17

Chapter One

The tower stood tall, the light of the rising sun turning steel, brass, and white stone to golden splendor, greeting the new day as it had every one for the last several months. Ships, drifting through the sky, made their way up, one by one, to the top of the tower, where the spherical cap spun, great gears turning and aligning the greater magical array, glowing blue lines of Mana clear even through the tinted light, as well as the brass focusing arrays which glowed with light of their own, all dialing in for a singular purpose.

The energy gathered, and activated, magic circles hundreds of feet wide flickering into place and stabilizing, more forming outwards, into a lensing array, encompassing the next airship in line, tightening, before, with a single melodious chime, the circles collapsed down and the ship was gone, only a long thin blue line of Mana pointing in the direction it had been sent, a quarter of the way across Runeterra, a trip of several months completed in as many seconds.

And then, above the tower, more circles formed, a spinning many-part azure halo that shone for several seconds, a blue nimbus of light appearing around the structure, pulled inside, like water down a drain, before that formation, too, flickered out of existence, and the tower once more started to turn, away from the nation of Bilgewater, swinging north, towards Noxus, to do it all over again.

"It's hard to believe we really built that, Jayce," Viktor, my partner, remarked, the pale man having hobbled over to me in our laboratory. While I, or at least the body I'd taken over after its untimely death, one 'Jayce Talis', came from Piltover, the city of progress, he had grown up in its sister city, Zaun, city of industry, or 'lower Piltover' to the Pilties, as Zaun had lost the war over a century ago. While Piltover was a wealthy Steampunk Victorian metropolis, Zaun now was a sunken pit of fumes and neon poverty, every bit of prosperity taken by the higher sister city, higher both metaphorically, and physically.

While most Zaunites adapted, growing up in that toxic waste of a city had left Viktor, who had no last name, sickened, and lame, though his mind was untouched, enough to catch the attention of Dean Heimerdigner, the Yordle, and a founding member of the almost two-hundred year old city of Piltover, and a member of the Council that ruled it, allowing the spirit to lift the young genius out of the muck.

"We designed it," I countered, turning my eyes away from the sight. "Quite a few others built it."

With a shrug, the pale man gave, "Technically, but without us, it would never have been."

"Fair enough," I smiled, turning back to our workspace, where our two thirteen-year old apprentices were preparing the first of today's experiments.

I'd pulled them both out of Zaun myself, though under very… different circumstances. Both, were it not for my actions, would become Champions in their own right, just as Viktor, and, had he not passed unexpectedly, Jayce would have been, but the circumstances of their original developments into figures of Legend had been… unacceptable.

So I had changed them.

Viktor's apprentice, Ekko, was a genius when it came to tinkering, the dark-skinned, white-haired boy orphaned twice over, the second time watching his adopted father slaughtered in front of him by an alchemically twisted thug, and while he would have probably made it on his own, scrabbling for survival in Zaun's back alleys, I had, with the help of another, saved him from that.

Beside him was 'Piper Vandottir', real name Powder, who would have one day turned into the Mad Bomber, Jinx, had I not stepped in. Where Ekko dealt with the mechanical, and the practical, Piper was a genius in the theoretical, able to intuit the deeper mechanics of the universe and tweak them, ever so, into doing what she wanted with her devices, but, as she worked on hunches and intuition, the pale-skinned, blue-haired girl's creations tended to fail, quite spectacularly, if they were anything beyond single-use devices.

The past three years, we'd all worked hard, here at Piltover's Academy, trying to figure out the specifics of the new branch of study that Viktor and Jayce would have discovered, and which I, taking up the baton, had carried forward in new and interesting directions.

Hextech.

In Runeterra, there were normal people, and then there were Mages, who could draw upon the magic that saturated the air to perform great feats, but, through Hextech, even those without that innate gift could utilize Mana. However, that energy was wild, a constant shifting and changing of unseen tides, and thus instead of trying to pull upon that mercurial source directly we utilized Hexcrystals, solidified Mana found in the deserts of Shurima, to the south, Piltover serving as the Panama of this world, even down to the Canal, though the locals called it the 'Sun Gate', the structure the source of a great deal of the Medarda family's wealth, to the point that they, too, had a seat on the Council of Piltover because of it.

With that stabilized source of energy, even if the crystals themselves were physically volatile, and thus unfit for any sort of mobile device, progress could be made, and creations did not need to shift their functioning to account for the mercurial nature of wild magic before they could manifest reproducible results.

One of which we were testing now.

"Matrix's good!" Ekko called, tone serious, carefully checking our current array's frame.

"Hexcrystal's Hexing!" Piper added with a grin, waving her hand through the array, watching as the pseudo-circle shifted and flowed, runes warping, flickering between possibilities, not yet set.

Looking to Viktor, he nodded, and I commanded, "Alright, Activate the Zero-G Array."

With a set of clicks and a deep Hum, the circles flicked, then stabilized, the Zero-Gate, using the same array as the tower above us, but whose origin and end point was the same location, popping into existence in the small cage meant to contain it, because it wasn't the gate effect we wanted, it was the Zero-Gravity one it created as a side effect.

Yes, there was probably an easier way of doing this, but we hadn't found it yet, and this worked for now.

There was a slight shimmer in the air, and the faint scent of ozone, but other than the Zero-Gate, the charged Hexcrystal spinning in place, it was nearly impossible to tell anything had actually happened.

Just as we'd planned.

"Initial shaping seems to be in place," Viktor noted, "given that we are not floating."

"Okay! Checking shape!" Piper announced, grabbing a bag of chalk dust, only instead of tossing it up like I'd asked her to, she took off running, jumping up onto a table, then leaping, pulling her legs up, and slowing to a stop in mid-air, the anti-gravity effect of the Zero-Gate inducing an odd sort of inertia-cancelling manifestation that made things easier to transport, but seemed to, ever so subtly, react to thought, so that if you wanted to go somewhere, you had to kind of 'swim', but, as the only person here who knew what true zero gravity was, I knew that those motions shouldn't have been enough.

That also meant that, if the girl wanted to come to a stop, she would after a moment, provided she didn't have enough of her body outside of the effect to pull her down from it.

I sighed, "Piper, you were supposed to add the chalk from the outside."

"Yeah, but this is way faster, and we've already checked it's safe!" my ward replied, spinning with a "Weee!" as she threw chalk in every direction, the substance spreading out to highlight the field's shape, small bits falling out and dropping to the tarp we'd laid out below it.

