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Pomni couldn’t remember the last time she was so relieved to get off her feet.
With their adventure for the day done, the group had reconvened at one of the few furnished areas in the circus, both to share their halves of the story and, in Pomni’s and Kinger’s cases, to try and relax after the harrowing events of the manor. Well, mostly Pomni’s case. Kinger didn’t seem to remember enough of what happened to be exhausted by it.
As she sat on the sofa and let her digital muscles rest, Jax broke the silence, as he did irritatingly often. “You know, I could go for a bite to eat.” He paused for a moment, glaring at Ragatha before continuing the thought. “Especially considering I didn’t get any of those fancy cakes and tea at the mansion.”
“Well, what else were we supposed to do? You kept vacuuming up all the NPC’s! Not to mention what you did to Kinger and Pomni.” Her fists moved to her hips, meeting his glare threefold. “How are we supposed to trust you when you just do stuff like that? Someone could have really gotten hurt!”
“Uh, actually…” Pomni rose to her feet, awkwardly clasping her hands in front of her. “I was hoping maybe we could try that, breath holding thing again?”
Jax, as one would expect, rolled his eyes and crossed his arms in mild annoyance. “Didn’t we already do that today?”
“Yyyeah…” Ragatha was hesitant to agree with Jax on /anything/, but still found herself needing to. “We already found out what happens, so why would you want to do it again, Pomni?”
The girl’s gaze dropped. She couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious about the request, despite having reasoning for it. “Well, being able to hold my breath came in handy back at that mansion, but even then, I wouldn’t have made it if Kinger wasn’t there. If this is apparently going to be a useful skill here, then maybe I should practice it more, right?”
“That does make sense. I think.” Kinger agreed, though having Kinger agree with someone wasn’t usually a point in their favor.
“Well… alright.” She still seemed lukewarm on the idea, but Ragatha still put on her best encouraging smile. “In that case, we’ll all be cheering you on. Right guys?”
Gangle nodded a few times, her freshly replaced comedy mask visibly loose on her face. “You already do better than me, so I bet with some practice, you’ll be able to go for a real long time.”
“I just wanna see how fast she can change colors,” Jax joked, followed rapidly by Zooble punching him in the arm and prompting a soft ‘ow’.
With a soft preparatory exhale, Pomni nodded, closing her eyes to settle her nerves. “Alright then… here I go.”
After a few moments of preparation, her mouth opened wide, taking in the deepest inhale she could manage before sealing her lips to trap it inside. Only afterwards did her eyes open again, glancing around with a slightly nervous gaze, already anxious about the pain that was going to inevitably set in. Ragatha, of course, picked up on that rather quickly, and stepped forward to place a felt hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, don’t worry. You’re going to do great!” Her other hand swung across her chest reassuringly, and somehow, that was enough to reinforce Pomni’s determination… although just as she predicted, her torso was already starting to throb.
“There’s the blue,” Jax said in a low voice, amusement rising in his words. Ragatha took a step back in response, not wanting her presence to throw off the jester’s concentration.
Just as her best friend’s words reinforced Pomni’s resolve, wanting to deny Jax the pleasure of her failure did much of the same, making her purse her lips tighter to prevent any leaks. Her fists clenched, arms straight at her sides as she forced herself to hold it in, despite the twinges of fire in her lungs and the tightness of her inflating cheeks.
“And the red,” Gangle continued, her voice noticeably more concerned than that of the rabbit, that being holding any concern at all. Still, she put a soft smile on. “You’re doing great.”
Despite the kind words, it was still a challenge to keep herself composed against the growing pains. The quivers of her chest were becoming both more frequent and more noticeable, and she could feel her cheeks expanding, holding in all the air her body was trying to exhale. She held fast until the first violent convulsion made her noticeably jolt forward, hand moving to her chest as if to soothe the demon trying to break out of it.
Kinger, leaning in, examined the girl’s face with both eyes wide, needing to see it in detail before making his observation. “Oh, I think I saw a new color!”
“That was blue,” Zooble said with audible annoyance.
Pomni’s concentration was already waning, and the chatter from the peanut gallery was doing very little to help with that. Her chest trembled, desperately trying to exhale her stale oxygen through pursed lips, lungs screaming at her to take in a refill and quench the fire. She felt like she was going to die… but she couldn’t. All she had to do was keep reminding herself of that, and she’d be fine. Hopefully.
Ragatha, hand over where her heart would be, spoke with an audible tone of worry. “Hey, you can stop if you need to, Pomni. You don’t need to push yourself that much.”
“Oh don’t listen to her,” Jax was quick to follow up. “Keep going. You’re almost at your record.”
