Chapter Two: In the Middle, Innocence
Tea flowed out of a kettle and into a silver teacup, where steam then spewed and rolled upward into Camille's eyes, unblinking to the heat, and their hextech azures uncompromising to the bright neon lights of pink and green that embraced Baroness Avarita's office.
The baroness's skin was pearl among silken flesh and her smiling lips, that of a young maiden's despite her true age of sixty-eight. She had not a mark of that age; not in the limber shape of her body, in the sharp lashes of her eyes, in the multi-colored swirls of her hair, nor in the doll-like array of her teeth. She was smiling when Camille sliced her throat with the bladed ridge of her knee, so she had a good view of that, as well as of her Zaunite bodyguards' bodies eviscerated across the floor of her office, with the rustic stench of their blood concocting into the chem-oil of their augments; the only smells to overpower the aroma of the baroness's perfumes.
Their conversation had taken a less-than-amicable turn, but there was enough time for a polite exchange and tea before that. The polite exchange did not last long, but there was, of course, always time for tea. Baroness Avarita was courteous enough to provide some from her personal collection, but, unfortunately, not quick enough to dodge her bladed legs, so while Camille drank an exotic brew of imported Ionian tea, arterial blood was still fresh escaping the baroness's throat, leaking down into the snow-tiger fur of her coat.
Outside this office, a muffled cacophony of Zaunite dance music, the viscous grunting of men, and the moans of women blared, a tortuous brew for her augmented ears. The Piltovian lady sighed and set her teacup down. There was always time for tea, and it was seldom peacefully enjoyed. Half of the mission was over. She stood up from the lion skin chair opposite the baroness, her bladed legs now unobscured; bloodied limbs of titanium alloy, perfectly balanced to her control, forming a precise yet resolute stand.
"Your transgression was beyond compromise, but at least your tea was delicious." Her voice sounded as a synthetic mesh veiling a stern lady's tone; paced, mechanical yet expressive and articulate.
To Camille's quip, the dead baroness, of course, could not respond, save for the involuntary twitching of her eyes and the final wheezes of air escaping her gashed throat. She had made the baroness answer for an unacceptable insult. She had put her in her place. Camille was done here.
And so she turned for the office doors, her blades striding with even grace beneath the steel-gray coattails flowing behind her redingote attire. Half done was well begun. The operation's completion was nearing her. She had one more objective to deal with before she could finally leave this place.
When she left the baroness's office, she was greeted once again with a sight that bent a disgusted frown. The hyperenergetic music cut into her ears like razor-wind, and the flashing electric colors of the room contested with the interface of her scanners. Camille sighed, intaking the chaotic amalgamate of smells: food, alcohol, chem, cologne, sweat, saliva and the unmistakable salt-laced musk of genitalia and their fluids. Naked and shining limbs of bodies crowded all three floors of the baroness's compound. They moved in colliding and slapping rhythms, in positions that involved using the couches, tables, and walls, and so preoccupied were they, that no one bothered to notice the Piltovian lady.
Eugh, she thought. She scanned for her objective, and as she strode through, searching, her eyes glided over repulsive scenes. A posh Zaunite, Baroness Avarita believed in Piltovian elitism outside her estate, often speaking of purity among those above, but her hypocrisy was palpable in this chamber: Shurimans, Ionians, Freljordians, Noxians, and Zaunites among Piltovian flesh.
Camille passed by dark-skinned Shuriman maidens who licked carpets as burly hands pulled their rears into warm and girthful crotches, the force of their coitus causing the women's golden accessories to clink along with every thrust, ever gaining speed, only stopping either to fill their throats and wombs, or to blemish their sun-kissed faces, rears, and jewelry with sticky ejaculation. A thick-bottomed Shuriman woman pressed herself down against the mouth of a masturbating man, a bronze phallus against his teeth, shining brightly with the woman's ascent, her liquids slicking down his jaw.
Apart from this, the lady witnessed the sweat of Freljordian dames being forced out of their icy skins as groins hotter than hearthfire pumped up and into them like machinework, spurting out the warm mixture of sweat and semen until they comprised the paint of the chamber's walls. One was held by her buttocks, suspended between a muscular man's legs, who bucked into the Freljordian woman with such rigor that her braided golden hair fluttered; her buttocks drummed; and her breasts jiggled to the force of the man's thighs. She was then pushed against the back of a couch, the man's movement intensifying, then peaking as he spilled three generous dollops of seed into her, contesting for every inch of her warm space. He relaxed, and with the last throbbing pangs of pleasure, embraced the Freljordian to passionately twine his tongue with hers.
