Luxurious Anarchy (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 7: This Is War

Caitlyn sighed and tapped the commandeered yardstick on the corkboard she'd set up in the council chambers, having done her very best in the last two hours to point out that, even with Silco out of the picture, it was in Piltover's best interest to pursue peace.

Certain war-hungry hawks, both on the council and on the streets had been pushing for a pre-emptive sort of blow, a good hard spanking to teach the workers their place, as one upper-crust idiot had put it.

Unfortunately, all the facts, the figures, the reports she could pull, they all suggested that it could be done, and at relatively little cost in terms of human resources.

So, as Vi had suggested late one night as they brainstormed with Jayce how to sidestep the whole fucking mess, they had to stop playing the topsider way, with books and numbers and fancy wordplay. What they needed was a good hard sucker punch, a proper undercity welcoming, as it were.

And they found it, found their line of corkscrew logic to sucker punch the council with, and hopefully stop a full-on war from happening.

It wasn't a pretty picture though when they followed that corkscrew to the end of its point.

Caitlyn sighed again, realizing her thoughts had drifted, and tapped the corkboard again. "So, in summary-"

"Y'all're fucked."

"Vi!"

Vi gave her a shrug, some crumbs from her recently polished-off sandwich falling to the floor. Caitlyn groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ignore the fact that her soulmate was radiating at least a bit of smug self-satisfaction at the offended mutterings echoing in the council chamber. This was not how they'd planned the hand-off of the presentation, but it would do.

Unlike standard times, the council chamber was much more full than usual. Two months ago, there was a united agreement that peaceful separation with Piltover's undercity would be the best, it was by the vote of seven individuals. Now, those same seven were present, as Jayce had kept his place as councilor. Caitlyn knew she had very little room to talk, being the newly minted Sheriff of Piltover at least in part due to nepotism, but the fact that the golden boy of Hextech was still being treated as sacrosanct after the shit he pulled behind everyone's backs rankled a bit.

But beyond those seven, Heimerdinger had been reinstated, though supposedly it was for the sake of having a member on the council who tended to take the long view. The hope was that he'd tamp down any rash actions like those that had occurred in his absence. If the yordle professor held any animosity for Jayce and his little coup, it didn't show in his behavior or recent voting record.

Caitlyn was present, as was Vi, though supposedly in their professional capacity as Sheriff and... well, Vi had pulled up a chair and introduced herself as "a native expert of the undercity", and since no one moved to kick her out, she'd stayed, sandwich and all.

Others littered the chamber, merchant dynasty inheritors, local business leaders, politicians from the various spires and blocks of Piltover. It went unannounced, but certainly not unnoticed that aside from Vi, no one in the chambers was a resident of the undercity.

Pulling her hand away from her eyes, Caitlyn looked at her meticulously assembled presentation on the state of the undercity, before sighing and holding out the yardstick for Vi. Her soulmate shot her a look that was at least forty percent apology and thirty percent nervous, but she rose to the challenge and accepted the yardstick.

Coughing gently in one fist, Vi looked over her Cupcake's work and winced. It was an awful lot of fancy words and nice paper, and pretty much all of it irrelevant in the face of a few pointed realizations they'd shared in the eleventh hour of putting this presentation together. Vi used the yardstick to scratch her back and walked up to the board.