Chapter Text
Pomni is violently ripped out of sleep by the sensation of falling.
Her eyes fly open, heart pounding wildly. What? Where is she? She's too panicked to focus on anything around her. Why is she midair, what's happening, why does everything look so wrong--
"Oof!"
She falls onto her bed, completely unharmed but thoroughly shaken. Breath coming in quick gasps, she looks around frantically to try and figure out what the [#$&!] just happened, only to find... nothing.
She's in her room. Everything is completely still and silent. The lighting is brighter than usual, implying that nighttime has passed, but other than that? Nothing of note. Pomni feels her eye twitch, ready to turn around and scream into a pillow, when--
The bed glitches violently, jolting down and launching Pomni into the air, wrenching a panicked cry from her throat. This time she isn't caught as off-guard as before, though, so she gets to focus on other things happening around her. Namely, the other furniture in her room glitching into the floor just like the bed, emitting a loud crash over and over as it struggles to seperate itself from whatever is interacting with its hitbox. But even more eye-catching is what she sees next. The walls are going completely haywire, rapidly gaining and losing textures, sometimes disappearing completely into black nothingness.
Then just as quickly as it started, everything goes back to normal. It doesn't even last half a second before Pomni lands roughly onto her bed again, stiff as a board. Her eyes bore holes into the ceiling, hands gripping the sheets tightly, not daring to move an inch. With everything now deafeningly quiet, the only thing she hears is her own panting, bordering on hyperventilation. Okay. Okay this is fine. One hundred percent.
...
What the [#$%!] is she supposed to do here? She's not getting up, that's for sure. Half of her expects the bed to launch her into the ceiling the moment she tries.
At first, she expected this to be Caine's doing. Not the room glitching, to be clear. That was new. No-- her subconscious thought the sudden wake-up call itself was due to the ringmaster deciding he wanted to drag Pomni halfway across the circus right then, right there. She's fallen victim to his random whims on more than one occasion. One instance in particular comes to mind: the glint of knives flying directly towards her immobile body flashes through Pomni's mind, causing her to shudder. It's sad, really, how quickly her mind connected the violent and rather rude interruptions in her daily life to Caine. It made complete sense, of course, but it was sad all the same.
But, for the first time, her presumption is incorrect. This isn't Caine’s doing. Right? Truthfully, she had no way of knowing. At the very least, this isn't his usual weirdness. It very well could be him trying to [#$%!] with her sanity, but unless he pops out of the aether to let her know, she can’t exactly pin this on him. Besides, sometimes, things around here tend to just... break. No prompting necessary. Honestly, she's surprised the circus hasn't completely shut down at this point. The whole place seems to be held together with the coding equivalent of tape and glue.
A strange distorted noise rumbles as the wall beside Pomni flickers through a few different glitchy textures. She snaps out of her thoughts, staring at the offending wall like it might leap out and attack her at any second...
It doesn't. The rumbling stops, and the wall stills. She blinks, then takes a deliberate breath.
Point being. It's all well and good that she wasn't woken up by Caine's antics. However, that doesn't make her feel any better about witnessing the digital equivalent of the world having a seizure. For once in her miserable existence in this place, Pomni almost would have preferred to be woken up by Caine. At least then, she would know what the [#$%!] was going on.
____________
With nothing else to do– and a fresh dose of adrenaline keeping her from going back to bed– Pomni eventually makes her way to the tent's main area. She keeps her eyes peeled, anxiously watching for any sign of a glitch as she goes along, even flinching when she thinks she can hear another distorted noise... but it was just her own footsteps echoing off the empty walls. Slightly miffed at herself for being so jumpy, she groans and runs a hand over her face. Keep it together, Pomni.
Her nerves haven't been this shot since the day she first arrived at the circus, which– well– which is saying a lot. She thought getting out of bed would help calm her down, but the longer she's out here, the more intense her anxiety becomes. The more her mind wanders into places she would rather not go but, like a moth to a flame, she just can't help herself.
Whatever happened in her room… was it just a one-off thing? Or is it going to happen again? It technically happened twice, so it's up in the air as far as she's concerned. If her bed could glitch through the floor like that so easily, who's to say she couldn't suddenly clip through? Oh god. Would she end up in another nightmare maze with uncannily frozen assets littered about, like the last time she clipped into an area she wasn't supposed to be? Or, even worse, would she be dumped straight into the cellar? Because it's directly under the circus, right? If that happened, would the others find her?
