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Wyatt Mason IV pads down the hallways making up the guts of the Agency building they’re currently stationed in. They lost their shoes about ten turns ago when Nanci Grackle, mad ornithologist, zapped them away. At least their socks are comfortable. At least it didn’t take more than their shoes. Ivy adjusts their glasses and sighs, placing a hand on the sheet metal that currently lines the hallways. Escaping Nanci is always a struggle for them. They get roped into being a lab assistant, or a test subject, or a reluctant observer in Nanci’s ever increasing one-sided rivalry with Mohammed Picklestein. They just don’t understand hir obsession with getting one over on the other mad scientist of the Spies.
According to old blood, Picklestein engaged in stress-testing more intense than anything Grackle could throw at it. What’s one ornithologist from Atlantis against a walking concentration of bad luck? Ivy continues down the hallways, taking left turn after right turn, doubling back upon themselves occasionally. They know this is the way to Yuniesky’s lab. They almost miss the simplicity of the other headquarters they’ve been in. Sure, Atlantis had water leaks now and then, and you couldn’t shake a stick in Dallas without hitting a BBQ, but it’s got to be more convenient to visitors than the shifting maze that is An Undisclosed Location. To be honest, despite the team professing to be “from Houston”, Ivy isn’t exactly sure where they are.
When they fell out of the sky and crash landed into an empty stadium, they weren’t exactly sure what to do. They wandered the halls, going deeper, and deeper, and deeper, until they felt like they were back in the Shadows. The endless hallways of cubicles, break rooms and laboratories were disorienting. They found abandoned files filled with redactions, dossiers with no contents, corkboards with faded red string. They explored the dark insides of what they now know is the Agency while it was completely empty. No clerks, no players. Nothing. Just the echo of an echo walking down hallway after hallway. At one point, they walked by a window so deep in the labyrinth of office spaces and saw the Earth from above. It doesn’t make sense, Ivy knows they crashed down from Immateria to what’s probably Houston. How can they be…?
Something inside them… changed, after that. Ivy doesn’t know what it was, or how it happened, but suddenly they knew exactly how to navigate that endless maze. For the first time, they found the kitchen. It was spotless. It looks like the former Spies tidied up before the black hole took them. And when they turned out to the field to check if anyone else fell like they did, Nanci was blowing up the mound.
After that, they were inseparable. For better or for worse.
Ivy concentrates. They know they can clip to where they need to go now that the Agency likes them. They turn the shadowy corner, and immediately find themselves in front of a door made of solid oak.This is where Yuniesky usually works. And sleeps. And lives, generally. Something about the room having the best Ethernet connection? Ivy doesn’t understand how that works. Everywhere in the Agency has good internet. How would they keep up information wise if it wasn’t? Ivy knocks on the door twice.
“Come in,” Yuniesky calls. They sound tired. Ivy opens the door and walks inside. The dim lighting and blanket draped over the coders shoulders tell them all they need to know.
“How long have you been awake?” Ivy asks.
Yuniesky waves a hand dismissively. “Eh, two or three.” Ivy blinks at them and gives them their best judgemental stare. “Don’t worry about it. Really.” They shake out their disheveled hair and give Ivy a weary smile. “What can I do ya for?”
“Well, I was just going to ask for help with Nanci,” Ivy says. “He’s been attempting to get me to show him how the maze works-” A mechanical clacking interrupts them as the giant, looming, obsidian obelisk chimes in. Both Yuniesky and Ivy watch as text appears on a monitor above Yuniesky’s main setup.
[I THINK YOU SHOULD IT WOULD BE FUNNY – ]
“Conditional.” Yuniesky says, tone flat.
[ ^__^ – ]
“It wouldn’t be such a big deal if ze wasn’t constantly trying to dematerialize me in the name of science.” Ivy sighs. They glance at Yuniesky for permission and with a nod, they sit down at the foot of the bed Yunie has stationed in the room. The hacker spends almost all their time here. Ever since games stopped, they’ve barely been seen outside their room at all.
Yunie stretches and rubs the back of their neck. “Yeah, I bet that’s annoying.” A comfortable silence falls for a moment before Yuniesky breaks it with another sigh. “Still no word from the officials on when this Siesta is going to end. I honestly don’t think it ever will.”
“Really?” Ivy asks, a surge of emotions running through them. They wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Blaseball. It’s so strange to think the Game has just… stopped.
“Yeah. People are still falling, making their way back to wherever home is, but…” Yunie takes a sip of something that’s probably lukewarm at best. “It’s been months. The umps are still dormant. The commission hasn’t said anything. Conditional and I have been crunching the data. You know how long the last big Siesta was.”
“Well, not really.” They admit. “I came out of the static in…Season 14?”
