filed by Agent O
So how !@#$ed are we?
Well, Sun(Sun) exploded, we’re getting conflicting eyewitness reports on whether or not it’s collapsed into Black Hole(Black Hole), Parker MacMillan has the Super Roaming Fifth Base instead of The Force Field, the Coin said there was nothing to worry about —
I’ll take that as a yes.
…Well, there’s more to it than that.
The Coin’s semi-centennial exhibition was cut off after 29 innings due to… let’s call them extenuating circumstances.
Inside The Vault
Immediately after the conclusion of the Season 23 Internet Series, the Rising Stars were temporarily moved to the Vault for this game, plucked off their teams. The ones who were dead were resurrected for the express purpose of putting them on the Stars, with Returned but no Debt. The non-Ego-bearing players on the Idol Board were pulled into the Stars’ shadows.
This is when we found out that the Vault is also a ballpark. A physically unremarkable ballpark, save for the fact that it has zero fortification and maxed-out mysticism. Fortification prevents weather effects and mysticism increases the proc rate of special abilities such as Trader. This will become important in a moment. However, the ballpark does have a strange metaphysical property: every inning, the weather will change.
Oh, and their ballpark has the highest level of Hype that we have yet seen.
Curtains Open
Like with the Day X fights, a large banner with a god on an Earthbound-style moving background was positioned above the game event viewer. However, this time the god in question was Crates, who provided snarky commentary on the happenings within the game.
We got to see many of the old Vault players playing again. Commissioner Vapor got to see York Silk one last time. Valentine Games and Collins Melon presumably caught up with each other. And the all-star cast stepped up to play ball.
The very first action of the game was New Megan Ito trading for the Fifth Base, thus seemingly confirming the success of our honestly rather harebrained scheme to make sure the Fifth Base – which is a Legendary item of infinite durability and thus, in theory, of maximum appeal to a Trader – made it into the game.
The Legends played well. Unnaturally well. The sheer amount of hype in their ballpark buffed them so thoroughly that even Chorby Soul performed respectably as a batter somehow. Every inning, new pitchers were switched in, and new weather arrived, heralded by pronouncements such as:
A new Weather Report arrived from History.
SEASON 11: PEACE & PROSPERITY
The Black Hole burped. [Note: Nothing actually happened, this seems to just be flavor text]
Legends’ pitcher Pitching Machine Cycles out for Clare Ballard!
Crates discussed the weather, reminiscing about the seasons it had come from – “SEASON 11: PEACE & PROSPERITY/A Reading Paged/A Future Written”, “SEASON 10: REST IN VIOLENCE/A Waiver, Events Horizoned/A cronch“, “SEASON 16: MASS PRODUCTION/Fabrication masking Secrets/Attractors Rounding Home”. But the Season 10 subtitle was Backdraft. That’s a mistake blatant enough that Crates is clearly doing it on purpose rather than by accident. Why?
Crates also commented on the performance of Parker MacMillan, oscillating between referring to him as a “failed son”, a “good son”, and a “failed sun” depending on his performance. Wait, isn’t the Coin his “mom”? …This has disquieting implications about the relationship between Crates and Coin, which I am immediately going to ignore.
Spies generally agreed that the whole thing felt like “a storm before a bigger storm”, and braced themselves.
They
During play, an entity only referred to as “They” attempted to kidnap Rat Mason. Rat zigged and zagged underfoot, evading capture. (“From a Sinking Ship / Vermin Flee”, Crates said.) Other players were less lucky. The Legends “collected” Don Mitchell, who was “Artificially Forged”. Others followed. The Sun Pressure gauge would pop up in the corner, showing that each new forgery increased the Sun(Sun)’s pressure by roughly 2%. Each player who was Artificially Forged was commemorated with a scrap of doggerel as well:
“Don Mitchell
A Slow Build
A Reverberating End”
“Sutton Bishop
A Diagonal Move
The Vault is Gandered”
“Jaylen Hotdogfingers
Protagonist
Antagonist”
Crescendo
New Megan Ito took the Force Field, having apparently decided that it was more interesting than the Fifth Base. “A Trade-Off/A Traitor/A Repetition”, said Crates, as history repeated. A message appeared sporadically throughout the rest of the match, seemingly taunting us:
New Megan Ito sought out a trade, but nothing caught their eye.
