The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round... Uh, Seven? The Oasis]

Originally posted on MSPA by Pick Yer Poison.

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A bubbling cauldron floated across a field as AMP looked on in confusion. The stew inside fell out whenever it rotated upside down, then flowed up to the top of the cauldron and fell back into it, forming some kind of bizarre Klein bottle that really shouldn't have ever existed, and never really would.

AMP asked Database if she had any idea what was going on. Her response was to open her mouth, shake her head, and close it again. He turned to Protocols and was rewarded with a cascade of gruff shouting, none of which really amounted to anything substantial other than "holy fuck."

They weren't really talking about the cauldron, of course. What had them so confused was the inexplicable non-linearity of the timestream, a phrase Database had used before she had become too flabbergasted to speak at all. AMP was glad Database was around; she was smart and knew so many things he didn't. For example, she had informed him that something major that happened in an alternate timeline to kill them - such as the beast with the hard to discern form that had come over the horizon - would still happen, and would need to be prevented if they wanted to, well, not die. AMP put more processing power towards thinking of a way to defeat the monster, but infuriatingly came up with nothing no matter how many times he analyzed the situation.

A baseball bounced off AMP's central lump of metal and was promptly ripped to shreds in his magnetic cloud. He looked over and saw a pitching machine sitting in the field, firing baseballs in his general direction for no apparent reason. A thought sparked in his mind, and he rolled towards the machine. Although pitching machines feel neither pain nor emotion - such a thought would be silly - anyone looking at it at that moment would have agreed that it looked like it was saying its prayers. With high velocity baseballs.

---

Captain Quirrinal was thinking deeply. Pondering his own existence. The existence of others. The universe. Everything. Or at least he was trying; it was a bit hard to think about deep matters when everything was going wrong constantly.

As if to exemplify this issue, a beeping noise sounded from his desk. He sighed and acknowledged the request to talk. Chief Defensive Coordinator Terrence's voice issued from the speaker. "Captain, we need you in a video conference right now!"

Quirrinal groaned. "Fine! Fine. Put me on." He was immediately surrounded by a number of the higher staff, who he assumed were the ones who were not critically busy at the moment. Terrence's character was at the forefront, larger than the others, indicating he was currently making the important points.

Terrence glanced down and shuffled some virtual notes, clearing his throat. "Captain, we have on record at--"

Quirrinal groaned again. "Please, just use the colloquial timing systems, I'm not in the mood for procedure right now." Chief of Communications Szindle looked at Quirrinal curiously, but remained silent.

Terrence shuffled his notes again nervously before continuing. "Right. Um. There's a bunch of...things...outside...you'd better see for yourself. Szindle?" The crab clicked his claws once, and a window popped up in the center, rotated differently for every member so all could see. There wasn't much to see, but that was what was notable - it was an ordinary view of the meadow they were floating in, but with a large number of spherical objects blocking their view.

Quirrinal leaned closer to the image. "...what exactly am I looking at here?"

Terrence bobbed about nervously. "That's just it. I'm not exactly sure. I had LeBeau run a search in the archives, but I'm still waiting on a response."

Chief Librarian LeBeau chose that moment to speak up. "As a matter of fact, I just got one. Seems those things we're seeing out there are 'baseballs,' and they're the primary objective of this human game called, well, called baseball."

Quirrinal raised an eyebrow. "Can you elaborate?"

LeBeau opened up a massive page of text and scrolled around until he found a few sections he'd highlighted. "The game takes one baseball - that's what we're looking on the screen there - and a bat. Also, a number of players..."

Szindle clicked his claws. Nobody really noticed.

"...then the 'bases' are arranged in a diamond pattern, as you can see in this picture..."

The clicking became faster and unmistakeably frantic. Everyone still ignored it.

"...and so the batter swings at the ball with the bat as hard as he or she can..."

AMP dumped the empty pitching machine on the ground. Most of it was plastic, anyway; he'd only needed the mechanism. Database was shaking her head in disbelief and Protocols was egging him on. He rolled towards Lucky, who was barely visible behind a layer of orbiting baseballs, picking up speed as he went. Once he reached the beach ball sized planetoid, he quickly picked it up in his magnetic field, sorting it behind the outer layer of metal. It began orbiting around him faster and faster as he accelerated it magnetically, emulating a railgun, with Lucky as the bullet.

"HOLY SHIT!"

"What in the name of--"

"SZINDLE, WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SOMETHING!?"

Szindle gave the entire video conference a look that could only be interpreted as something along the lines of "fuck each and every one of you with a rake" and quit from the call. He was back again in a couple of moments, after remembering that, as the Chief of Communications, he was able to make everyone quit from the call, which he promptly did out of spite. A bit petty, to be sure, but it made him feel better.

A hole opened in AMP's shrapnel cloud and Lucky shot out, visible only as a blur until it was flying over the horizon. The baseballs were yanked out of Lucky's orbit almost immediately, flying with impressive speed into the forest. Some hit branches and tree limbs and shattered, or broke them and continued; others flew straight through to their unlikely destination, in much the same way that Lucky flew straight and true to its own unlikely destination.

Which just happened to be flying at the face of an abomination without a constant shape that regarded it in much the same as a cat regards the mouse it's about to pounce on and eat.

---

Much like the rest of the chimpanzees in the marching band, Alpha-He-Who-Declines-The-Nipple was not at all prepared to be hit by a baseball traveling fast enough to knock him unconscious, which meant that the ground was quickly covered with groaning apes, along with a single groaning human who wished she was an ape just a little too hard. The multi-legged shadow paid no heed and didn't bother to slow.

"WHAT. THE FUCK. JUST HAPPENED." Etiyr felt he spoke for everyone right about then. He was, more or less, right.