Shaking my head, I grabbed one of our safety lines, and tossed it into the anti-gravity effect, walking over to her as she finished up, and grabbed onto it. With a single yank, she was sent flying down, and I let go of the lead, holding my hands out, so that when she exited the effect, tossing another handful of chalk into the space she'd vacated, Piper dropped directly into my arms.

With a slight toss that got a laugh from the teen, she landed lightly, as we both turned to look at the Zero-G field.

"Well, we have shaped it," Viktor offered, what should have been a hexagonal prism that bent upwards at one end, kind of like an Allen Wrench, was instead it an oddly lumpy cylinder. "For certain definitions of shape."

Looking at it, I wasn't quite sure what had gone wrong, but the bulges looked regular, forming ridges that were almost organic looking.

And then the entire thing rippled, sending bits of chalk falling to the tarps we'd laid out, Piper and I both looking to array, where Viktor's ward had busted out his tools and was working on the reference model that the array used to shape its own field.

"Ekko, what are you doing?" I questioned carefully, the boy, just like Piper, having not quite broken the tendency to see a problem and just try and fix it himself, didn't answer right away. My partner and I had drilled enough knowledge into them that we'd stopped the kids from doing so on anything big, especially after Piper had blown up half the lab, twice, in one day, but for smaller things they both tended to act first, and only explain afterwards.

"It's repeating," the boy finally replied, gesturing towards the field with a pair of pliers, that he then used to tweak not the model, like I'd thought but the focusing array. "Turned into one of those chained together things."

"A fractal?" I questioned, and he nodded without looking up, making more changes, the field quivering and shifting, bits of chalk falling, the bulges along the prism extending outwards, catching bits of falling white, though the changes he made were unstable, almost wobbling, the bits of dust caught in the extended sections dropping an inch every third second.

Viktor walked over to the array, leaning on his cane. "I think I see the problem, but it needs to be powered down, young man. You're developing instabilities in the field's expression. Those can be somewhat detrimental."

"Gimme a sec," the dark-skinned boy deferred, twisting a bit of rune-inscribed quartz about, the cylinder above us starting to pulse and deform, bits of chalk twisting and shimmering, forming intricate interlocking patterns, until his mentor reached in and, with a single twist of his own, deactivated the entire array.

"Hey!" Ekko complained. "I had that!"

Holding a hand out, Viktor caught a bit of now hardened chalk, halfway to limestone, as it fell out of the air, other bits dropping in a clattering rain, and he showed the piece of interwoven near-stone to his ward. "You also had this," the older Zaunite chided. "There is a reason we take down the array each time. And we are in no rush, Ekko. I'm sure you will get it soon."

Handing the boy his accidental creation, the Tinkerer hung his head. "I, yeah. Sorry. I could just… see it, yaknow? It was right there."

"Trust me, we all know what that's like," I smiled. "The first modification wasn't bad, and seemed to be a proof of concept, but all it takes is one serious accident, and not only will you not find out whatever you're looking for, you won't find out anything ever again. Do we need to ask Heimerdinger for another safety seminar?"

"Ugh, no," Ekko sighed, while Piper looked over what he was working on.

She saw something in his work, asking, "Oh, you wanted to spin it back around, so if it skipped, it skipped straight?"

That clearly meant something to the boy, who nodded. "Yeah, and it should work!"

"And turn anything inside into a pretzel, as it repeats the change!" she nodded with a smile.

"Yeah! … Oh," the white-haired teen admitted, realizing his problem. "Um, it might be good for mining?"

Piper snorted, "What isn't?"

"Do a write up, and add it to the pile," Viktor commanded with a smirk, as destructive uses for our tech were quite easy to stumble upon, but constructive uses were far harder to figure out. The boy nodded and headed to his desk, while my ward and I gathered up the edges of the tarp, folding up the collection of oddly formed precipitate we'd wrung out of the air, the white chalk containing faint streaks of color from the contaminants that, even all the way up here, could be found in what we breathed, though, with Mana passively strengthening even non-Mages, we were fine.

Well, except for Viktor, whose lungs had been damaged as a child, likely from breathing in something truly toxic during his formative years, but most of these were trace elements found everywhere civilization existed.

"I'm sure we'll figure it out, Eks," Piper told the boy, who gave her a rueful nod, as the two of us dumped the chalk formations into the 'could be interesting' bin, as opposed to the 'throw it out' bin, or the 'don't touch this with your bare hands' bin that got enough use we had to set it up in the first place.

"Speaking of projects," I added, folding up the tarp fully to put it away for now, "how's the Recharge Array looking?"

The blue-haired girl smiled at me and skipped away, working the pully at the back of the room to lift up the blast-shield and checking the magical creation that was chugging away there, a single slowly spinning circle of runes at work, and, at its center, what used to be a fully depleted hexcrystal lethargically sparking, flickers of glowing light dancing within it. After a moment of her looking over her work, she gave me a thumbs up. "Stable!"

At her words, the crystal rattled in its housing, and she froze, slowly lowering the blast shield. "Stable-ish!"

"Well, when it's stable-ish-er we'll see about updating the larger trial array," I told her, walking up to the blackboard we'd set up next to it, displaying the current Recharging Array design. "So, what parts do you think are the problem?"

She started to outline her ideas, as I made her stop and more clearly define her terms, turning 'Whosiwhatsit' to 'Collation Spiral' and 'Thingamajiggy' to 'Flow Regulator', which, despite how much it annoyed her to do so, did help her slow down and work through things, figuring out half of the problem with the latest iteration of her project then and there.

And, with the Hexgate built and functional, each of us now had our own sub-projects, that we took the lead on in turn, though we all helped each other out in the process.

Ekko's project was the repurposing of the Zero Gate's zero gravity effect. The boy loved the feeling of flight it created, and flight in general, working on 'his' own version of the completed version of his hoverboard from farther along the original timeline I'd purchased from my employers. To that end, he'd worked on various ideas, though, to use any of them, he'd have to make a shaped, stable area for it to work in first.

There were a number of uses the ability to create anti-gravity on demand could be turned to, though most of which I was only somewhat aware of, from my pre-existing knowledge, and the Basic Training I'd gone through before I'd come to this world. Materials Engineering was the most obvious use of it, a number of hyper-advanced materials in more sci-fi oriented dimensions only able to be made in space because the lack of a gravitational pull allowed metals and such to make crystalline atomic structures otherwise impossible.

But, I couldn't exactly tell the others that, as it stemmed from my knowledge as an outsider to this dimension, even if I was inhabiting the body of a local who had accidentally killed himself with his own experiment. No, I could only guide them in its general direction.

