filed by Agent O
The Expansion Era is hurtling towards something approaching a conclusion. Or a trainwreck. Here’s some of what you might want to know beforehand.
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The theme of the Expansion Era has been expansion. The increasing complexity and top-heaviness of the league is spinning utterly out of control. More teams, more rules, more subsystems, more stuff.
This is best exemplified by the number of suns we have in the ILB at this point. Sun 2, Sun(Sun), Sun .1, Sun 30, Equal Sun, Sum Sun, and Maximum Sun are all worsening global warming causing the league to gain increasingly ludicrous numbers of runs and wins.
There are other teetering stacks of Jenga blocks. The number of stadium renovations. The mechanical complexity of Wills. The… thing that is eDensity.
And of course the increasing impossibility of teaching people how to even start playing Blaseball, let alone catching them up on the plot.
Even I don’t know how I’d get someone on-ramped before the !@#$ inevitably hits the [REDACTED], and I write these things.
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As discussed in the previous debriefings, herring have slowly been revealing more parts of the Library.
The first, and most straightforward, bit to talk about is the Pre-History teams. (You can find a full list here, from Blaseball News Network.) Highlights include the Louisville Lobsters (unrelated to the Baltimore Crabs, or the other Baltimore Crabs), the Wyoming Dolphins (I’ve done the research and found there are no dolphinariums in Wyoming; I suspect this is just to spite the people claiming that there exists a team named the “New Jersey Jolphins”), the New Hampshire Eggplants (moving right along), and the Kola Boars (this is a reference to the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the result of a Russian project to dig the deepest hole in the world – perhaps they have a rivalry with the Core Mechanics about who’s further down?).
Then there’s all the other… How am I even supposed to tell which revelations are actually from this offseason? You know what, I’m not even going to try teasing that apart. I’m just going to tell the story of Parker MacMillan, because that’s the most important narrative thread right now.
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In the beginning, Parker MacMillan was an adequate player on the Alaskan Immortals. Parker had a 10x payout modifier if you idoled him. Not coincidentally, Parker was one of the first MVPs of the league.
During the Season A election, the Hawaii Fridays hexed Parker with Non-Profit (preventing Parker’s home team from getting any money from him) and the Antarctic Fireballs hexed Parker with Firewalker (trying to discourage the Immortals from removing Parker from their team).
Without the ability to make money off Parker, who was the economy, the Alaskan Immortals were left with the prospect of never being able to win anything in an election ever again. As best as anyone can tell, they decided to Revoke Parker, gambling on Instability being something that they could survive. They lost this gamble. During the first solar eclipse to ever occur in Ultra Internet League Blaseball, at the beginning of Season C, the Alaskan Immortals were incinerated.
At some point after this Parker seems to have joined the Canada Artists. At the end of Season C, the Canada Artists – knowing that they had Agan Espinoza, a Fire Protector – presumably thought that if they revoked Parker again, they might survive. While we don’t know what happened next, it’s likely that this is where Parker gained the On An Odyssey modification. The Canada Artists’ players survived the blaze. The Canada Artists, and Agan Espinoza, did not.
Season D’s election was probably where Parker gained Super Roaming; and as a result season E was a firestorm of proportions unseen in our time.
Why would someone put Super Roaming on a player that they knew would spread destruction? Speculation abounds. It’s not unlikely that this was a backfired Reform, in the same way that the Hades Tigers’ trying to reform Paula Turnip’s Super Idol turned that modification into Credit to Team. It’s possible that someone was angry enough about the entire situation that they pushed the button out of sheer frustration. It’s also entirely likely that this was enacted with a 0% chance wimdy.
And at the end of Season E, Parker received his fifth MVP nomination and was Vaulted. This meant that he exited the ILB, leaving every single team in the ILB unstable. An emergency siesta was called, followed by a “snap election”.
(There’s been speculation that an incinerated team’s votes would be cast on their replacement team, allowing a team that had been incinerated for being unstable to still be able to try to keep Parker somewhere. This is likely false, as we have observed that votes from the Baltimore Crabs did not apply to the Tokyo Lift when the Crabs ascended after Season 10. Though I guess incineration might work differently? I’m not cleared to know.)
In that election the Boulders Bay Birds succeeded at a last-ditch effort to put The Force Field on Parker to try and prevent him from moving again, and a Decree to reset the entire league passed with 94% of the vote.
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What isn’t in the library is also interesting. We are getting Books in a scattershot order. We can use herring to uncover lines that the Coin did not want us to know, but we have no way to influence which Books we’re getting to see. The books themselves are likely being parceled out by Crates.
(Speaking of herring, if you need somewhere to use them, may I recommend the four redacted entries in Liquid Friend’s Special feed? I have heard talk around the office that they may reveal something… interesting.)
Also, we still haven’t seen anything from Root or Bridge. What’s going on there?
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Finally, let’s talk about that exhibition match the Coin says we’re getting after Postseason 23.
The behavior of the various New Megan Itos established that Trader/Traitor players will trade their nothing (or their broken item, or I guess their existing item if they are actually holding something) for an item of higher durability: see the number of Clutch Wooden Rock Rings that the various Itos have gained possession of. And as has been established by the existence of the Fifth Base, Legendary items have infinite durability.
The most popular theory of what’s going to happen next is as follows:
New Megan Ito and Parker MacMillan are both going to be in the exhibition match. Because Megan will always take the item with the highest durability, they are likely going to take the Force Field from Parker MacMillan.
This is… going to remove the Force Field from Parker MacMillan.
Leaving Parker to Super Roam.
Causing team after team after team to become unstable.
Making a reset the only way out.