Have Some Madeira, M'Dear

by Lullabyes

Zaun is independent - a city apart from Piltover, beating to its own drum of progress. You, the star reporter of Piltover's Sun & Tower Newspaper, are tasked with capturing its heart and soul - and with it, the nature of its leader, the elusive Eye of Zaun. You end up with much, much more than you bargained for.

1. Chapter 1

This is a one-shot this is also an upcoming chapter from Act V of Forward but Never Forget/XOXO. As such, there will be mild spoilers. However, it can easily be read as a standalone, in a very meta-within-meta sorta way.

tw: drug use, violence, sex, mentions of war.

Story is told from a second-person POV - i.e. the 'you' perspective. Reader is presented as gender-neutral. It's my first time writing from this perspective, so feedback is much appreciated!

Title is from the Flanders and Swann number 'Have Some Madeira, M'dear.

---

Excerpt from "A Heart for an Eye: My Time in Zaun."

A new nation, a haze of pollution, a blaze of hope –an intimate talk with Zaun's First Chancellor.

By B. Goode

[This excerpt contains explicit content involving drug use, violence and mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.]

IT STARTED with a sip of sherry.

Thus prefaces many an ingenue's recollections of Zaun. The classic cautionary tale. A pair of eyes meeting across a smoky café to presage a night of shadowy debauchery—and in the stale sunrays concluding with a cut purse and tearstains on the pillowcase.

In your case, the truth ran in reverse. For nearly a decade, as senior correspondent for the Sun & Tower, you had delved into the chaotic workings of the former Undercity. You had puzzled over its nuances, and argued with your Piltovan cohorts who painted their sister city in monochrome brushstrokes of black-and-white.

The Undercity, you'd maintained, was a many-faceted palette.

Yet, once upon a time, you'd also found it a Pandora's Box.

Mystery ran in the former-Undercity's lifeblood. Equally mysterious were the machinations of the puppet-master at its zenith. Known as the Eye of Zaun, he controlled an elaborate network of gangs, saboteurs and spies. They disseminated Shimmer, a substance whose addictive properties were known beyond the Hex-Gates. They seeped into law enforcement, greasing it to keep a machine of infernal corruption turning. They terrorized the territories, transforming the Undercity into a front for their leader's agenda of ruthless self-interest.

But who was the Eye? What was his end-game?

For years, your investigations were fractured by disaster. Too often, your contacts disappeared under unspeakable circumstances. Promising leads crashed into dead-ends. Lies unraveled into lies. In your gloomiest moments, the Undercity seemed more space than structure, controlled by centrifugal forces beyond your comprehension.

How could you divine their crux? Or rather—their Eye?

The endeavor took six years.

In those six years, you descended with frequency belowground—a frequency that left colleagues doubting your sanity. Yet in those six years, the Undercity ceased to resemble a Pandora's Box. Rather, a culture coalesced, at once arcane and alluring. At first blush, it was easy to be wary of Fissurefolk: all scowls and scars and seething attitude. And yet, in private, they loved to let their hair down. They were aficionados of strong drinks, fast dancing and high spirits.

They were lovers of life.

Beneath the Undercity's tough exterior, you discovered a beating heart. Your notebooks were filled with vibrant characters: an amputee who performed feats of acrobatic derring-do across rooftops; a black-market dealer who quoted Demacian poetry; a starlet who gambled with Piltovan aristocracy by day and was the mistress of three different chem-barons by night.

Six years, you circled the Undercity's bright edges. Yet you never penetrated its shadowy nadir. Nor did you meet the Eye of Zaun. In time, you began thinking of him as a myth. The cutthroats' version of the bogeyman, fabricated to keep the troublemakers in line.

Perhaps that was his aim too. To sidetrack outsiders with smoke and mirrors, a seduction of the senses.

A dance with one inevitable dead-end.

THEN, in an October bloodbath, Zaun was born.

The Eye cut like a blade to its center.

As it turns out, you needn't have chased for leads. The Eye—to excuse the pun—was always in plain sight. After six years and a hundred-and-fifty correspondences back and forth, you were granted permission for a tête-à-tête.

You met during Zaun's expo, over a glass of sherry.

---

YOU RODE the Hexadraulic elevator to a newborn nation.

Newborn on paper. In soul, the city's multifaceted energy felt unchanged. During your tenure, you had traveled to lands far and wide. Each left a colorful trace of its zeitgeist on the page of memory. For most nations, the tableau vivant of brushstrokes was easily captured. Bilgewater was blue harbors and cutthroat bargains with a zest of sea-spray. Ionia was emerald forests and secretive mists, with silhouettes gliding dryad-like through the foliage. Noxus cut a grander figure, holding court in gilded halls of red and gold, sipping vintage wine over solemn declamations of war.

Zaun was different.

It had too many colors, too many moods. The hardscrabble miner from the Sumps returning to his saltbox shack in dirt-caked overalls after a day's labor. The chem-punk decked in swirling tattoos as he arrogantly spliced between traffic on a chromed hoverboard. The minx-faced shopgirl clutching a paper parcel of sugared eel as she traipsed through late-evening streets.

To you, Zaun was no single shade. It was an impasto of varying hues.

As was its odor.

Exiting the elevator, your sinuses were clubbed. The atmosphere was an insalubrious haze: factory smoke, diesel fumes, cooking grease and a lick of spiced sweetness from brightleaf tobacco. The air quality in the Fissures had always been poor. The main source of the smog—the Gray, as Zaunites called it—was the industrial zone, a shameful holdover of Piltover's mercantile era.

The atmospheric pollutants gave rise to multiple diseases among Zaunites, from treatable allergies to terminal Gray-lung.

Last year, a comprehensive Emissions Control Program was implemented to clear the smog. The emergence of multi-level Hex-turbines had further dissipated the spread of toxins. Zaun's evening sky was no longer dirty green, but pastel lime with undertones of silver. A cover of fog hung at the riverside. Vaguely, like an imprint of leftover phosphorous, you glimpsed the scarlet definitions of a sunset.

Admittedly, it was cleaner. But far from salubrious.

Coughing, you scrabbled for your chem-filter mask.

Your escort laughed a superior Zaunite laugh—lungs of iron and a heart to match. His name was Lock. He was charged with security for the expo and, more importantly, with keeping you out of trouble. In a prior life, he'd been a smuggling runner, a convict, and a prizefighter. As of late, he was the Eye's top muscle.

A laconic goliath in a tank-top and dark trousers, he had tattoos inked in a geometrical maze across his torso all the way up his shaved skull. His physique was impressive: a mountain of brawn that could break a body in half and pick his teeth with the broken spine.

You wondered, briefly, if the Eye had, in fact, ordered him to do so on a past occasion. The Eye was reputedly fond of such spectacle.

His metal-capped grin said, "Welcome to Zaun."

His sharp blue eyes said, "Look out for yourself."

His hitched thumb said, "This way."

He led you from the platform into a wide thoroughfare. The plaza was formerly the main drag of the Boundary Markets. It had been paved smooth as glass, with cobblestone outlines demarking the old-time pathways. The plaza's perimeter was lined with chem-tech lamps, their brilliant radius chasing the old aqueous ambiance from the riverfront.

Their glow was tinted an otherworldly green, as if you'd been transported into a realm of alchemical science fiction.

Within, the Boundary Markets were a throbbing phantasmagoria. Everything was glossier; the spoils more plentiful. Stalls teemed with bric-a-brac from all corners of Runeterra: spices, stones, silks. People went in and out of the neon-lit shops, toting shopping bags, sipping drinks, carrying take-out.

The crowd was diverse: tourists from Bilgewater, Ionia and Shurima prowled for cheap merchandise and cheaper thrills. Office workers with rolled-up shirtsleeves slumped at outdoor food-stands. Clusters of youngsters paraded across the sidewalks in the brazen height of local fashion: all streaked hair and artfully-ripped clothes.

Unlike Piltover, Zaun had no laws on public disarmament. Anyone who was anyone carried a weapon—a gun casually holstered under a jacket or a dagger carelessly hung from a belt. A blind mendicant with a loudspeaker stood at the street-corner, belting out the blues while brandishing brass knuckles. A pair of teenagers played cat's cradle with a barbed garotte. A wiry man sat at a table, tossing chem-charged poker chips for a group of punters. As the chips landed, they exploded like bombs into puffs of red glitter. The spectators ducked, then laughed, before betting more chips.

They jeered as you hurried past—your pacifist Piltovan roots showing plain as day.

Lock scowled, and they dispersed.

Under his breath, he muttered, "Quit gawking at the scenery."

"How can I help it? The Undercity has... changed."

"Don't call it that. It's Zaun now. Z-A-U-N."

"Sorry. Of course. I meant Zaun."

He shrugged. "Don't sweat it. Just trying to make it stick in that Uppside noggin of yours. Some quarters, the wrong moniker can earn you a knife to the gut."

You struggled not to blanch. "Good—good to know."

The main drag raged with traffic. The roads were in good repair; signals flashed and signposts gleamed. Here and there, luxury motorcars zoomed by with armed bodyguards on bikes—a visiting dignitary or a local cham-baron with their entourage.

You'd heard that the social etiquette in Zaun was that you didn't look a bigwig straight in the eye—and that if you did, you dropped your gaze first if you valued your life.

You related the urban legend to Lock. He scoffed.

"Look the biggest bastard in the eye," he said. "I'll knock 'em dead after."

You weren't certain he was joking.

You followed Lock through the streets. Already he felt your towering Vergil in a tantalizing Inferno. He opened the door to a lustrous black motorcar with the First Chancellor's crest: a psychedelic green eye.

Inside waited a young person with sleek dark hair and a fine sharp face. Proffering a steel-fingered hand, they introduced themselves as Ran.

"You're staying at Hotel Muse," they told you. "Lucky."

You weren't certain Lucky was the right word.