Manufacturing and Transportation were the directions Ekko was currently pointed in, after a fashion, with workers able to freely move about and construct items that would normally require complex winch systems, or travel easily up and down the layers of Zaun, and perhaps even up to Piltover itself, though, like all of our projects, it was very much a work in progress.

Piper's Project was something that had already borne fruit, her creation scalable and so implementable without issue. Recycling was something that most Piltovans didn't even think of, but was something that was second nature to Zaunites, turning the 'Pilties' trash into their own kinds of treasures, though, once put in the business terms of 'cutting operational costs', my Piltovan backers were all on board with it.

The Hexgate went through hexcrystals, you see. A lot of hexcrystals. And while they were currently fairly cheap to mine from the desert wastes of Shurima, such a state of affairs could not be guaranteed. Furthermore, because every creation we made drained the stones upon use, every single invention we came up with needed to have a way to easily expend the spent power sources and replace them with a new ones.

If we could get the rate of return high enough, we could construct devices with internalized crystals that would power themselves, to the point where they would no longer need to be replaced at all.

But we weren't there yet.

Not even close.

As it was now, her array pulled from the ambient Mana in the air, the same way that Mages did, getting about a ten-percent return on every use of our other devices, which leaked the stuff as they worked. The Hexgate itself saturated the air around it with Mana, and the array we'd built into it helped a great deal with that, something that Dean Heimerdinger was very happy to see us working on, as it hit all of his buttons.

The mana-draining nature, which would lead to less Mages being born, appealed to the being who'd been psychologically scarred by the Rune Wars, where Mages erased entire civilizations in their struggle for domination, ending for reasons no one really fully knew, the nation of Noxus founded almost immediately after. Meanwhile the recycling aspect appealed to the Yordle's nature as a Spirit of Nature, even though he, like most of his kind, had moved on from that and hyper-focused on one aspect of Humanity to the exclusion of all else, in his case, that of the scientist.

Heimerdinger, of course, assumed that the Recharging Array was Viktor's idea, my partner having served as the Dean's assistant for close to a decade before he'd started working with me, at my request, and, while the pale man had tried to defer the unearned praise, the three-foot tall ball of intellectual arrogance and floof would not hear of it.

Piper didn't mind, as she cared more about my praise than the Dean's, and I gave her exactly as much as she deserved, which was quite a bit, as her work was, quite frankly, beyond our current understanding of runes. The girl's intuition let her take flying leaps of logic and land at least near the target, at which point her difficulties laid in figuring out what she'd stumbled upon, to better firm her mental footing before she yeeted herself into the void of unknown discoveries once more.

Viktor's project, meanwhile, was somewhere between our two wards', and was a variation of the device that he would have originally created, though not for another four years from now, if he was working completely from scratch, and with only the original Jayce to assist him. In that version of things, the man would create a mechanical arm with an integrated cutting laser that could etch steel from a dozen feet away, and even slice a several-inch thick block in half with ease.

I'd looked at his design, once he'd figured out his focusing array, and told him, "Wow, what an inventive weapon, you've made."

"W-What? It's not a weapon! It's for manufacturing!" he'd argued, scandalized, until I posed the question of its military implementation to our apprentices, who'd both come up with dozens of combative uses for it, most of which boiling down to 'cutting something, or someone, in half'.

He'd sighed, looked at his schematics, and then shot me a wry look. "And I'm sure you have an idea on how to limit such abuses?"

"I've got a few," I'd shrugged.

To that end, we'd made a proto-CNC table, setting the laser-cutter pointed downwards, with enough of a barrier that we didn't accidentally cut through the floor, again, though the computer part of the CNC machine was still a work in progress.

We'd tried to make it work with Hextech, but that kind of complex directional manipulation was… well, we weren't anywhere close to having that kind of fine control. We'd been stymied, until Ekko had asked us why we just didn't use mechanical gears, since clockwork devices that'd moved things around in set patterns had been a thing since 'forever'.

Sharing a look, both Viktor and I had laughed, and put the surprised boy in charge of that aspect of the project, as it turned out he had more experience with such things than either of us, and the fact that we'd both openly admit it had shocked the heck out of the Zaunite teen, though he'd quickly adapted into showing us how it worked.

So now my lab-partner's project was functional!

Kind of!

Power regulation was still an issue, the beam cutting through what it was supposed to be etching, one time in five, which for manual work could be accounted for, but was unacceptable for any sort of automation. Once we'd had that issue fixed, though, it'd be ready, and I'd already drawn up some plans for how we could implement it to provide another revenue stream on top of that which was coming in from the Hexgates.

And then there was my project.

Air filtration.

Well, it was more than that, but that's what the base was. It was actually following the same concept that Ekko had just accidentally utilized, twisting and warping the air to remove particulates. It even worked, but a bit too well, taking every contaminant out of the air in one go, creating solid blocks that, if I tried to handle, pinged my Body Defense, the supernatural ability I'd purchased from my employers that allowed me to outright ignore toxins, diseases, and the like.

My problem was the opposite of Piper's, in that she was trying to ramp up her creation, whereas I was trying to dial mine down. If I could pull out the differing particulates from the air individually, I'd be able to screen out the various elements, or at least various compounds, safely dispose of the toxic ones, and reclaim the ones that wouldn't poison anyone that touched them.

As it was, I'd gone from a solid toxic block, to an even more toxic slurry.

And while I could justify it as an 'experiment', if I wanted to put more of them down in Zaun to clean up the mess of pollution that was the 'Undercity', I needed to get a provable return on investment. With Piper's Recharging Arrays, and the higher Mana-density in Zaun as opposed to Piltover, I could make ones that would theoretically work until they broke down mechanically, but that, too, was something that we were still working on.

Which was really how everything was right now, in every respect.

On one hand, we were still four years away from that fateful Progress Day, and all of the craziness that would devolve from parts two and three of Arcane, but, with everything I'd done, none of the later events of that series should ever come to pass, which left me flying blind in terms of what was coming down the line, though, to be honest, I much preferred that rather than leaving everyone to tread down the Canon Paths, riding the rails of Fate to calamity.

On another hand, some part of me couldn't shake the sense that, because of what I'd done, I'd face something else in its place. But, then again, I'd had that feelings for weeks now, and nothing had happened. So, I'd continue improving things, both personally and professionally, keeping an ear to the ground, but making sure to keep moving forward.

Piper finished up her explanations, and, as I'd asked her to, started modifying the diagram instead of going straight to modifying her array, Viktor and I offering our insights, and coming up with a possibly refined model, as we'd done many a time before, and would likely do many more times in the future.

