Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 5a: Get Away

Teardrop woke up somewhere completely different.

The last thing she remembered was being out in the open ocean. Nothing but the vast blue in all directions. Blue above, blue below, blue all around. She herself was blue too, both metaphorically and literally. She'd been adrift for... who knows how long, really; she can tell the time with the sun and moon, but doing that while focusing all her attention on keeping herself together, to stop herself from dissolving completely into the greater body of water, was a bit beyond her. Could've been hours, could've been days, could've been a week or more. A stretch of time where there was *nothing* but her and the water. Water and more water. The waves came and went, the breeze took her in a random direction, things... happened.

And things continued happening while she was down and out.

For a little while, she just remained there; collapsed onto the floor, sand on her face, splashes of water periodically grazing her feet. At a moment's notice she could get up and quickly get back to work, but right now... maybe later. She half-expected that something, *someone* was just gonna take her away the moment she budged, the moment she did anything. That's usually what happened, wasn't it? She was finally feeling at home, feeling peaceful, when that speaker box fell from the sky one day and started the Battle for Dream Island. Life always comes to ruin your day right when you least expect it. Right when you get your things in order. And you just have to deal with it.

One minute passed, then two, then three. After all that time passed with nothing happening, time that was successfully wasted, Teardrop finally bothered to get up. Pushed herself off the beach sands, stood up on her own to legs. Remaining balanced and upright for the first few moments was... a challenge. It's the sort of feeling one gets after being immersed in the pool for quite a while, then they get off and all the water that had stuck to them keeps weighing them down. TD felt a few pounds heavier, and it took a moment for her to get used to that; quickly, she'd shake off a few excess drops, and she'd be back to (somewhat) normal before she knew it.

The drop of water took everything in. She took a deep breath of the cool winds, closing her eyes and pretending that, even for just a moment, everything was still normal. For even just the shortest stretch of time, she could convince herself of that. Everything was fine. Nothing was amiss. She didn't have anything to look back on, she didn't have anything to look forward to. Nothing to fear, nothing to dread. It's just her and the beach, alone in an indifferent and uncaring world. That's exactly what she wanted, wasn't it? That's why she was so silent all the time. That's why she kept all her thoughts bottled up, all those secrets forever locked away. What else could it have been?

She slowly went on a 360 degree spin, looking around and seeing the sights. Above her, a mildly overcast sky; indeterminate shapes drifting across the nothingness of the atmosphere, going along with their business like there wasn't anything wrong. Perhaps there truly wasn't, in some sense. Below, the sands were occasionally soaked by oncoming waves, crashing against the shore and bringing a little bit of life in this desolate little world. Behind her, the sea continued churning, vast quantities of water being moved across unimaginable distances like it was nothing.

Beyond her... the world. Always mysterious, always enigmatic. She'd tried her hand at exploring every once in a while, venturing beyond the grasslands of Goiky for the sake of figuring out just what's beyond the horizon. What else did she have to look forward to, after all? More of the same? More of this? More of that? More of *them*? If she could laugh, she very much would. She could go on for days walking in the same direction, or roughly in a straight line; sunrise to sunset, nothing but one foot after another. But sooner or later, eventually, she'd wind up back at square one. The world would somehow circle her back to her 'home', to the same stretch of grass with all the same faces. No matter how hard she tried to escape them, no matter how often she looked away, she wound up here again. And again. And *again*. It was infuriating each and every single time. It was...