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Several pairs of eyes look dubiously down at the little creatures twitching sporadically on the stage. They almost look like small sheep, except they actually look nothing like sheep at all. They have six legs instead of four, their heads are shaped more like triangles than something round, and whatever static “cloud” writhing around their bodies most definitely isn’t wool, and yet there is something oddly “sheep” about them.
“They look…kinda cute?” Gangle offers.
Jax snorts. “That’s one way to describe them.”
“What are they?” Zooble asks.
“I’m glad you asked, Zooble! These adorable little critters are called Zizzles!” Caine says, opening his arms to display the strange creatures with a flourish. “Your adventure for today is to round them up!”
“Oh, like shepherds!” Kinger says pleasantly.
Caine nods. “Yes, exactly! Whoever collects the most Zizzles at the end will win a WONDERFUL PRIZE!”
That seems to interest the others—at least they now have more of an incentive to do this silly task—but Pomni can’t help but be a bit nervous. The Zizzles, at least in her opinion, appear to be prototype creatures, if she’s being honest. Their bodies keep glitching every once and awhile, sometimes so badly that their limbs occasionally will fully detach from their bodies before coming back together again. She’s come to learn that Caine gets so excited to share new creations that he doesn’t ever really bother to test them first to make sure they’re safe. She makes sure to point this out, saying, “They don’t look, umm…very stable…”
They all look at the Zizzles again. One of them is no-clipping into the stage. Another’s head is slowly but surely floating away from its body. And another appears to be stuck in its Default Pose.
But then Caine snaps his fingers, and they go back into perfect position, like nothing is wrong at all. “They’re just a bit jittery, but DON’T WORRY, MY DEAR! They’re completely harmless!”
Pomni bites her lip, but she doesn’t say anything in response. She’s choosing to trust Caine.
“How exactly do we ‘round them up’?” Ragatha asks.
“That’s for you to find out, Ragatha!” Caine answers. “It’s up to you to figure out what attracts these little guys and what they like to get them to follow you around! Think of it like a learning experience! Do you all understand?”
They all nod.
“Now… FLY, MY PRETTIES!” Caine bellows. “A little real-life fiction joke I just did there. Hehe.” He waves his arms, and the herd of Zizzles scatter throughout the Tent. “Next, all of you! Go now! I believe in you!”
The group breaks, and they all head off in different directions to complete the adventure.
Pomni creeps slowly through the looming towers of shapes that are scattered around the area. The Tent is essentially what a kindergartener’s idea of a metropolis is, and she will never fully digest just how weird this place is. It makes her head hurt to try and process it.
She turns a corner and finds a Zizzle standing in between a large red arch. It’s pressing its sharp-angled “snout” into the pillar, like it’s trying to eat it, despite it not having a mouth. Pomni approaches slowly, holding her hands out in a calming gesture, afraid that the creature might try to run or charge at her.
“Umm… Hey there, little guy,” she says, trying to keep her voice gentle.
The Zizzle turns its head to her. One of its eyes is the shape of a rhombus, while the other is in the shape of a trapezoid, but both of its vibrating pupils are parallelograms. Even when standing still, the Zizzle is quaking ever so slightly, causing it to make a low, humming frequency.
“Hi,” Pomni says. “Do you maybe wanna come with me? I won’t hurt you.”
The Zizzle blinks at her slowly (because it apparently has eyelids and is able to do that).
Pomni tilts her head ever so slightly, causing the bells on the end of her hat to jingle softly. “Please?”
The Zizzle also tilts its head. Pomni realizes that it isn’t looking at her but rather at her hat. More specifically, the bells.
Reaching back, Pomni gives one of the bells a little jingle. The Zizzle perks up and makes a weird, static churring sound, like it’s trying to replicate the noise.
“Do you like this?” Pomni asks. She jingles the bell again, and the Zizzle responds with the same noise as before.
She takes a step back, and the Zizzle takes a step forward.
She starts to walk away, and the Zizzle follows.
Realizing that she’s found a way to round up the Zizzles, Pomni feels a little bit better about this adventure. She hasn’t been very good at just about all of them she’s gone through so far, always turning up last in those that are meant to be a competition and just barely completely those that aren’t. But this gives her hope that she isn’t a complete and utter failure at everything.
