It was well into the night, and everyone had already fallen asleep to gather up energy for the next episode. Well, *almost* everyone, anyway.
Once again everyone was competing for some fancy prize that they've barely ever seen, and it's become *extremely* exhausting for them to keep up the pace. Maybe it was the large span of time in-between the seasons that made them frail, maybe it was age catching up to them, or maybe it was a third thing entirely. The point is that, by the time an episode had ended and one team (or two) was slated to shrink in size, the last thing any of them wanted to do was worry any more about all that. They wanted to sit down, or maybe lie down, or maybe talk to others, or maybe cause some mayhem, or maybe something else entirely. There's a whole world out there to enjoy, and over 2,763 ways to enjoy it. To waste all that precious time worrying about who might get eliminated, or how everyone else saw you, or what those mysterious viewers get up to in their spare time whenever they aren't watching your every move, was just... ridiculous. You could use up all that time on doing something infinitely more productive instead; most of the time it's generally at the cost of others, but *usually* it was some sort of benefit to you. Maybe it made you happy, or allowed you to let out some steam, or maybe it was just a great distraction from all of... this. All this trouble. All this nonsense.
Golf Ball and her... research associate, especially held this finite time in high regard. The Battle for Dream Island and all its derivatives had already taken away so many precious seconds, minutes, hours, and days; a misguided effort to garner attention and knock some sense into others turned out to cause the exact opposite. Now, she could barely do any of her work without getting harassed by someone (or a few people) complaining about how all she's doing is a bunch of boring nerd stuff, how she's a bozo-brain bossy-bot team tyrant that's better off removed from the equation, how her voice and commands got on everyone's nerves, and so on and so forth. She couldn't even get some time alone in her factory without being extremely vigilant and making sure nobody was going where they didn't belong, usually finding some strange item or artifact to use as a weapon of sorts. It was a mess. It was a nightmare. It was absolutely everything she'd feared, and then some.
And so, whenever the sun set, whenever the moon came into view, whenever the stars started twinkling in the sky, whenever people started calling it a day and fell asleep wherever they felt like, only *then* did GB and TB make the most of their free time. They'd hurriedly rush into the Factory, grab whatever they needed, go through the long, arduous task of hauling it up to the surface, and proceed to conduct some good old-fashioned experiments. Maybe they'd observe those that pulled all-nighters, see what they got up to whenever nobody was looking. They'd see what sorts of team-building exercises they conducted, what sorts of strategies they were cooking up, what targets they had on their minds. Maybe they'd examine some curious little item they found on the ground, or try and get *any* sort of lead on what the algebralians are, or whatever sort of boring science stuff losers like them get up to. They usually ended up taking the entire night to do everything they wanted, then quickly rushing back into the Factory, into the miserable depths below, at the earliest possible glimpse of sunlight. Then they'd rest, then as soon as night arrived they'd do the whole thing over. Again and again until the next episode finally came around.
Today's experiment wasn't any different from all those other lame activities; after spending half an hour or so dragging everything they needed up to a hilltop, they got ready to point their telescopes and start looking at the stars, investigating the mysteries of the great firmament.
To the unfortunate few that ended up spotting them whenever they did this peculiar activity, they usually ended up leaving after being bored to near-death through their long-winded explanations of 'astronomy' and other big dumb words, or after they wrecked up the place and sent them rolling down the hill. Absolutely no one could (or would) get why they'd ended up spending many, *many* nights just looking down some weird instrument and taking all sorts of notes that might as well be written in Yoylese. Even for them it seemed like something out of the ordinary; what could they *possibly* gain, if any, from looking at a bunch of white dots in the sky? Golf Ball would be undeterred, however; she'd spent all her life poring through the extensive records that were almost lost from history. Even if *they* didn't know a single thing about the stars in the sky, or their left from their right, or how to spell their own names, at the very least *she* knew. *They* knew. They'd continue the work that was started so, so long ago, and *inevitably* future generations would continue where they left off, and once more the world would be thrust into a beautiful new golden age, one where your stature wasn't decided by speaker boxes and/or numbers telling you to go Battle for Dream Island.
