#a lot of this is from liftcord and is not strictly mine. but some of it is mine! i just LOVE them

[waveridden]

hi hayden can you tell us about the throwkyo guys 👀

okay, picture this. the world just ended.

not really, right? it's one of those blaseball things. lots of people have lives outside of blaseball; the world is bigger than splorts. but there's a vibrancy to tokyo that's decidedly a little dimmer now. hundreds of people vanished off the face of the earth, and a lot of them were hometown heroes. the people grieve, and move on.

the legscraper grieves, and moves on, by staying open. the tokyo fitness center might've been a passion project of the lift, but at its core it's a community center, and it's more important to a lot of people than it was to a blaseball team. they help people who need it, they offer art classes, they are a useful institution, and there are people who keep it going.

it's a massive, endless skyscraper with a lot of room. one of those rooms is a pottery studio, and there are four people who lay claim to it. this is about those four people.

the people are as follows:

katy hermoso (she/they), the youngest of the group. a kiln tech, a butch goth, decidedly the most capable and also the most empathetic.

gumdrop che amran (ne/nem), the eldest (in their 60s), a malaysian native who moved to japan to work as a language tutor and history teacher. kind and grandparently, and is here because they want to learn something new.

özlem suttner (they/them), a bike courier who is competitive, loud, and contemplative. they're here because they're horrific at making pottery, and they want to get better.

aya chartreuse (she/her), a tokyo native whose parents kicked her out in her late teens. she came to the fitness center because she had nowhere else to go, and she stayed here. she's been here for a long, long time.

they're here because of loose friendships, because of studio availability. because tokyo likes them and the legscraper sees promise in them, and so they get nudged together, ever so slightly.

they spend time together. not always in big groups but sometimes it's the four of them. sometimes it's pairs. sometimes it's özlem and aya teaching kids to swear. sometimes it's gumdrop helping katy learn to teach pottery classes. sometimes it's birthday parties. sometimes it's working in silence together.

a blaseball player falls from the sky. another one does, and another.

they all know. it's one of those magical innate things, something they can't explain. it takes a while for them to broach the topic as a group, and when they do it's hesitant. they all remember blaseball but gumdrop remembers it most clearly, can tell stories about ruby tuesday and the first consumer attacks and the rumors about before. not to scare everyone off: just so they know.

and they talk, and talk, and they decide: yes. they will do it, because they want to. because the team needs people who want to be there, instead of the handful who have been thrown into an unfamiliar continent and country and are scared and traumatized and tired. because they hope that this will be a kinder time.

in some ways it is kinder. gumdrop is blessed in the first season. aya and rush valenzuela become close, even though they have no common spoken language. katy works with vernon, a lift shadow and longtime maintenance worker.

and in other ways it's less kind. özlem leaves from a curse (more thoughts in this post) and breaks everyone's hearts in the process. people die: maybe not teammates, not yet, but maybe it will be.

but the four of them, they're going to stick together as long as they can. they went in with eyes open. they went in with hope. and they will not let that go.

(they're called throwkyo bc you throw pottery and you throw blaseballs)