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Blaseball is played on the immaterial plane- it exists in a world outside of the world. It’s not thought of often and not often important. Flooding was the first major exception, when the immateria flooded stadiums to wash players off base, sometimes taking them elsewhere to return Scattered.
It never seemed that important to Deborah, until she saw the Crabitat ascend into space, packed full of all those left, players and fans alike.
The first thing that struck what was left of her, the idea of her, the memory of her, which let her live on past death while never truly living again, was that she wasn’t with them. She could see her body flying away, hurtling towards the too-bright sky, but she could feel none of herself within the walls of the stadium, within the hollows of the shell.
The second thing that struck her was that she was finally going to die . If everyone was leaving the Earth, everything that could give her half-life of remembrance and impact, then surely she would cease to exist. Gods could go on fine without worship, so long as they had the minds of others to continue to live on, small Gods combining into the conceptual whole.
Deb didn’t know how to feel about that.
There had been a time, she knew, where she didn’t exist. It was a very long time ago, a very different time ago. Maybe that would be what death was like, a return to form on a cosmic timescale.
That would be nice, she pondered, but it seemed too easy. Her mind kept busy, pondering exactly what kind of end was fit for her.
It was hours later when she realized the Earth was finally empty of people, and yet she remained. At this, her initial reaction was a wave of panic, shot out in all directions from where her soul roughly resided. And then, as if on cue, waves of crustaceans crawled from the bay, from the coasts, from all places that they lived.
They congregated around her, and she felt some comfort. These had been her first subjects, her first followers. They had been loyal, but too perfect in their own ways. The sentience that could give Gods their true strength, their importance, had been mostly absent in them. But they took orders well enough, she recalled. They took orders well enough.
In the realization, Deborah realized that she hadn’t been left behind, one of the few sad remnants of a world lost to greed and ambition. She had been permitted to stay.
The crabs were the easiest to meld into a mass, and once they had conglomerated to the size of a city bus she found it much easier to guide and bring the rest together. Miles of shell and claw became one, all in service of one greater purpose. With the mass as her instrument, the Old One knew what she had to do, what had to be done.
She never could’ve saved the world, and it wasn’t hers to Preserve anyway. That could be left to whoever else had stayed behind, old Gods and new. The only place she needed to keep safe, to ready and remold, was Baltimore.
And as the skies poured fire from a supreme nova, she stood resilient, shielding her home. Their home. Unto the city she became a shell, and even as the pain of the world around her tore through this new body, she held on. It was the least she could do.
It was the least she could do.