Yuniesky blinks. “Oh, I forgot about that.” Another sip of the mysterious drink. “Wow, this is shit. Conditional, how long has this been sitting here?”
[ TWO MAYBE THREE - ]
“Oh, ha ha.” Yunie snarks back. “Anyway. The last major Siesta didn’t last as long as this one did. I know people want to start up unofficial games, at least. So we all have a reason to stay.”
Ivy never really thought about where they would go when Blaseball ended. Maybe they would meet up with the other Masons? They didn’t have a life before the Game, and now that they’re in the Agency… “I think I’d stay regardless,” they say. “It’s nice having people around.”
[ IVY FRIEND <3 – ]
[ YUNIE FRIEND <3 – ]
[ SPIES FRIENDS – ]
Yuniesky smiles and rubs the side of the obelisk. It makes an odd humming noise that vibrates Ivy from top to bottom, though Yunie doesn’t seem bothered.
BOOM!
Both members of the room jump at the sudden explosion. “...don’t tell me Grackle was chasing you.” Yuniesky says.
Ivy laughs nervously and fiddles with the rims of their glasses. “Well… I won’t tell you that!”
“IVY!” Comes a raspy shout down the hallway. “COME HERE AND HELP ME!”
“That’s your cue,” Yuniesky says, getting up from their chair to move towards the door. Ivy wriggles in place on the bed and shuffles their socks together. They look up at Yuniesky with the biggest, most pathetic eyes they can muster. “Don’t give me that look.” They make their eyes look wetter. “Aw, c’mon Ivy. That’s not fair.”
“Conditional, you’ll protect me, won’t you?” Ivy pleads.
[ NO <3– ]
“You’re just scared of Nanci!”
[ MAYBE – ]
[ HAVE YOU SEEN HIS OUTFITS – ]
[ THOSE SCARE ME – ]
“Ughhh!” Ivy stands and crosses their arms. “I know you’re only saying this because last time Nanci came towards your lab, the leftover radiation from his death ray bricked one of your computers!”
“Well, yeah?” Yuniesky says. “I got a lot of work done here. I’ve almost finished writing a script to automate my investigation into the new Broken Ridge media publications, it’s actually really interesting –” They’re cut off by another, closer explosion. “OKAY, time to go.”
They throw open the door and with another suspicious vibration from Conditional, Ivy is outside the door. They hear a deadbolt click and a quiet call of sorry before the hurricane on legs that is Nanci Grackle runs into them at top speed. Ivy tumbles to the ground and by the time they hit it, the both of them are somewhere in the endless halls of the Agency, away from Yuniesky. “Neat!” Nanci comments, still crushing Ivy. He hops back to hir feet and lends a hand to Ivy to pull them up too. Ivy stands, somewhat dizzy. “Was that you or the obelisk?”
“Um…” Ivy has no clue. “Conditional?”
“DRATS!” Nanci snaps his fingers and scowls. “Yuniesky… I’ll get you someday! SOMEDAY!” Ze begins shaking a ray gun at the ceiling.
Ivy eyes it warily. “Can I get my shoes back?”
“I have no idea.” Nanci says, looking at the side of the gun. Like most of his inventions, it’s green. It matches hir extremely bright jacket, at least. Really ties the whole mad scientist look together. “Well, now that I’ve got you here…”
“Nope!” Ivy squeaks and takes off again. Unfortunately, they’re still dizzy. Which leads them to running head first into a wall. Nanci cackles. He trains the ray gun on Ivy and they panic. That thing dematerialized their shoes, they have no idea what would happen if it hit them! They squeeze their eyes shut and cover their head with their arms. There’s a feeling of vertigo and silence and that overwhelming feeling of the Shadows. Ivy peeks out of their arm cage and sees something they’ve never stumbled into before.
The room looks infinite. It seems like it stretches on forever, not too unlike the endless hallways of the Agency. However, instead of rows upon rows of cubicles, it seems to be full of bookshelves and filing cabinets. Ivy straightens out and blinks a few times. That really is the biggest filing cabinet they’ve ever seen. They walk over and open the third drawer, pulling out a random file. It doesn’t look like anything important. Covered in redactions (as per usual), it only seems to detail a week of food deliveries to the Worldwide Field. Who in the world needs that much salsa in a day? Investigations of the other files reveal much of the same: heavily redacted, generally meaningless information.
“Dang it…” Ivy whispers, putting the file back and closing the cabinet. It looks like they stress clipped again. Max showed them how to clip out of their shell once and with the general anomalous nature of An Undisclosed Location, it seems they can appear and disappear (mostly) at will inside the Agency.
“Oh, a visitor?” A nondescript voice calls out from the endless depths. Ivy squints towards the layered bookshelves and filing cabinets and sees a figure approaching them. “You didn't get in the normal way, did you.”
