Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When I put on the headset, I suddenly find myself somewhere else.

Alarm bells sound in my head. Nothing happened last time. Why is it working now? I reach up to rip the thing off my head, but my hands hit thin air, and then my face.

My face. My face feels weird. It's not my face; it's not even human. It's too smooth, too spherical. Like a cartoon come to life. My eyes go wide, staring at my hands, at the floor.

"Okay," I say. "Okay. Okay, okay. Um." Speaking feels weird too. My mouth isn't lips over a hole, it's... God, I can't even describe it. Slow breaths, I remind myself. I'm not alone. "Uh, E-Emi? Can you hear me out there? I don't, can't take—"

"—didn't mean for this to happen, I can't believe I—" A man's voice, coming from in front of me.

"Oh god." A woman's voice now. Footsteps approaching me, shadows on the floor. My breath quickens, my heart rate speeding up but not really because I can't feel it beating even though I should because I know what this feels like. Oh god there's people here they'll see me like this I don't—

"Caine, you..." A second woman. She sounds familiar, which makes it worse. Her voice trails off in disappointment. She sounds shocked. They're all staring at me, I know it, but I can't look up from the floor.

"It was an accident, I swear!" The man again. Caine, I guess. "It was an automatic program and I just..."

"Forgot?" The second woman. God, where have I heard her before? I'm scared to look up. "You just forgot about the thing that trapped us all here in the first place? After all that?"

Someone shushes her. "Hey there, uh... Do you remember your name?"

The first woman. She's talking to me, approaching. Her legs come into my view, and they're just as ridiculous as my hands and face. Red and blue shoes, paper-white legs with strange proportions and ball joints. A cartoon come to life, just like me.

The sight causes me to lift my gaze, almost without my input. She's a cartoon clown. Big, wide eyes. Poofy jester get-up. It startles a laugh out of me, a short bark of a "Ha!"

"She's shaking," a high-pitched voice points out. My eyes follow the sound to a... ribbon-person with a mask? I don't see anyone shaking though. She's just looking at me with a worried expression.

Wait.

"It's okay," says the clown gently. Someone who looks like a Raggedy Ann doll silently comes up behind her to put a hand on her shoulder, and she straightens up a bit. "My name is Pomni," she continues. "I know things aren't making sense right now, but—"

"I don't," I blurt.

"Um. You don't what?"

"Remember my name," I lie. "Totally gone." My face relaxes into a casual smile. "But I guess that's normal, or you wouldn't have asked, right?"

"Yyyes, that's right," she says slowly, then turns to look at the rest of her group, all of whom are also weird cartoony shit. "Caine, could you...?"

"Of course!" says the freaky eyeballs-and-teeth guy floating two feet off the ground. He seizes up and his eyeballs turn black, green text flashing across them at dizzying speeds.

"Uh, wait—"

"Bad news!" Caine exclaims before I can protest, a finger raised and his eyes back to normal. "Our new friend's file didn't come with a name attached!"

"What the hell?" asks the bizarro lady made out of random shapes. Even the way she moves is familiar as she raises an arm in Caine's direction. "All of ours did though, right?"

"Yes," he confirms. "Plucked directly from your mind files! There shouldn't be any reason for a newcomer's name to be missing, but now it's happened anyway. I'm... uh... sorry."

"It's alright," I say. Mind files? What the fuck? "You guys don't need to know my name, I won't be here long. If you tell me how to take off the headset, I'll just log off in a bit."

That was the wrong thing to say, apparently. Everyone stares at me with pitying looks. I feel a cold, clammy hand wrap itself around my heart, but I keep going as if nothing's wrong. I'm on a roll now. Take two steps forward with a casual bounce. "So what is this place, anyway?" I say, gesturing around at the stage I'm standing on and the weird, checkerboarded mishmash of stuff around it. "Looks like a damn cartoon."

For several seconds, nobody speaks. Then Caine clears his nonexistent throat. "This," he says with the pomp and gravitas you'd expect of the circus ringleader he's dressed up as, "is the Amazing Digital Circus! It's! Uh." He freezes in place, holding a goofy pose with his arms stretched out, completely unmoving.

"This isn't the time for jokes, Caine," complains bizarro lady. "Look, uh. Newbie. There's no easy way to say this, so I'll just be blunt. You're stuck here."

She pauses, waiting for a reaction that doesn't come.

"We're all stuck here," she continues eventually. "Most of us have been for years. There's no way out, not for any of us. This is your new life."

I stare.

"I'm sorry," she offers.

"Heh." A chuckle escapes my throat, then another, then a flood of laughter. "Ehehhehehe, ahahahahahaha!" I fall down, sit on the floor, keep laughing.

