The floor of Golf Ball's Underground Factory was still hot to the touch, definitely a jarring difference compared to its usually frigid state.
The factory had very clearly seen better days; it definitely looked a *lot* better than one would expect the place to be after being fully submerged in red-hot lava, but it's simply a statistical certainty that something somewhere has been messed up to some degree. The place had all sorts of security features and redundancies to make sure the whole place wasn't reduced into absolute nothing, even in the event of the absolute worst occurring. The great walls and supports that stopped the place from caving in were built to be impervious to pretty much anything, all the vital circuitry and devices were properly insulated, and there were sections that were sealed up tight to protect against the *very* scenario that this unfortunate place has been subjected to. But GB and her *rather* close associate are rather busy people; they are balls of science, progress, innovation, and the hope of a better tomorrow. If they weren't working on managing their team, or planning their next moves, they were down here working on the next big thing, the invention that will *surely* cause everyone to see the wonders and merits of constant, horrific, mind-wracking effort, and never seeing the sun or feeling the warmth of another for days on end.
Definitely.
As such, over the years, they've gathered up a pretty impressive collection of thingamajigs and whatchamacallits other such doodads that could potentially rival Cloudy's assortment of items in size. But definitely not scope, though; anything they see as having enough use or purpose to haul all the way down here is perhaps some of the most boring, mundane, dull, uninteresting stuff one could ever see. From the smallest metal trinkets, gears, and pieces of scrap, to large, bulky machines that have no discernible purpose. Enormous texts full of illegible scrawls, artifacts with seemingly no use besides looking cool, and all the other boring nerd junk that only boring nerds like the bossy-bot and her clumsy friend would like. Despite ultimately having nothing of value, the two of them just kept on building up their mountain of metal, eventually filling up nearly the entire place with them.
And so, when some fluke of the universe decided to fill the factory with lava, it had a *ton* of nooks and crannies to make their way into and completely wreck up the place. Delicate and labyrinthine wiring was destroyed, metal was melted, books were rendered illegible or worse. By the time it was all drained and dealt with, Golf Ball estimated that a very good majority of their amassed wealth was now destroyed or partially ruined. What could potentially be up to 2,763 years of history, innovation, and science could now be lost to time, forever erased from the record, and they could only grieve and mourn over what has been taken away from them. That's *more* effort that they, and the subsequent generations after them, would have to put in so that they could achieve even a scrap of what these supposed precursors were able to do. And all because of some dumb competition. A snap decision made without much thought caused the destruction of so much, and they don't even know it. Unbelievable. Unthinkable. *Absurd*. None of this would've happened if GB had just won Dream Island all the way back then. She already had it all planned out and everything; the prestige and reputation she could've attained would've allowed her to finally attain the respect of those *others*, allowed her to steer them out of their senseless, self-destructive ways, into a prosperous, golden age...
That's enough thinking about the past; not like it matters, anyway.
The unremarkable journey to the bottom took even longer than it already did usually, as the two sport globules inspected and investigated every square inch, making sure nothing was amiss and that things aren't just about to collapse in on them. While Golf Ball, as always, was extremely ecstatic at the prospect of doing such fruitful work, Tennis Ball... wasn't. He wouldn't admit to it, of course; there's no sin that's more grave than offending his partner (in science) by even *implying* that he was tired of it. But they had *just* gotten done with an episode, just barely clinching victory and stopping one of them from getting the boot, and he wanted even the smallest bit of rest before getting right back to the swing of things. But no, of course not; immediately after TB asked about *maybe* unwinding a little to be better prepared for the hard work ahead of him, GB berated him for even suggesting the notion. Time wasted is time lost, she'd say. Time taken off their precious, finite lives. Time spent remaining in the dark about the many secrets and mysteries of the universe. Time spent continuing to toil and work under these all-powerful beings with unknown motives. They had to work as if their life depended on it, because it might as well be.
