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Ragatha would not say she had been having a good day thus far, but it wasn’t a bad one either. Her bad days involved a lot more bodily harm than she was presently experiencing. It was just the sort of usual headaches that came with living in the Circus.
“But, Zooble! You always skip my adventures!” Caine gave a wounded look right then and there. Like he was the one whose day had just gotten yanked away from him because the head of the household decided everyone “It’s hurting Bubble’s feelings!”
Zooble squinted.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
Ragatha had her hands clasped together neatly by her chest. She felt a vague pins-and-needles feeling in her forehead. She ordinarily wasn’t so harsh on Caine. She had just gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, that was all!
Only she was thinking a little more about Mom. She shouldn’t. No one likes a sourpuss.
“Pretend any of this is about Bubble! God, Caine!”
Not that Caine and Mom didn’t have the same rhythms. That lying, right there, was so much like her. Their total control, the refusal to give an inch, the explosions of rage. Ragatha felt that same pulsing beat from them, and the same threatening potential for violence.
But then, she felt that in everybody. So she could never be too sure.
“What’s the matter, Zoobie?”And Jax had just decided to butt in. Wonderful. “You don’t want to be part of Say Something Nice About Your Ringmaster Day?”
The new “in-house” adventure. Caine wanted everyone to write a card about a quality of his they liked. Ragatha was confident in her ability to assuage him. This was perhaps not ideal, but a welcome change from the physical labor that came with most of the adventures, and from the “slice-of-life” ones. Ragatha certainly knew it would be an infinite improvement from the suggestion box. She shuddered even thinking about her humiliating meltdown in the bar.
Everyone’s eyes on her, disgusted, boring past her skin.
“Oh, shut up, Jax. I know for a fact you’re gonna hate this as much as I do.”
“Well, Bubble thinks that HATE is a very strong word, my dear Zooble.”
“Bubble has the same number of thoughts as a moldy ham sandwich.”
“Ooh! Somebody’s feisty today.”
“Don’t you even start, Jax!”
Caine started to say something. Whatever it was, Ragatha could not decipher. All three of them started talking at once and it just turned into gibberish. Pomni and Gangle were just watching quietly, while Kinger didn’t seem to be registering any of this.
Ragatha had to at least try to calm things down. She didn’t ever have much of a success rate, admittedly. It wasn’t like any member of the bickering trio was particularly inclined to listen to her. No matter how many of the Right Things™ she did, it wasn’t enough. Not for Mom, not for anyone.
“Guys, please! I’m sure we can have buckets of fun on this adventure! We-we can be creative, and-”
Ragatha was pretty sure that Caine had been the one to cut her off first with something that sounded like Thank you Ragatha. But at that same time, Jax had said something she couldn’t make out but was definitely some kind of insult and / or threat.
She didn’t know why she had said post cards. Just old memories. Maybe that was what this whole thing had reminded her of. Mother's Day…
“For fuck’s sake, Ragatha, don’t encourage him!”
“I’m just trying to-”
To what? Why?
“You always do this! Why is it us who have to shut up and take it and not him?”
“Good idea, Zooble!”
Caine snapped his fingers. As he’d done once before, a zipper appeared over Zooble’s mouth. Ragatha knew his rhythms. He was close to exploding. He didn’t expect his party trick to actually, physically make Zooble shut up. Just that doing so would be the wise choice.
Zooble just glared at him irately.
“What are you even trying to prove here?!”
“Nothing’s ever good enough for you, is it? You want ‘chill, low-stakes adventures’ and then you hate them, but you hate the big adventurous adventures too! More this, less that! Make up your mind already!”
Jax grinned. Ragatha could tell he was savoring this.
“Looks like you made him mad, Zoobie.”
It was so familiar. The self-pity, the rage, the accusations of ungratefulness, those were all Mom’s rhythms. Ragatha just couldn’t help but think of that one Mother's Day. It might not have been the worst thing her Mom had done to her, but it still hurt.
“Caine, please,” Ragatha interjected. “Zooble is just saying that they’re not in the mood for this particular adventure. Maybe they can sit this one out-”
“I don’t need you to speak for me.”
“I’m just trying to-”
“Yeah! Fight!”
Jax always had to add his two cents, didn’t he? Ragatha idly thought about punching him right in his stupid smile. No, that’s no good. That’s a bad thought. She’s doing the Right Things™. Be nice and smile and always be there, and people will be there for you.
