By Most Mechanical and Dirty Hand

*knock knock knock* "Come ooooon, Tin Man, I know you're in there!" Jinx shouted as she pounded her fist against the door of an old Zaun factory. She was back in her own skin (for now), having spent most of the day sitting back in Caitlyn's mind as she pretended to work, thinking on what her mysterious new enemy had said. As soon as Vi had clocked out for the day, though, Jinx had snuck away up to the roof, the rough beginnings of a plan rattling around in her head.

"For reals, dude, open up already," she groaned, briefly considering tossing a grenade through the window. "Come oooooooooooon-"

"What?!" came a sudden shout as the door flew open to reveal none other than Viktor, the Machine Herald, in all his evolved glory. "For the love of- have you never learned to take a hint?"

"Finally!" Jinx exclaimed, ignoring Viktor as she pushed past him into a lab that definitely did not match the exterior of the building. "Do you even know how long you kept me waiting out there?"

"Fourteen minutes and eight seconds," Viktor replied, his annoyance evident even behind his mask. "A time after which most people would have given up."

"Pshh, since when have I ever been 'most people'? Now come on, Vik, I wanna talk to ya," she continued, unfazed as she nonchalantly tossed a duffel bag onto the floor.

"And what exactly makes you think that I want to talk to you?" the mechanical man said, still holding the door open for Jinx to leave.

Jinx smiled. "Because I think I have a way for you to finally get one over on Piltover's Golden Boy. I assume you heard about his mysterious new prototype?"

Viktor paused, before he slowly started to close the door. "Very little. Only that it was meant for anti-espionage, but that it had been stolen before he could... finish..." He looked up at her. "Am I to assume that it was you who stole it?"

"Bingo!" Jinx grinned, "But let's not get ahead of ourselves - first, let me tell you a story, because I have had a wild couple of days. Long story short, I've been having what ya might call an 'identity crisis', been spending a lot of time trying to figure out who I am and all that - even went up to visit the Noxian capital, of all places! And that... that is where the trouble started."

"See, last night someone jumped me - and it wasn't random, they knew exactly where to find me," she continued, starting to pace back and forth. "I thought I gave 'em the slip, but then suddenly this morning they show up again - and said something like 'don't try and hide from me, it won't work'. Now, the nature of this... person, had me thinking at first it must be magic or something, but then I start thinking... what if it's not?"

Jinx suddenly whirled, pointing a finger at Viktor. "Do you remember a couple years ago at one of the Progress Day Expos, the Academy showed off this fancy micro-GPS thing? Said it was meant for shipping security, but everyone with a brain knew it was really meant for warfare and espionage?" Viktor nodded, still silent. "Good! So get this, the other night I was drinking-"

Viktor snorted, a noise which sounded downright haunting coming from a man with mechanical lungs.

"What's with the laugh?" Jinx interrupts herself, offended. "I drink! Not... often, sure, but I've been known to partake once in a while! Anyway, that's not the point - the point is I had a wicked hangover the next morning, and someone I thought I could trust at the time gave me this pill, said it would help. And it did, the hangover was gone in barely a minute! Didn't think much of it at the time, you know how it is when your brain's aching to escape its fleshy prison and all, but now I'm wondering..."

"You're wondering if there was a tracker inside that pill." Viktor finished for her, nodding to himself. "It's not impossible - the technology exists, though it is exceedingly rare, and particularly expensive to manufacture at such a small scale."

"Great! So we're on the same page," Jinx said with a big smile, clapping her hands together, before reaching out one hand. "I'll make you a deal then, Vik - if you can get this tracker outta me, I'll give you the full rundown on Wonder Boy's new toy, deal?"

Viktor took a moment to stare down at her outstretched hand, before slowly reaching out and clasping it in his own cold metallic one. "Deal. Come, this way," he gestured down a hallway, and set off, Jinx hot on his heels. They followed its twists and turns, flickering lightbulbs illuminating multiple disused rooms, until finally Viktor pushed open one door and motioned for Jinx to step inside. As she did, she realized that it was in fact a surprisingly clean operating room.

