sevika’s jaw like a freight train, Vi captured in a perfect disjointed still. Knuckle pins hiss, pistons pump, thrusters burn and Sevika feels the mild pain of an injury disregarded as mere drama. She’s got a hashtag on her cheek, marked.
Vi’s disappeared again, and this time Sevika gets the prickles and premonitions; she ducks and Vi’s jab whistles over her head. How did she get behind her? Useless question. The chickens fluff the fire like singed marshmallows.
Sevika turns, rips her lever, and fires her terrible claw at the approximate location. Approximations are useless too but she gets lucky; Vi is there, reflexes spring-coiled like a nervous greyhound before a race. She snatches the claw out of the air, but that’s my special-grade reinforced cable. Her glove wrenches off when it reels.
This is the opening, the crux. Sevika lunges and Vi defends, blows falling on her lopsided guard. Her face takes some of them. Sevika grabs the guard-blind girl and knees her brutally in the side, lets her stumble away.
“Traitor,” Sevika tells her. “How’s that Piltie feel in bed? Soft?”
Vi raises her fists, nose bloodied. She spits a wad on the dirt. “You can’t call me that. You weren’t one of us the moment you threw in with Silco.”
“There isn’t Silco or Vander anymore. There’s only Zaun.”
Vi gets lower. “You’re gonna remember.”
Ting… ting… ting… SPROING!
Vi over her head.
snatches smashes it
the and
SPROING
The
fell
like
words
stars.
Sevika blinks rapidly against the sudden bright light in her vision. A ringing wavers around her head like little twittery birds. Without seeing, she pulls her lever, over and over, and Vi’s creasing planes, folding the edges, reducing dimension, cutting perspective, closing distance.
It’s getting sloppy, rowdy. The crowd has formed again, excitement swelling and peaking, and money passes from hand to hand, as the two try with all their might to beat sense into each other in this senseless world.
Sevika is older. She’s slowing, brain sloshing in her skull. Vi’s moving thickly through time, but temporally displaced haymakers keep battering the side of Sevika’s guard and face.
Spectators scream, kill her. But they would never kill each other because they couldn’t. No, these fated projections of a tireless conflict would keep brawling and carrying on and fucking and getting knocked out and coming around because I want them to, and it’s me whose telling this story.
Vi’s bouncing like an overclocked engine with no kill switch. Sevika digs in her mouth and pulls out a tooth.
“How’s the arm? You feeling lucky?” Vi pants, chin up obstinately.
Sevika rotates her arm in a metal-groaning 360. “Give me Jinx and I won’t have to beat it out of you.”
“You think I’m that much of a rat, huh?” Vi’s makeshift margins are narrowing again,
And
Sevika is
backed up
to the corner
of the
page.
Vi lunges, claw-hands, and Sevika pumps the lever. I have one last smile for her. She catches Vi’s fist in her jaws, and the hydraulics rip through to crucial componentry and into the radiant core of energy–- just as Vi tears the lever off.
They stagger back, falling in the dust and woodshavings, breathing hard. Vi can’t lift her mangled gauntlet. Sevika’s slots are stuck permanently in the static frowny-face mushroom display.
A heavy gravity drags at them. It’s reality, coming down hard. The crowd, the chaos, isn’t really there; stageplay for the two stars who don’t know we’re watching.
Vi hears a click. Sevika has her gun drawn on her.
“You two aren’t worth the trouble,” Sevika says.
Vi snorts. “Let’s see how that turns out..” She rolls leisurely over on her back, her huge hand like a ridiculous joke.
Sevika keeps her gun pointed at Vi for a good few minutes before she lowers it, letting her head hit the dirt.
“I hate you,” Sevika says.
Vi gives her an oversized middle finger.
###
You’re still here? Huh! Usually my subject matter this late at night is pretty abstracted, hard to digest. But as long as I have you captive, I wouldn’t mind telling you more.
There’s alcohol involved. Half a bottle of liver-cleaner. Dark fluid swishes as the bottle passes back and forth.
Vi burps, tasting acid. She goes to burp again and hiccups instead.