Ivy squeaks and shakes their head. “S-sorry! I was being chased, and-”
“Don't worry.” The approaching person looks a bit like a librarian. They wear a comfortable purple sweater, black dress pants and flats. Silver hair swings loose as they walk closer, and circular glasses gleam without any visible light source. Ivy gets the overall impression of someone sharp. “I was commenting.”
“Um, I'm Ivy.” They say. The mysterious librarian smiles back at them.
“Blather, Plums.” Ivy shakes the offered hand. Ivy was sure they had heard the name before. Blather turns to walk away and Ivy trots after them, still feeling awed at the sheer amount of information that surrounds them. Eventually, they gather the question that had been brewing in their mind.
“I thought you were in Kansas City?” The words come out more like a question. “I thought I was at least still in, um. ‘Houston’.”
“So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They’re sorting it all out for us.” Blather says.
Ivy blinks at the apparent non-sequitur. They start to work through their confusion out loud. “So… you're an archivist? We are still in Houston, and you're trying to sort out this whole Endless Siesta thing?” Blather inclines their head with a slight smile.
“No other place can hold me. The Library is my home.” They gesture out to the stacks. “I hold the truth and truth-seekers in high regard.” They stop suddenly and turn towards Ivy. The look on their face is not comforting. It is sharp, and cold, and startling inhuman. Ivy can't see any reflection in their glasses, or anything behind it. Their heart starts to beat faster. Static fuzzes at their fingertips.
Blather isn't just an Archivist. They are the Archives itself.
“You're like me.” Blather says. Their words crawl through the air on spiderwebs of red string. “Two sides of a different coin.”
Ivy can feel their breathing pick up. They just want to be a normal kid. They don't want to be tied to Houston, or Blaseball, or anything else, they just want to be normal. “No,” they manage, rubbing the bottom of their shirt in their hands in a desperate attempt to self-soothe. “No, I just want to be normal!”
“The only thing to fear is fear itself.” Blather says.
“I'm not scared!” Ivy says, voice sounding much braver than they feel. Their form feels fuzzy, unraveling, they can feel the buzz of every light, they feel the space between pages of books, they know in that single instant exactly where to find anything that they would ever be asked for and anything that has ever been asked of this Archive. They feel laughter and tears and success and failure and every single pin on a corkboard loaded with connective tissue, the beating heart of the Agency and it's lifeblood of Agents-
Blather turns back around, overstimulation of their mind ceasing in an instant. Ivy gasps for breath as they snap back into their body and blinks tears from their eyes. Gazing into the infinite had never made them feel so seen. Even syncing up with the other Masons and the Microphone didn't make them feel so panicked and small.
They follow Blather in silence until they reach what looks to be a comfortable sitting area. There are warm lights, couches, beanbags and soft rugs, all scattered seemingly aimlessly about the area. Ivy spots a few agents napping on desks, blankets draped over their shoulders and files carefully moved away from open mouths. Blather takes their place behind a stereotypical librarian's counter and quirks their lips up into a smile Ivy thinks only they can see. “Fair winds, safe travels. May your voyage bring you luck and fortune.” They say.
Ivy nods and scurries out of the library.
They have no idea where they're going, they just have to get away from the Archives. They want to stay away from Grackle’s experiments. They don't know what they want, but they know they can't find it here. Ivy runs directly into a wall (again) and falls to the ground. Their glasses spin off somewhere they can't see.
“Shoot..” Ivy mutters and squints around where they've fallen. Their breathing and heartbeat finally feel steady. There's a rumble beneath their legs and their glasses end up right next to their hand. Ivy pats the ground with a small smile. The Agency really does like them.
Glasses secured and body and mind settled, Ivy turns the corner and finds themself on the field of An Undisclosed Location. Someone they haven't talked to very much is idling near the home plate, looking up into the supermassive black hole that swallowed the sky.
Ivy walks over and sits on the dirt where an Ump would normally stand. The quiet of the pitch is only interrupted by a slight breeze and the ever present white noise of the black hole. Fitzgerald Blackburn's body wavers in the breeze, and they continue to look up at the sky. When the Siesta started, the Spies took it upon themselves to restructure the pitch to something that everyone would enjoy. The grind rails were re-installed much to the delight of Jomgy. The secret base under second and the connected tunnels were excavated and updated to be even safer and more efficient. An illegally installed PsychoAcoustics machine hums by the scoreboard. It's nice , Ivy thinks. It all feels so familiar.
“Something on your mind?” Blackburn asks. Like every Spy left in the black hole once games ended, they made their way back to Houston. Although… Ivy is pretty sure they heard claims of Blackburn always being in Houston, and the “falling” being more of a formality.