You knew of Hotel Muse by reputation. So did most journalists and diplomats. It was a bohemian honeypot for Zaunite artists and intellectuals. It was also a frequent crime scene. The duo of a famous rock-and-roll band had committed suicide in its penthouse suite. That same year, a famed chanteuse of Oshra Va'zaun lineage was found stabbed to death in the hot-tub.

More disturbing were claims that it was a Glass House—a Zaunite euphemism for a bugged residence. Its walls were rumored to be hollow. Its paintings held hidden peepholes. Even its bathrooms were not spared the sordid specter of surveillance.

Privacy for a journalist on foreign soil is tenuous. In your case, it felt a chill forewarning beneath a charmed façade.

"Look out for yourself."

To be sure, Zaun and Piltover's relations were cordial but far from solid. Just a year prior, both had endured a bloody conflict—known belowground as the Siege—that culminated in Zaun's shocking independence. Seemingly overnight, one nation broke into two sovereign powers. The shadow of mutual annihilation hung where the Bridge once stood.

Piltovans compared the split to a tempestuous divorce. Zaunites begged to differ. For them, relations with Piltover had never held the parity of marriage. Rather, it was the worst sort of concubinage.

In retrospect, it is striking that Piltover's indifference to the former-Undercity's decline has not received harsher scrutiny. Your own articles on the subject were buried in the bylines. They attracted notice only from certain Fissure-bred schisms of intelligentsia.

Zaun's possession of the Hexcore—a marvel developed by Piltover at the expense of Zaunite lives—complicated matters. To Piltover, its theft represented terrorism. For Zaun, it was a matter of survival.

A squared debt.

Following the split, relations bobbed along at a low ebb. The Peace Treaty was a hopeful prospect, the first brick in a cooperative bridge. With it came a chance to move forward. Glossy photographs of Councilor Medarda and Zaun's First Chancellor in a spirited Sumpside Waltz made a splash in magazines across Piltover. Visa-free travel was greenlighted. Trade deals were struck. Zaun's economy was a goldmine; its mineral resources were plentiful, and its chemical and engineering sectors were second-to-none. In return, Piltover had much to offer as the epicenter of technological and intellectual advancement. The world's greatest minds gathered in Piltover to invent and innovate. The future, many predicted, would see Zaun rise to its sister-city's level, if not beyond.

And yet, the newfound comity was a fragile one.

The spate of positive publicity would remain, always, eclipsed by the now-iconic image of Jinx—in a gown of midnight blue, the Hex-gem at her throat and her slim arm extended like a gun. Her crooked smile was a reminder that nothing was forgotten. The hurts of history cut deep, even as your nations waltzed arm-in-arm.

The expo—like your visit—was simply another brick in a long road to progress.

The motorcar whispered along the freeway, Lock resting a couple of fingers on the wheel to keep it steady. Curious, you stared out the window. Your destination wasn't far. Yet the roads were densely jammed—motorbikes that shrieked like chainsaws, others that made barely a sound, luxury limos with a single passenger and hoverboards with two, three, even four riders.

Zaunites remained adept at doing much with very little.

Rounding a blind curve, Lock glimpsed a darting shape. He slammed his foot on the brakes. The motorcar's rear-end fishtailed; a riot of honks erupted. Your pulse stumbled; Ran coiled to pounce on a potential threat, switchblade in hand.

A jaywalker flashed deuces at you before disappearing into the crowd.

"Dumb [expletive]," Lock said lackadaisically.

Ran snickered and sheathed the switchblade. The motorcar rolled on.

You dabbed the sweat beading your forehead. A nation's highways allow a visitor to glean much about its mindset. Zaunites drove like they did everything else: with a reckless abandon. Vehicles swerved between lanes with nary a warning. The speed limits were offhand suggestions more than enforced laws. Pedestrians barged heedlessly across crosswalks amid honking horns and obscene gestures.

For Ran and Lock, the daredevilry seemed ordinary. Each time you flinched, they exchanged sideways smirks.

The highway wound its way along the Pilt's southern bend. The hazy cupola of the evening sky narrowed into the palest ashes of light. Below, blighted waterways were dotted with fishing trawlers and coalships. Idly, Ran pointed out landmarks new and old.

Zaun was in the grip of manic reconstruction. Cranes spanned the cityscape, looming tall as obelisks. The architecture had shed its symmetrical splendor of Art Deco—a legacy from Piltover. In its place was an eccentric firmament of iron and glass: Art Nouveau with a smoky kiss of steampunk.

And yet there was an organic feel to the urban landscape. A spectacle meant to be traversed, not gazed upon.

To be sure, the Undercity's architecture, as many a traveler had observed, was a crazy jumble of styles. Gaudy, gilded facades sat side-by-side with austere marble edifices. Towering steel-and-glass skyscrapers were nestled next to squat, brick-and-mortar factories. The streets themselves were a jumbled mash of cobblestones, pavement, and concrete. Some, lit by ancient gaslight, lent a theatrical air to the proceedings. Others were a pervasive gloom of shadow and grime.

Maps were an impossibility: the fabric of the old city from the mercantile era had never unraveled. Instead, its dimensions had been altered with such a profusion of zigzagging pathways and cross-stitched thoroughfares that it defied logic. Hole-in-the-wall grocers shared premises with residential complexes; warehouses were converted into nightclubs; clinics were wedged between brothels and billiard rooms.

Worse, as the city's sprawl expanded, the city did not follow the conventional dictates of spatiality. Rather, it spanned up, down and sideways. The streets were multidirectional. Some, in miasmatic alleyways and shadow-streaked lanes, plunged straight down to the Sump. Others soared vertiginously, so it was not uncommon to find a butcher shop on a sixth-floor balcony and an art gallery in a basement alcove. Walkways split and reconvened like the roots of a tree. Seemingly overnight, razored sheets of steel could be welded to existing structures, forming new additions to a labyrinthine whole. Others were razed in the span of days, replaced by an eerie stretch of lunar nothingness. Then, as soon as the dust settled, the rubble was carted off and new edifices began to take shape, their pathways connecting to the existing spiderweb.

Naturally, this fostered the distorted historic view that the Fissures were beyond the scope of zoning laws—or, indeed, the bounds of civilization. The Undercity, and its inhabitants, were falsely perceived as a chaotic mass whose only commonalities were anarchic mayhem, criminal tendencies, and a disregard for all things logical.

Your research had disgorged a more nuanced reality.

It is true that Zaun's secretive nature stirred in Piltovans—self-professed lovers of airy well-lit spaces, clean streets, and orderly conduct—an unease of the dark unknown. This paranoia was deepened by real-life accounts of certain buildings—or entire districts—revealed to be hollowed out and customized to suit the purposes of smugglers, saboteurs, and worse. Weekly, to the thrilling horror of Piltovan readership, tabloids printed tales ranging from the gruesome to the fantastical: bodies of infants discovered floating in the riverside; a madman with a saw-toothed grin who kidnapped entire families and sold them into slavery; virgins sacrificed to hell-gods in bloodsoaked orgies of violence.

The Undercity, it was argued, was living proof of an unhinged psyche. Its citizens were predisposed to vice; vices that were, in turn, byproducts of a cult of savagery and superstition. Worse, there was bound to be a grain of truth to the most macabre rumors. What labyrinth, after all, was complete without its minotaur?

As a journalist, your duty was not to regurgitate rumors. Rather, it was to lay bare the truths that lay beneath.

And the truth was that the city's ethos was not so much sinister anarchism as it was the spillover of self-invention. The Fissures, for years, were a haven for the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the outliers. These groups, over the decades, had nourished entire subcultures out of their outsidership, carving out a niche where the rest of the world saw a void.

This zest replicated itself on a societal scale. Nothing in the Undercity stayed stagnant. Life was always in flux; always evolving—at once in a state of perpetual decay, and perpetual renewal. If the past was a canvas, then the future was a work-in-progress of freeform brushstrokes, a masterpiece not yet realized.

And, like any work-in-progress, its execution was messy.

As you rode, the cityscape changed from the industrial zones along the riverbanks to the commercial district. Here, the buildings were a mosaic of neon and chrome. The Chancellor's skyscraper headquarters cut through the sky in stark contours. The exterior was a lattice of metal and glass. In daylight it was a fearsome edifice, the green cupola at its crest a watchful sentinel. At night, it was a dazzling beacon, lit from the within, at once impenetrable and inviting. A second spire—a shimmering chrome as if in ode to the city's signature narcotic—soared skyward, a half-kilometer in length. A pair of drones swept its perimeter.

In your research, you had found a single photograph of the same structure: a grainy shot of a shadowed silhouette.

It was called the Aerie.

The workshop of Jinx.

As you stared, a palpable zing leapt like static against your skin. A sense of thrilling hope and gut-clenching peril. It was as if the city itself were sentient. A presence with its own heartbeat.

It pulsed, and so did you, with a single question.

What would become of the city in the Eye's care? And in that of his prodigy?

What did the future resemble in their shared hands?

"We're here," said Ran.

---

YOU ENTERED the revolving gold and glass doors of Hotel Muse.

The lobby resembled a rococo creampuff: a cozy gilt-paneled space with frosted-glass valances and lush vanilla carpeting. Lock hefted your suitcase. Ran checked you in with the receptionist. Their manner wasn't solicitous so much as efficient.

You sensed that they'd been debriefed to anticipate in advance every move you'd make in Zaun. They advised you to refrain from hiring a taxi by the trip, as you would find yourself stranded after dark in places you ought not to be.

Instead, they would drive you wherever you wished to go.

You protested. "This is watch-dogging!"

They exchanged looks. Lock woofed a chuckle.

"Let me break it down for you, Mx. Goode," he said. "We respect your journalistic integrity."

"And all that jazz," Ran deadpanned.

"But," Lock went on, "you're an outsider. And a Piltie to boot. There's people out here with a long memory—and a nasty attitude."

"Should that matter? I wish for Zaunites to speak with candor!"

"Oh, you'll get candor." Ran said blandly. "It's an incurable condition."

