Machine Works

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

[robotkaspirit]

Gloves Off

“Analyzing approach.” As Viktor uttered this to himself, his preparation for the pottery class with Vi was finally over. His wild mane of hair had been tamed and domesticated. His 3rd arm had received slight alterations to ensure its complete obedience in the sculpting of clay. The dent Vi left in Viktor’s armour had been smoothed out and its function returned. All for the sake of discovering the inner workings of her hextech gauntlets. Viktor wasn’t even sure why he needed to know. Outfitting himself with the hextech gauntlet was something he’d mused with, the power they output had been felt too many times by Viktor on the fields of justice.

Viktor continued on his trek to the ceramics studio. Viktor was early to the pottery class, but this was as he calculated. He intended to practice before Vi’s arrival to make sure he had the upper hand (figuratively and literally) in sculpting.

[p-ltoverenforcer]

Vi frowned. She wasn’t exactly sure what pottery date attire was, or any kind of date for that matter, but it didn’t exactly seem like a black tie optional kind of gig. With a sigh she slammed her closet door shut and grabbed the same pair of jeans she had worn the last few days. It wasn’t like it mattered anyway, with her luck she had been landed with some sort of voidling monster and their date would quickly turn into a brawl.

Slugging on a jacket and grabbing her gauntlets she left. Late.

Pushing her way into the studio her eyes scanned over couples already sickeningly into their sculpting - arms wrapped around each other and hands playfully dabbing bits of wet clay onto each other’s faces. Vi resisted the urge to retch. An urge that become almost impossible to curb when her eyes came to rest on the one lone figure in the class.

“Hey!” She shouted, ignoring the alarmed stares of those around her. “The hell are you doing here?”

[robotkaspirit]

Viktor, of course, already knew who he’d be meeting here, but still managed to look surprised, well as much as a robotic face mask could let him. Viktor removed himself from the sculpting process and turned to the visibly annoyed Vi. “At last, your arrival. Take a seat and let us begin sculpting the glorious evolution!”

Viktor felt assured that everything would go to plan.

[void-reaver]

Kha’zix - Viktor: A Passion for Perfection

[robotkaspirit]

“Submit to my designs!” Viktor shouted as he struck the metal with his hammer once again. Repairing the chassis unit had been a more demanding task than Viktor had originally envisioned. Back on Runeterra he could merely assign one of his countless Remont Repair Robots to repair it as he slipped into a spare one, but constructing new remonts had been low on Viktor’s priorities. Fixing his chassis had also been low, but Viktor knew he’d need it soon enough. Viktor felt the cold upon the bare flesh his chassis had been covering. His body had been ravaged by the self-experimentation and surgery performed by his robots. A patchwork of pale white flesh and machinery crisscrossed his torso. 

Viktor wasn’t alone in his workshop, an unwanted guest had arrived in his domain. Viktor ignored its presence. Without his armour, Viktor was vulnerable. He continued on hammering the metal into its original shape.

[void-reaver]

Recognizing a fellow champion, Kha’zix moved further into the workshop. It was Viktor, no mistaking the mixture of metal and flesh. In his previous form Kha’zix had detested this man but it was clear that Viktor too was working towards his own perfection. Impressively so considering he lacked the ability to rewrite himself from the inside like Kha’zix. Kha’zix moved around to see what the machine herald was doing, climbed up onto an unused surface and perched there, his eyes unblinking watching him work.

“Your armour improves, Viktor. It’s strength is your own, in a way. Why is it only you that does this? The other humansz do not follow the way you have shown them?”

[robotkaspirit]

Whatever placed itself upon Viktor’s desk was not as human as his appearance portrayed. Viktor noticed that the creature did not blink once, as if it knew it would only take a microsecond for Viktor to end this intrusion. The visage before him was not familiar, but its voice rang true in Viktor’s memory. It was Kha’Zix, the voidreaver, a monster Viktor had fought alongside and against many times. Viktor decided he’d entertain the once bug’s questions.

“The other humans seclude themselves to their frail forms. Stuck in their flesh, they refuse to change themselves. They cannot embrace progress, but willingly embrace their own weakness.”

Viktor finished hammering the chassis unit, content with its repair process being successful. Viktor, using his 3rd arm, carefully locked his abdomen unit into the chassis. Viktor turned to the creature and studied him for the first time. No longer was the bug in a chitinous exoskeleton, it now had soft flesh. A degeneration Viktor thought.

“Now what is your purpose here, Kha-Zix?”

[robotkaspirit]

Gloves Off

“Analyzing approach.” As Viktor uttered this to himself, his preparation for the pottery class with Vi was finally over. His wild mane of hair had been tamed and domesticated. His 3rd arm had received slight alterations to ensure its complete obedience in the sculpting of clay. The dent Vi left in Viktor’s armour had been smoothed out and its function returned. All for the sake of discovering the inner workings of her hextech gauntlets. Viktor wasn’t even sure why he needed to know. Outfitting himself with the hextech gauntlet was something he’d mused with, the power they output had been felt too many times by Viktor on the fields of justice.

Viktor continued on his trek to the ceramics studio. Viktor was early to the pottery class, but this was as he calculated. He intended to practice before Vi’s arrival to make sure he had the upper hand (figuratively and literally) in sculpting.

[void-reaver]

Kha’zix - Viktor: A Passion for Perfection

It was another cold day, grey and overcast with snow drifting down across the town. Kha’zix was walking around near the fringes of town, he’d not been over this way before. He’d been told at some point this was where the workshops and craftsmen set up their shops. Although he’d never been that interested in actually making things before he was starting to see the appeal now that he had these ‘hands’.  His ears pricked up and he straightened at the sound of metal being worked and a voice muttering away in a thick foreign accent. He was sure he recognized that voice from the rift, he moved closer and peered inside the workshop.