The Noxian women were a slightly more adventurous bunch. They took other ladies, mostly the ones having done with the men, by the spaces between their thighs, then they would kiss and lather tongue, lip, and nipple with vigorous and biting mouths. Camille saw three: a Noxian man and woman helping themselves with an Ionian, whose eyes rolled back at the feelings of fingers and lips working together to greedily engage her slit while a muscular Noxian crotch ground again and again inward her throat. An Ionian man would then come behind the Noxian lady who was pleasuring the girl of his own nationality, and he'd then gingerly mount and use her, forcing out submissive moans from the Noxian with the push of his vigor translating into the inserting fingers and licking tongue that invaded the Ionian whore's slit, and into the beat of the Noxian man's breadth conquering her throat.
It was endless, unbridled, and heterogenous fucking.
Food, drink, and pink wrappers of instantaneously-acting birth control pills were littered beneath the drove of humping shadows. Sauces and alcohols sometimes mixed with stray fluids that were left to decay on the carpets, and it was inevitable to see traces of pubic hair not far from these, for the continuous action loosened the hairs from their mothers and fathers.
Camille thought, if she still had the ability to vomit out her tea, now would have been the best time to do so.
After much searching, and awkward 'excuse me's' as she passed by the busy throng, she had found the scene which upsetted her the most. Shrugging away lines of beads serving as the door, she walked into a sub-chamber lit by a dim purple light, and caught the nauseating, ultra-sweet aroma of Zaunite shimmer. Sure enough, upon a table at the center of this room, tin buckets filled with shimmer glowed brightly, their spilled drops shining like nuggets of diamond, dripping from used brushes of multiple sizes. This, along with empty bottles of shimmerwine, caused a contorted expression in Camille's face. Shimmer was a drug, an addictive one, capable of whittling skin through excessive use, and whoever was in the room, had used it enough times not to care.
And atop a wall-couch, she saw more of the drug on the alabaster slenderness of a Piltovian girl, her breasts and buttocks bereft with the lathered substance and its rapidly-shifting colors, which was a manifestation of the emotions she felt as two brown-skinned Zaunite men kneaded their members into both her orifices. One took her above and behind, anally, and one below, vaginally, her velvety cream-white thighs spread out firmly against the man's crotch. She sucked on the augmented metal fingers of the man taking her anus, the first and second fingers sliding in and out of her shimmer-slathered lips. The Zaunites too had shimmer brushed onto them, mostly by their thighs and groins, where the substance flashed a kaleidoscope of hues, going in and out of both her sphincter and slit in constant bestial pounding lubricated by the liquid drug.
Camille's mouth gaped. She wondered for a moment if this had been truly the objective she was searching for. If it were, the consequences were unspeakable. The Piltovian girl's body, conditioned and beautified for a future prospective marriage to another clan, was being violated by the urges of two Zaunite men, one of them feeding her shimmerwine through the augment fingers coated with the substance, the hand over her mouth bridling her like a pony. Her once gracefully flowing auburn hair, fashioned with a white dahlia headpiece her late father had gifted, was now jumping wildly to the labor-sweated bodies exploring her as if she were a toy.
This can't be.
The woman sandwiched between the two nondescript Zaunites was helpless between them, but she did not struggle, she embraced each thrust with welcoming stirs of her hips and yells demanding more in a voice of a girl who had recently just come of age. Her breasts hopped to the flow of brutish movement enveloping her and her tongue tumbled liberally against the metal fingers fiddling into her lips as their bodies rocked against one another.
She was too busy moaning and whimpering to hear Camille call her.
"Sofia Arvino."
The man below her grunted. "Ah, I'm cumming! I'm cumming inside a Piltie's tight cunt! I can't believe it!"
"A Piltie? More like a desperate sumpsnipe slut from the fucking Entresol!"
That was it. Anything but the girl's status.
And as they injected hot globs of Zaunite lineage into Sofia, Camille fired both hooks from her omnidirectional navigation apparatus, speeding out from the sides of her blade legs, and thwumping as they latched into the wall, particles of brain matter strung like bloody spider silk across their titanium strings. The shimmer of the two Zaunites faded into white, its inactive color, for killing the brain stopped the emotions influencing the hues.
Sofia's shimmer, however, blinked even more rapidly when she wondered why they stopped, only to scream when she saw the half-sundered head of the man below her, the chipped-off bits of his skull scattered on the couch. She nudged her body, yelping each time their dead members wormed inside her, and struggled to get out of the two limp corpses, hunks of freshly slaughtered meat stuck into her holes.
