The bottom city had a fundamental rule about food: you found it daily, because storing it meant having something worth stealing.
Vander had been occupied the previous day with the business of preventing two armed factions from turning a bad situation into a catastrophe, which meant nobody had thought about groceries. The result, by morning, was an empty kitchen and four children who were going to need breakfast.
Jayce, blinking at the bar table over his notes, said: "I don't understand. You don't have food in the refrigerator?"
Mylo looked at him.
Claggor looked at Mylo.
Vi looked at the wall.
"Don't bother," Shizuku said.
She raised one hand. Blinky materialized with the particular soundless arrival that had stopped startling people approximately six hours ago and was now simply a feature of the space. The fish opened its enormous mouth and began to produce: stacked boxes, warm enough that the steam from them was visible in the cool morning air of the bar, followed by several sets of disposable toiletries arranged with the same quiet efficiency.
Powder's eyes went very wide. She had known, on a theoretical level, that the fish stored things. She had not yet experienced the fish producing a hot breakfast from a dimension where time did not apply.
"Nothing cools down in there," Shizuku explained, correctly interpreting the expression. "Time doesn't pass."
Jayce stared at the fish. He had recently expanded his definition of what constituted a meaningful scientific question. This qualified.
"Sit down," Liam said. He waved Powder over. "You have something to show us."
Powder put down her lunch box, stood up, and demonstrated.
Ten. Zetsu. Ren. Hatsu, or at least the beginning of it.
The aura moved through her correctly, with the specific quality of something that has been practiced into the body rather than reasoned through the mind. The control was not perfect but it was consistent, which is the harder quality to develop and the one that matters more in the first stage.
Shizuku had her toothbrush in her mouth and her eyes doing the narrowing thing.
"Professional Hunter level of proficiency," she said, around the toothbrush. "She's genuinely talented."
"That's impossible." Mylo had rice on his chin. Claggor pushed his head back down without comment. "I was watching her. She was lying on the sofa for most of the night. I barely saw her move. How do you practice something while lying down?"
"You can," Vander said, from behind the bar. "You think, you feel, you work through it. The movement is internal."
He said this with the air of someone who had spent the night doing exactly that.
Mylo opened his mouth, looked at Vander, and closed it.
"I did practice," Powder said. Not defensively. Just accurately. "I just did it the way that felt natural."
Vi was not looking at the demonstration or the argument. She was looking at Powder's hair. She had been looking at it since she came up from the basement.
It was longer.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that would be immediately obvious to someone who had not been looking at Powder's hair with intense attention for years. But Vi had been doing exactly that, and the hair was longer, and Powder was slightly taller, and something in the line of her face had shifted in the incremental way that faces shift over months.
She looked at Liam.
"Yes," Liam said. "I know what you're worried about."
He set down his box. "There are practitioners for whom strong Nen ability manifests spontaneously without conscious intent. Usually Specialization types, and usually when the person's emotional state is specific and intense enough to form the shape of an ability on its own. We know someone whose first real ability appeared the same way."
Shizuku nodded, thinking of an earlier chapter of a different story.
"When a Specialization ability forms spontaneously, it tends to use the body's own resources rather than waiting for deliberate training. In Powder's case, the ability formed overnight and the body's development was the resource it drew on. Roughly one month's worth."
The bar was quiet.
Powder put down her drumstick.
"One month of my life," Vi said, flatly.
"That's our best estimate, yes."
Vi opened her mouth.
"Vi." Powder touched her sister's arm. "One month of life for skills that would take years to develop otherwise. That's not a bad deal."
"That's not the—"
"I know that's not what you're saying." Powder looked at her directly. "I know. But I wanted it. I wanted to stop being the one who breaks things. I wanted it enough that apparently some part of my ability figured out how to help me want it faster." She picked up the drumstick again. "I'm not upset about this."
Vi looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at Liam with the expression of someone who has decided not to start the argument they were about to start, and is noting for the record that they are making this choice deliberately.
Liam received this with appropriate calm.
"Excellent," Jayce said, having eaten his entire meal while this was happening. He was already standing. "Shall we go?"
Everyone looked at him.
"The appointment," he said. "The light curtain. It continues today." He was almost managing to keep the urgency out of his voice. Almost. "I would like to see what happens after the hextech experiment succeeds in the story. Is that unreasonable? I would like to watch myself make history."
