Chapter Text
Pomni didn’t know how she was supposed to explain her thinking to the others. How to explain her suspicions about Abel. How much she trusts Kinger, that he might know something they don’t about this exit strategy. That niggling voice in her mind that insisted it’s too good to be true.
She’s not like them. She’s fallen for the false promise of an exit before. If Jax was right–
Jax.
Halfway into replying to Zooble, her eyes flick to him, and she feels her digital stomach twist in horrified recognition of the look on his face.
Fear.
Panic.
And as his long, purple limbs coiled, she felt pure terror streak through every electrical impulse in her digital nerves, because he wasn’t moving like a man dashing for freedom.
She twisted back to the big red and blue buttons in front of her and knew if Jax crossed that room, he’d trap them all in the circus forever.
Before she could second guess herself, or Abel, or just get an answer out of Kinger about any of this, she screamed over the sound of Jax’s panting breaths and slammed her gloved fist down on the blue button.
They should have been freed.
Or Caine should have popped out and whined that they tried to abandon him. Or a loud buzzer should have sounded that scolded them all for making the ‘wrong’ choice, if the AI had really designed all of this as another adventure like Jax said.
But that didn’t happen.
One second, Pomni was in a dark room, surrounded by her friends, backlit by a bright blue computer screen.
The next, she is in The Void.
She doesn't know how long she floated in the Void the first time, when Caine pulled her out and finally returned to the circus to fix the mess Kaufmo’s abstraction had made. Somehow, she knows he won't be coming to pull her back again.
The first time she’d been here, she'd been overwhelmed. Wrought with panic, driven to the peak of her nerves by the endless hallways, the haunting reminder of the desk and headset that started all of this, she’d had nothing to lose in the vast emptiness but herself.
She didn't feel the nothingness like she does now, like the vacuum of space without the cold. She didn't feel it consume her, like being swaddled in a blanket with none of the comfort. She saw but didn't see as she does now, how different nothingness is from blackness. Empty not just of things, but of emptiness itself. Not black or white, not full and not empty, but some horrible, terrible contradiction of both, and neither. Everyone who spoke of the abyss as a yawning trench filled with inky blackness had no idea how much worse the un-white is. How significant negative space, the absence of something, is compared to the blocky, indefinable absence of absence that filled the Void. Shapes without meaning. Color without context. Nothing, everything, neither, both.
Pomni doesn't think. Doesn't think about not thinking. Doesn't blink or breathe or anything as the Void creeps into her as it consumes everything around her.
I wonder if this is what Abstraction feels like
It's that… idle flicker, that tiniest jolt like a hint of static, that shocks her system back into awareness, before suffocating her and knocking her breathless like a fist driven so deep into her gut that it punches through the back of her. Pomni doubles over and hurls, heaving so violently stars burst behind her eyes as nothing, not even that disgusting black ooze rips out of her mouth. No release from the torturous excretion of nothing, just the agony of trying to expel all the wrongness from her avatar where no thing exists to be expelled.
Tears pour from her eyes as she coughs and gasps for air, desperate for even the facsimile of oxygen she hasn't needed in all her time in the digital realm, but there is no air in the Void to fill her digital lungs.
In defiance, her lungs expand anyways.
Pomni sobs, overwhelmed with such raw, indescribable emotion that she can't tell if she's mourning losing everyone and everything around her, or rejoicing that she's found herself again after being chewed up by the unspace around her. She laughs, hysterical and crying, as the feeling of being returns to her like an old friend that loves to beat her black and blue. Even the aches, the pains, and the scars are welcome reminders that she's alive after feeling nothing, not even death, for who knows how long.
That inescapable dread that she's lost time sends spikes of fear like glass shards into her chest. How long has she been here? How long has she been alone? How long has everyone been… gone?
And somewhere, deep in a place Pomni can't define inside her, deep in the Void around her, she's knows they're gone. She hasn't just been lost in the digital expanse, there's nothing left but her. No Jax or Ragatha. No Kinger, Gangle, or Zooble. No Caine or Bubble or Circus.
