Chapter Text
From the first moment Cassandra had laid her eyes on her daughter’s face, she knew she was in for a wild ride.
When Caitlyn took her first steps and spoke her first words, people were already beguiled by her presence, recognizing greatness as she was younger than most children when she accomplished these important moments.
It was when she held her first gun and made her first hunt, that she invoked fear in those who may try to lay claim that she was only just the heir to the Kiramman family.
But when her mother was killed at the Council building during a meeting to discuss rights for Zaunites and for the lost children of Zaun, no one could expect how vengeance grew in Caitlyn’s heart to seek out the one responsible for her mother’s death.
The Kiramman heir had also built her reputation up as not the future heir to her mother’s seat on the Council, but as a scientist working with her childhood friend, Jayce Talis, on creating sentient beings or robots and other technology that could help people.
They called it Hextech…
A revolutionary science inspired by the tales of magic in fairy tales and science fiction films, and Jayce had found a way to create such technology that mimicked the Arcane but was science through and through.
Their robots were built with the capabilities of working with the elderly, or as babysitters. Some even worked in the hospital alongside Caitlyn’s father to help be a calming presence for patients who feared the prick of a needle, or as assistants to the lab workers.
They made billions off their work, but it wasn’t the money neither cared about but the effect it had on those it helped.
However, there was another company that rivaled them…
ShimmerCorp…
Led by Ambessa Medarda from Noxus, along with scientist, Dr. Singed, the company specialized in a different type of robot. They made them for reproduction, for security, and other reasons that Hextech simply didn’t, but something was amiss and Caitlyn knew it.
The lead of the security bot department, Maddie Nolen, a former Military officer who'd been injured in the line of duty but hired by Ambessa for her knowledge, was heavily infatuated with Caitlyn and the two had gone on a few dates but inevitably, Caitlyn wasn’t into Maddie the way the ginger-haired woman hoped she’d be.
Still, Caitlyn kept her eyes on the rival company but would never expect what would come from it, as it would soon become entangled in her life very soon…
Caitlyn sighs as she walks through the hallways of Hextech, nodding to the several workers that she and Jayce had employed there as they went to their respective departments.
Her department was where the robots were designed, while Jayce’s main focus was building tools and weapons for the Piltovan Enforcers as well as for city workers and other areas that might require the help.
She sighs as she steps into her lab after scanning her badge and eyes the different bots she’d been working on as she moves to stand in front of them now.
“Rough morning?”, a gentle voice rings out from behind her, causing Caitlyn to turn to see her other best friend and Jayce’s fiancé, Mel Medarda, daughter of Ambessa, standing there with two steaming mugs of coffee.
She smiles and shrugs, “Just a late night with father again, working on a few things he’d like to see for the medical bots… Have you seen the requests that the Enforcers put in for one? A cleaning robot…”
Mel chuckles, “Humans have become lazy when it comes to tidying their offices… Here, something to make the morning easier for you.” She hands a mug of coffee to Caitlyn and sips from her own as she eyes the robots, “My mother would laugh in the Enforcers’ faces if they requested her to design them a maid robot. But even still, mother’s bots are… Different than what we make here… They incorporate human parts and realistic synthetic skin for the robots, making them seem real but they’re just virtual intelligences… The cost she charges is unreasonable, but many seek her out for their, well, personal bodyguards or a unit that could help even a single woman get pregnant… I’d much rather be here, where I never have to question the methods behind my mother’s work.”
Caitlyn snorts as she takes a sip of the warm liquid, “She does love to show them off like puppets… Maddie is no better about it either, with her little security units at her every call… Robots are sentient beings and while their work is profoundly controversial, it also rivals us as she is designing bots that can help a woman conceive a child without the need of a man to do it for her. For that, I must applaud Ambessa but there’s just something about them that confuses me on just how she does it. I mean, she also has some that have synthetic wombs? Able to carry a child for a man who’d never have luck meeting a real woman to bear his heir? I mean, how is that even possible? The science simply does not add up, Mel.”
“I agree… Mother’s methods working with Dr. Singed are questionable… But she’s accomplished it, regardless of how they’ve done so… The security bots on the other hand, we could make our own too?”, Mel offers, sighing as Caitlyn shakes her head.
“Mel, we build them to help people… Not to become someone’s personal soldier, or toy to have look over their back. I mean, I see the good in it, but truly… We have Enforcers for that same reason as our guards for the company. Robots can become unstable and so what if one were to go rogue? Even with the best programming, there are always flaws. You do remember the first few units Jayce and I built, yes?”
