Good time of day, Agents. How sweet the taste of hope for triumph. How bitter the taste of anticipatory loss.
Yes!
Firstly: Spies clinch the playoffs! This is after an absolute slugfest in Wild Low that had us gripping our seats until the last few games in the season to know if we were in, and until the very last game to know if we were going to be stuck in 4th seed with the wildcard. Thankfully, we are in 3rd.
And – get this – we had harder opponents and no Middling, and we still passed our previous non-losses-to-losses record.
Soul
Chorby Soul swinging wildly up and down the leaderboard has summoned a great number of λ-sharks to the wildcard rounds, and presumably also the rest of the playoffs. Doesn’t feel great, but Consumers are a balancing mechanism, so I’ll put up with them.
Also, uh. So there’s this peculiar thing that’s been happening on Blaseball2. Every time a team has reached the AAAAA credit rating – every time a team has sunk all the way to the bottom – the gates have been damaged. And the easiest way to sink a team below AAAAA… is to have Chorby Soul on it.
I still extremely antirecommend trying to pull Chorby Soul; the collateral damage caused by their mere existence is not something I would wish on a team so close to victory as us. But there exists at least one reason to pull Chorby Soul that isn’t “haha it’s funny to ruin a team”. So remember that before getting angry at whoever’s been doing the plundering. They might actually be trying to advance the plot.
Gone
The MVPs were not announced this time (though their various egos were still incremented as usual). These messages from Crates showed up, instead:
Sediment Collects in the Delta
Sparking Nucleosynthesis
Forging Legends.
Stars Vaulted
Preserved.
Immediately afterwards, York Silk and Nagomi McDaniel disappeared from their teams. They have the modification of “Legendary”. Their teams’ feeds have two lines that are completely redacted.
They’re gone.
Maybe this is how they are balancing the idol economy? Deleting the ones that are on there for too long?
Metaphysically…
This previous week’s Blaseball Beat referred to York and Nagomi’s position as “Legends in the making […] building the pressure on the perennial MVPs to critical mass.”
A star, according to the Glossary, may or may not be “a volumetric unit of congealed care”, or “a measurement of potentiality”.
There is a completely redacted glossary entry exactly where the word “Legendary” would fit.
Remember, the word “Preserved” was also used to refer to the Iffey Jr.
And so, there is one more line of speculation that your humble writer has seen: that Legendary, being the word used to describe the highest tier of loot in every other game, could well mean that they might be turned into items. Things to wield. Things that Blaseball players would have no choice but to use against each other on the field.
This has precedent, actually. The winners of the Coffee Cup were “rewarded Percolated energy”, as the Perk modification initially said. But the Real Game Band was percolated by the Tractor Bean. So these players were rewarded with the Real Game Band’s energy, their life force.
…So does that mean that Iffey Jr. was a player in some distant age, some other place? Are the other lootcrates also… made of… people?
At The End
Did York Silk and Nagomi McDaniel sit on one of the smaller Hawaiian islands, holding hands, not bothering to bring anything with them to watch the idol board with because they knew full well that the idol board standings would not change? Who said that they were scared, and who replied that it was okay because they were, too? Would Nagomi have told York that he was the best stepson she could ever have, putting a hand on the shoulder of the young man that had grown to be even taller than she? Would York have thanked Nagomi for everything, a sliver of a smile on his face? Would they have taken off their shoes, put their feet out to feel the surf crashing in one last time? Might they have been crying?
Would there have been a flash of light, and then nothing, as everything nearby was scoured by plasmatic flame?
Who is to say?
There’s nothing, and nobody, left to tell us if that’s what happened. And even if there was once a camera recording of what happened, someone might have destroyed it: erasing the tape, shredding it, and then melting what remained beyond recognition into a lump of plastic slag. If so, it would have been to afford them a last sliver of privacy for their final moments: the dignity the Agency would otherwise never have given them.
Look Forward To It
Spies: Your voting instructions will be enclosed tomorrow.
Good luck and good sense. I love you all.