#i miss u naph from league of legends

[funnyscienceman]

“He is to me as I am to you.”

After Viktor left, Naph stationed himself in his room, drawing on the bed with his sketchbook on his lap to escape the awkward silence in the laboratory. He was hard at work replicating the pond outside from memory when a long shadow began to creep in from the corridor, and he looked up to see the bandaged man standing idle at the doorway.

Naph blinked at him. The bandaged man stared back.

…After a moment, when it starts to get awkward again, Naph goes back to his drawing, shading the cavern walls and being mindful of the pencil outlines he’d left to mark where the flowers shine.

The bandaged man huffs something that sounds like a laugh and sits beside him on the bed. Naph pays him no mind.

“...You are an artist?”

Naph jolts, just barely managing to lift his pencil from the page. He looks up at the bandaged man, who’s looking at him and his work with a seemingly impassive expression.

“Oh. I guess…” Naph shrugs, fiddling with the corner of the page. “Jinx says my lines are too clean.”

The bandaged man scoffs. “The girl often says things without meaning. And art is as varied a field as science. You are very talented.”

Naph blinks. “Oh. Um… thank you.”

“Where did you get your tools?”

“Huh? Oh, the pencils? Viktor gave them to me, for my birthday. The sketchbooks too. He says I should ‘cultivate my talents.’”

“He is right,” the bandaged man says as he stands. “There is a desk in the laboratory you can use. It has better lighting. Come.”

He leaves without even letting Naph have a moment to reply. “It will be better for your posture as well,” he adds as he goes. Naph has no choice but to hastily gather his things and scramble off the bed to follow.

The bandaged man directs him to a table at the corner, propped up against a cave wall and a stack of boxes, lit by a white chemlight. The table is tall and so is the chair, but it has ladder steps that let Naph climb up by himself. As he does, the bandaged man hovers nearby, just like Viktor does whenever Naph does something that might end in him falling.

He gets up on the chair without trouble, though, and he nods his thanks to the bandaged man. He nods as well.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he says as he turns away. He seats himself at a workbench occupied by a glowing chemical setup Naph can’t put a name to. He nods anyway, and only turns back to his drawing when the bandaged man returns to his work without another word said.

The silence isn’t awkward this time, though; and the lighting actually is better for drawing.