[robotkaspirit]

“Submit to my designs!” Viktor shouted as he struck the metal with his hammer once again. Repairing the chassis unit had been a more demanding task than Viktor had originally envisioned. Back on Runeterra he could merely assign one of his countless Remont Repair Robots to repair it as he slipped into a spare one, but constructing new remonts had been low on Viktor’s priorities. Fixing his chassis had also been low, but Viktor knew he’d need it soon enough. Viktor felt the cold upon the bare flesh his chassis had been covering. His body had been ravaged by the self-experimentation and surgery performed by his robots. A patchwork of pale white flesh and machinery crisscrossed his torso. 

Viktor wasn’t alone in his workshop, an unwanted guest had arrived in his domain. Viktor ignored its presence. Without his armour, Viktor was vulnerable. He continued on hammering the metal into its original shape.

[robotkaspirit]

Beeep beep

What’s this? You awake to find your computer screen aglow, but who could be messaging you at this time of night. Scrambling out of bed you make your way over to the desk, perhaps knocking a shin or two on your journey, and your blurry eyes try to make out the words in the yellow glow.

This was how Viktor assumed the other champions responded to this. Viktor merely needed to hear the notification of the message to know its contents, reading it was a waste of time. On the fields of justice Viktor had been pitted against the capable citizens of Piltover too many times for even his advanced processing to keep detail of. One of their motley crew he had developed a soft spot for. Quite literally, as he had the denting in his old chassis unit to prove she had turned his world upside down as she uppercut him with her hextech gauntlets. Those gauntlets were something of an amusement to Viktor as he was able to have a closer, albeit brief, inspection of them with every new assault and battery he became victim to. He knew Vi would not willingly part with her power gloves, he also knew too well she couldn’t be made to part with them forcefully as Viktor’s hand passed over the dent. The computer worm he made and successfully spread to intercept and edit data, had at last been worth the time it took to create. Now he had the opportunity to get Vi into a situation were her defense (and gauntlet’d offense) would be down. Viktor returned to his work bench and began preparing himself for pottery.

[robotkaspirit]

☃

“Begin life signature scan.” A man shaped figure with a giant hammer came into view through the snowstorm. “Perfect optics.” The outline took form into Undeniably it was Jayce. “Of all the people who could be here...” Jayce continued to wander in the storm. Viktor’s passing hope for Jayce’s demise to the snowstorm as he switched to thermal vision. In place of Jayce was a huge explosion of red heat originating from Jayce’s mercurial hammer.

A few more hours wandering lost in the snow and he might be more receptive to Viktor’s offer for his arcane crystal...

[robotkaspirit]

✝: What are your muse’s religious belief(s)?

“Does a machine require a god to function? No, only a creator.”

If Viktor still had the ability to smile smugly, he would have been. As he turned away and retired to his bench he began fiddling with the next greatest creation he had been toying with for some time now. All the pieces fit together perfectly with a soft click. The hexcore within Viktor gave a meager pulse down his metallic arm towards the device. The small device whirred and spluttered into mechanical life. Viktor recalled when he himself had been as still and defunct as the device was. The memories were hard to access fully, but Viktor recalled it as the tipping point of his ascension to becoming the machine herald. The brain is a tricky organ especially with its imperfections as Viktor had perceived. Even more so when Viktor’s specialty was machinery and not the human body  The operation he designed took time and resources he didn’t have. Viktor had been up to this point, liberating the electricity from the Zaunite Electricity Grid. His calculations of the electricity needed to bring him back from the state of death after the operation proved to be too much for the grid, causing a power cut. Viktor knew he should have been dead. The only thing keeping him alive was a faint pulse from his deactivated hextech pacemaker heart replacer. As his newly augmented brain functioned on quarter the power it required, he saw what he’d later term as the Robotka Spirit. The hallucination was of all his creations sharing an intertwining web of spectral laces. His laboratory was covered in the ethereal string. Removing his goggles from his still human eyes, Viktor realised that the web all lead to one place, himself. In fact all the string was him, in a matter of speaking. Viktor felt the machines all creak to his very being. The machines were almost extensions of himself and each with a distinct feeling of its own. Now he was a part of them, in a way he could have never hoped to be before. Before they had became his life and eventually his flesh, but now they had formed his mind as he had formed them. As Viktor came back to his dying sense, he made the demand for energy from the machines. They answered in earnest to his call. Viktor returned to his normal state as he finished the operation with his 3rd arm acting as surgeon to close the incursion into his own skull. The new augment in his head functioned perfectly. However, Viktor wasn’t content with the disappearance of the framework that had connected him and all his creations. “Prepare the surgery again! Now we begin the installation of the optical perfection augmentation.”

[robotkaspirit]

Transport

As Viktor’s optics calibrated the location, what little remained of him as a human told him he was not on Runeterra anymore. As the new images loaded up, the destination was a bare room with few pieces of furniture. Viktor’s eyes whirred towards the table in the middle of the room. Upon it laid a newspaper detailing his arrival. Viktor quickly computed the chances that the transportation was due to a experiment gone wrong, but Viktor knew there was more to this. The newspaper was placed in the room before his arrival. Clearly, he’d been plucked from his laboratory to serve in some game. Professor Stanwick had a hand to play in this. Once again, beaten by Stanwick. “DESTROY, THEN IMPROVE!”. Energy surged from Viktor, from his Hex Core to his synthetic 3rd arm. As the raw power culminated, his rage took form, as his laser split the room in two. “All will soon change…”. Viktor rapidly set to work rebuilding this room in his own idealistic style