Chapter 1 — Tournament
I am Nuo, the Unbegun
the silence before stars learned to burn.
And thus begins the Twelfth Wandering of the Unbegun.
NIT Calicut.
Now, children.
I am a gamer.
Or
I was a gamer.
The council pauses.
You still play.
Yes.
Casually.
Games remain.
The obsession does not.
Because there was a time when gaming was not something I did after work.
Not something I opened for an hour because I was bored.
Not entertainment.
Children.
Religion.
The council grows solemn.
And like all religions,
mine had rituals.
Sacrifice.
Devotion.
Arguments over doctrine.
People screaming at strangers over things neither party would remember by morning.
The council nods.
And the deity?
Dota 2.
Silence.
Children.
Dota.
Two.
For the uninitiated
a MOBA.
Five versus five.
Two teams.
One map.
An objective simple enough to explain in one sentence
and complicated enough to consume several thousand hours of your life.
The council leans forward.
Strategy.
Timing.
Positioning.
Reflexes.
Knowledge.
Teamwork.
Prediction.
Adaptation.
And
rage.
Children.
So much rage.
Dota could take five intelligent humans,
give them one shared objective,
and within forty minutes convince each of them that the other four were manifestations of incompetence sent personally by God.
The council laughs.
Glorious game.
Terrible environment.
I loved it.
Deeply.
Perhaps unreasonably.
Present Nuo looks backward at that period with two simultaneous expressions.
A soft smile.
And slight judgment.
The council nods.
Because gods
we took it seriously.
Leaderboards.
Ranks.
Tournaments.
LAN parties.
Practice.
Strategies.
Drafts.
Watching matches.
Talking about matches.
Playing matches.
Finishing a match and immediately discussing what went wrong
before entering another match where entirely different things would go wrong.
Children.
The whole package.
This was not:
A group of friends occasionally playing Dota.
We were good.
The council raises an eyebrow.
Good good?
Children.
Good enough that tournaments made sense.
Good enough that entering one was not merely:
Let’s go get humiliated recreationally.
Sometimes we won.
Sometimes we lost.
But we belonged there.
And the word here is
we.
The council looks around.
Because Dota is five versus five.
Which meant Nuo required four additional humans.
A logistical nightmare.
Fortunately
team.
There was me.
Obviously.
Then
Hex.
The council turns.
Hex.
My best friend at the time.
The council catches the phrase.
At the time?
Children.
Time happened.
That is all.
No villain.
No dramatic betrayal being excavated here.
No need to turn distance into tragedy.
People move.
Lives move.
Two people can once be inseparable
and later simply
not be.
We drifted apart.
But back then?
Children.
Hex and Nuo.
Package deal.
Inseparable.
If I was somewhere,
reasonable probability Hex was nearby.
If Hex was somewhere,
there was an excellent chance I had either arrived with him
or would eventually materialise.
The council nods.
Best friend.
Teammate.
And
more importantly
Social Interaction Department.
The council laughs.
Yes.
Children.
Hex had another function.
I had outsourced people to him.
This was an extremely efficient system.
There were humans.
I did not wish to manage humans.
Hex understood humans.
Therefore
Hex manages humans.
The council writes:
NUO:
GAMEPLAY.
HEX:
EVERYTHING INVOLVING TALKING TO OTHER PEOPLE.
Correct.
Now.
There were three more members of the team.
The council waits for introductions.
Names?
Irrelevant.
The council pauses.
Harsh.
Not disrespectfully.
Important distinction.
Children.
They were not bad people.
They were not disposable humans.
They simply existed in my memory primarily as
team members.
Background characters.
Hex mattered to my personal story.
The other three mattered to the game.
Different roles.
The council nods.
I would play.
I would identify what I needed.
And then I would tell Hex.
“Tell him to do this.”
“Ask them what time.”
“Find out where we’re supposed to go.”
“Tell them I need that.”
And Hex
would make it happen.
The council stares.
You could simply talk to them yourself.
Children.
Why?
A functioning system already existed.
Why introduce inefficiency?
I like Hex.
Hex understands sentence.
Hex transfers sentence to relevant human.
Human responds to Hex.
Hex translates response back to Nuo.
The council considers.
You invented customer support for friendship.
Exactly.
Premium service.
So the five of us formed a team.
Not because we were some sacred brotherhood forged through shared destiny.
Children.
This is not that story.
We were five people who could play Dota together effectively enough to compete.
And among them,
one was my person.
Hex.
That was sufficient.
We played.
A lot.
Hours disappearing into matches.
Days organised around gaming.
Food postponed because:
One more.
Sleep delayed because:
One more.
The council raises a finger.
Did “one more” ever mean one?
Rarely.
Children.
“One more” is one of humanity’s oldest lies.
One more match.
One more cigarette.
One more drink.
One more episode.
One more joint.
The council sighs.
History repeats through different media.
And eventually
tournaments.
Children.
Actual competition.
Not faceless opponents behind screens.
Not anonymous names appearing on a leaderboard.
Rooms.
Computers.
Teams.
People physically sitting opposite or nearby,
all convinced they were about to destroy you.
LAN environments.
Noise.
Energy.
