For the first act of Arcane, while Ekko is still a child, he was a pint-sized conman. Even at a very young age Ekko had a knack for reading people (or picking out marks, really), and he was also insatiably curious, always finding ways to listen in to conversations that adults tried to hide from him. He was gregarious and mischievous, a totally incorrigible child, balanced out (or maybe bolstered by) by the fact that he was also a genius. Despite his incredibly young age at the start of the series he already worked at the junk shop owned by the man who took him in (Benzo), repairing things so they could be sold again, which probably helped to instill in him a hard work ethic that never faded. During those years is also when he started building pretty sophisticated machines out of the extra junk, from a sort of periscope to an automated monowheel for helping him make deliveries.

When not working he seemed to be left mostly to his own devices, which is where the trouble comes in. Adventurous and wily, Ekko developed the skills to sneak around even well patrolled places to gather information without being caught, and the restlessness to always be seeking out dirt on everyone and everything around him. Unfortunately, this did not come hand-in-hand with the wisdom to avoid poking his nosy little fingers into extremely dangerous business and (most tragically) dragging his friends down into it with him.

Even as a kid he was very brave, shooing another boy barely older than him away after spotting Enforcers (Arcane's cops) and sticking around as a distraction, helping Vi's gang escape a group of armed Enforcers later, and then secretly following the man who murdered Benzo despite the trauma of witnessing it before returning to free Vi and tell her where they went. This... did not go particularly well for everyone involved after, but what can you do?

During the timeskip, Ekko was completely alone (due to previously mentioned things not going well.) A lot of the personality he developed in the interim between acts one and two has been a reaction to his dire circumstances: where he was once a lively jokester, he got a lot more withdrawn and cautious. The childishly short temper he'd had in act one has gotten a lot worse, but also a lot more righteous, and he became so active in his community that he made an enemy of his city's most powerful crime boss rather than sit back and let him take over without a fight. He is a meticulous planner, taking a stopwatch into fights to time everything down to the second, and due to his surroundings he is incredibly desensitized to violence even if he does lean towards non-lethal tactics himself. He also has no hang-ups about running away from fights he can't win as he is more practical than prideful, though has chosen to stay in in dangerous situations to cover for others retreating in-series as well.

Because so much of his life has been a desperate scrabble for survival, Ekko doesn't necessarily plan with the long term in mind, instead he is much more concerned with the here and now. In a series full of forward thinkers planning big things for the future, someone trying to help the people who are struggling in the present was a gap that desperately needed filling, but it does leave Ekko in a pretty precarious position of relying on secrecy and being able to hide for survival, without any real plans to change that reality on the horizon.

Not all is doom and gloom, though. Ekko became, if anything, more compassionate during the time skip, taking in orphaned children and addicts and building up a community where they were sheltered and (relatively) safe. Despite his effort to seem very serious, he still knows how to have fun and even invented hoverboards for his gang to joyride into battle because he can see the need for lifting spirits. And also because they're freaking cool, okay?

Ekko never lost his love for inventing, and he really lights up when he gets a chance to have deeply nerdy engineering conversations. Despite all of its (many, many) issues, Ekko genuinely loves his city and the people in it, and he does everything in his (admittedly limited) power to help them out where and when he can. He is sarcastically called the Boy Savior by another character (and his episode's title), and he seems determined to live up to that name, even if Arcane is a world in which that cannot possibly last, or end well.

Due to childhood malnutrition, Ekko has hollow cheeks and is pretty short. Recent better times (and a significant amount of manual labor) have given him decent musculature, but he's not bulky by any stretch of the imagination. His hair is styled in a high top in two-strand twists and meticulously bleach dyed white, with a fade on the back and sides. He always paints a white hourglass down the center of his face, because... you know what? Don't question Zaun fashion sensibilities. You'd already get it if you were cool!!

height168cm/5'5"

build💪

hairwhite

eyesbrown

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(Contains a bunch of headcanon accounting for the differences between LoL!Ekko and Arcane!Ekko's backstories!) Ekko was born in Zaun to two poor factory workers who were already barely scraping by. When he began building simple machines before even learning to walk, his parents knew they had to find a way to nurture his prodigal talent—unfortunately, finding a way is not easy when you have no resources. They worked themselves to the bone during Ekko's infancy and very early childhood, trying desperately to save up enough money to send Ekko topside to receive an education in Piltover.

