An Agonizing Death of Paintballs
The Undercity, One Week Later, The Warehouse
When Viktor awakes, he is greeted to the sight of a gun inches away from his face. “Morning to you too, Isha.” The child narrows her golden eyes, lowering her paintball gun. You were lucky, I’ll get you next time, she signs before sprinting away. This was an exchange he had become accustomed to, and he was fortunate enough that he had woken before she fired. There had been mornings where he had not been as lucky, and spent the next few days with vivid colors smeared across his face.
Prying himself from his bed proved to be a challenging task, but one he managed. His leg ached from the loss of warmth, but Viktor was made for pain. Yawning, he didn’t bother to muss his hair, but did strap on his brace and tuck his crutch underarm before heading down to see what Ekko had made for breakfast.
On his way down he expertly dodged what had become a veritable obstacle course this past month. Workout clothes from Vi strewn over the stairs, rundown walls littered with explosions marks from Jinx’s failed inventions, which were also scattered around the halls in pieces. The colony of rats had proven to be no match for Isha’s actual blaster, which added to the collection of scorch marks, as well as some spare screws for ends for when she had run out of hex-gems. The only neat person in this house was Ekko, and Viktor only suspected that this was because he had stashed all his messes in the rafters, using his hoverboard to reach the high ceilings.
Personally, Viktor loved the mess, because it proved that he and his family had turned this abandoned warehouse into a home, a safe haven that they all had sorely needed. He had to remind himself of this when his foot landed on one of Isha’s hasty bullets, what appeared to have been tiny toy bricks. His eyes bulge, and his foot slips, and suddenly he is sprawled across the east hall. SPLAT. Something wet hits the back of his head and begins to drip. He twists around to shoot a glare at a smirking Isha, his hand reaching back to find his hair covered in neon-green paint. Before he can yell, she takes off down the wall, giggling all the way.
Viktor fumbles for his crutch, smashing a series of buttons on the grip that Jinx and Ekko helped him install precisely for moments like this. The crutch snaps and contorts into a tool he can more easily use to haul himself up. After seeing how his grumbling about the mess had resulted in a clean house for about three days, he had to design a more permanent solution. The crutch folds back into its walking position, and he sets off for breakfast again, paint dripping behind him. Ekko was complaining that the warehouse needed new carpet anyways.
Viktor makes it down to the kitchen to a symphony of heavenly smell.“Something smells good,” Viktor commends to Ekko, who is currently attending to whatever is frying on the stove. At the makeshift table, there is Jinx, and Vi’s new girlfriend. Everyone knows that the blue haired girl seated before them is a spy, but they all find it hilarious to mislead her questions with widely inaccurate answers. To date, Jinx has had over 100 lovers (Ekko only the latest in a string of conquests), Viktor has seventeen toes, and Isha is a seasoned war criminal. Aside from being a spy, anyone who can make Vi go that gooey deserves respect.
Behind him, Viktor can hear giggles, and turns to find Jinx and Astrid (or so she introduced herself) barely holding it together over their coffee. Ekko doesn’t even turn around from the stove before saying coolly, “You’ve got a little something in your hair Vik”, and Astrid and Jinx can’t hold it back any longer. They begin howling with laughter, causing Viktor to turn a shade of red he is sure rivals the green in his hair for brightness.
“Isha, Isha, Isha,” Jinx gasps between tears, “I’m so fucking proud.”
“May whatever demon thought it wise to possess that child find a safe way out,” Ekko says gravely.
Vik, Vi, and Jinx had all grown up together with the same foster father, Vander, and Ekko right next door with their Uncle Benzo. When Vander contracted memory sickness a few years ago, the four of them had squatted in this warehouse, which Viktor’s actual uncle owned. Silco had never had any use for this place though, and never realized that four teens were carving out a home in it. Isha was a newer member. Isha had tried her best to pick Jinx’s pocket a couple months ago, and Jinx hadn’t been able to leave her on the streets. So Isha became the fifth resident of their warehouse-turned-home.
Looking around now, Viktor can see how far they’ve come. Jinx, embracing who she is, moving on from her past, using various utensils to illustrate her latest machine to Astrid. Ekko, humming while he frys more eggs, wearing his signature I’m Handsome and I Know It apron, with the handsome scribbled out and replaced with “a dork”. Vi just walking in, snagging a piece of toast while leaning down to kiss her girlfriend. “Morning bitches,” she says as a way of greeting, leaning over to peer at Ekko’s cooking. “Looks like shit Ekko, what the hell did you put in it this time?”
