THE BIG CRUNCH

filed by Agent O

It’s the end of the Expansion era. Blaseball has been swallowed by the supermassive black hole. And here we are, still, somehow.

We won games, I guess. We also lost games. Since there’s no postseason and no championships and we won several games by default (I’ll explain this later), our position in the standings means absolutely nothing.

Time to Panic?

Parker roamed to four separate teams on day 81: the Hades Tigers, Baltimore Crabs, Alaskan Immortals, and the Seattle Garages, leaving the former three unstable. Not that it mattered, because almost all of the Supernova Eclipses were gone, replaced with increasing numbers of Black Hole (Black Hole)s.

This is when we found out that the Black Hole (Black Hole) had one more trick. In a Black Hole(Black Hole) game on day 79, the Pies batted in their fourth tenth run and – in a rush of absolutely nothing – nullified themselves.

The ‑‑‑‑‑ (Yellowstone Magic) won by default, or rather, “non-lost due to nullification.”

The Coin said, “N-! Ge- b‑‑k h-r- Pie-! [No! Get back here Pies!]”

The Philly Pies could not in fact get back “here”… because when their fans attempted to see if they could Steer their team, they instead found nothing but a strange message.

Your Team is Elsewhere. They have passed through the Event Horizon.

And when the ‑‑‑‑‑ (Yellowstone Magic) showed up to their next game, nobody was there. To everyone’s surprise and dismay, {nullteam} could not play Blaseball, and thus, the ‑‑‑‑‑ (Magic) won this game by default too.

Full Speed Ahead

Meanwhile, the Hall teams, the ones I called the rogue revenants, rammed the coin on Day 82, with the Hades Tigers leading the charge.

Then, with a

Rogue Teams Incinerated the Coin!

The Coin appeared, melting like a Wicked Witch.

St-p [Stop]
W‑‑t [Wait]
Y‑‑ c‑‑’t d‑ t‑‑‑ [You can’t do this]
‑‑o d‑ y‑u th‑‑k y‑‑ ‑‑‑ [Who do you think you are]
W‑ w‑‑‑ W‑‑ [We will Win]
‑e alw‑‑‑ W‑‑ [We always Win]
We’r‑ F‑ns [We’re Fans]
J‑st l‑ke y‑‑ [Just like you]

General celebration ensued.

Then people found out that melting the Coin had melted coin. Deleting the shop. Removing betting.

Destroying the concept of currency.

Okay, Yeah, Definitely Time To Panic

Every team that was in the Horizon corner disappeared. They had been nullified. Teams showed up to empty stadiums, non-losing their games by nullification. (The website said that home teams had “won” their games, even if they didn’t exist. But at this point we all know that winning and non-losing are different things. The standings, after all, only work on non-losses.) Meanwhile, the Vault teams had been “Forced” into place, preventing them from moving.

Somehow, in between all the panic, play continued. Games still started on the hour every hour. Some of them even had two teams actually playing in them!

With the nullification of coins, Votes were the only thing left that were of use. They could still be used to steer. Meanwhile, the Aid tab now let people send their snacks away to burn in each other’s engines. People with singular stacks of 99 pickles contributed what they could. Players who had hoarded millions of peanuts shoveled them into everyone’s dwindling fuel gauges.

Then a square black hole filled with the nullified teams appeared at the Horizon corner as the Map continued to tilt crazily. We, having dawdled around the center for a while trying to figure out if we could also punch the coin and if that’d do anything, realized we’d run out of time.

Running Away

The fans of the pre-history dead taught us much about how, precisely, navigation worked. There were two people with votes left on the Antarctic Fireballs, who worked closely with SIBR to chart their steering vector compared to their actual movement. The Kola Boars were driven entirely by a singular but extremely determined individual who deleted and recreated their Blaseball account hourly so as to take advantage of the one free vote that each new account comes with.

From these people we learned that eDensity pulled teams into the square black hole, changing the direction of their vectors (though not changing their actual speed). We read these notes as we ran away screaming, adjusting the ratio of hall to desert votes every hour so as to straighten our trajectory.

Other teams picked a direction and ran. A handful of the teams that had come from the Hall decided to try to make a break for it towards the Vault instead, hoping for succor from the Historian’s offer of “Safety”. The teams that had been nulled shoveled the last of their snacks in to Aid the few teams left, and bit their nails, and hoped.

(Meanwhile, the Hawaii Fridays decided not to worry about navigation at all. Declaring that they were going to “skateboard trick” from first to third, they went surfing off into the event horizon and, still partying in the face of despair, disappeared into the Null.)

Barely in time, we, closely followed by the San Francisco Lovers, were the last ones to make it to the Desert corner on Day 97, to no response. Some people thought this was like the “trust fall”, that the Reader would save us at the very end of day 99. Others hoped the Black Hole would stop right at the edge rather than consuming anyone at the corners. The Core Mechanics invited the other Desert Bus teams over for a last hurrah, sharing playlists, holding hands, and wondering what they would do over whatever Siesta would follow the season.

At the End of Everything

In our own watch party channel: salutes. Holding hands. Sitting watching the abyss.

The site disappeared.

In white:

EMERGENCY ALERT
VAULT LOCKED
SANDS SHIFTED
PULSAR FLICKERED
BLACK HOLE (BLACK HOLE) NULLIFIED BLASEBALL
BLACK HOLE (BLACK HOLE) BURPED
BLASEBALL WAS COMPRESSED BY GAMMA

With that, the “BETA” next to Blaseball’s title was replaced by “GAMMA”. Wait, so does that mean it’s BΓASEBALL now?

And these words, backwards, accompanied by Namerifeht’s flames:

balance paid
credit extended

Finally, with an icon of a microphone:

did you hear that
that big bang

Roll credits.

At the very end of the credits, they thanked:

The Fans who create art.
The Fans who write stories.
The Fans who chart graphs.
The Fans who just vibe.
The Fans who bring us all together.
There are many Teams, but only one League.
Without You, Blaseball would just be a Book of Rules.

The End…?

The Under Review modification added to the twenty-four teams in play has also been shown to have a purpose, with “review underway” stating that we, as well as the rest of the other twenty-three, “will return”.

There appears to be no postseason, and no championships.

The site has been replaced with a picture of the map, fully consumed by the Black Hole, now tilted into the shape of the blaseball diamond it has always been.

Blaseball is Elsewhere…

(The Ticker, of course, is hyped for Season 12J, which turns out to be a reference to some equation or other in physics, and then – in a reference to a joke other teams have made involving filling a spoiler tag with frivolous nonsense like “get tillmanned lol :shorts:”, one that never really appealed to the Spies – followed it the emoji for a singular pair of shorts.)

What Now?

The central Blaseball Discord will be put on a standard Siesta for the next two weeks, and has announced that they will have more news on the length of the siesta (and maybe some things for us to do) after that.

The Spies are going to have some lorejams about our new players, our old players, and our setting. We do still need wiki pages about the Agency and the Plan, among other things. There’s also ideas being thrown around about movie watch parties, and people playing games on voice calls. We’ll figure something out.

Also, hey, if you’re reading this? Thank you. For being here. I’ve been scarred by the disappearance of fandom history before. The debriefings were originally my efforts to not let that happen again. But then people started reading them, and finding them useful, and that’s why I kept going.

I’ll see you around. Assuming nothing catastrophic happens, of course.

P.S. Spies win.