Training a mortal to fight is, at the best of times, an exercise in monumental patience. Training Vi, specifically, was like trying to teach an enraged crag-bear with boxing gloves the nuances of Ionian calligraphy. Every fibre of her being screamed for action, for impact, for a direct and violent solution. And my job was, ironically, to teach her the virtue of doing nothing. Of breathing. Of waiting. A personal hell for both of us, I'd say.
Mortality has this design flaw: it mistakes strength for noise. They believe the loudest hammer, the rowdiest chem-tech engine, the voice that shouts the highest, are the most powerful. It is a fallacy I have seen bring down countless civilisations. True strength is silent. It is the weight of a mountain. It is the patience of a glacier. It is the inexorable pressure of the ocean floor. But try explaining that to a Zaunite teenager whose standard response to most problems is a right hook.
Our mornings on the tea house rooftop became a series of unconventional trials, designed as much for her improvement as for my own sadistic amusement. Today, the test was on sensory balance. I placed a thick black blindfold over her eyes.
"Your eyes lie to you," I explained, as she extended her arms awkwardly. "They make you trust in what you think you know. Your anger, your overconfidence. Today, you are going to learn to listen with your feet."
Her task was to cross a single wooden beam I had placed on the floor. It sounded simple. It was impossibly difficult. She took two steps, her entire body tense, and lost her balance, stumbling to the side.
"What's the problem now?" she grumbled.
"The problem is you're trying to walk on the beam," I replied, my arms crossed. "Stop thinking about it. Think about the air. Feel it on your skin, the wind that blows from Piltover, the damp breeze that rises from Zaun. Find the point of balance between the two and walk through it. The beam is just a consequence."
She tried again, and again. She nearly fell a dozen times. <"Congratulations, Bubblegum,"> I thought, <"you are officially less stable than a drunken owl trying to fly in a straight line."> But slowly, reluctantly, she began to understand. Her breathing slowed. Her posture relaxed. And she took three steps. Three perfect steps. It was agonising progress, but it was progress.
Emotional balance was a different battlefield entirely. In the middle of a combat form, I would deliberately provoke her. "Your movement is slow. The anger makes you slow. It's predictable. The problem isn't that your punches are weak, Bubblegum. The problem is that a myopic Piltovan inventor could predict your next move from ten paces away."
I saw the muscle in her jaw twitch. The red creep up her neck. The fire I had taught her to find began to burn out of control. Her fists clenched so tightly her knuckles went white. She was about to explode, to abandon all technique in favour of pure violence.
"And there it is," I said, my voice calm. "The beast at the end of the leash. Easy to provoke, easy to lead into a trap."
She took a deep breath, once, twice, three times. The fire did not go out, but it receded, contained behind her eyes. The bear had not been tamed, but at least it had learned not to snarl at every squirrel.
The last trial of the day was the cruellest. Two younger boys from Zaun, perhaps eight or nine, were on the bridge below, near the entrance to our shop, in a heated dispute over a single shiny cog. They were on the verge of coming to blows.
"Solve it," I ordered. "But without touching either of them."
The look on Vi's face was one of pure panic. To her, this was a situation with only one solution: a clip 'round the ear for each of them, snatching the cog, and sending them home. Diplomacy was not in her vocabulary. She approached them awkwardly. "Oi, you two… stop it. It's… it's wrong."
The boys ignored her completely. She tried again, stammering, trying to reason. The sight of Vi, the queen of the street brawls, trying to mediate a children's squabble was so absurdly funny I almost smiled. Finally, she gave up.
"Look," she said, her voice filled with the old, familiar irritation. "Whoever gives me that cog right now, I'll pay you two of the biscuits from the shop. And whoever doesn't… well, you both owe me a favour."
The boys looked at each other, calculated the odds, and without hesitation, handed her the cog. Peace, it seemed, could be bought with sugar and the subtle threat of a future debt of violence. It was crude. Imperfect. But it worked. And it involved no broken bones. I considered it a monumental victory.
My newest and most reluctant student was taking her training seriously, showing up on the rooftop every morning with a fierce determination that was almost frightening. An interesting side effect of this new routine was a subtle shift in how she viewed our shop. Before, she would bring Powder with her now and then, more like a burden she had to look after, letting her 'play' with me while she kept a wary distance. Now, the frequency had increased, and the nature of the visits had changed. It was no longer about safety; it was about permission.
She began to bring her sister to 'The Last Cup' once or twice a week, with the excuse that she needed a quiet place. While Vi would sink into an armchair, waging an epic battle with one of my history books "This thing's got more complicated words than a Piltovan contract!" she'd complain in frustration, she would give Powder an almost imperceptible nod. It was her way of saying 'go on'.
And Powder, needing no second invitation, would find her natural, almost instinctive path to my cellar. She no longer asked for permission with her eyes but would descend the stairs with the confidence of someone who knows they are welcome in the dragon's lair. For her, my workshop was the greatest of treasures. For me, it was the beginning of increasingly complex headaches.