Would anyone even notice she was gone until it was too late?
Pomni startles, realizing she's frozen in the middle of the circus as her mind spirals into the usual paranoid thoughts. Smacking her face lightly to snap out of it, she refocuses on the task at hand: finding the others. Because surely, someone else would be able to explain what she experienced. Or, at the very least, offer her some level of support.
____________
“You sure you aren't just going crazy?”
Or maybe not.
Pomni visibly deflates under Jax's mocking grin, his eyes narrowed and head tilted. “I suspected you'd lose it pretty quickly, but I didn't think it would be this soon. I'm almost disappointed in you, Pom,” he adds casually. He leans down to ruffle her hair, then jerks his hand away before she can smack it.
Just moments prior, Pomni found her way to the usual hangout area, where almost everyone was already waiting. Ragatha and Jax were carefully situated as far from one another as possible, with Ragatha on the couch and Jax leaning against a column before gravitating over to Pomni. Gangle was curled up in a comfy-looking chair, her sketchbook held close as she draws something. Unsurprisingly, her comedy mask is nowhere to be seen, having broken long before Pomni showed up. But besides the permanent tears dotting her eyes, Gangle seems relatively peaceful at the moment, with Zooble leaned against the armrest of the chair to watch over her shoulder as she draws.
As it turns out, Pomni had actually overslept, making her one of the last to show up. Now all they were waiting on was Kinger. Odd, but not concerning. Sometimes he would be the first up and wandering around, other times he would be the last to arrive-- like today. Pomni learned not too long ago that this was because he would just... wander a bit too far. There were even a few instances, before her time here, that he disappeared altogether and it took half the day to find him. Knowing that, Pomni makes a mental note to go looking for Kinger if he doesn't turn up in the next few minutes.
…Caine was also absent, of course, but they weren't exactly waiting in eager anticipation for him to show his face and subject everyone to another nightmare. He'd been acting more unhinged as of late, which was reflected in his adventures being more unstable than usual. The last adventure outright broke, with the cast getting stuck halfway through thanks to the NPCs going completely unresponsive and requiring Caine to pull them out early. He'd acted strange after they got out, but not his usual strange. He just got quiet, barely even said a word before he disappeared.
In any case, the group is more than happy to spend their time chilling and resolutely not thinking about the upcoming adventure.
“Jax!” Ragatha snaps, turning to glare disapprovingly at him. “Don't even joke about that. Pomni, I'm sure whatever you saw was just a fluke.”
“Or! Maybe it was one of those digital hallucinations,” Jax says sarcastically, waving his hands dramatically in Pomni's face and laughing when she, yet again, slaps them away. “Except this time, it's an actual hallucination and not one of Caine's cheap tricks.”
“No, I swear, this was real!” Pomni insists, voice hardening as her frustration boils over. She goes to pace in front of the couch and Jax follows, leaning against the back of the couch to watch her. “It was almost like the time I accidentally clipped into one of those blocks in my room, except this time… my bed clipped into the room, I guess? Should that even be possible?”
She looks up to the others, hoping to get some kind of confirmation. Ragatha smiles placatingly but looks on-edge, like she has no idea what to say. Jax shrugs, helpful as ever. Gangle glances up, confused, as if she wasn't listening in the first place. Zooble sighs in irritation as the silence goes on, before they unexpectedly start talking.
“It's... happened to me more than once. The furniture clipping, I mean,” they mutter, sounding bored but giving Pomni an empathetic look. “It [#%&$]ing sucks. Scared the [$#!%] out of me the first time. It was especially bad during that incident with the box of parts.”
A beat of silence passes. Pomni blinks, looking around, and asks, “What happened with that?”
Zooble stares at her flatly, arms crossed. “A couple of legs phased into each other, caused a chain reaction, and everything glitched out like some kind of explosive jack-in-the-box. Took me a whole [#$%!]ing day to pick it all up… with Gangle's help, of course.” They tack on that last part, the irritation in their eyes giving way to fondness as they look to Gangle. She smiles, shyly ducking her head down into her sketchbook at the silent acknowledgement.