​

As our day came to a close, I powered down the Zero-G Array, the chalk dust filling the anti-gravity field dropping down onto the tarp once more, Ekko grinning broadly as he'd discovered a problem with the positioning of the focusing crystals, the runes involved its creation having had additional effects beyond what we'd first thought, and now he had an idea on how to fix it.

Because if there was one thing I'd learned in the last three years?

It would be that Runes were really freaking complicated.

Making basic weaponry was dead easy, but when every single sigil had at least three separate, but linked, meanings, creating new formations while having any idea of how they'd turn out before you turned them on was a very convoluted process. For instance, the location-stability-space-center rune you were working with, when combined with a cut-sever-separate-remove rune could create a stable cutting field, like the world's sharpest band saw, the 'stability' and 'sever' parts harmonizing, or it might destroy everything within a few feet of itself, 'location' and 'removal' concepts activating, or it might make a teleportation gate, the 'center' of the 'space' between two 'locations' being 'severed' and 'removed', which was actually an integral part of how the Hexgate worked.

And we still were figuring things out about the Runes we worked with, having barely scratched the surface of what was possible, with my back-end knowledge of magical theory and Piper's intuitive grasp on metaphysical concepts letting us tentatively explore and feel out uses before they went really, really wrong. That and a commitment to stringent lab safety, one strong enough that led Heimerdinger, that paranoid professor, when he decided to pop in unannounced, as he was wont to do, only command us to make superficial changes to our testing methodology to sate his own academic ego by 'doing something', and thus being 'part of our research' before leaving, unable to find any problems himself.

It was also why we were mostly refining our four projects, as testing anything new was very very dangerous, and while we could make weapons with ease, that's the one thing that we were trying not to do. That's not to say I hadn't made another Mana-Cannon in my workshop back Home, in case of an emergency, but making another one in the Academy, after I'd created a rough version to show Viktor that I both could and didn't want to, was just asking for trouble.

Putting our equipment away, powering down the Recharging Array (as leaving it on overnight tended to make the hexcrystals placed within explode), and covering the whiteboards, we wrapped up for the night, having learned after the first few months that long hours were only conducive in creating accidents, and that any discoveries could just as easily be found tomorrow.

"Heading to the Undercity?" Viktor questioned, as I packed up my bag, the containers and drinkware we'd used for the lunch I'd made for us all stowed, and slung it over one shoulder.

"Gonna go Home and change first, as this," I replied, flicking the sturdy vest I was wearing over my Academy Standard white shirt, "wouldn't work there, but yeah, we're heading down to Zaun. You?"

Looking to his ward, who nodded, my lab partner turned a smile our way. "Then we will meet you there."

Chapter Two

There were four ways to get down to Zaun, from Piltover.

The first, and most 'Pilty' way of doing it, was to take the Bathysphere, owned by Clan Ferros.

It cost a four silver 'cogs', each way, which was about twenty bucks per person, give or take, given that economies scaled on a whole host of factors. To me, that was now chump change, but to the working people of Zaun, it was an extreme expense, and one they openly scorned. It was also watched, Zaunites knowing that only the rich, who could eat that charge without blinking, took it, or tourists, who were, if anything, easier marks.

The second way was the hidden elevators.

They were spread all throughout 'upper Zaun', the bit of the city that was just across the bridge separating the sister metropoli, even if Piltovans considered it all Piltover. They were hidden away in all sorts of places, and while those in common, easily accessible areas like plazas and the sort had been permanently decommissioned, by order of the Piltover Council, attempting to force everyone to use the Council-owned Bathysphere, others could be found in abandoned buildings, in the backs of shops, in side rooms in cafes, just all over, some charging a few copper 'washers' to use, but others were left free, if you knew where to look, though their upkeep was… questionable at best.

Zaunites would never sabotage them, given their existence was collectively considered a giant middle finger to Piltover, but while they were generally built tough, they'd been around longer than any living human Zaunite could remember.

Third, was just to climb.

It was the ballsiest, most dangerous way to do it, so of course it was how Violetta usually chose to travel, unless she was feeling under the weather. The few times I'd done it, I had to admit, it was really fun, a kind of high-octane, pulse-pounding kinetic puzzle you could take at your own pace, for the most part, though one that, if you fucked up while attempting, you needed fast reflexes to recover from, lest you fall to your likely death.

And then lastly, I could just fucking fly.

I'd spent the credits to get the hoverboard that Ekko, in another timeline, would've created, and I could summon it in moments, but I'd only used it thrice, once to save Powder, before she became Piper, to make sure she never became Jinx, once to blast out of an abandoned bar and escape a waiting ambush, even if they didn't know who they were ambushing, and once more when I left Stillwater, Piltover's Alcatraz, going there to save Vi, before she'd become Violletta.

Upon arrival, pretending to be Piltoverian Law Enforcement, I had found the guards had were in the process of having her sexually assaulted by inmates because she'd nearly killed a guard trying to get out and save her sister, the fifteen year old girl tied down so she couldn't defend herself. I'd killed the rapists, gotten her emergency medical attention in my pocket dimension, walked back through my portal and killed every guard and evil inmate that crossed my path, setting the others free, and then leaving.

Every time I'd gone in my hastily constructed armored longcoat and pants, repurposed helmet, work gloves, and with my slapped together shortsword and 1911 pistol, all of which was adorned with dots of glowing green paint because I'd fucked up and splattered my gear with it when trying to paint the sights on my gun. Leaning into the accidental theming, I claimed to be a spirit named JUSTICE, who knew Vander, Violetta and Piper's now dead adopted father, and unofficial ruler of Zaun, and was doing this as a repayment of favors to the now deceased man.

And except for my unexpected trip into the extensive technological ruins underneath Zaun, or, as Piper had taken to calling the Under-Undercity, 'The Flowspace', given it was the source from which all Chemfluid flowed up to Zaun, running through its walls, and powering almost all of its technology, I'd left my 'JUSTICE' garb at home after that, though I had fixed up the gear once I finally both had the time to do so, and knew what the heck I was doing.

With any luck, I'd never need the full body armor set again, but that hadn't stopped me training myself, and my wards. Given how dangerous this world truly was, once you got away from the relative safety of Piltover, and Zaun, really, to not train oneself to combat even the common evils that lurked in the shadows when living in a high-fantasy magical world would be the height of arrogance.

So, four different ways down, and today I was taking the Bathysphere, Piper coming along with me, while Viktor and Ekko would take the elevators, as they always did.