"How intolerably pathetic." Camille said, retracting her hooks before looking down upon the girl. With the hooks pulling the bodies towards Camille, Sofia fell sideways alongside them, hard onto the floor, whilst attempting to crawl out as seed seeped out of her orifices and as blood dripped down the wall-couch. When she stood up, she whimpered, screamed, and looked with terrible dismay in her emerald eyes at the lady now witnessing this all.
"You!" she shouted, her throat confusing both sentence and sob, "How… dare you! How fucking dare you!"
Her hair was ruffled to the point of total disarray; shimmer was strobing red to the color of rage; and her body shivered with both the aftermath of pleasure and the sudden hold of shock. Most of all, and Camille noticed this, tears gleamed in her eyes and down her cheeks, the same face Sofia carried when she had killed someone dear to the girl.
And when the girl left the mortified embrace of the men, she crawled to Camille, pounding herself against her redingote, repeating over and over: "How fucking dare you! How fucking, fucking dare you!"
She slammed her fist at Camille, but the lady let her be, cooly observing this breakdown with immovable electric eyes. She felt her little fists beat at her, until the girl, exhausted from sex and rage, resorted to sobbing. She was now nothing but a naked and broken spirit overcome with terror. Her shimmer strobed again in different colors: first red, then violet, then gray. When the girl had withdrawn to whimpers, the lady towering above her spoke.
"Fucking?" Camille said, as if the word were new to her. "Hm, fucking." Sofia looked up, and revealed wide-eyes, confused. "Tell me, Sofia, where did you learn this word and the gall to do what it means? Was it from Baron Volkage, or these two dead Zaunites?"
Sofia did not answer, only sobbed against the broad side of Camille's left blade.
"Did you know that Baroness Avarita's estate is filled with fucking?" She stressed the word, setting apart. To Sofia, it was more unnatural than Camille's augmented chimeric form. "Did you know the fucking implications of visiting this place? And do you fucking know that the intelligencers of every fucking clan knows that you are here?"
Sofia wept again. Her tears fused with the shimmer, now nothing but the gray of grief.
"Sofia, my dear, you are a fucking disgrace to your family." Camille said. "Seeing you like this and hearing you speak such vulgar a word disgusts me beyond any degree in this world. Your father was a timid yet intelligent man who saw your future as Clan Arvino's heiress, and now you're here, squandering it by copulating with Zaunite shimmerfiends!"
"You killed my husband!" Sofia screamed at her; shimmer flashing crimson. "You killed my husband, you heartless hextech demon! You killed Volkage, my first and only love! You are the monster of us all, and you are the reason why I am here! I just wanted to feel his embrace again. I just wanted him again. He promised me everything and more: a life! And you took that away! I do not want my father's inheritance! I do not want to go back to Bluewind Court! I refuse-"
The back of Camille's hand slammed hard against Sofia's face, sending her to the ground in a yelp with her tears splattering across the floor. She sobbed once again; a devastated thing, and Camille did not speak for a moment. She only listened to the incomprehensible wailings of Sofia. Camille realized but did not relent: She destroyed something beautiful. Innocence.
But she was Sofia Arvino, a gear in the machine that held Piltover aloft, a thread in the delicate tightrope of balance, and though a groveling lump before her, she was a Piltovian of the Bluewind Court, a potential Archminister someday, and neither Camille nor the clans could disown, exile, or even execute her. She was too delicate, too important, and too strategic. And, with that, if she had refused to take the pills which would prevent the Zaunite seed, still freshly trickling down between her buttocks, from actualizing, it may be too late for her.
Fortunately, among the brushes of shimmer, Camille spotted crumpled pink wrapper. She took a deep breath, one of relief, before speaking to Sofia.
"Privilege is earned, my dear. Privilege is power. It simply cannot be offered to the impure and incapable, for if you do, Piltover, our fragile society, our progress, will suffer." She leaned down, like a monument with a static bottom come to life, and pulled the girl's chin up to look into the apathetic hextech circuits of her eyes. "You are young, selfish, gullible, and yet to realize your piece in the grander scheme, Arvino. All that you are doing now is but your dying innocence gasping for air as reality smothers it."
Camille let go of the girl for her head to bow down, hair draping her face. Sofia could not reply, only stare. Her shimmer was wearing off. The colors were turning translucent as the drug's power depleted.
"Now, I suggest you come with me." Camille said, a hand against her hip. "You are not irredeemable, as you might believe. I have negotiated with other intelligencers to keep this secret, for the sake of your father's memory. This ensures you remain good in the eyes of the court and the people."
"Where will I go?" Sofia said, eyes red but now drifting.