Sevika raises an eyebrow from her side of the room. “You drunk already?”
“It’s medicinal,” Vi grumbles. Peering into the bottle is like falling down a hole. Sevika finally slots the screwdriver in place. The hinged jaw to her arm sags as she loosens the tension of damage.
In Zaun daylight, everything is uglier. Furry diluted light, old boarded up witch-houses with battered warty faces, derailed train on the abandoned tracks where the shimmering people live. The ugly creeps like rust.
They’re at one of our nests. The ones we made when home was still safe and tenable. Remember the doll-guts? The damsels that couldn’t be saved? We had our fun and now the cowboys clean up our messes.
Sevika nods at the dissected bomb componentry. “Your whole family’s got issues. And I’m not talking quirks. I mean seismically.“
Vi places the bottle down, fiddles with the whorled dial on her gauntlet. The thing’s still not working even after she had turned it off and on again. Jumper cables gutter from the unpaneled palm.
“Out of every genius and lunatic in this backwater city, how come I got stuck with the fossil?” Vi says. She makes a fist and her gauntlet remains unresponsive, like a deflated glove.
“Do you have any idea of where we should start?”
“Why would I? She seems a lot closer to you these days.”
“You chose the wrong side.” Sevika grabs the oil rag and the bottle, douses the rag, and presses it to the cut on her cheekbone.
“Hey, how come we’re not smashing each other’s faces in?” Vi says.
“We’ve already done that. It gets boring after a while.”
“I don’t think we’re bored.”
“You’re drunk.”
Vi hiccups. “Shouldn’t I want to kill you? It doesn’t make sense. I feel like I missed something. There’s this noise in my head. Or water in my ears.”
Sevika sighs. “All those fights. They get to you, rattle your head. It's compounding damage. Every time you take a hit, you’re replicating all that momentum of the hits you took before.”
Vi squints idly. “We’ve fought– what, three times?”
“Three times. A loss, a win, and a draw."
“Give me the bottle.”
Sevika hands it over. The dark fluid swishes like a stillborn. Vi tilts her head back and drinks the rest. Nurtured on daddy’s milk. Divisions of golden light on her face like a solar cell field.
“You know you were my first crush?” She stretches an arm behind her head in pantomimed arrest.
“That’s sad,” Sevika says without looking up, ruthlessly focused on the task at hand.
“Yeah,” Vi says. “Remember the lessons?”
“How to cheat at cards? Or how to treat a woman? I don’t think you paid attention to either ‘cause you’re shit at cards and where’s your woman?”
“I retained some stuff,” Vi says, rolling her head back. “How to get your ass beat.”
The mostly-empty bottle drops and bounces. Sevika cranks her arm into place with an orgasmic s n a p. The supple gold ingots deteriorate into darkness; her imposing frame blocks the light. Vi cracks an eye open.
“Hey,” she mutters in feeble protest. Sevika has bent, not touching, surgically inspecting the raised cut along Vi’s scalp. Tight itch like tugging on hair. Fat lip too, bruised jaw, cartoon sabotage. Nobody in the world cared a damn about this girl.
“Clean yourself up,” Sevika rinses the rag with clean booze and presses it to Vi’s head; the girl whistles a two-note low-high. Then she raises her chin in vague aimless defiance.
“You totally trampled on my feelings,” she complains. “I told you I liked you.”
“Half a decade ago. And three decades too late.”
Vi hiccups. “I didn’t think you had an expiration date.” Sevika let her hand loosen and Vi obediently takes over, pressing the rag to her scalp. She sits sideways in my chair, a cat’s curl, and the family resemblance burns bright. Sleepy blinks, one eye squinted. Barefoot, rough soles. Building jumper. Skin bruised a million different colors from the pits.
“We have to find her,” Vi says. “Because I need an explanation for all of this.”
Bright loud music. They startle badly, two jumpy bullet casings. My voice jangles through the speakers.
“You have: one new message.”
Sevika and Vi look at the offending arm. The speakers pound with an intake of breath.
