Journey to the North; a Epic Quest to Find Top Lane
There I was. Mid lane. Farming the CS and playing it cool. This Fizz hasn't seen nerfs since I was 12, and he looks aggro. Diving in, flipping out. I don't think so, pal. Not today. So I farm. Creep score wins the game, and besides, I'm a floating eyeball. I want nothing to do with that giant...pokey...thing.
My life has gone on this way for years. I don't even remember who was at the fountain with me when I started doing this. Once, when I recalled to get food, I saw that armored up midget at the fountain. Pepper? Was it? I don't recall. She was too positive for me, and the way her armor accentuated her elbows made me almost throw up. I threw my change on the counter, and thanks the Walrus. He said something perfunctory but I can never hear him through all that bristle, growing ever more yellow by the day like some fading polaroid. He has to smoke tamacco, or whatever the Demacians call it. Either way, it's transactional. I say hello, he gives me what I need. I pay him in the latest wares from the frontlines. In this miserable hellscape, it's the closest thing to a friend I have.
Halfway back to the tower I spot, in the distance, that spiked ball. He's rolling dangerously close to my tower, and I don't like the look of it. I'm vigilant and I'm not straying far. The Fizz has vanished but it's not clear where he's gone. I speak into the Comms unit the walrus gave me.
"Fizz. MIA" I say to the great hungering wilderness.
"Know where he's going?" a disembodied voice says over the line. According to the device his handle is "Cigar4eva." I don't know where these idiots come up with this shit.
"I think it was south."
And then, after 30 seconds, I realize I'm alone again. I can hear off in the dark the constant sounds of war. The screams, the fires, the explosions. Only the tower is safe. I crack the seal on a red can the walrus gave me. And I sip it slowly, starving into the distance, but my ears are on high alert. You get pretty good at this duality. The long stare of a voidling contemplating its existence, with your ears constantly grounding in the here and now. In another war so many years ago, I remember Cho'Gath not being in the hear and now. That was before the Nexus exploded and we were forced to find another front. I wouldn't be Cho'Gath. Still, this red can is the only small pleasure you'll find out here. I sip it slow as if to say that I'm going to do what I can to remain out here. They won't break my soul. Should I die and leave a little piece of the void here in this shit-covered rock, I'll at least go out myself.
Behind me, the comms device is buzzing. Tales of towers falling and absolute slaughter. The numbers are getting so high you'd assume it was a suicide mission. Any number of green boys, untrained and without discipline. And I'm here with them. It might be smarter to just let the enemy kill me than to roll the dice with these clowns.
The Fizz has returned. I chug the rest of the can and throw it to the side. Up over the horizon he advanced with his army. He looks well equipped. This isn't the same Fizz I had seen a few hours ago. He'd grown stronger. Wiser. He had on him a talisman that seemed to give him great power. Our boys hit meet his. This Fizz dances through them as if they're standing still. I'm firing at them however I can, positioning to him as many as I can, but it isn't enough. Fizz has slaughtered my front lines like he wasn't even playing the same game as they were.
The last of my casters goes down. They turn and pivot to me like a Zuan scientist moves to his next subject. Without any hesitation or humanity. The Fizz throws something at me. I dodge it but the noises it's making behind me say that it's job isn't done. They advance and I'm now trapped against my tower. It's firing but it's choosing all the wrong targets. The Fizz, moving at alarming speed advances right for me. His pokey thing gleaming from the light of the tower, he leaps forward and all of time moves slowly, and I can see him coming so clearly I can see exactly how he'll kill me. In the seconds between his leap and the eventual impact, I see a thousand people analyzing my corpse, and instructing both soldiers and surgeons alike on the example I'll leave behind. I'm back here again just in time for contact, and i realize that this is my time in the war. All those green boys who don't know their weapons from their equipment, all their grand theories and their suggestions on what to invest in when. It was all fleeting. Someone else problem for some future war. I breath in slowly
My world goes purple.
...but the kill never comes. The purple, now enveloping me in it's warm goo has The Fizz slide around me like some great wall. He lands behind me. I turn, completely indifferent to his minions attacking the tower. I look in disbelief. The Fizz seems less concerned about how this happened, but more concerned about coming at me again. The tower is now firing on him. He readies himself to turn on me, and as he gains his foot a explosion next to me.
