Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 2a: Get Running

Obviously, Golf Ball wasn't dumb enough to put all her eggs in one basket.

The thought first crossed her mind while she was in the middle of setting up her Factory, double-checking everything and making sure everything was good to go and ready for permanent-ish habitation and usage. She knew that she was gonna have to get to it *eventually*; the sooner she did, the better. It was a priority, a rather large one, and she made a note of it on the back of her head somewhere. But the thought of *actually* getting her own personal space, an area where she could fully devote herself to the pursuit of scientific and technical knowledge, superseded any desire to go back into the field, that dangerous field, and start looking for an improbability. She *just* couldn't wait any longer to get straight to work, to finally prove everyone wrong and show them all the wonder and beauty of actually caring about how the world works for more than 2.763 seconds.

This was before she was reduced to an emotionless husk, after all.

And so, getting the Factory up and running became the first and most essential thing. She familiarized herself with all the nooks and crannies, adjusted and moved things around to be ergonomic for armless people, determined where the best places were to store things without them being at risk of getting damaged by some rogue delinquent wandering about, and moved all her equipment there, which had been spending its time languishing away in some ditch somewhere, hoping that the risk of falling in would scare everyone away from tampering with the goods. But still, the idea lingered in her mind. Experiments needed to be replicable, so she kept a copy or two of what she needed for when they were needed. They also kept them in different parts of the place, to ensure that the destruction of one wouldn't lead to the destruction of the other. Although she was initially reluctant to bring Tennis Ball into the team, figuring that *nobody* could ever hope to match her intellectual prowess, she knew deep within herself that having someone spare to handle things if she was somehow incapacitated was more ideal.

And eventually, she'd be able to conduct her first major project without a single issue (well, besides the obvious ones), and for the first time in 2,763 years, important knowledge was uncovered in Goiky. There was much excitement in the air, and there was plenty of celebration. Well, about as much celebration as there could be from a bunch of lame science spheres. When the cheer and enthusiasm eventually wore off, as most things do in this dreary little world, the thought finally returned to her.

It was only a matter of time, really. She tested out all the security systems that were available to her, even tried installing some for herself. She hid everything as far away as they could, reasoning that the *others* didn't have enough motivation to search through *every* little corner of this place, that they'll just get bored halfway through and give up. But if the history of the universe, the history of their entire lives, was anything to go off of, it's that you shouldn't underestimate these little, almost inconsequential probabilities; they tend to strike when you least expect it. The more Golf Ball thought about it, the more she feared that it was just *inevitable* that someone, or something, or whatever, came around here and destroyed the whole place.

And so, as much as she hated the thought of it, as much as she knew people were gonna harass and bother her for the foreseeable future, she *had* to go back up to the surface and find another location.

It was a somewhat more tolerable experience with Tennis Ball on her side. The grasslands of Goiky were, as one would expect, *lands* full of *grass*. Barely anything of note stuck out, having been buried under a few inches of soil (at best) through the passage of time. She fully expected that the first few days, the first few weeks, the first few months, the first few *years*, those were gonna be full of nothing but disappointments. The time before the Factory certainly was, after all; you ever tried conducting an experiment with *any* amount of scientific rigor out in the open? Where people can just come up to you and kick your 'dumb little toys', being completely unable to do anything about it?