Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 10a: Well Then

The days just kept on passing by.

After a bit more arguing and bickering, Golf Ball and Tennis Ball eventually decided that a compromise was the best way of settling things going forward. TB had his attempt at fixing the speaker box on the first day of this new arrangement, and so it would be up to GB to try and figure something out the day afterwards. If she couldn't put it back together by then, then it'd be back to fuzzball on the subsequent day. Then it was back to the dimpled one, and they'd go back and forth until either they eventually manage to figure it out, or they just... die. Or give up. Or whatever.

Whenever the ball used in tennis was working, he'd always keep his DDS close by, always keeping one foot ready to communicate with Teardrop whenever she popped up and needed someone to talk to. Well, not necessarily *talk*, but you get the gist. The bossy-bot would very quickly take notice of this multi-tasking, and, in true bossy-bot fashion, would start berating him for not keeping his eyes and mind on the task at hand. After yet another round of shouting, he eventually managed to explain what was up to her and tried getting her to figure out the basics of communicating with TD; she was able to quickly figure out the controls for the camera, but immediately gave up when it came to learning the sophisticated ways in which movements could be used to indicate letters and phrases. Golf Ball ultimately caved and let Tennis Ball do his thing, but swore that if and when he inevitably failed in spectacular fashion, he wouldn't hear the end of it.

Things continued like this for quite some time. GB would be fixing the speaker box one day while TB was talking to TD, then the next day TB would be fixing the speaker box *and* talking to TD while GB did a number of things around the base, mainly tabulating whatever junk and whatnot was piled up in storage. Despite the atmosphere being a bit less dreary, the mood a bit less miserable, the balls still didn't really fancy talking to each other. There'd be the mandatory instances, of course: whenever one of them appears to have made some sort of breakthrough- perhaps figuring out how to put two major pieces together, or bringing electricity to a component -they'd write it down and pass it over to the next sphere on the next day. Sometimes one of them (ie. mainly Tennis Ball) would write down something else as a postscriptum, asking Golf Ball how her day was, what she got up to, what the next part of the plan was, and so on. GB would never reply, however, always sticking to the most relevant details. Most relevant to her, anyhow.

The days went on. The sport globules continued to find little to no use for their pile of scrap metal. TB had tried connecting his DDS to some promising pieces to try and get whatever data may be stored inside, but currently those searches were turning up empty. Nothing but obfuscated code and unknown technology. After a day or so of those futile efforts, after waking up the next day and doing the routine conversation with Teardrop, he'd get up and see GB already hard at work at putting the puzzle pieces together. Very exciting, very riveting stuff.

The hours, the days, they just kept ticking by. They passed like a blur. In times like these, he once again thought back to the past. To the days of them searching through ruins and shelters and whatnot in pursuit of ancient tomes filled with all-important knowledge. Most of the time, that'd be exactly what would happen; they've done this so much that they've gotten it down to a science at that point. Sometimes, however, they'd find... not that. They'd find stories and legends and novels and poems. Works of fiction. Perhaps they had *some* value as cultural pieces, but that wasn't what they were looking for.

Golf Ball largely used them as just spare paper to write down notes on, ripping off a page or two whenever they were needed. But Tennis Ball decided to read a few of them whenever they weren't doing much; that usually meant whenever they were observing a particularly *boring* experiment, or hiding from some know-nothing that wanted to make fun of their lame science stuff. Plenty were short enough to span just a page or two. Some had a couple more, and others were entire books, both thick and thin. Those larger ones were a particular pain to get through, however; quite a lot of words, and not enough action to go around. Also, it's *fiction*. It ultimately had no impact or value to whatever he was doing in the now, other than some vague notion of entertainment. That was part of the reason why GB hated them so much; her rants about how worthless these ventures were made up part of the entertainment when going through these more boring instances. But sometimes that humor just wasn't enough; sometimes a text is just so vast, and so, so *boring*. It felt like filler. Padding to make a volume seem more impressive, or appease some outside power, like an arbitrary word limit or something.