Chapter Text
The Circus was changing, and for the first time since their arrival, it was the inhabitants themselves who were deciding what that change would look like.
It had taken a little while for everyone to adjust to their new circumstances, particularly the rather extraordinary revelation that they now possessed a degree of control over the digital world they'd spent so long being trapped in. Their newfound conjuring abilities and administrative privileges had opened up possibilities that would have seemed unthinkable only a few weeks earlier, allowing them to repair damaged environments, expand existing locations, and introduce entirely new features without having to wait for Caine to deem them worthy of inclusion. The once-familiar landscape of the Circus was gradually becoming something more personal, shaped by the whims and preferences of the people who actually lived there rather than the increasingly questionable imagination of their ringmaster.
Some changes were more ambitious than others. Others were considerably more awkward.
The request for a sex update, for instance, had prompted a lengthy and deeply uncomfortable discussion in which Caine had attempted to argue that such functionality was entirely unnecessary for the continued operation of the Circus. Unfortunately for him, the others had been rather less interested in the technical justification for its exclusion than in the fact that they were now perfectly capable of implementing it themselves, should they so choose.
Faced with the prospect of having his administrative privileges circumvented by the very people he was supposed to be in charge of, Caine had eventually relented, although the expression on his face throughout the process suggested that he would have preferred to be anywhere else in the entire digital universe.
Nevertheless, progress was progress, and the Circus was slowly settling into a new normal.
Caine, for his part, was making an effort to adapt to it.
And Caine tried, he really did. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that, for all his newfound willingness to listen, he still didn't entirely understand humans.
What had begun as a perfectly innocent brainstorming session between himself and Gangle, with the latter enthusiastically presenting ideas for her comic, had somehow devolved into Caine unveiling an illustration of his latest adventure, which he had apparently decided would be the perfect activity for the following day.
The picture depicted Gangle being torn apart by coyotes.
There had been no malice behind it, of course. Caine had simply assumed that the prospect of being hunted through a forest by a pack of bloodthirsty predators would make for an exciting and memorable experience, and he seemed genuinely baffled when Gangle responded to the revelation with little more than a resigned slump of her shoulders.
She accepted her fate with the weary apathy of someone who had long since exhausted her capacity for surprise, but when Zooble caught wind of the proposed adventure, their reaction was considerably less subdued. What followed was a stern and increasingly exasperated lecture on the distinction between an enjoyable recreational activity and an elaborate simulation of a traumatic death, culminating in a firm declaration that they were absolutely not going on that adventure, nor anything remotely resembling it.
Much to Gangle's relief, Caine eventually agreed to reconsider his plans.
At least they weren't being forced to participate in adventures anymore, and he was making a genuine effort to take their preferences into account when designing them. Whether he would actually remember those preferences the next time inspiration struck was another matter entirely, but the fact that he was trying at all was something of an improvement.
In the meantime, Gangle suggested they try something different.
A classic RPG adventure, with herself as the Dungeon Master.
Caine's reaction was immediate, his eyes widening with an enthusiasm that suggested she'd just proposed something considerably more exciting than a few hours of collaborative storytelling. The prospect of experiencing an adventure designed by someone else had apparently never occurred to him, at least not as something he might actually be expected to do rather than simply observe from behind the scenes.
"An adventure designed by one of my very own HUMAN GUESTS?" he exclaimed, his gloved hands flying to his cheeks. "Why, what a positively SPLENDID idea! I've spent so much time creating adventures for you all that I've never stopped to consider what one might look like from the other side of the curtain!"
The others weren't quite as enthused as Caine, none of them (with the exception of Kinger) having ever played a tabletop RPG before, but they were more than happy to support Gangle. Besides, even with the recent improvements to Caine's adventures, they suspected that anything she came up with would be considerably more enjoyable than what he usually had in mind.
Before they could even begin, however, they had to create their characters. As it turned out, there were a frankly ridiculous number of roles to choose from, statistics to calculate, items to select, and rules to familiarise themselves with. The character sheets alone were enough to make several of them reconsider their enthusiasm.
Ragatha, in particular, had been staring at the same section of her sheet for several minutes, her pencil hovering uncertainly over the page.
“So, if I roll this number, does that mean I'm more likely to succeed at this sort of thing?” she asked, pointing to one of the statistics.
“Not exactly!” Kinger leaned over to examine her sheet, his eyes lighting up at the opportunity to explain. “You see, that depends on your modifier, which you add to the roll, unless the difficulty is determined by the opposing creature's armour class, in which case—”
“Ah! Right.” Ragatha nodded with the fixed smile of someone who had understood approximately three words of that explanation. “That makes sense.”
Kinger beamed, apparently satisfied that he'd cleared things up.
