Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 20c: No Hope

As always, Pen was doing a whole bunch of nothing.

After a little while, his little chat with the Announcer started to feel more and more like a hallucination. A fabrication. Something that never happened. Something he made up in order to satiate his need for *something* to happen in his dull, miserable, imprisoned life. Something to give him the impression that he still mattered in this world, that there was still a purpose to his continued existence, and that there was a reason to keep on living.

The writing utensil knew that was one of the things that could happen. He read about it in a book somewhere, or heard Golf Ball talk about it back when she was forcing everyone to listen, or just made it up on his own as well. The source is unknown, but does it really matter? It doesn't make it ring any more true, it doesn't make it any less credible, any less real. It is a natural, inevitable law of the universe that every living being *demands* interaction, demands something to do, demands something to break the monotony and dreadfulness of... nothing. Of receiving no other stimuli besides the bare minimum, of just lying down and letting time pass by all around you, barely registering a single thing that occurs. The brain just *doesn't* like that. It's the product of billions (or some other big number like that) of years of evolution, of natural selection taking all the traits necessary for survival and amplifying it to vast degrees to gradually refine and perfect each and every new generation of creatures. He isn't exactly sure just what sort of evolutionary advantage turning into household objects gives, but all those big science terms can't be wrong, can they?

If a living being wants to survive, it needs to acquire all that it needs to survive: air, food, water, and so on, and so forth. To do that, it needs to be in constant motion, going from place to place in order to acquire it from places where it is in abundance. And so, as the theory goes, evolution steered the countless species towards maximizing the time they spend in medias res, working towards tomorrow. It was reinforced over the generations that stillness was stagnation, that stagnation was suffering. So long as you were in motion, you were *alive*. Even if what you're doing ultimately doesn't mean anything (as the Battle for Dream Island has shown time and time again), even if it's ultimately detrimental, the brain will prefer it so long as it is actual action, profound movement. Anything is better than staying still. *Anything*.

So goes the theory, anyway, or something like that; for obvious reasons, Pen wasn't exactly the intellectual sort.

As a result, when stillness is forcibly imposed upon the body, when a creature inexplicably finds itself incapable of doing *anything*, it perceives it to be the worst thing in the world. It manifests subtly at first, as boredom. With the body no longer doing anything of note, the mind starts working overtime, trying to figure out what it *could* do. Leave it enough time to fester, enough time to realize the futility of things, of the helplessness of the situation, and it'll start to go a little mad, a little sad. It'll start actively protesting against this lack of motion, and will do all in its power in order to break free of whatever is causing this monotony, this ennui. And if even *that* doesn't do the trick, if there is still nothing on the itinerary, it'll resort to desperate measures. It'll begin hallucinating, imagining things that aren't there, pretending that it is doing things that aren't true, all for the sake of being able to say that they've done something, *anything*, instead of just sitting idle, instead of hoping in vain.

There was no reassurance that what happened actually happened, after all. As soon as the Announcer left him behind once again, resumed his duties and closed the door behind him, everything was once again exactly the same as it was before. Still the same old room, the same old isolation, the same old *dread*. With any memories of a time that's different being exactly that- memories, fragments of a better era -it becomes more and more difficult to remain firm in the belief that things haven't been the exact same all this time. Especially as those thoughts naturally become fragmented and hazy with time, due to the brain's imperfections and flaws. It starts as a little voice in the back of Pen's head at first, questioning if that encounter with the speaker box ever happened. Then it'd appear again after a little while, then once more, then repeatedly, then it'd completely dominate his every waking moment. Eventually, at some point, he just couldn't keep up. He begins wondering if that truly was the case, if he truly just is stuck here, for the rest of eternity, *forever*.