Chapter Text
Probability.
Vi recalls the complicated word the way she recalls how to count. Punches—fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two—all up to one hundred. Against the wall.
Always the wall.
Never liked math. Not her thing. Like many other Academy stuff she never learned.
Such as patience. Or shutting her mouth, like she had told Mylo to.
Or to follow instructions.
If she had, she wouldn’t have to worry about the wall. About wanting to break through, so it would come tumbling down.
Like anger. Like shame.
Like blame.
Yet, other random knowledge stuck.
Like the theory on percentages, statistics.
Events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur.
Probability. No other word conveys so little meaning, yet remains entirely reliant on an endless variety of factors.
Like a mathematical formula that only reveals itself after winding through the labyrinth of inspiration.
For even when dealing with the purest, most rational form of human ingenuity, mathematics is rendered nearly useless without the inspiration guiding the hand that chalks it across the board.
Academics are lyrical like that.
“And you think… that this may work? The displacement?”
Then, there’s causality.
“Eh, theoretically? You’re the quantum physicist brainiac here, Vik. I’m just a humble mathematician.”
Action and reaction.
“Student of quantum mechanics, Professor. For the next three years, at the very least.”
Cause… and effect.
“Aw, don’t play coy with me. Everyone and their mother here at the Academy knows you’re Heimerdinger’s star student. The Entresol Wonder! Reckon one of these mornings we’ll both be getting our certified letters: yours saying you’ve graduated early, mine telling me to pack my things and let younger generations carve their glory under our esteemed Founder’s watchful, snotty gaze.”
Factors that, lined up one after another, trigger a chain reaction.
An end, a conclusion.
“What? No, I’m not… that’s… not what I’m aiming for, Professor.”
A result.
“So serious! Just picture it: you’ll be helping the preppy moustachioed little Yordle write his Progress Day speeches for the next decade or so, whilst I get to grow fatter thighs and empty pockets eating deep-fried, greasy rubbish at Jericho’s.”
“Professor…”
Professor. That’s what they had called her at the Academy, where Vi had spent her mornings watching Pilties take classes as she absorbed nothing beyond their glares. A world not meant for her, that she had tasted nonetheless. Professor Glasc had been an eminence in math, and nobody dared question the scruffy, pink-haired little girl she brought with her to work.
Because, for her and Pow, she had been no Professor but Tata.
Their Tata.
And she always brought results.
“All while still—somehow—paying my student loan debt and the loony meds. Huh, reckon I’ll have to consider making drugs or something. Do you think Doc would be interested in a drug-based business model? Bet he can develop some bioluminescent smoking crap with those flowers of his. Preferably with a minty aftertaste. Mint always sells well.”
“Please don’t say that. And don’t bring that man into this conversation.”
“You really should pay him a visit sometime. The way you left wasn’t… eh, exactly ideal, to be perfectly honest.”
“Please don’t.”
“You broke the poor man’s little black heart.”
“Assuming he has one.”
“Whoa, didn’t your mum and dad teach you to be kind to the elderly?”
“Only when that gets me a free seat on public transport.”
“For a guy with a cane and a leg brace, you’re surely walking the thug life path.”
“My steps may not be pretty, Professor, but at least I’m not accumulating traffic fines whenever I’m late to work and rolling up Enforcers with my bicycle feels like a smart move.”
“Ouchie-ouch! You’ve grown into quite the tongue-whipping reptile, lil’ Vicky-Vik. I’m proud of you.”
“Yes, very emotive. Now, can we please set personal sentiments aside and focus on our current predicament?”
The problem comes when that result becomes the breaking point—the moment consequences branch in every direction.
“Which is?”
“Changing the world, of course.”
“And what do we NOT do while doing so?”
“Asking for permission.”
“That’s my flower delivery boy!”
“Professor, no.”
“Viktor, yes!”
And good intentions, as they say, tend to get lost once the road to hell is paved.
“If you walk out that door, don’t bother coming back!”
She had known this from the very beginning.
“Tata? Where are you going?! Please don’t leave!”
That’s why she had hesitated. If only for a moment.
“Vivi, listen to me. I need to be gone for a couple of hours. Please take care of Pow.”
“Don’t leave! Take us with you!”
“I… can’t do that…”
“But why?!”
The bridge had claimed so many lives that spring… within just a few hours, after the Pilties had closed pedestrian traffic to Low Piltover and the Alcove District, forcing Tata to take them to the ferry back to the Southside Harbour, only to find all accesses cut to the Fissures from the Southern District, leaving the Wharf District as the only way in. A near-endless line at the bathysphere had taken an hour of their lives before police brutality had come in waves from the Alcove District up northwest.
