The grasslands were empty, as they usually were.
Well, they were *relatively* empty, so to speak. Of course, the contestants of the Battle for Dream Island (and all subsequent seasons) were out and about, doing all sorts of nonsense and causing all sorts of mischief. But there were only around several dozen or so of them going about their days, and the fields were... big. Pretty big. Quite big. Plenty of room for the BFDI to be conducted and orchestrated, with only sporadic journeys into the lands beyond. They can walk around plenty without ever coming across a different biome, a different scene. There are places where, if they didn't think about it too hard, they could just about convince themselves that nobody else existed, that the competition was just a *very* vivid hallucination, that nothing was bothering them. And that's just *weird*, isn't it? The Battle has been their whole life, their entire way of thinking crafted and molded by those mysterious hosts that tell them to do whatever for the sake of mysterious prize. It was everything and everywhere, always a looming presence in each and every waking moment. And yet it doesn't really take long until it feels like that that wasn't the case. You didn't have to zoom out *that* much until all their troubles and worries were just little specks on the landscape, and then disappeared completely, becoming too small to even detect.
Zero activity.
Pen was listlessly wandering around the grasslands, unsure of what to do with himself. He'd spent the past few years successfully distracting himself from that big, looming issue. When he finally got the chance to compete in the Battle for Dream Island once again, he seized the opportunity with both hands, absolutely *refusing* to let go. But sooner or later the novelty wore off, the days began to drag on, and the writing utensil started to find himself having more and more free time. It was more time to contemplate his strategy, his next move, how to not get eliminated, sure. But it was also more time to reflect, to consider his past choices, what led him here, what he could've done differently.
Pen was 200 vigintillion dollars in debt.
It didn't even really seem like a number at that point. Everyone knows all the classics: a hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion. Golf Ball and the other nerds know a couple more. But a *vigintillion*? That was a number that was just so mind-bogglingly big, so utterly incomprehensible. Even writing out the full thing instead of just using the shorthand- 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -still couldn't *begin* to let him figure out just how big of a number it was. And yet the world was telling him that not only was he able to attain such a number, he was able to do so 200 times over.
Out of *all* the things to have 200 vigintillion of, out of all the ways to capture that lightning in a bottle, why did he have to accumulate that much debt?
He tries to avoid the reality like the plague. He figured that at some point, eventually, *inevitably*, some mysterious cosmic force would snap their fingers and make whichever authority was keeping track disappear. But someone brings it up at some point. It keeps haunting him in his nightmares. He was the last to be picked for a team because of it. And at some point, he was gonna be facing something very, *very* bad because of it.
If this *was* gonna be the big, crushing weight that's gonna permanently kill him off, he might as well get to know it.
The question came back to his mind: how big is a vigintillion? Was it really *that* big, or was it perhaps not as terrible as he made it out to be? He'd tried to know several times before, but every single time he ended up dozing off as Golf Ball boringly explained the topic. That bossy-bot. Clearly, this was a journey that he had to undergo himself. He *had* to grasp the scale of such a large number. He was gonna count to a vigintillion, or die trying.
His fingers seemed like the best place to start. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And now he was out, and he was *nowhere* close to a vigintillion. But he wasn't gonna get any closer if he just kept on moping, so further up he went.