In the distance, she hears Kinger give a boisterous, successful laugh, making her believe he’s caught a Zizzle of his own. A second later, there’s a loud scream slowly growing louder…and louder…and louder…until a Zizzle sprints by. Jax is hanging onto one of its back legs and getting dragged across the floor, yelling as he goes. Pomni and her Zizzle stop and stare, watching as he’s hauled out of sight, his cries slowly fading away.
Pomni and her Zizzle share a look. The Zizzle’s trapezoid eye slowly starts to float off of its face. Pomni shakes her head and proceeds through the Tent.
After about five minutes of searching, she finds another Zizzle. This one is perched atop a tower of colorful blocks that looks like it was put together by someone with no understanding of physics, let alone architecture. Every shape is twisted and turned to form a whole variety of things that look like they shouldn’t make sense or stack up as perfectly and stably as they seem to be. She isn’t even sure how the Zizzle managed to get on top of the tower.
“Hey!” Pomni calls up to it.
The Zizzle looks down at her and tilts its head like it doesn’t quite understand what Pomni is saying to it. Then, it lets out a low-pitched, buzzing hum that quickly descends into just a static hiss.
“Uhhh…” Pomni blinks for a moment. “Think you can come down from there please?”
The Zizzle stares at her.
Looks like she’ll need to employ the help of her trusty bells again. Finally, they come in handy and aren’t just an annoying sound that follows her around wherever she goes!
Pomni reaches back and jingles one of the bells on her hat. Similar to the first Zizzle, the one on the tower perks up when it hears the sound.
“Come on down from there,” Pomni says. “I won’t hurt you, I promise!”
The Zizzle seems to consider what she’s saying. The enticing tinkle of the bell seems to be too alluring for the little creature, and it leaps down from the tower.
Pomni is a bit nervous about it jumping down from such a height, but it manages to land on all of its legs. And when it does, there’s this strange cracking sound, almost like bone crunching, and a pixel breaks off from one of its “hooves.”
The pixel shoots straight into Pomni’s left eye.
The pain hits her instantly.
It’s like someone has just poised a nail over her pupil and hammered it right into her eyeball. Her entire face erupts in this hot, electrical agony, encompassing her whole head, but it’s at its worst at her left eye socket. A sharp cry is drawn forth from her lips, and with all of the grace of an Olympic gymnast who had just learned that her parents passed in a tragic explosion, she stumbles back and trips over her own two feet in her panic, sending her crumpling to the floor in a twitching ball of torture.
It feels as though a squadron of angry wasps has just declared war within the confines of her eye socket, their stingers injecting liquid flames that ignite her nerves with every movement. Blinking is like dragging her cornea over a valley of needles, and she can feel her eyelid catch on something every time it flutters, increasing the sensation. Something hot and wet bubbles out of her eye, and she knows it isn’t just tears.
Pomni writhes on the ground, making the sound a cat would make when it gets run over by a monster truck. She’s rubbing desperately at her face, but that’s just making everything ten times worse because it’s pushing it in deeper.
The pixel.
She can feel it in there, inside of her eyeball, a sharp, geometric thing shaped like pure suffering. It’s moving, shifting like it’s trying to dig its way out to the other side. Its vibrations fill her skull with a grating buzzing sound. The sensation this brings forth is in a dimension she didn’t even know existed, and her brain simply cannot handle it.
When her body stops having a mini seizure, Pomni lays prone on the ground, struggling to breathe. One of her hands is cupping her left eye. With the other, she pushes herself up slightly so she can look around. She doesn’t see either of the Zizzles anywhere; the sound of her shrieking must have scared them off.
She takes another moment to breathe. Breathing through her mouth is like throwing gasoline onto an electrical fire, but breathing through her nose is worse. Her entire face has become hypersensitive to every little sensation, even ones that have nothing to do with her optic functions.
She whimpers pathetically. Her hands go back to pawing at her face, hoping to help herself, and she accidentally presses a bit too hard, causing the pixel to slide in further. Too far.
Agony.
Hot, blinding, voltaic.
