Edit: this item may seem out of place as there has been 5 posts since I started and finished.
<<A little while earlier>>
Neirai wheeled in the sky above the Hill He grimaced wryly to himself. The three-week treck from level 60 to level 70 had left him out of the action for quite some time. He felt refreshed, though. His newfound powers over weather, coupled with gaining the abilities of avianthropy (bird-type shapeshifting) had made the hiatus well worth it.
On the plus side, he hadn't spent so much time in avian forms as to cause him to develop aviantropic psychosis yet, and his time out of feral forms had allowed him to almost completely recover from his lycantropic psychosis. All that remained of feralsbane symptoms was an inane desire to cover his toilet with dirt every time he---
Suddenly Neirai felt a mighty tremor rush through the air. Instinctively, he climbed higher. Just in time, too -- a ginormous nuclear cloud filled the sky. He blinked in amazement. Humans really did know how to overdo things.
Quickly Neirai began to feel sicker and sicker and sicker. What was going on? He did a quick check of his combat log.
<Nuclear radiation hits you for 1 nature damage.>
<You are inflicted with Radiation sickness 1.>
<Nuclear radiation hits you for 2 nature damage.>
<You are inflicted with Radiation sickness 2.>
<Nuclear radiation hits you for 4 nature damage.>
<You are inflicted with Radiation sickness 3.>
<Nuclear radiation hits you for 8 nature damage.>
<You are inflicted with Radiation sickness 4.>
Hmm... the glowing cloud seemed to cause a minor amount of damage, and to cause a debuff.
<Nuclear radiation hits you for 32 nature damage.>
<You are inflicted with Radiation sickness 6.>
Neirai wondered how high this buff could stack. But about the same time that it hit him for 256 points of nature damage, he decided he was through with figuring out semantics of debuffery. In the harsh, grating voice of the storm crow, he yelled out: "By the three winds of Kalimdor, I command you to leave this place!"
Immediately a cyclonic wind appeared and blew the nuclear fallout away. Looking down at the ground below him, he saw a guitarist being buried by a frontend loader.
A strange feeling began to permeate his consciousness. He'd felt this way before, long, long ago...
It took him a long time to figure out what the problem was. So long, in fact, that by the time he remembered, the battle had waged on for a long while and kings had been desposed and then.................. Laz was king again.
Suddenly he remembered! He shifted from bird form to cat form, dropping 20,000 feet from the air and onto the Hill Mark II.
"Run, Laz!" he snarled. Laz looked at him strangely, and the brought his new weapon -- a depleted plutonium rubber chicken slingshot -- to bear on the druid's head.
"No, you fool! You don't understand the danger!!" Neirai felt a sinking feeling. The stupid human hadn't figured out that this had gotten past the simple "game" stage. This was no King of the Hill struggle. This was a struggle for survival. Laz pulled back on the slingshot, a grin on his face.
Suddenly a thin burst of wind grabbed Laz and threw him into the air, where it held him, three thousand feet above the ground. "It's for your own good..." The druid's voice floated up to him.
Neirai's head suddenly snapped around as Laz's two chumps pointed their fully automatic rifles at him.
But just as suddenly, the ground beneath them burst into pale blue balefire. The hair on Neirai's back stood on end as they screamed in torment, and then powdered into ash. Crowned in an aura of unholy fire stood a figure Neirai had wished never to see again. The ageless eyes bored into him.
"Jiminy Cricket. My archenemy." Neirai wished desperately that he was somewhere else. "I thought that you were dead."
The apparition regarded him with disgust. "Several times, in fact. Dying's such a bore, you know." Then his expression hardened. "I murdered your father and mother, your sister and you brother. I even killed off TJ's conscience and replaced him with myself, all because he reminded me of you. Now, you are the last of your family, and you will die by my hand."
"Never, foul creature of deepest evil! I will avenge my family! Prepare to die!!"
The ground beneath Neirai's feet began to break apart, and he could see balefire beneath it, but Neirai was not afraid. He jumped into the air and assumed the form of a crow. Jiminy Cricket seemed surprised that his balefire had not consumed the druid.
Neirai laughed mirthlessly to himself. It had seemed so easy to escape the evil being. But all of a sudden Jiminy was standing in the air in front of him. Whistling "When You Wish Upon A Star," the dark agent of chaos was holding his gloved hands above his head. A giant ball of superheated plasma began to form in the air, growing bigger and bigger as it spun above the midget disney creature.
Suddenly, Neirai had an idea. For the first time in a long while, he switched from his bird form into his natural form -- that of an elf. As he fell towards the earth, he called on the powers of balance and focused his thoughts on the spinning ball of fire. "By Elune -- STARFALL!!!" he yelled.
Jiminy's star turned from bright yellow to deep blue and rocketted straight to the ground. Unfortunately for the cricket, he was still standing underneath it. The arcane starfall hit him squarely in the head and excised his evil from the universe. Balance was restored.
Turning back into a crow (at the last second, of course,) Neirai flew over to Laz. "Sorry about that, dude, but it's an old family feud thing, eh?"
Laz couldn't understand a thing the druid was talking aboot. He really realized that he needed a course in Canadian speach. His silence annoyed the druid, who decided to punish him for him impunity by releasing him from the funnel of air. The drop was quite unforgiving.
Neirai landed gracefully on the part of the Hill that was not covered in bits of smushed Lazarus, nor a giant crater from the starfire. He began to preen, in the way only the KING OF THE HILL MARK II could.