From the Bridge of Progress.
Chaos and confusion among Fissurefolk had pulled the woman and the two little girls in her charge apart as everyone ran to their homes—climbing down between rusty guardrails, emergency stairs, and platforms when necessary—and to the sewers’ entrances to barricade themselves against the waves of enraged Enforcers.
Powder had been too small to understand half the things happening around her, clinging to her sister’s slightly larger hand as she hummed the tune Mum used to sing to them before bedtime.
“I… need to fix something. Something that should never have happened. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t! Stay! We’ll be good, I promise!”
The heat… burning endlessly as piles of corpses from the two cities had mixed their blood and ashes throughout the river, staining its waters deep red.
It had been unbearable.
“I’m gonna make it right, Vivi. I swear…”
But the most unbearable thing…
“No, Tata! Please don’t go! PLEASE, DON’T LEAVE ME TOO!”
… Had been not letting go.
Of her. And the memories they had shared throughout the nine years that little, pink-haired girl she once was had been alive in this world.
She had been there throughout her infancy.
While Mum and Dad worked their lives away in the mines for ten hours straight, six days a week, Tata had been there, filling the void alongside Vander.
A duty both had shared gladly, loving the girls they had promised Mum to care for… unlike some.
“Vivi?! What are you doing here?!”
They had never spoken about her after…
“WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?!”
No photos, no memorabilia beyond a forlorn pile of dark clothes and some dusty makeup. Not even her cat.
As if she had never existed.
“No, Vivi! STAY AW…!”
Action and reaction.
The child in her had been terrified of being abandoned again. After the fires and the bridge. So, she had crossed that same bridge, following Tata, barely three or four days after the burial. Leaving Powder alone with that man, half his face wrapped in bandages and smelling of sewage, wounded and running a fever on their parents’ bed. A loser Tata had kept allowing into her life even though he fell short in many vital aspects, like not wanting to deal with the two little girls who were like family to her.
Perhaps even in the most legal sense of the word, once Mum and Dad were around no more.
And there’s nothing more dangerous than a scorned, angry loser.
“Kill them!”
Such as the old cannery incident showed.
Years later, she barely remembers who brought her back across the river, back to Vander.
Back to the Underground.
“You… what have you done?!”
The loser had been a no-show, as usual.
But what she had never forgotten was a vital lesson learned the moment she had touched that cursed lever: that wounds of the soul are three times more resistant to healing compared to physical ones.
This, Vi knows better than anyone.
“Seventy-two… seventy-three…”
And that knowledge—planted so firmly in her brain so long ago that she could no longer recall who she had been at the time—had embedded itself beneath her skin as she grew, becoming part of her blood.
“Seventy-four… seventy-five…”
Festering and fostering guilt, her most enduring companion in the long night hours, when the lights of her prison block go off and the weight of the cell enclosing her presses down, entombing her ghosts.
“Seventy-six… seventy-seven…”
She has grown accustomed to their insidious whispers, to their many faces, wiping them away with every punch on the wall.
“Seventy-eight… seventy-nine…”
And counts.
“… Eighty…”
Until she is sure she is the only one left in her own head.
Inhaling deeply, she rolls her shoulders back, feeling the trail of greasy sweat tracing paths down her spine, soaking the hem of her striped prison shirt bearing an old yet recognisable numeral: 516.
And then, that sensation. Prickling at the back of her neck.
One does not survive this long behind bars without developing the ability to anticipate conflict. To spot a presence that your peripheral vision cannot immediately detect.
This one feels different, though. It isn’t the Warden. She would have heard the metallic echo of that bastard’s cane a mile away.
She turns slightly, casting a warning glance over her left shoulder.
The pretty vision in blue that meets her eyes isn’t what she was expecting.
She would have scoffed at the notion… were it not that this new arrival sported long, dark hair neatly parted on the right side.
Just the same as…
“They’re Vivi and the Pow. Yes, Vivi and the Pow. One’s pink, the other’s blue as a dove!”
“But Tata, doves ain’t blue! They’re white!”
“Nah, those are boring Vanilla Doves. Gimme a paint gun, and I’ll paint ‘em blue!”
“But if you paint them, they cannot fly!”
“No worries. We’ll call them penguins then and sell them to the Pilties for their fancy Menagerie Zoo for a fortune.”
“You’re silly, Tata.”
Even with the wave of melancholy that washes over Vi, her disposition softens enough to open her mouth—not to bark a taunt—but to form a question.
“Who the hell are you?”