Alright I'm pretty sure I made up the term "clock-shift swap" so I should probably explain that, which is easiest with a graphic.

Also given here is the foremost clockshift, Team Snakemouth themselves. To clarify what exactly the arrows mean here, spoilers under the cut,

this is a love letter to sonic rush and sonic rush adventure for the nintendo ds

i grew up in a vaguely anti-video game house and i had to buy my own ds, but by the time i was in middle school i had a small collection of sonic games and this duo was my favorite. i had bits of the games memorized. i knew that shit inside and out. i can still envision a couple of the levels, especially from the first game, although i am bringing up both games bc of marine the raccoon my beloved

Derrick doesn’t owe Mike anything. He doesn’t. But they’re trying a new thing where they actually talk to each other, and it’s verging on the end of siesta, and Derrick’s the only one manning the switchboard when Mike calls in, voice tinny and tired on the other end of the line. So maybe he feels a little obligated to answer. Maybe he wouldn’t feel obligated, if it wasn’t Mike. He’s not going to think about that too hard.

“Hey, uh,” Mike says, filtered through the speakers, “is anybody awake down there?”

Derrick drags his chair closer to the mechanisms of the switchboard, holds down a button and leans into the mic, smiling to himself. “Hello again, friend of a friend.”

“Oh,” Mike says. There’s the same surprise in his voice every time Derrick actually picks up on the switchboard. It is - as the radio might say - a little bit funny (and a little bit sad). “Hey, Derrick.”

“Good morning,” Derrick says - he thinks it’s early morning, anyway. Hard to tell in the Trench.

“I’ve got - I was wondering what you know about Chorby. Chorby Soul, I mean? Before, uh, before the season starts. if that’s okay to ask.”

Derrick presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, considering.

“Give me a second, I need to get my story straight,” he says, mostly so Mike doesn’t think he’s being ghosted.

“Sure,” Mike says, with something resembling relief.

It is not, strictly speaking, Derrick’s responsibility to tell the living people that Chorby Soul has no apparent problem with murder. He’s not sure he has the words to describe it, anyway. Not with the nuance it deserves. Not in a way that captures the way Chorby saw “not wanting to be killed” as a personal boundary people needed to communicate or risk having crossed, the way Derrick watched Chorby beat Shaq to a pulp not once but twice while roughhousing, because Shaq was too stubborn to tap out and Chorby was having too much fun to stop. How do you capture that when you can only speak through a radio? You can’t.

“I hope they cannot see the limitless potential living inside of me to murder everything,” he settles for eventually. Not entirely on the money, but as close as he can get it. Mike’s sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line is enough to tell him he’s gotten the point across, at least.

“That bad, huh?” Mike asks, voice shaky.

Jaylen does not fly to Dallas to see Allie the moment she’s shadowed, but it’s a near thing.

Instead, she throws everything she owns around Tot’s guest room and then cleans it back up, sweeps the glass into the dustpan and shoves the clothes haphazard into her suitcase. She screams loud enough that Tot’s neighbors start knocking on the door. Tot knows her well enough to know when she needs to be alone, and kindly leaves the apartment, texts her that ze’ll be around and that there’s cookies on top of the fridge, and Jaylen shoves three cookies in a ziploc bag and takes her suitcase and goes.

She doesn’t have a destination in mind until she gets to the airport. She thinks, maybe Dallas. She thinks, no, she’s going to have a breakdown if she sees anyone who’s still playing right now, and picks a city with no blaseball team, and goes there instead.

So in the end, the first time Jaylen-in-the-shadows sees Allie in person is months into the season. A layover in Dallas turns into god, I just want to sleep turns into a cab to Allie’s ranch would only take half an hour turns into dragging her single suitcase out of the airport, leaving a seat unfilled on the flight she was meant to get on, and forty-five minutes later she’s using the key Allie insisted she keep on her keyring to let herself into Allie’s home and collapse on the couch.

“Shit,” she hears, a few not-quite-restful hours later. The sound of something falling, the sound of Allie scrambling to pick it up. Jaylen yawns as she opens her eyes.