"Like Grey Lung," Lock snorted, then sobered, "Zaun's full of people happy to talk. All with different motivations. We won't tell you who to meet or what to ask 'em. But we will be closeby. In all places."

"All places?"

The edges of his lips curled. "The usual suspects. Brothels, Shimmer-dens, bath-houses…"

"All the places real life is!"

Lock shrugged off your objection. "Unless Himself greenlights a solo trip, your safety comes first."

"Himself? Do you mean the First Chancellor?"

"The one and only."

Certainly one way of putting it.

It was the First Chancellor—as much as Zaun—whose pursuit had lured you belowground. Today, his sharp-hewn profile is unmistakable in Piltover's historical archives, as is the sibilating slither of his baritone in recorded broadcasts.

Yet, in those days, the man remained an enigma.

To Zaunites, he was a Faustian father at his most polemical. On the one hand, he was a revolutionary who had dedicated himself to Zaun's liberty. Arguably, few men could achieve what he had—dragged a nation from a stupor of subjugation and into the shocking zenith of survival. After the war, he'd spent a king's ransom from his own fortune to rebuild the city's infrastructure. He'd seduced foreign investors into splurging on fast-tracked fields of science, tech and art. He'd brought a dizzy optimism back to a populace weary of suffering.

Most importantly, alongside Councilor Mel Medarda, he had engineered the Peace Treaty with Piltover—a treaty whose existence was still contested in some quarters.

On the other hand, there were those who believed that this Faustian bargain was too costly. To them, the Chancellor was a dangerous subversive who'd sold his soul to save Zaun and yet left it imperiled by his own vices. His history as a Shimmer-baron—a fact neither publicly refuted nor confirmed—was complicated by rumors that the profits were used to back Zaun's independence. Some said he was a dealmaker driven by demonic forces: where Piltover's Hex-tech was sold for millions, he weaponized a dark amalgam of chem-tech and Hex-tech that fetched billions. He reputedly had murky contacts in newspapers, publishing, radio, printing and research databases all the way from Demacia to Bilgewater.

There were sordid stories of assassinations ordered by his hand—trade secrets stolen and politicians suborned. He'd been romantically linked to a number of sirens and savants: Bilgewater's Miss Fortune, who'd reputedly described him as "a shark who devours bite by bite"; Jhin, a murderous prodigy turned street performer who claimed to have sampled firsthand the "man behind the mask"; and even the infamous Sett from Ionia's fighting pits, who boasted of having shared drinks with the Chancellor, calling him a "witty, manipulative asshole"—amongst other things.

Some of these tales were tabloid trash. Others held a seed of truth.

What was most evident was that the First Chancellor was a master of misdirection. If you asked five people about him, you'd get six answers. The only commonality was the ambiguous aura of danger that surrounded him. More than once, you'd wondered why a man so secretive had invited a journalist—of all professions—for a tête-à-tête. Was it simply for the sake of good publicity? Or, perhaps, an elaborate ruse?

Would a single-page obituary be printed after the visit was over, with the byline reading, "Curiosity killed the journalist"?

The Eye of Zaun was rumored to have killed for less.

Haltingly, you asked: "Does he often have journalists shadowed?"

Lock's metal-capped teeth glinted in the lobby lights. "Only if he's interested in what they've got to ask."

"I should hope so!"

"So we can't have you getting hurt, eh? Shame if you ended up like the last guy."

You were nonplused. "The last?"

"Fell in a charnel pit." Lock chuckled. "Himself didn't bat an eyelid."

Again, you weren't certain he was joking.

Once you had settled into your room, Lock and Ran treated you to supper before the Expo. Their choice of venue was Jericho's. Together, you sat by the stall with a dining area open to the neon-stained street. Green squid curry was ordered for you, and black tentacle stew for Lock. Ran stuck to fresh cavernberry juice. Around your feet, torn-eared cats fought over gristles flung behind the stall.

The Undercity's menu was invariably pickled—and of dubious quality at best. But with Zaun's birth came changes. Trade bargains with Ionia led to prime cuts of meat in even Sumpside shops. New Shimmer-based hothouses allowed genetically modified fruit and vegetables to proliferate local markets. It showed in the tweaks to Jericho's menu: curls of lime leaves, sticky mounds of rice, plump morsels of cherry tomato.

They weren't as flavorful as their Piltovan counterparts. But Zaunites seemed grateful for extra folates in their diet.

Between mouthfuls, you attempted small-talk with your companions. How had they fallen into service with the Eye of Zaun? What was he like, as a boss, as a man? Was his persona as foreboding as the rumors made it out to be? Did they enjoy working for him? Could they speak honestly without fearing reprisal?

"I wouldn't," Lock grunted, slurping up a morsel of tentacle. "No offense, Mx. Goode."

"I would." Ran smiled sweetly. "Then I'd kill you where you sit."

You laughed, thinking they were joking. But the look they exchanged was inscrutable.

Beneath their amused reticence, you sensed a natural reserve. They'd not been coached by their superior not to overshare. Rather, they'd been chosen specifically because they kept their own counsel. Their discretion was as valuable as their more dubious skillsets.

Still, they weren't without the inborn Zaunite playfulness. Ran's tongue was quicksilver; Lock's humor was wry. Their familiarity with one another was evident. They ribbed each other endlessly over past antics. Yet their rapport was professional, too. Lock deferred to Ran when it came to matters of intel. Ran deferred to Lock when it came to matters of security.

It was a comfortable dynamic, and they knew the city well. You learned more from them over the course of a single supper than you had in months of research.

For instance, you learnt that Zaun had opted to retain the currency system of Piltover: washers, cogs, hexes. Not out of a nostalgic desire to cling to the past, but to maintain the pretense of economic equality. As long as both nations' coinage was interchangeable, Zaun's economic disparities would remain hidden until the nation's had found its feet. A similar reasoning explained why the two nations shared the same national language. While Zaunites spoke the hodgepodge of local and foreign dialects, a standardized version (literally: Standard) was taught in schools and promoted in media. The aim was to make the language as accessible as possible, a tool of empowerment rather than exclusion.

This inclusivity was also extended to Zaun's legal system. For decades, the Fissures patchwork legal framework was symptomatic of a wider disconnect between Piltover and the Undercity. While Topside had its own—admittedly sclerotic—constitution, the Fissures were treated as a lawless colony, famed for gang codes, tribal courts, and vigilante justice.

The Council had exerted its authority through the Wardens, with Enforcers serving as the brutal enactors of its writ. The Wardens were known for their callous disregard of the Fissures' welfare: disproportionately high rates of violent crime, rampant poverty, and widespread corruption were tolerated, even fanned hotter when the mood suited. Fissurefolk, for their part, were unsympathetic to the Wardens, whom they saw as little more than Piltover's stooges.

This, in turn, had led to a culture of distrust, where Fissurefolk massed into a monolith of defiance at the first whiff of authority.

Zaun's independence had changed that. The Cabinet was now committed to reforming the legal system, an arduous process that involved rewriting archaic laws and amending incomplete decrees, from the criminal justice to the bureaucracy. Progress was slow, but steady. The penal code had been overhauled in the first few months. Fines rather than jail sentences were becoming the norm for petty crimes. A sentence in Dredge prison was reserved for the most heinous offenses: treason, terrorism, murder, rape, assault. Rehabilitation programs were being introduced to combat recidivism. Vocational training for felons was in the pipeline. Even a draft-work program had been introduced to provide free legal counsel.

It was an ambitious undertaking. Zaun's judiciary was a young institution, and the city was home to a wide range of ideologies, from anarchists to syndicalists. But the Eye was the guiding hand, and his silent influence was felt across every tier.

As an example, you were informed that the proposed Chief Justice, a masked woman of humble origins, had been personally recommended by the Eye. The lady was widely reviled by Zaun's chem-baron fraternity—largely for her uncompromising sense of fairness and reputation for unflinching integrity. In the months since her campaign, she had put forward a series of proto-legislations, all with the aim of establishing a fair and impartial judiciary.

In sum, it was a city determined to slough off a regressive past. One that, in many ways, had not been a matter of choice, but necessity.

"The old empire of Oshra Va' Zaun," Lock said, scraping his bowl clean, "was one where anyone could make a fresh start. Anyone could change their name, their story, their fortune. So Zaun is like its namesake—it's the land of the famed second chance. Or do-over. Anyone can become anything, from the Sumps to the Spires. This is a city that accepts all."

"Janna Omnia Amat," Ran drawled.

"Exactly. Janna loves everybody."

You were surprised to hear the spiritual mantra from a pair of hard-eyed cutthroats. Then again, even the most morally compromised in Zaun held a dogged core of faith—and its flipside of superstition.

"Is that the Eye's philosophy?" you asked.

"More like his personal credo. He's a man who believes in redemption."

"Redemption?"

"Not in a saintly sense," Lock said, with a tiny smirk. "More like making good on a debt. He's not a man who forgets a kindness. Or an insult. In the end, all accounts will be settled."

"With interest," Ran said.

"I see. That's... remarkably fair."

"He is, actually." Lock's manner downshifted. "He's fairer than a lot of folks realize. I wouldn't be working for him otherwise. Hell, I'd be dead."

"And me," Ran said, polishing off the cavernfruit juice.

"How so?"

Lock glanced away, the corners of his mouth folding. "Let's just say, we were leftovers as far as Uppside was concerned. No place to go. Nothing to lose. I was getting my skull bashed in weekly at cage fights. Ran, they were running 'em ragged, day and night, in cartel deals. I didn't know which was worse. The work or the life."

Ran said nothing. But you saw the shadow of old suffering flit across the porcelain face.

"But he found us," Lock went on. "And we got a new start. So yeah, I'm not a man who forgets a kindness either. Or the kind who wastes a second chance. A lot of folks see Himself as the Devil incarnate. But if he is, then he's the best damn devil a man could work for."

"Even his vices?"

Lock grinned, all teeth. "Especially those."

