Chapter Text
“Caine?” Pomni called, rapping her knuckles against the ringmaster’s office door. A dull echo accompanied each knock, floating eerily through the empty hallway behind her. She lowered her hand and waited for a response. None came. Silence settled like dust around her. An icy chill crawled up the jester’s spine. Caine’s office, which had once felt so welcoming, now felt like part of the Mildenhall Mansion adventure. The whimsical red and blue of the painted door were replaced by dreary monochrome shades, bringing to mind the state of the Circus following Caine’s death, when color had fled from the digital world.
Pomni fought the depressing memory by reminding herself that they’d brought him back. She herself had volunteered to be deleted in order to save their ringmaster from permanent deletion in the recycling bin. It was an easy decision to make after Caine’s brother Able, the self-proclaimed perfect being, revealed himself to the troupe. He claimed to be the superior AI, bragging of the strings he pulled to drive Caine to madness, and reveled in his plans to create a new world of stable outputs that spared no room for the messiness of humanity. The humans would’ve been erased if he had gotten his way, and the digital world would have forever remained a monochrome wasteland, the way that Able preferred.
But when Caine returned from the recycling bin with Pomni and learned of the part that Able had played in the torment of his humans, he didn’t give his brother much say over visual aesthetics. No—he just killed him again. This time with the support of six humans and their newly discovered conjuring abilities. Once Able was defeated for good, color returned to every last inch of the Amazing Digital Circus.
At least, that’s what everyone had assumed.
There was a bitter irony that Caine’s office was the only place that seemed to resist the vibrancy of his return.
“Hey, Caine?” Pomni tried once more. “Are you in there…? It’s been almost a week since I’ve seen you, or anyone else has. I just want to make sure you’re okay…?” Once again, she was met with silence. Pomni sighed. She fiddled with the yellow drawstring of her red and blue hoodie that she’d conjured that morning.
“You haven’t been inside your new bedroom Kinger made. You know, the one that’s close to mine, in the Hall of Rooms? I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been visiting it.” She cleared her throat awkwardly. Visiting was a polite word for straight up barging in without permission.
A few days ago, when Pomni first attempted to reach out to Caine, she had a similarly one-sided conversation at his bedroom door. Frustration and concern compounded with every minute that passed until she racked up the nerve to throw social conventions to the wind. She’d conjured a key to his door, jamming it into the lock and right past the voices in her head that screamed at her for not respecting his boundaries. The guilt was there but she defeated it by summoning Evil Pomni (albeit a diluted version without so many sharp teeth and bullets). Pomni had sprung into his room, fully prepared to land in a miniature world of chaos and color and weird words like paraphernalia that never made it into normal conversation.
Instead of anything resembling the ringmaster’s loud personality, she’d been met with the default furniture and textures of a room yet to be inhabited by a person, human or otherwise. Everything in the room was carefully inoffensive, aesthetically neutral, and basically the complete opposite of everything that Caine represented. Heck, even the symbol on his door—the C&A symbol, but conspicuously missing the A—was at odds with Caine’s usual, boisterous style of presenting himself. The lack of personality stood out like neon paint. She wanted to be angry at Kinger, but realized the programmer probably didn’t see the need to decorate for a creative AI. Caine should have done so himself, but he hadn’t. Pomni didn’t think anything could rival the visual apathy of his room.
Now she stood in front of his monochrome office door and wondered what surprises, or lack thereof, awaited her on the other side. It was pretty clear that Caine didn’t plan on responding to her, and she’d already wasted enough time calling his name and knocking on doors. This time Pomni didn’t bother summoning a key to barge in. She simply pressed her gloves against the bleak door and glared at it for being so resolutely closed. It didn’t take long for the object to respond to the sheer force of her will. The door reluctantly opened with a long, whining creak, giving Pomni the impression of a dog scuttling away with its tail between its legs.
She squared her shoulders—which had a slightly tougher look now that she’d lost the poofed sleeves—and stepped into Caine’s office for the first time since the Escape the Circus adventure. In spite of her insistence, she really didn’t want to be there. But, by the looks of the place, the office itself didn’t want to be there, either.
It was even more depressing than his bedroom had been. She almost wanted to pat the wall and congratulate it for achieving the impossible. The monochrome door had just been a preview for the dreariness that waited beyond. This wasn’t the office that Pomni remembered: a place of rich colors, accentuated by the sophisticated rendering of light and shadow. Now, the colors that had inspired her awe—even after weeks of living in an overly saturated madhouse—were withered to shades of black, white, and gray. The polished floor no longer greeted her with soft reflections, and there were no shadows to offer depth, detail, or comfort to the cold digital environment. Pomni padded toward the spiraling staircase, subconsciously anticipating the sound of her footsteps, but even the noise mechanics were absent.
