Chapter Text
Pomni doesn't know it at the time, but the first thing Jax tells her is a lie.
So is a lot of what comes after.
“Thank goodness this is all a dream, right Pomni?”
Pomni doesn’t answer him. She isn’t capable of it.
She pays the price only a few seconds later, a light one-two swat against her cheek breaking her from the middle of an internal freefall. In that moment, the sting of her cheek feels more real than the ground beneath her feet.
“Wha—?”
It’s one of the other players. The purple rabbit guy—he hadn’t offered his name—stares at her with his hand hovering in preparation for another strike. He raises a brow at her, mouth quirked at the corner. Waiting.
Expectant.
His expression stands out to her in that moment, out of place among the rest. The others have done nothing but look at her with pity since she arrived.
This is something else.
Pomni turns her gaze to the floor. Discomfort rises in her chest. If this were any other time, any other place, maybe she’d call him out on it and ask this guy what his problem was. Tell him to stop looking at her like that—like he already knows her, or perhaps took a peek beneath her skin and figured out what made her tick while she wasn’t paying attention.
Pomni glances up at the doll woman. Ragatha, her mind dimly recalls. Like Raggedy Ann. She stands with her hands clasped at her middle, smiling sweetly as if she hasn’t just announced it is impossible to leave this place and that trying to will drive you to insanity.
Ragatha watches Pomni with a different kind of expectation. Warm, patient, concerned. Pomni sways on her feet, briefly unbalanced by the tonal whiplash standing at either side of her.
“Why are we here, again?”
There’s another player. Kaufmo. Pomni stares at the portrait printed over his bedroom door, wondering if he’ll expect something from her as well.
Ragatha rings his doorbell and hums at the silence that follows.
“Huh, maybe he’s not in his room?” Ragatha turns, eyes shifting toward the rabbit character. “I hope he’s alright.”
He isn’t looking at either of them. His attention wanders, fixes on something just over Ragatha’s shoulder. One of his ears twitches forward, just barely. He gives a slow blink. When he opens his eyes again, his boxy pupils blow wide, swallowing yellow sclera until there’s almost nothing left of it.
He’s still smiling. Pomni doesn’t recognize the expression he wears now, but it’s far from happy.
She follows his gaze and sees nothing but empty space.
Ragatha notices the change as well. She glances at Kaufmo’s door, hands wringing together at her chest.
“I spoke to him just yesterday…” Ragatha says, a nervous wobble in her voice. “Or, uh. Maybe the day before? Jax, you don’t think…?”
Jax’s smile widens. His eyes slide to meet Ragatha’s.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s fine,” Jax drawls. “Nothing bad happens under your watch, does it, dollface?”
Ragatha flinches.
“Tough crowd.” Jax’s eyes snap to hers, then. “Hey, Pomni?”
“Uh, wha—? Me?”
Jax pulls something from his pocket and tosses it in her direction. She almost fumbles the catch with her too-big hands, crushing the item against her chest to keep it from falling.
A key.
“Tell Kaufmo I said hi,” Jax says, giving a little two-fingered salute. He turns on his heel and waltzes back the way they came without another word, ignoring Ragatha’s sputters of disbelief.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“That’s just Jax.” Ragatha sighs, a poor attempt to modulate her bitter tone. She holds out her hand, motioning for Pomni to pass her the key. “You get used to it.”
Pomni drops it into her open palm.
“Don’t worry,” Ragatha says, returning to what seems to be her baseline level of cheer. “Kaufmo’s much friendlier. I’m sure you two will get along great.”
The creature everyone keeps referring to as “Kaufmo” disappears through an opening in the floor. Caine snaps his fingers and the hole seals over as if it never existed, but not before Pomni gets a glimpse of what waits below.
A darkness that stretches on forever. Inhuman whines echo from the deep, a chorus of garbled static against a backdrop of what might be rushing water. Bright pinpricks, deep within the gloom. Pink and green and yellow and blue. The dots of light flicker the way distant stars do. Blinking.
She feels a pressure against the back of her mind the longer she stares. Something fizzles beneath the flesh of her right hand and Pomni flinches away from the opening, gaze darting to the appendage. There’s no glitching, no static. No sign of the damage she’d sustained from her contact with Ragatha in the wake of Kaufmo’s attack. Just the shiny rubber of her ridiculous, oversized glove. She flexes the fingers just to be sure, but finds no trace of the sensation from earlier.
Caine had fixed her. Pomni hadn't been able to bring herself to thank him for it.
By the time the hole closes, the colored lights linger on the backs of her eyelids for a few blinks.
Across from her, a few of the others stare at the floor in various states of grim acceptance. The detached head in the chess piece’s arms makes a comment about giving up, as if this was a fate Kaufmo had chosen for himself.