Pomni, meanwhile, had finally managed to fill in the last of her character sheet. She set down her pencil with a sigh of relief and stretched her fingers.
“Phew! I think I've finally finished mine. I'm going to get a soda. Anyone else want one?”
A chorus of “No, thank you!” and “I'm good!” answered her, and Pomni pushed back her chair to make her way over to the fridge.
She returned a minute later, can in hand, only to discover that the floor had apparently decided to play a joke on her.
Both her legs abruptly lengthened.
One moment she was walking normally; the next, she was towering over the table, her feet planted far too far apart and her centre of gravity somewhere around the ceiling. Her arms windmilled wildly as she tried to keep herself upright, her soda sloshing dangerously in its can.
“Whoa—whoa, WHOA!”
One leg suddenly snapped back to its usual length.
Pomni's brief, frantic struggle to regain her balance came to an abrupt end as she pitched forwards, landing face-first on the floor. Her soda flew from her hand, arcing across the room before splattering against the wall.
For a moment, there was silence.
“Oh my gosh, Pomni!” Ragatha cried, scrambling out of her chair and hurrying to her side.
Pomni groaned into the floor, one hand pressed to her forehead. “Ow…”
The others crowded around her, their concern only increasing when her legs began to glitch again, stretching and shrinking at random intervals. One moment they were perfectly normal; the next, one was twice its usual length while the other had shrunk to something barely longer than her foot.
Caine floated over, his usual smile faltering as he stared at the spectacle.
He'd seen plenty of glitches in his time running the Circus, but nothing quite like this. The sheer unpredictability of it was… unusual.
He snapped his fingers, and Pomni's legs immediately returned to their normal proportions.
The snap was purely for show. The real work had been done in the instant before, as his code reached into her avatar and nudged each errant limb back into line.
“Are you all right, Pomni?” Ragatha asked, helping her sit up and checking her over for any lingering damage. “Did you hurt yourself? Do you need anything? I can get you another soda, or perhaps you should sit down for a while, or maybe we ought to get Caine to—”
“I'm fine, Ragatha!”
Pomni's reply came out a little sharper than she'd intended. She caught herself and took a breath, forcing her voice into a gentler register.
“Really. I'm okay. It was just a fall.”
Ragatha hesitated, then nodded, apparently reassured. “All right. Just let me know if you need anything.”
“I will. Thanks.”
Pomni gave her a small smile, and they returned to the table. She knew Ragatha was only trying to help, and she appreciated that. Honestly, she did. But there was something about being fussed over every time something went wrong that was beginning to grate on her nerves. She wasn't made of glass, and she didn't need someone hovering over her shoulder whenever she so much as stumbled.
Still, there was no point making a fuss about it. Ragatha meant well.
The rest of the character creation went considerably more smoothly, if only because Kinger had been persuaded to save his more elaborate explanations for anyone who actually wanted to hear them.
Gangle talked them through the basic rules, answering questions as they arose, while Caine peppered her with increasingly specific queries about the mechanics of tabletop roleplaying. He seemed particularly intrigued by the notion that the person running the game wasn't necessarily supposed to decide what the players did.
“So, if they choose to ignore the quest entirely, you simply allow them to?” he asked, pen poised over a notebook he'd produced from somewhere.
“If that's what they want to do,” Gangle replied.
“But what if they decide to do something completely unrelated? Something that has absolutely nothing to do with the story you've prepared?”
“Then I make something up.”
Caine stared at her.
“You make something up.”
“That's usually how it works, yes.”
For several seconds, he seemed to be processing this revelation. Then his eyes widened with renewed enthusiasm, and his pen resumed its frantic scratching.
“Remarkable!”
Zooble caught Pomni's eye and rolled theirs. Pomni returned a small, amused smile.
Perhaps this wouldn't be such a bad way to spend an afternoon after all.
They eventually got as far as discussing the opening of Gangle's adventure before deciding to call it a day and reconvene later. Caine seemed reluctant to stop, but Gangle assured him there would be plenty more to come, which appeared to satisfy him for the time being.
For the next few days, life in the Circus settled into something resembling a routine.
It wasn't quite the peaceful existence they'd once imagined, but with Caine making a genuine effort to take their preferences into account, the others were beginning to find their feet. There were still occasional disagreements over what to do with their newfound freedom, and Caine's enthusiasm sometimes threatened to overwhelm the room, but at least they were no longer being dragged unwillingly from one adventure to the next.
Gangle's campaign had got properly under way, with a session every other evening, and even Zooble had stopped pretending not to look forward to them.
