Chapter Text
The time was 8:25. Probably in the AM, but the watch didn't have an indicator for that. It was on theme, of course, all red and blue plastic, and keeping track of the hour with hands tipped by little gloves with outstretched fingers. It was indisputably mass produced merch, and merch of herself no less, but Pomni thought it was pretty cute all the same.
Ragatha glanced her way, as she was prone to do, and her eyes locked onto the watch. She said, "Wow, you got a cereal prize? Lucky! Look, it even has your face on it!"
It did—the exact same image on Pomni's door plate, in fact, though the watch hands currently giving her a moustache certainly added something to the overall impression. She said, "It…sure does. When did we get a product line, exactly?"
Zooble sighed. Pomni had never actually seen them eat, but she appreciated that they still joined the group for meals sometimes. "Pretty sure Caine makes it all as soon as we show up," said Zooble. "He doesn't usually let us see it, though. I stumbled into a whole room of these tiny Ragatha plushies last week, and they were all cut up. It was creepy."
"You what?" Ragatha looked alarmed, but not so alarmed that she stopped pouring syrup onto her pancakes. She laughed nervously. "You…never told me about that. I hope he's not mad at me! For some reason!"
"I found the Dead Ragatha Room aaages ago," Jax drawled. He was sitting to Pomni's left, his breakfast (an entire roast chicken?) mostly just serving as a stage for the various forks and knives he'd stabbed into it. It was becoming quite the art piece. He put his arm on Pomni's shoulder, easily ignoring her attempt to bat him away. "Can you believe Caine hates her so much he had to kill all of her little dollies? Man, it'd suck to be Ragatha right now. Am I right?"
Giving up on getting her personal space back, Pomni sighed, and just shoveled another spoonful of cereal into her mouth. She tried to focus on the argument brewing around her, but something about the watch was holding her attention hostage. It was 8:26:45. 8:26:46. 8:26:47.
At 8:26:48, the table exploded. Pomni's vision went red, then white, then finally black, as her vision was taken from her completely by the searing heat engulfing her entire body. She felt herself being flung back, way back, carried by a shockwave that peppered her with sharp pains all over her body—shrapnel, she guessed. From the bomb.
Then, Pomni died.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize?" Ragatha asked. She looked genuinely thrilled in that moment, like she'd been the one to get a prize, and the prize was actually worth something. Pomni stared blankly up at her as she continued, "Lucky! Look, it even has your face on it!"
Then, her smile wavered a little. She looked from Pomni to the watch, then back again. She said, "Gosh. It's so accurate! Are you doing that on purpose…?"
Pomni swallowed. "Doing what?" she asked, mostly on autopilot. She was pretty sure the red she'd seen before going blind had been Ragatha's severed head slamming into her face.
"Ugh, you're making the face," said Zooble. They shuddered a little when Pomni turned her gaze over to them. "Yeah, that one. It always makes me feel guilty, even though I didn't do anything. Are you good?"
8:26:05. Pomni shook her head, then said, "I—no, I don't know. I think I just…died?"
Even before she finished saying it, she could tell it was ridiculous. She quickly amended, "I mean, not really. I think. A glitch, maybe? I saw myself die. I saw all of us die."
She'd done a lot more than see it. Things didn't usually hurt in the circus, not in the way they did back home, but the heat from the explosion had been like sticking her hand in a pot of boiling water, just all over. And also much worse.
But she'd probably just imagined that. Right? She felt fine now. 8:26:12.
Jax was the one to break the silence. He said, "So, Pomni, you know how your room's kiiinda in the best spot? When you finally go full nutso and move in with Kinger, can I have it?"
"Jax!" Ragatha snapped. She tried to place a hand on Pomni's arm reassuringly, only to sigh when Pomni promptly pulled away from the gesture. She asked, "Did you have a nightmare? I think we all get those, sometimes."