(A brief moment of levity, as Crates remembered Season 15: “A Sham Investigation/Fall Guys Among Us”. Some people claimed that this was the reveal of Gamer Crates, but we already knew Crates was perfectly willing to dip into popular culture; Tot Fox killing the sun and the moon was called “A Star Fox”.)
Further Forgeries followed:
“Tillman Henderson
Noise-Cancelling Headphones
Render One Immune to Criticism”
“Sosa Peperomioides [of the Carolina Queens]
Crowned Queen
of Strikeouts”
“Hewitt Best
Better than All
Now Rest”
“Collins Melon
Ripe for the Picking”
Collins Melon. The incineration replacement for Dickerson Greatness. The feedback trade for Comfort Septemberish. The terrifyingly fast watermelon that rolled from base to base for the Breckenridge Jazz Hands, the one everyone learned to love as the top base-stealer of our time. Forcibly vaulted. We extend our love and our deepest condolences to the Jazz Hands.
It was at this point that Crates apparently looked at the Sun’s pressure gauge, which had just passed 98%, and decided to leave before things got too hot to handle, with one last comment: “Constellation Expanded/Stars in Safe Keeping/The Historian returns to Safety/A Walk Off.” Whether this means Crates saved as many as it could before the sun exploded, or that Crates left to save its own skin after its hobby of putting players in display cases became too dangerous, is unclear.
I told my fellow Spies fans that it had been an honor, and a pleasure, as we watched the Polarity weather background silently scroll by, with nothing and no one on top of it.
Play continued. Rat Mason narrowly escaped being stolen away twice more; everyone said that Mason knew that the fate of the sun was on the line, and so evaded capture for as long as he could. Holding the world together with his tiny paws. Giving us just a little more time.
In the bottom of the 25th inning, the Legends scored 25 runs. And because of ratification, we saw what Stables do for the first time: they took away the 25 runs, as well as the Instability of Gunther O’Brien, Chorby Soul, Nagomi McDaniel, and associated replicas.
The Legends, undeterred by losing their entire lead and then some, rapidly caught up to the Stars’ score, which remained tied for some time. Commissioner Vapor hit a magnified solo home run to put the Stars ahead by two runs.
Then Nicholas Mora was collected for forging, and all hell broke loose.
Boom
SUN(SUN) SUPERNOVA
The entire screen was taken over by concentric multicolored squares. A certain Coin was sitting in front of them.
Wow! Look at those colors!
[…]
In Light of Recent Events
The Semi-Centennial is Henceforth Cancelled.
The Result is a Draw.
At this point we were all yelling at the screen that no, it wasn’t a draw, we all saw CV hitting that home run right there! But nobody can second-guess the ILB’s scoring, and so the proclamation must be left standing.
The Coin then briskly told us to “#Vote!” and left us staring at a black screen with “Please wait…” written on it.
For the next ten minutes, we bit our fingernails and watched absolutely nothing happen.
Untied
Eventually the site returned to its former state, with the Standings page topped by a picture of the Coin in front of aforementioned supernova. Or, apparently, for some people, in front of the icon for Black Hole weather. This seems to be dependent on which browser people are using?
The Rising Stars were disbanded and returned to their teams of origin. We received Commissioner Vapor safe and sound, and even moved forwards to a better place in our lineup for our trouble. (Meanwhile, the Moist Talkers had their former batters unceremoniously plopped in the middle of their rotation, leaving them with a batting lineup three players long and a pitching rotation of eleven. We may be within reach of Batting Machine.)
The players that were revived have been distributed to random teams, alive, thus obviating any plans to resurrect Agan Espinoza, as Espinoza has already been resurrected. This includes Gunther O’Brien, Sutton Picklestein, Gerund Pantheocide, and all the various players who had Ego from being on Pre-History dead teams and thus were entirely unknown until now.
The players kidnapped into Legends have not returned.
The Sun(Sun) rule has disappeared from the ILB, returning us to Turntables Scoring (the one where all wins are unwins during the regular season).
It is unclear what Parker holding a Super Roaming item while already being Super Roaming will do. Will he roam twice at the end of every day divisible by 9 and thus leave two teams Unstable at the end of each week? Or will the second iteration just be rendered redundant?
The ticker has only one thing to say about the whole affair: “HOLY WHOA”.
Voting
Roamless Crate, Hitting Flotation Bubble, Precognition, Booster Pack, Uncle Indemnity. No Wills because they don’t exist anymore.
Good luck and good sense.