Chapter Text
“This is stupid,” Jinx mumbled, “Argh. Stupid. Damn. Door!”
Her voice rang out in echoes from the gloom-shrouded stones of the dungeon, as did the sound of her boots scuffing as she kicked the massive stone door again and again and again –
But it didn’t matter how hard she kicked. It wouldn’t matter at all; even the dust her boots knocked from the cracks in the stone simply lifted from the floor, fell in reverse, and sank back into its place, rendering the door untouched.
Even her most powerful weaponry wouldn’t leave a dint, as the slowly-clearing clouds of noxious pink smoke and giant scorch mark on the floor, walls and ceiling around the door from her rocket launcher attested.
“Stupid magic door!” Jinx howled, “I said open, and you didn’t! I even knocked! With my lockpicks, three Chompers, and Fishbones! Now you’re my personal freakin’ nemesis!”
Luxanna Crownguard, coughing and waving away the smoke from her face, shook her head, and lifted her staff, its crystalline tip shining with a bright halo of her Light magic as she squinted again at the runes on the door…
“Jinx…”
They spiraled out in a ring from a gigantic, crystalline prism, easily thrice the height of either of the girls, studding the middle of the door, framed by curling stone arms, their hands clasped, rendered in stone with deeply unsettling realism.
“Jinx, calm down. It’s a riddle.”
“Of course it is,” Jinx sighed, with a fierce roll of her glowing pink eyes, “Couldn’t be a candy store for once, nooo…”
Four, five days underground, now, on the sixth level of the Labyrinth of Woes Unforgotten, and they’d suddenly been split off from the rest of their companions by this Hall of Mirrors trap…
So now here they were, in a heptagonal stone chamber beneath a groin-vaulted dome, each of its archways framing a mirror, save the seventh, whereupon sat the great stone door.
And there was no point in trying to break the mirrors, as Jinx had found out the hard way; firing a rocket into one, only to find it screaming out of the opposing mirror, zipping from portal to portal in an endless loop until Lux had been forced to detonate it in the midst of the chamber by catching it in a well-timed Light bubble.
If she hadn’t been able to contain the blast, they might both be dead.
“Taking bets,” Jinx mumbled, “Without your sunny perfection and my chaotic charisma around to keep it copacetic, which do we think’s gonna happen first – Yas drinks himself into a broody coma, Missy F. finally loses it and ditches the party in the nearest available deathtrap or Briar gets the munchies and eats everyone?”
“It brightens my day that you used the word ‘copacetic’, Jinx. Did you do that just to impress me?” Lux beamed back at her, but under the circumstances even her cheery smile couldn’t linger long, her brows furrowing as she turned back to the runes, an ancient Demacian dialect, “But c’mon, have some faith in our friends!”
Jinx poked her tongue out in a feline blep.
“…then the bearer of All Hues shall open the way,” Lux murmured, ignoring her,“Should the sixth key illuminate the simulacrum of…” she frowned, “…Thousand-Faced Koth…?”
Jinx, tools out and weapons propped in her lap on the dusty floor, clanked noisily in the background, repairing some damage to her minigun from their previous battle with a petricite griffon.
“Ooo, spooky.”
Lux frowned and squinted at the last of the runes.
“…those anointed by the prophecy, shall be scattered and thrice sundered, until by the utterance most feared, spoken to the face most intimate held, may colors blend united and the curse of Azab-Nur, King of the Starved, be at last dispersed…”
“Huh,” Jinx scratched the back of her head with her wrench, “Call me, um, not an expert in Demacian history like The Shiniest Book Nerd in Runeterra over there…”
“Oh,” Lux shot her a mild glare over her shoulder, “I hope you meant that as a compliment. I’m choosing to take it as one!”
“Aw, Blondie, don’t I always compliment you?”
“Y-yes,” Lux had to think about that a moment, and a hint of pink tinged her cheeks, “You are…unusually nice to me, actually, considering the – way you talk to the others-”
“Trash talk!” said Jinx, bobbing her head, “It’s trash talk, Sunshine. It’s one of my favorite things!”
“Well, I um, I’m really glad to be the exception,” Lux beamed back at her, “I – I’m used to being criticized by others sometimes so it’s…it’s really nice not to be in the firing line.”
“Who’d ever pick on you?” Jinx scowled, “I’ll kill ’em! What would they even say about you anyway? ‘oh that Lux, she’s too pretty and friendly and nice and smart, whoo, what a stinker, hate her’?”
Lux’s cheeks had gone a blazing red, “Well, um, I do tend to ramble on a lot when I’ve got a topic I’m excited about, I can’t stop myself, really-”
“It’s cute and engaging!” growled Jinx, offended on her behalf.
“Oh, I guess you do tend to listen to me all the way through,” Lux only flushed deeper, “…and then there’s all my light puns,” she raised a glowing fingertip, “Some people find them more glaring than dazzling…”
“What?! Well that’s cuz their bulbs are dim!” Jinx snorted, crossing her arms, “Losers!”
Lux looked at the floor, but she couldn’t stop grinning, “Um. And they say my voice is, um, shrill, and my laugh is…” she winced, “a ‘war crime’…”
“It is!” Jinx proclaimed, and Lux blinked.
“Y-you think my laugh is… a war crime?”
“Oh yeah, heinous,” Jinx bounced her head firmly, “Criminal, act of terrorism, illegal across Valoran.”
Lux stared at her, lip quivering.