"I sure do," Gangle said, glumly. Her comedy mask was already in pieces, thanks to Jax pulling her chair out from under her, and she was just rolling a single broccoli around her plate over and over and over. "How did we die?"
Pomni remembered heat and sharpness and screaming, felt a panicked rush of I need to get the [#@*!] out of here, and that feeling pushed her to her feet. "Oh, god. There's a bomb on the table! We need to…!"
She didn't bother to finish the thought, trailing off as she scrambled to her feet and ran for the nearest cover she could see, a door she'd never bothered to check before. She wrenched it open, and ran inside, holding it open for everyone else to follow her in.
Except that 'everyone' turned out to be just Ragatha, face pinched with concern. Pomni stared back at the table, at the confused and/or amused faces watching her, and she knew with cold certainty that it was too late for any of them. She hated herself for it, but she slammed the door shut.
8:26:41. 8:26:42. Pomni glanced around with wide eyes—she'd apparently taken refuge in a large conference room, sterile and white and deeply out of place in the otherwise goofy circus environment. What the hell was it even doing here? Did Caine have board meetings?
"Hey, are you okay?" Ragatha asked. Her tone was calm, and soothing, and right then it was like nails on chalkboard. Pomni flinched away. Ragatha did too, hands raised in surrender, and said, "Ah, sorry! No touching. Listen, Pomni, I think you're having a—"
At 8:26:48 exactly, Ragatha exploded. Pomni was actually looking at her this time, so she got to see her friend's chest burst open, watch the charred stuffing and fire and chunks of metal shoot out of her. She didn't get to see it for long, though, because then she was blind, again, and she was engulfed in flames, again, and she died. Again.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize?" Ragatha asked, brightly.
Pomni shrieked, falling backwards off her chair before Ragatha managed to call her lucky again. "No, no, no!" She scuttled away, tiles cold on her hands, stupid little boots squeaking as she went, staring up at Ragatha like she was—well. Like she was a timebomb.
The timebomb stood up, looking a little hurt and a lot alarmed. She said, "Huh? Pomni, what—?"
"Don't move!" Pomni pointed at her, then checked the watch. 8:25:55. She clambered to her feet, and backed towards the door she'd tried to take refuge in, saying, "Do not move! No moving! Just—just stay there. Stay way, way over there."
Over there with everyone else? Because of course, they were all still there, perfectly unexploded. Pomni eyed them all as she backed up, hand searching behind her for the doorknob that should, hopefully, lead her to safety. Gangle and Zooble were only just looking up from their own conversation, and Jax was hanging his head over the back of his chair to shoot her an upside-down grin that must have been taking years off his spine. Kinger was…there. Ragatha was, too, and it was 8:26:13, and she was going to explode.
She was biting her lip, and making little aborted movements as she visibly warred with her instinct to run over and be comforting versus Pomni's clear instruction to the contrary. Voice a little shrill with sudden stress, she said, "Pomni, what's wrong? Are you okay?"
Pomni didn't answer. She didn't want Ragatha to explode, was the problem. But she was going to. She also didn't want Ragatha to explode her other friends, but that seemed like it was going to happen, too. 8:26:20. She had 28 seconds. What could she do in 28 seconds? She could at least get Ragatha to move somewhere else, right?
"Oh, this is great," Jax was saying. He'd sat back up, and shifted around to look at her like a normal person, arm hanging casually over the back of his chair. "Hey, Pomni, when—"
"You don't need my [#$!*] room, Jax!" Pomni snapped. That wasn't what she'd wanted to say, and she absolutely didn't have the time to be getting into pointless arguments, but the comment had just stuck with her for some reason. "It's literally opposite yours. It's not closer to anything!"
Jax actually recoiled, as if he'd been slapped. It was such an extreme reaction that Pomni couldn't help the hysterical little giggle from coming out. What, had he been saving that one up? He opened his mouth, and then he shut it, for once completely speechless.