Not that they ever seemed to actually be there
“Zooble, you OVERPRICED LITTLE- ” Caine stopped himself midway through whatever insult he’d had planned. He shifted back from his forward lunge into swinging his arms and legs placidly. He adjusted his bowtie. “Now where were we? Oh, yeah! Say something nice about your ringmaster day!”
He was just pretending it had never happened. Like Mom would always do. Mom would scream and tell Ragatha the most horrible things. She was like Jax; she knew how to say the exact right sentence that would just gut you.
But Mom would go on for what felt like hours, just telling Ragatha how worthless and nothing she was. And whenever Ragatha complained, Father and her siblings acted like she was unreasonable. She always had to make it up to them, to her, to Caine, to Jax. Why can’t they ever make it up to her? Why doesn’t anybody ever apologize to her? She does everything Right™!
“Caine, you can’t just yell at people like that.” Someone hazarded. Ragatha belatedly realized that someone was her.
“I did no such thing, Ragatha! Now, for this in-house adventure-”
“Caine, I really don’t think-”
“Too late, I’m already ignoring you~!”
“Mom, just stop!”
Ragatha clasped her hands over her mouth. She had absolutely not meant to say that. She wanted to shrivel up and die like a worm on the blacktop in the hot sun. Everyone was quiet for a moment, no doubt recalling her embarrassing display of selfishness at the bar.
Everyone else gets to do it but I don’t?
“Thank you, Ragatha!” Caine chirped. “I’ve always wanted to be a parent-like figure!”
“Yeah…” Ragatha said. “I’ve got to go… toooo….”
Ragatha couldn’t think of an excuse so she just ran off. At least, as efficiently as her stumpy feet could take her. She slammed her door shut and hoped Caine wouldn’t just summon her right back for the adventure.
—
He did not. Thank God for small favors. Given the murmurings in the hall (which reminded Ragatha of a dormitory more than anything), he had let things go early. Which was very unlike Caine.
Ragatha was curled on her bed. Her knees were pressed into her head. Her arms were wrapped around her knees.
She hoped she hadn’t upset him too much. Or hurt his feelings.
Caine had very big feelings. She knew his rhythms. His thoughts were incomprehensible; his feelings less so. Ragatha had learned how to read people’s body language. She wouldn’t have made it this far if she hadn’t. She had also learned to read that of animals. You had to do that with horses.
A horse is a friend that, if it gets startled, could crush you entirely by accident. You have to learn to respect them and their needs, to learn and be in touch with their rhythms.
Caine reminded her a lot of Mom in his rhythms, but in many important ways, he was not Mom. He did not enjoy the act of hurting people, or of making them squirm. He didn’t want them to let him cut them open again and again just so he could take pleasure in how they’d come running back. That was more Jax’s territory.
Caine reminded her more so of a horse. Horses have been taught to fear. When the right stimuli occurs, like say a firecracker, they do what they’ve had ingrained in them to do. Horses ran. Caine did what he knew how to do: adventures. Games.
Ragatha could get no more mad at him than at a snake for biting her if she picked it up.
That comparison seemed rude. She was so out of it today. Her thoughts kept drifting to Mom.
She was such a mess. She understood why no one wanted to bother with her. Ragatha averted her eyes from the mirror. She felt ugly. She felt the eyes boring into her. She felt fire surging underneath her plush skin.
Why did every day have to hurt so much? There was always something coming to yank her under. She always did all the Right Things™ but it never worked out for her, not ever. For everyone else, yes, but not her. They were never there for her, after all she does, everything she does and yet
And yet she really hopes nobody knocks on her door. Because she really wanted to be alone right now and she didn’t want anyone to see her like this. Putrid, ugly, disgusting.
She thought about Mom again. She thought about pain.
About Mother's Day.
There had to be something she could have done differently with Mom. Something that would have fixed everything. Some magic bullet, some-
A hand rapped against the door gently.
“Can we talk?” said Zooble.
“Unless you don’t want to,” added Pomni. “Which is, uh, totally cool and all, but we’d like to make sure you’re… okay.”
Ragatha let her knees and arms uncurl from their loop around themselves. Why now? Why’d they have to be here now of all times?
—
Caine stared at the Rubik’s Cube determinedly. He had made no progress in solving this puzzle since he’d started. And by extension, with the other puzzle.
Putting off an adventure was very-Cainelike. The humans had likely been frazzled by the sudden change in routine, but Caine was a little frazzled too. And to make a good omelette, you have to break things for the eggs to ripen on the frying pan properly.