Stunned, you were not entirely certain how to respond. You'd been warned to expect a certain degree of blind fanaticism from the Eye's inner circle. But their loyalty seemed less like cultish fervor than a debt owed. They didn't feign affection for their employer as a friend. Rather, they respected him as a man who had done right by them, and was therefore worthy of their loyalty.

It was the same devotion shown to a mentor.

Or a father.

The conversation was interrupted by a platter of Zaun's specialty: sump-vole fritters. Doused in an ascendant sauce of chilli, citrus and turmeric, the fried meat was as piquant as it was juicy. It was also, in a word, flaming. Lock and Ran spit in their palms and exchanged a betting handshake over how many you could swallow.

(Six: a poor personal best.)

Afterward, you fanned yourself and downed glass after glass of sweet yoghurt drink. Idly, Ran leafed through your notebook. "Nice. But maybe you want to swap 'ethno fusion' for 'Zaunite cuisine' in this line?"

You stifled a cough. "Wh—Why?"

"Sounds too pretentious. Ethno-Fusion is Uppside. Zaun has no need for fusion. Our city's already a blend. The food shows that. There's a little of everything: Bilgewater, Shurima, Ionia, Noxus. We don't pick apart which is this or that. We've got no time. We take what we get and make the best of it."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"And here?" The black-tipped nail tapped a page. "Cross out 'desire lines.'"

"Oh? Why?"

"Too snooty. Desire lines is an Uppside term too. Zaun doesn't do maps the same way your city does. For one thing, we're underground. So everything flows vertically. Like a mineshaft, only the drilling's in progress. There's no traditional routes, no set paths. Nothing in Zaun stays static. We find our way like we do everything else: by improvising."

"So the city is terra incognita?"

"Kinda. It's more a question of how you carve your way through it. Living here means having your own tailor-made mental map. We all do. The streets Lock takes aren't the ones I'd use. And the ones I use won't be the same as the Bossman's. He likes to say that each of us is a cartographer. We map a different Zaun, inside ourselves. And together, we build something new."

"That's beautiful. I like that."

"Yeah. Bossman has a flair for poetry."

"A man of hidden depths."

"A man of many things." Ran winked. "Most of 'em terrible."

The rest of the meal passed amicably. In between bites, you took in the nightscape. A fog hung suspended between the vaulted sky and the cobblestone streets. Silhouettes moved through it, some at a fast clip, others limping. From the open window of a nearby cabaret came the jazzy riff of saxophones. A pair of shoeless urchins chased a rat around with nail-spiked sticks while their caretaker shouted after them.

Behind them was a massive wall scrawled with graffiti: revolutionary slogans from the independence conflict, and a caricature of a gleeful girl with blue braids straddling a zooming missile that read: REMEMBER ZAUN BEFORE ZAUN REMEMBERS YOU.

The girl was Jinx.

For Piltovans, she remained a focal point of controversy: an unhinged terrorist whose bombs had taken countless lives. Opinions were split. Some saw her as the embodiment of Zaun's untamed wrath. Others perceived her as a victim, a puppet on the Eye of Zaun's strings. Jayce Talis is reported to have described her as an "unstable thief;" Cassandra Kiramman derided her as a "shameless little doxy;" Warden Camille Ferros condemned her as, "woefully unrepentant."

Meanwhile, for Zaunites, Jinx was a mythic figure. Half-whiz, half-witch, an exuberant fairy godmother spreading not boons but booms. Chem-punks emulated her fashion sense. Clubs played Get Jinxed in her honor. Zaun's everyday lingo featured a lexicon of Jinxese: "Anything jumpin' off?" – "Let's see what Pow-Pow thinks" – "Eff for Effort!"

She'd become a shorthand for anything crazy—from a party to a hot date to a disaster.

Jinx was everything that made Zaun unique: a reckless effusion of magic and modernity. Her gumption with gadgetry was legendary. In the wake of Zaun's independence, she'd collaborated with another Zaunite prodigy, Viktor—the former partner of Jayce Talis—to develop a series of ingenious inventions. Most notable among them was the Hex-turbine. It was credited with purifying the atmosphere of acidic freak-storms—Gnashers—that had long plagued the Sumps. The turbines' hum was now ubiquitous throughout the city.

In her spare time, Jinx shed her contentious wartime record in favor of a freewheeling fashionista's duds. With her mastiff, Sparky, by her side, she made the rounds of the most premium clubs and the most high-rolling casinos, leaving gunsmoke and bevy of broken hearts in her wake. Rumors abounded: everything from high-society swains to the dregs of the underworld were linked to her. But Jinx's private life remained the subject of breathless gossip. Nothing could be proven. Her reputation remained beyond reproach.

In many ways, she was the apple of the city's eye. Zaun's firstborn daughter: its most beloved and best.

As for yourself?

You'd met Jinx once. Or rather, seen her. During the Peace Treaty's gala, you'd witnessed her dancing to wild riffs of jazz. Then, during the photo-op, falling asleep—only to waken with a jolt and fling a glitter bomb into the crowd. She'd been a mere slip of a girl, then. Nothing like the unhinged terrorist from reports. Yet her magnetism was undeniable. The camera loved her: she seemed a starlet in a stage of her own making.

The perfect emblem for Zaun's new era.

You asked Lock and Ran about her. They exchanged loaded glances.

Lock said, "We don't talk about the Bit of Ghostberry."

"Who?"

"Jinx. Himself's got a short fuse for the media's obsession with his little girl."

"A short fuse? In what sense?"

"Every."

Ran shrugged. "No interviews. No photographs. No hearsay. We're always careful."

"I take it the Chancellor is protective."

"Protective? Hell." Lock dug a fishbone out of his mouth, and spat on the sidewalk. "She's like a bomb waiting to go off. A real shiny bomb. Best not to get too close."

Despite yourself, you were intrigued. "I hear similar rumors about the Chancellor."

"Like father, like daughter."

"Is Jinx his by blood?"

"This ain't Piltover, Mx. Goode. Blood don't count for much."

Interest piqued, you pressed further: "Has the Chancellor other children?"

"One's enough of a gamble."

"My sources shared that Jinx has a sister. Violet. Currently one of Zaun's blackguards."

Lock raised an eyebrow. "Not many folks know that."

"I am an investigative journalist."

Ran and Lock exchanged a loaded look. You waited, pen poised, hoping against hope for a nugget of intelligence. It was a matter of professional pride. To understand a nation's leader is to understand its future. To understand his children is to understand the man.

Lock said: "Can't say."

"What? Why not?"

"Because." The blue eyes went flinty. "You'd be eating all of your teeth."

"Then she is not the First Chancellor's daughter?"

"Daughter? You call her that and it'll be the last thing you do. I don't mean Ran or me will off you. She'll do the honor her own damnself."

"The First Chancellor wouldn't stop her?"

"He'd help." The flintiness gave way to grim amusement. "They're a lot alike. The Bit of Ghostberry has Himself's charm. Both of 'em could talk you into a corner and slit your throat for the trouble. Violet, though. She's got his temper. If anything, she's worse."

Ran danced a fingertip along the rim of the juice-glass. "Aren't you glad you asked?"

"It's a great story," Lock went on. "Real soap opera. Plenty of redemption, revenge, all that jazz. If you published the novel, you'd win a Bullitzer, guaranteed. But it's not a tale we'll tell."

"Not even off the record?"

"Off the record, and our heads will be on the chopping block. I speak for both of us. Right, Ran?"

Ran winked. "Rather be doing the chopping myself."

You tried changing tacks. "Is Violet related, at all, to the First Chancellor?"

"Not a chance. That one's out in the public records." Lock slouched back on his stool, and his grin returned. "Let's put it this way. She's not his daughter. Not by blood—any more than Jinx is. But Jinx is his family. Apple of his eye. Violet? She's something different. More like his... pupil."

"A protégée?"

"Yeah. Let's go with that." Lock's grin was cagier now. "Himself's got a soft spot for lost lambs."

"And black sheep," Ran deadpanned.

"Or whatever you call a stone-cold [expletive]."

You frowned, trying to parse their meaning. "I take it she is not as affable?"

Lock ran a palm over his inked skull down to the shovel-shaped jaw. "You could say that. You could also say: she's got no cause to be. She's Himself's bodyguard. Her job description's pretty straightforward—keep him alive. It's the sort of work that breeds hard heads. You keep out of her way and you'll be fine. But don't expect her to give you an interview."

"How did she become the Chancellor's bodyguard? It seems a position of considerable trust."

"Trust. Yeah."

Again, the loaded glances swapped. It was clear the matter was not for public consumption. But one thing was certain: the Eye's family dynamic was more tangled than you'd anticipated. There were no neat lines, no clear delineations. Just a web of relationships, some familial, some not. It was a far cry from the nuclear model you'd been taught to revere in Piltover.

In Zaun, you thought, the real desire lines were not mapped on streets, but in hearts.

And the Eye of Zaun, at the epicenter, was where all the lines intersected.

The cartographer of a hidden world.

---

AFTER SUPPER, Lock and Ran were joined by a jack-in-the-box named Dustin.

A spiky-haired fellow with a vacantly amiable air, but jittery reflexes that set you on edge. His fingers were a constant blur of motion. You sensed, rather than saw, a glint of steel strapped somewhere beneath his sleeve. His rapidfire remarks were punctuated by snickers. As if his own words tickled him pink.

He didn't introduce himself so much as amble up to your table at Jericho's and slap you on the back.

Hard.

"So this is the hackette!" he said by way of greeting.

With dignity, you rubbed the bruise forming on your shoulder. "Good evening, sir."

"Sir? Call me Dusty. Short for Dustin. Not to be confused with Dustbin. I'm the better-looking brother." His earsplitting cackle had a hyena's pitch. "Say, what do they call you? I've heard all sorts of names: Goodie, BG, Gumshoe. You've got quite the reputation. In a city full of hacks, you've got a genuine knack. It's a pleasure, a real pleasure. You coming Down-Low is a big deal."

