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In Jax's defense, the adventure was stupid.
It was some silly treasure hunt, where you had to find the treasure before dying. This was the fourth one this month, and frankly Jax was getting bored.This was they had to find a golden rubber chicken. So Jax solved the riddles in four minutes, killed his teammates for fun (other than Kinger,) and then stole the chicken from the top of a statue. He waved at his teammates (who were locked in a glass chamber above him since they died,) and started making jokes about the adventure.
Ragatha said "Jax" in the tone. Zooble laughed, which they would deny later. Gangle's comedy mask held up okay. Kinger thought the chicken was actually talking and had to be calmed down. Pomni looked like she wanted to laugh and felt bad about it, which was honestly the best reaction.
Caine surprisingly did not laugh.
That was new. Usually Caine just kept going. He’d laugh, and then re-hide the chicken as he made up a new riddle on the spot. This time though, he just floating in the air, staring at Jox, his usual sorta happy eyes twitching and his mouth no longer smiling.
"You know," Caine spoke, "some of us put a lot of work into these."
"Some of us can tell," Jax said. "The spotlight was a nice touch."
"Every day." Caine's voice had gone kind of flat. "Every single day, Jax. I make something wonderful and you poke a hole in it."
"Literally, in this case." Jax held up the flat chicken that he had just popped.
Caine's eyes stopped twitching. Instead, he smiled.
“You know what! You’re right. Clearly these group adventures aren’t hard enough for you. What you need is a solo mission.”
"Nah I’m good."
“I wasn’t asking.” Caine replied, snapping his fingers.
The jungle disappeared, and Jax was standing in a dark empty hallway.
Instead of the trees covering the floor, there were concrete walls, and small, flickering lights in the ceiling that didn’t make it easier to see. It was freezing in this hallway, as if the AC was going at full strength. Jax took a look at himself and realized that he was wearing a black tutrtleneck along with an earpiece against his ear.
“Jax, or should I say, Agent Jax!” Caine’s voice crackled in the earpiece, “Welcome to your solo mission! Operation Destruction!”
"This is a joke right?"
“Your mission, should you accept it, is to infiltrate the enemy compound and retrieve the Secret Plans. The extraction point is on the roof! Good luck agent. Also you can’t choose not to participate, because that would be boring.”
Click.
Jax rolled his eyes and started walking down the hallway.
Honestly, the first ten minutes were fine. The guards were clearly NPCs that Caine barely tried on, seeing as they all had one default expression and kept it the entire time (think eyes squinting and mask over eyes.) They walked back and forth in straight lines and occasionally conversed with one another with simple phrases such as “Hey Jarold, what’s for lunch?.” He found a keycard in a potted plant that opened a door with nothing but a vent in it, which he decided to crawl through. It was a dumb mission, but it wasn’t terrible and he’d rather do this than be stuck doing nothing and being left alone with his thoughts.
He made it through the vents and stumbled into a room with a huge glass case in the middle, and lots of red lasers. He tested the lasers and when they didn’t do anything, decided to walk straight through them to get to the glass case. Inside, he found a single sheet of paper with the words SECRET PLANS in crayon.
“Hoory!” he said out loud, his voice dripping with sarcasm “I solved the case!”
And then something dropped over his head.
He struggled for a moment, and then realized that it was a sack. Before he could get his hands up, someone grabbed both of them from behind him and yanked them back, stopping him from doing anything.
"Hey—"
They shut him up by putting tape on his mouth. He tried to kick them and they retaliated by grabbing his legs and tying them together. Then, they lifted him off his feet and carried him, with the sack still on, while a cardboard voice from in front of him said “Boss, we’ve got the spy” in a robotic voice that definitely belonged to an NPC.
He tried to kick. Someone caught his leg. More scratchy stuff around his ankles this time. Then he was off his feet and being carried, sack still on, while a cardboard voice somewhere above him said "We've got the spy, boss," as if it was reading off a card.
He technically knew that this was a part of the mission. This happens in all spy movies, when the spy gets captured and tied up and then has to escape in a super cool procedure. Jax used to watch a lot of spy movies, back when he first arrived in the circus. He thinks that he might have forced Caine to watch one or two with him.
He was so distracted, he didn’t understand where they were taking him until he was dropped into a chair, and then they took the sack off him. He looked around, and noticed that the new room was really small with grey walls and a single light bulb right above him, which was swinging on a wire. There were only two other people in the room, and both of them had no face, just a hat and a mask.
They stood there, and Jax started to struggle to try and get out of the bindings, and then the faceless guards walked towards him, rope in their hand.
The started around his chest, effectively pinning him to his chair, and then proceeded to his arms, binding him tighter. The rope felt never ending, as it went down to his legs, and then they finished with a tug at his wrists that made his fingers lose feeling.
That's when it started.
