Chapter Text
It all stopped so abruptly Pomni barely registered slamming into the floor, too stuck on staring up at the AI who was one glitch away from torturing her all over again. She could still feel the phantom alligator jaws around her arms and legs and hat because of course she had to have feeling there, too.
"Wait…" Caine said, voice shaking as his pupils trembled.
His eyes snapped to look to his right, then he was gone.
Pomni thought she blinked and missed something, so she blinked again. And again.
Nothing changed but the Circus quaking, draining of his vibrancy in mere seconds, glitched fractures into the Void appearing everywhere. Nobody said a word—nobody could say a word. They just all stared in horror at the devastation in front of them.
And then Kinger came, and, well…
Zooble's "Holy shit" was all the confirmation they needed. Uncensored. Real.
Caine was dead. The Circus was broken.
What now?
We were supposed to just…live on? Like this? How were they supposed to do that without the actual AI creator of this world? Jax's anger fell on muffled hearing, Pomni only offering exasperated attempts to stop him from lashing out. Kinger's voice was the only thing that broke through her mental whiplash. Figures. He had always been able to do that.
"Brainscans." Well, that cued even more whiplash. There wasn't an escape for them because they had no bodies. They had no future beyond pixels. They were snapshots of people in one fleeting moment of their life, a picture of a mind preserved and molded to fit in a digital hellscape.
Jax grew even angrier, words he lashed out now barbed along the edges. Pomni only processed Ragatha collapsing to the ground, kneeling next to her and letting words of reassurance out automatically—a reflex that came with tears of her own. "I know it hurts. But we still have each other." Her voice felt choked. "We're all in this, together."
She could tell Jax wanted to storm off, trembling hands stilling and a robotic motion to how they returned to his sides. She heard Gangle as she heaved silent cries—a constant to her avatar that meant so much more now because she needed to cry like all of them did. A feather-light step of her ribbon neared Zooble's ramrod stillness. She would have reached them if they all didn't hear what came next.
A distant clamoring near the stage. The sharp, ear-piercing yell of "WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Seven Avatars popped into existence in a spot made for one. Materials clashed and clipped together, flinging them apart and eliciting shouts of surprise.
Seven humans scrambled to process their surroundings, hands—if they had them—patting at their new bodies like covered in tar and feathers.
One human blinked from his perspective through a bubble, floating just above the clipping hell that he blessedly avoided, others being flung into the curtains or clear off the stage. He blinked. So many times. Where was his body?! He caught a glimpse of something in the bubble's reflection, flinching away like he'd been burnt. That. Wasn't him. No, it couldn't have been.
Then his flinch made his body expand, puncturing the bubble and driving him into a split-second of darkness. He blinked and he was back seeing double. Seeing himself. A floating bubble containing a blue, way-too-familiar pufferfish. Panic boiled within him fast, his mouth working faster. "WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Beneath him, six others were still stabilizing. An enlarged plush of a red soda can straightened onto its nonexistent feet, hands floating in front of him, fingers testing the cushiony give to the mockery of detached soda fizz palms. His pupils were spirals atop his sunglasses.
An eyeball sprang up from its 2D state, gaining a dimension but not losing its jagged monochrome linework, single pupil appearing as the squiggle of a 1 year old holding a pencil for the first time. Colors streaked across it like dying slashes of broken crayons, the pupil angling downward as its body finally followed suit. It was tiny, barely a quarter of the eyeball's size, detached from it and very much made of pure ice—the glint to the brillant blue and radianting chill recognizable immediately. The eye's pupil trembled as a noise escaped a mouth it didn't have.
On the opposite side of the stage, a pile of slinkies unraveled, rebounding into its original form. Stretching and scrunching haltingly with the human's stumbling, the slinkies' bipedal figure appeared to form some sort of animal. The springs compressed closer together to form the body and even closer together where the head appeared to sit, the tip of a coil hand tapping at what it held on its surface. On the front, undeniably a snout with how the slinkies curl to form the noise. The rest…was unclear. It was all blocked by two giant lens slapped onto the figure, one green and one blue. The lens blinked, and the finger-coil flinched away from the movement, the whole Avatar tensing and coiling tighter. A short, humorless laugh escaped the figure, followed by a shaky, "What…is this?"
Standing upright beside the slinky abomination was some kind of anthropomorphic bear Avatar. It looked mostly stable, looking down at its paw hands and paw feets and oversized orange hoodie that looked actually comfortable to be in. The only thing off was its face—tiny features, innocent-looking beady eyes at a glance. The face of a cub. It grumbled something once its paw nearly covered its whole snout, it coming out as a growl that was silenced immediately.
On the ground off-stage there were…pieces. Everywhere. Pale brown, speckles in parts, a blue cap clattering in the center like the remains of an exploded cartoon character. The pieces were puzzle pieces, shifting and sliding and hopping around chaotically until the piece with the 2D eyes flipped rightside up. The rest of the puzzles clicked into place surrounding the eyes, a look of panicked concentration being revealed on the Avatar's expression. The hat flew up last, clicking atop the Avatar which now looked like a humanoid potato. Its limbs looked like it was made by late-game Jenga towers, shaky but holding steady for now as the Avatar immediately ran towards the last one unaccounted for, facedown in a rapidly-leaking puddle of milk.
Its propeller hat spun wildly to right itself, the ripped milkbag scrambling to plug its contents from spilling out and—oh. It wasn't a milkbag. He was cushiony to the touch. Soft but firm. A pillow. What was spilling out was milk, but it was mixed with a weird polyester filling like stuffing. The game and its creator, for all of his image-based learning, didn't quite access Canadian goods enough to discover what milkbag were. The potato Avatar slowed in the confusion the pillow had, the propeller slowing on his head and green eyes blinking more than an unusual times a second.
It—no, he—was thinking.
"What the hell…?" the pillow stammered, taking in the chaos around him. The people that weren't people anymore but with just enough of their brand attached to their appearances to be able to recognize them. The Stage was still erupting with overlapping words of confusion and panic, the bubbles of entrapped Pufferfish popping and reappearing shrunken and multiplied. Puffer only got louder after each pop, the bubble cloud shifting around together in the air until a slinky coil gingerly wrapped around one and pulled them all down. He sat, calming and now muffled, in a heap of foam.
The others were helping each other, enough for the pillow—no, he wasn't a pillow what was he? Who was he? He couldn't remember. A SMii7Y? No. That didn't feel right. Close…but not it. That wasn't his name.
Whatever it was, SMii7Y had no more time to linger on his lost name, turning at the potato Avatar's voice—Blarg's, his mind provided uncomfortably— "There's more?!"
Blarg had turned away from the stage, staring forward hard enough in exasperation that his arms promptly shattered back into puzzle pieces. He didn't even react to it, just staring.
SMii7Y hopped forward—immediately cursing his short stature and complete lack of legs—to peer around him, freezing at the sight of six more figures.
A crying theater mask held by ribbons, a king chess piece with regal purple robes and a bucket on his head, a ragdoll, a lanky scowling purple rabbit, a short red-blue jester, and an abstract collection of shapes and parts.
The king stepped forward first, the others looking way too overwhelmed to even consider speaking. Slowly, detached palm outstretched slightly, he said, single visible eye creased in sympathy, "I don't usually do these things, but. Welcome to the Circus."