#ixtal

The first thing you have to learn to survive Qiyana, is that Qiyana is everything.

No, you don’t understand. She’s a princess of the Yunalai, daughter of the current masters of the whole civilization, top tier royalty in this complicated ruling caste of mages–the Yun Tal. She makes Caitlyn Kiramman look positively proletarian.

Oh, and she’s a born, natural, effortless magic prodigy. That too. Mastery of three elements–Magma, Water, and Nature, as she’s proudly fond of reminding me–unprecedented–unmatched, both in her intuition and her aptitude for learning.

She’s a rising star, a perfect storm of brains, beauty and unrivalled badassery. She’s destined to be Empress. She has no equal in the academies or among the Yun Tal themselves, and soon, they will all know it…

Who’s ‘they’? That’s gonna take some explainin’ cuz, like, everyone here? Mages. Mages mages mages. Holy crap, there’s some mages.

I’ve barely been outside her chambers because I’m technically not supposed to be here–and only Qiyana and her most loyal retainers know I exist, on pain of death, because no foreigner has set foot here in a like a zillion years–but of course, I’ve snuck around a bit and–from what I can see of this place—hah!

Piltover, City of Progress? Progress? Pilties would wet their knickers and run scrabbling back to their chalkboards if they saw what the Ixtalis do in their sleep. Makes the Marvels of Hextech look like toddlers bashing toys in a playpen.

Their city’s a shiny white stone colossus just … sticking up out of the jungle, from what I can see through Qiyana’s pleasure palace windows, it sprawls out into the distance, white mathematical lines slicing through the jungles to the nodes of other satellite cities. Looks like the fabled petricite cities of Demacia, only not so stuffy and hung up on statues of boring swordy kings and knights and stuff.

This place is all sleek geometry and floating rocks and floating fountains and–look lotsa stuff floats–even the freaking corridors are temperature-controlled through elemental magic.

And it’s entirely self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-maintaining. A perfect feedback loop that could last another thousand years even if the world outside was burning.

Remember stealing some Piltie plans for architecture like this. Someone’s benevolent plan to purify the air and fix the dirty poors in the Undercity by rebuilding it–and gentrifying it–as a self-contained eco-system. It actually already is, but they meant completely sealed from the polluting environment, even the air, clean and safe and tightly controlled…by their hand, of course.

Gross. Don’t need to explain why the thought of that gives me the heebies, but, fortunately, theoretical, decades of research away, never got funded, pipe dream…

They called it an ‘arcology’. And I recognize that’s what this is. Pipe dream for Piltover, but the Ixtalis actually did it, this city, this Ix-…ixtaco–Ixiewhatsit–

“Ixaocan, Ee-shao-can!” Qiyana snaps at me for the hundredth time in my–weeks?–of hiatus from my quest in her clutches, “The city of Ixaocan, the Empire of Ixtal, you insipid cackling macaw. Pay attention, Qiyana does not waste her breath on your hollow ears!”

—yep, that’s pretty much QiQi and me, in a nutshell.

Anyway, her city, once I pronounce it, is pretty freakin’ cool. They don’t even really bother with technology, though? They just will stuff to happen and it happens. Feels like cheating, but it’s not…

…cuz it ain’t as easy for ’em as they try to make it look. See, it’s not like everyone here shoots outta their mom’s babyspitter as a baddass elemental demigod like Her High Frickin’ Amazingness, Princess Qiyana The Magnificent.

All of their amazing crap has to be constantly upkept and maintained by mages and their special gifts. Hextech kinda did its own thing once you used runes to tell it what to do but here? Literally people-powered. And that means everyone’s gotta be bare minimum competent for the engine to run smooth. There’s all kinds of elaborate hierarchies and oligarchies and blah-blarchies, there’s magic academies and levels of teacher and student and what is permitted or forbidden to be known by whom and bla bla bla…

And I’m starting to feel like it might actually be, low key, much stuffier and more rigid than Piltover. I’ve never been to Demacia and I think the magic in this place would make those guys spontaneously combust, but it sounds maybe even stuffier than there!

Soo…. according to my gracious host, after thousands of years of isolation, Noxians are building their military outposts up north, Piltie Clan ‘exploratory parties’ are popping up all over to plunder the jungle’s resources and they’re poking at the edges of this lost empire…which kinda explains a lot of Neeko’s stuff, now that I think about it.