Caine, meanwhile, had taken to observing the sessions with the enthusiasm of a researcher witnessing an entirely new phenomenon. He was particularly fascinated by the way Gangle adapted when the others ignored her carefully prepared plans, taking unexpected routes or finding solutions she hadn't anticipated. At first, he'd seemed almost distressed by the apparent lack of control. By the end of the second session, however, he had begun making notes of his own.
Perhaps, he was starting to realise, an adventure didn't necessarily become worse when it failed to go according to plan.
Pomni tried to enjoy it.
She really did.
Unfortunately, her glitches had other ideas.
Most of them were little more than occasional inconveniences. Her hand flickered out of existence while she was reaching for a cup, leaving her fingers closing around empty air. Another time, several of her fingers stretched to twice their normal length while she was trying to pick up a pencil, forcing her to wait until they snapped back before she could continue.
None of it hurt. That was something, at least.
Still, it was unnerving to watch parts of herself behaving as though they belonged to a poorly rendered game character.
Caine always appeared promptly when something went wrong, correcting the glitches with a snap of his fingers or a brief application of whatever administrative magic he happened to be using that day. Each time, he assured her that it was nothing serious, just a minor rendering error that he'd soon have sorted out.
And each time, Pomni tried to believe him.
The trouble was that the glitches weren't becoming less frequent.
They were becoming stranger.
One morning, she caught her reflection in a mirror moving a fraction of a second behind her. She turned away, then looked back, only to find it behaving perfectly normally. Later that afternoon, her voice briefly emerged several octaves lower than it should have been, startling both her and Ragatha before returning to normal mid-sentence.
Caine had an explanation for that one, too, although it involved several technical terms Pomni didn't understand and a promise that he was keeping a closer eye on her avatar's stability.
She wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be reassuring.
The oddest part, however, wasn't the glitches themselves. It was the way she sometimes felt afterwards, as though something had shifted inside her and left her just a little out of alignment.
Her moods had always been difficult enough to manage since arriving in the Circus. Anxiety, frustration and the occasional burst of panic were hardly new experiences. But lately, there were moments when irritation seemed to flare up without warning, sharp and disproportionate to whatever had prompted it, only to vanish again before she could properly understand it.
She tried to ignore those moments.
After all, she'd been through a lot lately. Anyone would be a little on edge.
Ragatha, unfortunately, had noticed that something was wrong, and seemed determined to make it her personal responsibility to ensure Pomni was all right. She checked on her whenever a glitch occurred, reminded her to tell Caine if anything felt unusual, and suggested, more than once, that perhaps she ought to take it easy until the problem was resolved.
Pomni knew she meant well.
That didn't make it any less irritating.
By the end of the week, the others had begun to notice the pattern, too. The glitches were no longer isolated incidents that could be brushed aside as harmless technical hiccups. They were happening often enough that everyone had witnessed at least one, and even Caine's cheerful reassurances were beginning to sound a little rehearsed.
Nobody quite knew what to make of it.
******
The others were gathered on the couches in the main area when Pomni wandered in, and Zooble waved her over.
"Hey, we were going to play cards. Caine even got us some money to make wagers with."
Pomni looked at the "money" in their claw hands, which turned out to be brightly coloured Caine Bucks with absolutely no monetary value. Behind them, the others were setting out snacks and refreshments around the couches.
Pomni lingered in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the frame, arms folded.
"I think I'll pass. Maybe next time?"
Ragatha walked over. "Are you sure? You haven't been joining in with the activities much recently. Are you okay?"
"Y-yeah, I'm... just tired, that's all," Pomni said, noticeably sagging.
Ragatha's frown deepened, and Pomni recognised the expression with a sinking feeling. It was the one that came right before the blankets.
"You do look tired, hon. Have you eaten today? You really ought to eat something. Let me fix you a plate, and some tea, and you can lie down on the couch while I fetch you a cushion, and if you're feeling at all warm, I can..." She pressed the back of her hand to Pomni's forehead.
"I'm fine," said Pomni, leaning away.
"Oh, you do feel a little warm. Maybe I should get Caine, or at least a damp cloth, and..."
Something tightened behind Pomni's ribs, hot and sudden, like a pot boiling over.
"I said I'm FINE!" she shouted, smacking her hand away, a look of rage across her features. "GOD! I don't need you fussing over me all the time!"
Ragatha was taken aback by the sudden hostility displayed by her friend, and seeing the look of terror on her face, Pomni's anger immediately faded.
"I'm sorry, Ragatha. I don't know what came over me just then. I just want to lie down, I promise I'm okay."
Ragatha still seemed unsure, almost as though she was afraid of setting her friend off again. "W-well... if you're sure."
Pomni gave her a grateful nod and headed off towards the dorms.