It wasn't meant to be. Ekko's parents died prior to the start of the series in an industrial accident that ended up being one of the many catalysts for the riot on the bridge from the first episode's prologue. Ekko was taken in by Benzo, the right-hand man of Vander (Zaun's de-facto community leader) and worked in his shop, repairing things for sale and making deliveries for him. When he wasn't busy working he spent time with the orphans that Vander took in after the riots ended disastrously, becoming a sort of tertiary member of Vi's gang. Aside from just hanging out, he supplied the gang with intel for marks and targets learned during his time out and about or working at the shop.

Then after act one, Ekko was all alone. With Benzo, Vander and Vi's gang presumably all dead, Ekko found himself living on the streets at the same time that Silco's new drug hit them and Piltover started using hextech teleportation to import goods where once they'd been entirely reliant on the mining and production from Zaun. Ekko watched Shimmer eat away at the poorest districts of the Undercity, which were only growing more and more destitute from the dip in trade with Piltover, and for the first time this disparity created a class of wealthy (and dangerous) Zaunites called Chem Barons. As he got older he found it impossible to sit back and watch the people become addicted and die all around him, so he started fighting back with the same set of tools that lost him everything in act one. He recruited from addicts trying to recover and children left orphaned after their parents died in the worsening conditions of Zaun's lower levels, and he used his knack for stealth and intel gathering to start removing Shimmer from circulation. Forcefully.

His inventions kept him from getting crushed by Silco's goons, and his habit of using the infrastructure of both Zaun and Piltover as a way to get through the city without being spotted eventually led him to finding a lone tree growing in the toxic environment of Zaun. Inspired, he set up a base around the tree, and made a home there for the ever increasing number of former addicts and victims he recruited off the streets, eventually naming his faction Firelights after the glowing firefly-esque insect living in abundance in the clearing. By the start of Act 2, Ekko and the Firelights have a system of targeted strikes against Shimmer shipments going to the point that Silco has begun using the Enforcers that he controls to join in the hunt for Firelights members leading them to retreat further and further into secrecy. Ekko rarely leaves the hideout without his mask anymore.

SKILLS — INVENTOR

Ekko's main strength is in his intelligence and ability to cobble together functioning machines purely from scrap. Due to the nature of the technology of Zaun (called chemtech, so you can probably see where this is going), Ekko's specialty involves a mastery of Chemistry as well as Engineering. As he received no schooling and very little (if any) apprenticing, he is basically completely self-taught. In-series we see a lot of his most impressive invention (this hoverboard, which allows for rapid traversal and maneuvering with no apparent upper limit to how high it can go), but there are others as well, namely a sort of crystal grenade, which grows extremely rapid crystals around targets, trapping them for exactly 5 minutes before the crystal grows brittle and can be pushed through, a spy device (set up sorta like a periscope) he used to be able to secretly see and hear into the main room of the shop he worked at from the upper floors, a monowheel to help him make his deliveries, and in the near future even a time machine that will allow Ekko to rewind brief intervals of time and re-do them (he does not have this yet as of current canon, but it's an example of what he's capable of creating.)

SKILLS — FIGHTER

Ekko relies a lot on maneuverability while engaging with opponents, and when he fights it's on top of his hoverboard. When he's forced off his board and into combat at close range, he uses a pipe as a weapon. He is extremely agile, shown dodging gunfire almost point-blank, and he is strong after years of climbing up and down through the levels of Zaun and doing construction work on his home base... but he is hampered by his relative lack of size and is not the best physical fighter in the series by a wide margin. Luckily, to balance this out when taking on larger opponents and terrible odds, he has a head for strategy and tends to plan things meticulously down to keeping time during missions with a stopwatch. He is also isn't afraid to beat a retreat if he's in a fight he can't win: he only survived on his own in the Undercity by knowing when (and how) to disappear.

SKILLS — ARTISTIC

Ekko's artistic skills aren't the biggest part of his identity, but they are demonstrated here where he would have been the one to paint all the largest central portraits (the ones of of Benzo, Claggor, Vi, Powder, Mylo and Vander.)

Cris . CST (3rd shift) . crissyphus (Discord) . sylvari (Plurk)

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CHARACTER INFO

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olfactory

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