Lines in the Sand - Opener - For the Taking

Return to Opener
== Lines in the Sand—For the Taking ==
by CupcakeTrap
This mini-scene centers on Noxian and Piltovian Champions doing some illicit artifact hunting in Shurima.
Note: The third part of this scene is still in progress.''
Talon stood at the edge of the 
pyrikhos that surrounded the oasis. He felt the Void’s presence: 
something between a sharp scent and a shrill sound. A more profound 
revulsion oozed out from between these layers of human sensation. It was
 wrong. Even the most primitive Shuriman would feel this. It was no wonder the place was deserted.
A cool wind swept over the 
contaminated water, which rippled with unnatural hues. He heard alien 
voices upon the breeze, whispering the kind of insanity which could rend
 reality itself, pull you through to some impossible hell in pieces, 
send some of those pieces back inside your skin.
His thoughts turned to the hollowness 
of these Shuriman sell-swords and petty merchants. Their crumbled ruins,
 their lost magic. Their dead eyes, their tepid ambitions.
He spoke to his companion. “Do you think a nation’s spirit can die?”
Katarina met his glance. She arched an
 eyebrow. “I can’t say I’ve thought about it much, Talon.” She turned 
back to the Nyrothian tablet she held. Enchanted by Desmeya, the 
mind-twisting witch of Aeaea. Bright purple and blue lines spread across
 its black surface.
Katarina waved her hand over the 
tablet. The lines moved, swirling into a vortex in the center. She ran 
her thumb along a groove on the tablet’s side, and a peculiar symbol 
appeared in the corner. She looked up at him and nodded. “This is it.” 
She gestured at the symbol. “The thaumic resonance matches Yoroth’s 
nexus. The manashock traveled through the pyrikhos field here, and 
siphoned down into the oasis. And now, just as the dear shaman from 
Bel’zhun said, the portal inside the water has phased back into being, 
just enough for us to squeeze through.”
Her lips curved into a grin. “Time to 
find out what drank up all that energy.” She sounded pleased, as though 
she’d found a great prize. Her delight was beyond his understanding.
Shurima was
 dead, and this was a festering wound upon its carrion-corpse, pecked 
open by the black ravens of time. Hard beaks driving, sharp sharp sharp,
 like ticks of a clock.
“I saw a demonstration, once, in Zaun.
 During the Harrowing. They brought in the corpse of a slum-rat shot by 
corporate security. They rigged his body with electrodes, and sent a 
lightning bolt through him. He started shaking on the table, like he was
 living through his death throes one more time. I think he tried to say 
something. He thrashed so hard on the table that it dislodged one of the
 bullets they’d put into his chest. This grayish greenish ooze bubbled out of the putrified flesh. Then the lightning stopped, and he was dead again.”
And now, the thaumic shock from 
Nyroth’s violent restoration had flashed across the sea to Valoran, 
surging into this dead land. He gazed upon the Void-sickened oasis, its 
sickly shine of unnatural color, and saw the dead man’s wounds oozing on
 the examination table. The mumblings of the mystics they’d interrogated
 for the contents of their visions, their lips so very like those of the
 dead man, mumbling thoughtless voices from the abyss. Talon was not 
averse to robbing graves, but never had he plundered so vast a tomb.
Talon drew one of his blades and 
gestured at the oasis. No matter how much pure water crashed down from 
the waterfall above, it was beyond purification. “I was reminded.”
Katarina slipped the tablet back into its null-magic metal case. “I went to a party,
 once, in Zaun.” She looked his way. “We ate liqueuered cupcakes off a 
supermodel’s back, drank foaming neon booze in one of those hot-tubs of 
theirs until we could barely haul ourselves out of the water, then 
passed out in our beautiful suites on top of what seemed like the softest beds in Valoran. We were so hungover the next morning that we completely missed the corpse reanimation.”
Talon thumbed his blade and lowered his white hood. “It was midnight.”
How easy to be so glib, when one has 
grown up among the privileges of a noble house, rather than as a 
starving urchin upon the streets. Yet despite her frivolity, she was a 
fearsome swordsman. Perhaps her father’s equal. In a fair universe, 
perhaps all pampered aristocrats would be useless cowards. This was not a
 fair universe.
