MAN IN THE MACHINE

As in the words of the Herald himself, Viktor does not hate Jayce. Viktor has long since superseded pittances such as hate and envy, else his most prominent priority beyond the Glorious Evolution would be ruining Stanwick’s reputation as he ruined his, and to a lesser extent, even Jayce’s.

But Jayce is a variable-- a dangerous one.

Jayce is the variable Viktor negotiated with for the crystal. Jayce is the variable Viktor, with great irritation, knocked unconscious with that crystal in hand. Jayce is the variable that stormed in to his treatment of the ailing sufferers of the Sump’s toxicity, destroying the crystal and collapsing the warehouse, Viktor’s hopes for an expedient Evolution among the rubble and broken hybrid bodies. Jayce is the variable that has forced Viktor, back against the wall, to transform his agnostic movement into a religion in a bid for crucial followers.

Viktor may have liked Jayce. Viktor may have believed Jayce to be a valuable partner in his artificer research in Piltover, arrogance and egoism just a piece of Jayce’s greater genius. Deep somewhere in the well of his heart, Viktor may have even held feelings for the man, fleeting as they might--

--but, above all?

“You’re right, you caught me. I was in the area and thought I’d see if you wanted to catch up over some lunch. How’d you know?”

Jayce’s words are no longer jovial. Every sound is delivered with stoicism and punctuated by silence. He’s finally lost his smile.

Viktor will do that to you.

“Look, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. I was in the area, yes, but not for you. Gods, not for you.” He shakes his head and blinks rather slow.

Jayce doesn’t know why he thought it smart to show up in person. Really, he doesn’t. The scars that mar his body remind him that talking things out didn’t exactly work last time. There isn’t a single logical reason why he should believe this encounter will end differently. He forgets sometimes, most times, that he’s dealing with an actual, literal madman.

Jayce looks to the hand on the staff once more. It has a function, he knows, or Viktor wouldn’t be holding on to it so tightly. The safest guess, ironically, would be to assume that it will summon something capable of killing him in an instant. Jayce’s hand moves to hold the lever on the mercury hammer. He’s left it in its ranged form since before he approached Emberflit. Though he’s made it this far with that subtle gesture of peace, he can’t rule out the possibility of needing it now.

“I wouldn’t have come if I could have helped it, but I’d rather deal with this topic now than risk another day or two for a letter. That is, if you’ve already got something planned for me when I get back.” ‘When’, he thinks. Because I am going back.

“As much as I’ve tried dissuading her- the girl, she’s still coming around. She’s not the only one that’s taken to shadowing me either.” Jayce’s eyes shift back up to look for some kind of humanity behind that metal mask. Something that has survived the steel. Anything at all that he can plead his case to. “If you have a problem with me, if theres some plan to off me in the upcoming week, month, decade- what have you. Deal with it when I’m elsewhere. On the street. Getting groceries. Taking a shit. It doesn’t matter when or where, just not at that workshop. I’m getting too many visitors who don’t deserve to be caught in this.”

There’s a pause.

A moment, a beat, time of silence; whichever it went by, it’s now.

( “Surely you don’t intend to just let him in, without some plan?” “Of course not,” Viktor said. “I am not a fool. Neither is Jayce. He would not come here lightly.” “Then what shall we do?” Zeta’s tail flickered dark metal underneath the yellow light. “Wait.” “Wait?” “Yes, wait. For my cue. Do not show yourselves.” )

They wait, and Viktor sighs.

His thoughts linger on the paths they both took to end here, skirting on each other’s thinning ice just to see themselves in another’s face. Viktor, sitting down on his throne, flanked by pipes and machinery that all hummed and fizzed and dripped with steam and power. Jayce, the least close workbench that’s still in the room. 

Viktor wonders, briefly, if it would have been easier to have struck harder with the crystal down on Jayce’s forehead, when he still had it.

It would have been, Viktor answered. He would have not survived to destroy the crystal. Its destruction has set me and the Evolution both back several years.

Taptaptaptap. A clicking noise chitters from a room aside. Impatience. They don’t want to have to wait much longer.

Though Jayce could not see it in Viktor’s visor, his eyes softened.

But that is not now.

“You care for that girl, Jayce.” Viktor’s digitizer is quieter. When he speaks like this, it’s almost indistinguishable from his voice without his mask. He knows well to not phrase it as a question. This is what you are, that says. You care for that girl and you know that I know.

Would he use it?

Another pause; not as long as before.

“The assault on your workshop ended more severe than I originally intended,” Viktor says, tone unchanged. “For what it was worth, it was supposed to be a scouting mission. For the crystal, any remaining fragments.”

His finger let off the button. No.

“It is unfortunate that my acolytes, so early into their training, interpreted such as a missive to break in and cause havoc. Such sloppy work will not happen again. You have my word.” 

The clicking gets louder and Viktor almost sighs again. He stands up, pushing forward down a step from his throne (as if he would admit he had one).

He readies the hand on his scepter and points it at Jayce.

“I do not hate you, Jayce.” The digitizer barely picks it up.

Jayce’s cocky smile vanishes. A forced grin, fit for a holiday dinner with the in-laws, takes it’s place.

