Everything has gone according to plan – no, even better than according to plan. For that I am incredibly grateful.
Lōotcrates (but pronounced like Socrates)
Firstly – the new season was heralded by a particularly strange appearance.
It was not any of the Blaseball entities we’d known before. A scroll of parchment unrolled in front of us, and upon it we beheld an field of twinkling stars. Within this darkness were crates, rendered in white-and-black: described as “Tools of the New Age”.
We saw described a flood, then, that crashed across the Bridge, “erode[d] the Pillars” underneath; and through the flood, “a witness wades.”
We, our thousands and thousands of witnessing eyes, “shape the Current.” Even as we observe, we trace out the path of the future with our gaze. And perhaps even the flood itself is made of stories and memories. The stories we have created from nothing but names and numbers. Our narratives, and our love.
As the site said: “Crafting Legends.”
…Also, uh, I couldn’t figure out how to make this into pretty words, but this is also important – at about this time, Parker mentioned Lootcrates. We’re quite sure this refers to a certain Twitter account that we know of with a scroll of parchment as an avatar. The very same scroll of parchment that we saw at the beginning of this weird cutscene.
But Enough With The Weird Experimental Stuff
The Decree that passed was Bats. Every player was given an Item – a bat, naturally – that increased their batting slightly. Yes, even pitchers were given bats. Not that they ever go to bat, but I guess it’s the thought that counts? A few were given bats with special properties, that increased their stats more or let them access modifications like Chunky.
This also unlocked a new tab on every single player’s profile called Items. The way Items work is both elaborate and uncertain and I will not try to summarize it here, but suffice it to say, we have yet another weird subsystem that’s going to break in fascinating ways.
Meanwhile, the subtitle of this season is Mass Production. And the Commissioner referred to it as “Dead Stock”. Dead stock is a retail term for items that are more or less impossible to sell, such as calendars for the previous year. The kind of thing they put in the bargain bin for 99 cents.
So, were our bats plundered from the bargain bin? Or are we the bargain bin?
Actually, No, There’s Still More Weird Experimental Stuff
Meanwhile, the Kansas City Breath Mints pulled off a heist of epic proportions.
So remember how Uncle Plasma, while investigating things, would briefly pop into the Shadows of the team of the crime scene? Uncle Plasma was in the Mints’ Shadows investigating the FreshDome for twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes, everyone on the Breath Mints collectively dumped every single vote they had into Foreshadowing for Uncle Plasma.
And it worked. Oscar Vaughan is now on the New York Millenials, and Uncle Plasma joined the Mints.
Frankly, I envy the amount of vote discipline they can bring to bear.
Instability
There were several attempts to grab REDACTED players out of the Shadows, as well as an attempt to reroll Chorby Soul’s Debt.
This…
This didn’t work. Not only have the redacted players not returned to anyone’s rosters, everyone involved has gained Unstable.
Remember what Unstable did last time? Marked players for increased chance of incineration, and chained to others and marked them for increased chances too?
This Unstable is permanent.
Spies Win
Enough talk of terrible consequences. Here’s everything that went right for us, because it’s a lot:
- We foreshadowed Malik Romayne for Fitzgerald Blackburn, not only retrieving Fitz but putting them into the cleanup hitter spot on our roster (fourth on the lineup), which is perfect.
- We moved Morrow Wilson to the Shadows. That peanut reaction was bad.
- We got the Defense Boost blessing. Remember how we used to be good at defense? We got a decent roll on our boost, and that sprinkled approximately 2 stars’ worth of buffs across our entire team. Nobody’s star total was actually increased by more than 0.2, but spread that out over a whole team? Now we’re cooking with gas.
- We got Middling. This makes the Spies overperform during this Midseason, which means that the Wednesday curse that I still don’t believe in has been entirely nullified.
- Stew Briggs spontaneously Roamed, leaving our team and ending up on the Charleston Shoe Thieves. Sorry, Thieves. Jordan and Howell will have a lot of fun when they realize that we never told Stew anything about the Spies, though.
We have solved every single problem with our lineup in a single election. (Though we do still have to deal with Becker Solis in some way – that chomp really hurt her.) Spies are not only going to win, Spies are making a playoffs run. And maybe even more.