It didn’t happen suddenly. Instead, it started with his chest feeling tight, but Jax didn’t think too much of that, since the rope was pressed together so tightly. He took a deep breath to see how tight the rope was and discovered that he could barely breathe.
He tried again. Barely halfway to a normal breath.
Alright that’s fine, Jax thought to himself. Instead, he tried to see what other mobility he had. He started with his wrists, and while the rope gave him a little wiggling room, it wasn’t enough to actually do anything. The fibers on the ropes were especially rough, and he could feel how thick it was, meaning that it was harder to break apart. He also noticed how real it felt. Almost like...
Like what?
He couldn't remember the memory, or at least, not fully. All he could remember was water and him in rope and being thrown into something. A group of kids laughing. Someone lifting him out. A baseball bat? But none of that was real, because here in this circus, no one could remember their memories from the outside world. So it had to be fake right?
He pulled at the ropes again, a little more desperately. Nothing.
His heart was going a lot faster. He could hear it pounding through his chest as his breathing began to get faster as well. It was fast enough where he wasn’t even taking proper breaths now, just little gasps that made his head dizzy. His hands were also beginning to feel numb and tingling along with his face. His eyes darted around the room, the edges getting darker, and the guards disappearing suddenly, with nothing moving except for the lightbulb, sliding back and forth.
“Alright,” he said, his voice weak and shallow, “Okay Caine I admit it. You make great adventures. You can take me back now.”
The earpiece stayed silent.
"Caine."
The guards appeared in the corner of the room again
"Caine."
He was full on trembling now. He could feel himself trying to shake and the rope thankfully not letting him, and it was just holding him, and making it harder for him to breathe, and there was a super tiny part of his brain that said that it’s clearly a panic attack, and that he was just being stupid, and that he was weak, but the rest of his brain was just trying to escape.
He took a deep breath (at least as deep as he could) he yanked his arm as hard as he could, causing something in his shoulder to pop, but it didn’t matter. He yanked again and his arm slid out, because the thing about being stuck in Caine's adventure as a cartoon rabbit is that if you pull something you can just snap it in place. He rarely did things like this because he could find other ways to get out of situations, and it still hurt, but he didn’t care right now. He just kept pulling at different parts of his body until finally, he managed to free himself.
He stood up and stretched to gain more feeling in his toes and could hear the guards yelling, “Hey! The spy’s escaping.” in their monotone voices and he just stood there.
His legs. The knots on his legs. His fingers were shaking too hard to do anything useful, so he just tore at them. The guards said "Hey! The spy is escaping!" in their cardboard voices and didn't move from the door.
He stayed there for a while, breathing. Or trying to. It was still going too fast.
When his vision finally cleared well enough for the dark spots in the corner of his eyes to clear, he stood up and walked past the guards, nodding at them with his fake cheerful smile, and went up the stairs to the roof, although he could barely remember any of it. At the top of the building there was a bright purple helicopter with the word ESCAPE written on the side.
He got into it and started flying up, shooting everyone and then suddenly everything went white and he was free falling, and the next thing he knew, he was back in the circus. He noticed that he was in the “movie room” with the screen and noticed that on the screen was the cold empty room with the lightbulb and the ropes still on the floor.
And sitting on the floor, spread out across the room, was the rest of the circus.
Ragatha raised her head as if she wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. Gangle’s comedy mask broke on the floor. Kinger was looking out the window at the butterflies. Zooble was staring at the carpet. Pomni was looking at him, her face looking like it held a disgusting amount of sympathy.
“And our agent returns!” Caine whooped, floating down to stand besides him, “You finished the mission! Well, you escaped at least. You did leave the Secret Plans behind, but I'll give you partial credit for how well you escaped. I have to say Jax, I didn’t know you had it in you. I thought you would have just died and I would get to make fun of you.”
Jax stared at the screen and then at the popcorn thrown around on the floor.
“How long.” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“How long was everyone watching me for?”
“Since the beginning! I figured that if you were trying to prove it to everyone, then you would love everyone to watch you escape! Also, I was so proud of coming up with that on the spot I needed to show everyone. So a win-win scenario!”
“Jax,” Ragatha stood up, arm outstretched, “Jax, are you al–”
"Don't."
It came out way louder than he meant, but at least Ragatha stopped.
He stared at all of them, betrayal in their eyes, and knew that he should say something. Something to prove that he wasn’t as weak as the guy they saw in there, and that he was still mean, awesome Jax who didn’t care what anyone else thought of him. But his mouth wouldn’t open.
He turned around and walked out of the tent, avoiding everyone's eyes.
"Jax?" Caine called after him. "We haven't done the debrief!"
He went down the multiple halls, trying not to think of how the only difference between these and the ones in the mission is that these have color, and then went into his room and locked the door. He also jammed his desk and chair under the handle to make sure no one could come in and then sat on his bed, his head resting on his knees and arms wrapped around him.
