Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 4b: Groggy

The Announcer was dead.

It's the same old story that has played out around 2,763 times by now. The speaker box and the bossy-bot have never really gotten along, even as they spent many weeks and months working on the same thing, planning towards the same goals. From the big, world-changing things that completely affect the overall course of the Battle for Dream Island, to the tiny minutiae such as the precise second to start Cake at Stake, the two always found reasons to disagree and bicker. Whenever the two weren't present, whenever there were days where the contestants felt like things were... *fine*, it was usually because they were off in the background, arguing about resources and the greater good or whatever else losers talk about.

The two simply had completely different perspectives on how the world is, how things should be run, and who's best to run them. That much is obvious; one's a heartless, soulless machine that only cared about the facts and didn't bother with taking the feelings of others into account, pushing everyone to just do whatever they fancied; the other just suddenly fell out of the sky one day. They have completely different levels of familiarity with the contestants, their wants and needs, and just how much they can be pushed until they snap like a fine twig. They thought differently about how well they should be treated, how much of the world they should see, how much knowledge should be withheld from them. That's all they ever did, day in and day out. If they weren't working on the show, they were talking about working on the show. If not either two, then they were *fighting* about it.

But neither seemed to spare a moment to acknowledge that this whole partnership was voluntary, something they both agreed on beforehand.

Eventually, one of them had to snap. Although both were renowned for not caring in the slightest about the world and its hapless creatures, it's clear that one was better at it than the other. After all, Golf Ball was only human; well, she was only object. And so, she'd plot for the Announcer's demise, coming up with a scheme or two over the next several days, working on it behind the scenes, looking like she's doing actually important work in the meantime. Then she'd put it into action, usually whenever everyone wasn't looking, whenever *they* couldn't appear to ruin everything. Sometimes they'd fail, sometimes they'd fail massively, sometimes they'd fail *catastrophically*. But an exceptional few would actually work out.

But typically not for long.

The pile of scrap metal would remain there, undisturbed, for a few hours. Perhaps a day or two. GB would keep her eyes peeled, wanting to ensure that the box was gone for good, but she would eventually have something or other to do, usually something to do with the contestants bickering amongst themselves, and so she'd focus on that. And in those brief moments of vulnerability, everything seems to happen. The machine's corpse would disappear, and in its place would be a brand new talking rectangle, in completely flawless condition, acting as if nothing's amiss, not even commenting on the attempt on his life.

Of course, Golf Ball wasn't one to just give up; over the episodes she'd plan and enact a variety of strategies, each one more creative than the last, figuring that she just hadn't killed the thing enough. But inevitably, eventually, the robotic talker would emerge from whatever underworld it came from, ready to start the next contest.

Well, at the very least, she tried.

-

Seeing is believing, and yet Golf Ball *really* didn't want to.

It could just be any pile of scrap, she reasoned. She couldn't see *anything* with how dark it was; it could be her eyes playing tricks on her, or some shadows obscuring vital details. She could come up with 2,763 ways to convince herself that what she's seeing *wasn't* what she thinks, but she could also come up with 2,763 ways to disprove each and every one of them. She just *really* didn't want to accept it. She couldn't. She didn't know if she could go on if she did.