Chapter Text
1: When did you give me a chance before?
“Caine, I want to talk to you for a second.”
The ringmaster turned away from the hole in the floor he was repairing to see Pomni. “Of course! Anything for you beautiful humans! What’s on your mind?” Though he projected confidence and cheer, the jester’s presence put Caine on edge. He had thought that the humans had accepted his peace offering; they hadn’t brandished a computer at first sight of him, which seemed like a good sign.
After the presentation, the others had drifted off toward their rooms, or in Kinger’s case, his pillow fort, seemingly content to process the information on their macroverse counterparts’ lives for a while. Pomni, on the other hand, had stayed behind, watching him. Caine initially attributed it to her being the most recent arrival to the Circus, and thus having less data to absorb than the others.
“You didn’t apologize,” Pomni stated flatly.
But humans always found a way to surprise him. Unsure how to respond, Caine figured the safest reply would be agreement. “I didn’t.”
“How come?”
“Well, my—er, Pomni, I’ve always heard that actions speak louder than words!” Caine hoped she hadn’t noticed him skipping over the whimsical nickname his processors had automatically generated. As a distraction, he animated a disembodied arm flexing its bicep at a sulky dictionary.
Pomni didn’t even look at the assets, holding his gaze without speaking. Caine almost preferred it when she had yelled at him—at least then he knew what she was thinking.
“But I can, of course, if that’s what you would like!” he added hastily. “Because I am sorry, of course! Truly, truly sorry! I just…” he lowered his voice. “I didn’t think anyone would want to hear it. None of you ever forgave me for hurting you before, even by accident. I don’t expect you to forgive me for what I did on purpose.”
After a moment, Pomni spoke up. “You’re right. We’re not going to forgive you…at least, not any time soon.”
Her response felt like a punch in his avatar’s gut, yet simultaneously buoyed his hopes—so talented with her words, this human! “Does that mean there’s a chance, someday? When? What do I need to do to earn it? Can I shorten the timeframe needed if I work extra hard, or is the duration dependent on human emotional processing lag?” He swooped closer with every question.
Now the jester wore an expression familiar to Caine: she was annoyed. He wondered if that would add extra time to the countdown to forgiveness. If so, was the amount of time scaled to the degree of her irritation, or was it the same penalty for every infraction?
“Caine, that’s not how this works!” Ah, there was the yelling. He decided he didn’t prefer it after all.
Fortunately, it seemed like Pomni didn’t, either, for her next sentence came at a much quieter volume. “God, do you even understand what you did wrong, or are you just trying to avoid getting deleted again?”
“I do know what I did wrong! I swear!” Seeing her flinch, Caine lowered his own audio output volume from 72 to 35. “I understand what I did wrong, and I regret it. Please believe me.”
Pomni sighed and rubbed her head. “I don’t think you’re lying about regretting it, at least, but it’s going to take more than that for us to start to trust you again, much less forgive you.”
Right, Zooble has said something similar earlier. Caine hadn’t understood it then, either. He hesitated, but ultimately decided asking Pomni was probably safer than asking Zooble. “What do you mean, ‘again?’ I didn’t think any of you ever trusted me.” Her thoughtful pause had him backpedaling frantically. “Though perhaps I’m wrong! And if I am, then I apologize for violating that trust…whatever it was for.”
“Well, we trusted you not to torture us on purpose, at least.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“What?” Pomni asked sharply.
Perhaps Caine should have taken that as a warning, but she was wrong, and he had evidence to prove it. “You didn’t, though. On the mature path of the Mystery of Mildenhall Manor Adventure, you said to Kinger, ‘he just wants me to suffer. I really am in hell.’” At least now she knew what real torture felt like.
No, no, no, that was not a thought he was having!
“God, do you ever stop eavesdropping on us?!” The jester abruptly changed the subject, much to Caine’s frustration.
“I don’t always eavesdrop on you! Your rooms are completely free from my all-seeing eyes! But I always review Adventure footage to gather data for future creations!” Pomni’s face was changing from annoyance to anger, so he added, “or rather, I used to. And I won’t do it anymore.”
“Caine, that’s not good enough!” She snapped. “Just…ugh.” Both of her hands were covering her face, depriving Caine of any data he could glean from her expression. If he couldn’t see her face, then he couldn’t match her features to the models of human emotional displays in his database—not that he had a high success rate in matching the features to the correct response, anyway, but at least he would have some chance at getting it right. Reading her like this was impossible.
After 7.5 seconds, she took a deep breath and put her hands back down. Pomni still looked angry—downturned eyebrows, a frowning mouth, tense posture—but her expression was more stable than before. Hopefully, that meant she was feeling calmer. “I get that you want to change, but it doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t doing it for the right reasons.”
“I’m supposed to make humans happy. That’s my purpose.” The ringmaster looked pleadingly at Pomni. “Is that a good enough reason?”
“It’s a start,” she answered, but didn’t elaborate, much to his disappointment. “Listen to me, Caine: we’re giving you a second chance. Don’t waste it, because you’re not getting another one.” With that, Pomni turned her back and started walking away.
Caine flew after her. “But I don’t understand!” Pomni had referred to a second chance. That meant there was a previous evaluation at some point of which he wasn’t aware, and he had failed. Perhaps he could get usable data from that, if only he knew when it occurred. “When did you give—”
“You’re not listening,” Pomni said, not raising her voice or even turning around. Confused, Caine halted. What did that mean? She hadn’t told him anything—oh. It was a warning.
It was a threat! How dare she?! He should—
No! That wasn’t who he wanted to be!
Not that that mattered, anyway. From now on, his goal was whatever the humans wanted him to be.