When the dust clears, it's one of those pajama-clad Ionans. The sort living in weird open castles. You see them at fountains occasionally, but you never get into it with them. They seem to serve themselves and that's fine by you. You're mid. And they aren't. The Fizz seems furious and with the flip of staff, he launches off into the dark. His minions are all dead. The tower has melted their remains into the soil, and a new wave of recruits marches off into the breach. I turn to look at the Ionian.
"Who are you?" I say. It's neither smart nor clever. But in war sometimes the base instincts of the Id are what works best.
The Ionian speaks. "I'm Shen. I'm at the tower North. And you need to help me."
"Do what?" I say, incredulous that he doesn't see my own problems here.
"I have my own fish creature. My tower is almost gone. If we don't stop him now, the tower is gone, and soon our Nexus will fall."
I can't imagine what another Fizz is like. I can barely deal with one of them. If there's a second, I don't know what we're going to do.
"His name is Fizz. And he's hard to fight, and harder to catch. I don't know what I'm going to do, he gets on top of you and then you're screwed."
"This isn't him. He shoots...darts or something."
"Darts?" I say. I meant that doesn't seem that bad, but it comes out like I want more clarification. He doesn't seem offended but I can't exactly see his face. For a brief moment, I find the juxtaposition humorous. For him, only two little eyes peer out from behind his mask. Conversely, I'm just one massive, exposed eyeball. In any other circumstance, he and I would never meet, let alone speak. But here in the middle of this apocalypse, here we are. Fighting fish men with spears and darts.
"He also plants bombs. Our men can't seem them and they walk into them. It's horrible. Limbs are everywhere up there, you have to watch your step as you advance so you don't slip on the blood-greased remains."
He had said it in such a matter-of-fact way I couldn't help but wonder if the war had broken him. If all the red cans in the world weren't enough to keep his soul inside of his shell. After more conversation, I told him I'd reach out on the comms. The southern tower might be able to send troops, and if so, we might have auxiliary forces to support the tower while I headed north. With that he left. A purple beam came from the sky and vanished, him along with it, and with no more information than "go north."
The boys are embattled not far off, but I'm left with the moment I'm still trying to process. Who was he? How can I help? If there are bombs in the ground, will my floating over them trigger it? I snap back to reality and realize that to do nothing is worse than something wrong.
"Is anyone out there?" I say into the comms device. A minute goes by. Maybe two. I wonder if even the Ionian can hear me. I'm about to speak again and before I can the deafening screech of a dying dragon rings in my ear. In the battle, even the soldiers look shaken. Both of them regroup and attempt to gain the advantage while their enemies are disoriented but to no noticeable benefit.
"Yep! Whats the word?" a voice drawls across the device. It's cigar again. However stupid his handle might be, at least he's out there.
"We need to go north. Our tower there is under siege."
Some amount of time passes, but before I can get worried he comes back. "Yeah, hold on, I'm coming to you."
Two waves of soldiers come and die before Cigar shows up.
"You rang?" he says with a sort of sinister gallows humor. To his credit, he actually has a cigar in his mouth, and suddenly the name seems just a smidge less stupid.
"Yeah, look man. I don't know how to explain this, but this Pajama Ionian came out of no where and saved me from Fizz. He told me our northern tower is about to get smashed by some fish-like dart thrower with bombs, and that if we don't get up there, the Nexus is done for."
There's a moment in time where you say whatever you've said, and instantly review your statement like you should have prior to saying it. In that moment, I realized I must have sounded absolutely deranged. I couldn't remember the Ionians name, I'd never seen the north tower, and the description of what was up there must have sounded like science fiction more than the truth. But to his credit, Cigar never even raised an eye brow over his metallic eye-covers.
"He's not a fish."
"What?" I shot back, with only a slight delay to confirm he actually correct this, the most trivial of things.
"He's not a fish. He might be as tall as Fizz, but he's a rat, and it sounds like he's no slouch."
"You know him?"
He ashed his cigar. "Yep. You get out here long enough and that rat bastard will be seared into your mind...alright, I'm on it."
He turned and slowly walked toward the jungle, slowly reloading his ridiculously oversized gun.
"Wait" I said, annoyed at my lack of understanding. "What are we going to do?"
