filed by Agent O
audio version (partway through)
Things were pretty decent for us this election, other than one glaring hole that I’ll cover in a bit.
But unlike with most of these recaps… I’m going to leave the Pre-Election Plot Stuff for last. A bit of a buildup will help the story here, I think.
Decree
The Underbracket passed because of course it would, it’s the button that has “!@#$ the Coin” written on it.
THE MIRROR DOUBLES
DIVIDES
ADVANCING LOSSES
SPINNING VICTORY
END OVER END
As expected, it’ll be a losers’ bracket for the bottom eight teams. I’ve seen speculation that the unwins of the underbracket will also count as championships for the purposes of Evolution, because twelve championships is a lot, but there’s no confirmation on that.
Three Wills, No Donia
We have received no Blessings, so let’s talk about our Wills.
After four previous elections where we were repeatedly unable to retrieve Donia Bailey, we decided this week to take a more cautious approach – don’t want to mess with our current success – by starting with Shadow Infusing Donia, instead. And despite having three Wills, and sinking more than two hundred thousand tracked votes into it… we were yet again disappointed.
You could arguably describe this rate of failure as sabotage, not just unluckiness, at least in-fiction. Is the Agency interfering with our attempts to help? Is Donia’s “other employer” the one who is interfering? After she threw herself into the void for us, I think she has proven her loyalty to at least the team, even if not the Agency proper. But maybe they don’t think so.
Okay, enough being bitter. So what Wills did we get, then?
Yeong-Ho Garcia’s Friend of Crows got rerolled into Walk in the Park. The Yellowstone Magic, his former home, look upon this with fondness. And Walk in the Park is a modification a batter can actually make use of!
Mohammed Picklestein has been moved to the shadows, so as to be our third fax machine pitcher.
And our last Will – well, we’d originally intended to move Jasper Blather’s shoes onto Fitzgerald Blackburn, thus casting that Super Idol-granting Golden Necklace into the void of the Bargain Bin. Unfortunately, someone read the instructions backwards, and so now the Golden Necklace has instead been moved onto Jasper Blather. This outcome is too funny for any of us to be particularly mad about it.
Also, the Squid apologized again for the whole faerie gold thing and has given us a Free Gift, which means that in the next gift shop cycle, we will receive an extra Gift on top of the ones we get from our donations.
Elsewhere in the League
This list of non-Spies results is, as usual, incomplete and in no particular order. At this point I won’t bother noting which ones of these results are or aren’t less than 1% – just know that a lot of them were extremely low-probability (an occurrence Blaseball fans know as a “wimdy”).
Jaylen has been Alternated, and joins the many other Discipline Era stars who are no longer their former selves. She is… no longer the pitcher we once knew. I suspect this may have been an attempt to shed all those modifications Jaylen has. Well, it didn’t work. As has been true for Alternate Trust in general, she still has all of them. But she now has five-star Defense and is a Negative – that’s something, right?
The Hades Tigers were attempting to take the spotlight off Paula Turnip by reforming her Super Idol modification. Unfortunately, it became Credit to the Team, turning a 2x multiplier into a 5x multiplier!
The Charleston Shoe Thieves have revoked the already-Roamin’ Bright Zimmerman, who “embraced the Roamin’ lifestyle” and is now On An Odyssey: which is like Roamin’, except that every time he roams it makes him 2% better. They also managed to reroll Stu Trololol’s Flinch into Spicy, which makes it clear that the Reform will is not in fact a set flowchart.
The two remaining Wyatt Masons – “Ivy” and “Max” – are now in the same subleague. This makes it more likely for them to echo into static. Good for the plot. Very bad for Wyatt fans.
The Boston Flowers sent Hierophantic Foible right back to the Kansas City Breath Mints so that they could retrieve Jacob Haynes. I’m told Jacob Haynes was one of their few remaining originals, so there was a sentimental attachment there as well as a practical one. Now the Mints have to find somewhere else to send Hiero and spend another Will.