"O-Oh, oh no." The ragdoll. She's speaking up for the first time, staring at me with wide eyes. "Hey, new one, it's not so bad, it's..." She trails off when I just keep laughing. "Zooble!"

"Just let her get it out of her system, Ragatha," says bizarro lady.

I catch my breath for long enough to speak. "Ohhhh man, ahaha, this is hilarious! It's just so fucking funny!" I slam the ground with a fist so hard that I'm surprised it doesn't hurt. "I finally try to... and then I..." I wipe tears of laughter from my eyes. "Oh man, fuck you Emily!" I flip a middle finger at the ceiling.

"...Who's Emily?" asks Pomni.

I wave her off. "Doesn't matter. Nothing fucking matters, as it turns out!" I stand back up and take a deep breath, covering up my embarrassment. My hands go in the pocket of my hoodie. "So don't even worry about it."

"Hey, no, that's not true," says Ragatha, approaching. "You still matter. Just... take a moment to calm down, and—"

She lays a hand on my shoulder, and I bat it away. "Get away from me," I snap. Ragatha stares at me, stunned. "Don't you fucking patronize me! I don't even know you! I'm not..." I click my tongue, except I don't have one; my mouth just kinda makes that sound.

Pomni raises her hands in a placating gesture. "Okay, I feel like we're getting off on the wrong foot here. Let's just find a place to sit and... we can talk things out? Help you come up with a new name, maybe show you around the circus?"

I pin her with a deadpan stare. "I would rather do literally anything else," I tell her. "In fact, I will!" I start walking, hop off the stage off to the side where nobody's standing. "Later!"

A few people call after me, but I ignore them, save to throw a glare back over my shoulder. Caine looks dejected; Ragatha and Pomni are talking in hushed voices. Ribbon girl looks lost, while the buckethead who never said a thing is walking over to join the girls' discussion.

Zooble alone is staring at me with a piercing look. I feel my body shiver in a way my real one never does, and I face forward, speed up. Once I'm out of sight, I break into a full sprint. "I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, why am I such a fucking idiot!"

I run blindly, past giant blocks and a dark circus tent (inside a circus tent?) and various doors and hallways. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror, a shock of purple and yellow, and my heart beats in my throat as I squeeze my eyes shut. "What the fuck what the fuck what the fuuuuck." I almost trip over my own feet, and when I scramble to regain my footing my legs do that cartoon thing where they turn into blurry wheels to show how fast they're moving and oh boy does that feel weird.

And then I'm running again. My feet eventually carry me out of the tent and into the night, where—

"Oh, hello."

I jump in surprise and fall flat on my ass for the second time today. From my new vantage point on the ground, I find myself face to face with the source of the voice.

"Oh, I startled you," says the crescent moon lighting up the sky. "Sorry about that. Are you a new human?"

"I, uh, I don't..." I glance back at the circus tent. "I gotta go."

And back in I go, because fuck if I'm gonna have a chat with the moon. Or anyone. Fuck. Panting with exertion — and isn't that some bullshit? I'm in a fucking cartoon, why do I still have shitty atrophied muscles? — I open a door at random to find a dark corridor, the lamps shattered on the ceiling.

This will do. I shut the door and plunge myself into darkness, then sit down against a wall, curled up with my head in my arms.

"Shiiiiiiiiiit." The word leaves my throat like molasses, slow and drawn out and shaky.

"Oh."

The soft voice startles me, and I hurriedly wipe the tears from my eyes. "Shit. Shit. You didn't see that."

"I—"

I look up and glare at him. It's the buckethead, his eyes lidded and his body hunched over in a way that suggests a kind of pity I cannot fucking stand. "You. Didn't. See that," I say.

He stands there, silent. Then he closes the door and takes the bucket off his head. My eyes, adjusted to the darkness, can make out his shape. He's a chess piece, a white king, the bloodshot spheres of his eyes floating under the crown to create the impression of a face. He extends a hand.

"I realized I didn't introduce myself yet," he says. "I'm Grant."

I laugh at him. "Fucking Grant? What, you're not... I dunno, Chesster? Kingy?"

He chuckles with me, which... huh, alright. "It's a long story. We all used to be unable to remember our real names. Some of us... stuck with the ones we made up, once we remembered. Some of us didn't."

I stay silent, staring at the ground. I'm claiming to be an anomaly then, though I guess if Caine was telling the truth I actually am. Ugh, this place is so fucking weird.

"Have you... thought about a name yet?" asks Grant, sitting down next to me. "It's—"

"Mind files," I say.

"Pardon?"

"Caine said something about our mind files. The fuck does that mean?" I know what it means, but I have to ask anyway.

