"Make your one vote count!"
That little bit of silence was always *incredibly* tense.
The Battle for Dream Island (and its associated acts) had been going on for well over a decade now. Over a decade since that speaker box fell out of the sky one day and declared that an island was up for grabs. Over a decade since twenty-odd objects decided to sign their lives and souls away. Over a decade since they agreed to have their most intimate emotions, feelings, and passions carefully monitored and observed by unknown viewers from beyond. Over a decade since they agreed to being ripped away from their lives, their friends, their routine, and being locked away in some prison somewhere, never to be seen again. There were ups, there were downs, there were smiles, there were frowns, there were spikes, and there were loops. And yet they persisted; propelled seemingly only by a desire to win... *something*, they continued to cling on despite their absolutely abhorrent living conditions, despite being tortured and abused by several generations of sadistic, psychopathic hosts with no reverence for things like morals or decency. They kept on chasing their goals around, even though it only ever seemed to take them around in circles. The days, months, and years just kept on piling up, with not a single contestant thinking that anything is amiss, that perhaps there's something better to fight for.
Maybe they just didn't have a choice, maybe they didn't have anything to return to; after all, does anyone know *anything* about who any of these people were prior to that fateful day on the green plains? But even then, even if they were created out of nothing one day, even if they were shaped out of the Earth with no greater purpose than to compete for the amusement of some creepy weirdos that watched their every move, would they not eventually feel the desire to do something else, to be something more? After all, *surely* these contestants have some degree of free will, of creative expression and conscious decisions; it wouldn't make for *really* exciting drama otherwise. Even if competing and Battling for Dream Island was all they've ever done, all they've known, they'd at least think about the possibility of there being more to the world than just that; they've seen so much of Goiky, and had done so much in the process, that the concept might just be tempting to them. But no. Through some fluke of the universe, the contestants are seemingly bound to this battle for life. They willingly returned to the monotony, tedium, and dread when that other algebralian appeared one day after finally being given freedom. They cared very little when another one separated them from their allies, then made them *ages* for the luxury of competing. They were willing to wait the months of absolute nothing, then would happily bear the tremendous weight of the episodes, right up until the very end.
And what of the end of episodes, anyhow?
It meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For most, it meant the long-awaited, highly-anticipated end of another round of struggling and battling; shortly after Two says those magic words, they could finally take a deep breath, relax their muscles, and just lay down somewhere nice and rest, building up all of their energy once more until the cycle repeated all over again.
For others, however, it meant quite the opposite. There were some that felt defined by the times where they were the attention of the cameras, those that felt as if those were the only times that anyone actually cared about them. The contestants would try their hardest to pretend that that isn't actually the case; that no such characters actually feel that way, and that they all have *spectacular* social lives outside of the competition. But they're undoubtedly out there, their stories just waiting to be told.
And for the unfortunate few that ended up falling short in the day's contest, it was the time where gravity of the situation *truly* began to set in; they were inadequate, incapable, incompetent. They, or one of their friends, would now get the boot as a result of their actions. They would forever be sent away to some unknown realm, out of their reach, and would likely stay there for an unimaginably long period of time. It was already bad enough to know that that was going to be the case, but to be stuck with that inevitability for so long? The dread constantly building up, waiting for the moment Two finally showed up again and started the trauma anew? It made them unable to sleep.
