[Fanfiction] Fracture - Chapter 1
PROLOGUE: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/fZAXxjHA-fanfiction-fracture
Fanfiction.net link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10770866/1/Fracture
Genres: Suspense/Drama/Mystery/a lot of others Characters: Leona, Caitlyn, Nasus, Kassadin, too many to list
Summary: The machine that sustains the lethal matches of the League fails. Events spiral outwards. (Character death.)
RIPPLE
Because she was a warrior of Rakkor, she would not cry. This, above all else, was what Leona told herself as she tried to coax her hands to cease their shaking. She closed her eyes slowly, resting her forehead against the wall and taking a deep breath.
Diana was dead.
The mere thought of it summoned a resurgence of sorrow – there was a tightening in her chest that she couldn't describe. Leona knew that one day she would have had to kill her, knew that somewhere down the road Diana would die. She had done her best over the years to make peace with that. But for Diana to meet her end in an accident? By the hands of someone other than her?
It was inconceivable, and more than anything, the Radiant Dawn wanted it to be a dream.
The Fields of Justice were shutting down. The Institute of War was sending almost all of its champions away until the error could be fixed. Their exact words irked her. Diana's demise had been a mistake. The error they failed to notice had cost her life.
Leona opened her eyes, blinking a few times to clear away the grainy filter. Her hands had stopped shaking, but still she felt unsteady. She backed away from the wall, collapsing ungracefully onto her cot. It was only a matter of time until she would be urged to leave the barracks, to abandon the Institute until they could ensure all was running properly.
She didn't want to leave.
It wasn't that she didn't want to return to Rakkor, nor was it that she had any fondness for the League. She just – she still had so many questions. The why's and how's haunted her, and above all else, she wanted to know how Diana spent her last moments. Was she in pain? Did she die slowly?
What were her last words?
Did Diana leave this world cursing her? It pained her to think so, but Leona knew that the years had not done well for her. The curious, free-spirited girl she once knew had become a bitter woman, and her hands were not clean of fault. Maybe if Diana had not been driven to such circumstances, she would not have ended up here. She wouldn't have died.
Maybe in the end, it was utterly her fault.
Leona shot upright abruptly, some strange kind of urgency flooding her senses. She had to know, to understand what happened. Though she was already opening the door, the Radiant Dawn had but a faint idea of where she was heading, only a vague notion of what she might find once she reached her destination.
Tired of not knowing, that was good enough.
. . . Someone was knocking.
It was more of a sharp rap, really. They must've had thin knuckles, or so the Outlaw figured in the haze of his hangover-addled brain.
“Graves. Graves!”
He groaned, burying his head further into his arms. His head was pounding – but maybe it was actually his door. He didn't know. Didn't care.
“Graves, good god! Will you just open up?” came the indignant shout.
The Outlaw opted to ignore her, sniffling once as he tried to resettle himself. How in the world had he found the table comfortable before? His back hurt like a bitch.
“Graves!” she screeched, and the shrillness of it practically split his head. “O-pen up!”
“Fortune!” he barked, voice muffled through his arms. He looked up, eyes squinting at the door. “Will you just – it's open, dammit!”
The door swung open to the click-click of high heels as he dropped his head back down to the table, cursing under his breath.
“Finally!” Miss Fortune huffed, hands on her hips. Her nose wrinkled at the strong reek of alcohol in the room, the slovenly mess of bottles at his feet. “And you didn't even share.”
“The hell you want?” he grumbled, finally sitting upright. His face had an ill pallor about it, his eyes sunken in and ringed with dark circles.
“You look like shit, old man,” she remarked, toeing aside another empty bottle as she circled around to get a better look at him. The Bounty Hunter whistled. “Like a corpse.”
“Didja come to take shots at me,” he snapped, “or was there something you actually needed?”
“Calm down, I was just checking up on you,” she told him flippantly with a wave of her hand. “Nobody's seen you in two-some days. You expect us to just leave you to rot?”
He didn't answer, turning away from her gaze. His head was still pounding, the light of day seared his eyes – but more than anything, it was how empty his insides felt that stuck out to him. He'd tried and tried to fill himself up, with alcohol among other things, but nothing seemed to work.
“You're not in a rut about her, are you?”