The static hiss of the pixel and the crackle of electricity from the pain collide, and the whole world recedes, replaced by this endless succession of all-consuming suffering. She cannot see, cannot think. But she is aware. Aware of this great, gaping maw of agony, more surreal than even the Void. She has no control, no say, no choice. She is merely a vessel with the simple existence to house this torture.
This level of hell isn’t right. Even when her entire presence has shrunk down to a particle made for the purpose of being tormented, Pomni knows this. She knows there should be limits, a point when she blacks out or dies. Death would be preferable, honestly.
But the pain continues.
It continues, and it continues, and it will continue for all eternity, as if it has been designed to exist outside of time.
There is no end.
Slowly, perception comes back to Pomni in pieces. Her ears are ringing like the aftermath of a concussive blast, and everything around her is a fuzzy mass of shapes and colors that are only broken up by the tiny pinpricks of light that manage to squeeze their way through the mess.
She’s spasming on the floor, now having a full-on screaming, crying meltdown, and the pixel is still in her eyeball.
It’s pressing into her optic nerve.
She can feel the pixel grinding against it, causing her eye to twitch, and her pupil to expand. The purpose of the optic nerve is to send messages to the brain to create images, and the images that are being crafted are all bloody red pictures of pain, pain, PAIN!
And it just hurts. So, so much. There’s no stopping it. No pain is too great, no sound too loud, no sight too bright. All of her senses are being violated. She’s having a sensory overload, overstimulated by the torture her face is undergoing, and she cannot breathe.
Her brain is getting scrambled, her thoughts are losing the ability to find any logic. Everything is just a burning hot mess of pain.
There’s a sickening, sloshing sensation in her stomach, and she vomits. Thick, black, viscous fluid pours out from her quivering lips, splashing onto her body, but she’s so focused on the pain in her eye that she can’t even think about how disgusted and humiliated she should be about throwing up on herself.
The pixel twists and writhes, tearing into the bundle of oversensitive nerves in her eyeball. Harsh and abrasive, it grinds like sandpaper rubbing over her sclera. Tears and blood pour down her cheeks in a warm, pulpy river.
Her left eye starts to twitch. No- spasm. It’s practically vibrating, and the pressure inside is unbearable. It’s like there’s a toothpick resting just behind it, and it’s being slammed into it over and over again.
She can’t take this anymore.
She needs to get it out.
Pomni’s hands fly to her face. There’s a small tear in the surface of her eye that the pixel created when it went into her, and she sticks her middle finger into it, desperately feeling around. The mass of her eyeball is forced to expand, stretching unnaturally around the intruding digit, and the pain is something malignant and exquisite.
Her other hand grabs tightly at her face, scratching first, then tearing. Her nails sink into soft flesh and begin to shuck it off. Her fingers hook on her eye socket and pull, and a thick swath of skin is ripped away.
Blood and tears and vitreous humor gush free, staining her face. Her middle finger twists and prods the inside of her eyeball, searching for the offending pixel. She’s too consumed in a frenzy to realize she’s doing much more damage to herself than the pixel ever did.
She can barely be considered a person anymore. Just an animal driven mad by pain.
She can feel the sharp edge of the pixel just at the end of her fingertip, but she can’t reach it. Even when she pushes her finger in deeper, she still can’t reach it. The pixel is buried too far in her nerve endings for her to be able to pull it out.
A choked sob strangles out from Pomni’s bile-burned throat. Her free hand is still clawing viciously at the skin around her left eye socket, ripping her face to pieces. Angry red gouges mar whatever is left of the skin, and the underlying tissue underneath has been exposed in several places. She must surely look like she’s had her head brutally mangled by the slobbering jaws of a hungry dog.
She digs her fingers into her eyelid and pushes back the skin, trying to give herself more room to reach into her eyeball. The flesh stretches, her veins and capillaries straining, and a sudden spout of blood shoots out and splatters across the floor. It doesn’t help at all.
With one finger wedged inside of her eyeball, Pomni rocks back and forth on her knees, whimpering and mewling. She’s in pure shock, her sane mind gone. All that’s left is agony.
That’s all she is now. A mass of pain.
She isn’t even screaming at this point. She isn’t even thinking. Her entire existence has been reduced to this pain. She isn’t Pomni, she isn’t a person anymore. Just pain. Agonizing pain.
