Golf Ball was hard at work in her Factory again.
Once again, a massive problem threatened to throw off her carefully planned-out strategies, all the delicate schemes that she had in mind to get out of her years-long rut and lead everyone out of this period of... *nonsense*. And in response to that, she'd do what any rational, logical person would do in such a scenario: plug her ears (not with fingers, of course), yell that everything's just fine, and proceed to run away as fast as she could.
She knew that Two was gonna hit them with a curveball or two at some point. At some point teams were gonna get merged together, or abolished outright, or restructured in some other, completely unexpected fashion. She did a whole bunch of calculations and estimates to figure out just when exactly it was gonna occur, how much time she had to prepare. She made contingency plans for if she was suddenly made to cooperate and work with a whole new batch of characters, with around 2,763 minor variations depending on just who exactly she wound up with.
But she's just one mortal ball, one small sport sphere with a brain that, while *definitely* larger and more dense with all-important information than average, was still constrained to the confines her volume. She couldn't possibly envision every single possibility that could occur in the battle for The Power of Two, let alone plan to get past each hardship without a scratch.
It's not like she *really* needed to be on good terms with them, anyway. It *would* be nice to not have as *many* enemies as she could possibly have, but at the end of the day, all that mattered in a competition such as this were two things: ensuring that you win every single contest, and, if you fail that, making sure you look as good as possible for the crowd of faceless, soulless viewers that they'll give you at least *one* more vote than someone else on the team, someone that's *significantly* more disposable.
With the Team Swap having come and gone, and her new team being at least a dozen different flavors of disastrous, that was all Golf Ball was focusing on. As far as she was concerned, the teams were gone. They were no longer a relevant variable that matters to *any* of her calculations. None of her teammates wanted to listen to her, and she didn't want to listen to them. It was just herself against the world, like how it always has been.
But... despite that, she just couldn't fully come to terms with that reality. She wouldn't ever wanna talk about it with *anybody* of course, but being separated from Tennis Ball, her life-long... *associate*, certainly dampened her mood. She could still somewhat rely on him, of course, but he had other things to take care of now. She was well and truly alone now, in every sense of the word.
It couldn't *possibly* hurt to try and bring some order into that chaotic mess of a team, right?
Up the stairs she went. Much to nobody's surprise, GB would surface and see CloudYAY remaining as the complete mess it always was. Barf Bag and Donut, having both come from the same team, were keeping to themselves and planning... *something*. Yellow Face was advertising as much as he could to anyone who would listen. Winner was... doing whatever they did.
And then there was Pillow.
Being the self-proclaimed smartest person in all of Goiky (and perhaps the world, and the solar system, and the galaxy, and the entire universe while she's at it), Golf Ball kept an eye on everyone around so that she could plan the best way manipulate- er, *influence* them towards the path of light and reason, a path that'd lead them to a golden age of peace and prosperity. And stuff. The moment she was pushed into her new team, she immediately racked her brain recalling all that she knew about her new teammates. All their strengths, weaknesses, interactions with her, with everyone else, their attitude towards the competition, and so on, and so forth. Every single detail was meticulously tabulated and quantified so she could predict how far they could go in the competition, as well as how to best plot their downfall.