“Howdy, folks! Is this thing on? Ahem. Hey, sis. Big Ugly. I’m glad she got to you before you dyed your hair. Anyways, don’t be mad but I couldn’t do it. I can’t be the lynch pin, I can’t hold the weight of it, of all those needy souls. Enough of the spectacle, enough of the sensationalized circus, I had to get out. I had to get her out. You’re not going to find us. I’m running until I can’t see my shadow behind me.”
“I know you can’t see the end, only the beginning and the rotten endless middle. When you get some perspective, you can comprehend the scale of the hoax. You’re chasing ghosts. There’s no miracle to be found here.”
The disembodied voice shuts off. Vi and Sevika look at each other.
“It’s a start,” Sevika says.
“What?” Vi doesn’t get it.
“She said she can’t see the shadow behind her. She went west.”
###
Now we have something out of the soupy discordant mess. Firm fine heroes polished with axle grease and wound tight as clockwork. Hot compressed metal stores all the humming potential.
The oil bubbles and catches and the city’s on fire. You got all these heretical psychologies mixing. Hearsay, I say. Nobody’s got the real story but me.
Sevika hasn’t been topside in a while. Her connections are intact–- they get through the checkpoints. Ascending to golden heights like viruses through a glammed-out nervous system; foot-funk to shining crown.
“Have you ever been outside of Piltover?” Vi asks as they file in with the processions of people who couldn’t take the heat. Runic anti-gravity pulses blue at the top of the tower.
“A couple times. I ran lines overseas too.” She catches Vi’s look. “Not just for Silco.”
“You know, you’re kind of ruining the whole mysterious stranger thing you have going on,” Vi says. She has an energy in her step– the Hexgates are really something, wonders of imagination. Sevika’s imagining something else. See, Vi’s ahead of her on the stairs.
Sweet metronomic tick-tock of the hips. Vi wore pants like a topographic map. Crests and swells. Sevika’s arm snaps shut like an old rusty bear trap. The corners of her mouth turn up. She’s not sparing or cursory.
The port dwarfs them with the enormity of sustained civilization. Airships rumble in like massive cloudbanks.
Vi bounces. “Oh sh-it!” Eyes wide, shining like a kid’s.
Sevika feels exasperated amusement. “Wait till you’re actually on one of them.”
“I should’ve known,” Vi says fondly. “My sister was always gonna fly away some day. I just thought I’d be seeing her off.
They board, Vi walking unsteady as if the floor would pitch like a ship. Their tickets are printed with the man of the future. She’s wary of the windows, tensing at turbulence. The open sky is as daunting as the sea.
“Do you need to piss?” Sevika says.
“It feels weird,” Vi says. “There’s this– swooping in my stomach.” They’re sitting in the defensible middle, away from the windows.
“You really haven’t seen much past those four walls.”
Vi turns her head away. “I’d probably have a better time without you.”
“I know you’re on your bender but we’re not here to have fun.”
Vi scowls and gets up. “I have to piss.”
Note: Sevika’s in between women at the moment. Maybe that attitude is why.
While Vi is peeing, the airship winks into spatial transposition, the intelligent runes chattering like stellar electrical storms. She stumbles out of the bathroom, clutching her head, teetering from sudden molecular reconfiguration.
###
I’m bored. You can help write the scene, if you want.
Sevika’s improbable connections get them west. The land is dead here. The town’s worse, like people forgot to furnish the set.
They’ve left the civil unrest behind. This is a nation of masks and ruthless order. Nobody gets a hard-on without permission around here. Team colors are red. Ghosts in windows watch with surveillance-state eyes.
“This place is a dump,” Vi says. “I don’t have much to say about it.”
“I don’t have much to say in general,” Sevika says. “Someone got lazy with the dialogue.”
They are walking weapons, knuckle-bruiser and funky arm. Nobody gets in their way, which is good because their toys are still broken; Vi’s glove is stuck in a fist; Sevika’s slots are on the fritz.
Sevika turns into an alleyway and then a couple hundred more confusing turns. They come to a nondescript door with a half-moon on it and a foul smell behind it like an outhouse. Vi looks at Sevika and pulls her teeth over her lip in an incredibly obnoxious, Jinx-like expression.