"If you truly do not wish to be in Bluewind Court, then I can make arrangements to accommodate you in our clan. My niece, Justine, the Mistress of Clan Ferros, will oversee and protect you for a year or so until you can be responsible for your own clan. You will learn what you must know as a member of the court, and most of what your father failed to teach you. You will learn to see Piltover and Zaun as I do, as we do, and as you should."
Sofia turned her head away. She was silent, and Camille smiled. She was considering it, while at the same time recognizing it as a power move in favor of Ferros, entangling her clan with them. The more naive version of her would have either immediately accepted it or denied it. She was doing neither. She was weighing the nuances; the gray between black and white. She was finally thinking.
"Or, you can choose to live the kind of 'life' Volkage promised you and spend your days being exploited by the chem-barons. Your inheritance, privilege, will be forfeit from you, transferred to your less desirable uncle, and you will no longer be mistress nor part of the court. Piltover is safe; your family lives on, and your uncle simply has to be elected in order to officially replace you, and consequently preserve your clan's position in court. Your father's bloodline, however, will be diluted into the blood of riffraff, as will yours, but that shouldn't be a problem for you, correct?"
Sofia still did not answer.
"But, whatever you choose, I will not stop you, but you must choose now. The Trifarix of Noxus will be visiting the court tomorrow, and it is ideal, maybe even imperative, that all mistresses and masters of the clans be present. You will definitely sit in once you come with me, but if you choose to leave, your uncle will 'represent' you in your absence with your consent. We do not want to demonstrate even a single empty seat in front of a newly reunited nation merely because you took too long to decide."
For a while, Sofia stared down, thinking over her choice. Camille waited. The girl's conviction about wanting a new life and refusing her inherited court tenure was suddenly in hesitation. A gear in the delicate machine was unrusting.
"Well?"
Sofia had stopped sobbing. She stood up, meeting eyes with Camille, who offered her a cold smirk curled upon her face. The Zaunites turned the girl into a woman, but she, the Principal Intelligencer of Clan Ferros, would undo the damage, and mold her into a proper lady.
Now, the shimmer was nothing but transparent fluid, completely diminished. Once a display of endless colors, the effects of the shimmer have left her, and so was the high they brought,
So was the last of her innocence.
AN: This is the start of the Camille arc, following the events in her comic, Severed Ties; her story, The Weakest Heart, and after the diplomatic mission to Noxus which the first chapter established. I derived Baroness Avarita's name from the Latin form of the word "avarice" (avaritia). It's the attribute responsible for eliminating Sofia Arvino's innocence; the sexual avarice of the Zaunites, the political avarice of the Piltovians, and the conflict of the two which puts her 'in the middle' (hence the chapter's name). Also, Sofia Arvino and Baron Volkage are not original characters of mine. They were the ones from Camille's comic, Severed Ties, whose marriage of 'love' Camille violently cancelled. Shimmer and shimmerfiends can also be found in some Zaunite short stories by Riot, as well as the Entresol, a place between Zaun and Piltover.
I released a lot of sexual imagery here as well as some character building for Camille. I hope I did an okay job in my descriptions. The first part when Camille walks into the orgy chamber was meant to be an erotic representation of some of Runeterra's conflicting situations: Shuriman 'ascent' (ascension of the empire), Freljordian 'generous three dollops of seed contesting for space' (three sisters vying for territory), the Noxian and Ionian quadsome (the Noxian invasion and its effects on Ionian unity, i.e. an Ionian lady being fingered by a Noxian, who, in retaliation, is fucked by an Ionian from behind, the force of his thrusting affecting the fingered Ionian lady, only to push her further into the groin of the Noxian man she'd been fellating), and Piltover-Zaun's enforced inequality for the benefit of the privileged (Zaunites managing to screw a Piltovian lady, which results in bloody consequences). Again, sYmBoLic SmUt.
I understand that some would want scenes without much context attached, and this sort of chapter deals with that, to make room for the more context-heavy and politically endearing scenes, which this story was made for. Suffice to say, this probably won't be the only one with such scenes.
I am unsure as to the quality of my erotic descriptions, being inexperienced with writing them, so I welcome criticism, as long as it points out where I went wrong so that I can correct myself in the future. Also, I hope that I have been convincing with the descriptions of Camille's personality, her augmented nature, and the political discourse involving her thusfar. I want to portray the kind of woman Swain is going to first dominate, and establish the appropriate context surrounding it, which I hope adds to the vigor and significance of the scenes.
All said, thank you, to those who fave, followed, and reviewed. This grew a bit faster than I expected and I hope to update it soon among my other stories. Thank you again and see you on the next one.