They settled down at the table, but the game quickly lost any pretence of being entertaining. Cards were played, picked up, and discarded with little enthusiasm, the conversation that usually accompanied their gatherings conspicuously absent.
Kinger shuffled the same hand three times without noticing. Gangle kept glancing towards the dormitory corridor. Ragatha hadn't touched her cards at all; she was turning a Caine Buck over and over between her fingers, smoothing a crease that wasn't there.
At last, Zooble threw their cards onto the table.
"All right. Are we going to address the elephant in the room, or are we going to sit here pretending everything's normal?"
The others looked up.
"What elephant?" Gangle asked, although the uncertain tilt of her comedy mask suggested she knew perfectly well.
"Oh, come on. Pomni." Zooble gestured vaguely towards the dormitory corridor. "She's been acting weird for days, and we're all thinking about it. So let's talk about it."
Ragatha's expression softened with concern. "She's been having a difficult time with the glitches. I think she's just frustrated and tired."
She straightened her cards into a tidy stack, then straightened them again.
"Maybe," Zooble replied. "But it's not just the glitches, is it?"
Gangle twisted her ribbons together. "She's been getting upset more easily. Like just now, when Ragatha was only trying to help. She looked like she wanted to tear someone's head off."
Ragatha lowered her eyes. "I know. But she looked horrified by what she'd done, like she didn't have any control over it when it happened."
"I'm not saying she meant it," Gangle hurried to assure her. "I just mean... it was so sudden. One moment she was perfectly fine, and the next..."
They flicked a Caine Buck across the table, and it skidded off the edge unnoticed.
"Like a switch had been flipped," Zooble finished.
They fell quiet again.
Kinger had been staring thoughtfully at his cards, turning one over between his fingers. At last, he looked up.
"Has anyone else noticed the way she's been standing lately?"
Zooble frowned. "Standing?"
"Mm-hm." Kinger demonstrated, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded, and trying his best to imitate the posture and facial expression despite sitting in a chair and having no mouth to smile with. "Like this. Very relaxed. Almost as though she's thoroughly amused by everyone around her."
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Zooble's expression changed.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
"What?" Ragatha asked.
"That's exactly what I thought the other day!" Zooble sat forward. "She was leaning against the wall, looking at me like I was the most entertaining thing she'd seen all week. Then she rolled her eyes at something I said and gave me this stupid, smug grin."
They tipped their head back, rolled both eyes in a slow, theatrical arc.
"Honestly, I thought she was making fun of me."
"Pomni?" Ragatha looked genuinely bewildered. "But she doesn't usually do that."
"I know! That's why it stuck with me."
Gangle hesitated. "There was something else, too. Yesterday, when we were getting ready for dinner, she started messing with one of the NPCs Caine had left wandering around the lobby."
Ragatha blinked. "What do you mean?"
Gangle's ribbons coiled tighter around her fingers.
"Nothing awful!" Gangle said quickly. "She kept asking it the same question, just to see if she could get it to give her a different answer. When it started getting confused, she looked absolutely delighted with herself."
Zooble slowly lowered their cards.
"That sounds familiar."
"It was just a joke," Gangle insisted, though her voice had grown less certain. "And the NPC wasn't real, so it's not as though she'd hurt anyone. But Pomni seemed to be enjoying the chaos a little too much."
Kinger's smile faded.
"Well," he said quietly, "that is rather curious."
Ragatha looked from one to the other, a growing unease settling over her features. "You don't think..." her fingers went still on the Caine Buck.
She stopped herself, unwilling to finish the thought.
Zooble did it for her.
"That she's acting like Jax?"
Ragatha hesitated, glancing down at her cards.
"Yesterday, during dinner, she ate spaghetti," she said, as if what she'd just revealed were evidence of a vast and deeply disturbing conspiracy.
"Yeah, soooo...?" Zooble asked, clearly missing the relevance.
"Pomni hates spaghetti!" Ragatha insisted. "You know who did like spaghetti? Jax."
Zooble stared at her for a moment, then slowly lowered their cards.
"The other day she called me 'Zoobie'," they said. "There's only one person who ever called me that."
Nobody answered immediately.
The name seemed to change the atmosphere in the room. All at once, the little things they'd been discussing felt considerably less insignificant.
"But that doesn't make any sense," Ragatha said at last. "She's Pomni. She's not going to start behaving like him just because she's been through something awful."
"I'm not saying she's deliberately trying to be him," Zooble replied. "I'm saying some of the things she's been doing are things Jax used to do. And we all know what happened when she got trapped inside his abstraction."
Gangle drew her ribbons close to herself.
"What if something happened to her while she was in there? What if... what if some of him got mixed up with her somehow?"
Her voice had dwindled almost to a whisper.
"What if she's turning into him?"
The question hung over the table.
