# 14 .

jaylen hotdogfingers of blaseball fame. undead pitcher for the seattle garages. written by rosemary. sideblog to @violnc.

guide.     pinterest.     playlist.

there are things jaylen would say if she were a little more brave and a little more cruel. allison, do you know what it’s like? being given one damn way to survive, to take the chance that’s been offered you, and then be blamed for taking it? it makes her sound so fucking innocent, doesn’t it? oh, it isn’t jaylen’s fault. it’s the only way. you’re the one who brought her back; you, allison, and the garages, and every person who got her on that fucking leaderboard, and every person behind the scenes. everyone who put their filthy hands on the binding of the forbidden book and pried it open five years ago. she’s just making sure it wasn’t all for nothing. isn’t that a good thing? shouldn’t they be grateful?

it’s the aftermath of what the news has dubbed as ruby tuesday, and the tigers’ ranks have been decimated down in hades. jaylen is... jaylen would like to believe this is simple. jaylen is simplifying it, in her mind; she’s focusing on the rush of life that sparked her heartbeat into threefold strength after the game was over. it’s almost two months into the season and she hadn’t realized, until the comparison was offered, how dead she still felt. not until she felt alive; some of the smoke siphoning off her skin, dispersing in the air. she is thinking about billowing chimneys, not about the lives she’s taken.

maybe that line of thought doesn’t explain why she’s shown up at the steaks’ stadium. she isn’t pitching today. the time between games tends to skip and glitch and dance around like a busted record player, screeching all the while, but it’s moving in a straight line for once. jaylen thinks that’s ‘cuz of the deaths, but it’ll take more before she can confirm the theory. so she’s in dallas and now she’s in front of allison, and if it’s not to absolve a guilt she doesn’t feel then she doesn’t know why she’s there — because allison doesn’t want her there, and the garages don’t want her in seattle, and nobody’s ready to deal with the fucking consequence her resurrection brings.

maybe that’s why she’s there. ding. got it. she is a consequence. allison looks at her like a ghost, the garages look at her like a murderer. the truth is somewhere in the middle. the truth is unavoidable. 

‘ not having fun, al? ’   jaylen puts on her best grin. it’s the kind she’d give the audience from the stage of a run-down basement show back with the band; the kind that says keep your distance, these teeth are sharp. it’s got more bite to it, now that everyone knows what she’s capable of.

‘ y’know, ’   she says, dropping her voice lower. like it’s a secret, or an oath. something she doesn’t want to say or something allison won’t want to hear.   ‘ you look at me like i’m different, now. you and the band. you all do. but you trusted me before, didn’t you? ’   jaylen gives her a look, roughly translatable to i know you did, we both know you did. crosses her arms over her chest.   ‘ i haven’t changed. maybe you forgot in the last five years, but i’m exactly the person you all decided to bring back from the dead. same old me. ’

SOMETIMES THERE ARE NO GOOD ANSWERS. that’s the shitty reality of the thing. blaseball is a splort and people play it and now they get incinerated and it rains blood and there are peanut shells everywhere, too many for them to be cleaned before the next game but somehow they are. jaylen, who died and then came back, is asking for some kind of order to it. he knows the feeling. you can look for barriers everywhere, but that’s not the point of things. he shifts uncomfortably this way and that.

a few seats down, mr. robot flicks a peanut shell towards the empty lower seats that turns into dust as it flies, just particules buoyed by a breeze.

❝ god, the fucking book. yeah. ❞ he can hear the tension in her voice. to her it’s something that started the end of everything. to him it was – a pain in the ass to implement. ❝ look, let me… explain to you what blaseball, inc. is actually like. i do back-end programming. so i implement things like idols, for example. which, you’re welcome for that. but here’s how it goes. i get an email. it has this fucking block of code. not even organized with some decent comments or…. or line breaks. it’s just a big mass of code, couple thousand lines. so i email the boss i got it from and i’m like, ‘hey, what is this’ and i get back an email whose subject line is IMPLEMENT ASAP in all caps. that’s also the body of the email. so then i get to sit there for at least fifty hours that week and try to fucking figure out what it even  means, and by that point everyone just wants to get it out the door, fuck it, we’ve got our supervisors breathing down our necks all the way up the top. ❞

he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and peers out towards the field. if jaylen wanted to push him over he would fall and crack his head open on one of the chairs, probably. or she could just tap him with a baseball. though it might have to reach a certain velocity to make someone vibrate apart in the right ways. he might’ve seen that in an email somewhere, forwarded sixty-three times and redacted to hell and back.