“Hey, Al.”

“Hey — jesus, Jay, you couldn’t have texted?”

“Forgot,” Jaylen says, dragging herself up to sitting, rubbing at her eyes. “Wasn’t planning on coming here, but I had a layover and decided I didn’t actually care about where I was planning on going anyways, and —”

Allie’s found his way to the couch at some point, and his arms wrap around Jaylen, suddenly holding her tight. The embrace is such a shock to her system that she can’t remember what she was going to say next, not even a little bit. It’s been — it’s been a while since anyone’s touched her. She thinks she’d ended up sprawled halfway across Betsy when they’d gotten high on the roof the night before elections, but since then she’s been jetting around, looking for any meaning at all beyond the game she’s no longer permitted to play (or maybe just an escape from the hostage situation Seattle has made of her life.) It’s only now that she realizes she was missing it.

“Missed you,” Allie says against Jaylen’s hair.

“Yeah,” Jaylen murmurs into his shoulder. Her voice is hoarse all of a sudden, and she’s content to pretend it’s just sleep making it that way. “Shit’s been weird. Didn’t want to lay all that on you.”

“That’s — weirdly considerate of you, you know. But you don’t have to do that.” Allie pulls back a bit — just far enough for Jaylen to miss the touch — and brings a hand to her cheek, and looks her in the eyes, and —

He covers up the sharp breath pretty well; it wouldn’t be noticeable at all, were he not so close, and if Jaylen weren’t so familiar with Allie.

“Oh shit, your eyes,” Allie says. Softly. Something like awe creeping into his voice.

It’s been just long enough for Jaylen not to leap out of her skin every time she looks in the mirror and sees two dark brown eyes instead of one dark and the other burning incinerationfire blue, the way it had been since she came back.

The way blaseball has changed her physically has always been among the lesser of her worries — she can change herself right back, keep its influence off with shitty haircuts in hotel bathrooms and shittier dye jobs — but this feels personal, feels like something’s been taken away. Every sign of what she’s been through erased. She looks, once again, the way she did in season one, with her hair grown almost to her shoulders, her eyes both dark. She also looks nothing like she did before she died: she carries herself differently, now, like she’s always looking for a fight; she’s tired; something skeletal still hangs around the edges of her smiles when they appear.

“I — fuck, did I not tell you about that,” she says, knowing full well that she didn’t. It was a stupid hope that they’d return to what’s been normal for the last decade. This was the norm for the two decades before she’d died, but nothing else is the same as then, so why the fuck should she look like who she was?

(It isn’t true that nothing’s the same. Allie’s — well, Allie isn’t the same, he’s changed, same as everyone else, but he’s still here.)

“You didn’t,” he says. He reaches up to brush a strand of hair out of Jaylen’s face, and she feels exposed, she feels — more seen than she has since she was shadowed, that’s for fucking sure. People tend to look around her, now, more than at her. Their eyes slide past. It’s made her question, more than once, if she’s even still visible, if blaseball hasn’t taken her very corporeality from her — but Allie is looking at her, and there’s no doubt in her mind about that.

She looks down at his shoulder, because if she looks him in the eyes while he’s looking at her like that she’s going to lose her entire mind right here on his couch.

“It’s fucking weird, I know. I don’t know how I feel about it, either. It’s — I don’t know, it’s —” The words come out all in a rush, and don’t stop until Allie kisses Jaylen, sweet and soft and over before it’s even started.

29it is, as a rule, difficult to get a clear picture of agan. they turn out blurry or blown out or strangely in shadow or a light leak eclipses them, even if amal tries to take a picture with his phone. it means that he’s got 17 seasons of tlopps cards labeled Agan Harrison that bear little to no resemblance to his husband, each taped at the beginning of a scrapbook dedicated to a season.

but he’s got a lot of practice now. the pictures don’t always turn out but it’s gotten to the point where amal can get some of agan’s profile or their hands in his; something that’s legible as a picture of a person if he shows it to someone else. it means agan, the new one, has 20 odd scrapbooks to flip through, most of which have pictures of the them they swapped for.