An awful feeling like claustrophobia made Pomni shudder. She wanted to turn tail and run for the stimuli present in the rest of the Circus, away from the sensory deprivation of this lackluster hell. The concern she felt for Caine must’ve been even stronger than she’d thought, because she forced herself to keep going. Pomni climbed the stairs, the mental image of Caine seated at his desk giving her an odd cocktail of relief and dread as she approached the upper floor. She halfway expected the digital world to dodge her expectations once again and greet her with an empty office. But there he was, her enigmatic ringmaster, a blot of color in a monochrome space. He was exactly where she thought he would be, yet the first thing that registered was the utter wrongness of the sight of him. The feeling jarred her system like a gut punch. It took a good few seconds to interpret what looked so amiss about her ringmaster, who sat with his hands neatly folded on his desk, silently watching her.
Caine wasn’t watching her. He was looking straight through her, an emptiness in his gaze that could have reached to—or emerged from—the Void. He didn’t respond to Pomni when she crept closer, called his name, and waved her hands. His body didn’t twitch. His face didn’t show any sign of registering her presence. The ringmaster just…sat there. Like a decoration, but even more lifeless than the adventure orbs lining the walls, which had lost all their color but retained the smallest glow. There was no glow left in Caine. From what Pomni could tell, his avatar could have simply been a prop placed neatly at his desk, existing only to complete the scene of a host working in his office.
Sadness was a sneaky operator. Before it was even a puddle at Pomni’s feet, she was swallowed by an ocean of it, completely submerged by all the signs over the weeks of Caine’s increased distance from the humans. It was all leading up to this. A visit to his office from which he never returned. When he would simply put his consciousness in the back pocket of the Amazing Digital Circus, to be a conductive material for its electricity and nothing more. Not a friend, but not a threat, either. Pomni knew of the guilt he carried over what Able had manipulated him into doing. She’d seen the shame in its raw, bleeding form when she found Caine in the recycling bin. After his brother’s defeat, he did his best to cover it up, but it wasn’t Pomni’s first encounter with self-enforced detachment.
Once upon a time, Pomni attacked those walls with literal violence. She’d nearly torn Jax’s face off. A tempting tactic, honestly, because anger was in the mix with grief. Hadn’t she told Caine he could talk to her? Hadn’t the others drilled the exact same sentiment into his gums? Why didn’t he at least try to reach out? Why had he—how could he just—
Pomni took a breath and stepped back from her spiral. Caine may have given up on himself, but she hadn’t. None of them had, and she was equipped to prove it. Starting with a guilty admission.
“I’m…not actually here just to check on you, Caine. If that was the case, I would’ve come right over a few days ago, when I saw you weren’t spending any time in your room. To tell you the truth, this is the first time since then that I haven’t been busy.”
Caine didn’t respond. His gloves remained folded in front of him. Pomni covered them with her own hands and squeezed, never breaking her gaze away from his blank stare. She willed with all her might for him to come back. Whether it was the force of her own, rusty conjuring abilities, or the unyielding pressure of her grip on his hands, she didn’t know; but she saw it in Caine’s eyes when he looked at her for the first time. Pomni smiled, offering him one last squeeze before she let him go. He tracked her fingers as they formed a familiar pose.
“I’ve got something to show you, Showman,” she teased.
Snap!
- - - -
They were in Caine’s room. Caine’s room, not the neglected blank canvas that Pomni had barged in on before. It had taken lots of time and effort—not just from Pomni, but from each and every human, whose individual talents she employed for this ambitious project. Gangle’s eye for artistry happened to extend beyond the page; she had a natural instinct for interior design, and her efforts were already present throughout the Big Top, with cozy nooks for sketching or hanging out with the others. In Caine’s room, her creativity showed through in the bees that flew in shiny gold accents across the dark wood paneling of the wall opposite the door. Golden drapes hung across the crimson-painted walls that flanked either side of the room, all courtesy of Gangle.
Where the ribboned woman helped reflect the elegant side of Caine’s personality, Zooble used their own preference for alternative styles to recreate Caine’s unique oddball flare. Instead of using their manifestation abilities, they had opted to donate some of the things in their room they had no interest in keeping. Irregularly shaped mirrors found a perfect home on Caine’s walls, and a couple bouquet arrangements of their unused limbs made for decorative pieces that were a little discomfiting, but also pretty beautiful, and undeniably in line with Caine’s weird aesthetic style. A bee antenna (which had earned Zooble some unwanted attention from the ringmaster several months back) was the highlighting piece of the bouquet next to his bed.