Eventually, you get to asking what the point of anything is, and you completely lose sight of who you are and why you’re even alive—
“This’ll make a hell of an entry in the ol’ dream journal, huh, Pomni?”
She turns and finds Jax beside her, hands in his pockets, eyes gleaming. He has his back to the others and to where the hole had been, seemingly unfazed by the creatures lingering in its depths.
“Does everyone end up like that?”
Jax quirks a brow at her, smile drooping lopsided.
“That’s more of a late-game conversation,” he tells her, rocking back on his heels. “I’d think a little harder about whether you really want the answer to that, if I were you.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t meant to be.”
The words are cruel. Dismissive. The smile he wears as he offers them to her is even more so. It is, however, the first thing anyone has said to her since she arrived that doesn’t feel like it’s had its edges filed down before she’s had the chance to hear it.
The others spoke in gentle words, empty reassurances—each conversation another spoonful of honey attempting to conceal bitter medicine. The sweetness isn’t helping. If anything it only stokes her panic, revealing new depths to the wrongness of this place. This prison doesn’t merely trap its inmates; it convinces them to do its bidding, to welcome newcomers and keep them docile until the circus has time to sink its teeth in. Her stomach churns at the thought of joining them, eyes scanning the edges of the room, searching for a glimpse of Caine’s false exit if only to give herself something to flee toward.
Jax makes no effort to disguise the bitterness of what she’s seen. Pomni doesn’t know what to make of that right now. Doesn’t know whether she should be thankful or terrified or some combination of both. He clearly isn’t coming from a place of kindness.
His bluntness does make it feel a little easier to breathe, though. She cautiously decides to settle somewhere in the middle.
“Never seen anyone face an abstraction on their first day,” Jax continues, as if commenting on the chance of rain. “You believe in omens, Pomni?”
“I… not really?” Pomni says. “Why? Is that bad?”
Jax grins at her, and Pomni feels the scales tip—apprehension winning out over the gratitude she felt only moments before.
“Guess we’ll find out.”
A few days later, Pomni can’t help but wonder if Jax’s omen theory held some merit.
Admittedly, the whole getting thrown from a moving truck thing was Jax’s fault. But what came after—spending the better part of an afternoon helping a sentient NPC come to grips with a reality she herself didn’t fully understand, only to watch him violently meet his end in an explosion of confetti—was something no one could have predicted.
Ragatha finds her in the main tent the next morning, silently staring at the cracks in the tile. There are still a few stray pieces of confetti caught between them from the day before.
“The next adventure will be better,” Ragatha promises her, patting her on the shoulder. “You’ll see.”
She’s whisked away to a funeral for a person she never met. Pomni spends it mourning someone the others will never get to know. Guilt winds its way around her heart and constricts.
She stares at Kaufmo’s portrait and wonders what kind of person he might have been. Moments before running for her life from his abstraction, Ragatha had told Pomni she’d get along with Kaufmo. Had Ragatha been right about their compatibility, or had she simply seen the similarities in their character models and made assumptions? Are their models even based on anything? Pomni doesn’t consider herself all that funny. Not enough to justify the jester theme, at least—but maybe the avatars run deeper than that. There are other ways to be entertaining, after all.
Maybe her bad luck streak was part of that.
As she listens to the speeches, a vicarious grief washes over her. The people here are all so different, but she can tell each of them had cared for Kaufmo. For them, his abstraction carries an additional layer of horror that goes beyond his transformation and haphazard rampage through the circus.
They’ve lost a friend.
There’s something else Pomni notices, something she isn’t sure what to do with but can’t let go of no matter how she tries to focus on the speeches.
Jax doesn’t attend the funeral.
None of the mourners are surprised by his absence.
Pomni keeps glancing toward the hall, half expecting Jax to appear with some tasteless remark about being fashionably late. Instead, something cold prickles over her skin. Her attention shifts to the dark corners of the room.
That pressure builds behind her eyes again as she searches the shadows, throbbing against her skull. It is the same pressure she felt while peering into the cellar as Kaufmo was lowered down: adrenaline setting her nerves alight, heaviness settling in her lungs, a strange buzzing spreading beneath the flesh of her right palm.
Pomni finds nothing watching her from the shadows.
She spends the rest of the funeral glancing over her shoulder anyway, unease lingering. Without Jax there to interrupt it, the pressure has room to settle. She tucks her right hand beneath her opposite arm and folds her arms across her chest, trying her best to play the part of the respectful mourner at a funeral for someone she never met.
Jax is a menace. His humor seems to run along an unpredictable continuum between genuinely funny and downright cruel, and she’d be lying if she said he hadn’t gotten in her head with the whole bad omen thing. The others give him a wide berth when they can, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Even so, every sound draws her gaze back to the doorway.
He never comes.