“But,” Pomni says slowly. “It didn't cause the walls to glitch out, or lose texture?”
As soon as the sentence leaves her mouth, Zooble seems to tense up. An odd reaction, and one that Pomni notices almost instantly. But they quickly mask it by shrugging, feigning a bored expression. Or, at least, replicating as close to a bored expression that only eyes and body language can manage. “Not really. Maybe a bed glitching into the floor is different, though.”
Pomni isn't entirely convinced and wants to argue, but Ragatha latches onto Zooble's words immediately and interrupts her before she can. “Yeah! Don't worry too much about it, Pomni. None of us felt it happen, so maybe it really was just a glitch contained to your room!” She asserts with that ever-present smile, hands carefully folded in her lap.
Pomni, realizing she's alone in thinking there was more to it, quickly loses steam. She's about to mutter out a few resigned words of acceptance and change the topic, when the group is suddenly interrupted by a new voice.
“You know how you can smell when it's about to rain?”
Everyone looks to the source. Kinger, directly behind Pomni, vacantly staring at nothing. When did he..?
“You mean... like, in the real world? Because I thought it didn't rain here,” Ragatha says slowly, her one eye flicking to the side briefly.
Kinger hums at this, scratching his head in thought. “Really? Well then, I don't know what that smell is. But something tells me–”
He doesn't get to finish his sentence before the entire circus suddenly glitches. The walls flicker and rumble, shifting colors rapidly enough to be seizure-inducing. Everyone stumbles as the ground lurches, the couch and chairs briefly clipping into the ground just like Pomni's bed. And just like before, it stops within less than a second, and everything goes back to normal.
“...Oh [$#!%],” Zooble curses, eyes wide with horror and hands gripping the back of Gangle's chair. They seem to be having their own revelation, entirely disconnected from what Pomni was talking about earlier.
And Pomni, who had tripped and fallen roughly onto the floor, shoots to her feet and points an accusatory finger at everyone else. “See! See!! I told you!” She says frantically, her teeth sharpening to reflect her manic energy. “That's exactly what just happened to my room!”
Jax has an iron grip on the back of the couch, but still manages to give Pomni an amused look through the strained smile on his face. “Great, good for you. You want a medal to go with your victory in proving everybody wrong here, or what?”
“Oh boy.” Ragatha mumbles from her spot on the couch, her expression not far off from Gangle's. They both look surprised by what just happened, but not to the same degree that Jax and Zooble are.
Pomni lowers her hand and looks between them suspiciously. She could be imagining it, could be the paranoia talking, but it almost seems like…
“Do you two know what's going on?” She asks, her words slow and deliberate.
As soon as the question is out there, Zooble whips their head to Gangle, who shrinks in on herself and very clearly emits an 'I don't want to explain' energy. Ragatha, on the other hand, lets out a stressed and pitched laugh. “Well. Yes?”
“...So, this has happened before.” Pomni's words are still carefully chosen, but behind them lies a very clear edge of irritation. “And you didn't believe me?”
Ragatha's entire body locks up, realizing what Pomni is implying. As expected, she's all too quick to try and placate her with frantic hand-waving. “No, it wasn't that I didn't believe you! Honest!”
Gangle, of all people, is next to speak up on Ragatha's behalf. She peeks up from her sketchbook anxiously. “If it helps, I really thought it was just a fluke, too. None of us saw what you were talking about...”
At that, Pomni catches herself. She heaves a sigh, forcing all the tension to leave her body. “Alright, that's fair,” she admits. If nobody but her saw a glitch like that, and it was supposedly contained entirely within her room, she can't fault them for dismissing it. But that still leaves a major question left unanswered: “If it wasn't a harmless room glitch, then… what was it?”
Ragatha hesitates, then also sighs, rubbing a hand against her neck. “You see, the last time something like this happened, it was because of–-”
Ragatha is cut off abruptly. Another violent stutter of the world interrupts her, followed by an all-too-familiar face popping into existence directly above the group. But the moment he opens his mouth, it becomes clear that–-
“Gooood MO-O-ORNING, my dairy d-d-delights!"
--something is very, very wrong.