Karato Bean – who used to be one of our pitchers, and is currently on the pitching staff of the San Francisco Lovers – is now Guarded, and thus plays better in more fortified ballparks. The Lovers’ stadium is a Douglas, which means that it is very fortified. The final effect is to grant a sort of Homebody-lite.
The Shadow of the Bats blessing accidentally buffed the Hawaii Fridays’ Shadows’ pitching instead, to general confusion.
It turns out that Subtractor flips the polarity of all RBIs hit by one player, and Underachiever flips the polarity of all home runs hit by one player. The Baltimore Crabs were the highest bidders in an attempt to avoid both. Then both these blessings got wimdied out from under them, and their fears were realized: the Crabs’ Alston Cerveza is now a Subtractor.
Who got the exceptionally hotly-contested Underhanded Blessing, the one that turns home runs into unruns? Michelle Sportsman of the LA Unlimited Tacos. For Forbidden Knowledge reasons I will not explain at this time, Michelle Sportsman was by far the pitcher they most wanted to receive this. Good for them.
And finally: Jesús (pronounced hay-soos) Koch of the Moist Talkers received the Super Roamin’ Fifth Base, the first Legendary Item we have seen since the rework of Items. Legendary Items cannot be dropped or broken, displaying a golden infinity sign where the durability would have been. Super Roamin’ states that the player roams at the end of each week as well as the end of each season. We are not yet sure what it being a Fifth Base does. There’s some speculation about it being related to the “Five Bases [that] were Placed” at the beginning of Pre-History I, and/or it giving either Jesús themself or their host team the Fifth Base for the duration.
Post-Election
Almost all the replicas were dusted… but Goodwin Morrin III, who had stowed away into the Charleston Shoe Thieves’ Shadows due to the Fax Preparation blessing, didn’t.
Having grabbed the necklace off of Fitz, Jasper Blather scurried off to the Jazz Hands. Probably to try out those edutainment raps on the big stage.
Pudge Nakamoto wandered out of the Hall of Flame and directly onto our team, as if there was no barrier between life and death at all. Apparently Roamin’ players can just do that!?
I asked the Kansas City Breath Mints if they wanted to get rid of Hierophantic Foible badly enough that they’d accept Pudge Nakamoto in exchange. The response I received was a tape containing ten minutes of screaming about something called “The Spearmint”.
Debt 2
All right. Can’t put it off any longer.
So. The Coin began this election with a bit of an… announcement. She complained about the “massive Losses”, the fact that the league had gone upside-down, about how we’d floated out of reach of Consumers instead of being thrown to them, and that we had yet again voted for the Decree that wasn’t hers. And then:
We’ve been forced to make a Deal
A Grand Bargain
[…]
So have your fun
Barely concealed menace.
After this, the Tidings for this election read:
A DEBT II
THE LEAGUE WAS LEVERAGED
SUN(SUN) WAS FORGED
SUN(SUN) WAS SET
BLASEBALL WAS RAISED BY A SECOND POWER
This added a league modifier called “Sun(Sun)”. It reads, “All Wins and Unwins earned will be Squared.”
What does that mean? Well, firstly, when you square a negative number, it becomes positive, thus meaning that – at minimum – unwins are probably just wins again. So, basically, despite the fact that we didn’t vote to repeal Turntables, she unilaterally repealed Turntables anyway.
This probably doesn’t mean that your entire record is squared, because that would inflate out of control approximately immediately. Maybe if you Sun 2 a game too hard, you might end up with 4 (or occasionally 9) wins, instead of one.
…Or is that too simple? What if what’s being squared isn’t the actual win count? What if it’s the eDensity that each win comes with?
“So have your fun”, the Coin said. “Win or Lose”.
Signoff
As has been recently announced, we have three Material Plane weeks to stew in these developments.
I mentioned at the end of last threeson that, if you want to earn a few coins over the offseason, you can buy a snack slot and one Breakfast and check it daily. This advice still holds, even though this is a… “thrieesta”.
We do still need a lot of wiki pages written, so if you’ve got a bit, you can help with those. Also, we have several lore jams planned with various other teams so we can work on lore handoffs: feel free to wander in and ask what we’ve got.
Good luck and good sense, Agents.