"Wow," she remarked, giving a low whistle as she looked around. "I didn't know you could get a room this clean down here, honestly thought it was illegal for a building not to be dirty." Viktor ignored her remarks, gesturing to an operating table in the center, over which hung several sharp-looking instruments, while he walked over to a cabinet to pick out some tools. Jinx hopped up on the bed, kicking her feet a bit while she waited for him, until finally he peered over his shoulder at her.

"While you're here, I don't suppose I can interest you in joining the Glorious Evolution?" Now it was Jinx's turn to stare at him unimpressed, to which he only shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the cabinet. "Mmm, it was worth the try..."

Picking out a couple of scanners and what looked like some kind of EKG, he turned around and walked over to her, motioning for her to lie down. "How long ago did you take this pill?"

"About... a day and a half ago?" Jinx replied, and Viktor nodded, murmuring something to himself that was inaudible from behind his mask, before setting down the scanners and peeling opening the seals on the pads of the EKG-looking thing.

"These trackers are not designed to last for more than a week or so... they use a form of electromagnetism to effectively stick to the wall of your stomach." As he spoke, he stuck the pads to a couple of points around Jinx's exposed belly, causing her to gasp slightly from the cold. "It's a very mild charge, most people probably would never even notice it, but it should theoretically be detectable by this instrument. What that also means is that if we can send another corresponding pulse through your body, it should short out the tracker and unstick it, allowing you to, erm... excrete it."

"Makes sense to me, doc," Jinx replied, watching as Viktor flipped a couple of switches on the terminal. As the machine hummed to life, he pressed a couple of buttons, and Jinx could swear she felt a kind of tingling sensation around the pads. Before she could focus on that too long, though, she heard Viktor let out a surprised hum.

"How interesting..." he said, turning the screen so Jinx could see. "It appears your intuition was correct." At first, Jinx wasn't quite sure what she was looking at, it just looked like a bunch of static, but then she saw it - a little blip, pulsing just a bit too consistently to be natural.

"Awesome! Actually, wait, no... not awesome! Can you get it out?"

"Indeed," he replied, already pressing some more buttons on the terminal, then turning to pick up one of the other instruments he'd brought over - only now did Jinx realize it was little more than a weirdly-shaped taser. Viktor glanced over at her, and she briefly saw his eyes widen beneath his mask. "Ah, right... organic..." He looked around, then reached down where Jinx couldn't see and pulled up a simple metal bar, moving it over to her mouth. "Bite down on this, the process is... likely to cause a brief pain."

Jinx glared at him, but reluctantly opened her mouth and bit down on the bar - just in time, too, as she watched Viktor press the taser to her and press a button... right before she felt the electric shock rock through her body. She bit down as hard as she could on the bar, trying in vain to suppress the scream, as the shock felt like it lasted forever, until - it suddenly stopped, and Jinx collapsed back on the table. Letting the iron bar fall from her mouth and clatter to the floor, she took several deep breaths, until finally she could speak, "Could've... could've given me a little more warning, dude..."

Viktor ignored her (which she was actually starting to get annoyed by, thank you very much), his attention already back on the screen. He waited a few seconds, before nodding and turning the display back to her. "Success; the tracker has been deactivated. Assuming you keep at least some kind of healthy diet, it should leave your body in the next day or so." He then proceeded to remove the pads from her body and gather up any stray cables before stepping back to let her sit up.

As she did, Jinx felt the room sway a bit, and took a couple of seconds to collect herself, before her eyes landed on Viktor, who seemed to be waiting to speak. "Now, as for your end of the bargain...?"

"Ugh, keep your parts on already, I know..." she groaned, hopping down from the bed and walking back out of the operating room. "Come on, shellhead, this is a show-and-tell presentation."