The blue-haired girl had needed to stay in Piltover for at least a year, as, for all that Silco, the man that killed Vander, the girl's brothers, and tried to kill her, knew, Vi, now Violetta, was dead, so giving the brawler a haircut, after coloring what was left white with a Company-grade long-term dye, along with furnishing her with a new foreign looking wardrobe, had let her pass without issue. Piper, meanwhile, had kept her hair color, and Silco knew that JUSTICE had taken Powder with 'it', so she'd needed time to grow, to change, and to, with the power of healthy, or at least non-toxic living, was now, if not unrecognizable, than much harder to see as 'Powder' instead of her current identity as 'Piper Vandottir'.

That year had also given her time to… assimilate, a little, to Piltoveran practices, and to my own, so that when she first entered the Bathysphere a little less than two years ago, it was with none of a Zaunite's distain for the transport system, but a 'Foreigner's' wonder, as she, along with her sister, were both supposed to come from magical Norway, aka Freljord.

Mind you, if I could fucking find Silco, I could kill the slimy, traitorous, backstabbing son of a bitch, but he'd up and vanished like a fart in the wind, to the point I wasn't even sure if he was even still in Zaun, though, given that he was, in his own way, a Zaunite Patriot, I had a feeling he still lurked somewhere in that twisting subterranean city, so large that over half of its buildings were in various states of abandonment, but which had also been built to such a crazy-high standard of durability that everything was still standing with effectively no risk of collapse.

Which, in a 'fish don't know water is wet' paradigm, no one thought of as odd.

Regardless, flipping an extra silver to the Bathysphere attendant, Piper copying me with a giggle, we both took our seats and waited, the others taking the transport slowly filing in, a mix of Piltovans and wealthier Zaunites, the former either staring or trying to pretend they didn't care that the creator of the Hexgates was in the same pseudo-railcar as them, the latter nodding respectfully or studiously not looking at me.

Once, a year and a half ago, four Zaunite thugs had paid the fees on the top end, and then, a minute before the trip was over, pulled out knives and tried to rob us.

I'd shot one through the eye, another the chest, slit the throat of a third with my blade, and, to my surprise, Piper had used her knife to kill the last, who'd tried to stab me from behind. It'd been her first purposeful kill, and one that she had had a bit of trouble with afterwards, but talking to me, to her sister, and to Babette, who was like the girl's adopted great-aunt, had helped settle the teen afterwards.

Tossing the attendant four silvers after the slaughter, for 'the mess', might've been a bit much, but it certainly left an impression, and, more importantly, robberies on the Bathysphere had dropped, all the way down to zero whenever I took it, in fact.

The Piltovans respected my position as creator of the Hexgate, and upcoming mover and shaker of society, while the Zaunites respected strength, both martial, and that of character, as while my… unequivocal denial of those thugs request had done the former, the other thing I'd done had demonstrated the second.

The trip down into the Undercity proper was always an… interesting one, the cabin's air filtered, making the moment you left it much more of an obvious change, which I wasn't sure if was intentional or not, and the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun were quickly lost, as we descended into the eternal chemtech glow of Zaun, the steampunk not-neon of its infrastructure combined with the pollution giving the sunken city an a dreamlike, borderline eldritch feeling.

Reaching the bottom, waiting our turn to leave, yes, stepping out was still to be swamped with heat, humidity, and a riot of smells, some nice, some not, and a veritable wall of sound. Moving down the Lanes, the main thoroughfare of modern Zaun, the city was busy, but, as it had been for the last six months, oddly peaceful. Not calm, I wasn't sure if that was possible, but, after Vander's death things had gotten… tense in the Undercity, and they weren't really that way anymore.

And, walking past a pair of calm looking gangers hanging out, watching the crowd, each of them carrying knives so long they were practically short swords, the reason why had been unexpected.

The Justifiers.

With Vander gone, there was a power vacuum, one that Silco would've taken over in the original timeline, but without him another group had stepped in. I'd expected rampant fighting, anarchy, and chaos, but, to my surprise, while there had been a lot of back-alley knifings for about a year, they'd rarely spilled out into the Lanes, and even they had petered off almost completely.

And since then, the Justifiers had spread out, more… obviously omnipresent than Vander was, less trusting, enforcing consequences instead of appealing to their fellow Zaunites' better natures and sense of community, but, in their own way, were effective, arguable even more so then Piper and Violetta's father had been. There was still some crime, and rumors of disappearances, because this was still Zaun, but reports of them abusing their assumed authority were rare, and they policed their own zealously, far more than Piltover's Enforcers did, which had led, in many ways, the Lanes to become safer than ever.

The pair of men nodded to me, and I idly returned the gesture, heading down the main drag, taking a slight left at the second plaza, which took us technically out of the Lanes, but still in its general periphery, as my project down here needed space, but not necessarily customers. And, turning the corner, there it was.

The HALP Center.

The 'Helping Assist Lower Piltovans' Center was my blatantly ripping off the F.E.A.S.T. Project from Marvel, which supplied Food, Emergency Aid, Shelter, and Training, but, in a place where 'Spiderman' was more likely to be some monstrous Ixtalan beast, no one was going to call me out on it. Getting my Patron, Mrs. Kiramman, to front me the money to make it happen had taken a bit of negotiation, but when I put it in terms of testing ideas away from Piltover proper, any accidents falling on the heads of Zaunites, she'd started to agree, and with the added benefits of good will generation, intelligence gathering, and the screening of potential geniuses like Viktor or Ekko, in much the same way that Clan Ferros secured its workers, well, it was a small starting investment in the scheme of things, and both Viktor and I diverted part of the money we received from the Hexgates into the Center as well.

Viktor tried to divert all of his share of his profits into it, actually, and I had to sit down with the man and go over his financials to convince him that upgrading his apartment from 'Alright', his diet from 'Serviceable', and his entertainment options from 'I have things to work on' up a notch or three, lest he make me look bad by relation, had finally gotten the absent-minded humble inventor to stop being quite so self-flagellating and live a bit better.

I didn't think it would cure whatever disease would normally cut his life prematurely short, but I hoped it would extend his glide enough to give me time to make that panacea myself.

There were a few more Justifiers hanging outside the Center, keeping the peace, though they weren't allowed inside for… numerous reasons. That said they didn't mind, an elderly woman exiting the front door to give them all three of them glasses of iced tea, which they accepted with smiles, as Piper and I walked up to them.

"Hello, Ms. Darcy," I nodded to the gray-haired woman. "Any issues?"

