Chapter Text
Popping back into existence had been a jarring experience, to say the least.
A month ago, Christine had arrived in her bedroom, from before the circus.
The door and window were in the same place, but the walls had been painted maroon, and the bed frame contained only a mattress with a white bedsheet. A quick look around proved that this was her apartment, but sparsely decorated, with only the basics in furniture.
A few teary-eyed phone calls later, Christine reunited with her family again. She promised she would explain everything in full detail later (at least until she could get enough information as to how and what the hell had happened), and that the important thing now was that she was safe and finally home.
She had tried looking up a plethora of Google searches with keywords such as ‘headset circus game’, ‘digital circus headset’, ‘stuck in headset game’, to see if anything had appeared online. Every search yielded fruitless results.
As for getting back into the swing of life, she re-obtained her apartment pretty easily. Her mother had been renting it out to temporary city-goers, and using the funds to try and find her missing daughter, and all of her belongings were being kept in the attic.
The job was a little harder, given her unexplained period of unemployment. Thankfully, after a few days of no responses from employers, she’d managed to nab a 9-5 job in an office not too far away, working as a data analyst.
Surprisingly, going to work helped to ease herself into reality, and take her mind off too many damning psychological questions at once.
But, it was still hard adjusting.
The circus had been horrible. It mentally damaged her and so many others, and for an unlucky few, ruined them forever. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have any happy memories of her time there. She missed her friends, and the real world felt so lonely without them.
She’d once had a double-take when a coworker placed a tape dispenser on their desk, the thin red tape resembling Gangle’s ribbons. On another occasion, she’d gotten excited hearing the name ‘Ragatha’, before realising she had misheard the name ‘Agatha’.
It wasn’t like she could look any of them up online, either — they had all forgotten what their real names were, adopting aliases until the day they would spontaneously remember. At least, she assumed so, because there was no way any parents were allowed to name their child ‘Zooble’.
And yet, strangely, she had a feeling that they’d all find each other again.