The unlikely pair made their way back out to the entrance room, where Jinx immediately walked over to the duffel bag she'd brought in and hoisted it up onto a table. "Now, let me ask you something - before you were... you know, glorious and all, did you ever have times where you would look at someone else and wonder, even if just for a minute, what it might feel like to be them? Walk around in their shoes, smile with their face, all that jazz?"

Viktor said nothing, but the subtle downward tilt of his head made Jinx pause. "...Yes," he finally said, sounding surprisingly somber. "More than I'd care to admit."

Jinx stopped for a minute, unsure how to continue. "...Well... good, because apparently - so has Jayce. Or, at least... so have his mysterious benefactors - I'll get back to that in a minute. Behold!" she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a gun, the very gun that had recently been sending her life spiraling in all sorts of directions. "The 'Jayce Talis Costume Gun, mk. 1', or as I've taken to calling it, 'Jinx's New Favorite Toy'." She held out the gun for Viktor to see, but very pointedly did not let him take it.

"See, what this baby does is straight up something out of a romance novel! Or, actually probably a horror story... always getting those two mixed up. All you gotta do is blast somebody with it, you know, like a gun, and they just deflate like a balloon! No blood and guts, no mess, it's just like they collapse into a pile of empty skin. But you see... that's only the beginning. The real fun is what you can do with that empty skin - you just climb inside, like some sort of weird sex dungeon shit, and it's almost like your own body starts to deform to fit inside them. Doesn't matter if they're tall or small, you just kinda morph into their shape, and as you zip it up - pop! It's like they never deflated in the first place, only now it's you behind their eyes. And the craziest part is you even get their memories, so if you play your cards right you can basically just take over their life and no one will ever know the difference!" She gave the gun a twirl, a little skill she'd tried to keep from Samira's mind (even if she didn't quite have it down). "What do you think, Vik - pretty wild, right?"

"...You're insane," Viktor said, his tone even and unimpressed. "You expect me to believe that this... this toy is actually a device that in the right hands would be capable of shattering entire governments?"

"Mmm, yeah, I figured it'd be a little hard to believe, which is why I brought Exhibit B!" Jinx said, turning back to the duffel bag and pulling it open for Viktor to see. As he stepped forward, though, nothing in the world could've prepared him for what he saw - the deflated face of Sheriff Caitlyn Kiramman, hollow eyes staring up at him from where she'd been unceremoniously stuffed into this old duffel bag. "Maybe I forgot to mention - I tested it. It works." Jinx continued, reveling in this moment of catching the Machine Herald truly off guard. "Spent a couple days in ol' Big Hands' body, toured around Noxus for a bit as a Noxian bounty hunter, then came back and decided to take the Sheriff's life for a spin."

"I..." Viktor started, shaking his head as he stepped back in shock. "Okay... Let's say for the sake of the argument that I believe this - how in the hell did Jayce Talis invent something of this caliber? A tool of perfect impersonation, and it was him that created it?"

"Ahh, well you see that's the mystery, isn't it? Remember that mysterious benefactor I mentioned? Well they're the one who's been after me the last couple days, somehow tracking me even through different skins, and this morning they sort of... gave me this ultimatum - they want me to return the prototype to Jayce by Friday, or else. Apparently they need him to finish it, but what I'm gathering from that is that Jayce is just a pawn in someone else's game, and he almost definitely didn't actually come up with all of it on his own. So you know, little victories."

Suddenly, Jinx stepped up right in front of Viktor, staring up into the glowing eyes of his mask. "But ya see, Vik... Friday is days away, and now that I'm free of the tracker, we've got this toy right here and right now in our hands with no one to stop us. Who knows what we could learn from this - I mean, you and me? We're two of the sharpest tools down here in the watershed - we could leave Golden Boy in the dust!" Jinx twirled the gun into her opposite hand, and reached out her hand once more. "Whaddya say, Vik... partners?"

Viktor remained still, and Jinx could see his eyes behind his mask darting between Caitlyn's skin, the gun, and Jinx's outstretched hand, before finally he slowly reached up and took her hand in a firm handshake. "...Partners."