The old whore beamed, "Oh, I keep telling you, just call me Darcy, Mr. Talis. So sweet, this one," she added to the two male Justifiers sipping their cool drinks, a rarity down here, getting small smiles from the tough looking men, the sleek, scarred looking woman to their side rolling her eyes, but smirking as well. "Oh, could you or Mr. Viktor look at the mixers? One of them is making that odd noise again."

"The distal rotational array's out of whack?" Piper questioned. At the woman's confused look, she clarified, "Is it a whiiiir, whiiir, whiir, a chuga-chuga-chuga, or a clickclickclickclick?"

"Uh, the second?" Ms. Darcy stated, unsure.

The blue haired girl looked to me. "Kinetic Converters out of alignment and over-correcting. Want me to take care of it?"

"Oh, honey, maybe you should let the menfolk take handle it," the elderly woman suggested.

Piper rolled her eyes, not responding, waiting for my response, and I gestured her forward. "If you want to. You're the one that designed it, after all."

With a grin, the girl nodded, and took off at a jog into the HALP center.

Meanwhile, the retired prostitute frowned, "I know you're taking care of the girl, Mr. Talis, but indulging her like that-"

"I'll double check her work," I reassured the woman, keeping my expression reassuring, causing her to sigh in relief, as I headed inside.

I'd bound a total of one person to me, with the Stamp my employers provided me to gain power with, if I so wished, and that had been Babette, an ancient Yordle who ran the premier brothel in Zaun, granting her the various supernatural Defenses I myself possessed, while, simultaneously, granting her my eternal youth. However, the Stamp was metaphysical… contaminated, with a bevy of non-negotiable effects, ensuring loyalty, friendship, and romantic and sexual interest in the bonder, being me, and encouraging it in other Bonded. While they could still do things I didn't want them to, it would always be in the 'I believe this is the right thing for him' way, as well as pushing them to Stamp others, and to doubly be okay with my doing so.

To most, those would all be unmitigated benefit, but to someone who was rather interested in the primacy of the mind, like myself, such a Binding was a… violation, if not willingly accepted. And Babette… I wasn't exactly proud of that one, as I'd offered her the benefits, but not explained all of its effects, both because, had I done so, she would have never believed me, but also because I needed to know if I'd been lied to, and if the Stamp I possessed worked as advertised, or if I'd been… not lied to, exactly, but told how a Stamp worked, and then given another instead.

Given I was originally recruited by the Fey, before moving to Class D, The Undead, it was a definite option.

So, the centuries old nature-spirit turned madam had regained her youth, and her vigor, and had started working for me, feeding me information that I, as a Scion of House Talis and Apprenta of the Great House of Kiramman, could never gather myself. Also, in so doing, she had confirmed that my Stamp worked just as advertised, much to my relief. Our relationship had been strictly that of informant and controller, until I'd decided to open up the HALP center, and asked for her help finding workers, as, well, she knew a number of older women who would be very grateful for a job that didn't discriminate against them for their past, and they all had fairly good people skills.

One of the issues that'd cropped up was that old whores could get very… opinionated on what 'proper' girls should do, even if their 'helpful statements' sometimes reeked of 'validate my life choices', and while they were never mean about it at the HALP Center, or at least never did so twice, them being 'nice' was still something of a problem. Stepping through the doors, I took a deep breath, the cool, purified air washing over me, not quite as refreshing as I liked, but keeping things at a stable sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit would not work well with the Zaunites, who were used to a constant eighty-eight-ish.

Turns out heat-pumps were stupid easy to make with Chemtech, once we'd taken apart the fridge we'd taken from the abandoned apartments down in the Flowspace and seen how it worked, but the concept had slipped by those of Zaun. They used Chemtech to create heating elements, and had looked for ways to make cold with Chemfluid directly, instead of using the kinetic creation elements of the mana-packed fluid to work on an a secondary medium, compressing and decompressing it to shift the relative heat of the secondary substance to always either be colder than the air indoors, or hotter than the air outside, dumping the thermal energy from inside the building out the vents into the alley.

It made the back passage somewhat uncomfortable, sweltering even, but given that we didn't want anyone hanging out there, that was just another benefit.

That said, had I not had a modern education, along with some 'practical engineering' Seminars in my Basic Training, I probably would've missed it, like the others did, because, just like how gyroscopic forces could cause a spinning bullet to fly straight, taking the well-known 'things get hotter when compressed, and colder when decompressed' phenomena from Piltover's Academy and turning it into something useful was a step no one had taken here.

Then going a step further, and applying Chemtech, the distinctly Zaunite substance to the device created with Piltovan Science?

Sacrilege!

But any odd reports of our experimentation that made it out would believe that it was experimental Hextech, not Chemtech, and thus get people off my back about it. And, in a way, this did help, because we'd discovered that Flowtech, as we'd taken to calling the salvaged devices, also used Runes, just like Hextech did.

So, by reverse-engineering Flowtech, we could then apply it to our Hextech creations, which is what half of what Piper's Recharge Array used to function. As for implementing the purloined devices as they were, while Piper and I had been able to build a functioning replica of a Flowtech coffee machine, but there were some… issues with it.

The first of which was the runework, which, holy shit, could go so bad if knowledge of it became widespread without any kind of safety guide, but the device also expected a certain, shall we say, degree of intelligence to operate.

At least to operate it safely.

Because the way it was designed was borderline malicious, requiring regular maintenance, and, if it broke, and you weren't paying attention to the subtle signs it had malfunctioned, your first indicator that something was amiss was when you poisoned yourself drinking the toxic Chemfluid from the heating element pipe that dripped directly into the brewing reservoir.

And they were all built like that.

Toaster? Shot flaming toast as it was overbuilt to need restrictors, which themselves were built so that they were the first thing to fail.

Stand mixer? Chemfluid set to fall into the mixing bowl.

Oven? That fucker EXPLODED!

But if, and only if, you didn't do regular maintenance, or dismissed the subtle signs something was wrong, which they all were built to give off, but also were something that most Zaunites and Piltovans would ignore.

And while Piltovans would see an appliance was broken and either call a repairman or just buy a new one, Zaunites would attempt open it up to fix it themselves, at which point everything in the design of native Flowtech became ten times more dangerous.

So we'd busted the designs down to their most basic proto-elements, and worked on them from there, getting Viktor and Ekko involved until they were, as Violetta would say, 'Piper-Proof', to the point that, even messed with, they didn't turn into bombs. Our designs had gotten to a staff-usable level, which we figured out in our 'off' time from our lab in the Academy, which we also spent inventing, because why not, and they were no longer suffering catastrophic failure, even when messed with, so… progress!

