Some common (read: predictable) questions relating to Unstable Matters: the Journal of Zac will be answered here. If you have any questions of your own, feel free to send a private message or leave a review. I don't mind answering questions at all!

Question 1: why choose Zac as the main protagonist?

Zac has one of the more entertaining personalities in the League that isn’t properly synced with what you would expect out of his character design.

There are a lot of Champions in League that have the personality you would generally expect from their appearances. (Examples: Aatrox, Olaf, Gragas, Zyra, etc.) This is to be expected, of course. If the majority of characters acted completely different from their appearances, it would be more peculiar (and out of place) than creative design.

That being said, Zac still holds the title of “Secret Weapon” despite the fact that his personally says that he does not want to be some sort of unthinking tool used by someone else. He is a living, breathing, laugh spamming bio-weapon who was adopted/rescued/kidnapped by two sympathetic Zaunite scientists who saw a greater potential in him. A potential to be more than just some creature born from chemicals in a flask, and raised to fight like a mindless beast for reasons that weren’t his own. As a result, he was given as much of a normal human life as possible, until the day came when he was forced to use his strength to rescue his parents.

The (tragic) irony of this, is that by eventually joining the League of Legends, Zac had become the very thing that his parents sought for him to not become. Champions, although living and breathing individuals with their own agendas, are used as tools on the Fields of Justice by Summoners over the political problems that constantly plague Runeterra.

Or at least they were before Riot decided to start butchering their own lore. No further comments on that matter.

To me, Zac is a fascinating character whose depth goes much deeper than the surface of his origin story. He has the potential to be so much more, when he interacts with all of the other Champions in the League too.

Question 2: why the three side characters (Ahri, Riven, Katarina)?

There are a lot of other Champions I could have picked other than the three I have. I picked them mostly because of how I imagined their (noncanon) interactions with Zac would go, considering their distinct personalities.

To start with Ahri; the nine-tailed fox is the most femme-fatal stereotype of the three women. The things that happen to her, involve her, and will include her all tend to take on a female’s point of view about a world that’s mostly dominated by the wanton destruction of men. This isn’t to say that Ahri is someone who expects a free pass from her responsibilities because of her gender, but rather, she has the unique position similar to Zac that they are strangers to the human world. Abet from a female point of view.

Compared to Riven and Katarina, Ahri will most definitely have a distasteful view on the world outside of the Institute of War. After all, she currently resides in a place where the masses of Runeterra envision her as an figure of incredible beauty and power. Tying the setting of the story to the real world, Ahri is (still) an incredibly popular Champion who has gone through waves of changes from her release, all while still staying popular as the meta constantly shifts. Even as I write this, with the proposed removal of the item Death Fire Grasp, there are changes being made to ensure that Ahri will remain a viable pick for players to consider.

Ahri is certainly tagging along with Zac and company for her own reasons. But as readers will notice, over time her past relations with many other Champions will come to light, and she will come to confide in the Secret Weapon as a dear friend.

Moving onto Katarina: the Sinister Blade (lore wise) has gone through some of the most dramatic changes any character has in the League canon universe. Over the period of the Crystal Scar update (and the lore that followed), the military nobility of Noxus was rocked straight to its core with the rise of Jericho Swain over the Darkwill lineage. So too, it was revealed that the ancient order of mages that were driven out by the military nobility (the Black Rose) had returned, and would enact their vengeance against the descendants of those who had ruined their vision of Noxus in the past.

Katarina Du Couteau is metaphorically a living ghost of a bygone age. The disappearance (and implied death) of her father Marcus Du Couteau has had a rippling effect on everything in her life. As the lore stands now, there are countless questions to be asked when it comes to both Katarina and Cassiopeia, now that they are the sole heirs to House Du Couteau.

Why were they spared by LeBlanc and the Black Rose despite the noted bad blood between them? Was it because they were both Champions in the League for Noxus? Was it Swain who forced LeBlanc to heel on her quest for vengeance? What domestic responsibilities do both sisters now hold with their father’s disappearance/death?

Since Swain had used his position as a League Champion to out maneuver the Darkwills, have Katarina and Cassiopeia made their own deals with Swain as fellow Noxian Champions? Katarina has also made it quite clear that she prefers her field work as an assassin over the responsibilities of leadership. Is it because she completely lacks the education and knowledge needed to become a general in the ranks of the Noxian military? Did the failed campaign in the Freljord to exterminate the barbarian tribes leave a permanent black mark on her military record? And to top it all off, has her reputation in Noxus been tainted by her awkward canon encounters with Garen Crownguard?

