[FANFIC] Death Dealers

Restrictions upon restrictions, Jhin fumed. He had spent most of the last month in this cramped room in this squalid inn in the ugliest city he had ever been in. All under strict injunction to avoid revealing his presence through doing the least bit to improve the civic character of the place. That would change when Admiral Gauntseal arrived, but o how much longer would the art have to wait?

This latest missive from the Council instructed him to ensure that his grand performance took care to avoid harming those blathering priests of that awful indigenous tentacle god. Jhin sighed — did he tell the Council how to do their jobs? Well, yes, he sent them the occasional respectful letter, but that was his right as a citizen. Surely they had some idea how their traditionalism inhibited his creativity, but they were his employers.

A cup of tea would settle his mind, Jhin decided, and so he left his room to retrieve some hot water from downstairs. He tried to ignore the line of ants crawling along some trail of spilled beverage. Jhin couldn’t understand how the locals tolerated such filth, but then again, he reflected, they were hardly any better themselves. Really, thought Jhin, as he walked down the stairs, his exhibition would be the best thing that ever happened to Bilgewater.

It was mid-afternoon, and the tavern was nearly empty. The only people there were three card players sitting around a table, one nervous-looking with obviously fake jewelry, another wearing a ridiculous hat and a too-small coat that only accentuated his bulk, and the last apparently a fisherman who Jhin judged to be a native of the Blue Flame Isles. Jhin called for the bartender, but he was gone — no tea would be made today. Grumbling at his thwarted thirst, Jhin turned to go back upstairs.

“Hold there, brother,” said the fat card player, “Could I entice you to join us in our afternoon’s entertainment?”

“No. I have work to attend to,” said Jhin, as politely as he could manage given the aesthetics of the man asking him.

“It’s too bad you won’t deign to grace us with your company. Because I know this game is best with four.” Jhin froze partway up the stairs. “Really, I think playing with three just isn’t the same as playing with four.” Jhin twitched, an appetite much deeper than the one for tea stirring. “But all right, Eora, Jakry,” the man continued, “let’s play, just us, just us one, two, three…”

“FOUR!” shouted Jhin, running back down to the vacant chair. “I’ll join you, I’ll join you.”

“Four then. Glad you found the time, child. Now, here’s how you play…”

The game was simple enough, and the others no great players. The fat man dealt, but if he was crooked, he was a better sharp than Jhin’s eye could catch. Jhin gambled cautiously; he had no interest in winning money, especially from louts like these. Though Jakry and Eora were quiet, the dealer kept up enough conversation for the four of them, occasionally asking Jhin a question he deflected. “You look to be Ionian to me,” he said, “So what brings you to teeming Bilgewater and my humble establishment?”

“Your establishment?” Hope of tea flared suddenly to life. “Then you are the proprietor? I have several requests and complaints—”

A deep laugh cut him off. “No, I ain’t the proprietor, only the patron of places like this where people come to slake their hungers, like fleas to a dead stoat.” The dealer gestured at Jhin and his fellow players. “You’ll see what I mean,” he said with a grin.

They continued to play, and the game started to turn to towards Eora. Jakry and the dealer’s money flowed to him, and he almost began to smile at his good fortune. Jakry’s nervousness only increased, and the dealer glanced good-naturedly at his own dwindling pile. Jakry broke first. She gambled her ostentatious earrings, then her bracelets, then finally, reluctantly, a locket, but the cards were against her, and Eora could hardly believe his fortune, even as the ashen-faced Jakry unsteadily left the table and the inn.

Jhin frowned; he didn’t like to see people in such despair as Jakry had been. Perhaps she would be present at his exhibition, and there find terror and catharsis. He had to hope. He would keep an eye out for her.

The game was now down to three people, so Jhin felt no more urge to stay, but it was breaking up anyhow. Eora, now jubilant, scooped up his winnings. “The Drowning Serpent has the finest lager between here and your outpost,” the dealer told him as he led him to the door, “and there you’ll find plenty to feed your other appetites. Why, you may even find me!”

“I think I am done with your game,” Jhin said. “Like everything else in this filthy city, it lacks beauty.”

“Well, you may be right. If the audience can’t understand it, I guess it ain’t really art. Don’t you agree, Khada Jhin?” Jhin instantly drew his gun, but the dealer continued, smiling. “Huh. Seems to me if you make a canvas out of everyone who opines about art, you’d never find the time for planning something truly original.”

“I stand behind my art; it is not about me. How do you know who I am?”