"It is?"

"Hell yeah! This is the first time Mister S agreed to an interview. With an Uppsider, no less. What's your secret?"

"I haven't the foggiest. Perhaps he is genuinely interested in improving relations between Zaun and Piltover."

"That he is!" Another cackle. "He's a man with a plan, Mister S. Always looking forward. That's what the expo is about. Coming together. Making connections. It's a brand-new day for Zaun. We're going places, and Mister S is leading the way. He's the best, you know. The realest."

"Realest?" you echoed. "Do you mean, 'real,' as in 'realist'?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Realist. No idealist. Definitely not one for rose-colored glasses. Or glasses, in general. He's got his eye on bigger things. Zaun's got a lot to offer, but it's not going to be easy. Fortunately, with good folk like yourself, we'll have a leg-up."

"I'm a journalist, not a diplomat. My goal is to inform, not influence."

"Sure, sure. No offense meant. I'm just saying. The world needs to see the truth."

"Which is?"

"That Zaun's going places. So are we. So are you! Hey—did you try our brightleaf tobacco yet? You should. Really starts you off on the right foot."

Dustin perched beside you and lit what looked—and smelled—like an enormous spliff. The fumes made your head reel. Or perhaps it was the secondhand effluvium wafting off Dustin himself. The man was clearly a chem-fiend. Zaun was no stranger to chemical vices: Fizzle, Puffcap, Slither.

Most—under the city's remarkably lax regulatory regime—were legal. Lenient drug policies made distinctions between 'hard' and 'soft' substances. Their production and sale were tolerated for recreational use. It was not uncommon for street dealers to operate openly, as long as their wares were sanctioned through official channels. It was also an open secret that elite Zaunites regularly indulged in the finest narcotics.

Some, you'd read, were still so high the morning-after, they had to be strapped into their chairs during cabinet meetings.

Naturally, this ethos of hedonistic laissez-aller was a powerful lure for outsiders. The city's reputation for vice was legendary. Few could resist dabbling in Zaun's chemical cornucopia. Indeed, there was a certain daring prestige attached to indulgence: a night on the town culminating in a whopping hangover at best, a 'dry-out' in the city's most posh rehab at worst, was a rite of passage. A mark of the truly cosmopolitan.

Then, there was Shimmer.

The drug was a scourge of the Fissures. A synthetic narcotic produced in clandestine laboratories, it was a siren's call to the destitute and disenfranchised. Once ingested, it offered an immediate euphoria, enhanced stamina, and heightened physical prowess. Pure strains were ingested intravenously; diluted forms were peddled as a smokeable narcotic. Its street-names included: Eye-Candy, Shine, Glow-up.

Its medicinal uses—all the way in Piltover—were controversial. Progressive factions hailed it as a breakthrough in medical science. Special strains, in controlled environments, were said to offer miraculous cures for otherwise incurable diseases. Conservatives, however, saw the drug as a menace to public health, and a vector for violence.

To bolster their case, they pointed to side-effects that manifested at later stages: delirium, paranoia, and, if overused, psychosis. The most insidious effects, however, were the physiological ones. Long-term exposure caused irreversible brain damage and muscle degradation. Over time, the addict suffered the same symptoms of decay as the Undercity. Muscles atrophying; skin sloughing off; joints degrading.

The body, in its final throes, resembled a half-decayed corpse. The afflicted became known as Rotters.

The Sun & Tower had, prior to the Siege, published an editorial entitled "Shimmer and Shame." A series of articles, written by intrepid journalists undercover in the Fissures, ripped the lid off the rampant Shimmer addiction. It was a damning exposé, calling for stricter oversight of Undercity imports and the reinstatement of full-body searches for travelers passing through Bridge.

The series went on to win the coveted Golden Quill. It was lauded as a seminal work in raising public awareness of the crisis.

Subsequently, the editorial was buried in the bylines. Publications were limited to redacted snippets. Certain articles in the archives mysteriously vanished before their due date. Others were outright censored. A rumor circulated: a mysterious benefactor had offered a generous stipend for the paper to cease-and-desist its critical coverage. The publisher, a staunch advocate of free-press, refused to fold.

A month later, the publisher was found hanging from a noose in his office. Suicide, according to the Wardens. The publisher's widow insisted otherwise, but her efforts to seek justice were futile. The case remained unsolved. In the interim, the editor-in-chief was replaced. His predecessor preferred a more diplomatic approach. In place of investigative journalism, the paper focused on 'churnalism'—rehashed articles on society gossip, celebrity interviews, and a travel section.

Meanwhile, belowground, the Undercity stewed. A cauldron of corruption, crime, and chaos.

Shimmer, of course, was not the catalyst of its social ills. Rather, it was a side-effect of a mass-scale industry in human exploitation.

The symptom of a disease whose roots lay deeper still.

Lack of economic empowerment had, for decades, crippled the Fissurefolk: physically, psychologically. Shimmer, in controlled doses, was a balm. It eased afflictions of the body, and spirit. It made life bearable. For the downtrodden, it was a cheap, available fix.

It was also, as your research had revealed, a profit-driven enterprise.

Rumored to shipped as far and wide as Shurima, Bilgewater, and Ionia, Shimmer served as weaponized currency. It boosted the stamina of soldiers, the performance of mercenaries, the morale of the masses. Its revenue, funneled back into the Undercity, provided the resources needed to wrest the Fissures from the Warden's aegis. To fund an independence movement. To bankroll a new nation.

To birth Zaun.

As of today, Shimmer had become the cornerstone of a complex and contentious dialogue between Zaun's Cabinet and the Council. The latter had recently placed an embargo on Shimmer-related exports, and were seeking to curb its distribution among the populace. The former, meanwhile, had pledged to crack down on the black-market trade. In demonstration of their commitment, the First Chancellor had recently passed an edict: all distribution of the drug as recreational narcotic was illegal. Any chem-labs found manufacturing it were to be razed.

What followed was an unprecedented crackdown on the black-market. Cartel bosses were arrested; warehouses confiscated. Shimmer's rampancy on the rave circuit was curbed, and its supply chain disrupted.

Many were quick to condemn the Chancellor's decision as a capitulation to Piltover's political whims. It was a sign of weakness, they decried. The symptom of an underdeveloped state, and an unpatriotic sell-out, to boot. Another vocal minority argued that the edict was a ruse. The real agenda, they insisted, was not to curb Shimmer's availability, but increase its profitability. They argued that the drug was still being produced—this time in legitimate factories, overseen by the government itself.

Instead of an adulterated poison, the scientists were now producing a purer strain—twice as refined, and ten times more potent.

Zaun's Cabinet dismissed the claims as spurious conjecture. Investigations were launched. No hard evidence was unearthed. Shimmer truly seemed, among Zaun's beleaguered citizenry, on the way out. There were fewer glimpses of Rotters in the slums; pharmacies had begun selling Shimmer-specific antidotes; rehabilitation clinics were in vogue. And while the chem-cartels still existed, their activities were curtailed, and their leaders were either dead, or in Dredge Prison.

Or so the official statements claimed.

As a journalist, you were ambivalent. You'd seen Shimmer's corrosive effects, up close and personal, during your sojourns belowground. Part of you—like the middle-class masses who were the backbone of your readership—hoped against hope that Shimmer could be eradicated, once and for all.

The rest of you, the reporter with the nose for a good story, knew it would not be that simple.

Dustin, blithely self-medicated on Janna-knew-what, was proof positive.

"Want some?" He proffered his joint. "They're passing 'em out at the Expo."

"They—what?"

Through pursed lips, Dustin blew out a misshapen smoke ring. "Brightleaf. Free samples. It's a new strain. Supposed to keep the chest clear, make the lungs less congested. The benefits are pullomo—plomo—"

"Pulmonary?" you supplied.

"That's it! So what's your poison? Brightleaf? Z-Zap? Puffcap?"

"Thank you. But I'll pass."

"Puff-puff-pass?"

"Just pass."

It wasn't that you did not appreciate a good toke. You were a child of Piltover's golden age: the days of opium dens and cannabis clubs. But Zaun was not a place to be off one's head. Their tobacco was infamous for its potency. Also, you weren't sure you wanted to swap saliva with your unsavory-looking guide. You'd not had your shots, and you'd prefer not to catch an exotic strain of flu.

Not when the interview was less than twelve hours away.

"Your loss." Dustin threw a rubberband arm around your shoulders, and gave a squeeze. "Say, have you tried the sweets yet?"

"Sweets?"

"The sweet-shops at the Promenade. We've got a couple: Cray-Cray, Lollypop's, Mango-Splash. Best in town. The Li'l Miss goes to Lollypop's sometimes, after her gigs."

"The Li'l Miss?"

"You know. Jinx."

"O-oh." You were relieved. For a moment, you'd feared being strongarmed into reviewing a strip-club. "I am told Zaun's patisseries are second-to-none."

"You can say that again!" A high-pitched cackle. "Hey, why don't we swing by a few? There's still time before the Expo. And Mister S, he won't mind. He wants you to take in the sights."

"Is the First Chancellor a fan of sweets, as well?"

"He's a fan of a lot of things. Sweet nothings. Sweet deals. Sweet cheeks." A wink. "Hey, have you tried our Sachertorte yet?"

"I—I cannot say I have."

"Wha-a-a-a-at? Lock, Ran, are you hearin' this?"

Lock was busy scraping the dregs from his bowl. Ran's reply was a laconic shrug. Their natural aptitude for indolence was beginning to strike you as the side-effect of a daily exposure to Dustin's ceaseless chatter. You wondered at the circumstances that had thrust these individuals—each a walking stereotype of Zaunite vice—into the Chancellor's inner circle.

Then again, you suspected their skillsets were far more specialized than the vices they seemed to represent.

"That's a shame," Dustin was saying, shaking his head. "That's a damn shame. Hey, why don't we drop by some shops? The Rack's got the best Sachertorte in town."

