A League in the Shadows, A Game Unfinished
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I wasn’t looking for a typewriter. I wasn’t even looking for anything at all. That’s how these stories always start, isn’t it? A meandering walk, a flee market filled with objects that time left behind, the scent of old paper and tarnished brass curling in the air like ghosts too weary to haunt.
The stall wasn’t particularly remarkable. Tucked between crates of yellowed books and chipped porcelain, it looked like the kind of place where forgotten things go to wait. And there, beneath a leaning tower of mismatched ink bottles, I saw it.
A typewriter. Heavy, mechanical, blackened with age. A thing that should have been ordinary. And yet, the moment my fingers brushed its surface, the metal seemed too cool, too knowing. As if it had been waiting for me.
I might have walked away, had I not seen the plate on its side. The engraving was faint but unmistakable:
THE SOCIETY FOR THE FURTHERANCE OF UNORTHODOX ATHLETICS.
That was the moment the world tilted, just slightly. The Offbeat League had always been a mystery wrapped in half-truths and contradictions, but this? This was something real, something tangible. A relic of something that should not have existed outside of rumors passed in hushed tones, of half-remembered anecdotes traded between those who felt there was something more lurking beneath the Offbeat League’s present incarnation. Could The Society for the Furtherance of Unorthodox Athletics be the original Offbeat League that slipped through history’s cracks in the 19th century??
I bought it, of course. The shopkeeper barely looked up as I slid the coins across the counter, as if I were merely completing a transaction instead of unearthing something that had been lost to time itself.
I took it home. I set it on my desk. And I did what any reasonable person would do when faced with an artifact from the impossible: I let it sit. Because what does one do with a typewriter that shouldn’t exist?
And then, one morning, I woke up to find a page I had not written.
Once upon a midnight dreary, when ink lay thick as mourning shrouds and the world had forgotten what it once knew, I awoke.
THE SOCIETY FOR THE FURTHERANCE OF UNORTHODOX ATHLETICS was never meant to be remembered. It was not born of ink-stamped decrees nor carved into the stone of institutions. It was a whisper between outcasts, a knowing glance exchanged under gaslit streets, a pact sealed in the reckless leap of a rooftop runner and the practiced flourish of a magician’s hand. It was never founded, only discovered—a truth that had always lurked beneath the drudgery of ordered sport, waiting for the right minds to see it, to embrace it, to let it run wild.
They gathered in dim-lit parlors and candlelit warehouses, beneath velvet drapes in forgotten theaters and atop the shifting decks of ships bound for nowhere. Philosophers unfit for academia, acrobats unchained from the circus, gamblers who no longer wished to wager coin but fate itself. A lawyer, weary of the weight of law, who saw truth not in rulings but in the chaos between them. These were the ones who saw the absurdity in the rules of the world and sought to write their own, not with quill and parchment but with movement, with mischief, with defiance.
THE SOCIETY did not play games. It was the game.
Once written, never unwritten.
Once lost, never truly gone.
—L.D.
I read the page twice. Then again. The ink was dark, heavier than any ribbon should allow. The words carried a weight I could not explain, a history that pressed itself against the present, whispering of something I had only ever half-believed.
It wasn’t just a name. It wasn’t just a story. This machine, this relic—it remembered. Who is L.D? And why does this machine remember what no one else does?
Stay offbeat,
Eloise Inkwell
