One Year Ago
Of those who inhabited the Noxus capitol, early morn always arrived first for the stationed soldiers since their barracks were intentionally situated at the eastmost areas. This way, they would be the first to absorb the incoming rays of the rising sun. And today was no different as the sun's bloody red tendrils spilled over the horizon's edge, running freely onto the rows upon rows of humble military black bungalows. The morning air was chilly and stifling, and only now were the men and women beginning to stir to the shrill reveille of raised bugles everywhere...
Deep within the underground dungeons beneath the Noxus capitol, however, and inside a blackened stone chamber that served as both bedroom and office, one particular veteran was already up and at 'em, needing no bugles to rouse him from his brief nightly period of inanimation. He hummed a Noxian war hymn under his mechanical breath as he stood at a corner of his room, using his monstrous pincer of a right hand to jam a variety of breakfast foods, from white banana to whole wheat bread, into a badly nicked blender of a baby blue hue. The hymn's words and notes were pretty much unintelligible, drowned out by the harsh grating reverberations within his stainless steel windpipe, but the grotesque warbling was uplifting music to his pinholes for ears nonetheless, and he cheerily rocked from side to side on his four segmented legs of steel.
"Brand new day, time to slay, with Noxus and its friends! The blood and slaughter never ends!"
And with that inspirational lyric, Urgot, formerly the Headsman's Pride but now Chief Torturer due to that ******** Draven hogging all of the executioners' glories for himself, slapped a plastic cap onto the blender and hunched over to carefully press the tip of his pincer against a button on the blender's base. The blender screamed for a few seconds until Urgot withdrew the pincer. Off came the cap. In dropped a large plastic straw, one end sinking into the yellowish brown muck, the other end inserted neatly into a circular hole at the bottom of his face's stainless steel grill. Ten seconds of noisy sucking sounds as he quickly drained the blender of its contents. A loud satisfied "Ahhhhh!" escaped from the grill as he set the blender back down onto the top of his knee-high refrigerator, which doubled as his kitchen counter. Breakfast was served and done with.
The onion-shaped soldier patted his bare leathery belly, momentarily waiting for a burp that would never come due to his electronic digestive system's ability to silently expunge most of his gaseous waste. Then he scuttled over to his chair-less office desk and turned on his computer so that he could check his email, twiddling his pincers together as he wondered what he might have missed during his three hours of sleep.
The musing Urgot twiddled his pincers for quite the while during his wait. For while his desktop computer was a high-end machine with state-of-the-art components, its hard drive was absolutely swamped with malware, spyware, trojans, rootkits, browser hijacks, you name it. Although Urgot was a savvy veteran of the battlefield and blessed with a genius tactical mind for warfare, the seventy year old machine man was also a complete and total noob when it came to this whole newfangled internet thing. He could sniff out enemy snipers hidden inside dense foliage from ten miles away, yet he could not stop himself from opening every damn email that came his way, regardless of subject line and attachment size. He could sense impending predator ambushes from within the silent dank darkness of an Icathian cavern, yet he simply could not stop himself from clicking on dodgy web links that promised videos of hot amateur Ionian teenage girls engaged in promiscuous activity with each other. Urgot had no idea what AdBlock and NoScript were, because he had no idea that one could actually install extensions and addons for a web browser. And yes, his web browser of choice was Internet Explorer.
As his computer's hard drive creaked and groaned, platters spinning this way and that as a hundred different malicious programs pulled from a hundred different directions, Urgot started to clang his pincers together in impatience.
"Goddamit, why does this infernal computer of mine take so damn long to boot! I swear, it takes longer with each passing day! Perhaps this could be Demacian sorcery at work?! A diabolical scheme to undermine workplace efficiency within the Noxian military?!"
He would have gnashed his teeth together by now if he had teeth. As it were, he contented himself with squatting down on all fours so that he could glare balefully at his blasted monitor with his right eye, whitened with near blindness, and his left ocular hextech implant, an all-seeing monocle of chromed steel with a round green crystal inset for a lens. Watching the computer visibly tally the amount of RAM it had, Urgot reminded himself to open yet another support case with the Noxian military's woefully underfunded IT department (the Noxus government pretty much blew all their money on weaponry and war machines, and ignored all else)...