“Heh.” It was a sardonic sort of laugh, more of a wry exhale from the back of his throat than anything. He leaned back in his chair, casting a hand over his eyes. “Reckon I might be.”
“You're such a fool,” she sighed, crossing her arms.
“I'll give you that one,” he said, without moving.
“It wasn't your fault.” When Graves didn't respond, the Bounty Hunter kicked the back of his chair, jerking him forward. He glanced over at her, decidedly unamused at her thin smile. “An accident was bound to happen, and you were the one who ended up pulling the trigger on it. That's it, now will you stop being a pathetic mess? It's not like you did anything you didn't normally do.”
“You listen here, Fortune,” he snapped, irritably running a hand through his hair. “I may be a crook, but I ain't no murderer – ”
“It wasn't murder, you stupid man!”
“You weren't there. You didn't see the look on her face.” The anger faded now; there remained only the hollow quality of his tired eyes. He leaned forward onto the table, covering his face with his hands. “She was so young. Almost as young as you, I reckon...”
Miss Fortune's agitated expression softened. She laid a light hand on his shoulder.
“Malcolm... That's not so young, anymore...”
“Go home, Fortune,” he said tersely, shrugging off her hand. “Go back to Bilgewater. The Institute's insistin' everyone go back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ain't any League matches happening when there's a chance of dying again. Not until they get it fixed.”
“And what about you?” she demanded, hands on her hips.
“What about me?” asked Graves, looking up. “Nowhere I'm looking to go back to.” A grim smile stretched across his face. “They want me 'round for some more questioning, anyhow.”
“Then I'm not leaving,” she said shortly. “Heaven knows if you were left to your own devices how quick you'd kill yourself on the booze.”
“You sure about that?” Idly, he tipped a bottle off the edge of the table, watching as it crashed to the floor below in a shattering of glass. “Things'll get heavy around here right quick. People ain't gonna be happy when the word gets out, and far as I know the Institute's expecting some big political blowout. You sure you wanna be here when that gets underway?”
The Bounty Hunter laughed sharply, waving her hand in a disdainfully dismissive gesture. “If it's political muck you're talking about, I've been dealing with that salty old mutt Gangplank for years. I can handle a couple old windbags harping, thank you very much.”
“Your funeral,” scoffed the Outlaw, reaching for an unopened bottle.
. . .
Working next to such a convoluted mess of machinery might have been dizzying for any high-caliber scientist, never mind working on it as he was doing. The potent arcane magic used to power the system, too, posed a dangerous threat should any careless hand accidentally become the completing component in the severed circuit. Any ordinary man would be killed in an instant – the Machine Herald, thankfully, was anything but.
With only the vaguest hint of bitterness, he wondered if he had been the Institute's first choice to repair the system. While it had been a creation of his own designs, he knew that they were beginning to place less and less stock in him as a champion, all questions of his loyalties aside. It wouldn't have surprised him if Jayce had been put to work on it instead – the so-called Defender of Tomorrow's reputation had grown immensely by now. Still, he supposed it would have been foolish for them to have called anyone else to the job. Who better than the creator to repair it?
Viktor paused, yanking out a loose cord with a soft grunt. The system's core had been eaten away at, as if something had been burrowing through the wires. He would have to sever the entire thing and then rewire it again, assuming there was no damage done elsewhere. Though he had augmented his eyes, improvements of which were only amplified by the lenses of his mask, the shadows cast by the thick knotting of wires were still difficult to see through. His third arm whirred as it rotated around to shine the flashlight it held in the proper place.
“I thought I'd find you here.”
He had been concentrating so much on the machine, he hadn't heard her enter. The light glinted off of something, deep inside the mess of coiled cords.
“Sheriff,” he greeted evenly, lowering himself to his elbows to get a closer look. “If this is about your rifle, now is not the best time.”
“I'm not here about that. The Institute has me on the case.”
Neither of them needed to elaborate on exactly what case she spoke of.
“Come to poke around the Respawn Room, then?” he asked nonchalantly, reaching his arm shoulder-deep into the gap eaten out of the wires. “Or come to interrogate me?”
“A little bit of both, you could say.”
He could hear her heels clicking, as she stepped off to the side. Glancing quickly over his shoulder, only her legs were visible as she went to settle against the main console, the rest of her obscured by the overhanging panel that usually covered the system core he was currently repairing.