elliot closes his eyes. at least it wasn’t bloodrain, the metallic smell of it clinging to everything as a janitor scrubbed away at where it coagulated on the steps. ❝ the book wasn’t me. we got told to leave the choice on it up to the participants. you know. democracy in the classic american pasttime, or something. it’s like a machine, right? all these little cogs and gears that work, and eventually they wear out, but there’s just another gear. that’s you. that’s us. you want to blame someone? blame – have you read any of the portions of the book we have out there? did you see the part about fucking entities? you’re doing your job. we’re doing ours. only way out is… well, i guess we destroy blaseball, or we destroy whoever’s at the top. ❞

he looks down at his shoes for a moment. plain black sneakers. when he was a kid, he used to dream of playing blaseball. used to practice like every kid did. and now he’s gotten his wish. he is a player in the great game of blaseball. just not in the way that he thought.

the fucking book is, well... it’s a good way to describe it, and it’s not. it’s the reason all this happened. it’s not like the league was ever fucking normal, but it was only as odd as the rest of the world, once. strange in ways jaylen could process, could reflect. so what if the magic had wizards on their team or whatever; so what if the baltimore players tended to turn crablike after enough time near the bay. seattle was normal. seattle used to feel a little bit like a haven: in the garage, with the band, jaylen felt at home once in a way that’s absolutely unfathomable to her now.

so the book. it’s the reason for all the strangeness, the reason she died, and also, probably, the reason there was framework to bring her back. of course she’s read it. she’s scoured those goddamn pages and she’s thought about marching into the commissioner’s office with a fucking knife — not a blaseball, not using the tools he and his gods have given her, but goin’ the old fashioned route.

none of them have any real power here. nice to dream, though. and she won’t say it out loud, but when she throws a 500 mph fastball directly at some dipshit’s chest... there’s something nice about that, too. knowing she can affect the world in some way, paying her debt while she’s at it.

‘ yeah, alright. not blaming you. it’s all the gods or what-the-fuck-ever, and we’re all spare parts in their great holy blaseball machine. message received. ’   she’s pretty damn acquainted with the powers that be, at this point. the garages think they’re solely responsible for bringing her back, maybe with a bit of help from some of the more spiritually-inclined teams, but jaylen knows: at some point, she made a deal, or someone else made a deal for her, and now her body will go up in smoke again if she doesn’t fulfill it. and this is what we call life. this is what she calls life. others may disagree.

she leans back, puts her feet up on the seat next to her. it’s a pose that could be called relaxed by a casual observer, but jaylen’s not sure she can actually do that, anymore. doesn’t even sleep much. (death, as it turns out, makes for excellent nightmare-fodder.) she doesn’t look at the field, doesn’t look at him; her eyes fall on the half-empty peanut bags littering the stadium instead, their contents spilling out. she thinks about the satisfying crunch they would make under her sneakers if she got up and left right now.

‘ i know the band’s done a lot of big-talking about killing gods while i was gone, but what the fuck would that even do? ’   maybe it’s pessimistic. out of everyone, she thinks she has the right to pessimism.   ‘ they’d just kill you. and then they’d replace you, and someone else would do the exact same job. ’

A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BE AROUND JAYLEN. it’s said; it’s unsaid. a lot of players don’t know what to do. some blaseball players – okay, a lot of blaseball players, and a lot of the audience, and a lot of the higher-ups – are kind of superstitious. elliot doesn’t really buy into that. sure, there are clearly some whims, and the gods of blaseball love them, but the fact is that if you concern yourself too much with superstitions you’ll never get anything done. blaseball players especially seem to have their little pre-game rituals, well-documented and accounted for, but that makes sense. as far as he can tell, most splorts are just kind of like that. so whatever. let them do all the things that make them feel safe, and he can know deep down that it won’t do anything to help them when it comes down to it. and jaylen knows this too. of course she would. the first person incinerated would understand more than anyone that the rituals don’t help.

there’s only one thing that matters, which is the continuance of the game, no matter what that means. it takes new forms. it changes shape. but the core remains the same. all of the new functions are just auxiliary, to keep things interesting, to keep the participants from getting bored or to satisfy whatever idea the gods of blaseball have devised. or that’s his theory, anyway. it allows for just about anything to happen, like resurrection.

the assumption is that he knows things. and he does know certain things, but not as much as many blaseball players would like to think. it’s the only reason he’s tolerating jaylen’s presence. she doesn’t seem to think he’s some kind of arbiter of what happens out on the field. he didn’t invent bloodrain. sometimes he still tries to look at the source code behind the forbidden book and it feels like something is scratching around at the inside of his skull, about to claw its way out. then he stops looking, usually.

and sometimes he looks a little longer, just to prove that he can. that fear is relative. that you can make choices and it isn’t all just predetermined, or subject to the whims of the people putting down bets. it’s nice to think you have control for one precious second.