These are the questions that will never be answered by Riot probably, but will be addressed in my work, in one way or another.

Lastly, we come to Riven, our favorite Battle Bunny Exile.

Riven’s existence will be paralleled against Katarina’s, as some people probably predicted. There’s nothing in Riven’s canon lore that suggests she came from any established House in Noxus, perhaps joining the Noxian military as a conscript, but the lore is quite clear that she became a model soldier through her own effort. Some way or another, she quickly rose through the ranks to some degree of field officer that would lead by example with her massive rune blade in both hands. It’s also quite possible that she would have met Swain, Darius, Urgot, or Katarina in her travels.

As we know with Riven’s lore, she becomes disenfranchised with the Noxian military after committing herself and her men to the slaughter of the Ionian people and their culture. In this respect, it seems Riven was naive to the politics human civilizations on Runeterra have enacted with each other over the Rune Wars. The wake up call to that reality would be the death of her entire unit, killed by the biochemical weapons of Zaunite mercenaries (Singed in particular) that had been hired by Noxus to aid in the war of extermination.

This is where Riven’s lore gets interesting. Breaking her own blade, she then goes into a self-imposed exile for both atonement, and to save the pure Noxian vision she had once believed.

That vision may very well be the classic Noxian credence that the strong will live and the weak will die. Maybe her “atonement” is for running away, and not doing what Darius did to his superior to rise up the ranks.

In this respect, Riven is simply a rogue Noxian officer who has secret dreams of grandeur for when Noxus conquers the world by force on a level playing field. A field much like a Field of Justice, where the strength of an single fighting individual can determine almost anything in the world. She is not a justice seeking heroine with a tragic past that a lot of people who write fan-fiction imagine her to be. In fact, she may very well consider the deaths of her unit to be a testament to her strength, since she was the only survivor. She might even have no regrets about killing the Ionian Elder Yasuo was supposed to protect, since she would consider them fair game to kill if they had resisted.

In short, Riven is someone who will always look at Zac’s choices and actions with a touch of disdain. And he cares enough about what she thinks of him that her thoughts keep his feet on the ground when his pride starts to swell.

Because to her, Zac will always be the “Secret Weapon.” Something created in a Zaunite laboratory to replace human soldiers like herself.

Question 3: how long do you think Unstable Matters will be?

I have no idea. Really, I don’t.

At some point I envisioned around thirty chapters, but since the story is currently at chapter fourteen with the main plot only starting, thirty is unrealistic. If I had to make a reasonable estimate, I imagine around forty chapters will encompass everything I have in my head about this story. There are a lot of places Zac and company are going to visit, and they deserve their own fair share of the spotlight since the plot is traveling there in the first place.

That being said, there are going to be a lot more Champions in the future who will get their five minutes of fame of being included in the main plot. I was to make the effort to show their distinct personalities when the time comes, which takes up even more space.

Question 4: what’s with your portrayal of the Institute of War?

The Institute of War, to me, is a monolithic organization that holds the world together. It was founded by a mix of scholars, mages, and leaders from all across Runeterra because of the damage their world had sustained during the Rune Wars. It is an organization that holds immense power, perhaps founded with the dream that mankind’s addiction to war and conflict could be pacified in a sense.

As such, it is an organization that holds incredible sway in the politics across Valoran. But at the same time, it still relies on the cooperation of the various city-states to participate in the League to settle their political grievances with each other. I imagine a lot of city-states are hesitant about abdicating so much power to a single organization, for fear of betrayal or abuse of that power. This is exactly what happened during the Kalamanda/Crystal Scar update, where Institute staff attempted to spark an artificial conflict between Demacia and Noxus. So too, the rise of Swain Jericho as both a Champion and leader of Noxus shows that the Institute may (secretly) meddle in the affairs of city-states when their leaders don’t share the Institute’s vision of the world.

I don’t know what Riot’s plans are for the canon future of League of Legends, but this work is being written with the Institute still existing for its lore.

As the phrase goes, the road it hell is paved with good intentions.

Question 5: what is the order of places Unstable Matters will visit?

The places visited with be the following: Zaun, Piltover, Bilgewater, Ionia.

Question 6: are there any established pairings in your story?

Other than canon/semi-canon ones, no. The primary genre of this work is an Adventure/Drama, and while there may be hinting tones, there will not be a focus on romance for any of the major characters.