Kinger put his manifestation skills to use when creating Caine’s bed. Fluttering butterflies mingled with bees on the headboard. The mattress was just the right amount of firm, while the red and purple duvet was honestly ridiculously soft. There were so many pillows from Kinger’s pillow fort that the ringmaster could make his very own plushy fortress if he wanted. Where she sat on the bed next to Caine, Pomni grabbed one such pillow and set it on her lap. She squished the corners of it a little nervously while Caine gazed in silent awe at his surroundings. His jaw was slack, the bottom part nearly touching his shoulders. His attention briefly locked onto a feature of his room that was harder to explain than the rest of it. Pomni followed his gaze and chuckled lightly. She gestured at the large insect terrarium placed between two of Gangle’s golden curtains.
“Oh, that was Jax’s idea. He has a knack for making ‘creepy-crawlies’, as Ragatha puts it. I honestly kind of like insects, though, and I thought you might too…y’know, because of the bee thing.” She cleared her throat, hoping Caine was too enraptured by the life inside the terrarium to notice her awkwardness. He still had yet to say anything. She’d been expecting at least a “Wowee!” by now, or some equally cartoony expression of surprise. The silence was starting to make her wonder if he hated it. What if he was angry at her for messing with his personal space?
She started to ramble, explaining everyone’s contributions. Not to broaden the blame—no, definitely not, this was her idea and she’d own up to it—but to fill in all the quiet that made room for all her doubts.
“What about…”
Pomni’s head snapped to look at Caine when he finally spoke. He was already gazing at her. Something in his eyes made her freeze up. It wasn’t anything bad. No, it was worse than bad. It was good—too good, too full of appreciation that she really didn’t feel like she deserved. She’d been pretty useless when it came to actually pulling this off. There were a couple cozy pajama sets in his wardrobe that she’d conjured up, which she was entirely content to let him find on his own. Other than that…
“What about you?” Caine asked.
“What do you…Oh. You mean, what did I make?” Pomni clutched the pillow tighter in her hands. She really didn’t want to show him the pajamas, she didn’t actually know if his love for bee themed stuff extended that far.
“Well…” she kicked her heels against the side of the bed, “My only real contribution is technically Ragatha’s present to you. I’m only good at conjuring clothes. Ragatha loves making horses and chickens, so she’s pretty much a pro at making animals at this point.”
“Animals…?”
“Yeah.” Pomni nodded. Her brows furrowed. “Speaking of, I wonder where she—oh.” Pomni smiled when she spotted a fuzzy tail sticking out from a small heap of pillows. “Right. Ragatha made her a bit of a napper. I think most cats are, though.”
Caine’s eyes grew almost too big to fit in his mouth when Pomni presented to him the purring, bleary-eyed housecat. She yawned, briefly flashing her teeth before licking her nose with a small, pink tongue. It was a harlequin-patterned cat, Ragatha had explained; it had a colored tail and spots on its body. On one ear was a patch of red; on the other was a patch of blue. She wore a collar with a yellow pom-pom in place of a tag.
“I hope you don’t mind the coloring,” Pomni said sheepishly. “I guess Ragatha thought it would be cute if she looked kind of like me, since she was my idea. We’ve been calling her Harley. You can come up with your own name obviously,” she added quickly, starting to ramble. “But she’s super sweet, and loves to cuddle, and she only eats shrimp which, I don’t know, I guess we thought it would be funny since—“
“Pomni,” Caine interrupted, more gently than he’d ever done before. To the jester’s complete and utter horror, it looked like he was about to cry. He opened his arms. “My dear. May I…” His voice cracked. When did Caine’s voice ever crack?
“Oh god,” she whispered, then amended, “I mean yeah, of course! Like I said she loves to snuggle! She can be like your emotional support—oof.”
The ringmaster’s arms were wrapped around her. He pressed her as tightly against his chest as he could without clipping their avatars together. She distantly worried about hurting the cat, but Harley’s deep, rumbling purrs signaled her happiness at being squished in between them. Ragatha really did a great job with the purr factor, Pomni mused. The vibrations moved through her chest, and they only grew stronger when she finally relaxed and returned Caine’s embrace.
“Thank you,” Caine whispered, his voice choked with tears.
There were lots of things she could have said in that moment. Long-winded speeches that she cared about him. That everyone did. That he would always have someone to talk to whenever the past got too heavy, or the future looked too impossible to surmount.
“…Yeah,” Pomni replied quietly. She rested her head against the side of his gums. “No problem, Caine.”
But, maybe, she had already said enough.