Teardrop was minding her own business.
Even though the time between episodes and challenges in the Battle for The Power of Two was longer than ever, she felt like they were passing by in an instant. She was unable to feel any sense of relaxation and calm during those long stretches of time, and in the rare instances where she actually managed, it usually got interrupted right away by the start of another contest. TD had a lot to think about, seemingly not a lot of time to digest it, and worst of all nobody to talk about it with.
Well, not like she *can* talk, but you know what I mean. Unlike every other instance of this stage in the game, she didn't have a team to call her own, any extra sets of hands to rely on if she just wasn't cutting it. Due to being a late addition to the cast, a straggler that competed in a whole other game before she wound up here, she was forced to be all on her own, lest she ruin the pre-existing dynamic among the teams.
*What* dynamic?
Being the silent type has some rather obvious disadvantages, but one of its hidden bonuses allows her to sneakily eavesdrop on anyone and everyone without anyone figuring out that she was ever there. She didn't talk, she didn't yelp, she didn't gasp, she didn't mutter, and maybe she didn't even breathe. Seeing the monumental task ahead of her, not feeling too good about the likelihood of her overcoming six teams of seven, she decided to survey the land and figure out just what she's up against.
What she ended up finding was... underwhelming, to say the least. Are You Okay had the two bossy balls paired up with those that were the least likely to follow any sort of authority or guidance. Death P.A.C.T. Again had a ton of issues in fulfilling the goal written in their name. Just Not seemed reasonable enough, until she found out that one of their members was a serial killer that had a good chance of betraying her teammates if she felt like it. The only members of The S! that felt like they had some value were Yellow Face and Winner, and she was rather unsure if they were gonna be able to counteract the others. And The Strongest Team on Earth... Well, it's enough to say that that name oversells them a bit.
Still, even *if* those teams were to collapse in on themselves tomorrow, and everyone ended up essentially fighting for themselves, Teardrop still had quite a lot on her plate. This was *limitless* power they were talking about; odds are that everyone is willing to do *everything* possible in order to get even a taste of that stuff. Just think of what one could do with virtually infinite power, with basically nobody allowed to dissuade you from doing anything you fancied! Teardrop already had a lot of ideas in mind; she'd seen plenty, done plenty, and she reckoned that she could do... plenty more with that sort of power.
But all that's in the far, *far* future; given how long everything's taking, the end of time was more likely to occur earlier than *anybody* winning that power for themselves. There were more than enough worries in the now to preoccupy her brain, to leave her thinking and strategizing from sunrise to sunset, then back to sunrise again. All this fueled by the ever-looming fear of elimination.
Back in the day, what happened after you got the boot was simple and easy enough to understand: you just got stuffed into a box. A box that was cold, cramped, and miserable, but it was something that you'd be able to live through. As long as you could deal with your fellow eliminated, anyway. But in the age of the algebralian, things were... different. They largely had no prisons to speak of (except for that one time), so instead you just... disappear; they'll do a wave of the hand or some other motion, and you are just gone. Teardrop wasn't keen whatsoever on figuring out what happened afterwards, so she made it her imperative to stay in the game for as long as possible, at least until her fate was guaranteed to be... not so painful. That ordeal would be made more difficult by the fact that, *again*, she was a team of one; if she lost, if she slipped up just *once*, that was it. It's over. Done.
