Bandle City

Bandle City is the homeland of the yordles, a realm of vibrant color, impossible architecture, and cheerful chaos that exists in the spirit realm rather than the physical world. It is a place that defies logic, where time is meaningless and the natural laws of the material realm do not wholly apply. Its outlands hold wooded glens where moon-moths glimmer and riverbanks overflow with rainbowfish, and travelers returning through its portals describe air that is sweet, thick, and lush. Older still is the Glade, a hidden place of raw primordial magic that existed before yordles came into the world, and from which Bandle City itself may have sprung; the enchantress Lulu is the only yordle ever to find it. The doorways between realms are finicky and seldom open. Yordles have waited days for the eastern star to align with a stone archway, or searched marsh-lilies for the silver blossom that reveals a pathway. In the material realm the gateways are sheltered by bandlewoods, forests steeped in portal magic that offer yordles a safe haven, and yordles travel Runeterra along hidden pathways only they know. These doors can be destroyed: Tristana watched a warband's sorcerer collapse a bandlewood gateway forever, and the ripples of that loss were felt in Bandle City itself, causing great despair. That destruction reshaped the city's defenses. Tristana dedicated herself to guarding the bandlewoods, commissioned her cannon Boomer, and eventually began training her imitators as the Bandle Gunners, the most explosive branch of yordle military service, many of them armed by the scrappy inventor Rumble. The Bandle Scouts, by contrast, handle exploration and diplomacy, ranging from the Freljord to Bilgewater and Piltover in pursuit of mission badges. Bandle City has known its share of upheaval. A Harrowing once billowed Black Mist through the city, and while most yordles fought to beat it back, the sullen Vex followed the Mist to the Shadow Isles instead. A giant rampaged through town and injured many yordles before being scared off by a makeshift turret that a young yordle built from Heimerdinger's H-28G ball-pitching prototype, an episode that helped convince the professor his inventions needed a testing ground larger than Bandle City. And in the outlands, the enchantress Norra vanished from her cottage through a destroyed portal, leaving her cat Yuumi as Keeper of Book, whose thousand pages open onto the lines of magic between realms and whose capture could throw the doorways to Bandle City open to unsavory intruders.