They still needed regular maintenance by a professional, of which there were currently four, including me, and we were ironing out the bugs out through 'large-scale domestic-style use' until the only remaining failure points were minor and easily corrected. But that was months away, at the earliest, if only because we were working on a dozen different devices at once.

Walking through the front area, and past the off-duty Enforcer that Ms. Kiramman had insisted we hire, the half-dozen we'd finally ended up on, having fired five times that many in the process, were pretty good people, with Zaunite families themselves, even if their wives and husbands had 'Bridged' over into the lowest parts of Piltover proper, I nodded to the man sitting behind the screen of the 'guard station'. The requirements for the post were light, though I had needed to ask them to not sleep 'on duty', even if there was an average of one incident per month that they needed to handle.

Past the atrium, the old woman at the helpdesk smiling at me, to whom I smiled back to in return, was the 'Cafeteria', as we provided one meal for free to anyone who walked in, once a week, determined by our people, and starting a fight got you kicked out for two months. Kids got a meal per day, with, again, what constituted a kid determined by our people, being about fourteen, though no one had proper papers down here. With knowledge of what was being offered, everyone had looked the other way when a few adults had tried to pretend to be children and were dealt with harshly. Especially as one pulled a knife when confronted, Vi beat the shit out of them as they all tried to jump her, then they were collectively tossed out, where the Justifiers were informed of what happened, and then beat the child-mimicking scum some more.

Whether or not the pretenders had been killed or just never showed their faces again, I wasn't sure, but also didn't care, as, if I'd been present, I would've just killed them outright.

However, everyone got a free cup of either coffee, juice, or tea, hot or cold, each day, which made the place quietly busy, a neutral meeting ground where anyone that started trouble would, at best, get jumped by the other patrons, at medium get the off-duty Enforcer on you, or at worst get a very annoyed Violetta politely, if tensely, asking you to leave, once, before dropping on you like the fist of an angry god.

It, in some ways, resembled what I'd been told of Vander's bar, The Last Drop, only a lot more sober, in many respects, but also a lot more… welcoming. As we'd expanded, the children's meal came after they sat through a lesson given by one of the staff members, taken from the Academy's basic curricula, though they were given a snack beforehand, and after having to… relocate a few old whores who let the power of being a schoolmarm go to their heads, everything settled in fairly nicely.

Had it practically bled money?

Indubitably.

Was it also not only letting us test the shit out of our devices before we started selling them, but also providing a zone of stability in the Lanes, and, in doing so, improve things?

Absolutely.

And that cost was somewhat defrayed by a sizeable portion of the supplies we used being sourced from my own Pocket Dimension, which was over seven-hundred square miles large, and self-populated with flora and fauna without unwanted predators, pests, and the like, which meant doing a quick hunting trip every week let me dump a couple dozen dead cattle into the HALP Center's receiving bay for them to render down and utilize to the best of their abilities, while also stress testing even more inventions.

The workers pocketed some things, I was aware, like horns and such, but everything that could be turned into food, was, and helped supplement the cheaper 'filler' foods that made up a good portion of the meals we handed out, but which were still better nutrition than many here regularly received.

As such, when I walked inside, I was always… well received to say the least. Nothing too showy, at least anymore, I'd asked them to not make a fuss often enough that they stopped trying to thank me directly, which took forever, and wasn't why I was doing this, but the smiles and looks of gratitude were always nice. I allowed myself to enjoy them a little, passing through, checking in on the classroom, and spotting Vi leaning against the back wall, keeping an eye on everything, the others moving around the eighteen year old, giving her a respectful distance.

"Sup," I nodded, walking over to lean against the wall next to her, the white-haired girl giving me a chin-thrust of acknowledgement. "Anything interesting happen?"

"Some new arrivals," she replied. "Couple Junglers who thought a single free meal wasn't enough. Freakin' Ixtalans."

I frowned, "Wait, are we talking Ixtal Ixtal or-"

"Colony towns," the brawler corrected, and I glanced down at her gloves, checking for any traces of blood. Babette had asked her to stop wearing the metal gauntlets I'd used the most basic bitch of alchemy to color deep crimson, as the girl, despite her statements that they were merely 'okay', tended to wear them everywhere. However the Yordle had requested she not do so here, as the appearance of permanently bloody hands was apparently sending the 'wrong message'.

I'd not made them that way, just remembering that the girl liked to include that color in her outfit whenever possible, so I'd made her a 'formal pair' that was sleeker, still with weighted knuckles, but with smoother contours and colored black, with gold colored inlays, to straddle the line between intimidating and professional, working on the design with the girl until she liked it, and not including any kind of gadget despite her sister's numerous suggestions to make 'fire fists' or the like.

As to the new arrivals… "So, rural Zaunites," I prodded, the young woman beside me snorting.

"No such thing," she disagreed instantly.

"It's what Caitlyn would say," I noted, getting another disapproving noise from Violetta.

"Cupcake would say they're rural Piltovans, and she can have 'em," the fighter scoffed. "Bunch o' rubes."

"Well, not everyone can be Freljordian," I reminded the ex-princess of the Lanes, a little warningly. "Even if you've gone a bit native. Any reason why the influx?"

Grimacing, the white-haired girl looked away, her growing wild mane of ivory locks hiding her face for a moment. "They're here 'cause things are better. Apparently."

I frowned, in turn, "And this would be bad because…"

Vi shot an angry look my way, her gaze searching, but, while I had a feeling I knew why she might say have said that, my question was honest, not chiding, mocking, or otherwise a dig against her, which she seemed to understand, because the irritation faded and she looking downwards, switching around her folded arms.

"Weren't like that before," she muttered, quietly, her words almost lost underneath the constant susurration of relaxed conversation, eating, and drinking of the cafeteria.

Which meant it was what I'd thought, that she was upset that it wasn't like this when Vander was in charge, marking it as a visibly and objectively positive change from her father's leadership, the added obvious stability of the Justifiers bringing people in.

'Violetta Vandottir' had… not taken well how quickly Vander had been effectively forgotten.

The tragedy of his death had been mourned, yes, but within three months people had stopped talking about it, within six they'd stopped seeming to care, nine and they'd been doing the kinds of things he would've killed them over, and after a year it had not been the 'better nature of the Undercity' that finally started to bring an end to the chaos, but a gang whose philosophy was the antithesis of everything Vander fought for.