Five tedious minutes later, the login screen to Windows XP finally appeared, and Urgot angrily stopped bashing his pincers together so that he could punch in his user name and password on his half-destroyed keyboard.
"urgot2002... urgot2002..."
His computer groaned some more as it sluggishly brought up a desktop so totally littered with and obscured by icons and shortcuts, the wallpaper was not even visible, let alone recognizable. And Urgot grew even more angry as a familiar pop-up window appeared on his screen. This damn forsaken computer always asking him that same damn question all the damn time!
"No, I don't want to waste my time upgrading to service pack one or what have you! I just want to check my email, blast it all to hell!"
As one can see, Urgot was the living embodiment of a desktop support specialist's worst nightmare. Hence, the number of pending support cases currently piled up under Urgot's name which no one wanted to deal with.
Regardless, one way or another, the stalwart soldier of Noxus finally managed to open his Outlook email inbox and he began to pore through the three hundred and twelve emails he had received in the past three hours... Urgot sneered out loud at those emails which guaranteed increased virility and organ size via some miraculous medicine, for his frank and beans had been blown off long ago by an errant friendly mortar shell.
He crowed, "Hah! Stupid scammers! You can't fool me!", even as he absentmindedly opened an email sent to him by a nameless Shuriman prince begging for aid and donations to save the starving children of his nation... Urgot then realized what he had just opened, and the lens of his ocular implant dilated in horror as the email described, in all upper case letters, the plight of these poor children...
With a hoarse cry of dismay: "Oh my god, the poor children! Will no one help these distraught victims of circumstance!"
Urgot then attempted to open his browser so that he could send some money to the children via , but unfortunately, IE kept crashing. After fifty tries or so (if nothing else, Urgot was a very determined man), he resigned himself to the cold unforgiving truth that someone else would have to save those poor children, and he moved on to the next email, which happened to be the only legitimate one of the bunch.
"Dear Urgot, In the unlikely event that you are able to open this email, I wish to inform you that General DuCouteau requests your audience today at two o'clock PM at his summertime manor. To ensure you receive this invitation, Beatrice will arrive shortly at your office to relay this exact same summons via a paper note bound to her left leg. Sincerely, P.S. For gods sakes, man, get yourself a cell phone so people can get a hold of you through means other than email and carrier raven! And no, your goddamn rotary phone doesn't count!"
Swain, Grand General Esquire
Swain's plea falling upon deaf earholes (Urgot was of the opinion that the radiation from cell phones caused brain cancer), the fleshy onion sat back on his hind legs for a moment to chew on this intriguing turn of events. The esteemed General DuCouteau himself, requesting Urgot's audience at the DuCouteau mansion?! Certainly a rarefied honor which the former headsman could never turn down! And yet... this invitation was most definitely unexpected, since these two heroes of Noxus were neither friends nor acquaintances. They had never even had the chance to meet face to face, let alone work side by side, the main reason being that DuCouteau's extensive body of work involved mostly covert operations while Urgot had gained his fame at the front lines of bloodbaths and meat grinders...
And yet, here was today, DuCouteau wishing to exchange pleasantries at Noxus's traditional tea time...
A rumble of delight issued forth from Urgot's facial grill as the pincers came together to rub in glee at the prospect of gaining stature within Noxus's high society. For too long had that fresh-faced brat Draven stolen the limelight from him! With the favor of a man like DuCouteau on his side, surely Urgot would gain glory and accolades far beyond anything which that axe-wielding whelp could ever dream of!
Stitch-strewn head fairly swimming with the possibilities, Urgot hummed once again under his breath as he waddled over to the sink and wall mirror which served as his bathroom, and he began to attend to his toiletries, swapping out his left pincer appendage for a hair dryer appendage so that he could better arrange the two straggling strands of hair which remained on his otherwise barren scalp...
And yet, as formidable as his imagination was and as far as his mind strayed, Urgot never did once contemplate the possibility that he might tumble head over (four) heels in forbidden, impossible, and utterly unreciprocated love with the most tempestuous of Noxus's fair maidens.
END OF CHAPTER
Crunch time at work for a couple weeks... too tired to write anything super serial... so tonight, I doodled this instead... I like Urgot because he reminds me of a volleyball made of cadavers.