"Pssssh." Lock wiped his mouth. "The Rack's for the kids. All sugar. No kick."

"Well, what about the Honeypot? Punchiest opera cakes in the business."

"Too punchy," Ran hummed. "Takes a week to come down."

"Then how about the Laughing Coffin? I'm tellin' ya. They've got the meanest rum-baba."

"Bossman gave it a thumbs-down. He said, and I quote, 'Ich würde meinen größten Feind nicht an dieses Dessert verfüttern.'"

"Damn. Guess there's a reason they're going out of business."

"I say we hit the Piglet's Squeal," Lock said. "They do a decent macaroon."

Dustin grimaced. "No way, man. Too frilly. You'll catch a dose of cooties before rush hour."

"How about the Sugarplum Fairy? Eclairs to die for. Even the Bit of Ghostberry goes nuts for 'em."

"Eh. Maybe. Hey, what do you think, Goodie?"

You'd been listening dizzily to their debate, hoping for an interlude to extricate yourself. Zaun's gastronomic scene was an entirely untapped market. Half the names dropped sounded, to your ears, like the opening lines of a particularly bawdy tavern song. The other half, however, were clearly establishments of repute.

Perhaps you could, in good faith, venture off-script to sample a few. After all, a journalist, if they wished to report the truth, must also live the truth.

In this case, you would eat it—and your own naivety—soon enough.

The Sugarplum Fairy was a glossy establishment, complete with a wrought-iron trellis of chem-nourished wisteria and an awning of glittering pink neon. As soon as you walked in, you were treated to a sensory assault: the aromatic waft of spun sugar, gingerbread baking, and a rich, fruity tang of liqueurs.

The staff were a troupe of rainbow-aproned cuties. They wore striped stockings and frou-frou skirts. Their heads were topped by tiny chef's hats; their faces painted like dolls. They were all dimpling smiles, and spoke a Zaunite dialect so rapid it might have been the language of the pixies themselves.

Their shop was, you were told, a favorite haunt of Jinx. You could imagine the blue-haired firecracker skipping in, then sauntering out, leaving a trail of candy hearts and sugar-spun dreams in her wake.

You were also told that the First Chancellor patronized the shop once a year.

"It's true," a server gushed, her cheeks fetchingly a-glow. "Jinx enlisted our services to bake his fortieth birthday cake! He had a slice—oh, it was such an honor—and so the tradition began!"

"Tradition?"

"Every year, on the Day of Ash, he orders a special cake!"

"What kind of cake?"

"Plain bundt. No decoration. No icing. No candles."

"Whatever for?"

"Who can say?" She giggled. "Some say he's paying his respects to the fallen. Some say he's commemorating the days of rationing, when flour was as precious as gold. Some say he's simply a plain-Jane fellow at heart. Whatever the case, we're honored to be his purveyors. He tips very well."

Curiousor and curiouser, you thought.

The larger-than-life persona you'd collated from reports clashed with glimpses of this quieter, more private man. Perhaps his proclivity for austerity was the legacy of a childhood spent in the Sumps? Perhaps his taste for the simpler things reflected a deeper sense of humility? Perhaps it was a reminder of his roots, and a pledge to never forget them?

Or, perhaps, he simply enjoyed a good bundt cake.

The Sugarplum Fairy were as generous as their reputed patron. Each sampling was on the house. Their confectionary creations were a symphony of sugar and spice. Piltover has always prided itself on its sophisticated palate. Our desserts are inspired by the classics: soufflés, angelcakes, jam tarts. Zaun, conversely, was an untamed frontier: every flavor from the far-flung corners of Runeterra was distilled into a pot of bubbling sugar and set to simmer. The result was an extravaganza of culinary hybrids: Nazumah honey drizzled over Zhyunian strawberries; Bilgewater rum soaked into Bahrl's black-bean cakes; Demacian almond paste blended with spongy, melt-in-the-mouth Noxian pears.

Each mouthful was a journey across Zaun's variegated landscape. Some melted like liquid bliss on the tongue. Others exploded across the palate in a joyous expletive. By the end, your senses were reeling.

Then came the coup-de-grace.

The servers brought in four slices of decadently-rich double chocolate cake. The first layer was a dark fudgy delight; the second a velvety-smooth ganache; the third, a creamy milk chocolate mousse. The base was a hazelnut praline with a sprinkling of chopped pecans. Topped off with a swirl of vanilla cream and a dusting of icing sugar, the cake was as gorgeous as it was sinful.

"On the house," the servers cooed.

Ran's eyes lit up like an excited child. Lock rubbed his massive hands together. Dustin danced from foot to foot. Their effusive glee was contagious. In retrospect, you ought to have realized: there were a few too many winks and nudges. A pitch too high, a skip too fast, in their voices. A sense of something secret, something scandalous, afoot.

But you, babe in the woods, were too entranced by the sugar-coated charm. Too dazzled by the culinary wizardry.

Too stupid to spot the trap.

Four golden forks were presented. You each drove one into a glistening chocolate wedge and stuffed it in your mouths. Ran's eyes were closed. Dustin's head swayed back and forth on a gyre of glee. Lock grinned from ear-to-ear as he chewed. Like them, you could only marvel at the skill that had gone into making the perfect bite: the smoothness of the chocolate, the light crunch of the nuts, the airiness of the whipped cream.

This cake slid down your gullet with a sensation that made your shiver. It felt nearly lubricious. It felt—wicked.

"Merciful Janna," you sighed. "What is this?"

"The Sachertorte," they chorused.

"I've never tasted anything like it."

"You wouldn't." The server tittered. "It's a secret recipe. Passed down for generations. All I can say is: it's got a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

"This, and that, what?"

"Oh, you know." She batted her eyelashes. "A pinch of sugar, a dollop of honey, a dash of spice..."

"And?"

She put a finger to her lips. "And everything that makes Zaun oh-so-nice."

The edges of the shop began to ripple. Your head grew light. Butterflies—silky soft butterflies—danced in the pit of your belly. The sensation spread, in slow-motion, through every extremity, down to the tips of your fingers, up to the roots of your hair. You couldn't help but giggle. This was the feeling. The one you'd been chasing. The one you'd been after, since the days of youth, when you'd snuck your first taste of illicit fruit.

The euphoria. The bliss. The freedom.

In another minute, the body-stone was in full effect.

A word of advice, fair reader. Zaun's desserts are as deadly as its dead-ends.

To requote their favorite aphorism:

"Look out for yourself."

---

THE EXPO was a spectacular fiesta.

Eschewing the grandomania of Piltover's civic spaces, Zaun's architects had opted for a more egalitarian, pedestrian-friendly model. There were no towering monuments of limestone taking up prime real estate. No triumphal arches rendering passersby into insignificant dots. No magisterial courtyards, with their statues of stodgy, stout-chinned elders.

Rather, the city's civic space was a network of walkable streets and intimate, human-scaled venues. Spanning all three levels of Zaun—the Skylight Commercia at the Promenade, the Bridgewaltz at Entresol, the Commercia Fantastica at the Sumps—each was a world of themes unto itself.

The Sump-level was dedicated to historicity: entire excavated neighborhoods, archeological marvels, were on display in the spotlit amphitheater: from the atrium-style temples of Oshra Va'Zaun, to the sumptuous villas of the post-boom merchants, to the cramped and claustrophobic quarters of the Sump-folk themselves. A series of exhibits—showcasing spiritual traditions, folk art, and runic scripture—provided an intimate glimpse into a vanished era.

Oshra Va'Zaun, the scholars claimed, was buried beneath centuries of sediment triggered by the floods of the Cataclysm. But its legacy survived: in the enduring myths and legends of the Fissurefolk; in the fantastical architecture and arcane artifacts uncovered in digs; and, perhaps, even in the mystical, unknowable depths of the river's blackest waters.

The old empire's essence, they claimed, was embedded in the city's foundations.

And, upon its bones, Zaun stood strong.

Indeed, the narrative threading the Sump-level's exhibits was, overwhelmingly, one of rebirth. A chronicle of how, from the dregs of despair, Zaun had risen like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

There were photographs chronicling the Fissurefolk's struggles. Exhibits highlighting the resilience of a community battered, broken, yet still unbowed. Miner's dented helmets and rusted pickaxes; a flame-scorched textile loom; an old fisherman's boot, caked in dried mud; a child's clay figurine, gnawed by acid-rain; a pair of spectacles with old blood speckling the cracked glass.

The exhibits, while sparse, were evocative. Each was accompanied by a firsthand account, narrated through audio recordings: a fisherman's musings on the worsening state of the river, a milliner's recollection of her stolen childhood, a laborer's recollection of the days of rationing. In a sense, the city's ruins had become its greatest treasure: a memorial to its exploitative past, and a testament to its defiant present.

The contrast was striking. Piltover's memorials, invariably, were dedicated to the greats. The city's heroes and luminaries. The inventors staring imperiously into the distance; the philosophers lost in thought; the scientists poring over dusty tomes. The mythos, implicit, was that glory accrued, with time, through a process of natural selection: the most brilliant would ascend, and their achievements would be immortalized, in the city's golden skyline.

Zaun's mythos was, paradoxically, the antithesis of glorification. While its heroes were certainly honored, the city's emphasis, overwhelmingly, was on its common folk. Those who, without fanfare, had struggled, suffered, and survived. Those whose names had gone unsung; their stories gone untold; but whose sacrifices would never be forgotten.

It was also a reminder.

Piltover's sins were not an academic abstraction. They were, as the exhibits bore witness, an enduring blight.

One that could only be righted with progress, not platitudes.

At the Entresol-level, the Bridgewaltz was a living showcase of the arts. Neon lights refracted off the scalloped glass of shopfronts, splintering in glittering butterflies and fanwise rainbows. Open-air galleries showcased a cornucopia of mediums for public admiration. There were hundreds of paintings, from oil to acrylic, charcoal to pastel, watercolor to graphite; sculptures, from marble to stone, wood to iron, steel to brass; tapestries, from cotton to silk, linen to wool, satin to velvet.