“Oh don’t make that face,” Jinx bounded closer, beaming into her space with a wide white grin, “That’s why I love it so much! I’m a connoisseur of war crimes and I wanna play your laugh on loop across every hexspeaker in Piltover!”
Lux gave a choked little squeak and covered her face while Jinx’s eyes went wide, pondering the possibilities.
“Oh, I could do that, if I rigged up-”
“Jinx!” Lux cried out, “We’ll have to get out of this dungeon before you’ll be doing any such thing so – um – you were saying something about Demacian history?”
“Oh!” said Jinx, beaming, “Yeah, so, I’m not an awesome book nerd beauty like you, but…bu-ut…” Jinx went on, flashing her a cheeky poke of her tongue, “…like, ‘Azab-Nur, King of the Starved’ and ‘Thousand-Faced Koth’ sound just a bit too gnarly and metal to be outta stodgy ol’ Demacia lore to me. Am I warm?”
“…warm…”
Lux turned and looked at the carvings again, pursing her lips.
“By first ray, incepted, and by last light, made whole,” Lux finished her translation and stepped back from the door, staring up at the arches, the carvings along them, and into her own face, staring back from each of the mirrors as she turned in a slow circle.
“You’re right. This carving…this whole dungeon…is older than Demacia. Something from before the Rune Wars…”
She frowned.
“Something designed to work with the arcane.”
Jinx and Lux exchanged a glance.
“Wellp,” said Jinx, “We tried everything else!”
Lux swallowed and raised her staff.
“Light, don’t fail me,” she murmured, and let it well up from within her, through her arm, into her staff…
…into a thin, concentrated beam of light, all colors blending into one, gently probing the dark heart of the great crystal prism sunken into the giant door…
Light welled, pooled, and filled the innards of the crystal – and Lux’s eyes widened.
She’d made a terrible mistake.
The Light split apart into its component colors, refracted by every facet of the prism, and shot out of it in every direction – lines of vivid, blazing red, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, orange, and every hue between shooting out into the chamber – into each of the six mirrors –
And back out of them, haphazardly crisscrossing the chamber in a dizzying spiderweb of rainbow beams.
She couldn’t shout a warning to Jinx; by the time she’d realized what she’d done, the beams had already transfixed both of their bodies, a thousand times a thousand iridescent rays –
And Lux could only stare in horror as the room shifted around her, her vision blurring, then doubling – tripling – as though she were wearing multiple pairs of spectacles, a hideous warm sensation of being sliced without pain –
This is it, this is how we die…I’m sorry, Jinx…
Jinx…I…
Lux sat up.
“…I…” she gasped, “I…Jinx…I think I…”
Jinx sat up.
She was red.
No, she was really, really red. Her blue braids were gone, replaced by bright scarlet pigtails, but just as impossibly long. Her pink eyes blinked, red as blood. And she was suddenly…wearing some kind of red…and white top with…a big star in the middle of it?
“Luxie,” Jinx stared at her, licking her lips, “You’re blue.”
“What?”
“Your hair,” Red Jinx pointed, “S’blue. And it’s got a rabbit in it.”
Lux lifted her hand to her hair, pawing at her head.
A blue strand fell from a neatly-coiffed updo. Lux felt around at the top of her head and her fingers found, to her surprise – a cool, hard surface in the shape of a … rabbit?
She jumped in surprise, and her clothing clinked, delicate white and blue layers resembling both cloth and … porcelain?
“What – what in the the name of the Protectors…”
Lux sat up.
“Jinx,” she whispered, “Something’s wrong, my clothes…”
Jinx shook her head groggily in a bounce of her giant viridian bubble braids and furrowed her brows at Lux.
“Huh, who are you, Pinkie? What the hey – where’d my art go?” she checked over the satchels and belts at her sides, “Okay, phew, my cans are here, where’s Ekko? Did I leave him behind again? And why are you dressed in a sailor outfit?” She grinned. “Not that the Bubblegum Cutiepie look ain’t workin’ for ya…”
“Um,” Lux blinked at her, “What? It’s me, Lux – wh-what – Jinx – why is your hair green? And why are you covered in paint?”
“Luxie, I’m over here,” another voice called, and familiar red hair flashed in the corner of her eye, “Th-that ain’t me.”
Lux sat up.
Her winged yellow cap fell off her head. She shook pale violet bangs frosted blue out of her eyes.
“Okay, no fair, I didn’t even see that – that doesn’t count as a ringout –” she blinked, “Where the…is this some backrooms-ass DEMA facility? Who the heck are – all of –”
She blinked at the Blue Lux and the Pink Lux.
They blinked back at her.
Pink Lux and Red Jinx gaped at each other, then both stared at Green Jinx and…
“Ugghhh!!” announced a voice between them, as a short-cropped ginger head swept up from the floor, pearls clacking around her neck and feather swooshing from above the big green jewel – decidedly not hers – set in her headband, “I musta flopped harder than a tomato fried to the hat in the struggle buggy of a dimbox after her first Egg Harbor–wait, where’d I stuff the diamonds-”
Ginger Jinx’s eyes met Green Jinx’s.
“Luxie,” said Red Jinx, staring at them both, “There’s three of me.”
“Yes I, um,” said Pink Lux…
“…can see…” said Blue Lux.
“…the problem…” finished Violet Lux, with a tiny whimper.
Ginger Jinx slapped her gloved hands to her cheeks and screamed to shake the dungeon walls.