Powder's visits became the high point (or low point, depending on the number of explosions) of my days. She would come with boxes full of precious scrap, her eyes shining. And one day, she brought a friend. A quiet, white-haired boy with eyes so intelligent and calculating they seemed to belong to an old inventor. His name was Ekko.
He entered my cellar with an initial wariness, but the moment his eyes landed on my failed prototypes, something in him relaxed. He did not see failures; he saw data. He saw potential. He and Powder began to talk in a language of their own, a dialect of cogs, coils, and absurd theories.
"If we reverse the capacitor's flow, we could create a localised electromagnetic pulse!" Powder said.
"But if we do that," Ekko countered, "the containment field will collapse and it will probably open a temporary hole in spacetime! It would be much more efficient to use a hex-frequency resonator to…"
I leaned against my workbench, watching the two of them.
It was in the middle of one of these chaotic invention sessions that the workshop's innocence shattered. Ekko, ever the more curious, was rummaging on one of my higher shelves, where I kept my more… sensitive components. His fingers found a small, dark wooden box. He opened it. And froze.
"Do you… do you know what this is?" his voice was a whisper of pure awe and disbelief. He took out one of the smaller brackern crystals, which pulsed with a faint blue light in his hand. "This here… a piece this size. It's worth more than everything in Zaun put together. This… this could keep a whole family fed for months."
Powder moved closer, her eyes behind her goggles widening, drooling with pure scientific curiosity for the legendary, almost unobtainable piece of tech.
I didn't even look up from the copper coil I was adjusting. "Oh, those?" I said with a deliberately casual tone. "Got them from an… alternative supplier. His profit margins are dreadful, but he offers a discount on bulk. Let's just say his product fell off a moving cart. A very well-guarded cart."
Ekko stared at me, his eyes wide with shock. Powder just let out a "Wow… that's so cool."
I put the coil aside and turned to them. The game was over. The tone of my voice shifted, becoming lower, more serious. "They are not cool, Powder. And they are worth much more than mere coin, Ekko." I took the same crystal he was holding and placed it in the palm of my hand. "Piltover calls them Hex-crystals. They say they are power stones. That's a half-truth, which is the most effective kind of lie. The truth is, they are what's left of a living consciousness, a soul, that was mined, fractured, and refined until only pure fuel remained."
The room fell silent, the hum of our unfinished inventions suddenly seeming louder.
"Every crystal," I continued, "is the last breath of something that once dreamed. That's why they pulse. They're remembering."
I looked at Ekko. "You touched it, didn't you? And you felt something, a shiver, a… strange echo."
He nodded slowly, his face serious.
"That wasn't static," I said. "Now, do it again." I held the crystal out to them in my palm. "But this time, don't just touch it. Close your eyes. And listen. Really listen. Look for the sad music underneath the hum."
Hesitantly, the two of them reached out a finger. First Ekko, then Powder. They touched the smooth, cool surface of the crystal. I watched the concentration on their faces, the attempt to go beyond the physical. And then, the reaction.
A visible shudder ran down Powder's arm. Her eyes widened behind her goggles, no longer with scientific awe, but with a genuine, empathetic fear. Ekko snatched his hand back as if he'd been burned, his face pale.
"What… what was that?" he stammered, looking at his own hand as if it had touched a ghost.
"You tell me," I replied.
"I felt… something," Powder whispered, her voice trembling. "So… sad. Like someone crying, very, very far away."
"I heard it," Ekko said, his gaze fixed on the crystal. "A sound… like a wail. A thousand voices, all screaming in silence."
The horror of understanding began to settle on their young faces. The legendary piece of technology, the inventor's Holy Grail, was not just a battery. It was a tomb. And they had just heard the ghosts.
The indignation came next, hot and pure. "They use this," Ekko said, his voice shaking with anger, "to power their luxuries in Piltover? Their golden lifts? Their pretty lamps? All of this… at the expense of… of souls?!"
Powder was conflicted. I could see the battle on her face between moral horror and an inventor's fascination with pure power. "But… but so much energy," she murmured. "Imagine the things we could build with it. Good… things."
I watched them in silence, letting the heavy truth do its work. This was a lesson they needed to learn, not from my mouth, but from their own consciences. The beauty and the terror of progress. The dilemma at the heart of every great inventor.
"That is how the balance of the world works, children," I said at last, my voice as cold as the cellar. "For every bright, shining tower in Piltover, there is a deep shadow and a dark mine somewhere else. Never forget that. Never trust anything that is too beautiful to be true. And never, ever let the beauty of power blind you to the price it always charges."
And there, in my dark cellar, lit by the ghostly light of imprisoned spirits, I saw two seeds being planted. In Ekko's heart, a seed of righteous fury, the root of a future revolutionary who would hate Piltover with every fibre of his being. And in Powder's heart, a far more complicated seed: that of conflict. The horror of the price, warring against the undeniable desire to use that terrible power to create something wonderful.
Innocence had died a little that afternoon. And the future of Zaun, I suspected, had just taken a much darker turn.
[Lesson complete. Existential traumas successfully induced. The probability of one or both juvenile subjects initiating a technologically advanced insurrection in the future has increased by 45%.]
A wry, tired smile touched my lips.