She has reached her absolute limit, and all she can hear is that damn, incessant buzzing like a bee trapped inside of her skull. Her hands are still digging, clawing and clawing, but when they find nothing beyond more flesh and blood, that only makes her more distressed.
The pixel, however, seems to be having the time of its life. It rolls around in there, digging deep into the nerve endings and sending them into overdrive. It’s a game of sadistic tag. She tries to reach it, it retreats. She pulls back ever so slightly, it leaps right back in. She can’t win.
It’s not coming out.
She pulls her middle finger free with a wet popping sound, like she’s pried loose something sticky with a sharp tool. Her eyeball feels slightly deflated from being punctured and is leaking blood and aqueous fluid everywhere.
And the pixel continues to torture her.
She can’t stand this. She won’t live with this. She won’t.
She needs to do the unthinkable, the one idea that is so horrifying that it can’t even be phrased, thought, or even considered without being able to fully understand the consequences.
But at this point, she’s far beyond the point of any sort of logic.
She just wants the pain to go away.
And she’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.
Without any hesitation, she reaches up her hand and jams her fingers into her eye.
Her body reacts with all of the horror and disgust it’s able to. Hot blood wells up, and the scream that exits her lips is enough to shatter glass and send her recoiling backwards, slamming into the side of a tower of large colorful blocks. All of her muscles are shocked into wild spasms, and she vomits again, but not even this can stop the momentum of her actions, and she curls her fingers and rips her eyeball out of her face.
It comes out much easier than she expected. She’s had more difficulty squeezing out the last of some toothpaste than gouging out her own eye. She’s sure there’s some form of irony there, but at the moment, it’s lost on her.
Her eyeball is hanging from a long thread of flesh, so she pulls on that, too, until it snaps off and detaches, and what comes out is something thick and pulpy and gooey. Some kind of substance spills from her now-empty eye socket, and for a moment she wonders if she’s just dragged her brain out from her skull.
Her hands tremble, stained in blood. She’s covered in her own vomit, blood, and eye fluid. Her eyeball falls out of her grasp and rolls across the ground. It stares blankly into infinity, the empty gaze of a soulless husk.
Pomni is in a daze. Her body and mind have gone into shock. She looks down at her shaking fingers, drenched in her own gore, and she can barely process that it’s hers.
All of a sudden, there is a shout, “I found her!” Is that…Kinger?
And then, she hears footsteps approaching.
There are several gasps from behind, and she knows the blood and vomit everywhere has been noticed—but they haven’t seen the worst of it yet. From the way she’s positioned against the block tower, her back is turned to them, shielding the horror of her face. She can’t find the energy to move. She’s so woozy all of a sudden…
“What the hell happened here?” That’s Zooble.
“D-do you guys see… I-is that…” That’s Gangle. Is she talking about Pomni’s eyeball? Because it’s surely in view, even if her empty eye socket isn’t.
“What the f[@#$] did she do?” That’s Jax.
“Pomni?” That’s Ragatha. Her voice is easier to focus on, lacking any judgment or scorn or disgust, even if there is definitely some underlying worry and fear in her tone. “Sweetie? Are you…alright?”
Pomni doesn’t answer. She just leans against the tower of blocks, staring off into the void. Did she pull out her tongue, too, when she removed her eyeball?
“Sweetie, can you understand us?” Ragatha’s voice is soothing and calming, like a mother speaking to her child. It draws Pomni’s attention, cutting through some of her delirium just enough to get her to react.
Pomni slowly, hesitantly turns her head to look at the others.
The sight causes every single one of them to recoil.
They see her jester outfit, stained black with her own vomit; they see her face, half of it torn off by her own hands; and they see her left eye socket, empty and oozing fluids.
And, in return, Pomni sees their expressions go from concerned, to horrified, to disgusted, and then back to horrified. Gangle fully runs away to escape the sight of her, while Zooble can’t seem to look away. Jax turns to the side with a gag. Kinger is shaking, his hands outstretched like he wants to do something to help, but he doesn’t know how to make it better. Ragatha is petrified, one hand pressed to her mouth in horror.
For a moment, none of them move. None of them speak. They all just absorb the nightmarish scene painted in blood and bile and eye fluid in front of them.