Pomni’s next bout of bad luck is, again, set in motion by none other than Jax. He tosses Gangle’s mask through the Scary Door like a frisbee. His pleasantly surprised grin is the last thing Pomni sees as Kinger drags her over the threshold by her eyeball.
By the time they drag themselves out of literal hell, Pomni has gained an unlikely friend. It’s almost enough to make up for being hunted and ultimately possessed by a demonic entity. Almost.
“Gosh, Pomni. I’m so sorry you had to deal with all that,” Ragatha says once Pomni has finished her retelling over breakfast the next morning. She leaves out the parts about Kinger—the conversation between them felt intensely private. The others probably wouldn’t believe her anyway. “I’m sure today’s adventure will be—”
“Don’t!” Pomni shouts.
Ragatha flinches at the sudden outburst.
Pomni clears her throat and lowers her voice. The apologetic smile she offers Ragatha ends up feeling more like a grimace, but she presses on. “Sorry, I just—let’s not jinx it, okay? Please?”
“Oh!” Ragatha says, understanding bringing a touch of warmth back to her expression. “Um, sure? Sorry, Pomni. I didn’t pick you for the superstitious type.”
The awkward silence that follows is enough to make anyone squirm. As if responding to an inaudible cue, Jax leans forward from Ragatha’s other side, propping his head on his hand with his elbow planted against the table.
“Geez, Ragatha. This has got to be a new record,” he drawls. “What are we, not even a week in? I’m starting to think you enjoy driving off the newbies.”
“Jax!” Ragatha turns on him, a bright flush burning her cheeks. “You are such a—you can’t just say things like that! I would never do that, that’s horrible.”
Jax shrugs.
“Sure you wouldn’t,” he says, gaze shifting to meet Pomni’s. “Where’d you end up in yesterday’s adventure, again?”
“Um… hell?”
“Hell,” Jax repeats, smug. “Go on, Raggy. How are you gonna downplay this one, huh? I’m sure hell isn’t that bad. Maybe today she’ll get to visit purgatory, instead.”
“Why do you have to be so negative all the time?”
“You’re right.” Jax’s eyes remain fixed on Ragatha as he speaks. “At least no one died this time, huh, Pomni?”
Ragatha’s chair screeches across the floor as she abruptly stands from the table. She breathes hard, glaring at Jax with a hostility much deeper than the current squabble.
“At least I’m trying to help,” Ragatha says. “When’s the last time you did anything but make things worse for everyone else?”
Jax’s smile never falls. He blinks, slow and controlled, completely unfazed by Ragatha’s outburst.
Ragatha’s cheeks turn a furious shade of crimson. Pomni watches the stalemate unfold, feeling uneasy.
“I-I didn’t mean that.”
Jax tilts his head, eyes squinting with humor. His grin stretches wider, wickedly Cheshire.
“...Didn’t you?”
Just as Pomni’s considering crawling under the table to escape the growing tension, Ragatha sighs. She shoots Pomni a guilty look, then takes one last glance at Jax.
She turns and leaves without another word.
“What was that about?” Pomni asks in the following silence.
Jax’s gaze doesn’t move from Ragatha’s retreating form. He swipes the untouched toast from Ragatha’s plate and takes a bite, smiling in satisfaction. The cat who got the cream.
“Raggy’s been in a mood lately,” he says through his mouthful. The conspiratorial way he says it makes it sound as though he’s sharing valuable insider information.
“Because of you?” Pomni guesses.
Jax takes another bite of toast instead of answering, one brow lifting as if to ask, who, me?
Sensing she’s reached the limit of his candor, Pomni tries to return her attention to her own breakfast. She eases her grip on her spoon and swirls it through her cereal, suddenly nauseous at the idea of forcing it down.
It doesn’t take long for her attention to wander again. Beside her, Jax moves on from Ragatha’s toast and becomes momentarily preoccupied with her abandoned cup of coffee. She watches him sniff at it and screw up his face, prodding it away with the tip of his finger as if it personally offended him. Jax swipes a muffin from the spread in the middle instead, turning it over in his hands before taking a tentative bite.
His eyes snap to hers without warning.
“You gonna say what’s on your mind, or keep staring like some creep?”
“I don’t need you to defend me,” Pomni blurts, surprised by the sudden confrontation. She swallows, pushes onward despite the nerves. “Especially not like that.”
“Is that what you think that was?” Jax leans back in his chair and takes another bite, chewing thoughtfully. “You really that self-centered? Not everything is about you, Pomni.”
Pomni eyes Ragatha’s empty plate.
“I figured,” she says. It’s clear these two have some long-standing feud. Pomni gets the feeling she doesn’t want to get caught up in the middle of it. “Still. Can you at least try to leave me out of it?”
Jax grins, amused.
“Where’s the fun in that?”