Silvia Rugrat/IF-14.623

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 Silvia Rugrat at their Rumor Registry.

Background

Silvia Rugrat is a Mexican freelance journalist with a fearsome reputation for exposing sports-related corruption. Early scoops included a match-rigging scandal in women’s ice hlockey, a vote-rigging scandal in awarding the sloccer World Cup and a rigging-rigging scandal in professional galleon racing.

Rugrat wears a prosthetic arm which she treats with conspicuous carelessness (removing it to prop open windows, wrapping it in string lights at Christmas, leaving it in teammates’ beds as a prank). She is especially prone to jotting down quotes, reminders and contact details on the prosthetic, which is now full almost to the elbow. When in a hurry she may attach important notes with a stapler.

Career with the Mexico City Wild Wings

At the Return of Blaseball Rugrat was instinctively suspicious of Internet League management. She joined her local team as a cover for closer investigation. This enquiry soon fizzled out, because there was nothing whatsoever to report and definitely not because she was tricked into signing savage and multilayered non-disclosure agreements. She is keen to make clear that she would not have been able to talk about these NDAs even if there were any, which there weren't.

Rugrat shrugged off this initial disappointment and proved to be an excellent pitcher, more than holding her own in a rotation which featured all-time greats Burke Gonzales and Rafael Davids. While Rugrat pitches mostly with her flesh-and-blood arm, she attributes much of her success to the prosthetic. She delights in referring to its jumble of notes as her "arm canon", a phrase which leaves batters never completely sure what they are facing.

As a Wild Wings mainstay throughout the Discipline and Expansion Eras, Rugrat pitched over five hundred games before the team's Nullification by the Black Hole (Black Hole).

With the Tokyo Lift

Rugrat was the first player to Fall from the Black Hole to the Tokyo Lift. She arrived in an empty ballpark where the scoreboard showed unnumbers and the Beef Wings were still warm. Always in search of a scoop, Rugrat’s focus moved from financial irregularities to geological ones; having heard rumours of a mysterious cavern deep below the land on which the Legscraper stands, she resolved to reveal the truth about its alleged healing properties and associated kami. Between games she spends hours pacing the ground, scrutinising maps and scouring historical accounts for between-the-lines confirmation. It has not occurred to her that she could just ask literally any member of Lift staff.

While waiting for the return of splorting fixtures Rugrat also revived much of the Lift’s community programme. She had acquired a small repertoire of Japanese phrases while befriending/investigating Lift co-founder and sometime Wings pitcher Nandy Slumps, and her early interactions with fans and team staff took place in a fluttering pidgin of Japanese and Spanish variously called Spapanese, nihonspañol and Tokyohablo. This continued throughout Season 1 but has now been displaced by standard Japanese as the team’s lingua franca.

Personal life

Rugrat describes herself as a femme lesbian. She is friends with Lift teammate Natha Spruce, an experienced lawyer who is prepared to answer very detailed hypothetical questions about hypothetical non-disclosure agreements.

She has long experience of leadership with the Wild Wings and more recently at the Tokyo Community Centre, and slightly resents that the ideas of Juice Collins now seem to carry more weight. When fans voted Rugrat the Lift’s Season 1 MVP she was surprised less by their decision than by the satisfaction she gained from it.