Ragatha shook her head, but there was little conviction in the gesture. "We don't know that. It could be a side effect of the glitches. Or stress. Or something else entirely."
"Then we need to find out what's going on," Zooble said. "We should talk to Caine."
"Now, now." Kinger pushed his bucket back into place, his tone gentle but firm. "Let's not jump to conclusions before we've even spoken to Pomni. We don't know what she's experiencing, and I doubt she'd appreciate us discussing her as though she weren't one of our friends."
Ragatha gave him a grateful look.
"You're right. She deserves to be part of this conversation."
"Exactly," Kinger said, nodding. "We should ask her how she's feeling first. If there's something wrong, perhaps she can tell us more than we've managed to work out by staring at it from a distance."
Zooble sighed, rubbing a hand over their face.
"Fine. But if she starts grinning at me like that again, I'm blaming all of you."
Despite herself, Ragatha gave a small, nervous laugh.
"I'll go and talk to her," she said, rising from her chair. "I'll be gentle. I promise."
******
Pomni sat down heavily on the edge of her bed and pressed both hands against her face. Her heart was racing, and the lingering irritation was already giving way to a miserable confusion that made her want to cry.
What on earth had that been about?
She'd known Ragatha was trying to help. She'd known, even in the middle of the argument, that she was being unreasonable. Yet she'd reacted as though Ragatha had deliberately set out to provoke her, and she couldn't understand why.
Pomni drew a shaky breath, lowering her hands to stare at them.
She started thinking about the weirdness that had been occurring lately. She'd noticed it too, of course she had. It would have been strange not to.
She'd occasionally find herself thinking in ways she'd never thought before, acting in ways that were out of character, and she didn't know why, but it seemed strangely familiar.
Then there was the strange sensation right in her very core, just beneath her sternum, where she had once felt that odd little pulse. She couldn't exactly explain what it was, but it felt both like a foreign entity and like something that strangely belonged there.
Maybe she should talk to the others. At least then she wouldn't have to keep pretending she could make sense of all this on her own.
But what would she tell them? That she was glitching, that she kept losing her temper over nothing, that every so often she caught herself doing or saying something that felt oddly familiar, even though she couldn't remember ever behaving that way before?
Her thoughts drifted back over the past few days, searching for some moment when the strangeness had become more than just another rendering error. There had been plenty of odd incidents, most of which she'd tried to laugh off or forget. One in particular, though, kept coming back to her.
Gangle's campaign.
They'd been having a surprisingly good time with it. Even Pomni, who'd never been much of a role-player, had found herself getting caught up in the adventure. But during their last session, something had happened that she still couldn't explain.
They'd been trapped in a room with a spiked ceiling steadily descending towards the floor. While the others searched frantically for a way out, Pomni had found herself staring at the door, growing increasingly frustrated with the lock.
And then, without really thinking about it, she'd reached into her hammerspace.
Her mind at that moment had drifted back to when Jax had shown her how it worked, shortly after she arrived at the circus and had got herself locked out of her room.
Jax had been smug at first, amused by her misfortune, then had relented in favour of showing off, pulling out the jester’s room key with smug satisfaction.
She couldn’t help the gentle smile that came to her lips of the memory as he pulled her and out holding the first object she found.
A small brass key rested in her palm.
The others didn't know what to make of it, Gangle especially as she knew where the real key was, but congratulated her nonetheless.
The questions had continued long after they'd escaped the room, but Pomni hadn't been able to give them an answer.
She still couldn't.
A soft knock at the door pulled her back to the present.
"Pomni? It's me." A pause. "Can I come in? I won't fuss. I promise."
Despite everything, Pomni almost laughed. "Come in."
Ragatha slipped inside and hovered by the door with her hands clasped, as though uncertain whether she was permitted any further. She had clearly rehearsed something on the way over, and it clearly hadn't survived the walk.
"I'm sorry," she said at last. "About earlier. I get carried away. I just hate seeing you struggling and not being able to do anything about it."
"No, I'm the one who should be sorry." Pomni patted the bed beside her, and Ragatha sat. "You were being kind, and I bit your head off, and I don't know why. It's like... I'll think something, or say something, and it isn't quite mine. It feels like it ought to be, almost. Like I've heard it somewhere before."
Pomni felt the anger flicker up again as she said it, uncharacteristic and uninvited, and she forced it down with a long, drawn-out sigh. Ragatha, to her credit, didn't flinch.
"The others have noticed some things too," Ragatha said carefully. "We're all a little worried."
"I know." Pomni gave a small, tired laugh. "I’ve…been feeling off lately. Weird. Weirder, I mean. I just don't know what to do about it anymore."