❝ maybe, ❞ he says. ❝ it might’ve been in the contract somewhere. i just needed a job, mostly, and i guess blaseball needed a fucking halfway decent programmer. ❞ elliot’s better than halfway decent, but you don’t just say things like that. it’s better if you say things like this. people take it better.

he glances over at her for a moment. then he laughs, a short sad sound that seems too flat for the area they’re in. elliot closes his eyes against the sun and looks up at it until he sees spots on the inside of his eyelids. imagines, ever so briefly, looking until he goes blind and useless. whether there would be pain, and what kind, and for how long. these are all relevant questions.

❝ okay. i won’t. ❞ she asked, so he won’t clarify. but he doesn’t really know anyway, and that’s the funny part. ❝ i don’t really know much beyond the basics. it’s easy to write code. create parameters. variables. like, i don’t know why they catalogue your guys’s blood type like that, considering the main cause of death is incineration. i just make the variable and it gets filled in for all the players like that. blaseball betting’s just a big spreadsheet and occasionally i add a new row of data. ❞

( and i go home. and i don’t really watch the betting much. seeing the results of the machine matters less when i know how it works, at least in the ways that interest me. )

it’s all just simple enough. and then not simple briefly. and then even the not simple becomes rote.

he knows more than he’s saying. she’s sure about that. behind-the-scenes as he is, he must know a lot. she’s halfway grateful for him not saying any of it — sometimes the not knowing is a blessing, and there’s a hell of a lot she wishes she could forget. a hell of a lot more she just never knew in the first place. it blurs together sometimes now: the things she knows, the things she doesn’t; the things she knew when she was alive but doesn’t know when she’s only halfway there, one foot still in the darkness.

so she remembers the first time she played a real blaseball game as a kid, but not the name of the team. she remembers her parents’ names but not their faces; knows they’re dead but not where they’re buried. she remembers what it felt like to burn alive, but she’s got no idea what her last words were or who might’ve heard them.

she keeps count of the people she’s beaned, but she forces their names and faces and jerseys and fates out of her mind. easier not to remember. that one’s a conscious erasure, but does it matter? it’s gone all the same.

‘ parameters. variables. right. ’   she says it like she doesn’t understand it but doesn’t care to learn. she’s curious, but not about the computer-speak. about the rest of it. the way it impacts her, her teammates — jaylen can’t exactly call them her friends anymore, but that doesn’t mean their lives no longer interest her. there’s something nostalgic that clings to the edges of every relationship she’s ever had, even if they look at her like a funerary procession.

‘ so. the book. ’   it’s a hard-swerve into what she’s really wondering about. the reason she’s looking at him with cold pale eyes that shine something awful.   ‘ you must know more about it than we do, right? tell me. ’   she says it like a threat. maybe the gods would strike her down again if she hurt one of their minions, but she thinks it’s more likely they’d just replace him.   

@uncinerated​ sent: do you have a human soul and can you prove it?

SO HERE’S THE FUNNY THING ABOUT BLASEBALL, THE THING PEOPLE DON’T REALLY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT. people have always made bets on blaseball since the beginning. which was maybe forever ago. or maybe always. ever since some fucking caveman first smacked a projectile with a stick by accident. there is some terrible human impulse, or maybe inhuman impulse, to play ball. that’s just kind of how it is. but the system of blaseball – the workings, the nuance, the bureaucracy – had to be built. it had to be made. someone had to decide to democratize it, and decide they did. elliot’s best guess is that the powers that be just don’t have the ability to hit keys and write code.

you know. spinning howling peanut (peanut shell?) that likes to manifest and shit. can’t exactly make exact keystrokes. so you hire a mix. some script kiddies to get all the basic work done, and you pull together some programmers thanks to a seemingly infinite budget to create things according to your whims. apparently the front-end guys get a lot of the shit. he wouldn’t know. he just works on the back end of things, and leaves the backdoor into the system open that they ask him to. he tries not to ask questions. sometimes he thinks if he asks too many questions, he’ll have to see something he doesn’t really want to see.

