Goobie Ballson/IF-1667
Rumor / Community LoreThis article contains lore created collaboratively by the Blaseball community. It is just one of many Rumors that we've found in the Interdimensional Rumor Mill. You can find more Rumors about Goobie Ballson at their Rumor Registry.
The waters beyond this point are uncharted, tales from distant shores echoed back into our reality.
Background
The following information was uncovered, documented, and annotated by Lance Serotonin, researcher at The Atlantean Facility for Interdimensional Studies and Hypotheses, as part of an ongoing research project into the history of the Tokyo Adrift.
With the Tokyo Adrift
Goobie Ballson appears in tales of the Tokyo Adrift as a large sentient bubble in the sea of Immateria. Unable to break the surface but desperate for conversation and companionship, the buoyant Ballson was drawn to the wreck-divers of the Adrift. Their warm personality and oxygen-rich interior soon made them an important part of the operation.
In the years before breathing apparatus, Ballson offered access to greater depths than simple free-diving would allow. The most sustained discussion of Ballson is in connection with acting captain Lance Serotonin and his plan to retrieve an unnamed artefact long presumed beyond salvagers’ reach. The outcome of his attempt is not known and no later mention of him has been found in any extant manuscript, nor has he been seen by A.F.I.S.H. researchers.
Controversy
While Ballson’s depiction is persuasively consistent from text to text - a self-sustaining, mobile air pocket with a goofy grin and a lingering scent of berries - there is still some debate over their true nature. A minority of historians[who?] maintain that “Goobie Ballson” is merely a playful reference to a diving bell, and that the ascription of character traits to this object was a ship-wide running joke. Even if the so-called Bellists were correct, the device could not have been wholly reliable. The name appears in the logs of several other vessels, often just before some calamity costs them one or more shipmates.
The diving-bell theory has dwindling support. Complete consensus in contemporary sources is rare, yet we have more than a dozen independent descriptions of Goobie being an awesome friend, inventing board shorts and playing ska-hornpipe hits on the hurdy-gurdy. Ballson’s time with the Adrift does not seem to correlate with any timeframe yet observed in A.F.I.S.H, so definitive conclusions one way or the other are impossible.
