Piltover

Here, progress is less an occasional achievement than a civic obligation, and the city has built its whole sense of itself around pursuing it. Hextech, the craft of binding magical energy into stable, functioning devices, has done more than reshape how the city fights and builds. It has become something the city sells, guards, and sometimes dreads, often all at the same time.

Jayce, the Defender of Tomorrow, did more than anyone to move hextech from theory into practice, and much of his career has gone to handling what that invention allows in other people’s hands. Heimerdinger, the Revered Inventor, embodies an older, milder version of the same drive, caring more about what a device can accomplish than about how it might be put to use. Ziggs, the Hexplosives Expert, approaches the same energy as a pastime rather than a serious discipline, and that unnerves a city that would rather its explosions arrive with forms attached.

Somebody still has to make sure the forms get filed. Caitlyn, the Sheriff of Piltover, enforces the city’s rules with a sniper’s exactness, whereas Vi, the Piltover Enforcer, enforces them with far less tolerance for delay. Camille, the Steel Shadow, operates a tier above street-level policing, guarding the city’s commercial holdings with a precision that edges toward the surgical. Not every gifted resident keeps to the law or even to the city’s walls. Ezreal, the Prodigal Explorer, uses its inventions for expeditions the city never signed off on, while Orianna, the Lady of Clockwork, and Seraphine, the Starry-Eyed Songstress, demonstrate that the same talent can produce a dancing partner or a melody just as readily as a weapon.

None of this unfolds on its own. The city likes to portray itself as one tidy undertaking, yet its inventors seldom agree on what that undertaking is meant to achieve: a weapon, a convenience, a work of art, or merely evidence that an idea can be made real. Whatever gets refined in the bright upper districts eventually trickles down into the city below, typically in a cruder form that no one above intended, and almost never with anyone above accepting responsibility for what becomes of it afterward.