Get Jinxed: A Tale of Mental Instability and Poor Decisions (Arcane/League of Legends)

A Spark of Light 1​

I groaned as I slumped down at the Firelight's dinner table. "How can one sick guy be so good at hiding out? The guy walks with a cane and coughs up blood, he shouldn't be so hard to find."

Ekko took a seat next to me, passing over a plate of fried fish and chips. "You've been living in Piltover for too long if you're surprised, Jinx. This is still Zaun. People get blind and deaf whenever someone starts asking too many questions. Not quite as blind as they get when Enforcers turn up, but nobody wants to get involved in someone else's problems. Nobody wants to get caught in the middle of a gang fight between the Firelights and Silco."

"I don't suppose there's any point in telling everyone that this isn't going to put them in the middle of a gang war?" I groaned and rubbed my forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

"Words are cheap." Benzo took a seat on the other side of the table. It still threw me sometimes, how he'd gone from being such a big stout guy to losing a lot of his old bulk. He'd just never gotten back a lot of the muscle and fat he'd lost after that health scare. Not that I thought he'd gone completely soft, shedding that weight made him look like an old man made completely out of tough, dried-up shoe leather.

"Yeah, and in this case even if I told them that the guy we're looking for has nothing to do with Silco, there's no guarantee he won't get involved. Just the fact that we're looking for Viktor at all is gonna be enough to make him curious if he gets word of it. He'd probably try to grab Viktor just so we can't have him, or so he'd have some leverage over us." Never mind what would happen if he found exactly who I was looking for. Snagging his own pet Hextech expert would be way too tempting for Silco to resist.

Not to mention that one of our best guesses for where Viktor was hiding out was with that old mentor of his, whom he suspected was mixed up in Shimmer production. It felt like a pretty safe bet that getting anywhere near the source of Silco's Shimmer supply would set him off. I didn't know much about how drug lords did business, but I was pretty sure they reacted violently to any threat to their drug labs.

It would help if we had any other leads on where Viktor'd gone. So far the only hint of anything was the Sky, the cute lab assistant I'd tried to set him up with, had gone missing too. Some part of me really wanted to believe that Viktor had smashed the Hexcore and run off with a cute girl to enjoy the rest of his life, but I knew that wasn't realistic. Viktor hadn't seemed like he was gonna snap out of his obsession that easily, and I still wasn't sure if he was even interested in women that way. It was hard to tell the difference between a severe lack of game and a complete lack of interest.

I groaned and shoved some fish into my mouth. Some part me couldn't help noticing that the fish was underseasoned and the fry oil hadn't been changed for a while, compared to what I was used to eating back home. Maybe Ekko was right, and I wasn't as much of a Zaunite street kid as I used to be. I didn't like to think of it as leaving Zaun behind, though. I'd changed, but Zaun had changed too. Silco's influence was everywhere, covering all the rough edges of the slums in a layer of urban decay. Things had been rough in Vander's time, but there was a lot more of a sense that we were all in this together. In Silco's Zaun, everyone was out for themselves.

It wasn't all bad. People had clean water, and food prices had actually come down after we settled everything with Demacia, but those were just symptoms of the real problem. Piltover's wealth rested on keeping Zaun down, and Silco was determined to be king of the garbage heap even if he had kick the rest of Zaun down into the Sump to pull it off. I didn't know how to fix either of those, though. Well, not without burning down half the city in the process. There were some places I wouldn't mind setting on fire, but I liked Piltover and Zaun. It was where I kept my stuff, like my workshop, my gadgets, and my friends.

I listlessly shoved another piece of fish into my mouth. "So what am I missing? There's gotta be some way to find where he's hiding out. He's not some master criminal, he's a nerd with a bum leg and almost no connections." From what Caitlyn turned up in her investigation, he didn't even completely empty his bank accounts, so he wasn't gonna be tossing around money like crazy to build up a new home base. Jayce hadn't gotten anything from asking around at the Academy either. Viktor didn't have a ton of friends, he was too much of an introvert for that.

"Zeri had an idea about that," Benzo suggested. "If he's running some kinda underground lab, he's gonna need power, right?"

"Duh." Though the Hexcore was supposed to be the kinda power source that could run an entire lab without too much trouble. Though that was only an issue if he got it completely stable and running, and I didn't think he'd go on the run if that was the case. As far as we could tell, he ran to stop us from shutting him down. He wouldn't be worried about that if he'd already made the Hexcore totally safe and stable. If anything, he'd want to show us his results and how we'd been wrong to ever doubt him.

Thinking about it a little more, the pieces started coming together. "Does Zeri think she can find where he's hiding out by searching for power anomalies? I thought she said that was a no-go, because Zaun's entire power grid is basically one big anomaly." Back when I'd been just a little squirt, I'd been tapping into power lines and hijacking electricity to run the old arcade or other places. Plenty of other people in Zaun were doing the same thing. She couldn't look for anything weird in the power network when the city didn't have any kind of baseline for normal.

It was the same reason Seraphine's magic hadn't helped us turn up Viktor. She didn't know Viktor well enough to pick him out from halfway across the city the way she could with me, so all she could go off of was his emotional state. Maybe in Piltover she could find someone like Viktor, who was probably stressed out, desperate, and struggling to stave off the fear of impending death, but that wasn't exactly an uncommon feeling in Zaun.

Benzo sighed. "Yeah, if we check every place drawing extra power that we don't know about, we're gonna have to do a lot of process of elimination and probably end up running afoul of a dozen chembaron labs, brothels, drug dens, and gods know what else. But... aw hell, I'll let her explain it." He looked over his shoulder. "Zeri, tell Jinx about that plan you came up with!"

