#hexgates

From the moment Jayce returns to the main Arcane universe, he knows what's going to happen. He and MageVik's chat must have been longer than that which we see on screen, something along the lines of, "It's all going to go to shit, but there is a chance you can stop it, and also get your Viktor back."

Jayce is not surprised to see puppet-Salo in the lower Hexgates room, nor that Salo is a puppet. "Have you given Hextech to the people yet?" he knows he's really conversing with Viktor. There's no reason for him to know this at this point, other than MageVik has told him everything.

All his actions from then on are to get to Viktor, by way of the Arcane Herald.

You can see when he takes up the kneeling position (a la the evolved Jayce in MageVik's universe) on top of the Hexgates, that he takes a deep breath, in a lets do this way.

"This is what you see?" Not, "what the hell happened?!"

Then, "we finish this together."

This is Jayce's rune, the last thing to disappear, the rest of Jayce having already been sucked into it. Not exploded or disintegrated, but slurped up by a small shard of glowing blue magic, which poetically, is back where the story started from.

All that's physically left is the corrupted hammer, but crucially, the Herald's body has gone as well, presumably sucked into the Arcane just as Jayce's was.

The Hexgate timeline is insane, guys, it's actually insane.

So I'm writing a Jayvik fic set in the time skip between 1.03 and 1.04. Most people agree that time skip was about 6-7 years long.

During 1.04 "Progress Day" Jayce says "a few years ago", the Hexgates opened to the world. The year before, we learn from the Enforcer Caitlyn is talking to that Jayce launched a blimp "half way across the continent" which sounds like a demonstration of increased range for the Hexgates.

At some point, I would guess early in Jayce and Viktor's partnership, they also did the Distinguished Innovators competition where they needed to notch their own gears and, presumably, didn't have a lot of assistants or assistance. I only note this to point out that there was at least a year or so at the beginning where they weren't immediately thrust into limelight yet and they didn't have every resource available.

So just because Mel was buying into their vision on Day 1, doesn't mean the whole city had yet. They probably needed to prove an application for Hextech first before that happened and, likely, the Hexgates was what they came up with and that's the one all of Piltover bought in on.

So, mostly likely sometime in the first year or so, Jayce and Viktor had to provide a proof of concept for the Hexgates. Let's say for the sake of argument that by the first Progress Day of their partnership, they have one.

Progress Day / Year of Jayce and Viktor's partnership

(Let's go through the timeline)

Like. Ok yes this was devastating because we see that Viktor's name isn't on* it but something about knowing that Jayce designed this is stupidly sexy

And the little doodles of Viktor in his journal? And the lute/guitar thing we know he plays?Jayce is Renaissance Man confirmed

Technically speaking, each individual magical transportation portal opened using the arcane is a Hexgate. The physical structure is probably officially called something like "the Hexgate tower" or "the Hexgate terminal." But that's kind of a mouthful so in everyday conversation everyone just starts shortening it to "the Hexgates" and it's clear from context whether you mean the magical portals or the structure itself.

I think this would be connected to them figuring out pretty early on that magical teleportation operates by creating a temporary wormhole, as opposed to like, just using magical energy to fling things really fast in a straight line through space. (And, when you think about it this way, it's much less surprising that the acceleration rune would allow travel through time as well as space.) This would have important design implications, because if it's the second option, you need airships that can survive traveling at supersonic speeds. But we see right from the start that a regular old unprotected and slightly frostbitten human can travel through an arcane portal perfectly fine.

Except I don't think they have the word wormhole in Runeterra, so they'd have to come up with something else to call these magical doorways. You can imagine the brainstorming session:

Jayce, pacing: "Okay, we need a name."

Viktor: "Does it have to have 'hex' in it?"

Jayce: "Councilor Medarda says yes, for branding purposes. Come on, brainstorm time. No bad ideas. What do we call our magic space hole that'll convince people to go into it?"

Viktor, just to see how Jayce will react: "You mean the Hexhole?"

Jayce: "Okay maybe one bad idea. Hex...chute?"

Viktor: "You'll have people offering you a handkerchief."

Jayce: "Hex...portal?"

Viktor: "Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Hmm...what about Hexgate?"