Piltover's Finest: Rain

Piltover's Finest:  Rain

Another one of those rainy Sunday afternoons in Piltover, the hextech lamps flickered to life in the street despite the early hour.  Their bright reflections on the pavement shattered and refracted as the Sheriff clipped through the puddles at a measured pace.  Caitlyn was no fan of the rain, bundled up in her long dark traveling coat, and all she wanted was a quiet hour or two with a strong cup of tea and a good mystery novel.  But she knew better than to expect to spend the remainder of the dark day in cozy tranquility, not when the storm was bound to have transfigured Vi into an entity most closely resembling a riotous inmate on lockdown.

Caitlyn put aside her differences with the inclement weather, choosing actually to focus on the rain, cold and steady, rather than on the disaster from which she had just come.  Her gray day off had been interrupted that morning with a call from the head office, a black market hextech trading racket had blown up overnight, could she come down to the crime scene and have a look around?  And off she had slipped, leaving Vi snuggled up in bed, dead to the world for at least a few hours more.

She wished she hadn't gone.  The criminals had staged their operations back of a tumbledown restaurant in the grittiest part of the city, a greasy front for the ring’s unsavory activities.  The stench of the place made Caitlyn's stomach turn; the sight of the victims nearly made her retch.  Bone thin street children, eager to earn a penny, had carted the shoddily-manufactured hextech weaponry from cache to customer.  But the goods were cheap and flawed, ticking time bombs that were all too ready to go out in a blaze of techmaturgical glory.

Warped by magic and torn by shrapnel, the remains of the unfortunate young gun-runners lay amid the rain-soaked rubble.  This one might have been a girl, Caitlyn had thought in passing, holding a handkerchief to her face as she surveyed the scene with clinical eyes.  Soon enough she had scavenged sufficient data from the wreckage to direct the men towards one of the gang's two remaining hiding places, deduced the identity of the crooked engineer, and routed out a snitch from within the department's own ranks.
Easy work for the detective, but never pleasant.

Now, even though the wind blustered and bit, the rain gradually pounded the lingering odor from her clothes.  She had calculated the homeward stroll so that each step created emotional as well as physical distance.  Peace of mind could often prove elusive for the intrepid sleuth, and she had learned to take what serenity she could find, even if sometimes it was found in the numbing beat of the rain.

As she rounded the last damp corner onto her street, Caitlyn finally started to feel sorted enough to face down the tempest in a teapot that surely was waiting for her at home.  Vi was probably clawing at the walls on a day like this, a shrieking kettle about to boil over.  

Damn, Caitlyn needed a bloody cup of tea.

Taking one last deep breath of misty Piltover air, tasting of ozone and hextech exhaust, Caitlyn steeled herself and unlocked the front door.
 
She was met with silence, or rather, with the muted sound of rain on the eaves and nothing more.  Caitlyn stood a moment, bemused, before shedding her hat and coat and hanging them on the rack to drip quietly onto the entryway floor.  She next stepped out of her boots, leaving them leaning against the wall.  She would have to shine them when they had dried.

Was Vi still asleep, possibly? Caitlyn wondered, tip-toeing deeper into the house.  She could see Vi trying to make the best of a day indoors by ignoring it completely.  But--no, there she was, in her pajamas, definitely (a pair of violet plaid boy shorts and a black tee that had "Piltover Customs" printed across the front), sprawled out on the floor in the front room.

She had one of her gauntlets gutted on the floor with her, the other resting off to the side atop the old coffee table.  Caitlyn had succumbed to the reality that no amount of wood polish and stern lecturing would keep that table scratch-free, but she sighed at the sight of it for appearance's sake.

Vi had her goggles strapped tight over her eyes, and she had all of her focus on a panel cover for one of the gauntlet's hydraulic works.  Caitlyn stood at the side of the room, watching her tinker, waiting for any sign that Vi had even noticed her return.

A minute passed without so much as a "Yo, Cupcake."

Caitlyn padded off to the bedroom to stash her rifle, stopping by in the bathroom to quickly run a towel over her hair.  Reappearing in the front room with fuzzy poro slippers in hand, she wrangled each of Vi's swinging legs and fitted the things over the girl's bare feet.  The environmentally-friendly hextech space heater (a Heimerdinger prototype) was chugging away on hearth, so the house was a comfortable temperature, but Caitlyn hadn’t bought them for Vi just so they could be kicked under the bed and forgotten.

Plus, Caitlyn thought they made her look extra cute.

For another minute or two, Caitlyn watched Vi fiddle with the metal plate.  It looked as though it was designed with two tabs on either side that held it in place, but Vi was only able to get one tab in at a time.  With petulant determination, she kept fitting in one tab into the slot, then jamming the other side against the gauntlet to no avail.  After a few tries, she would switch to trying the other tab first.  And when that didn't work, she went back to step one.

"Why don't you just smash it in?" Caitlyn asked when she could stand this madness no longer.

"I don't want to break it!" Vi barked, and switched tabs.

This from the champion who, armed with these self-same gauntlets, was known to tackle any opposition while shouting, "When you hit a wall, hit it hard!"  Caitlyn kept her thoughts to herself, seeing that Vi would surely be occupied with this task for the rest of the day.
 
"Bless," Caitlyn said aloud, and then headed for the kitchen to put the kettle on.