“Hey, it's better than any protein powder you insist on ingesting. Looks don’t matter as much as the smell, but lucky for you, Astrid seems to think the opposite.” She playfully tosses his hair at that, his crooked smile flashing at Astrid. She smiles weakly in response, Vi settling in next to her at the table, still not quite accustomed to the gang's dynamics. Vi reckons she comes from Piltover Elite, which Ekko backs up with the fact he’d seen her hanging out with Jayce Talis when he had to run errands for Benzo. So, Astrid has stayed, and the four have tried to weasel information out of her since. All they managed to get were mundane schedules and an address, but it was providing useful information.
Jinx’s whining drags him from his thoughts. “It doesn’t matter how fucking good it’ll taste if we die of starvation first Ekko.”
“Fine, this is what I get for trying to be expressive and a culinary genius and-” He continues to grumble but shifts the eggs onto a plate, barely setting them down before Jinx shovels half into her mouth. And then the other half.
“Jinx! Those were for everyone!” The response Ekko gets to that is a burp and a lazy smile.
“Then they should’ve been faster. They know how good your cooking is.” Viktor catches the shy look Ekko gives Jinx, though Viktor's not quite sure she sees it. “Besides, need the extra protein today, going to teach a class at the gym.”
“Any particular reason why?” Viktor asks. Vi works full time at a nearby gym as a personal instructor. Sometimes Jinx will pick up a shift or two there to help cover expenses, but as of late they’ve been fine.
“Just need to blow off steam.” Anyone else wouldn’t blink twice at that response, but something in her tone gives Viktor pause. There’s more she’s not telling him, but not in front of Astrid.
“Okay then, I’ll drop you off. I have to get some cogs from the market anyways.” Ekko side eyes them on their way out, but Viktor can only give him a small head shake in response. They have to be careful about what they say in front of Astrid, Vi already helping by drawing Astrid’s attention away from the leaving pair with a kiss.
________________________________________
Undercity, Side Streets
“What’s so important that you had to drag me from Ekko’s cooking?” Viktor asks, genuinely curious why he was rushed out the door. Jinx had barely given him enough time to get dressed and put on his proper brace. The streets of the Undercity lay before them, a tangled mess of food vendors and shifting shadows and racing cars.
“Something's up with the buyers,” She starts off at a brisk pace, and Viktor takes off right behind her, keeping pace. “They’ve stopped taking our shipments, saying they’ve got ‘new gigs'. I nicked one of their logs, turns out they’ve been recruited to transport shimmer into Piltover. They’re getting paid a fuck ton as well.” Viktor cursed, this was bad. Not the shimmer, he could care less about the shimmer, that was a Topsider’s problem. The fact that it was interfering with his business was the problem. All carriers were too busy catering to the suppliers of shimmer to do much else. This had been the last carrier in the Undercity that hadn't been hired by whoever was supplying the shimmer to Topside.
“Did you try the usual methods of convincing them otherwise?” He asks casually, Jinx pulling him out of the way of children rushing by.
She doesn’t look at him as she says, “Yeah. Took off a finger one of the guys, didn’t seem to do much but make them pissed. He was screaming like such a baby, I offered to make him a replacement. That only seemed to make them madder though,” She smiles wolfishly, wiggling her own mechanized finger at him.
He huffed a laugh at that, imagining a blood spattered Jinx showing a screaming, pissed off man her finger. Oooh, specifically that finger.
“You didn’t” he wheezed, people looking at them now. No one laughs in public, not in the Undercity.
Her wolfish smile grows. “Oh I did.”
His heart can’t take it, his lungs squeezing painfully with laughter. Of course his sister would flip off a man whom she had just mutilated. It’s what made Jinx, well, Jinx. When his lungs settle, and he manages to collect himself, he mulls over her report. It's not good to hear that all the carriers have been bought up, they need carriers to distribute their machines. As the current leaders of Undercity, The Mutations are responsible for their own revenue because the job pays shit. So he, Jinx, and Ekko had pooled their collective scientific minds to devise unique prosthetics and other machinery. Their inventions were sold anonymously in markets all over Piltover, turning a nice profit. The Piltover elite, it seemed, had an undying need for robotic arms that could blast pop hits and hovering boots. People probably assumed they were art, but Viktor still hoped people purchased their inventions for their scientific value.
Jinx pulls Viktor back again, narrowly avoiding a car, a regular reoccurrence as far as he's concerned, nothing out of the ordinary. But Jinx glares at him, and he tries his best plaster a regretful face on.
“Sorry.”
“Is that ALL you have to say?" She explodes, and he wincecs, along with several other bystanders, at the sheer volume she's producing. "I save you from DEATH yet again and all I get is a ‘SORRY’? What’s the point of saving a genius if they’re too busy thinking to BOTHER with things like looking both ways BEFORE crossing the street.” She huffs a breath and punches him lightly, and he takes that as a sign he’s forgiven. As they move towards the border, traffic becomes lighter, almost silent, as if the city is muffled in the presence of those gleaming white buildings.
“So do you actually have to teach a class today or was that just a cover?”