"Okay, let's just everyone stay calm!" Ragatha begged, as if anyone other than Pomni was freaking out. She hadn't moved from her spot yet, so everyone was still very much about to die, but at least they'd be dying calmly. "Pomni, where are you going? Do you want someone else to go with you?"
That was a little stab of guilt straight into Pomni's chest—Ragatha had evidently already given up on being the one to fix this for her, which was admittedly for the best given that she was going to explode in 11 seconds, but still not really fair on her. Pomni's hand found a doorknob, and then she was out of the room, staring at the door she'd just slammed shut behind her.
In the quiet mundanity of the conference room, Pomni could admit that leaving everyone to die wasn't her best work. In an ideal world (well, a terrible world that was still much more ideal than this one) it'd probably be Ragatha sealed up in here, and everyone else safely seated around the table. Maybe it would have been, if that idea didn't also suck.
She'd probably still try it next time, because it had to be better than this.
Pomni frowned. 8:26:44. Next time? Once was chance, twice was coincidence, and then three times made a pattern. She really hoped this time loop thing would be a pattern, because otherwise…
At 8:26:48, the room was hit with a shockwave that had windows rattling, chairs tipping over, cabinets bursting open and shooting papers into the air. Pomni was thrown to the floor, tumbling over cheap, scratchy carpet until she hit the wall hard. She curled into a ball, and waited for the heat to take her back.
It didn't.
When she finally checked the watch again, it was 8:28:01. She was still staring at it when it ticked over to 8:30. Time was moving forwards, not backwards, and it was pretty [!*%#] inconvenient because she had the sneaking, dreadful suspicion that she'd just saved herself and let every single one of her friends and also whatever Jax was to her die in her place.
But this was The Amazing Digital Circus. Right? Nobody actually died here. Granted, she'd died twice, but as she'd just proven, twice was only coincidence. She pushed to her feet, and stumbled her way over a few scattered chairs, heading for the door. The thing fell right off its hinges when she poked at it, revealing…
There was a crater where the dining table had been, a deep, smoking gouge torn into the tiled floor, filled with splintered, charred wood and perfectly untouched plates of food. Pomni forced herself to draw closer. She expected to need to hop down into the crater, but it was mostly illusionary—nothing but a fancy explosion damage decal, like this was [#$*!] Call of Duty. The bodies were real, though.
She fell to her knees next to Ragatha, and also in a pile of Ragatha, the scattered bits of fluff much kinder on her knees than she felt they deserved. Jax's grin looked decidedly sardonic with only half of his face intact, and there was nothing left of Gangle but a few tragic chunks of porcelain. Zooble was even worse off, reduced to a lone, smoking antenna, and it was so hard to discern where Kinger ended and the mangled dining table began that it took Pomni a few minutes to be completely sure he hadn't miraculously escaped.
But he hadn't. Nobody had. Everyone was dead, except her. Because of her.
Caine found her like that at 10:00 sharp, eyes staring at nothing, hands squeezing a browned piece of fabric that could have been dress or hands or god knows what. It certainly wasn't Ragatha, not anymore, but it kind of felt like her, soft and gentle and nice.
"Pomni!" he cried, entering from stage left and gently bapping her on the head with his cane. "What are you doing?! The table isn't for crying, it's for chewing. Loudly! Come on, now, I want to hear those teeth earning their keep!"
Beside him, the ever helpful Bubble took the opportunity to clamp his jaws down on one of Caine's legs, which accomplished absolutely nothing other than making Bubble himself pop out of existence.
Pomni stared at Caine, then at the still smouldering wreck that had once been a dining table, which was pretty much everywhere except where she was. She shook her head. "I'm not on the table, Caine," she said, wiping her eyes. "The table exploded. Everyone's d—dead. You can fix them, right? You can—you're always doing [#@!$] like this. You can bring them back."
She sniffled, and snapped her fingers demonstratively. The gloves made it tricky, but she made do. "Like that. Right?"