And then, Ragatha is the first to break the silence: “Sweetie, oh my god— Pomni, what— what happened? You’re— Oh god, Pomni, are you okay? Your face— y-your eye— ” She’s rambling, tripping over her words, not seeming to grasp the sheer magnitude of Pomni’s mutilation.
Slowly, Ragatha starts to go toward her. She moves tentatively, like she’s treading over an active minefield. Once she’s close enough, she kneels down in front of Pomni, but she doesn’t touch. Not yet.
Ragatha’s mouth opens, then closes, and then opens again. She finally puts her hand on Pomni’s shoulder, and Pomni flinches. She’s incredibly, painfully sensitive right now—everything feels like a thousand needles, a thousand razor blades, a thousand pixels all slashing and digging into her skin.
When Ragatha speaks, it isn’t to Pomni. She turns her head and addresses the others, all of them still gawking, “Someone go find Caine. Now. ”
Kinger dashes off to do as she said.
Finally, one thought surfaces in Pomni’s mind. It’s the only thought she’s capable of having in the moment because everything else is obscured by delirium and confusion.
But this thought is clear. It is distinct. It is her last request.
“Help me.”
And then, she’s swallowed by a black hole of pain, and she passes out.
When Pomni wakes up, she’s met with darkness, and it makes her wonder if she’s really awake at all. She can feel her eyelids fluttering, so her eyes are definitely open, but she can’t see anything.
What?
There is pain. Pain slamming into her skull over and over again, like someone is smashing her head with a mallet. She groans, then whimpers.
She feels something tight bound around the left side of her face. Her hands are shaking when she lifts them up, and her arms are very heavy, as though they’re made of iron. Before she can make contact with whatever is on her face, someone’s hands press her wrists down, and she flinches, afraid. Someone else is here.
“Hey, hey,” murmurs a gentle voice. “Don’t touch that.”
“R-Ragatha?” Pomni croaks. Her throat hurts, and her mouth tastes like something curled up and died in it.
“Yes, Pomni, it’s me,” Ragatha replies. “It’s just me. It’s alright. You’re safe. Calm down.”
“What’s happening?” Pomni asks. Her brain is muddled, and she’s so confused. Her face feels like it’s just been shaved clean of all the skin. “Why can’t I—?”
“Pomni…do you remember what happened?” Ragatha asks. “What you…did?”
Pomni pauses, thinks about it…and then it comes to her.
She remembers.
She remembers the pain, the agony, the desperation…and the pixel.
She remembers losing control. She remembers tearing the flesh off of her face. She remembers ripping out her eye with her bare hands.
She remembers the blood and bile and tears spilling out around her while she screamed in pain.
“O-oh god… Oh f[@#$]…” Her hands start to shake again, the only parts of her body she can move. Her eyes— eye stings, and she thinks she’s starting to tear up under whatever is wrapped around her face.
“I—I had to— I didn’t have a choice— It was the only— I had to—” She trails off. Why did she do that? Why wasn’t she able to think of literally any other solution?
Pomni is overwhelmed with a wave of guilt and shame, and she starts to break down, her body wracking with silent sobs. Crying hurts, like her face is being carved out with hot iron tools, and that just makes her cry more.
She hears Ragatha shift closer to her- Pomni doesn’t even know where they are, but by the softness her body is lying upon, she thinks she’s in a bed. Maybe in her bedroom? That she cannot tell with her lack of vision, and the fact that she can no longer see only adds to her terror.
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Ragatha asks, and when Pomni nods, she sets a hand on Pomni’s back, rubbing softly. “It’s going to be okay, sweetie. Caine was able to fix you. It’s just...going to take some time for your ‘code’ to mend itself.”
Those words make Pomni’s panic attack stutter to a halt. It’s only then that she notices this weird “buzzing” sensation in the left side of her head, like her skin is made of static. It feels like little ants are slowly rebuilding her mutilated face.
“Wh-what…?” she mumbles.
“I know, it feels a little weird,” Ragatha says. “But in a few days, you’ll be all better. You just have to give yourself time to heal. You’re going to be alright, I promise.”
Pomni gives a small nod in response. She leans her head back against what she believes is a pillow and tries to breathe steadily enough to calm her racing heart.
And somewhere, in some dark corner of the world, the pixel is laughing.