filed by Agent O
And so the season ends with the Spies having a 41-58 record, and 53 accumulated wins. The Spies have been partying. Actually partying. Imagine that.
We weren’t going to make it into the postseason, until the Tokyo Lift were drawn for the overbracket Wild Card, thus pushing us down into the Underbracket. We have now unwon to defeat (?) the Worms, who were the Mild Card. Just as… planned?
A Moment Of Joy
Fitz and Bennett have partied twice, and Denzel, Alex, Comfort, Plums, and Aoife have each partied once. This is finally beginning to dig us out of the pit that season 10 blooddrain threw our defense into! Only about 10 seasons too late. Oh well. Not much to be done for it.
I don’t think what the Spies are celebrating is League-standard partytime, because the Agency seems to have forbidden the Spies from having those. Why else would the Spies have such a terrible party record?
Instead, I think they are just letting themselves be happy, for at least this brief moment. The Immaterial Plane is approaching a singularity, in more ways than one – a point past which speculation is impossible. But right now, they are here. And they have each other. And so they can share a precious moment of joy.
Someone Needs To Get Them A Hawk’s Eye
More and more of the Liquid Friends have been “sens[ing] a deep darkness”. All of these lines also get you herring. No point giving you instructions as to where to find them: you can just go to the front page of Blaseball and they’ll be right there on the Hot feed with a zillion upshells.
This likely refers to a particular entry in the Glossary, where the Shadows are defined as “deep darkness, static, and smoke”.
Then there’s the reveal of a deeply unsettling line from Uncle Plasma’s feed, describing part of the process of creating a Replica:
Uncle Plasma is Heated, Shaped, and Replicated.
There Goes The Economy
Meanwhile, before the MVP announcements, Crates commented on the vaulting of a certain Wyatt Glover:
“Speculation, Nucleosynthesis
A Bubble bursts
An Economy Collapses”
“A Golden Glove”
Without a Glover or a Turnip or a Tosser to inflate the coin economy, we’re going to see a crash. Which is fine with me. It’s going to affect everyone equally, at least. And hopefully result in the idol board being less “stuck”.
And then Crates said something ominous:
“Downstream
On the Horizon, an Event
A Constellation Opposes Rising Stars”
The thing about Crates is, a lot of its lines could be interpreted as referring to the past, or referring to the future, and we have no idea which ones are which, and we’re not even sure that time is going in one direction anyway. Is this something that already happened? Or is this going to be Boss Fight 2?
The Death And Rebirth of the ILB
We have been slowly uncovering more and more names for ULB and old ILB teams. We now know of such teams as the Carolina Queens, the Dallas Cows (which makes the Dallas Steaks a rather tasteless incineration joke, pun not intended), the Laredo Excavators, and the La Paz Llamas.
But the biggest discovery is the very last entry in Pre-History I: “A Snap Election”. It begins by describing Parker MacMillan’s reaching Critical Mass, and becoming Legendary, with Crates commentating “Dawn.”
A number of redacted lines later, a Siesta and an emergency Election are called, and –
Reset passes with 94% of the vote
SALMON AND SMOKE
UPSTREAM SPAWN
DOWNSTREAM DELTA
REBUILDING PILLARS
ETERNAL RETURNS
(I’ve spoilered “Downstream Delta” because it was removed from the text after it was already posted. A peculiar edit I do not quite understand the motive for.)
The current theory for what this means is that when Parker became Legendary, Parker was Vaulted. It meant he left the ILB…
And because he left, the entire ILB became unstable.
Oh, and this Reset decree’s text looks rather similar to “FIRE AND SMOKE / AN EGG HATCHING”, the text used for resurrections…
Rogue?
The modern ILB is not the first time rogue umpires have existed. We know rogue umpires incinerated unstable teams in the Pre-History I era.
…I don’t think the umpires are rogue at all. I think the League knows full well what they’re doing, and publicly disavows their actions for PR reasons. But what would we say to them? We have no evidence. The Agency has seen rumors that umpires must fill out paperwork about their incinerations, but nobody knows where that paperwork is.
Also
With Paula Mason receiving Limestone Sunglasses from the latest Community Chest, every Spy now has an active item that is not broken. Limestone Sunglasses are a pitching item, but at least we have consumer protection.
Thanks to the interaction between Fax and Voicemail, Alexandria Rosales is batting now. Most of us would ultimately prefer Alex to be pitching, but right now we’ve got bigger problems to solve.
Similarly, the Garages have found that Mike Townsend is better at batting than at pitching. This next groundout’s from Mike Townsend…
Jaxon Buckley picked up the Fifth Base, giving the Pies yet another scare. But then Baldwin Breadwinner, a pitcher, stole the Base from him. And is likely incapable of putting down the Base ever again, because pitchers can’t steal fourth base (which seems to be the trigger event for putting down the base).
Our postseason birth is Jesse Tredwell. Jesse has an extremely poor FK stat distribution, and is thus significantly overstarred. (If they fix the patheticism issue, Jesse could be a decent enough candidate for Alternating, but as noted previously, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.)
The Charleston Shoe Thieves have been leaving shoes filled with flowers and romantic letters on our Discord channel doorstep. We are currently contemplating responding with shoes with hidden compartments.
So, About That Voting Guide…
Because of internal structural changes, the voting guide is now going to be available on Saturday. Sadly, this means I can no longer advise non-Spies to not read said voting guide. You’ll see it tomorrow.
GNAB gnab, as people have begun saying (because unwins). In the underbracket, if we lose our games, we eliminate the opponent and advance to the next round. And if we win our games, we’re winning games. So no matter what happens, Spies win.