An entire lane had been commandeered by the city's most avant-garde street performers. A stage, running the length of the bridge, was dedicated to the historic dance styles of Zaun: from the stomp-and-shuffle of the Sumps' street-dances, to the syncopated steps of the rave circuit, to the undulant sensuality of the Promenade's cabarets. The titles were as evocative as the performances: the Drainpipe Fandango, the Bait-and-Switch, the Sumpside Waltz.

At the square, a troupe of performers spun in graceful figure-eights, waving red scarves to signify bullet-wounds, while a musician with an electric-blue cello rained a patter of sawed sixteenth notes down on them. They were re-enacting the carnage on the Day of Ash: Enforcer's bullets and the Fissurefolk's blood, merging into a river of red. The ever-changing glow of stage lights touched the beaded perspiration on the dancers' foreheads and struck multicolored crystals in the spectators' eye-whites. The polyphonic fusion of jazz, funk and swing held an undercurrent of the sorrowful.

It was a reminder of the sacrifices endured, and the struggles to come.

The theme replicated itself, in bold strokes, across the mosaics topping the three pillars at the center of Bridgewaltz. Each one traced, in compelling triptych, the evolution of the Fissurefolk. Their tortures and trials; their triumph and transcendence. The first panel showcased panoramic scenes of suffering set against the blood-red spume of the Siege. In the next, it depicted the aftermath in a stark vignette: a cityscape of smoldering embers, the deep red seams of its wounds still trickling blood. The third was a static montage: masses of silhouettes—masons and miners, fishermen and factory workers, clerks and craftsmen—working shoulder-to-shoulder, to affirm their rightful claim to a city now, finally, their own.

As with the Sump-level, the Bridgewaltz's exhibits were profoundly political. They were also, in their persevering hope, conversely ruthless. The machine of progress, they proclaimed, paused for no man or woman; there was no use pleading broken hearts and broken bones, when a city was at stake. Roads must be built, homes erected, factories refurbished. There was no time to mourn: for the future was at hand, and it demanded all hands-on-deck.

It was a sobering lesson; one the artwork confronted unflinchingly.

It was also a direct rebuke to Piltover's mythmaking. Here, the greatness was not the prerogative of a self-congratulatory elite. It was the collective achievement of the masses. The triumphs of a city, not a select few; the pride of a nation, not an aristocratic minority. Piltover, the artist proclaimed, would not be the City of Progress had not Zaun, the engine of its underbelly, kept its gears oiled and its furnaces fed.

The symbolism struck a sobering chill. For centuries, Piltover's elites had justified their hegemony by portraying the Undercity as the inferior, a necessary evil, a cesspool of vice and corruption. What's more, the Undercity was never given leeway to challenge its subordinate status: its acts of sedition were deemed a social ill, and the treatment was a scouring of gunfire.

The exhibits, however, suggested that Piltover's supremacy was always an illusion. It was the result of exploitation, and an abnegation of moral responsibility. The truth was that Zaun's ferocity, in the port city's formative years, had been the driving force behind Piltover's lasting economic success: the Hex-Gates, the trade-routes, the political and cultural supremacy.

And now, Zaun stated, it was time to repay the debt.

With interest.

The upper-level, the Skylight Commercia, was an ode to commerce: a never-ending parade of goods, services and the triumphant trumpetings of profit. All of Zaun's choicest wares were on display in a brilliant profusion. Multi-tiered stands of Hex-automata: wrist-chronos that doubled as tachymeters, collapsible parasols that transformed into pistols with the flick of a wrist; hoverboards that doubled as carts, with wheels retracting into sleek panels at a press of the pedal; miniature hex-robots, compact as bees or as flamboyant as butterflies, that buzzed about performing tasks at the behest of their masters.

The chem-tech industry was booming. Multi-function prosthetics, ranging from eye-replacements that doubled as cameras to mechanical limbs with built-in lasers, were all the rage. Others pushed beyond fads and into the realm of cutting-edge medical science: implants that detected cancers before the spread; artificial organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys, all functioning with an efficiency surpassing their natural counterparts; synthetic glands that stimulated endorphins, enhancing the user's stamina and focus.

There were breakthroughs in Sextech: a branch of biomechanical engineering focused on the enhancement of sexual pleasure. Special microchips outfitted into prosthetic appendages increased sensation through stimulation of the body's nervous system. Another, which allowed partners to control the pitch of sensations in the other's body via remote, promised a whole new level of intimacy. A third, the most radical yet, heralded an entirely new form of human reproduction: a gestational chamber, complete with a birthing device, capable of growing fetuses in the artificial wombs of chem-robots.

The most thrilling innovation, however, was by the Machinist, Viktor, in collaboration with Jinx. The duo, whose project had, before today, been cloaked in ironclad silence, had developed an entirely new branch of bioengineering: Hex-grafting. The method, using chem-infusions, enabled the transplantation of entire mechanical parts onto a living body. The recipient was able to retain full mobility and sensory feedback, without suffering any deleterious effects.

"This," Viktor had stated, in a brief public announcement, "is the future. One where we, as a people, transcend our flesh-and-bone limitations."

The audience, in response, had cheered with the zeal of the converted. To be sure, it was an unprecedented breakthrough. The applications were limitless. From cybernetic limbs for the infirm, to enhanced combat prowess for the military. From enhanced physical capabilities for the sports circuit, to unparalleled sexual gratification for the bedroom.

And, of course, the whisper of immortality fulfilled: a consciousness, transferred from one body to another.

It was also, among Piltover's conservative circles, hotly debated. There were the ethical concerns: Was it humane to create an entirely new lifeform, an amalgamation of flesh and metal? Was this a form of slavery? Did the creation deserve the same protections and privileges as one born of flesh and blood?

By and large, however, the reception was enthusiastic. For Zaunites—who dwelt in a reality where disease and disability were rife, and mortality was a constant shadow—this was a miracle realized: a chance to shed their bodies, like worn-out clothes, and don the design best aligned with their dreams.

Time would tell if Hex-grafting was a hazard or a harbinger. For now, crowds surged and swelled around the marquee, eager to glimpse the prototypes. Waitlists were forming for the initial phase: volunteers willing to be test subjects. Rumors swirled: the Machinist himself would be on site later, recruiting the first round of pioneers.

The rest of the Commercia was dedicated to all that made Zaun such a diverting paradise of hedonism. The night bazaars, with their sheer profusion of goods, were a kaleidoscopic dazzle. Everything seemed at one's fingertips: from honeyed cakes to chemically-infused tobaccos to moire-silk lingerie to jet-studded stilettos. Not was any modesty spared in the flaunting of more illicit pleasures. Wire-frame manikins posed boldly with chrome-embossed strap-ons. Heavily swagged shopfronts disrobed in a glistening sprawl of toys, from phallic to ribbed to studded. Boutiques were dedicated to oils, lubricants, patches and philters: bookshelves were stocked with everything from tantric manuals to illustrated memoirs.

Many a passing Piltovan had remarked on Zaun's brazen disregard for propriety. Sex-work was openly advertised on billboards; pornography was sold as matter-of-factly as a pack of cigarettes; brothel-workers had their own guilds. It was not uncommon, for the first-time Piltovan, weaned on a life of decorum, to forfeit all semblance upon witnessing Zaunites coupling in dark alleyways or the backseats of motorcars or the sloping tiles of rooftops.

Zaunites, for their part, did not spare the displays a second glance. Sex, to them, was just another drive: one not to be denied.

The Fissures age-of-consent laws further emboldened this attitude. While the official statutes followed odd-number system—Little Thirtieth, the Big Nineteenth, the Middle Forties—practice was often a gray area. The Fissures, by and large, held no taboo regarding sexual initiation. Girls as young as twelve were known to have a string of beaus, while boys were often expected to lose their virginity by the age of thirteen.

Naturally this phenomenon engendered a dark underside: deviants who visited the Fissures to indulge their sicknesses, and the resulting abuse of minors. However, for all its libertine ethos, Zaun did not tolerate rape. The courts were strict: a single conviction meant a mandatory ten-year sentence. No bail; limited parole. Pedophilia was treated with even harsher sanctions: a life sentence, with no chance of parole.

For a city with no shortage of vices, Zaun had, ironically, an even more robust penal code than its counterpart.

A paradox within a paradox, some might say. The truth, as with much of the city, was more complex. After decades of being treated as Piltover's dirty little secret—the "backroom brothel of the highest bidder," Councilor Hoskel once scathingly put it—Zaun had begun its own metamorphosis. The city had once been forced to peddle its body to survive. Now, it was beginning to reclaim its agency, from a commoditized fetish to a self-determined desire.

And, in the process, was rewriting the rules.

Fittingly, the final stretch of the Skylight Commercia was dedicated to Zaun's thriving esoteric subculture. Dubbed the Psychedelia, it was a homage to the mystical gossamer that spun through Zaun's inexorably modernizing core. Here, the city's interfaith tolerance was at its most vibrant: luminous marquees displayed the crests of the city's myriad sects, cults and orders. Braziers of incense-smoke perfumed the air; cloying sweetness of rose, the earthy tang of sandalwood, the musky richness of ambergris. Mendicants and monks and mystics wandered in ecstatic throngs, chanting hymns and prayers. Tables were heaped with crystals, talismans and amulets: vast tents showcased eye-popping relics, from the bones of fabled beasts, to the mummified genitalia of a forgotten god, to the fossilized footprints of the progenitors.

It was, in many ways, the Expo's heart: the thread that wove through its rave circuit, its drug-fueled revelry, its steam-powered innovations. For all its modernizing zeal, Zaun was an ancient city. Its roots reached deep into the primordial depths. Flowing through its veins was the effusion of millennia-old magic.