“A connoisseur of the finer pleasures, along with several others, must naturally know about a man whose performances are so intensely anticipated. And a representative of all this jewel amongst cities is obliged to defend it against scurrilous aspersions of squalor. So, those bullets of yours turn flesh into something as pleasing to the eye as the meat is to the tongue? Here in Bilgewater, we believe in the journey over the destination. So your art makes a transcendent corpse, but personally, I’d rather give someone a remarkable story of how they ended up sold for chum in eighteen different markets. See it yet?”

Jhin considered the dealer. He had idly speculated how he would respond to another artist of death — eliminate them as a competitor or embrace them as a kindred soul? — but so florid had this fellow’s words been that he couldn’t tell if that was what the man was claiming. If he were merely a fan, then the course was plain. After all, so many who had seen his work had been changed by the experience, that losing one follower, though a pity, would be no great price for security.

Asking seemed the simplest course: “I am afraid I do not. You say this game created beauty? Then tell me how.”

“Well certainly, child. Nothing compares to a fine feast, but there’s something to telling of banquets vanquished.” From the man’s girth, Jhin expected he could relate very many such tales. “Dear Jakry. She has a craving for chance. See this gentleman as she shares a locket with? That’s Lyos Powderfist, who leads a gang of wharf rats. Jakry was worried about no longer being able to gamble, not about running out of coin, which was never hers to begin with. This ain’t her first time here.” The dealer produced several more lockets and cameos, each depicting a different man. “She’s gone to find someone else who will feed her hunger, and I reckon she’ll turn to Suthri. Her mistake; he knows Lyos. They’ll talk, and Lyos will put it together, and Suthri will tell it to Ersch, and to Roasy, and to— And before you know it, Jakry gets killed by eight different gangs at once.”

“An interesting tale, but no more than that. You can’t know what she will do,” Jhin said.

“Well, certainly I can’t help it if she trips on some squid guts and falls in the sea, but barring such tragic happenstance, all persons, I find, are predictable. Their pathways are determined by their hungers. Of course, I imagine that seasoning of chance isn’t something you’ve had to contend with. I wager there’s nobody who died peacefully of age once you took it up to make them a subject.”

Jhin winced slightly as he remembered his frustration when he learned that Kusho had escaped him, during those quiet years in Tuula. “I grant the point,” he said, moving past the memory, “I too have relied on that very predictability. I take professional pride that I don’t need to dispose of traps after my performances. It occurs to me, Jakry needed to lose for your work to take shape. You rigged the game.”

“I did no more than any other dealer in Bilgewater. So, yes, I am a cheat.”

Distasteful, but the brush that produced the finest paintings of Sosal was still coarse and ugly bristles bound together. Judge an artist by their work, not their tools. “A natural question follows. Why direct her extracted wealth towards that fisherman, instead of towards yourself? Or to me, though I have little use for this city’s Serpents.”

The dealer chuckled. “Eora is a second project of mine. See, he’s not a fisherman, but an acolyte of that overgrown squid. His true appetite ain’t holiness; it’s a drug called ‘Trench’ in certain areas of this town that kicks the soul loose from the body for a while. Not too different from how those fools run their swimming tests, so you can see how he got a taste for that. But while their rituals tie together all their souls, Trench just leaves a gap. Now, most of the time, that’s all academic. When the Harrowing comes, though, it’ll bring with it a ravenous tide of magical mist that’ll sweep away whatever Trench-weakened tether ties pious Eora’s soul to his body — and will fill his discarded shell to bursting with a chorus of the damned.”

“I see the beauty…”

“And that’s only what I’m sure of. I do accept some gambling into my productions. Consider — Eora isn’t any Trenchie, he’s a priest, so his body isn’t just connected to his soul, it’s connected to all the others of that whole group. I don’t know what happens next, but I imagine it’ll be Nagakaborous trying to amputate a gangrenous limb. No great look for a mortal, but when a god does it?”

What vision! Jhin already saw ways he and this fellow artist could collaborate. He holstered his gun and addressed the dealer: “I am most pleased to have met you! I had assumed I was alone in my art, but how wonderful to have been wrong! Your work is that of an expert; how long have you been plying our craft?”

“I’ve been practicing my work for a long time, since there were hungers that grew for feeding. How about yourself?”

“I realized the beauty of death quite early, but my humility led me to wait to contribute instead of merely appreciate.” 
“For too long?” the dealer asked.

“Much too long. I fear my finest and most creative years have passed me by; I am not so young as I once was. Indeed, I had” — Jhin considered what he was willing to confide of his shame — “retired for some time. But my patriotic duty has drawn me forth once more.”

“Patriotic duty? That’s as artistic as a spider making dredge-nets.”

