[Witness]: a PROJECT Fanfiction.

Disclaimer: English is not my mother tongue nor i am i used to write in it. Any criticism, both on the literal and narrative side, is well accepted.

//Beginning playback

You ask me of PROJECT. That's an interesting tale. You see, the Machine War was nothing like whatever parody of war came before that. There were no quarters, no rules, no civilians or neutrals. It was the Creator and his mechanical beings against, well, everyone else. And yet, even when that bloody psycho was carpet bombing cities left and right, he kept preaching about his so-called mercy. "Be upgraded and live" the speakers shouted, every day. "Join the Glorious Evolution and the fleshlings' flaws shall haunt you no more." All in a synthetic, creepy as sin voice. The scary thing is many of us- way more than i like to admit- tought he had a point. The Battlecasts were crushing armies left and right, and for all his blatant insanity, the Creator was a ma...thing of his word. When your choices are playing dodgeball with a mountain-tall death engine or licking some metal boots and getting mechanized, the upgrading seems pretty attractive.

So, while the babbling politicians were planning surrendering our bloody humanity, someone in the high brass of Piltover put together this dream team of inventors. Who knows how they managed that- getting old' Donger and Rumble in the same room was about as dangerous as facing a Battlecast head on, but they came up with something marvelous. Someone once said that to fight monsters, you need monsters of your own. We went one step forward. We created heroes. We found a squad of the toughest bastards the world had to offer. Some were in for the glory, some for the power. Nobody cared. The only requirement was an iron will. After the failure with the disruption field in north Shurima we knew that magic was worthless, so we tried sending war machines versus war machines. As it turned out, pitting mechanical weapons in the way of the best hacker in the world was a terrible idea. So, the brain boys ( believe it or not, that's exactly how we called them) decided to strap the absolute best gear we had on some good old fleshbags. There would be no digital highway for the Creator to hack through, as the commands would travel only by nerve itself. The poor guys themselves would become the operating system, controlling the arsenal we gave them the same way one lifts a finger. Of course, there was a catch. We didn't just give them fancy weapons or a cool-looking armor. We ripped the flesh from their bones and poured titanium in their skin. Cut off limbs and jacked prosthetics on whatever remained. We're talking the stuff of nightmares, here. It was messy- and final. No going back. They all knew this. I talked to one of them the day before the operation. That woman was a martyr born- i'm not sure if this is a compliment, though. We were all terrified that one of them would just refuse to live through that torture and then she ...she strolls in, radiant smile and all, asks politely for some Rakkor beverage and then justs lands herself on the operating table. Keep in mind that the entire process had to be done while conscious. Anesthesia just doesn't cut it when it comes to nerve syncing. I'd love to say that she went through it all stern and silent, but she screamed. A lot. Four weeks the augmenting, four weeks recovery, two weeks attuning. In the end, we had the elite team to end all elite team. The subjects-or victims, i'd say- were already near superhuman before the operation; once they got used to their new toys, they were something greater. Some where adapting better than others. Some found their new power intoxicating. When we let in that crazy guy from Ionia we just assumed he was going to turn on us, sooner or later. We still didn't care. As long as we got rid of the machines; there would be time for the inevitable civil war later. At this point, Shurima had fallen completely and Ionia was quarantined. With that gigantic abomination of a factory sprawling next to Zaun, the Pilties knew they were next. After briefly considering half a dozen names, one more stupid and edgy-sounding than the other, the brain boys settled on simply calling the entire operation PROJECT. Because you know, it wasn't a project. It was the project. Either that worked, or we would all have ended up drinking tea from a pump inside one of the Creator's facilities. We released the PROJECT deep into enemy territory, in small teams of three persons top. The targets? Everything. Assembling facilities, mines, the Battlecast convoys themselves when we had a chance to catch one without much backup. We expected a fifty, sixty percent success rate top, and about twelve casualties in the first four months of operation. Thank the gods, we were all wrong. To be honest, we never expected the PROJECTs to win the war or anything. The baseline plan -even if no one was cold-hearted enough to admit it- was to just stall the damn machines until we could negotiate better terms with the Creator. Maybe, we tought, if we put up enough of a fight , the psycho would just let us be in exchange for some territory, or treasures, or whatever. We were still thinking in traditional warfare terms. It wasn't a smart plan, but it was a plan nonetheless. Everything changed just two weeks after the deployement . We were keeping a close eye on this three-men strike team, and we were about to send them new orders- by pidgeon, believe it or not. Long range communication was a mess with all the scrambling towers. Then we got words from the Demacian scout. A Battlecast Titan had been activated, two hundred miles from the Demacian border. Everyone in the top floor was looking for their brown pants, and the entire Demacian army was panicking like a yordle after a month in isolation cell. We had this safe communication crystal synced on Demacia, and it was overflowing with evacuation orders and stuff like that. Four days later - the bloody thing was incredibly slow, but i guess that's the drawback from being a giant engine of destruction- the Battlecast smashed a couple of outposts, got half the cavalry division running for their