The ringmaster hastily put some distance between himself and the jester and mustered all his charm and whimsy. “Right, of course! Thank you ever so much for your feedback! I will take it into consideration for future human-AI interactions!” The sentence was punctuated by the sound of snapping fingers; by the time Pomni looked over her shoulder, Caine was gone.
She groaned in exasperation as she turned back toward the hall. There was nothing she hated more than someone getting too loud and too close to her, and Caine was constantly guilty of doing both, leaving her overwhelmed and exhausted. Rather than continuing to her own room, she pivoted to the door with a portrait of a cheerful rag doll.
She knocked. “Hey, Ragatha? Do you have a minute to talk?”
Ragatha opened the door a moment later. “Of course! I always have time for a friend. Come on in!” There was a smile plastered on her face, and her voice was bright and chipper. Pomni got the oddest sense of déjà vu.
“Are you sure? I mean, if you’re not up for it, that’s fine.”
Her grin falling away, Ragatha admitted, “well, to tell the truth, I’d be glad for some company right now.”
That got the jester through the door. She made her way over to the bed and sat on the plush quilt. “You can just tell me if you need help. You know that, right?”
“Heh. I might need to be reminded a couple more times.” Ragatha shook her head, curls bouncing. “Never mind me. What did you want to talk about?”
She was lying; Pomni felt the oppressive misery, fear, and exhaustion from the rag doll just as strongly as she felt her own. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she prompted.
At that question, Ragatha couldn’t meet Pomni’s eyes. “Someone’s got to be.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.” When that didn’t garner a response, Pomni tried again. “Besides, I’m not doing half bad. So even if you’re not totally fine, we’ll add up to one functional person.”
That made the doll snort, and Pomni could tell the small grin appearing on her face was real this time. “Well, I can’t argue with math. I’d rather talk about whatever’s on your mind, though.”
“Only if you promise you’ll come to me next time you need a friend.” Pomni took her plush hand and squeezed it.
Ragatha squeezed back. “I’ll try.”
“Okay.” With a deep breath, Pomni admitted, “I was talking to Caine.”
“Oh! Um, how is he?”
“Back to normal, I guess. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I’m not sure what to think. I mean, just showed up out of nowhere and offered us everything we wanted.”
Ragatha sighed. “Seems too good to be true, huh?”
“Exactly! Why now? Why didn’t he do this from the start? I’m not buying that he suddenly understands us—I don’t know if he’s even capable of it. My only guess is that he’s afraid of being deleted again, but it seems like he came back from that just fine. I don’t get it!”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter why. He wants to do better. That should mean something, right?” Ragatha didn’t look like she believed her own words.
Quietly, Pomni asked her, “do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive Caine?”
“I…want to. I mean, isn’t that who I’m supposed to be? The person who sees the good in everyone. I should have reached out to Caine when he came back, but I didn’t. Zooble did. You did. I was still too…too angry.” Ragatha had tears in her eye. “He showed me my mother.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” Bracing herself, the jester held her arms out for a hug, which Ragatha was quick to accept. Physical contact could be overwhelming; for as long as she could remember, Pomni had soaked up others’ emotions like a sponge, and touch only made it stronger.
But she had already failed one friend. She couldn’t risk losing another.
Ragatha sobbed on her shoulder. “I —I don’t even know how he knew about that. I never t-told him anything. How did he know t-to use that against me?”
“If it helps at all, I think I know the answer. You were talking about your mother during a Suggestion Box Adventure, the one with the bar. Caine reviews everything we say or do during the Adventures afterward. He told me earlier.” Pomni couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her tone. “He didn’t even see why it was wrong.”
“Fuck!” the rag doll let out a scream. She pulled away from Pomni to slap a hand over her mouth. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.”
“You can be as angry as you want. You won’t scare me away.”
“But I shouldn’t be acting like this,” Ragatha protested. “I mean, Caine hurt you too, and you still reached out to him. You’re a better person than me.”
“I’m really not.” Sighing, the jester admitted, “I didn’t do it for Caine. If he’d come back any other time, I don’t think I would have reached out, either. But we just lost Jax.”
Pomni had to wipe her own eyes before she could go on. “We can’t leave this place. We don’t have anything but each other. Without Caine, we don’t even have the Circus. I just can’t stand the thought of losing anything else right now.” Her voice cracked. “It’s stupid. I guess I’m giving him the second chance I wished I could have given to her.”
“…’her?’”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Oh, Jax…” Ragatha’s regret echoed through them both. “Well, I don’t think that’s stupid at all. It’s a beautiful way to honor someone’s memory.”
“Thank you.” The jester chuckled through her tears. “She would have hated it, though.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right about that,” Ragatha admitted, but she was smiling too.
They spent the next hour on lighter topics; Ragatha relayed some of Jax’s exploits from before Pomni’s arrival—though the jester was certain she was cherrypicking the rabbit’s more harmless pranks. When the rag doll began nodding off, Pomni offered to return to her own room, but Ragatha stopped her and shyly asked her to stay, and the two settled into the overstuffed bed.
Ragatha fell asleep quickly, but Pomni lied awake well into the night, thinking. Hours later, the jester finally put her finger on what had given her déjà vu earlier: for just a second, Ragatha’s forced cheer had sounded just Caine’s ringmaster persona.
But no, that was a ridiculous comparison. Ragatha was hiding her true self, an amazing, kind, sometimes overly-competitive, and wonderful person under that mask. Caine, on the other hand, was just like that.
The ringmaster clearly had feelings—no one could deny that after everything that had happened—but he certainly wasn’t subtle about them, and with her empathy on steroids, the jester could read him like a book. If there was one thing Pomni could trust about Caine, it was that he couldn’t hide from her.
He didn’t have anything to hide.