But the Yun Tal guys apparently let the whole of Ixtal think the rest of the world just up and died in some ancient war of heebiejeebies and they’re the only ones left, so they’re stubbornly playing the ‘la-la-la-nothing-to-see-here’ game with these foreign intruders and only QiQi here has the stones to wanna go kick their asses out before they get a foothold.

And they won’t let her.

And I’m starting to get Qiyana. Oh yeah. She’s not just a gigantic bitch with a gigantic ego for no reason. She really can back it up–she really is a freakin’ prodigy–and the whole culture around her is stonewalling her.

All that power and jack shit she’s allowed to do with it.

She’s trapped, too.

So…I’ve been in way less comfy prisons. But I think my warden here might also be my cellmate.

And sure, QiQi might smell a damn sight better than you’d expect from whatever prison buddy you’d get stuffed in a dungeon with in Bilgewater, Zaun or Piltover…but she’s far more likely to kill me. And there’s no way away from her.

See, I meant what I said at the start. Qiyana is Qiyana. And ‘Qiyana’ means everything.

Princess. Prodigy. Rising star. Inevitable top dog, hot shit, best bitch in this whole puppy show. Perfect, unmatched, and unbeatable.

First problem; she knows it. Wow does she know it. And wow does she make sure I know it.

Second problem; not everyone else does.

“Nine?”

My screwdriver pauses, in the middle of dissecting a Piltie walking machine amid the mess I’ve made of Qiyana’s trophy room.

My blazing pink eyes flash back over my shoulder, to hers, as she paces behind me.

“You’ve got nine sisters?”

“Yes!” Qiyana steams, stalking back and forth on those nice thick dancer’s legs like an agitated cat, “Nine, and they are all lesser than me, useless, conniving, stupid and weak–and yet the Yun Tal will always, always favor them! Simply because I am youngest!”

“Dang, and here I just got one big sister and we still managed to nearly kill each other a bunch of times.” I blow out a whistle and get back to tinkering, “Y’know what I always say, sisters! Can’t kill ‘em, can’t stuff ‘em back in–”

“–the ‘old babymaker’,” she snorts at me, “Yes I have heard that one before from you, several times, Jinx. Disgusting mind, outlander, but you do have a point…”

I cackle like a filthy old witch and wink at her as I pop the panel on the walker’s control mechanism.

“Of course! Jinx would never steer Her Magnificence wrong! Sisters! Ugh! Lemme tell ya the story of how mine got stolen from me by a stuck up tea-swilling cupcake-munching Piltie Enforcer with incongruously nice titties—”

She tries to keep her aloof haughty calm, but I can tell her curiosity and intrigue is piqued when the panel comes open and the machinery inside is revealed.

“Yes,” she murmurs, “Sisters. All of them, one and all, in my way.”

So nine older sisters, all roadblocks to her Empress-hood, are the eponymous ‘Yunalai’ our girl QiQi is the widdlest babiest addition to. Seems like family drama is the order of the day–and whaddya know? She’s got an ear here, a private one, she can vent to without any fear I’ll go tattling. Who’d I even tattle to? I don’t even have a language in common with anyone else in this city but her…

And we even have plenty of sister angst to commiserate about. I’m the perfect punching bag–I mean confidante, for Qiyana, Princess of the Yunalai. Go figure.

This might be more like my setup with Sarah than I thought.

When I lift my head again, though, Qiyana is watching me thoughtfully. And chewing that soft chestnut flesh of her lip. I only do it when I’m being an evil brat, but Qiyana, that’s pensive for her.

There’s a sudden heat in my belly, and between my legs, that I don’t recognize at first, because Neeko’s been a total sweetie and me and Sarah at our most fiery still clashed as admiring equals. I think Qiyana might be the most offputtingly arrogant bitch I’ve ever met. Why the hell is it turning me on?

She’s too hot to be this awful a person. It’s not fair. I wanna be the one chewin’ on that lip–it’s like an itch I ain’t scratched yet–but the caveat is, I gotta achieve my mission first.

I gotta make her want me so bad it makes her look stupid.

“Soooo…?” I roll my big eyes back at her, “What’re you gonna do about that?”

Her eyes narrow.

“Come with me.”