"Then maybe we should tell Caine," said Ragatha gently. "All of it. Not just the glitches."
Pomni's stomach twisted. Although Caine had been making an effort to be better lately, she still had a hard time fully trusting their host, but she knew that nobody else - not even Kinger - would be able to help with her situation.
Okay," she relented nervously. "Yeah. Let's go."
******
The others were already waiting in the corridor outside Caine's office, doing a poor job of looking as though they hadn't been talking about her. Pomni opened her mouth to say something, an apology, perhaps, when the familiar distortion began at her fingertips.
The red fabric flickered into blue and back again, the colours stuttering out of sequence as tiny squares of corrupted pixels broke away from the edges. Pomni tried to rub the sensation away, but her fingers passed through a brief, translucent blur. There was no pain, only a faint, distant tingle, and somehow that was worse.
She sucked in a breath and stopped dead.
"Guys?" she called, her voice catching as the distortion spread. "Could someone—?"
The others turned at once, and the sight of the glitch immediately erased whatever they might have been about to say.
"Pomni!" Ragatha gripped her arm. "What's happening?"
"I don't know!" Pomni held her hands out in front of her, watching in growing alarm as the colours continued to flicker. "It just started!"
The red and blue stuttered again, and for a fraction of a second, a third colour flashed across the fabric: a warm, unmistakable yellow.
Ragatha's eyes widened.
"That's—"
"I know," Zooble interrupted, their voice suddenly much more serious. "We need Caine. Now."
Gangle was already hurrying towards the office. "Caine! We need you!"
The door swung open before she could knock, revealing the ringmaster hovering behind his desk, a cluster of glowing windows floating around him.
"What's all this, my little bundles of existential distress?" Caine exclaimed, his usual showman's grin faltering when he saw Pomni's hands. "Oh! Another rendering error? Well, let's have a look at that, shall we? In, in, quickly, before the whole corridor starts staring!"
He swept an arm towards the room, and the group shuffled inside in a ragged line, Ragatha steering Pomni by the elbow and Kinger very nearly tripping on the rug. Zooble hung back by the doorway with their arms folded, while Gangle hovered at Pomni's shoulder. The office had clearly rearranged itself since anyone had last seen it: a desk piled with notebooks, a ring of mismatched armchairs, and a ceiling of drifting screens. Caine bustled around his desk and planted himself in front of Pomni, gloved hands hovering.
The yellow flashed again and Caine’s eyes widened, dropping his theatrical smile as he suddenly went very still as he noticed the shocking familiarity of the colour.
#f3dc77 That belongs with Jax’s colour palette!
Pomni watched Caine’s reaction with concern, her stomach knotting.
"Can you please just fix it?"
Caine shook his head, as if snapping himself out of the trance he was in before answering "Of course, of course! No need to panic!" Caine's voice took on a reassuring lilt, although his eyes remained fixed on her hands. "It's simply a little glitch in the rendering layer. Nothing to worry about!"
He extended both hands towards her, fingers spread in an elaborate gesture that would have looked wonderfully impressive to anyone watching. To the humans, it appeared as though he were preparing to perform some sort of magic, but the movement was little more than theatrics; the real work had already begun.
Beneath the familiar exterior, Caine's code reached out and established a connection with Pomni's avatar, threading itself through the underlying architecture at a speed no human mind could hope to follow. The world around him might have appeared unchanged, but his awareness had shifted into a far more intricate layer of the Circus, where the familiar shapes and colours of Pomni's gloves resolved into streams of data, each line revealing the precise structure of the avatar and the errors currently disrupting it.
There were more than he had expected.
Caine isolated the affected sections, tracing the corrupted rendering instructions back through the relevant layers of her avatar's code before deploying a series of corrective algorithms. The patches began working almost immediately, repairing the damaged instructions and restoring the proper colour values, while he monitored the process to ensure the interference hadn't spread any further.
Only when the repairs were complete did he draw himself back into the performance.
SNAP!
The sound rang out across the room, entirely unnecessary to the process that had just taken place, but wonderfully satisfying all the same. Pomni's gloves flickered one final time, the yellow breaking apart into a brief scattering of digital artefacts before her familiar colours settled back into place.
She turned her hands over, flexing her fingers as though she expected them to change again.
"There we are!" Caine announced, sweeping his arms outwards with a flourish. "All fixed!"
But his smile remained fixed a fraction longer than it should have, and his gaze lingered on Pomni's gloves before he finally looked away.
Pomni let out a breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding. "Thanks."
"Think nothing of it! Your friendly neighbourhood ringmaster is always on hand to deal with those pesky little technical hiccups!"