He just had to figure out the puzzle.
He had done all the Right Things™. He had made jokes like a good host does. He’d gone through his same cycle of goofy slapstick animations to amuse his guest characters and make himself non-threatening. He’d made corny jokes. And yet Ragatha had still run.
That wasn’t a Ragatha thing to do, usually. More of something Zooble or Pomni would be inclined to do. But the behavior was jarring. The problem with Ragatha was she gave him the least feedback out of everyone, good or ill. Caine knew roughly that she preferred more peaceful adventures and so he’d programmed them all with pacifist routes, but beyond that, even her praise was cagey and non-committal. Zooble never explained their reasons but they at least tried to.
And she’d called him Mom.
Human parents are supposed to be good. In all of the media his creators had fed him, they were almost always good. The evil ones were usually step-parents, except in rare cases. But there was one thing he solidly knew about Ragatha and that was that for her, Mom was a bad thing.
Caine didn’t know the exact why or how or when or wheres of it. He could not read his players’ minds, after all. He got impressions from them the same way he imagined they could accumulate warmth from being near a fire or some other heat source. That was only a loose comparison, but the only one he could think of. It was as alien to him as the impressions were to the humans.
Gangle thought about trucks. Zooble hated their parts. Pomni still had some deep black feelings Caine was unfamiliar with leaking out, attached to the Bandit NPC from a while back. And Ragatha had a toothy shadow trailing behind her named Mom.
So, to reiterate: parents are Good. Except Ragatha’s Mom = Not Good. Except only stepMoms are Not Good.
Caine wouldn’t know. The closest things he’d had to parents were long dead except for Kinger. And they’d left him walled off in the dark the second he made them mad.
He didn’t think his lovely humans would do that to him. After all, he’d done all the Right Things™ that he was supposed to do. But he worried anyway. He couldn’t help it.
He was off-topic and off-track. He was a machine. Machines have no parents. He has a purpose: adventures. He did what the humans wanted. Did Ragatha want more Mom or less Mom? How was he supposed to know?
The humans never explained what they wanted. They - well, Zooble and Pomni - told him what they did not want. They were very keen to tell him about where he fell short. Not why, never how to fix it.
Back to the puzzle.
Maybe…
Maybe he should just ask?
—
Ragatha plastered a smile on her face and opened the door.
“Hi guys! No problems here!”
Ragatha did her finger guns.
Pomni and Zooble looked unconvinced. Ragatha grinned wider.
“I’m sorry about blowing up at you earlier,” Zooble said. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“Oh, um,” Ragatha felt her smile waver and willed it to stay up. Cheerfully: “Apology accepted!”
Pomni looked up at her.
“Ragatha, are you, like, okay right now?” When Ragatha remained silent, Pomni continued. “You’ve been in your room all day. What you said to Caine…”
Ragatha’s stomach swirled with ice. She didn’t want to admit how stupid she was being to them. No more boring eyes.o more boring eyes.
Gently, Pomni said: “Are you going to step out…?”
Right. She should do that. Ragatha squeezed out from behind the door and kicked it shut.
“I’m, um, I’m fine.”
Pomni leaned her back against the wall. She let herself slump down the wall until she was seated. She looked up at Ragatha with the unspoken invitation of do you want to sit down with me. Ragatha did, so she did. Zooble soon joined them too, sitting on the floor.
Ragatha put her forehead in her hands. She didn’t want to see how either of them reacted to her. She didn’t want to see if they could see her flinch.
“I’m not fine…”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“After last time-?” Ragatha cut herself off. That was too rude, too cruel. “I don’t want to burden anyone.”
“I- I’m sorry about the bar, if that’s what you mean.”
“I think none of us knew how to respond to that in the moment.”
“I just, um…” Ragatha collected her thoughts. “It all brought up memories of Mother's Day. It- it was just one Mother's Day, not all of the Mother's Days.”
Ragatha chuckled. Neither of her companions joined in. Her gut twisted.
“Mom really liked reading her post cards. One time in- in third grade or fourth grade, I can’t really remember, we had an assignment to list all of the things you love about your mother. And I wrote about Mom, and they had all the parents come in to look at it. And I had tried so hard, but not because I loved her. Which I do, but I wanted it to be perfect because- because I was scared.