“Don't lean on that,” he warned, returning to his work. “If you have questions for me, make them quick.”
“Why is it just you here? I'd have thought that the Institute would have an entire team working to get this system back online.”
“There might have been an entire team necessary to construct it,” he said, still scrounging around in the gap, “but there was only one mind that engineered it.”
“Yours, I take it,” she supplied, without much thought.
“At its completed state, it is extremely dangerous to mess with. Having several others working at once would simply complicate things.” He finally caught hold of something – a handful of something – dense and jagged, and he pulled his hand from the gap, flinging the object out with some difficulty. A cracked arcane crystal slid across the floor, in pieces. “Although, without power, it isn't much but a shell.”
The Machine Herald crawled out from underneath the panel, brushing the dust off his pants as he stood and surveyed the damage. With the light still focused into the gap, he could see some remnants of the shattered crystal left behind, sparkling in the low light.
“What happened to it?” asked the sheriff curiously, and he turned to see her kneeling by the crystal, examining it.
“There are numerous possibilities,” he replied, crossing his arms. “It could have been overloaded by magic and shattered then, or it could have been physically struck. Either would damage it.”
“You've experience in damaged arcane crystals, if I recall,” she remarked dryly. When he didn't grace her with a response, she continued, “Either would had to have been intentional?”
“Not necessarily in the case of the former. Respawning champions often generate energy surges capable of overloading the crystal, however, the system is equipped with failsafes to deal with them. It is entirely possible that the failsafe erred, and a surge caused the system to go offline.” Viktor shifted his weight from one foot to the other impatiently, robotic arm clicking the flashlight on and off rapidly as if it were a pen. “But...”
“There's no way the failsafe could have erred, is that right?” said the sheriff, finishing his thought.
He inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment. “That is correct. I wired it myself – it should be watertight, unless someone tampered with it.”
“Beyond that,” she began, taking a pair of tweezers out of her belt, “the way this crystal was broken looks as if it were crushed.”
He watched as she sifted through the pieces, holding them up for examination before dropping them into a plastic bag.
“Overloaded crystals explode. They do not implode,” he remarked.
“Indeed...” she murmured thoughtfully, sealing the bag and tucking it into a pouch on her belt. Caitlyn stood, replacing her tweezers before looking at him. “What's the damage there?” she asked, gesturing at the core.
“Most of the wires that surrounded the crystal are severed – as if something ate through them. As far as my scans have read, everything else seems untouched.”
“Severing those wires on their own would have rendered the system offline, wouldn't it?”
“Correct. The components of the core are the most essential parts of the system. Damage to any of it would have ceased system operation.”
“Then it seems strange that whoever did this went through all the trouble to crush the crystal. Arcane crystals are notoriously strong, are they not?”
Something about that observation set him ill at ease, and he did not reply to her for a long while, thinking. Someone had gone through all the trouble of disabling, or else bypassing, the heavy security around the Respawn Room, of lifting up the panel covering the system core and cutting through the wires to destroy the crystal within. It was obvious, to both of them, he was sure, that the culprit had wanted the sabotage to go undetected for as long as possible, or else they would have brute-forced their way through the covering panel instead of bothering to dismantle and then replace it, as they had forced their way through the wire knotting around the crystal.
But why? A temporary disabling of the system would not have warranted the crystal's destruction, but it was the only reason he could think of thus far as to why anyone would tamper with his creation. A temporary disabling of the virtual immortality granted by the system left the League's champions vulnerable to such things as assassination – something that, with the plethora of politically high-profile champions in the League, would not have surprised him in the slightest. An assassin could time the disruption with their attempt. A permanent disruption, however, would be equally as perilous to the aggressor as it would be to the intended victim, and the League as they knew it would not be able to last if its champions were once again subject to the dangers of death.
Arcane crystals, particularly of the kind used to power the system, were difficult and expensive to obtain, and finding a replacement would certainly take several months, if not years. It was definite that the Institute of War could not continue operating the Fields of Justice during that time. It was almost as if, by suspending the system, the culprit hoped to suspend the League. But again, why?
A thought came to him, foreboding and unbidden.
At this point, he knew of only one certainty.
“Whoever rendered my machine offline,” said Viktor at last, “did not want it online again for a long time.” . . . Chapter 2: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/t7FlpKLO-fanfiction-fracture-chapter-2