“Midnight. Of course it was midnight,” she answered, and drew a dagger into her left hand.
She extended her right for him to take. “Hold on. Running start, leap to the center, I’ll shunpo us through into the temple.”
“And if anyone should be inside…” She smiled. “Their blood for Noxus this day.”
Vi sat against the cool stone wall of 
the temple beneath the oasis. She’d picked one of the blank walls, 
because even though Ezreal had insisted the place was dead, she didn’t 
like the idea of leaning up against spooky old Shuriman enchantments.
She gave her left gauntlet a twist, 
bending the plates apart slightly, and stuck a folding screwdriver 
inside to retune the intake. She watched the gauge until the needle did 
that subtle double-wobble that told her it was primed just right. She 
popped open the panel over the regulator, and checked the lights. Three 
green, two blue. Nice. Running at about 8x, with a 10 Strickler capacity
 in the shifter. That was almost as good as she’d get on the Fields on a
 good day.
She looked over at Ezreal, who was 
still tapping away at the sides of the altar with that dainty little 
hammer with null-magic plating on one side. His boots were in the 
flowing circle of water that wrapped around the stone platform.
“Sure’d be nice to have a Summoner here while you’re banging away at that.”
She stuffed the screwdriver back into 
her belt, and took out a packet of SpectriYum instead, pincered neatly 
between the very tips of her gauntlet’s fingers.
“Y’know. Someone who didn’t flunk out 
of magic school.” She ripped open the packet and shook a few of the 
squishy candies into her mouth. Picking colors out was well beyond what 
she could do with the gloves on, but it tasted like she’d gotten dark 
green and purple. Mmm, purple.
Ezreal took out a magnifying glass and
 squinted through it while he tapped the stonework again. She thought 
she saw a flash of light.
“I left,” he retorted. “And given that this isn’t really legal, it didn’t seem like a bright idea to bring a Summoner along.”
“He says, to the cop,” she replied, with a mouthful of Zaunite confectionery.
Ezreal paused. “It’s a little weird,” 
he agreed. He eyed her warily, probably thinking about whether or not 
she was going to turn him in. Which was pretty cute.
She shook her head. “Nothing in the 
Pilt Crim Code about looting Shuriman temples, and I ain’t a League 
cop.” She emptied the rest of the bag of SpectriYum into her mouth, and 
spoke while she chewed the rainbow of sugary goodness. “But if you try 
to bring any of this stuff,” she waved the empty bag, “back to Piltover,
 that’s a 449, importation of Icathian derivative compounds.”
Ezreal wrinkled his nose. “Can’t believe you eat that stuff.”
She looked him square in the face. 
“Yeah, I’m thinking all the pyrikhos packed around this cave is going to
 do me in a lot faster than the NoxiToxi candy.”
She opened up another bag. “Cait’s at 
some gala tonight. Maybe we can stop on over,” she twisted her voice 
into a scornful parody of a Northern accent, “have ourselves a right lovely spot o’tea, we will, guv’nah, cheerio til then.”
She glanced inside the bag, then 
looked over at Ez. “But first, we need that scrying whatever.” She 
tilted the bag back, and got a red.
“Working on it,” he answered, testily.
She kipped up to her feet and walked over. While she chewed, she waved the bag at the altar, and the weird claw-thing on top.
“You sure it’s in there?”
“Yeah.” He waved his hand past the 
clawlike top of the altar. She saw a green-blue swirly aura that was 
pretty trippy, especially after a couple packets of SpectriYum. She’d 
seen all kinds of magical auras at the Institute, and had received the 
honor of smashing in the heads of many of Valoran’s most talented mages 
on the Fields, but never anything quite like that.
He conjured a faint energy wave from 
his gauntlet, and something streaked the spherical aura with purple. 
“It’s gonna take me a bit.”
She rolled her shoulders and cracked 
her neck. “Look, not to be too much the musclehead here, but I bet I 
could punch through that.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I bet you could, and
 it might bring this whole cavern down on us.” His voice took on a 
know-it-all tone which made his face seem even more punchable than 
usual. “So let’s keep that as Plan B.”