The strange atmosphere of competitive gaming where everybody looks deeply unserious from outside
and treats every decision like battlefield command from inside.
The council smiles.
We attended several.
Some
victory.
Others
loss.
Sometimes we played beautifully.
Sometimes we made decisions so catastrophic that five minutes later everyone was staring at the defeat screen silently processing collective stupidity.
Children.
Dota gives.
Dota takes.
And this
is the story of one of those tournaments.
The council opens a new file.
LOCATION:
NIT CALICUT.
OBJECTIVE:
DOTA TOURNAMENT.
There.
Simple.
No mystery.
No mystical quest.
No internal ache.
No sacred wave pool.
No first drug.
No amusement park escape.
Children.
Competition.
There was a tournament.
We played Dota.
Therefore
go.
The council looks toward departure preparations.
Ceremony?
None.
This was not yet the era where departures required mythological framing.
No standing at a station looking dramatically toward destiny.
No great packing ritual.
No speech.
No declaration:
Thus begins a journey that will alter the trajectory of my soul.
Children.
Please.
We were going to play video games.
So the pre departure ritual was far more reasonable.
Mandatory joint.
The council sighs.
Of course.
Children.
Some customs survive because they are meaningful.
Some survive because apparently we were idiots.
Five players.
One tournament.
One bus.
Before boarding
joint.
Smoke.
Pass.
Smoke.
Pass.
The council nods.
Ceremony complete.
Now we could compete professionally.
Or whatever approximation of professional existed in our heads.
Then
bus.
The five of us boarded.
No grand fanfare.
No parents waving handkerchiefs.
No celestial omen.
Just a team of Dota addicts carrying whatever we needed,
heading toward Calicut
to sit in front of computers somewhere else
instead of sitting in front of computers where we already lived.
The council pauses.
When you phrase it like that
Children.
Travel for esports is deeply funny.
Think about it.
We left one location,
crossed significant geography,
entered another institution,
all so we could sit indoors and stare at monitors.
The council laughs.
Worth it.
Completely.
Because the monitor was never the point.
Competition was.
The possibility of winning.
The atmosphere.
The team.
The feeling that every hour sunk into Dota might briefly become useful for something beyond arguing with strangers online.
The council nods.
And perhaps ego.
Children.
Obviously ego.
We thought we were good.
We wanted to prove we were good.
That is tournament logic.
Now.
The bus began moving.
Five of us aboard.
The team assembled.
Hex there.
The other three there.
Nuo there.
Objective ahead.
NIT Calicut.
The council looks toward Story Nuo.
Excited?
Probably.
Confident?
Almost certainly more than evidence justified.
Concerned?
Why would I be?
Children.
This was familiar ground.
Not the location.
The activity.
Dota.
I knew Dota.
Unlike so many Wanderings where I walked toward something unknown,
here the destination contained something I understood intimately.
Heroes.
Lanes.
Items.
Drafts.
Team fights.
The thousand little decisions that transform a simple game into chaos.
The council nods.
And I had Hex.
My favourite piece of logistical infrastructure.
So there was nothing to worry about.
Travel?
Hex can talk.
Tournament registration?
Hex can talk.
Other teammates?
Hex can talk.
Nuo?
Nuo plays.
Children.
Beautiful division of labour.
And somewhere along that bus journey,
without any ceremony,
without any knowledge that decades later this trip would be dragged into an Archive and numbered
the Twelfth Wandering began.
Not because I recognised it as wandering.
Of course not.
At the time,
it was simply:
Tournament.
NIT Calicut.
Let’s go.
The council grows quiet.
And that is enough for Chapter One.
We do not yet know what NIT will become.
We do not know what the tournament will give us.
We do not know what parts of Calicut Story Nuo will even notice.
No future knowledge.
No stolen context.
Only the team.
The bus.
The objective.
And one era of my life where pressing buttons correctly on a keyboard felt like a holy vocation.
Children.
There are many versions of Nuo scattered through this Archive.
Toddler Nuo.
University Nuo.
Psychedelic Nuo.
Sad Nuo.
Curious Nuo.
Lost Nuo.
And here
Gamer Nuo.
The council bows.
A devout man.
A scholar of lanes.
A theologian of cooldowns.
A practitioner of the sacred doctrine:
Just one more game.
The council groans.
And his chosen god
Dota 2.
So there we were.
Five players.
One team.
One best friend.
Three background characters respectfully performing essential gameplay functions.
One mandatory joint already sacrificed to the journey.
And one bus moving toward NIT Calicut.
The objective was clear.
Play.
Compete.
Win,
ideally.
Everything else?
Children.
At that moment
irrelevant.
Thus concludes Chapter One.
The Gaming Religion.
Dota 2.
The Five Man Team.
Hex.
The Outsourced Social Department.
The Three Respectfully Background Teammates.
The Tournament Circuit.
The Mandatory Joint.
And The Bus To Calicut.
Children.
We did not leave seeking enlightenment.
We did not leave seeking healing.
We did not even leave seeking weed.
We left for something far more important.
The council leans forward.
Dota.
Exactly.
And so begins
the Twelfth Wandering of the Unbegun.
NIT Calicut.