He didn’t let Caine heal him after the mission, so his wrist was still messed up and his shoulder was still aching. His fingers were also still shaking and he wasn’t able to make them stop.
Pomni kept glancing at Jax’s door.
It had been a day and a half, which Pomni only knew because she'd been counting. Even though the digital world had no real day and night, there was still a fake sun and fake moon so Pomni kept a careful eye on those, and noticed that Jax still hadn’t come out of his room.
He didn't come to dinner. He didn't come to the adventure the next morning either, which was a surprisingly nice one where they got to bake cookies to spell a letter to give to a princess, or something. Caine barely paid attention to them, and let them out before they were even done, which was very unlike him.
In desperation, Pomni went to Ragatha to see what she thought of all of this.
“He just needs some space,” Ragatha told her when Pomni had asked, as she was frosting a cookie purple and yellow, “I think he’s embarrassed. Jax hates it whenever he freaks out in front of everyone else, and needs some time to get over it. He’ll be fine though, you’ll see.”
"But it's been almost two days."
"He's done this before." Ragatha didn't look up. "Once. After… Ribbit. He was there for five days."
Pomni knew Ragatha was saying this to make her feel better, but it only made her feel more worried, and her mind kept going back to the way he’d stared at the popcorn on the floor.
She had been looking for a way out of the jungle when she suddenly got teleported to the movie room. At first it had been sorta funny, with Jax comically taking everyone down. Everyone was laughing at seeing Jax in a turtleneck and seeing him walk around through the lasers with such ease. When the sack and rope happened, people were still chuckling but a lot less, and by the time his breathing got weird it was a lot quieter in the group. When he said Caine the first time, Pomni noticed Zooble stop laughing and when he repeated it a second time, Ragatha was on her feet yelling at Caine to stop it, and Caine waved his cane and said, "Oh, he's fine, it's all part of the drama!" and the screen just kept going.
And none of them moved, because what could they even do?
So they just watched, the whole thing and didn’t say a word until they saw him again.
She put down her cookie.
"I'm going to go check on him."
"Pomni—"
"I'll just check on him, I’ll be right back."
The hallway to the rooms was dead silent, and Pomni creeped past all of their rooms until she stood in front of Jax’s room. She stared at the smiling purple bunny on the door before knocking.
"Jax? It's me, Pomni."
No response.
"I just wanted to see if you're okay. You don't have to open the door. You can just say something. Or, um, knock back. Or don't. That's also..." She trailed off. "Jax?"
There was a sound from inside.
It was hard to describe what exactly the sound was, but it was almost like a static that kept moving up and down. Pomni froze. She had heard this sound before, back when she first got here.
"Jax?" Her voice was very small now. "Jax, please say something. Anything, just let me know you’re fine."
The static got louder.
She opened the door frantically and looked inside the room, praying that she was wrong.
She opened the door and saw that it was mostly purple, with spots flashing at her from every corner. She looked, until finally she recognized the real eyes that were in there
"Jax," Pomni whispered, hand outstretched as if to try and help him.
A hundred yellow eyes turned toward her, and Pomni didn't realize she was backing off until her back hit the doorframe.
She stood there, hoping someone, anyone would come and help her, and that's when Ragatha opened the door, Pomni falling halfway out, “Pomni, what’s—" she stopped.
Ragatha didn't scream. She just stood there, hands coming up to her mouth, a look of horror growing on her face as everyone else came in. Zooble went in first, then Gangle, the Kinger.
"Oh no," Kinger said, the dark making him think more clearly as he entered the room. "Oh no, no, not again. Not again."
Gangle made a sound behind her mask. Pomni barely glanced at her.
Zooble just stared.
"There are the ropes on him," they said, after a pause. "From the adventure."
Nobody answered them.
"I laughed," Zooble said, voice quieter and meeker than Pomni had ever heard it. "At the start, with the turtleneck. I laughed at him."
"We all laughed at him," Ragatha said.
"Yeah, but I—" Zooble stopped. "He'd have laughed. If it was one of us up there. He'd have laughed the whole time."
"I don’t think so," Pomni said.
Everyone stared at her.
"He wouldn't have," she said. "I don't think. Not at that part."
J̶a̶x̶ The creature let out another noise, sounding more painful than the last, and for a second, Pomni thought it almost sounded like a word. Before she could try and decipher it, however, Caine’s voice came floating in, bright and cheerful.
"There you all are! I've been looking everywhere! I've got a wonderful idea for tomorrow's adventure, and I was thinking Jax could—"
He froze when he saw them all, and peeked inside the door. Pomni watched as his smile seemed to willow, his mouth going downwards.
"Oh," Caine said. "Oh, dear."
Nobody said anything.
Behind Pomni, in the room, the creature that used to be Jax kept pulling against the ropes, and the ropes kept holding him and twisting around him.