Chapter Text
Pomni closes her eyes and smells the sea air. It does smell more like a scented candle and a used bath, but it's definitely less overstimulating than the real deal. One of the few things the Circus can say about itself. She opens her eyes to her fellow troupe members.
Honestly, although it's a digital hell of which there is no escape, it can be a nice place sometimes. Kinger is making a sand castle to scale; Zooble is floating on a raft, talking to Abel and the Sun; and even Ragatha is enjoying playing Keep Away with Jax and Gangle. Until she accidentally pitches the ball right through the ribbon girl's mask, that is. Pomni picks up her feet and jogs on the sand.
Halfway across, her foot catches on a toy tugboat, glitching out under the sand Kinger displaced for the last half hour. A wave of pain ripples up her leg while a loud bang echoes across the entire circus. She flies up.
She zones into consciousness in the shimmering void. Smells hurt to hear as they run across her tongue. She's falling up into the eternal everything. She tastes at her hand: five fingers. She smells two thumbs and a middle finger. That's six fingers. She sees her name flayed off in the wake of her journey, the temperature of the echoing screams telling her it. Then she crosses the boundary and every thing deteriorated farther.
It's dark when Pomni wakes up again, steaming in a crater. The Moon is floating in the sky but slacking off, catching up on some well needed sleep-mode. She slowly limps her way back up to the tent & to the cast hallway. If she was more observant, she'd notice the Xs on the doors had shifted, but she wasn't. She stumbled into her room.
And then Pomni screams as the NPC with the same skin as her opens her door.