The temptation to ignore the new arrival bell gets stronger every time it goes off this season. It’s the same as it was in Season 7 - stretches of silence and time to get the new folks acclimated, interrupted without warning by jarring drop-ins, two or three at a time. Nora and Tiana have it covered, and all crowding around the Hall will do is freak the newcomers out, which is generally a lot to handle on top of being unstable and dead. So there’s really no point in Shaq leaving their room whenever the bell rings, other than to satisfy their own curiosity.

Only, the thing is - they’re one of the few people in the Trench who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t even attempt to, and sometimes the bell goes off in the dead of night with no one else to hear it. It was that way for Tillman, who Shaq couldn’t care less about, but it was also that way for Raul, who Shaq found scared and alone in the Hall, shivering in the dark. So someone needs to be on the night watch, clearly, and it’s Shaq who hauls themself out of bed when the bell chimes somewhere in the distance at who-knows-when in the morning.

This late, the Hall isn’t even lit by the torches that usually line the walls. Shaq uses the light of their phone to get them there, then casts it around the room in a long arc, spilling the shadows of statues across the black marble floor. The light catches the new statue’s face, playing off its angles and gently chiseled curls of hair, and Shaq startles violently enough that their phone slips from their hand.

The statue’s subject is sitting at its base - Edric Tosser, curled inside a jacket, breathing so hard and hoarse that it feels like the only sound that exists here. Shaq has no idea how they didn’t hear it before. They feel frozen with possibility, with a thousand things they want to say, but they force themself to swallow it all back and get on their knees below the statue’s podium.

“Hey, Eds.”

It’s soft, but it gets his attention. Edric looks up, and Shaq cups his face in their hands but doesn’t kiss him, instead leaning in to touch their forehead to his. Grounding, maybe. Edric’s eyelashes are wet with snow from Breckenridge or maybe tears, and he doesn’t say anything yet, and that’s okay.

“I thought the unstable stuff would pass you over,” Shaq says, eventually. It’s hard to tell how much time has passed just holding Edric in silence, but no one’s awake to find them here, so it’s fine.

“Wasn’t unstable,” Edric says, quiet and rough. “Just random.”

When the shop bell rings, Mcdowell is expecting one of hir regulars, or maybe Mike, or Sparks. Maybe even Lenny. Ze’s not expecting to see Jaylen fucking Hotdogfingers storming into the Monkey’s Paw, scowling, scattering the foggy forms of the usual shop ghosts in her wake as she strides towards the counter.

“You know, I give shadows players a discount on their natal charts,” Mcdowell drawls, slurping green tea out of hir thermos.

“Shut up,” Jaylen says. “Where’s Mike.”

“Hm. No idea.” Mcdowell glances over towards hir reading room just to confirm Mike’s not actually on the couch. He’s fallen asleep and had to be cleared out discreetly before a séance more than once, but he’s not in there now. “Hope you weren’t expecting a welcome party or anything.”

“I want to talk to Mike,” Jaylen says, her eyes wild.

“Andddd he’s not here, unless you killed him and want me to séance him,” Mcdowell says. Ze knew Jaylen wouldn’t react well to being shadows - everyone knew, to be fair - but ze wasn’t expecting to be directly confronted by it. Hell, ze didn’t even know Jaylen knew who ze was.

“I’m not his keeper,” ze adds. “Try his apartment, maybe.”

Jaylen snorts. “Obviously I tried that. He’s not there.”

Mcdowell hums in what might come off as sympathy, and sips hir tea. The scattered shop ghosts have reformed in their usual spots, but Jaylen’s brought more in with her, indistinct figures wandering about behind her back. Where Mike is a void of ghosts, Jaylen seems to attract them about as well as Mcdowell hirself does, though Mcdowell is certain Jaylen can’t see them.

“You could probably use a séance, regardless,” Mcdowell mutters.

“What?” Jaylen snaps.