"Ha ha ha! You always were such a kidder, Pomni." He mimicked her gesture, and five bodies blipped into existence a few feet in the air. They tumbled gracelessly to the floor, without so much as a yelp of pain or twitch of surprise. They were also very small, and each was clearly made of cotton, which was great for exactly one of them. "See! Everyone's fine, and raring to go for the next adventure! Speaking of adventures…!"
Pure morbid curiosity had Pomni inspecting the body that had landed closest to her; it was a tiny Ragatha, her dress cut to ribbons and with a big hole through her chest. She stared flatly up at Caine. "This is merch."
But Caine wasn't talking to her anymore. He was darting through the air like a fish in water, playing to a crowd that was just a little too dead to really appreciate his antics. As he yammered on about some kind of inane award show he was planning on hosting that night, Pomni stared at her watch.
It had to be responsible for the time travel stuff. Right? She was pretty sure that wasn't something she'd been able to do before, and then the second she slapped the thing on her wrist she started reliving stuff. Correlation might not equal causation, but come on, this was obvious. Maybe she could just…
Experimentation proved that the little dial on the side could be used to set the position of the minute and hour hands, and the tiny button on the other side didn't seem to do anything at all, no matter how desperately she hammered it. Pomni tried holding the button down, and spinning the dial both ways, and doing every possible combination of things she could think of, but nothing happened, and everyone was still dead and it was still her fault.
"Here you go, Pomni!" said Caine. Pomni looked up just in time to catch… "It's a gun!" Caine informed her helpfully. "You can go first, since you're being such a Deborah Dowager today!"
Pomni stared at the gun. It was a revolver, and it looked like it had six bullets loaded into it, and that was as much help as her gun knowledge was going to be. "You want me to use this?"
"I knew you were listening!" Caine sounded pleased as punch. "Never doubted you for a second, no matter what the papers say. Now, hurry up and unload that thing—I've got an award show to plan!"
Well. Fair enough.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize?" Ragatha asked brightly, before suddenly cutting off her next thought with a surprised yelp as Pomni all but tackled her. "Oh! Okay, wait, let me just put down the—oh, darn it."
Pomni felt the syrup oozing down her back, and she hadn't realised it was possible to care so little about being covered in goop. She hadn't just lost everyone. "I'm sorry," she gasped, the words mostly getting buried somewhere in Ragatha's stuffing. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"No, hey, don't worry! It's just breakfast!" Ragatha insisted. It wasn't a bad hug, as they went. Ragatha's grip was a little hesitant, but still much firmer than you'd usually expect of cotton, and she really was soft. With an ear close to her chest, Pomni could tell that she was also ticking very, very softly, which she could almost pretend was a heartbeat. A problem for next time.
She sighed. There was going to be a next time. What did four times make? A rule?
Ragatha was still talking. "I get it, you know? Sometimes it just builds up for weeks, and weeks, and then boom! You can get a hug whenever you want, okay, Pomni?"
It had been building up for less than two hours, actually, but Pomni wasn't inclined to disagree. She wasn't inclined to do much of anything at all, opting instead to just let herself listen as Jax asked if that offer was available to everyone, and Zooble told him to shut up, and Gangle admitted she could use a hug, and Kinger…still didn't say anything. That was a little weird.
At 8:26:35, Pomni made herself pull away, and she noticed idly that Ragatha was very quick to pull her hands back once the hug was officially over. "Sorry," she told Ragatha, again. "I think…I think I know what to do. I think I can do it better."
Ragatha shook her head. "Aw, you're doing great," she said, smiling wide. "And you know I've always got your back. You don't have to apologise for anything, okay?"
Then the bomb Pomni hadn't bothered to mention went off, and everyone died.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize? Lucky! Look, it even has your face on it!"