Caitlyn looks over at a closed door that held such robots within its room; defective bots that had been unstable to the point they’d had to shut them down immediately to prevent injuries but they kept them for observation and to study how to improve the next units. As to show where they started from and where they were now with the successful bots that they were now selling like crazy.
Mel nods, “I do and while those incidents were unfortunate, it did give us some ground to work with… Look at what you’ve accomplished now, Caitlyn. Your work is amazing! But think about how we could rival ShimmerCorp and throw up a middle finger to my mother, showing her that our units could be far greater than anything she could design?”
Caitlyn pinches the bridge between her eyes and shakes her head, “Not right now, but I’ll consider it for the future, maybe… Today, I just need to work on these three here to tweak them before they can be shipped out for their homes and new jobs. What are you working on today with Elora?”
She eyes her friend who just sighs but smiles as the dark-skinned woman informs her that she’ll be working on something secret for her birthday that was coming up in the next month. Caitlyn groans, “Mel, we’ve been through this. I don’t need anything for my birthday; it’s just another day.”
Mel smirks, “Yes well, I am still working on something for you, so hush and get to work on your bots while I go tweak stuff of my own.” She rubs Caitlyn’s left shoulder and hums, “Besides… Your father requested me to make it for you.” She winks as Caitlyn sighs, “You’ll thank me later!!!”, waving as she leaves Caitlyn’s lab to get to her own where her assistant was waiting for her.
Caitlyn shakes her head and smiles, sighing as she eyes the bots before her and she sets her coffee mug down on a nearby table to pull her lab coat on over her black turtleneck. “Alright then, let’s get to making you all perfect, shall we?”
Caitlyn reviews the schematics over and over again, until she can finally finish all the tweaks regarding the bots she needed to ship out before she left the office for the day. She sighs to herself as another headache comes over her, pinching her nose as to try and force the pain away but she gives in as she plops into her desk chair inside her office within her lab.
The bots she was working on were connected to her programming on her laptop, so she was able to make the changes through their wiring instead of with actual tools for what was needed to be improved upon, since it wasn't anything that she could physically do anyways.
As she sits forward and pops her knuckles to input more codes, her phone buzzes and she turns her eyes to see it was Jayce calling from his lab.
“Jayce?”, she says tiredly as she held the phone to her ear with her shoulder while typing away at her laptop still.
“Hey Sprout, am I interrupting something?”, Jayce asks calmly as his eyes flicker to a framed picture of them when they graduated college together, smiling at the memories.
“No, just putting the finishing touches and codes into my bots… Can you believe that one of these will be going to the library as to replace the librarians that do night shifts? It’s been such a headache inputting the databases from the library into their programming, but I’m nearly done tweaking them to ensure productivity.”
She then smiles as she finally fixes the code she’d messed up before, having input medical knowledge into one of the bots instead of the literary database after a long night and having felt delirious when she’d done it before. Caitlyn then sits back in her chair and grasps the phone, “How goes the new HexWrench you’ve been working on for the plumbers?”
Jayce chuckles, “It’s great and I think I might want to make more to keep on hand here. You know I like getting my hands dirty now and then… But Cait? I wanted to let you know that we’re having some investors visit tomorrow from Demacia. They’re interested in looking at your bots for their Royal family.”
Caitlyn’s ears perk up, “The Crownguards? That’s amazing, I’ll prepare a powerpoint on the different models for them. But that’s not the only reason you’re calling me, is it?”
Her friend’s face softens as he nods to himself, “No it’s not… Cait, you and your dad shouldn’t be alone tonight… It’s been a year as of tonight, Sprout.”
Caitlyn’s face falls and she looks away, “I know… We’ll be fine, Jayce… Father is probably going to stay at the hospital late tonight as he said he had several surgeries scheduled and may run over… I’ll just… Stay home.”
“Cait, please… Mel and I would like to take you to dinner, if that’s alright? We could have a sleepover like old times? Drink bad wine and watch shitty horror movies? Come on, for me?”, Jayce asks softly, tapping his fingers to his desk as he hears the resignation in Caitlyn’s voice.
“Jayce, just not tonight, ok? Maybe next weekend, I just have a lot of work to do tonight”, Caitlyn protests as she tries to fight the tears threatening to spill from her eyes, but feels one slip down her cheek. She looks at a picture of her mother that rested near her computer and swallows hard, “I haven’t visited her grave yet today… Perhaps I’ll stop by on my way home if you’d like to join me.”