So she read it with everyone else, and she smiled and talked about how great it was, and then the second it was just the family she tore into me. Mom just- she yelled about how I was selfish, and I’d made her look bad in front of everyone, and I was sabotaging her, and this- this went on for an hour. And then when I complained about it to my Dad, he said Mom was right. And he was so much nicer to me than her I thought he’d… I’d thought I did everything right, and this stupid thing today, it just brought up memories.”
Pomni put her hand on Ragatha’s shoulder.
Ragatha noticed only then that she had been crying.
“You’ve been holding that in for a while, huh?” said Zooble.
“Yeah.”
Ragatha’s voice broke on that. She hated that it broke.
“It wasn’t your fault, Ragatha.”
Pomni squeezed her shoulder.
“I know!” Ragatha took a break. “I know. That’s why it hurts so much, because-! It just… I wish that there was some- some lesson, or something I’d done differently, or… just something, some reason.”
Ragatha brought her hands away from her face cautiously. Zooble looked at her tenderly.
“The worst thing about the real world is that terrible things just happen to you for no reason, and the only thing you can do is survive it. You couldn't have done anything differently. There’s nothing to learn from it. It just hurts. It just sucks.”
Ragatha let out a shuddering breath.
“But for what it’s worth,” Zooble’s eyes gleamed puckishly. “Your mom was a real asshole.”
“Can we just… sit here, for a bit?” Ragatha asked. “Quietly?”
“Sure.”
So they sat, silently, and Ragatha let out only the occasional sob. But she felt lighter.
—
Ragatha stared out at the Digital Lake. She had to hand it to Caine. He knew how to mimic water almost perfectly. Even water at night, even how the moon reflected off of it. The small bridge over the stream leading into it was a perfect place to watch from.
In the real world, Ragatha could stare into streams for hours. She’d watch for any signs of life, for fish or amphibians or birds or whatever. Even if she didn’t see anything, she loved it.
Pomni and Zooble, satisfied she was in a better place, had turned it at her behest. But Ragatha needed air. She couldn’t sleep after that. She felt like some weight was off her shoulders, but also something heavy inside her chest.
“Media tells me that when humans stand out over water, it means they’re fishing,” Caine said. “Are you fishing?”
Ragatha yelped. She almost jumped out of her skin - a disturbingly likely possibility in the circus. Fortunately, she only jumped six inches up in the air. She took some deep breaths.
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m just watching.”
“Would you like a fishing adventure for tomorrow?”
“Um, no, thank you, Caine.”
“Would you like a horse adventure?”
“Do you…” Ragatha thought carefully about how to word this question. “Knnnnow anything about horses?”
“Sure! They’re like dogs, but bigger and you can ride them.”
Ragatha tried not to betray any disappointment on her face. Caine’s downcast look proved she had failed. She put her hands on the bridge’s railing and clenched them. Bracing herself for the explosion.
Instead, Caine looked out at the water.
“This is… kind of peaceful.”
“That’s why I like it out here. It’s nice and quiet.”
They were quiet for about a minute. Then, Caine looked at her and asked:
“Aren’t parents supposed to be good?”
“Huh?”
“Human parents.”
“Have you been spying on me?!”
“No?” Caine said, genuinely confused. “I just sense… un-good emotions. About the parent words. And human parents are supposed to be good, in the stories.”
“They’re supposed to be. They just aren’t always.”
He reminded her, in this moment, of a child. Of herself, as a child. Asking God why.
“I’m not sure if I have parents, but I have programmers. I have creators. They made me. Does that count?”
Caine’s voice was softer than she’d ever heard it. His confident baritone was halting now.
“I think so,” Before she could think better of it, Ragatha asked: “Were… they good?”
Caine - bombastic Caine, who always had something loud to say, who always wanted to make a spectacle, who never wanted for limelight - was silent. That was as much of an answer as anything.
“You never got to be a kid, did you?”
Ragatha thought that explained a lot. She understood what it was like, not getting to have a childhood. Not having someone to put a band-aid on your first cut. Never getting to feel safe.
Gently, she patted Caine on the shoulder. He looked at her with shock, but not fear, not anger. He resembled a horse sniffing curiously at a new person.
“No one’s ever… did that before,” Caine mused. “Touched me.”
Both of them looked out at the water and the crescent moon’s shining reflection on the black waves. Caine looked back at her.
“The world would be great, wouldn’t it, if it was just kids and dogs?”
And then he walked away. Not floated, not snapped. Walked.
“Yes,” Ragatha murmured. “It would.”