“I figured since the shipments have been stalled, as of now, then it can’t hurt to have layaway cash, ya get me toot’s? That experimental leg brace sold, so we’re gonna go pick up the payment now,” she says, pausing to open her pack and show him the clean Topside clothes she has stored away. “And there’s two other pieces for auction right now, but I don’t know how much we’ll get for those, they were mostly just filler pieces.” She tells him, tossing her pack over the wall before crawling under a gap in the border. He sighs, his leg already aching from the long walk. He tosses his crutch over the wall where Jinx catches it, and begins the crawl under the gate. Mud squelches beneath his fingers, the dried paint stiff in his hair. Shit, the paint in his hair.
“Jinx?” He says calmly
“Mmhm”
“There’s still paint in my hair.”
“Oh. Huh.” All it takes is a second of staring before they go off.
“How in the ever-loving-fuck did you forget-
“Hey it’s become such of habit, maybe if you didn’t get hit as much-”
“We’ve come all this way, to the most uniform city in the universe-”
“Is it my job to remind you that you got hit with a paintball, you-”
They settle on a mutual glare, Viktor tugging his ruined leg from out beneath him. Jinx hands him his crutch, studying the back of his head. He pulls out a change of clothes from the pack, admiring the clean white and red when- SPLAT. “JINX WHAT THE EVER LOVING FU-” He nearly drops the clothes in surprise, his hands and the clean shirt now stained neon-purple.
A blaster is in her hand, slightly steaming from the shot, a shit-eating grin on her face. “Hey, I just figured if the rest of you was also covered in paint, then maybe you could pass as an artist.”
“I’m not an artist, I’m a scientist,” He protests, sliding on the ruined shirt.
“Sure, but what does it matter? Now you’ll blend in better, pass as a hurried artist who couldn’t be bothered to change his clothes. Though you could probably do with some more paint.” As much as it infuriates him, he realizes she’s right. This is the only way.
“Can’t we just break down the rest of the capsules and smear them, rather than shooting,” He argues.
“Of course we could toots, but unlike you, I’m an artist, and you can’t ruin the artist’s vision,” she croons, before taking aim at him again.
________________________________________
Piltover, Main Street
Jayce was fucked. In so many ways, to say he was supremely, extremely, massively fucked was an understatement.
One might think it was because he was tremendously late to a meeting with Councillor Medara regarding the border breaches, or even the fact that there were attempts on his life being made, or even the fact that his best friend, who is also his best source of intelligence, has been totally silent since her letter last week. All of this would be wrong, because at this moment, his most pressing fuck was the fact that he was forced to drink decaf. How many times does he need to visit a damn cafe before they can get his order right? He takes another sip and grimaces as he walk-sprints down the avenues of Piltover. He doesn’t like to curse, but this coffee deserves all the expletives because why the fuck did the baristas put vanilla in what was supposed to be a simple black coffee? Literally, how could anyone fuck it up.
Well, that annoying, reasonable voice in the back of his head said, look how bad you’re fucking up right now. Oh mages, he was twenty minutes late and counting for that meeting with Mel. Shut up, not helping, and yes, there was the sleep deprivation voice that offered the best suggestions.
“Excuse me, pardon me Ma’am, sorry sir-” The masses of people were not helping his sleep-deprivation’s argument, because of course the councilors office had to be on the busiest street in Piltover. He finally reaches the cross-walk though, the light ahead about to change. He begins tapping his feet, drumming his fingers, come on come on come on- Just out of the side of his vision, he can see a figure crossing the street, not bothering to look both ways. They seem to be in mid-conversation with a blue haired girl, but the girl stops, her eyes growing wide as a figure- no the man continues to cross, oblivious to the street-cars around him.
Jayce doesn’t have to think twice before he shoves aside the rest of the crowd, throwing himself at the man. The man surprisingly made it halfway across the street without being hit, but that doesn’t stop Jayve from barreling towards him. Well this was a smart idea, dammit there goes the voice of reason again- the man’s head turns, golden eyes growing wide as Jayce slams into him, throwing them onto the side-walk. His back protests with pain as he lands on the hard sidewalk with the man and his crutch wrapped safely in his arms.
“VIKTOR,” The man in his arms looks up, blinking a few times before pushing himself off of Jayce’s chest. The blue haired girl the man, Viktor, was walking with is now shouting across the street. “NICE LANDING ON THE HOT DUDE.”
Viktor turns a shade of purple similar to the one on his jacket before muttering “Sorry for... Well that” in an accent that turns Jayce’s brain to mush. While Jayce’s brain is struggling to form a coherent response, acceptable response to this very attractive, very embarrassed man, Viktor grabs his crutch and sets off at a hurried pace back towards the blue-haired girl, who is… smirking.
Nice job letting the cute guy walk away. Finally, the voice of reason has found the one thing he can agree on.