Jayce smiles softly, “I’ll bring Mel and meet you there, say six tonight?” He beams as Caitlyn agrees, “Great! Ok Sprout, see you then and don’t work too hard, ok?”
Caitlyn rolls her eyes as the call ends and sets her phone back down with a heavy sigh, but then her mind shifts to the person who’d taken her mother from her and her eyes furrow with anger.
“I’ll find you, Jinx… I swear it”, she mutters under her breath, forcing herself to get back to work as she shivers…
As she stands over her mother’s grave with Mel and Jayce at her sides, she swallows hard as the memory of receiving that call filled her. She quietly begins to sob and turns to bury her face into Jayce’s neck as he quickly pulls her close, “It’s not fair!”, she cries out as Mel rubs her back in soothing circles.
“She dies and her killer just vanishes? Without any traces? It’s not fair!!! Someone needs to do something!!! Why won’t anyone do something?!!!”, she cries out in anguish, her voice trembling as she clings to her best friend while Jayce gently kisses the top of her head and Mel gives them both a sad look as they both knew the search had continuously ended with dead leads and so, the Enforcers had given up looking for Jinx.
“It’s not fair, we know…”, Mel says softly, her voice calm as she watches Caitlyn turn to face her. She smiles tenderly and places her hands onto Caitlyn’s shoulders, “She’d be so very proud of you, Cait… She wouldn’t have wanted you to do something drastic and you haven’t.”
Caitlyn looks down, swallowing hard as unbeknownst to her friends, she had a spare room at her home filled with the newspaper reports regarding her mother’s death and any clues as to how she could locate Jinx, but unfortunately, she hadn’t found anything concrete yet.
“I just… I can’t fail her, Mel… I can’t”, Caitlyn says quietly as she slowly sinks to her knees to place the flowers laying on the ground onto the grave, arranging them how she knew her mother would have liked and she sighs.
“Let me have a moment, please”, she quietly asks as she keeps her eyes on her mother’s grave, on the inscriptions engraved in the headstone.
“Cassandra Kiramman. Loving mother and wife. May she never be forgotten…”
Jayce nods and eyes Mel, “We’ll be in the car”, he tells Caitlyn softly, walking away to allow Caitlyn some privacy.
Caitlyn eyes the grave still and tears continue to spill from her eyes, but she then freezes as a sharp sound is heard from somewhere nearby, lifting her head up to glance around the graves surrounding her at the cemetery.
She then hears it and her eyes widen as a bolt of bright blue light crackles and she gasps, scrambling to her feet as bolts of blue energetic rage shoot towards her and cause her to stumble over a different grave and land onto her knees.
She hears the laugh and growls to herself as she turns her head to see the form walk forward, “YOU!”, she angrily shouts out as she manages to wobble back to her feet but then gasps as something sends her flying across the ground to have her body hit against a headstone and knocking her out…
When Caitlyn awakens, she groans as a bright light flashes in each of her eyes and hears her father’s voice above her. She blinks, and makes out her father, Mel, Jayce and a nurse looking down at her as she realizes she’s in the hospital with pain radiating from her body.
“W-What happened?”, she manages to get out as she tries to sit up but whines in pain.
“Jinx… She was there, Cait… We were almost to the car and heard your screams and we hurried as fast as we could to get to you, but it was too late. Whatever she used, made you actually crush a headstone, and you have a pretty nasty concussion along with a bruised spine and two broken ribs. Some bruises and cuts too, but nothing too severe. Cait, you’re lucky that we made it in time before she could do worse to you as we saw her run off when we found you.”
Jayce swallows hard as Caitlyn’s face twists in anger, “Cait… I think it’s time we got a guard for you… A security unit from ShimmerCorp…”
Caitlyn shakes her head, “I don’t need a bodyguard, Jayce, let alone something that is apart of the woman that I turned down’s, department… I’m fine…”
“No Caitlyn, you are not fine and we all know it. I’ve already sent word to Mrs. Medarda to request her best unit available. It will be here tomorrow afternoon from ShimmerCorp and escorted by Miss Nolen for delivery”, her father informs her firmly, not wanting to see anyone else he loved get hurt again.
Caitlyn clenches her jaw and her eyes shut tightly before she sighs, relenting as her shoulders drop upon hearing the concern in her father’s voice. “Fine…”, her voice filled with emotion as her father fixes her IV and gives her some more pain medicine, not looking forward to the next day…