Pomni nodded. "Yeah, so lucky. Hey, on a related note, I'm stuck in a time loop." She'd meant it to sound casual, but her voice clearly had enough urgency injected into it to grab attention—she suddenly had four additional sets of eyes staring at her. She cleared her throat. "So, yeah, that's how my morning is going. Is that kind of thing normal around here?"
"A 'time loop?'" Ragatha repeated, sounding a little off-balance. "I…don't know? How can time 'loop?'"
"She means Groundhog Day," said Zooble. To Pomni, they said, "You mean Groundhog Day, right? I've been in one of those before. It [#$*!] sucked. How long's yours?"
Of course Zooble had relevant life experience in time looping. Pomni said, "Uh, one minute and seven seconds. And at the end, a bomb goes off and we die."
"Wait, we die?" Ragatha asked. She still looked pretty confused about the time loop thing, but she was nothing if not adaptable. "Are you sure? Even if we get really banged up we always just, you know. Pop back to normal the next day. I'd really rather not get blown up, though…""
That was true, wasn't it? Pomni hesitated. If she personally survived the Ragatha bomb and waited out the clock, would everyone 'pop back to normal?' eventually? Jax was always saying she was too new, too caught up in how life and death and choice and consequence used to work. Maybe this wasn't as big of a deal as she was making it out to be.
Maybe. But in all her time in the circus, with all the violence and chaos and horror, she'd never seen someone get genuinely hurt. A couple of weeks ago, Ragatha had been left to boil in a deep fryer for what she'd insisted was over ten minutes, and after shaking herself off like a dog she'd been completely fine, if a little miffed.
This was different. That bomb had reduced everyone to charred, inert pieces, and Caine's revolver hadn't been messing around either. There was a creeping feeling deep within Pomni's simulated guts that told her that something had fundamentally shifted when she wasn't paying attention, and riding this one out like any other adventure just didn't seem like a good idea.
"I'm sure," said Pomni. She checked her watch. "We've got 25 seconds. Ideas?"
Jax stood up, casually strutting away with his hands clasped behind his head. He said, "I've got one. It's called 'see you in hell, losers.'"
It wasn't a bad idea at all, and Gangle and Zooble certainly seemed to agree.
"Jax!" Ragatha snapped, though she looked about ready to bolt, too. She added, a little sheepishly, "But, um, he might have a point. Where is this bomb, exactly?"
Yeah, isn't that the question. Pomni said, "Well, it's kind of…on you? Over your chest, maybe? I heard it ticking when you hugged me." Then she'd seen Ragatha's torso erupt into flames, but she really didn't want to talk about it.
A confusing array of emotions ran over Ragatha's face, though she quickly settled on terror. "Oh, god, what?" She ran her hands over her dress, like she was smoothing it out. Her voice a little shaky, she said, "There's nothing there! It's just—it's just me. Why would I be wearing a bomb?!"
Pomni grimaced. If Ragatha couldn't feel it, then getting rid of it probably wasn't going to be as easy as tearing it off her and throwing it in the conference room. Just shoving Ragatha herself in there wasn't a real option either, not if people were dying for real now. She had to figure something else out.
"Wow, you got a cereal—hey!"
Pomni stood up, yanking Ragatha up and tugging her bodily towards the conference room. There was a handy lock on the inside of the door, which she engaged as soon as she slammed it behind them, in case someone decided they needed to come in and get blown up for no reason.
Then, she turned to a (justifiably) unimpressed Ragatha. Her arms were folded, and she was fixing Pomni with a much less biting version of the glare she often shot at Jax as she asked, "What was that about? You didn't need to—"
"There's a bomb in your chest," Pomni said. 8:26:02.
Ragatha blinked. "There's a what?"
"A bomb. Inside your chest," Pomni repeated. She tapped her own chest, just in case Ragatha needed a reminder. "Can you get it out?"
"Of my chest?" Ragatha didn't seem nearly panicked enough, all things considered. "I…no? What do you mean 'can I get it out?' There's nothing in my—Pomni, are you feeling okay?"