She leaned over and peered at the 
grooves carved in the sides of the column. She had an intuitive hunch 
that there was some sort of mechanism inside. Like it could rotate, 
unlock. “Hey, Princess. Take a look over here. Maybe it’s got some 
kinda—”
The hairs on the back of her neck 
stood up. She heard a very familiar pop-swoosh sound, and barely had 
time to turn and step in front of Ezreal before a Noxian knife that 
would have skewered her dainty pal glanced off her chestplate.
Katarina grinned with homicidal glee. “Death to the enemies of Noxus.”
Talon was circling around the side. 
Ezreal threw a shot at him, but he turned mid-step, and the bolt 
impacted on the wall instead.
“Alright! Plan B!” she snapped, before
 backhanding the altar with her fist. The stone burst, and the cavern 
filled with blue light.
“Grab and go, Ez!” She was not keen on
 the prospect of fighting two Noxian assassins in a dark cave. The 
adrenaline hit her system, and she started getting that creepy-crawly 
Void-sickness feeling, like ants crawling over the inside of her skin. 
All this pyrikhosian radiation must have been doing more of a number on 
her than she thought.
Katarina dove into a roll toward her. Vi wound up to kick the psychotic redhead right in her teeth, and then she realized—
—she couldn’t see Talon.
Better take her out fast, then.
She threw her kick at Kat’s face, and 
raised her gauntlet to clock the Noxian poster girl when she did 
whatever bendy-twisty move she was going to use to avoid the hexplated 
boot swinging for her.
And that’s about when she felt Talon’s knife plunge into the soft spot of her armor beneath her raised arm. Not fast enough.
She staggered and fell onto her knee, 
catching herself with her left glove. With Talon still twisting his 
knife inside her, she ground her teeth together and yanked her right 
fist up to block Katarina’s stab at her throat. The Noxian steel 
screeched over the hexproofed metal, and she smelled the black smoke of 
kill-curses burning off the edge.
She set her weight into the ground and
 lunged upright, rotating hard to throw a left uppercut that she really,
 really hoped would cave in Katarina’s chest. But Katarina twisted away 
into the shadows, and she struck only air.
“I SAID GRAB AND GO!” she shouted. She
 felt the cold, tingly, creeping chill of Noxian poison, the one that 
made your skin go numb while your lungs felt like they were filling up 
with broken glass. On top of the Void-sickness, it was a really lovely 
feeling.
She whirled around, and a wild swing hit Talon in the chest. He went flying, but she didn’t see him hit the wall.
The poison was spreading. She forced a
 breath down her throat and flexed her gauntlets, forcing the black 
magic along the conductive strips lining her bodyglove and into the 
surge capacitors along her forearms. But it was in deep. Counterspelling
 was something she usually left to her Summoner, but at the moment she 
was solo.
She stumbled, maybe falling, vision blurring.
She steadied herself with effort. Then realized she wasn’t stumbling anymore because she was laying flat on her back.
She looked up. She saw Ezreal facing 
down both Talon and Kat. He had a bright blue-green aura swirling around
 him. Sometimes. Between her heartbeats, she could see it; when she 
heard the blood surge through her veins, her vision broke apart to a 
black and purple tableaux of blinking yellow eyes. Void psychosis.
She could shake this off. C’mon, Vi. Just like ganking Malzahar. Just like a match. Just shake it off. Before Princess Ezreal over there gets slashed to ribbons.
Kat brandished a knife in either hand. She feinted left, thrust right. Ezreal blinked aside, and hit her with…a jet of water?
She tried to get up, but stopped when 
she felt herself falling deeper into the black. Her vision went. She 
heard water rushing around. She heard stone breaking. It’s coming down on us.
What convinced her she’d lost it was when she heard a snooty Piltovian voice she didn’t recognize.
“Lady Du Couteau, I am afraid I must ask you and your guest to leave.”
Vi passed out, with a half-lucid thought about how she’d feel much better after a rest.
Category:Lines in the Sand
Category:LitS