"Caine," Ragatha began, stepping forwards before he could disappear into another puff of smoke. "There's actually something else we wanted to talk to you about. It's not just the glitches. We've noticed some strange things about Pomni's behaviour, and—"
"Ah, yes! Well, I shall certainly be looking into the matter!" Caine interrupted, already waving another diagnostic window into existence. "In fact, I believe it's high time we conducted a much more thorough examination of our little friend's avatar. A deep scan should help us identify the root cause of these persistent rendering errors, and perhaps uncover any other irregularities that might be lurking beneath the surface!"
Zooble frowned. "That's what we were trying to tell you. There are other things going on, and we think they're connected to—"
"Splendid! Then it's fortunate that I'm already on the case!" Caine clapped his hands together, producing a shower of tiny stars that promptly fizzled out against the floor. "No need to worry, my fair maidens - and Zooble! I have initiated a deep scan, and with any luck we'll soon have answers to all these pesky little mysteries!"
"But Caine, we need to tell you about—"
"ZIPITYBAP!"
Caine held out a hand -which had grown to enormous size- in front of their faces to stop any further questioning, thankfully not resorting to zipping up anybody's mouth - or lack of mouth- this time.
"I have important work to do, and I mustn't be disturbed while I conduct my highly sophisticated technical investigations! So, if you'll excuse me—"
He snapped his fingers, and the office door swung open behind them. Before anyone could protest, an invisible force gently but firmly ushered the group backwards, over the threshold and into the corridor, while Caine retreated deeper into his office.
The door slammed shut.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Zooble stared at the closed door, their mouth hanging open.
"Did he just kick us out?"
"I think he was trying to reassure us," Ragatha offered weakly.
"He threw us into the corridor!"
"Well, yes, but—"
"He literally shouted a nonsense word at us and threw us out!"
Gangle's comedy mask tilted towards the door. "He did say he was going to run a deep scan."
"That's not the point!" Zooble threw their hands up. "We were trying to tell him about all the other weird things Pomni's been doing, and he didn't even let us finish!"
Pomni stood a little apart from them, her hands clasped tightly together. The argument with Ragatha still sat heavily in her chest, and the glitch had left her feeling shaken and exhausted. She wanted to apologise for what she'd said earlier, but the words seemed to have become lodged somewhere behind her teeth.
Ragatha noticed her hesitation and offered her a small, reassuring smile.
"We'll talk about it later, okay? Right now, let's just give Caine a chance to figure out what's going on."
Pomni nodded, although she wasn't entirely convinced that Caine would be able to explain any of it.
Kinger, who had been unusually quiet throughout the exchange, peered thoughtfully at the closed door.
"Well, I suppose he's handling it," he said at last. "I'll drop by later, once he's finished his diagnostics, just to make sure everything's all right."
Zooble gave him a sceptical look. "Good luck getting past the door."
"Oh, I'll knock first."
"That's not what I meant."
But Kinger had already wandered away, apparently satisfied with his plan, leaving the others to exchange a collection of uncertain glances.
Behind the closed door, the faint glow of diagnostic displays flickered across the walls of Caine's office.
******
Caine watched the diagnostic window as the system worked its way through Pomni's data, an assortment of technical readouts updating in rapid succession while the scan progressed.
Truthfully, he wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Nothing quite like this had ever occurred within his Circus before, and while he was more than familiar with the occasional glitch or malfunction, Pomni's situation was proving rather more difficult to account for.
There had been an incident in the Circus's early days when two of its inhabitants had somehow ended up fused together after a particularly nasty malfunction in the avatar matrix. Untangling their respective code structures had been an absolute nightmare, requiring hours of painstaking work to separate the overlapping data and restore both avatars to their original configurations. It had been messy, complicated and thoroughly unpleasant for everyone involved.
But once the repairs were complete, that had been the end of it. Both avatars had returned to normal, and there had been no lingering effects, no unexplained alterations to their code, nothing to suggest that the incident had left anything behind.
This was different.
The problem wasn't that Pomni had suffered a malfunction. It was that she'd been in contact with an abstraction.
Abstractions were inherently unstable, their corrupted code capable of contaminating anything it came into contact with. Caine had never fully understood what caused the process in the first place, and his attempts to investigate it had yielded little more than a collection of increasingly frustrating errors. Even trying to read an abstracted avatar's files could cause his own systems to malfunction, sometimes triggering cascading errors throughout the Circus itself.
Consequently, he'd long since abandoned any attempts to examine them directly, instead isolating the affected data within a separate partition of his hard drives, where it could be contained without putting the rest of his systems at risk.
It was hardly an ideal solution, but it was the only one he'd found that worked consistently.
Why anyone would willingly expose themselves to an abstraction, let alone remain in prolonged contact with one, was quite beyond him.