The supernatural was an irrevocable facet of the Zaunite psyche. The city's mysticism was as varied as its cuisine, as pluralistic as its political leanings, and spanned the full breadth of Runeterra. Some believed the gods were a reflection of the natural order, and sought to emulate them. Others believed the gods were manifestations of the divine within, and strove to commune with them. Yet others believed the gods were the byproducts of human delusion, and sought to transcend them.

In any case, spirituality, like sexuality, was an integral facet of the Zaunite character. The sacred and the profane each held a mirror to the other: between the twain, the city's soul was defined.

Nowhere was this belief more evident than in the Temple of Janna. Once the Freljordian goddess of wind, wisdom and transformation, a syncretic blend of folkloric beliefs had coalesced around her. She was, at once, the gentle breeze of a summer day; the wizened elder dispensing hard-won wisdom; and the mother, ever-patient, ready to embrace an unruly child.

Zaun's version of the goddess elevated her to a patron deity. For many, she was the embodiment of the spark that animated the city itself. A pilgrimage to her temple was a rite of passage. Her adherents were devoted to the principles of nonviolence, universal love, and communal sharing. All were welcome: the disabled, the destitute, the damned. The Temple courtyard was renowned for its open kitchens, where hot meals were ladled out to the needy from massive cauldrons. The acolytes were the city's peacekeepers; the Priestess, the heart of the community. She was an unassuming figure, dressed in humble white robes, her only ornamentation the blue-feather circlet crowning her head. Weekly, she led prayers in the Temple in a perfumed waft of incense, the gentle melody of her voice rising above the murmurs of her congregants. Afterward she would receive the faithful in her chambers: lost souls seeking everything from poultices for blisters to divination for a lost loved one.

Another sect, the Order of the Solari, was devoted to the worship of a deity from ancient Targon. His name had long since faded from history. But the Solari's tenets, as written down in the holy book, were clear. The sun, the light of creation, was the ultimate symbol of purity. It was, thus, the only source of truth. heir shrines were distinctive: small turrets of gold leaf, crowned with a sun motif. At the cusp of the Equinox, when the sun's brightness penetrated even the Fissures, the golden rays would converge, as a prismatic burst, across the cityscape, in a phenomenon the Solari's devotees called the Radiance.

The devotees were a militant order, and yet the Solari's creed was a paradox. No was exempt from the light's grace. Even those damned to darkness. For there was, within each soul, a kernel of light. The sect was forbidden from taking human life, except in the direst acts of self-defense. Nor were they allowed to discriminate against anyone. All were welcome, the Solari believed, to seek the light.

Other sects were more selective. The cult of the Kindred, for example, shrouded itself in mystery. Its twin deities, the Wolf and the Lamb, embodied the dance of life and death, and the balance that kept both in equilibrium. Rites were secret; initiations private. Their temples, hidden in the city's darker recesses, were alternately sanctuaries to the suffering, or sinister dens of the damned. The cult's most controversial ritual was rumored to be a monthly mass, where its followers took a vow of celibacy, fasted for three days, then broke the seal, in a frenzy of bloodlust: feasting on the flesh of the freshly-slain, and copulating until the sun rose.

Similarly, the cult of the Veiled Lady was the object of both fear and fascination. A minor sect, with a few thousand devotees, the Lady's worship was rooted in the oldest stories from Demacia. In them, the Lady was the goddess of retribution, her veil concealing the true face of justice. Those who sought her aid were said to pay a steep price. Those who invoked her wrath were said to know no mercy. The Lady's followers were as shadowy as their goddess. They congregated, monthly, to a cathedral of purple stained-glass, hidden from prying eyes.

In sum, the Expo showcased a city in full blossom: a burgeoning capitalist economy, an unparalleled cultural milieu, and an unprecedented spiritual landscape. Each exhibit was a celebration of progress. And yet there was no pomp, no pageantry, no pretense of nobility. Zaun wore its pride like its heart: unashamedly, defiantly, on a bloodstained sleeve.

This was the city's story: from a brutal underbelly to a brash metropolis. From the cesspit of a thousand vices to the cradle of a thousand wonders.

From the bottom of nothingness, to the heights of its own creation.

And nowhere to go—but forward.

---

"OOOH," was all you could say.

"What'd I tell ya?" Dustin crowed. "Nice, huh?"

"Oooh."

Ran nudged your shoulder. "I think you broke 'em, Dustin."

"Naaaaw. You're a toughie, right, Goodie? Hey, the night's still young! How about we head to the Lazy Eye? Loraine's doing her set. And she's got a new trick up her sleeve. Or rather, her—"

"Oooh."

"Damn." Lock chuckled. "That's the sound of a happy camper."

You could neither confirm nor deny. The body-stone still buzzed though you. It turned the Expo into a jewelbox welded in glittering flux. The night air felt luminous on the skin. Greenish halos of lanterns lit up the boardwalk. Clutches of Zaunites eddied around the square. Like you, most were cheerfully intoxicated. The music was an effervescent throb; the neon lights, a pulsating rainbow.

In the distance, a distorted bell chimed. You blinked. What was the hour? The day? The week? Time was a slippery notion, and your thoughts were slipperier. You could feel them sliding against each other. The sensation made you giggle. The world was your backdrop: an abstract swirl of sensation.

Your notepad was chockful of words. It was as if the hours were a veritable feast, and your pen had gorged itself silly.

"Oooooh."

"Poor lightweight," Ran sighed. "You'll be a sad camper when this wears off."

"They'll be alright," Dustin dismissed breezily. "A little fun never killed anybody."

"Unless it's cannaboid hyperemesis. Or toxic shock syndrome. Or aneurysms. Or—"

"What's an-e-rhyzums?"

"A bleeding brain. The blood vessel explodes and you're dead."

"Blech!"

"Blech yourself. That's enough fun. Siddown, Mx. Goode. You need a coffee."

"I'll get it," Lock said. "Grab the kid some water, too."

"Oooh."

Your body was guided to a bench. The seat was bracingly cool; your rear felt the chill straight through your trousers. You shivered. It felt good. Your toes, your fingers, your ears were burning. Was this what it meant to be alive? To feel every cell in your body, singing, arias in praise of their own existence.

The festivity was winding down for the night. Soon, the crowds will disperse. A rarity for Zaun, where haunts are open at all hours. But the Expo, demurely, would not allow itself to be turned into a carnival sideshow. Tomorrow would be another day, another chance to dazzle the masses. For now, the revelers would return to their lodgings, and the cleanup will begin.

Dreamily, you watched the crowds thin out. In the distance, a trio of street-singers, harmonizing to an accordion, serenades passersby with an old Fissurefolk ballad. This one appeared a popular favorite. Bystanders gathered in small clusters, swaying to the melody. Others, in jolly chorus, belted out the refrain:

She was young. She was fair. She was new. She was nice.

She was pure. She was sweet, seventeen.

He was old. He was vile, no stranger to vice.

He was bad. He was base. He was mean...

The singers' voices, liltingly sweet, compelled tapping feet and clapping hands. As they reached the verse's apex, the music darkened.

Unaware of the wiles of the snake in the grass

And the fate of a maiden who topes.

She lowered her standards by raising her glass,

Her mind, her courage, and his hopes.

It's a song that would never see a Piltover-sanctioned anthology. A cautionary tale about reckless youth and the consequences of indulgence. But tonight, with the streets awash in neon and the skies alight with stars, it was no more than a jaunty ditty. The lyrics were not the point: the singer's voices, rich with the promise of tomorrow, were the only ones that mattered.

"Have some Madeira, m'dear!

I've got a small cask of it here

And once it's been opened, you know it won't keep

Do finish it up, it will help you to sleep.

Have some Madeira, m'dear!"

Ran dug a coin out of their wallet, skipping it like a stone into the tip-jar. Dustin sat cross-legged on a wrought-iron bench, fists under his chin, head bobbing to the beat. Lock, seemingly out of nowhere, had materialized with a steaming paper cup and a bottle of water.

"Here ya go, Mx. Good. Black and bitter, the way Himself likes it."

You sipped. The brew was strong enough to cut the haze. The warmth spread down your gullet and pooled, comforting, in your belly. It smelled like the bitterness Sumps, the smokiness of Entresol, the richness of the Promenade, all distilled into a single sip. You had to admit—for all its pretensions as a culinary epicenter, Piltover's coffee tasted like burnt bean-water in comparison.

"Good, right?" Lock said. "We call it the Wake-Up Call."

"Mmmm."

"Hey, that's better! Feeling alright?"

"Mmhmmm."

"There's our chatterbox." A heavy hand thumped your back, nearly sloshing the coffee down your shirt. "Drink up. The night's not done. We've still got plenty of Zaun's finest to sample."

"Ooh—" You cut yourself off. No need to alarm them. "Okay."

"Great. I'm thinking we hit the streets. You can get the candid scoop on Zaunite life from the locals. After, we'll head to the Blue Note. The barkeep makes a wicked bloody mary. And their oyster menu's the best this side of the bay. What d'ya say, Mx. Goode? You in?"

"Oooh!

Ran slitted a wary eye. "Maybe we should take 'em home."

"N-No!" You hastened to reassure, "I'm fine. Really. I'm here to have an adventure, aren't I? And I'd rather have a drink, with my new friends. Than a cup of tea, with nobody."

Dustin guffawed. "Aww, that's adorable! Hey, Ran. Tell 'em about the time you got so blotto, you stabbed a guy in the nuts for spilling your tea."

"Shut the hell up, Dustin."

"What? They want a candid scoop! That's what we're doing, right, Goodie? Showin' you the real Zaun! Nut-stabbing goes with the territory."

"I will end you."

"All right, all right! No nut-stabbing. Damn. Hey, Goodie, how's that coffee treatin' ya? Ready to see the real nightlife?"

You drained the rest of the cup, then crushed it. "Let's do this."

"That's the spirit! C'mon! We're gonna have us a night that'll get the whole damn city talking!"

Hindsight, fair reader, was always 20/20.

By next morning—a hungover, groggy, aching mess—you would eat your overzealousness the way a drunken man ate the pavement.

Nothing but a crash, and a cry.