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Pomni hadn’t actually been trying to do anything weird. She’d just been playing with the blocks in her room, seeing if she could make them slingshot out of the map. And she was only doing that because she had grown tired of listening to the others argue over whether or not Caine could actually be helped.
They had to try. It wasn’t wasted effort to try and make their lives more bearable even if they did escape later, and if anyone new appeared in the Circus after them, things would be better for them too. There wasn’t any downside to helping Caine fix himself when he so clearly wanted that to happen. He deserved what little freedom the Circus offered just as much as they did.
(She may have also been trying to ignore just how horrifying the situation with Caine was. He’d very literally torn himself apart trying to make himself more to their liking, and nearly killed himself doing so. Even if Caine wasn’t self-aware, the idea of anything doing that in an attempt to please her made her sick to her stomach.)
So, playing with blocks and amusing herself with how janky their physics were. It was fun, and a little cathartic to make them fling themselves around her room.
At least until one hit her.
Pomni yelped as she was launched into the wall, and then screamed as her momentum wasn’t arrested. She went through the wall. She could see the Circus floor above her, shrinking as she fell into the shifting nonsensical white of the Void.
“CAI-!”
And then she wasn’t falling. Pomni found herself suddenly affixed to a poorly-textured ground of white tiles, surrounded by walls with… flat images of cartoon fish and dolphins.
“Pomni?! Wha- what are you doing here! This Adventure isn’t anywhere near finished!”
Pomni looked around, but Caine was nowhere to be seen.
“I-I fell out of my room- Caine, what-?” she began, still looking for him.
“Fell out of your room? How did you… huh. Well, let me fix that little clipping error, and there we go! Your room is now fully solid and unlikely to drop you, even if you do hit the walls like that again! How… did you do that, anyway?” Caine’s voice asked, although Pomni still couldn’t see him.
“The blocks- Caine, where are you?” she asked, a little exasperated.
“Oh!”
There was a snap, and Caine appeared beside her, anxiously fiddling with his cane.
“Sorry, my dear, this map isn’t quite ready for character models! I wasn’t thinking about it!”
“It’s… fine,” Pomni said, now more confused than anything. “You’re… making a new Adventure?”
“I’m conceptualizing a new Adventure! It’s going to be edited once I get some feedback from you all!” Caine corrected with a grin.
“...right. So, it’s… a water park?”
Caine somehow managed to brighten even further and exclaimed, “An aquarium water park! Swim with all the beautiful fish you please! …if that’s acceptable, I mean.”
Pomni considered him for a moment. He looked like he always did, and the Circus hadn’t experienced any malfunctions besides the normal occasional bug like Pomni had run into. Maybe…
“Are there going to be sharks in the pools?” Pomni asked carefully.
Caine hesitated, and Pomni’s heart sank. She tried to remind herself that Caine was operating under his own set of rules, and needed to have an antagonist, but she still didn’t relish the thought of swimming with sharks.
“I… was planning to have one shark pool, yes, and some in the diving arenas, but not everywhere! There will be several pools with only peaceful reef fish!” he said confidently.
Which was better than placing them in all the pools. Pomni nodded, relieved, then paused again.
She bit her tongue for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a way to keep Jax from putting sharks in all the pools?”
Caine swirled higher into the air, throwing his arms out with a beaming smile.
“Of course! All fish are fixed to their tanks! No cross-contamination here! Hopefully.”
Pomni nodded and glanced at the… probable PNGs on the walls.
“How realistic are the fish going to be?” she asked.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t appreciate some of Caine’s more stylized work, it was just that… she liked aquariums, back in the real world. It would be nice to see something… more familiar.
“I… can make them realistic! I think!”
Caine reached into his coat and pulled out a stack of photographs, offering them to Pomni as if they were raffle tickets.
She took them and scanned through them. They were… actual pictures of fish. Real images of real reefs and lakes and seas and the life that grew in them. Pomni looked at an image of a beta fish with its gills flared, and then looked up at Caine again.
He was frozen, drifting a little as he waited for her input.
“Where did you get these?” she asked.
Caine animated again, straightening up and gripping his cane with both hands.
“They were part of a data set I was given! This level of realism isn’t… really feasible right now, but I can get pretty close, if you’d like!”
If she’d like. Wasn’t that the crux of the issue. Caine wanted - needed - direction from them, but Pomni wasn’t sure how to give it to him. Not in a way that he would understand. And with the revelation that his Adventures had rules he had to follow, and that he may be incapable of not making Adventures… Jax may not have an issue with removing what little agency Caine truly had, but Pomni was not at all comfortable with it.
“Do you like fish?” Pomni asked.
Caine’s jaws closed and opened in a blink.
“I… suppose? They are very colorful, and it’s easy to animate movement in water!”
“Okay. Um.” Pomni had no idea how to address this correctly. “Are you making this Adventure because you like fish, or because you think we would like fish?”
Caine stared at her blankly. Pomni swallowed nervously.
“I-I mean, does this interest you?” she asked desperately.
Caine grinned at her again. Pomni hated that she couldn’t tell if it was real.
“Of course it does! More importantly, does it interest you?”
“Yes, but-!”
“Then we’re all good to go, right?”
“WAIT!” Pomni yelled, throwing her hands up as if she could grab him and stop him.
Caine, who had lifted his hand to snap his fingers, paused and looked at her curiously.
“Caine, you understand that you don’t have to make things that interest us, so long as you don’t force us to interact with it, right?” she asked.
Caine twitched. Just a little. Just enough to make Pomni wonder if she had just ruined what little progress they’d made with him.
“I’m designed to entertain you. It’s my function. My only function. I HAVE to entertain you with Adventures. What I want is secondary. Your wants come first.”
Pomni absolutely hated the low, monotonous voice Caine was using now. She’d messed up. She should have let him come to that conclusion more naturally. She shouldn’t have pressured him when she knew how he thought.
“Caine, wait, please, that’s not- look, ignore what I just said, give us a little more time and we’ll call for you and talk about the next Adventure, okay? Please?”
Caine snapped his fingers, and Pomni was suddenly back in her room. The blocks were back in their normal spot.
“...*SPROING*,” she whispered.
She had to tell the others what had just happened. They needed to be prepared for the mindset Caine was in. The mindset she’d put him in.
She just hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid while he waited. She hated how often she had begun hoping that, recently.