Occasionally, when the feeling of sentimentality arose she would slink down from the cobblestone streets and delicately lit street lamps of Piltover. She would sit, on the very outskirts of Zaun, she never ventured further. Why? Maybe she didn't want to slip back into that world. Maybe she just wanted the taste of the acidic polluted air to touch her tongue, coat her lungs for a moment, no more than that. Or maybe she wanted to be looking down on the past, not engulfed by it.
I kept an eye on her for 3 months without making an advance, watching her every move, she was fascinating. I stopped when the offer was accepted, I no longer needed to know her regime and she became my partner. One thing I knew was that she still came here when things got too much, she wasn't aware of my knowing. I followed her for the first time, as my partner.
I watched her as she sat on the edge of the divide between North and South Piltover. She pulled out the small card box and pulled out a cigarette, her face lit up when she sparked up the lighter. I reminded her how bad they were on a daily basis but nevertheless, "A home from home" She always said.
It was strange, seeing Vi in this state of mind, a time where her face was plain with honesty. She wasn't pretending. Thick skinned as she said so herself. Physically yes, but her mind? A different story all together. Vi isn't the easiest to read, but I know how to read her. Her mind is more rigid than she let's on. Her code has its flaws.
It was when she continued her trips to her cliff view after becoming my partner that I realised she was missing something. She'd grown up alone, heard dozens of tales on her birthplace and family. She was told by one elder that she'd been found in the ruins of the Lost Hope orphanage after the accident. Others told her to check the wall of the slum work factories, a place where people wrote the names of their lost loved ones, forced to work by their poverty. She didn't have a last name so she couldn't try to look if she wanted too.
I had heard much worse tales when questioning witnesses. A potential test subject, being one of them. This was an occurrence known only too well in Zaun, unfortunately. Not all testing results in successes, some can turn sour.
She had so much anger burning inside her, it wasn't just her use of excessive force that displayed it. She was destructive, towards anyone who crossed her wrongly, especially herself. Her nemesis wasn't exactly who she had thought, it was none other than herself.
She inhaled slowly, two fingers pressed gently to her lips. The soft tendrils over the smoke danced into the gray haze drifting up from the crevice and disappeared. I hate the smell of it, but on her it's different, there's something seductive about watching the cigarette smoke escaping her lips. I would not voice this though.
As the sky darkened the gray mist turned greener as the light pollution from the undercity grew upwards. You could hear the mechanical whirring from the hexconveyors taking people down from the docks. I had always wondered why she never spoke of her home, I wondered why she never took the conveyors down of an evening I nearly offered once, but that was when I realised if she had wanted too she would be there now. She watched the world below so often, merely dipping her toes in each time, as though she needed a polite reminder of how different things had become.
Her whole world had turned almost literally upside down, she'd gone from nothing to everything, toxicity to pure air, down to up, alone to accompanied. Was she happy there? Was she happy here?
What would have happened if she had stayed that way? Would she self destruct? There are many questions I may never find the answer too.
There are times where I'm unsure if I've saved her. But I know she has saved me, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to return the favour.