He looked to consider the question for a moment. "Yeah, you should probably come. Another set of weapons can't hurt. And if this idiot up north is only wearing pajamas I'm going to need all the help I can get. I'm Graves" He said turned and extending his hand.
"Vel'Koz" I nodded. Hands were never my thing, and it was respectful enough.
"Well cuz?"
"What? Oh...no, Vel'Koz"
His confused face said to not let good be the enemy of perfect. "Vel is fine."
"Alright then, cuz" he said with a sly grin. "We'd best get moving."
On our journey north, we'd encountered all sorts of things. Wolves, poisonous frogs, as managed to slid by, unnoticed a giant golem.
"Whats that?" I asked Graves.
"Not for you is what that is." he snapped back. "We need to get to the tower."
We made it out to a river with grass and bugs in it.
"We're taking this left" he said.
When you float, matters of wet shoes don't come into your mind. But watch Graves trudge through the water without a second thought seemed curious. Wasn't his feet wet? People used to complain about that all the time at the walrus shop in the winter. Wet feet. Hold hands. Two problems the voidlings don't worry about.
As we approached the mouth of the river, he stuck his arm out in front of me and held me back. He pulled his cigar out and said "We're here. Every step you take could your last. Stay sharp."
"But I float."
"It won't matter" he said. "His mushrooms are that sensitive."
"His mushrooms?" I asked as if to suggest that had to be wrong. I wouldn't allow myself to believe it was correct. If this dart rat had landmines that were mushrooms, I couldn't bring myself to imagine what other horrors await us in this fight.
Grave said nothing. He slung his backpack around and pulled out what looked like a flash grenade. Throwing it down, it seemed to establish itself and spring to life. Sending red waves out from it, a field of dancing, neon mushrooms twirled in front of us. I furrowed my brow as if to wonder what plant I had landed on when Graves, wasting no time, became blasting all of them into dust.
"Those little bastards are what we're talking about" he said.
Slowly, he and I moved into the brush. We waited for what seemed like hours. Our soldiers against theirs. Blood, limbs, and the shiny shimmer of what I came to learn were those mushrooms.
"Shen" said Graves. "We're in position. See if you can bait this Yordle bastard beyond the river."
Shen never responded but Graves seemed satisfied. Shen danced around the battle for sometime, slaughtering their soldiers and pushing the front line. Finally, as if from no where, the rat emerged from the brush. Fizz was dangerous, to be sure, but the hailstorm of darts being fired by this rat was something I'd never seen before. If I had a mouth, my jaw would have been on the floor. Our once sizable army seemed to melt before the rat, and his impossible-to-believe dart gun. It shot three darts at once, and the advancing line was vanishing like ghosts in the fog. The left flank exploded on a mushroom and the legs of a caster landed feet from me, getting blood into my eye. I wiped my tentacle across the cornea and as the world came back into focus, Graves had already leaped from the brush and was racing toward the scene. The rat tried to pivot, but Graves laughed a smoke bomb at him that sent the rat running from the scene and gasping for air.
Shen, as if floating himself, glided through the rat, spinning him to disorient him. The rat, unsure of his surroundings flailed but his blows missed Shen by a mile. Before he could get his bearings, it was over. The rat's body lay amongst the limbs. Floating up to the two warriors I offered them both red cans, but they had their own. We stood there together as the only form of safety this far from the tower.
"Thanks" said Shen.
"Alright then" concluded Graves, saying as if a matter of business had just been conducted. "I'm headed to the south tower. If I'm gone too long Poppy will start bitching."
Poppy! That was it. I knew it was something with a P. Though what right she had to complain about anything I wasn't sure. If anything she ought to be apologizing for that disgustingly profane armor and those midget elbows with the bone...yuck.
Graves jogged off into the river and Shen and I went to recall to base when a scream let out from just inside the brush. Shen and I, about ready to leave turned to find emerging from the brush Fizz and the ball of spikes charging toward us. We lifted off back to the base as the tattered figure of out tower crumbled beneath us. We were too late. We lost the tower, and now we lost Graves. I survived so far, but to what end. Soon they'd be at the Nexus again, and not even the red cans would save me. Graves, like Cho, living on as a scar in my memories, and yet another reason to waste my life at the walruses cantina...