“I beg your pardon? The Council are my patrons. They supply me with the tools of my art, and in return, I work with canvases of their choosing.”

“Oh, child, allow me to be honest,” the dealer said. “You have a talent, a passion, an appetite for making beautiful things. Yet you’re letting some staid functionary guide your work instead? Art made to order isn’t. I’d say you never left retirement — you’re no longer an artist, but a propagandist!”

Indignation surged through Jhin, and before he realized what he was doing, he drew his pistol and shot his taunter in the chest. “Oh,” Jhin said, stepping back away from the dealer, whose flesh rippled and shifted around the wound. But instead of blooming into beauty, the dealer’s ugliness burgeoned: his great belly and torso expanded to an inhuman extent; his neck vanished, leaving his head a flattened dome; his mouth, still smiling, split his face in two; his thick, greasy mustache grew longer and fleshier until two barbels drooped and squirmed from his loathsome head; and a film of mucous spread over his suddenly green-gray skin. At the spot where he had been shot, a single, reluctant flower sprouted, which the creature absently plucked and swallowed. Jhin screamed.

The beast that had been the dealer lumbered forward, laid a three-fingered hand gently on Jhin’s shoulder, and said “Ah, there’s no cause to yelp. Course, there’s no cause to shoot someone as is just trying to help you to be the visionary you once was. To forestall your obvious question, I am indeed not human, but I’m sure you are cosmopolitan enough for that not to be a barrier between us. You understand the value of a mask.”

“You want to help me? How could something as hideous as you help me?” Jhin sputtered, trying to escape the friendly arm.

“Why, sir! Your words wound me deeper than your bullets!” the monster said. “Speaking of…” Jhin flinched at the noisome coughing, and surreptitiously dropped the slime-encrusted projectile he was handed. “But you know you need help. Splendid. Many a man starves to death as never realized he was hungry. Tell me, are you free to relinquish your present engagement?”

“It would be wildly unprofessional for me to abandon—”

“A commission I bet you entered under duress?”

“I could have refused!”

“And if you had?”

“A mere continuation of the status quo,” Jhin said quietly.

“Do oblige my curiosity as to wherefore their offer was acceptable. Would you have been at liberty to produce art in that status quo?” As Jhin faltered, the beast continued. “Do you think you are now? Seems to me you were coerced into a bad deal.”

“It was no choice…”

“That is what ‘coerced’ implies. I’m sorry, I understand you’re more of a visual artist. Political cartooning.”

“Will you do anything other than mock me? I admit it — the authorities did not understand my work, and caged my genius. Still, they see nothing but the crudest levels, the fact of the corpse and the terror it evokes in some unsophisticated minds. I work for them, because I believed it would be better than the silence of Tuula and because Whisper is a beautiful instrument, but this is not true art.” Jhin broke down weeping. He had not expected to be allowed to live when he was finally brought to bay. And then he had put his art in shackles to liberate his body. He had been dragged into Tuula, but this prison he had walked into. “Help me find the freedom to express myself!”

“Gladly. Now, I may not look the sort, but I am in fact quite the explorer. It’s a wide world out there, vaster than you or your Council do know, and there’s lands quite hospitable to your art. How would you like conveyance to those distant shores?”

Jhin seized at the lifeline. He would never again put anything ahead of artistic integrity, even love of the country he had called home. “If there is a place I can start anew, if it would truly be beyond the Council’s reach… The current situation is unsustainable, intolerable. What is the price of your offer?”

“When I find a fellow visionary in such desperation as you yourself are immersed in, I am moved to render what assistance as I can. So I ask only one insignificant thing in return — no doubt you’ll produce some masterpiece of unsurpassed enormity, and as I am a gourmand of passions, I would be greatly honored if you should let me in at your finest exhibition. I do so want to see how my munificence takes root.”

So little? “Then I accept your deal,” Jhin said.

“We shall depart at once, then! Get the rest of your wonderful paint-roller; at this point, it’s as much a part of you as my tongue is of me,” the monster said with a laugh as Jhin left for his room. “Khada Jhin, the Golden Demon, they called you, I hear. How right they’ll be.”

Jhin returned. The possibility that this was a trap had not eluded him, but if the Noxians had catfish-people at their command, he hadn’t heard of it. And he no longer cared for caution. He craved artistic fulfillment, however remote the location or the hope.

“I have everything,” he said. “Where shall we go to find your boat?”

“Child,” Tahm Kench said, opening his mouth from floor to ceiling, “We need no boat. Hunger is the vessel for the River King.”

I hope you enjoyed my first foray into League fanfic. Let me know what you think, or if you have any suggestions going forward!