Chapter 103 - Caitlyn - The Sheriff of Piltover

A determined and skilled investigator, Caitlyn is one of the sheriffs of Piltover, the City of Progress. She is a fiercely intelligent woman with a strong sense of justice and a resolute devotion to the law. Armed with a magnificent hextech rifle, Caitlyn is a patient hunter and the bane of criminals throughout her city.

Born to a wealthy and influential family of hextech artificers in Piltover, Caitlyn swiftly learned the social graces of city life, but preferred to spend her time in the wilder lands to the south. Equally adept at mingling with the moneyed citizens of the City of Progress or tracking a deer through the mud of the forest, Caitlyn spent the bulk of her youth beyond Piltover's gates. She could track a bird on the wing or put a bullet through the eye of a hare at three hundred yards with her father's Bilgewater repeater musket.

Caitlyn's greatest assets, however, were her intelligence and willingness to learn from her parents, who reinforced her innate understanding of right and wrong. Though the family's engineering skills had made them wealthy, her mother always warned of Piltover's seductions, of how its gilded promises could harden even the kindest heart. Caitlyn paid little attention to her mother's warning, for Piltover was a city of beauty to her, a place of order she would cherish after each trip into the wild.

All that was to change one Progress Day, five years later.

Caitlyn returned from one of her long forays into the woodlands to find her home ransacked and empty. The family retainers were all dead, and no trace could be found of her parents. Caitlyn secured her home, and immediately set off in search of her mother and father.

Tracking quarry that does not want to be found within the confines of a city was very different from hunting in the wild, but, one by one, Caitlyn located the men who had invaded her home. None of these men knew the true identity of who had hired them, only that they had acted via a proxy with the initial "C." The trail eventually led Caitlyn to a secret hextech laboratory where her mother and father were being forced to work for a rival clan under pain of death. Caitlyn rescued her parents, and the wardens, acting upon Caitlyn's information, arrested the clan leader behind the kidnapping.

She and her parents returned home and began to rebuild their lives, but something fundamental had changed in Caitlyn.

She had seen that Piltover could be a dangerous place, where ambition and greed were as deadly as a cornered beast. During the course of her investigation, Caitlyn had seen beneath Piltover's veneer of progress and science. She had seen people in need of help, a host of souls lost and alone. And she had seen that she could help them. Though she loved her parents, Caitlyn had no desire to follow in their footsteps as an artisan, and looked for a way to earn a living in the sprawling metropolis. She established herself as an investigator of sorts, utilizing her skills as a superlative hunter to act as a finder of lost people and retriever of stolen property.

For her twenty-first birthday, Caitlyn's parents presented her with a hextech rifle of exquisite artifice. The weapon was a thing of beauty, with specialized shells that enabled it to shoot with greater accuracy than any rifle she had ever owned. The weapon could also be modified to fire a variety of different ammunition types, and went with Caitlyn whenever she took a case.

Caitlyn knew Piltover's nooks and crannies as thoroughly as the forest paths of her childhood, and turned a tidy profit in a profession that brought her into contact with the many and varied layers of society. Her profession exposed Caitlyn to a great deal of strange encounters that taught her, first-hand, the dangers of untested hextech and rogue chemtech development. Over the next few years, she quickly made a name for herself as someone to go to for help in matters both mundane and esoteric.

One particularly traumatic case involving a missing hextech device and a series of child abductions led to Caitlyn working closely with an agent of the Piltover Wardens; one who, like her, had developed something of an affinity for stranger cases. Caitlyn refused to give up, even when the trail grew colder with every passing day. She chased it like a dog would a bone, and eventually, broke the case. Caitlyn and the warden rescued the children after a battle with a host of rogue chimerics in the employ of a lunatic chem-researcher driven mad by his own concoctions. As she and the warden shared a celebratory drink, he offered her a job as a sheriff. At first, Caitlyn refused, but eventually came to realize that, with all the resources the wardens had to offer, she could potentially get closer to discovering the identity of the mysterious "C," the only person involved in the attack on her family home she had yet to apprehend.

Caitlyn now works as a highly respected officer within the ranks of the Piltover Wardens to keep order in the City of Progress - particularly in areas where overzealous hextech artisans cross the line of what is acceptable in Piltover. She has recently partnered with a new recruit from Zaun, the brash and reckless Vi. How such an unlikely pairing came to be, and has proven to be so effective, is the subject of numerous wild rumors and tavern speculation among their fellow wardens and those they haul away to jail.

"To be the best hunter, you have to be able to think like your prey."