Alternate Battle for Dream Island

ABFDIA 25b: Brainstorming Furiously, Drafting Intensively

The journey was just as awkward and uncomfortable as the last one.

Gelatin decided to keep the van close to the coast, even though Golf Ball protested that this would make them *significantly* more likely to be caught and attacked; everyone else responded that they only got back to Dream Island via a fluke, and if they lost sight of it now, they might never again get the chance to get back there and save their friends; once that happens, there's no telling how much more chaotic and miserable things were going to get. As she was the only one complaining (and didn't even have any arms), the decision was made to keep going in the direction they were already going, driving along the seaside for an hour or so. The foodstuff would soon bring the vehicle to a stop due to his concerns about fuel; in the most ideal scenario, he'd have enough fuel to both fulfill whatever plan they come up with *and* get back home to the Steakhouse with minimal injuries and/or casualties, and so he picked a point in which they felt far enough to be safe, but close enough that they could return without burning *too* much.

And speaking of safety, they'd wind up spending most of the remaining afternoon setting up camp, calming themselves down, keeping an eye out for anyone possibly looking for them, and getting themselves ready for the *inevitable* conflict between them, the speaker box, and whoever else decides to join the fray for any reason. Once again, Golf Ball would try to step in and say that time was of the essence, that they need to plan their counterattack and enact it at the soonest possible opportunity, but *nobody* wanted to do that. Not only was that boring, it was also *stressful*; that was a killer combination that downed any enthusiasm towards it (despite that *also* being their priority, albeit worded in a less formal and boring way), similar to what has happened to any and all efforts to think about people other than themselves, and a future beyond what's gonna happen to them 2.763 seconds from now.

But, eventually, time would pass. Things would change, and things would shift. Day turned to night, and eventually everyone settled around a campfire, enjoying whatever Gelatin could cook up from the meager supplies he had in the van. In their efforts to distract themselves, they would talk mainly about the quality of the food, despite the fact that not a single one of them (besides the foodstuff himself and the sport globule) knew the relevant culinary terms to make any such conversation fruitful. The talking naturally meandered from there; from the food to the one preparing it, to the business he ran, to how that group of wanderers came across it, to everything else they encountered in their journeys, to how far apart the contestants of the Battle for Dream Island had grown since the competition started.

And then, *eventually*, people would start listening to Golf Ball and her pleas.

They decided that the first thing on the agenda was clearing up everyone's misconceptions about the timeline, all the twists and turns and curveballs that led them to this moment. If they could agree about the past, then maybe they could get a little bit closer to agreeing about other things too.

A long time ago, the Battle for Dream Island was a concept that not a single one of them thought about, even in their strangest dreams; the twenty (or so, give or take) of them were just living their ordinary lives in the green fields, minding their own business. But then the Announcer fell from the sky, declared them to be Battling for Dream Island, and so they were. The hints of it being some show for cosmic spectators had always been there, spotted by the likes of Pen and a few others, but those concerns were swept aside by the greater dangers of being part of said show, of being eliminated and sent to the PRISON. The competition would go largely according to plan, a winner would be picked out as scheduled, but the speaker box, for *whatever* reason, decided that it wouldn't do at all. He said that all of this was going towards fulfilling his great plan, whatever *that* was, but it wasn't getting the job done quickly enough. And so, he decided to concoct a hasty plan in order to get everyone going faster: he'd stage a bit of chaos in Dream Island, he'd take the winner of Dream Island out of the equation for a little while, and he'd use the subsequent confusion and hysteria to push them further along the right direction. Somewhere along the line, he also further hastened the process by subtly injecting *something* into plenty of them, allowing him to control them and do whatever he wished.