Inky Rutledge/IF-88.888

Rumor / Community Lore
This 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 Inky Rutledge at their Rumor Registry.

Time on the Magic

Rutledge ended up in beautiful landlocked Yellowstone when a summoning circle created by Bevan the Wise accidentally summoned 333 gallons of the Sea of Japan, instead of 3 orders of takoyaki from Japan Ocean Sushi (Wise’s favorite sushi joint in Tacoma).

In those 333 gallons was a very confused giant Pacific octopus. Feeling just awful for stranding him in beautiful landlocked Yellowstone, Wise used the remaining energy from the circle to summon a sturdy humanoid body for the octopus and was struck with how well adapted an 8-armed pitcher would be for Yellowstone’s blaseball team.

The newly formed, very handsome octopus accepted Wise’s offer to join the team, named himself Inky (after his love of writing letters in pen), and the rest is history. Only the players of the Yellowstone Magic were aware that he was an octopus, as he tends to use camouflage spells to appear as a normal human to those outside of his close family and friends.

Transfer to the Thieves

After much of the Magic was lost to redactions, Rutledge spotted former teammate Oscar Dollie on the Shoe Thieves rotation and jumped at the chance to move to Charleston. He later credited this move as a desire both to ask his longtime buddy what had happened, and hopefully commit some lighthearted crime and pranks together. While there he made many new friends, planned a grand heist with Dollie, and learned to effectively use all eight of his perfectly human arms to steal enough shoes to wear on each of his many limbs.

Time on the Lift

At the end of an enormously successful stint into shoe thievery, Rutledge was ready to go home for the siesta: not to beloved Yellowstone, but to the Sea of Japan, to see the waters he grew grew up in for the first time in decades. While there, he visited and fell in love with Tokyo, and signed up to join the city’s blaseball team on the spot.

There, he found himself unexpectedly thrust into a position of leadership alongside newly minted Lift captains Yusef Fenestrate and Gerund Pantheocide due to his ample expertise after seventeen seasons of pitching. The team was delighted both by his tendencies toward silly pranks and his deep insights into the splort and he quickly became some of the hearts of the team (three to be precise: Rutledge, as a normal human octopus, has a couple to spare). As he prefers to hydrate his beautiful human skin every few hours, the Lift installed a system of transparent aquatic tubes throughout the Legscraper. The pipes allow Rutledge to jump in the water from any room and zip around in comfort, reportedly reaching speeds of up to 604 miles per hour, according to the astonished and slightly envious real-life speedrunner Engine Eberhardt. Additionally, Rutledge, like all octopuses that are actually human people, discovered his extreme strength to be a boon in powerlifting and quickly took to long sessions of honing his athletic prowess while working as a spotter at the community gym.

Trivia

• Inky Rutledge is notable among fans for his steadfast refusal to use a blaseball glove on more than one of his many arms and his entirely human demeanor.
• Rutledge loves the song Oye Como Va by Santana.
• Rutledge carries around a gong that he uses uses all 8 hands and arms to sound before each game. While incredibly hard to play a song with many instruments using a gong, the crowds all unanimously agree that it does, indeed, sound like Oye Como Va.
• Reports from multiple sources reveal that Rutledge is indeed shaped like a friend and gives the best hugs. This has earned him the nickname “cuddlefish” (no relation to the cuttlefish of the Sepiida order, as Rutledge is a human, not a cephalopod).
• No matter his current whereabouts, Rutledge always makes sure to write letters to all his friends on other teams.
• Although he is aware that there is no danger to revealing his true octopus form, Rutledge continues to enjoy disguising himself out of a sense of good-natured trickery.