“Just thinking about what comes next,” Ivy says. “I ran into Blather and…”
Blackburn chuckles and their smoke swirls more languidly. “The information overload got you, didn't it?” Ivy nods. “Plums isn't so good at toning things back the first time you meet it. Next time you see them, that probably won't happen.”
“It happened to you?”
“Yes,” Blackburn’s eyes flicker with what seems to be amusement. “It was curious about the exact events around my forming and took a little bit of a peek. The Archives are very, very vast, and the dedicated Agents there do a great job. Plums likes knowledge. Hopefully the look they had at you satisfied their interest.”
Ivy nods, curiosity satisfied. It makes sense to them. Both Spies stay silent and enjoy the ambience for another moment. There really is something peaceful about the Siesta. Endless or not. Maybe someday the Umps would ignite again and they would all be drafted back into the death game. But the Umps are gone, the Commission is silent. The only entities with anything to say are the squid and the cards, and in those cases it's either chatting about the hall and snacks or about obscure sports.
A question bubbles to the forefront of Ivy's mind. “Blackburn,” they say. A pause while they wait for Blackburn to show they're listening. The smoke hums in response. “How did you, um. Deal with the Siesta before? You know, with the thought that it might never end?”
Ivy gets the distinct impression Blackburn is raising their eyebrows despite the fact they don't have any. “I mean I've just been thinking,” Ivy continues. “I don't really… know anything but the Game.” They gesture at the illegal music equipment taking up real estate under the scoreboard. “I don't know what I'm supposed to do without it. Who I'm supposed to be without it.”
“ Ah. ” Blackburn says. They take a seat next to Ivy, right where a batter would normally stand. “And you're asking me because I've been through similar, I assume.” Ivy nods.
Blackburn hums and looks out at the field. “Well, firstly, you can fall me Fitz. I know we haven't talked much, but we are friendly, I hope. But to answer your question... I was created as a consequence of the Game, just like you. If the fans never opened that book, Miki wouldn't have died. I wouldn't have taken their place. Even with the Grand Siesta I didn't have a break, really. The Agency always kept us busy. I didn't have time to think until I was Elsewhere.”
“The Agency isn't like how it used to be?”
“Well, it's very similar.” Fitz admits. “Someone claiming to be the Director resigned after the Coin exploded. But we were always doing our own thing so it didn't effect much. A lot of what you call the ‘Old Blood’ wasn't doing so well back then. We were all… burnt out, if you don't mind the pun.” A pause for Ivy to giggle. Fitz’s eyes tilt up in what Ivy thinks might be a smile.
“We were all tired, and paranoid, and deeply, deeply afraid. A paperwork mishap got me to San Francisco, and then I got swept Elsewhere once I got back on the line for Houston. I had a lot of time to think there. Who am I? What do I want to be? I never really had the time before to think about anything but the Game, and my work for the Agency.”
“That sounds… hard.” Ivy admits. They never thought about how much the older players had seen and gone through. How much stress they were under, going from management to management, with death following ever so closely behind.
“It was.” Fitz says. They run a gloved hand through the smoke at the top of what makes up their head. “But when I was Elsewhere I didn't have to worry about anything except how everyone else was doing. And I started thinking, a lot like you are now. Ivy, it's very simple.”
Fitz turns fully to face Ivy. “You're you. Try new things, hang out with your friends, grow and learn and change. This Game never defined us. Sure, we were made by it, but it isn't who we are. I'm a Spy because I choose to be. Every day I decide I want to perform espionage, and I want to stay here with my friends and work for the Agency. You can choose who you want to be. What you want to do. And if the Game comes back tomorrow, we’ll all pick up our bats again. But until then, live your life how you want to live it.”
“What if I mess it up?” Ivy says. They wring the edge of their sweater. They were alone for years waiting for others to Fall and games to begin. But games did begin. And then they stopped again. They just don't know what to do with the concept of infinity with no Blaseball.
Fitz laughs. It's a deep, rumbling sound that makes their smoke wave in a sinusoidal motion. “You can't mess up living .” They say. Fitz pats Ivy’s shoulder and their eyes tilt up into a smile again. “Ivy, you're not the Game. None of us are. You can figure life out. You just have to live it.”
Ivy’s eyes well up with tears and they nod, wiping the dampness away with their sleeves. They have all of eternity to figure out how they want to move on and grow. There's no rush. If games start again, they start again. Until then, they'll find their own path. They'll do their own thing. They'll knit sweaters, and test experiments with Grackle. They'll listen to stories from Rosales and learn how to code with Yunie and Condi. They'll talk to Max and NaN and spend time with Ankle and all their other friends. They can garden, and birdwatch and cook good food. They can travel the world and always make it back home to Houston, wherever Houston may be.
“Yeah,” Ivy says. “I'll live it.”