Without knocking, Sevika enters. Dim room, not much to see, whatever you want in there. Genie lamps, skulking cats, reams of maps. An elderly Yordle creaks up to them. He wears a backpack three times his size and looks like a dust bunny. Sevika and him converse about breeding stock and conversation rates and gestation periods.
Then, he leads them through double doors into a burst of sunlight; open stables, canvas stretched like sky. Their rides were here. Purring, snorting fire, cut with muscle, perfect machines.
The horses lashed their manes. One mare. One stallion. Guess who's getting which.
“What the fuck?” Vi says. She’s inspecting the mare. Sevika steals a cigar from the Yordle’s pack and lights it, anticipating Vi.
Vi tears around. “You pumped it full of shimmer?” The vents on the mare’s side breath a violet mist. She’s in Sevika’s face. Sevika directs a stream of smoke so that it glances off Vi’s roman numerals.
“Relax,” Sevika says. “It’s not like the thing can get addicted.”
“It’s an abomination,” Vi snarls.
“Really?” Sevika leans in; they can smell each other’s breath. “By that logic, so is your sister.”
Vi tenses, about to swing like the doofus she is. Defending my honor. Then the Yordle steps in, offering dusty advice.
“Blah blah blah endeavor includes finding a symbiosis between the agent and the host. The shimmer no longer overextends past limits, instead accessing the full potential without lasting bodily damage blah blah blah.”
With this, he leaves to go have a heart attack in his dimly lit room. Sevika shrugs, a little tiredly. Vi turns back to the mare, stroking its neck. Her expression is a little loose, a little screwy.
“Sorry, girl,” Vi says. “What a shit existence.”
The mare tosses its head as if to say no big deal.
They saddle up. The harnesses barely fit around the bulk of the altered beasts. All of the wildness contained in a shimmer-ambrosia. Vi sits light and balanced, never settling her weight fully. She’s a natural at riding.
Commotion at town square. What is it? A lottery? Pie-eating contest? Duel at noon? The two cowboys clop through the ghostly population, unable to place any sane chronologies of scenes.
“Your sister’s famous wherever she goes,” Sevika says, examining my flattering wanted poster.
“Yeah,” Vi says, “she has that effect.”
“We all thought it was going to be you with the bounty on your head.”
Vi tilts her head. “Because of Vander?”
“Nah,” Sevika says, “I knew he was a–- he was settling down by then. You were your own thing.”
Vi laughs a little. “I don’t know about that.”
“I’ve never seen a kid do what you did that day,” Sevika says, with no trace of teasing or envy.
Now Vi ducks her head and mumbles something.
“Seriously. You should reconsider your cause,” Sevika says. “You’d be an asset. Zaun could use someone like you.”
“I think Zaun forgot about me,” Vi says musingly.
“You’re gonna make them remember, right?” Sevika says and now Vi looks at her, eyes a little harder, surer.
The town square has a gallows. The braided rope used is blue.
###
There! What did you think? You shouldn’t be too disappointed; it’s what you wanted after all. What’s that? It’s confusing? So is anything in life.
You’re restless. Don’t want to sleep yet? That’s okay, we can watch the sunset. You want to play? Is this how Vi felt with me?
Fine. There’s this box. It’s not magic, but it contains cursed machinery. Just like Fishbones, it has enough kinetic energy built up to topple a nation. Crank the handle and the sweet music plays like sonorous lullabies.
It’s nice right? A music box. Keep winding, keep receiving those romantic drippy half-promises, the hypnotic warm voice that tells you everything’s going to be okay, that there’s a happy ending, that you haven’t messed everything up.
Ting…
Ting…
Ting…
Ting…
SPROING!
Ha-ha! I’m sorry, but I had to get you at least once. Oh boy, you should’ve seen the look on your face. I don’t know what you were expecting from me, honestly.
Now look at her, loose and bouncing, sprang from a coil. She can do anything. She will go on to do anything.
Our two heroes will have their time in the sun yet.