There was a time when Jayce considered the man seated before him a true, honest friend. His only friend, perhaps, but a friend nonetheless.

It was the time before that man had ordered his death.

It went without saying that Jayce had thereafter discovered the feeling was never mutual, which meant of course, that he was going to literally say it anyway.

“You know Vik,” he throws up an accusatory index. “That’s a statement that goes both ways. You’ve never called me a friend either.”

If only he’d noticed that fact a little sooner.

“But. Not the point I’m trying to make here…”  

He shifts on his perch, watching his old friend with equal parts trust and suspicion. The hand against his staff doesn’t go unnoticed. It’s met silently as Jayce’s own is placed against the top grip of the mercury hammer.

“Last month, my workshop. You surely know of it- of that girl who was with me?”

Vik.

The nickname hits Viktor at an awkward angle, not unlike a foul odor. It has the call of an underhanded attempt for Jayce to wedge himself in, put some show behind that friendship he’s chuffing about.

A brief moment of intangible irritation and the emotion slips away to the iron slipstream in Viktor’s pacemade heart.

At the question, his gaze redoubles.

What was Jayce getting at?

“The girl,” he says, “would not have been harmed by my acolytes, had they known she was there.”

Even Viktor, the man in the machine, knows how precious children are. Their idealism is not lost on him-- neither the naivety nor fragility, too. Children are as much the future as his own Glorious Evolution. It brought him some regret to know one was threatened for a mission as paltry as seeing if there were remains of the crystal somewhere in Jayce’s workshop.

Evidently, there were.

It gleams at him from the electric bend of the Mercury Hammer.

“I doubt you’ve come solely for a question as simple as that, Jayce.”

His finger adjusts.

@hexcored

In the den of his enemy, Jayce wastes little time in making himself at home. Arguably civil conversation or not, theres an invisible line he dares not cross situated somewhere between the two men. Instead moving to greet it, Jayce takes to his right, sliding his open palm along the top of the nearest workbench. The carefully organized trinkets resting atop it collect into a twisted heap in exchange for a pleasant place to sit. Jayce takes the perch, hammer coming to a rest against his leg. His smile is no less bright. He knows that stiffened posture isn’t just from those augments. “You’ll figure it out eventually. Probably. Ask sweet enough and I might even give you a hint.” He bats his eyes- just enough to seem dainty. “I for one thought you’d be glad to see an old friend.”

If Viktor was a man of traditional faith, he’d be cursing whatever Divines he could call on.

( “He’s here. That fool, he’s coming right in! What do we do, Master Viktor?” “Open the doors and let him through.” “What? Why? Are we putting out the carpet for him?” “No.” Viktor brushed his staff. “But it would simply the process.” )

Indeed, Viktor’s brushing his staff right now. All it would take was to press down hard enough on the nib of the button to summon his laboratory’s defense systems and put a formal end to this nonsense.

Hmpth.

But Jayce had come peacefully. That, against the pulses of Viktor’s higher judgment (and believe him, he had plenty of higher judgment), counted for enough to at least let him have his talk.

For now. Viktor lets his higher judgment go unanswered for only so long.

“An old friend.” Viktor’s digitizer whizzes. “Ironic.”

He sets his amber, visored eyes on Jayce. He’s not a fan of what he sees. 

GRAVE. | accepting

The reply comes easy.

“Many times,” Viktor says, one hand on his lap and the other around his staff’s steel grip. His thumb presses a tad on a small button– but it doesn’t activate. Not yet, not now. They have just got to talking–

Viktor resists the urge to sigh. He is tired of talking. He is tired of this game. He is entirely tired of Jayce and his hammer.

“Mostly,” he says, meeting Jayce’s gaze, “it is of wonder: how is it that you’ve managed to get inside my laboratory this many times? All to talk?”

His digitizer lisps.

REPLACE THE WORKING PARTS.

                                 an indie Viktor blog written by kayla.

It is a thought. It is a goal. It is, with regret on part of the Herald, a religion. Though its numbers may be a minority in Zaun and unheard of save for less than flattering newsreels in Piltover, the Glorious Evolution and its Gloriously Evolved are on the rise. 

The core tenants of belief-- improving humanity, uplifting it to a state where corruption cannot exist and the only option is forward, is not something that goes without drawing attention when most in Zaun are delegated to breathing the Gray and living beside the ailing heaps of the Sump.

For many of its believers, the Glorious Evolution serves as an answer to the growing distaste in their mouths concerning Piltover’s open policy of corruption and “beating back the unwashed, poverty Zaunite masses”. With the Evolution, Zaun bites down on the hand which sunk it and drowned it in toxic sludge and acid rain.

At the heart of it all is of course the Herald. While Viktor may not approve of the Evolution’s status as a religion as much as it is a movement, he recognizes the value it has in gaining him the critical first followings that will inevitably snowball into a far greater force to be reckoned with.

He thinks himself neither tyrant nor messiah, but a dedicated man with forthright in his picture of a perfect humanity free of the defects that threw him down from fame in Piltover to the worst corner of the Sump.