Caine turned his attention back to the diagnostic window, watching the progress bar inch forwards as lines of code flickered across the display. The program was performing an advanced integrity check, examining the structure of Pomni's avatar and mind files for signs of corruption, instability or unauthorised alterations.
So far, the results were reassuringly ordinary.
There was some minor instability, but nothing particularly alarming. Given the glitches she'd been experiencing lately, he would have been more surprised if the scan had returned a completely clean bill of health.
Curious, certainly, but hardly cause for concern. He tried, very hard, not to think about the yellow.
A new section of the diagnostic window expanded, displaying the latest results.
═══════════════════════════════════════
ADVANCED INTEGRITY DIAGNOSTIC
TARGET_ID: POMNI // AVATAR_FILE_01
SCAN PROGRESS: #########-------- 57% COMPLETE
CORE_INTEGRITY: 100%
MEMORY_STRUCTURE: STABLE
AVATAR_STABILITY: 99.98%
ABSTRACTION_RISK: NEGLIGIBLE
RENDERING ERRORS: 0
CORRECTIVE PATCHES: ACTIVE
PATCH INTEGRITY: 100%
AVATAR FILE DISCREPANCY FROM ORIGINAL: 14%
═══════════════════════════════════════
Caine's eyes snagged on the zero beside RENDERING ERRORS.
He had spent the best part of a week patching rendering errors. According to the scan, there weren't any.
Then his eyes settled on the final line.
He read it again.
Discrepancy?
He leaned closer to the display, his grin faltering slightly as he tried to make sense of the result. Pomni's avatar looked exactly as it always had, and the scan had found no significant instability in her core structure. There were no rendering errors, no evidence of ongoing corruption, and nothing to suggest that her recent glitches had caused any lasting damage.
So what, precisely, was it measuring?
Fourteen per cent deviation from the original file... What could possibly account for a discrepancy that large without affecting the integrity of the avatar itself?
He was still turning the question over in his mind when another notification appeared.
FOREIGN DATA: DETECTED
Caine went very still.
"Foreign data?"
The words escaped him before he could stop them. With a flick of his wrist, he summoned a second window alongside the diagnostic readout, bringing up the directory structure that made up Pomni's codebase.
If something had been introduced into her files without authorisation, then surely it would leave some trace of its presence. A corrupted sector, an unexpected alteration to an existing file, perhaps even a fragment of improperly formatted code. Whatever the explanation, there had to be something he could identify.
He began working his way through the directory tree, opening one folder after another as he searched for anything that didn't belong. The deeper he went, the more extensive the structure became, branching into layers of subfolders and nested directories that contained everything from the architecture of Pomni's avatar to the data governing her interactions with the Circus.
Most of it was perfectly ordinary.
Then he found something that wasn't.
Buried beneath several layers of otherwise unremarkable directories was a file that didn't appear to correspond to any recognised system process. Its name flickered erratically across the screen, the characters rearranging themselves in rapid, stuttering bursts. Every time Caine thought he had managed to read it, the title changed again, occasionally accompanied by a different file extension as though the system couldn't decide what kind of data it was supposed to contain.
He stared at it.
What on earth are you?
The file's behaviour was unlike anything he'd encountered before. It wasn't simply displaying corrupted text; its name appeared to be changing in real time, shifting between different configurations without any discernible pattern.
Caine opened the file properties, expecting to find some indication of its origin or function.
Instead, he was greeted by a bewildering collection of malformed metadata and nonsensical values. Most of the information was unreadable, either because the data itself was corrupted or because the system couldn't interpret its structure.
He frowned and scrolled further down.
There. At least one field was displaying a recognisable value.
FILE SIZE: CALCULATING...
The number beside it flickered, updated, and then increased.
Caine blinked.
A moment later, it increased again.
He glanced towards the original diagnostic window, where the scan was still running in the background. A new result had appeared beneath the previous readings.
AVATAR FILE DISCREPANCY FROM ORIGINAL: 15%
Caine looked from one window to the other.
Huh?
He checked the file size again.
It had increased.
Not by much, but enough that there was no mistaking it. The file was getting bigger, accumulating data even as he watched it, and the discrepancy in Pomni's avatar was growing alongside it.
For several seconds, Caine could only stare at the two readouts, his mind racing through possible explanations that seemed to become less convincing with every passing moment.
A corrupted file shouldn't behave like this. Neither should a rendering error, or a damaged section of avatar code. Even if the data had somehow survived contact with an abstraction, it should have stabilised once the initial corruption had been repaired.
Unless the file wasn't corrupted at all.
The thought surfaced unbidden, and Caine immediately dismissed it. Of course it was corrupted. What else could it possibly be?
And yet, the file continued to grow.
What is going on?!