lives, and caused a small eruption and a not-so-small earthquake. Then, it fell silent. We had already lost contact with the strike team, but we assumed the poor pidgeon died in the smoke caused by the titan. We were..amazed? Amazed seems like the right word. We were amazed to discover that the PROJECTS, led by Leona herself, had stopped the Battlecast. And by "stopped", i mean "tore the damn monster apart". We had the best military minds of the generation stressed out at the tought of merely slowing one down, and those three broke the bastard to pieces. How? You wouldn't believe me if i told you, and i'm sure you can already find the tapes somewhere. Let's just say that the living embodiment of the sun wearing the most advanced battle armor Piltover has ever produced is just a class above "mechanical-city-crushing-abomination". We popped the bottles of Freljord's True Flavour and got ourselves as drunk as possible before going back to work. We just downed one of the Creator's favourite pets and we knew he was going to make us pay for it. The fun part is we didn't care. At all. We made the bastard bleed whatever fluid he had instead of blood and we were going to do that again. And again. In the following months, we had PROJECT teams everywhere. Guerrilla up in the Freljord, open warfare on the Demacian plains. It was savage. Battlecast hordes and titans were falling left and right, and once we managed to break through the disrupting network, oh boy. The morale skyrocketed. Shurima was , what, eighty percent occupied? And yet as soon as Yi and his team fried the control towers, it was in full uprising. Mages in all Valoran got their fancy tricks back, and they were pissed. We gave them as much information and supplies we could spare, and they made for a wonderful diversion. With the machines occupied on every front and Noxus finally getting their chain of command together, we managed to sneak the Fiora team inside one of the big , heavily guarded facilities in north Shurima. In the inner circles, we called it "The Zoo". It was a research and containment facility. And i'm talking stuff so disgusting that in comparison the PROJECT operation seemed like a session with a tattoing session. Just below the horror gallery there was a massive cage- and inside it, one of the original Battlecast models. Now, can you guess what happens when an ancient Shuriman Ascended suddendly regains both his powers and his freedom, after being chained to a wall for years and being used as template for an army of killer robots? Let's just say that it's a miracle that we managed to get Fiora and most of the prisoners-well, those who could survive the extraction, anyway- out of the Zoo. Xerath didn't just blow the place up, he turned it into a baby sun and used it to cook every machine he could find. He stopped a few weeks later, leaving only a massive crater and a few broken Titans in the way. By this point, Emperor Azir had taken back the capital and we finally had a communication network again, thanks to those Ionian scryers. Noxus got his chain of command together and , the PROJECTS were running amok all over the Creator's toys. Can you believe it? Six months of operation and zero casualties. We threw every shade of secrecy out the window and starte celebrating them like the heroes they were. They led the charge-and the nations of Valoran followed. The machines put up quite a bit of resistance, but we had one last trick up our sleeves.
Now that we had magic back on our sides, we could finally complete the HELIOS project. The brain boys were extatic.We strapped a dozen Greater Quintessences to a rocket and called it a day. The blasted thing almost blew up on the launch platform, but it somehow got the HELIOS satelite in orbit before blowing up. At this point, we were laying siege to the major factories all over Valoran, and there is no better siegebreaker than orbital bombardment. It was glorious. Half a year before, we were all cowering before the Glorious Revolution, scheming insanities just to survive a few days. Now we were knocking on the Creator's door with a huge laser. In the end, we had all the boys back together for one final push, straight through Zaun and into the Mother Factory. Leona led the assault, with a personal painter for the HELIOS. Everybody else followed. Fiora, Yasuo, Zed, Yi, Lucian, and some guys so top-secret that even after that i can't even name them, all dived into the fray like a pack of wolves falling on an a sheep herd. Except the sheeps were eighteen meters tall war machines, but that didn't matter at all. We were just too many, too motivated, and too angry at the bastards to let them stop us. After nine days of fighting we broke through. We paid each meter into the Factory in blood and bodies, and somehow the Creator managed to shut down the HELIOS. We just brought down the satellite on a Titan-we were that commited. The tenth day, we were in. I hate to be cliche-y, but the rest is history. The bad guys lose, the good guys win, and we spent two or so years disposing of scrap metal. The PROJECTS became world-wide celebrities, and they deserve it more than anyone. Yes, even Zed. He might be a power hungry backstabber, but he still fought with us when it mattered. Zaun is still a wasteland and we have no idea of how the rid of all the roaming Battlecasts, plus the entire Freljord business and the other nations PROJECT arms race, but that was still our greatest victory yet. And i don't mean us Piltie, or the HQ, i mean "we, the living". No offense the Shadow Isles-they did their job too, even if no one would admit it sober. I can't tell you where the PROJECTS are right now, or what they're doing. But you're not here for that, right? You wanted to know what they are. There are many like you. Fearing we traded a mechanical overlord for another. You're a bunch of bloody ingrates , nothing more. Sure, they're not humans anymore. They're more than that. One does not suffer through all that pain and remains unchanged. But they're still people. They still have the same emotions and will they held before. And above all, they're our saviours.And no one- NO ONE - has any right to doubt it.__