At the door of the tavern, Vander stood with his pipe and an expression that contained the specific combination of trust and concern that competent parents have developed through direct experience with the gap between those two things.
"After yesterday," he said, " Vi and the others are recognizable. Their faces were in the light curtain above the whole city." He knocked his pipe against the door frame. "Taking them back up there. You're sure this is a good idea?"
"I know what I'm doing," Liam said.
"I'm not a kid," Vi said.
"Neither am I," Mylo said, with considerably less credibility.
Claggor was silent.
"A little disguise," Jayce offered. "And if there's any trouble, I know people in the upper city. A few at minimum."
Vander looked at Liam for a long moment. Liam met the look with the comfortable patience of someone who has been assessed by careful, competent people before and has learned that the most persuasive thing you can do is simply be still and let them reach their own conclusion.
"Wind Messenger," Liam said, suddenly, to no one in particular.
He was looking at the alley.
The Black Alley had the air quality it always had: compressed, chemically complicated, the product of years of industrial drainage and inadequate ventilation and the specific atmospheric consequence of building an entire district into the bottom of a geological crack. You did not notice it after a while, the way you stop noticing things that have always been present.
Liam extended his arms and let the natural energy field respond.
The wind came. Not from one direction. From all of them simultaneously: funneled through the cramped architecture of the rift, down through the middle tier of bridges, into the deep alleys where it had never been fast. Clean air from the surface, pushed down. Stagnant air from the bottom, pushed out.
"What's going on?"
"Where is this wind coming from?"
"The dark alley never has wind like this—"
People came out of doorways. People leaned from upper-tier bridges to feel it. A small boy with white hair stood at the door of Benzo's grocery store with his face upturned and said: "The poisonous air is going. It's like the wind is doing it on purpose."
Inside the shop, Benzo heard this, considered it, and said: "Janna."
"That's just a story," the boy said.
"Was the light curtain yesterday also just a story?"
The air in the Black Alley, for the first time in the living memory of everyone present, smelled like the surface.
Around Liam, the wind had gathered and compressed and taken on color: a deep green, the specific green of the lower city's long-held atmosphere, everything that had been breathed out and trapped and accumulated here and never gone anywhere. He held it in the shape of something large and pointed.
A longbow assembled in front of him from the clean air moving through his hands. The dark green mass sat against the string of it.
"Attention, everyone!"
Hundreds of people looked up. Liam was floating above the alley entrance, which people were still getting used to, holding a bow made of wind with a glowing green arrow nocked in it, shouting into the deep crack of the lower city like a man who has found exactly the right moment for a specific kind of statement.
"I am going to shoot this arrow at the Parliament Building in the upper city," he said. "Any objections?"
One second of silence.
"None!" someone called.
"The respectable people of Piltover breathing the Black Alley air for a morning. Anyone opposed to that?"
"NO!" The response came from several directions at once and kept building as the people further away caught up to what was being proposed.
"Then I'll ask one more time," Liam said, enjoying himself, "should I shoot it or not?"
The Black Alley answered this with the enthusiasm of a constituency that has been asked its opinion on something for perhaps the first time.
The arrow left the bow.
It moved fast and clean and green, trailing a ribbon of wind that connected it briefly back to Liam before releasing. It crossed the canal in an arc visible from both sides of the city. Several people on the upper tier of the bridge saw it pass overhead and had varying amounts of time to process what they were seeing before it arrived at the Parliament Building.
It did not explode. It did not crack the stone.
It dispersed.
Like ink dropped in water, but upward: the green spread from the impact point down the outer walls and into the streets below in all directions at once, rolling through the upper city like a weather event that had not been on the forecast.
From her position in the upper city streets, Caitlyn saw a green object moving in a parabola toward the Parliament Building. She stopped. She assessed the trajectory. She assessed the mass and velocity and the probable damage. She catalogued the options available to her and found none of them applicable in the available time.
Then she assessed what actually happened when it hit.
Green smoke. No structural damage. A waterfall of lower city air cascading down the most formal building in Piltover in all directions.
The streets began to cough.
The elegant pedestrians who had never in their lives been asked to breathe the air of the place three hundred meters across the canal from them were now being given the opportunity, and they were taking it poorly. Masks were requested. Windows were closed. The specific dignity of the upper city's morning routine was being substantially revised.
Caitlyn made her way through the chaos to Jayce's apartment, arriving at the street-level door with a quality of composure that required more active maintenance than usual.
She knocked.