While the ex-revolutionary had held a Rousseauian belief that his fellow Zaunites were good people that just needed a chance and a little guidance, the Justifiers took the Hobbesian approach that they were inherently evil and needed to be watched to kept in line. Having been trained by literal Gods of Humanity myself, the true answer was… it was complicated, there being no true answer as the nature of the biology, the psyche, and even the soul of Humans changed from Dimension to Dimension, and that was without getting into intra-dimensional variances like societal upbringing, religion, situational averages, and so on.

However, in a legitimately oppressed location like Zaun… Hobbesian approaches tended to produce superior results, as distressing as that thought may be for idealists, and it was something that, even three years later, Vi was having trouble with.

Mulling my answer over, the young woman glancing over when I didn't immediately respond, I finally stated, "People, especially in aggregate, tend to overfocus on the obvious, and miss the truth."

"Says mister 'I made a giant glowing tower'," Violetta teased, hiding her emotions, but still watching me.

"I'd know," I shot back with a smile, getting a chuckle from the angry girl. "But, because people react to the obvious, it makes it easy to think those reactions validate louder actions, when subtle measures could be just as effective. A kid used to be able to go months, maybe even a year without seeing someone dead in the Lanes. Now its weeks, and, even if they deserved it, that doesn't make them any less dead, but with guards visibly present, everyone can go 'but it won't happen to me,'" I articulated. "Security, and Security Theatre, are two different things, but while the former is hard to determine, require statistical measurements, and difficult to emotionally parse, the latter is immediate, impactful, and 'obvious'. Before, would anyone have tried to rob the Bathysphere?"

The brawler reared back a little, the very notion ridiculous. As, if they had, Vander and his contact in the enforcers would've made sure whoever did it would be taken down, and taken down hard.

"Yet it happens now," I continued. "Less, after I'd demonstrated the risk of such an act, and never on any that I'm on anymore, but it still happens." Sending an inquisitive glance her way, I questioned, "Does that seem safer to you, Violetta?"

The young woman smiled ruefully, and shook her head. "Stupid Freakin' Junglers," she re-stated.

"Like some Zaunites aren't just as bad," I shot back.

"Point," Vi agreed. "So how'd things go with the Nerd Herd?"

"Made some progress with Ekko's shaped zero-g fields, got the Recycling Array through another batch of tests, maybe figured out another Rune combo," I shrugged. "The usual. If you ever want to see…?"

"When you've got something ready," the white-haired girl deferred. "I'm more useful here."

Which was really why she'd set up shop here as soon as we'd even started working on the HALP Center, because the girl was prideful, and being the least amongst us, as we discussed high-level thaumaturgical sciences had made her feel… lesser.

She was still doing her best in her lessons, and would give us a hand if we really needed it, but it was clear she was a field agent first and foremost, and not an R&D type, which was fine, as, eventually, I'd definitely need the services of one of those whom I could trust.

"Whelp, I'm heading back to make sure your sister hasn't made another bomb," I told the brawler.

"Not taking that bet," Violetta joked. "And… thanks, Jayce."

"No prob," I smiled, getting a small but honest one in return, heading through the back doors, past the staff that were serving the meals, where Piper had already opened up the mixer and disassembled it, the girl fine-tuning the chemfluid relay that ran through the base, but not the top, while a few of the back-end staff watched her work.

"Hey, Jayce!" she smiled. "I think this needs a secondary clamp, or a thicker lever. The overflow from the converters are shifting the transfer levers out of alignment, which, ya know…"

"Shifts the Kinetic Converters even more out of alignment, yeah," I nodded. "Would a thicker lever fit inside the casing?"

Leaning over and popping the top-shell off a different stand-mixer that was working on some dough, the blue-haired teen looked at the swiftly rotating, spinning, and shifting mechanical parts, before shaking her head.

"Then work with Ekko on a clamp that'll hold for now, and we'll try a larger case on the next build, but remember, there's a difference between a countertop device , a permanent emplacement, and-"

"And architecture," the fourteen year old agreed, rolling her eyes but smiling. "I know, Jayce. But it's either that or cut down on mix strength."

I shrugged, "Which might be what we do, one version for commercial uses, like here, and another for personal residential needs, and this is turning into enough of a problem, you're right, we need to do a redesign."

"Do a what?" Ekko asked, coming in from a side door, stopping as he saw the opened mixers. "Aw man, again?"

"Yeah, again," the fourteen year old girl replied smugly. "Told ya it wasn't enough."

"But you couldn't explain why it wasn't enough," I countered, my ward sending a betrayed look my way, "which is why we needed the test. Now that we know, we can take that concept and apply it to other designs in the future."

That mollified the blue-haired teen, who sighed and nodded, as I turned to look to the now smirking boy. "Viktor checking the Hexcrystals?"

"Yeah, he says uh, 'Tell Jayce that these distribution arrays may just be ready for implementation on wider scale, young man'," the teen repeated, mimicking my lab partners voice as much as he could, which… wasn't that bad, actually.

"Good," I nodded. "The ones in the Hexgate have too much power-loss, and cutting down on Hexcrystal use will help a lot, and implementing archiHexture on a small scale in Piltover will help move things forward as well."

Piper giggled, "ArchiHexture!"

I shrugged, "Hey, if you can come up with a better name, I'll go with it."

Making a city-wide magical power grid for Hexcrystal energy was an absolutely terrible idea for so many reasons, but individualized generators in building that air-gapped each other would prevent any of the dozens of 'magically corruptive' elements from fucking up the whole city at once, which was step one on summoning the really bad Eldritch Abominations, and I was Class D not Class C, thank you very much.

"Ekko, Piper, I want you to do a spot-fix on the mixer, and see if anything else needs looking at," I directed, both teens nodding in understanding. "I'll go see how the Hexnet's doing myself."

"Actually," a sultry voice purred, and I turned to see a three foot tall sexpot posed in the doorway leading up to her office, the Yordle working her restored youth, health, and beauty to their fullest extent. "I'd like to have a word with you, Mr. Talis. In private."

The effect was somewhat spoiled as Piper giggled again, and Ekko shivered, going, "ugh," his memories of the woman as the Yordle equivalent of a Grandma in Lingerie clashing with his hormonal reaction to the incarnated Nature Spirit of Sexuality.

Smiling politely, as I really was just… not interested, Babbette sighed and gave a small shrug, "Kids, what'll'ya do?"

"Hey!" Both teens objected in unison, both of them, 'like, totally adults and stuff', causing the centuries old woman to laugh, having scored her point.

"Sure, Babette," I chuckled, walking towards her. "I'll always have time for you."

"Well at least someone knows how to make a woman feel… appreciated," she teased, glancing past me and smirking at something, though when I glanced back, I didn't see anything out of place, and shrugged, following the Madam upstairs.