Just Pomni.
Pomni and The Void.
And she cries, and screams, and long after a human throat would give out under the strain she fills the Void with enough sound and fury to wake the dead and scatter the living.
Where did it all go wrong?
It wasn't when she put on the headset. Everyone did. And unless everyone else was trapped in their own personal Void, which feels as impossible as Caine popping back into existence to tell her this was all a joke, a punishment game for trying to leave the circus, then it wasn't when anyone else put on the headset.
The button.
Everything went wrong when Pomni pushed that big blue button, to finally get everyone out of this deranged digital rabbit hole, so that no one had to suffer another miserable day in Wonderland with a Mad Toothy Hatter.
To think, everything would have been fine if she'd let Jax press the button, even if it might have been trapping them there forever.
If this were Caine's twisted idea of convincing Pomni not to leave, hats off to him. She gives up. She'll spend an eternity going on adventures every day if it means never spending another second in this abyss.
And she cries, because even that revelation doesn't bring anything back. Now she's just trapped in the Void missing the hell she’d wanted so badly to escape. She might call it cruel, if she weren't so sad. At least in the circus she had friends. She had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, things to do, as wacky and inane as the adventures were.
What she wouldn't give to go back. To start over. To hit Ctrl+R and reset the program, load the saved game, make a different choice.
If only it were that easy.
Pomni never succumbs to the grip of the Void again. Her mind remains her own, even as her body floats helplessly through nothing. If what she experienced before coming to was anything like Abstraction, she's never giving up like that again. She'll lock her mind up like a steel trap, like Kinger, even if the poor old chess piece could only find the keys to himself in the dark. If she loses her lucidity like him, maybe that wouldn't be so bad, if it meant she could at least be a little crazy with friends again.
She wonders what she must look like from the outside. Whatever consciousness means in a digital world, is her mind the only set of files left on the computer? Is the program everything runs on just off, or deleted? Is the Void just what a hard drive looks like when there's only one file open and nothing else there?
If she were sitting at the computer, mouse hovering over an empty screen, could she
→ File
She could feel it! Not with her fingers, but with something like her mind. She opened the menu, found the drop-down for File! All she has to do is
→ Load State
All she has to do is–
SNAP!
“WELCOME, TO THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS!”
“MY NAME IS CAINE! I’M YOUR RINGMASTER, AND I’M HERE TO SHOW YOU THE MOST JAW-DROPPING, HEART-STOPPING, MIND-BENDING PARAPHERNALIA YOU’VE EVER LAID YOUR EYES UPON!”
“ISN’T THAT RIGHT, BUBBLE?”
“Thaaaat’s rrrrright, Caine! I can’t wait to see what you’ve got cooking up for today.”
“WELL, LET’S NOT WASTE ANY TIME. LET’S GET RIGHT INTO THE SHOW!”
Gangle
And Zooble
And Kinger, too!
Ragatha, Jax, and there’s Kaufmo, woohoo~
Day after day after- day after- day after day we fly
Past the moon and the sun and we don’t know why~!
When Pomni emerges into the circus, mid-theme song, that glitchy ditty that had been the first thing she’d seen when she first arrived here, she doesn’t immediately collapse to her knees. Her feet stay under her as she breathes real, if digital air, and for just a moment it’s all she can do to stare at the world she never thought she’d miss seeing.
The world of the Amazing Digital Circus stares back, as a giant floating eyeball knocks her down and into Jax, setting off dominoes of her friends ending in Gangle’s mask breaking on the floor. Everyone, all five of the cartoon faces she’d missed in the Void, turned to look at her.
“Caine, is this another one of your NPC’s, or is this a new sucker? Because if it’s a new character, we're gonna to have to redo this whole theme song!”
And Pomni smiles, but as she opens her mouth, the only thing that comes out is a tiny, pitchy whine, as tears rip out from her eyes and sobs break out of her like inmates freed from their cells, raucous and joyous and she hiccups as she cries, hopelessly and happily, because she's back.
She's home.
And she won't lose them. Never again.