Zooble looked over, arching a disbelieving eyebrow. “You’ve been counting?”
“No.” He shrugged, grinning. “But it’s gotta be close, right?”
Pomni gently shook her head, eyes clenched shut as she tried to fight back the urges of her body. It was becoming increasingly obvious to her, though, that this was a losing battle. Her hand clamped over her mouth to try to keep it all in, but her chest continued to tremble, her stomach concaving each time she tried to exhale through the barrier of her palm.
Slowly, the fog overtaking her brain forced her to drop to her knees, quivering under the weight of her own challenge. The colors of her face were changing every half second, cycling through its various shades in time with the convulsions of her body. Each agonizing twitch seemed to slightly increase the size of her cheeks, barely noticeably, but slowly adding up over time.
“Uh, Pomni?” The cautious optimism from Ragatha was rapidly turning into just normal caution, seeing that look of pain in the girl’s eyes getting more intense by the second. “You can stop if you need to.”
Gangle seemed to bounce a little, clapping the ribbons that represented her hands together. “But she’s doing so well! I don’t think anyone has gone this far before, right?”
Whatever discussion was happening behind her, Pomni was unable to process it. Multiple sections of her brain were short-circuiting at once, the pain and spasms and convulsions making it impossible to do anything but keep her mouth clamped shut. Her free hand slapped desperately against her thigh, whines muffled in her throat, eyes rolling up as her entire body ignited in protest. She was down to a fraction of a second on each color, her face rapidly looking more and more like a rave party.
Gangle, rubbing her ribbons together anxiously, spoke up. “…Pomni?”
Hand shifting to clutch her throat, Pomni began to tip backwards, shoulders and heels digging into the floor below her as the rest of her body arched upwards in a trembling, desperate mess of agony and whines. Her free fist slammed into the ground next to her, thumping in pain, trying anything to draw her mind away from the overwhelming urge to empty her lungs.
“Pomni!” Ragatha’s voice rose in concern. “Really, you can stop! Breathe!”
The jester on the floor either didn’t want to, or wasn’t able to hear, because the colors in her face only shifted faster as she approached her limit. Her cheeks swelled, audibly creaking like balloons, the pressure making her eyes start to bulge out of her head. Her legs kicked and spasmed, the pain within her making it impossible to do anything but squirm.
Kinger, leaning forward, stared down at her with curiosity. “Wow, it almost looks like she might ex--”
POP!
His words were cut off by Pomni violently bursting under the pressure, her body giving out in an explosion of air and flickering confetti. The force of the blast was enough to make all the observers stumble for a moment, as well as dislodging Gangle’s mask, sending it flying backwards and shattering against the far wall.
For a moment, silence filled the air, the only movement being the colored paper slowly settling onto the floor next to the only other part of Pomni that remained: her hat. Finally, Ragatha spoke, her words being preceded by incomprehensible stutters. “WwWWhat just happened?!”
Jax, with a little too much enthusiasm, kneeled down at the pile of Pomni bits as he answered. “Looks like bells couldn’t handle any more. You know, I think I like her more like this.”
Before the next asinine comment could be said, Zooble’s arm darted out, constricting Jax’s neck to cut him off. “You know, maybe if I choke you for long enough, you’ll do the same thing.”
“%$!# off,” he barely sputtered through the claw constricting his throat, both hands trying to pry the appendage away as he stood.
Trying not to let the childish argument distract her, Ragatha turned, grabbing her dress to hitch it up and prevent herself from tripping. “I’m going to go find Caine, just… keep all that confetti together!” The final part of her command faded out as she sprinted to find the ringmaster.
Tears already trailing down her mask, Gangle knelt by the blast mark, using her ribbons to sweep up the mess into a neat little pile just in front of the remaining hat. As she spoke, her words were trembling and mixed with sobs. “Do you think… she’s really dead?”
Kinger, clasping his hands together, spoke with an odd amount of confidence. “Well, no. We can’t die from something like that, at least not in the, traditional sense.” His hand lifted and moved in a circle as he got into the philosophical portion. “She just needs to be reassembled, is all.”
Releasing her death grip, Zooble looked over with crossed arms. “And how would you know that, exactly?”
As the group started to talk in a circle about the intrinsics of death in the circus, Pomni gently stirred, only noted by the faint rustling of the shredded paper. She could pick up on the words, but without a mouth or any limbs, found herself unable to communicate in her fragmented state. Still, she found solace in the fact that the pain had stopped, even if she technically wasn’t even breathing anymore. She chose not to think about that, though, and instead focused on the more prominent thought in her head.
…On second thought, training like this was a stupid idea.