Zeri walked over to us with a cocky grin. Ever since she'd gotten the hang of her magic with a little covert help from everyone's favorite tech genius, she'd gotten a lot more confident. Not to mention she'd stopped causing quite so many random blackouts. I liked her, she had moxie and punk style, even if I wasn't sure about the bright green pigtails.

Zeri flopped into the open seat next to Ekko, leaning back in her chair and planting her feet on Ekko's lap. "Can do, Benzo." She turned to me with a grin, ignoring Ekko's half-hearted protests about how he wasn't her footstool. "So here's the thing: I can't go looking around Zaun for everything that's a bit weird, but that just means we need to narrow down what kind of weird we're looking for. Your theory is that he's working on the same experiments he was doing before he took a runner out of Piltover, so if I could get a good look at what his lab up there is like, it might help narrow down what I need to look for."

"That makes sense, but..." My eyes flicked down to what most people would mistake for just another bit of Zaunite flair or good luck charm on her jacket, but I knew was a disguised magic regulator. "It's kind of a risk for you. I know you wanna keep your magic on the down-low, and running around the Academy magically checking out the wiring is kinda the opposite of that." We could probably keep anyone from finding out about it, but her odds of getting caught went way up running around the Academy full of Hextech compared to sticking to Zaun.

Zeri shrugged. "Yeah, it's a gamble, but so's every time I get into a fight with some of Silco's goons or some chembaron's bully boys." She tapped her regulator. "You did me a solid, and you've been one of us in all but name for longer than I've been a member. You know what makes us different from Silco's goons or the jerks up in topside, right?"

"I hope you're not including me in the topside jerks," I couldn't help pointing out. "But I can think of a lot. Like the fact we don't kill people just to make ourselves richer."

"You're thinking of symptoms, not the disease," Zeri answered. "It all comes down to one word: community. We talk about Pilties or Zaunites like they're two distinct groups, but really all they are is geography. The only thing everyone in Piltover has in common is that they all live topside. Most of them would sell each other down the river just to get a bit richer. It's the same in a lot of Zaun, the whole reason Silco's gotten so strong is that people care too much about themselves and not enough about each other."

I nodded along. "Yeah, I can buy that. One thing Silco and the rich assholes have in common, they don't care who they've gotta step on to get ahead. S'why I don't buy all his talk of having a revolution in Zaun. He sees a boot on the necks of everyone on Zaun, and thinks the problem isn't the boot, it's the fact there's a Piltie foot in it."

"Which isn't how things are supposed to work," Zeri agreed. "People in Piltover and Zaun need to stop trying to get one over on each other and start helping each other out. I think you get it more than most." She tapped her regulator. "You gave me this. You didn't charge me money for it, or say I owed you a favor now, and someday you'd come to collect. You saw that someone in your community needed help, and you gave it to them. It's the same with stuff like making sure we have food and water. It's only right for the community to have your back when you've had our back."

"I thought you just said community wasn't about keeping score," I pointed out.

Zeri rolled her eyes. "I'm not cool with taking a risk to help you out 'cause I owe you. I'm cool with doing it because you're a good person who helps out the people around you. And the thing is? That doesn't change after this is done. I'm not marking off a debt in a ledger, I'm helping out a friend. You need help again, I'll still show up even if nobody thinks I still owe you for the times you helped me. It's not about debts, it's about doing right by each other."

Ekko glanced down at his lap. "So where does using me as your footrest fall on doing right by people?"

Zeri smirked at him. "Don't be a whiner, chief. Nobody likes it when the leader whines. It's bad for morale."

Ekko groaned. "Why do all the women in my life like giving me a hard time?"

"Must be something about you," I concluded.

Benzo smirked at him. "When I was your age, I would never complain about having two cute girls pay this much attention to me."

"Ew." I let out an exaggerated gag. "Don't ever call me cute again, Benzo. Did you forget I have a body count?"

A painfully long moment of silence followed that declaration.

"Not like that!" I snapped.

I quickly looked around Firelight headquarters for anything that could make for a good change of subject. That was when I spotted Caitlyn coming towards us, looking very out of place despite her attempts to dress down. She'd made progress, but it was hard to completely hide the Piltie aristocrat in her. I grinned and waved. "Caitlyn, there you are! What's the word from topside? I hope it's better than we've had."

Caitlyn grimaced and shook her head. "Still nothing in Piltover. I do actually have some news from Zaun, though I'm afraid I can't attribute this to my investigative prowess." She pulled out a letter and handed it over to me. I looked down at the bottom first, to see who'd sent it to us. That told me I didn't need to bother reading anything else. "How'd Silco send you a letter?"

"He used the post office," Caitlyn answered dryly. "He sent it to the office of my detective agency, addressed to both of us. It seems he's taken notice of how much you've been poking around in Zaun, and wants to meet. He doesn't issue any direct threats, but he does vaguely allude to how it can be dangerous to poke about Zaun looking for secrets."

"In other words, if we don't talk to him, he's gonna start trying to get in our way." I groaned. "Well, that's just great." Especially since any meeting with Zaun's Asshole-in-Chief was sure to be an ugly mess. Maybe I should just blow him off and keep moving forward on my own? Or should I try out Zeri's plan, even if it put her at risk? The Academy was outside of Silco's reach, so he couldn't complain about us messing around in what he considered his territory.

---

Current Stability: 0
Willpower: 2

What Next Step Does Jinx Take In Her Investigation?

[ ] Meet With Silco

[ ] Head to the Academy With Zeri

[ ] Keep Investigating, Even if it Angers Silco.