fine. okay. sometimes he asks questions, but they’re just in his head and between him and the other people in there.

watching jaylen makes something in his head hurt. maybe it’s the smell of smoke that seems to follow her, faint but present. maybe it’s something about the way she looks, or the knowledge she shouldn’t be. what he hasn’t said to any of the players, the few that do actually ever notice him huddled in the stands, thinking about how to translate stats to the audience, is that he put together a good portion of the idol system. it wasn’t hard to do. they already had individual blocks for every player, and it wasn’t a big deal to sew everything else together into –

well. the point is: coding’s easy. results? difficult.

he doesn’t know what to say to jaylen. she seems curious. not many of the people involved on the higher levels of blaseball actually show up. maybe they don’t need to. but he isn’t part of that level yet, where the splort and the person are the same thing. no. he’s just a programmer. that’s all. he just watches sometimes. avoids certain weather conditions. observes the peanut shells piling up on the field. there’s compulsion there, but he’s been good at resisting certain kinds of compulsions.

❝ … what, you think everyone who puts together the background shit is just… gone? like you sign a contract with blaseball incorporated and they steal your soul like a fucking demon? ❞ he isn’t sounding particularly mean, as sharp as his tone is. he’s just tired, his body sinking down into the cheap plastic seat and ignoring the sun beating down from overhead. he hunches there. it’s technically too hot to wear a hoodie, but it’s not like he really gives a shit. he just keeps staring out at the field for a moment. ❝ i know it must be weird to… talk to a guy who helps run the whole system. but i can tell you i don’t really do much. upper level – yeah, they might be pretty soulless. i just write the code. blaseball across all borders, right? or something like that. ❞

he can imagine the way it must sound, like words inscribed on a corporate letterhead. maybe they were, in some email he skimmed and trashed as soon as he got it. he peers over at her for a moment. wants to ask what it was like to be incinerated, in the same way that he used to read up on ways to die when he was a kid. all the ways it might happen. percentages of survival. what might happen if catastrophe struck and he didn’t die.

but he won’t. it’s not his place to ask.

she’s been thinking a lot about contracts lately.

you know, maybe that makes sense. debt and all. she’s wondered a few times, though less than she probably should, whether she could walk off the field and keep the second chance at life she’s been so graciously allowed to fight to keep. the short answer: no. the long answer: sometimes jaylen blinks and the time between games is just gone, up in smoke (ha), and she’s not sure she really exists beyond blaseball. maybe at one point, she did. she had friends and a life before she died. none of that holds true.

she can’t actually remember if the contract she’d signed when she’d joined the garages, almost a goddamn decade ago, had provisions for umpire-related deaths. seems like all the players would’ve fought back, refused to sign onto the league, if that were part of the established rules. what legal bearing does the opening of the forbidden book have, and why was it enough that her own death was overlooked, mourned but not fought for? mourned but only fought for when she would be convenient to resurrect for the team? (mourned, fought for, regretted the moment that fighting had consequences.) she’s asked around a bit, but the higher-ups claim the paperwork doesn’t exist anymore. go fuckin’ figure.

there wasn’t anything official about her resurrection, but she knows the price she has to pay, anyways. doesn’t need to be spelled out on corporate letterhead for her to know she owes a debt.

what she knows is: blaseball is part of her, somehow. blaseball’s the only thing keeping her alive. if she fights hard enough, maybe, someday, there will be something beyond the rotating cast of stadiums, the players that grow deathsmoke when a ball goes sideways. but, y’know, not right now.

she laughs. not like she thinks it’s funny, but like she’s trying to show how sharp her teeth are.   ‘ i dunno, ’   she says. she’s sitting backwards in the row of seats in front of him, the hellmouth stadium otherwise empty, too early for the trickle of crowds, or maybe too late. is it before the game, or after? to say her sense of time is fuzzy since her return would be the understatement of the season, and the sun here beats down the same regardless.

‘ thought everyone involved in blaseball signed their souls away. not just the background people. seems logical, you know, from a player’s perspective. ’   she doesn’t say how else do you explain what happened to me?, but she doesn’t need to. everybody knows who she is, what happened to her, what she does now. a fucking blaseball tech asshole definitely knows all about her. probably knows things about her she doesn’t know, yet.

she wonders just how much control the behind-the-scenes folks have. did he know what the book being opened would do? did he know about the umps? when he was inputting all the numbers into his little computer, watching them appear on the screen in neat orderly lines, did he know what it’d equate to in the real world?

jaylen doesn’t ask.