Baldwin Breadwinner/IF-12.886

=== Blot ===
As any diabolist worth their salt, Baldwin's way with words is immaculate. She is one of the few who ever equaled Case Sports in the verbal joust (though never bested), and the two formed a lifelong correspondence as work colleagues of the inky arts. At their funeral, Baldwin read for them a poem so beautiful that the audience sobbed tears of black blood, electronics fried for five hundred meters out, and flayed beasts fell from the sky like stars. Well, people assume it was beautiful because nobody remembers a word of it, but these are all known symptoms of beauty.
Baldwin has a propensity to forget things, as a consequence of her line of work. When she realizes her wallet isn't with her at the coffee shop, she would simply strike another inconsequential deal with one of her retainers to fetch it for her, conjure a cup, some coin, or get her surreptitiously behind the counter. Sometimes the cost would be that she buys her companion a sandwich with her coffee, sometimes it's a bathtub of blood, it's capricious. The number of deals she has made in her life as checks, balances, traded favors, defense mechanisms, contractual traps, and loophole jambs, has made Baldwin a conceptual fortress of a person, someone against whom neither man nor demon could approach with ill intent. Her nonchalance at sacrificing parts of herself that others on the Crabs saw as essential made her an imposing companion on the team.
In the Ascension, however, Crabs found themselves in a dangerous place. Many of the players sacrificed comfort for survival in those hostile waters. Baldwin was no stranger to sacrifice, and was very quick to escalate her behavior. She burned a lot of favors and not a few bridges in that place.
When the team descended in the flood, many of them came back hardened by their time above, but Baldwin seemed to hold together better than most of her teammates, was most like who she was before the climb (though such memories of her is stained by the red ink of innumerable contracts). However, as the others softened at the creature comforts of their home city, Baldwin did the opposite. Her bickering bouts with Brock Forbes took a bitter aftertaste, what was once healthy banter became a point of concern for him. Kennedy and Bevan both grew concerned at little changes in her behavior, but couldn't get past the walls she was putting up.
On Season 13, Day 23, Baldwin Breadwinner swallowed a stray peanut and had an allergic reaction, and with that, her facade caved. A discreetly recorded conversation in a Baltimore diner between her and Kennedy showed her finally knocking those walls down and coming clean with her frustrations:
"...gave it my all to get here, to be the best player I can, and then I gave so, so much more than my all to be even better. It didn't work, sure," [laughing] "but I still gave. I don't know how much I lost to this game. And I made it to the top, with the team, we got through it together, did unspeakable things to achieve it, and now...I guess I'm still not really that good," [laughing] "but more than that, I don't have it in me to keep caring. I made it to the top, and I got my achievement. I know you're all eager to pick up the pace again, shoot to the top of the world like before. I don't have that. It's time I started figuring out where the road takes me next." [shushing Kennedy Loser's protests] "Stop, stop projectin- yeah, I know you're gonna project some bullsh- Kennedy please shut up and treat this like something I actually want and not like a sacrifice or so help me I will teach you the meaning of sacrifice." [audio distortion fades] "Look. It's time to move on, somewhere calmer. I'm gonna give other things than blaseball a try. Maybe somewhere with beaches again."
=== Before the Ink Dries ===
Baldwin took the rest of the season lightly. With her decision made, she used the remaining time in the season to try and live demon-free, or at least demon-light. It didn't do much to improve her blaseball playing, but it was definitely less stressful to juggle all those dealings all day. It did mean that her fortress of a self began to show cracks she'd otherwise scramble to hide away, and through those cracks there slithered in the whispers of some gentle violent dead. She kept her at a distance, but found her an interesting enough conversation partner. Her carcinization was subtle, locks of her hair began to tangle together into almost featherlike appendages, setae for filtering plankton.
Something about finishing off her last year with the Crabs lit a fire in her, however, and as the Crabs began their postseason sweep, Baldwin played a significant role in it, doubling her at-bat performance and performing well above her star rating. The actual motivations are unclear, but in interviews she would joke about "having a good send-off" and "giving them a little something to remember me by." Facing both the Fridays and the Tacos on the road to victory, Baldwin stared down the new and only history she's forged these past decades; and closed this chapter in her life by getting good, no deals necessary. All three teams at her back symbolically and literally, she left the victory parade and kept on walking, towards whatever the future brings.