"Well..." Grant hesitates. "The Circus is a digital environment," he says carefully, "and we are now digital beings. That goes for our minds as well. I don't quite understand how, but when we put on that headset, our brains were scanned, copied, and are now being simulated inside the digital world."

I nod shakily. "Copied," I repeat.

"Yes," he says. "You're still out there."

Okay. She's still out there. She's probably talking and laughing with Emi right now, and...

"Did anyone else..."

Grant shakes his head apologetically. "Caine turned off the program that automatically scans brains after you got here," he says. "Even if someone else put on the headset, they aren't going to appear here."

I scoff. "Right. Of course."

An awkward silence falls. I avert my eyes from Grant, hoping he'll go away.

"We've got board games planned today," he says. "In an hour or so. We'd all be happy to have you there."

"Is that what you do here all day?" I ask. "Just... play games and shit?"

"In my experience, it tends to be better than sitting around doing nothing. There's more to life here than you might think."

"Sure," I say. "I dunno. Maybe I'll come, maybe I won't." I'm not planning to. "Can you just... leave me alone, please?"

Grant looks at me with a pensive expression. Then he clasps his hands together. When he opens them, a glowing purple butterfly flits out to sit on top of my head.

"Um."

"It'll lead you to us," he promises. "Just ask."

"Okay?" As I say that word, Grant's already leaving, back into the circus proper, bucket back on his head.

"See you around," he says. "As we've taken to saying around here, we're in this together. All of us."

The door closes and I roll my eyes. "We're in this together," I repeat mockingly. "All of us. What is this, a fucking anime?"

The butterfly flaps its wings in response, lightly tickling my, uh. My ears, I guess? I don't really want to think about my body right now. It's probably some caricature of me, something weird and stupid like with Zooble or Grant.

I sigh and lean back. I don't really want to have another panic attack, and if I just sit here and mope that's probably what'll happen. In the soft purple light, I can make out a door just across from me. On it is an image of a cartoon dog, crossed out with a red X. I stand up and try it, but the door's locked. Hm. I turn around, and just next to where I was sitting I see another door with another crossed out cartoon character — a speckled creature with a jester hat. Also locked.

I slowly venture further into the hallway to find more of the same: a worm on a string, a purple dinosaur, a mouse-like thing...

Then I find one depicting Grant. He's not crossed out. A chill runs down my spine as I look back the way I came. Are they all...?

Across from Grant's door is one with a black queen chess piece. Crossed out. I walk a bit further and find Ragatha's door, then ribbon girl's, then Zooble's. No Xs there. I take a couple steps back, then turn around and start walking. The dark presses against my back, urging me to speed up until I'm running, slamming the hallway door behind me.

What was that? Are they... dead? There's so few left. What happened here? Why are the fucking lights shattered? Maybe it's just a setup? Spooky hallway of death, some sort of roleplay thing? He did say they're all just playing games all the time. It would make sense to get more elaborate with it after a while, right? Especially if there's so few people.

Movement in my peripheral causes me to startle and whirl around. There's someone there, wide-eyed and staring at me. Some sort of tall, lanky rabbit. Long ears stick up from their scalp, drooping outward halfway. Their cream-colored skin (fur?) is like a thin plastic layer with holes for white eyes and an equally white "mouth", in reality a flat texture with black lines implying a grin, though right now it's more of a grimace. They're wearing a purple hoodie, their ears clipping through the hood and—

Wait.

That's me, isn't it?

I step closer, and so does the rabbit. I come to a stop in front of the body-sized mirror, staring at my own face. My new body.

My pupils have grown from tiny and shaking pinpricks to large circles nearly covering the height of my eyes. I reach up and poke at my face with a white-gloved hand. Squish. It has give as if it were skin, despite looking like a goddamn stress ball. I touch the base of my ears, which is surreal in multiple ways — they don't feel stuck or squeezed or anything, but they're definitely clipping through that hood. I tug at it, and the hood comes down, my ears slipping free with an odd sensation.

"I look..." Kinda stupid. I wanna say that, but it could've been worse. As I stare, one of my ears perks up and my 'teeth' spin, the lines going diagonal. With the knee-length hoodie and the eyeliner, I can sorta see why everyone assumed I'm a girl. Still, shouldn't my voice have given me away? I mean sure, I've been training, but it can't be that good.

Can it?

"I look weird," I say, really listening to myself. I point at myself in the mirror. "You look weird," I tell her, switching to my guy voice. I cringe a bit, then watch as my mouth moves up on my face and shrinks. "This is so fucking weird." Girl voice again.

I... I don't know. Hearing and seeing myself like this, a new perspective on a new body? I don't know if I'd have clocked me.

That's...

Huh.

I pull the hood back over my head and turn to the butterfly, still fluttering dutifully next to me. I sigh.

"Alright, whatever. Take me there."