Thingysland

Before we start delving into the complex season for the Cerulean Survivors, let's take a look at the context in which the team appears. As you know, the Cerulean Survivors are a team playing in the Thingysland Baseball League. This brings up some important question. What is Thingysland? And what's so special about the Thingysland Baseball League.

Thingysland is a world that my sister and I created that involves the intermingling of many fantasy characters. It was a chance for us to work our creative muscle with series that both of us enjoy. How else would one explain the existence of a baseball player featuring three seemingly incompatible series? The actual workings of Thingysland are a bit bizarre, as most of the groundwork was placed when my sister and I were below the age of ten. Each series represented in Thingysland are actually segregated in their own Thingy; they live apart from each other. Thingysland is actually a lot like a movie lot, with the entire world of a certain series contained in a movie studio-like structure. At the head of Thingysland is the administrative office of Thingysland: The Temple of the Commissioner, but that is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

What is more relevant is the metaphysics in Thingysland. In the beginning (circa 1993), there was no Thingysland. Each Thingy was just their own separate entity. Whenever we wanted to do Thingys, we would select one Thingy, like the "Garfield Thingy" or the "Simpsons Thingy," and stick with the storyline there. It wasn't until later that my sister and I created a world to encompass all of the different universes that were present, and even then the Thingys were kept from intermingling. Whenever we needed a cross-over, we would go to a separate Thingy: the Two-Thingys Thingy, which expanded every time we threw in another series. Open mixing between Thingys began in 1994-1996, and that made Thingys essentially a long-running soap opera. We kept each Thingy a completely separate entity, but the barriers between Thingy have completely dissolved. The characters can easily leave the Thingy and travel around to different Thingys on their own accord. So each character is subject to two different universes: the universe from their own world and the overall Thingysland universe.

In the end, the Thingysland universe took precedence. The concept of time for each Thingy has completely lost all meaning, as they switched to time in Thingysland. And the time in Thingysland has become completely senseless. It is subject to the fancies of my sisters and me. So if we said a billion years have passed, a billion years have passed. As you may expect, we do that quite often. We've estimated that approximately five billion years have passed in Thingysland since its inception. That's 5,000,000,000. And the passage of time has been a bit reverse exponential. So the early Thingys (Garfield, The Simpsons) have been around for 5 billion years, Thingys that arrived in 1998 (Pokemon) have been around for 2 billion years, while Thingys that arrived in 2003 have only been around for a few thousand. Yes, the characters in Thingysland are immortal.

Immortality in Thingysland is conferred through the Master's Degree, which is in reality a blanket concept that justifies the erratically fast passage of time. And yet the Master's Degree is not just something that prevents death. It has some distinct benefits, the most important of which is the 24-hour regeneration. Any physical injury will revert back to normal in 24 hours. So any broken bones, tumors, or decapitated heads will disappear within 24 hours. The Master's Degree has also brought the population of Thingysland to enormous magnitudes. Thingysland does not simply constitute the characters we are following. Rather, it's a world that contains dozens of different universes, each with its own population of "random people." And it's a world that has been accumulating people...many of which don't die...for billions of years. No official Thingysland census has been taken, but the overall population has been estimated to surpass Avogadro's Number, that is...6.02 ^ 23.

The Thingysland Baseball League exists only within the 15-Thingys Thingy (formerly the Two-Thingys Thingy.) It started around 3.5 billion years ago, and is made up of several tiers of play. New teams start out in the Amateur Leagues, and they have the opportunity to move onto the Novice Leagues, the Bush Leagues, the Rookie Leagues, the A Leagues, the AA Leagues, and the AAA Leagues. The reason why they are called tiers is because there are just so many teams that they don't all fit in one league. Instead, there are tens of thousands of leagues in the lower tiers, ranging from 8-16 teams. In each tier, the teams play a schedule of a set length, and then the team in each league move onto the playoffs. Depending on the tier a team is in, it can play between 13 (for Bush Leagues) to 15 (Novice and Amateur Leagues) best-of-seven series. They are playing for one thing: to be among the top 64 (N & A Leagues) or the top 32 (B Leagues) teams, where they will have the opportunity to advance to the higher league. The top team in each tier advances two leagues.

The Rookie - AA Leagues operate on a similar system, except since there are fewer leagues, fewer teams are allowed to advance. Only 16 teams can advance from Rookie to A and A to AA, and only 8 teams can advance from AA to AAA. Once a team arrives in the AAA Leagues, they've essentially reached the apex of their climb. The AAA Leagues serve essentially as a farm system for Major League teams to scout players. The entire pool of minor league teams are open to them to draft players. This is why the advancement of the four teams, including the Cerulean Survivors, is such big news.

The rules in Thingysland Baseball are essentially the same as the National League rules. In other words, there is no Designated Hitter position, and pitchers are expected to hit. What is different is the presence of the Master's Degree, which has a profound impact on Thingysland baseball. Not only would the 24-hour regeneration erase the effect of injuries, but it can also extend the careers of players indefinitely. So there are players who go out for millions, even billions of years. The basics of Thingysland and Thingysland baseball is laid out in this post. Any questions should be directed in the comments section (although I don't expect there to be any...mostly because nobody is going to read this), and we'll begin the inaugural season of Cerulean Survivors.