Oh, Pomni just knew she was going to be hearing that question again before this was dealt with. 8:26:15. She said, "No, not really! Can you please just humour me, here? Can I just, I don't know, cut it out of you? "
Now, Ragatha looked a little alarmed. She took a step back, and said, "No, no, that's—let's not do that! Jumping straight to amateur surgery seems a little extreme!"
It would have seemed extreme to Pomni a few deaths ago, too, but she had about 20 seconds left on the clock and was officially down for pretty much anything. She said, "Okay, fine. What if there was a bomb in my chest? How would you get it out?"
"Why do you keep checking the…" Ragatha's eye blew open wide. "Oh. Oh, no, you're being serious. I thought this was one of Jax's…oh, geez. Um, okay, I guess I'd ask Caine if he could snap it out of you. Can we try that first?"
A couple of deaths ago, Caine had handed Pomni a gun and told her to kill herself, and he'd apparently been right to do it. Pomni was having some mixed feelings about the whole thing, but she had to admit Ragatha made a good point. She sighed, and said, "Yeah, okay. You're right. I'll ask him in…eight seconds."
Ragatha bit her lip. "Why eight seconds?" she asked.
"Wow, you got—"
"Caine!" Pomni stood up, and hopped up onto the dining table to help her voice carry. She wasn't sure if that was actually a factor, here, but she didn't really have time to waste thinking about it. "Caine! We need help!"
Nothing happened for a long beat. Jax said, "Welp, Pomni's finally lost it. Hey, can I have—"
"Help with an adventure?" Caine asked hopefully, as he emerged from somewhere beneath the table. Heedless of the various sounds of irritation and disgust that earned him from the peanut gallery, he turned to Bubble, and said, "That sounds a lot like cheating! What do you think, Bubble?"
Bubble hawked up a huge wad of spit, and fired it directly at Caine's mouth. The slimy projectile slipped neatly between his teeth and just kept going until it splattered to the tiled floor, sizzling gently.
"We can't do that kind of thing here!" Caine said, scandalised. He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. "I think the clown is a minor…!"
Pomni felt an eye twitch.
"We're not on an adventure," Zooble said, firmly. The glare they shot Pomni was withering. "Thanks for inviting him to breakfast, though, Pomni. Really cool of you."
It was 8:26:11 already, and though she was generally on Zooble's side in regards to the ringmaster, Pomni really couldn't give less of a [$#%!] right then. She said, "Caine, there's a bomb in Ragatha's chest. Can you get it out?"
Ragatha blinked. "There's a what?"
"There's a what?!" Caine cried. He shot back a good thirty feet so quickly he left an afterimage. "There's a what?!" he asked again, almost immediately. "You're going to need to speak up. I can barely hear you from over here, Pomni!"
This wasn't going to work, was it? Pomni ran her hands down her face with an aggravated groan, and then she demanded, "Look, can you get the bomb out of her? Yes, or no?"
"No, seriously, Pomni, what do mean by—"
Ragatha cut herself off with a panicked shriek, and Pomni looked away from Caine just in time to see a grinning Jax leaping over the table, knives akimbo. She watched in muted horror as he tackled Ragatha off her chair, then pinned her to the ground with his knees like a very well armed playground bully.
"Don't worry, I can get it out," he said, brandishing his knives. They were dirty, Pomni couldn't help but notice, slick with chicken juice. Not hygienic at all. "Just think of it like amateur surgery, Raggy."
One thing quickly became very obvious: Ragatha hated being stabbed about as much as Jax liked stabbing. She was screaming, first from sheer anger as Jax refused to budge off her, then with far less restraint as the knives tore into her, and her thrashing turned into something chaotic and desperate. Pomni was definitely seeing issues with the 'cutting it out of her' plan.
"Jax, what the [$!%&]?!" Zooble asked. They looked about ready to jump over the table themselves. "Stop that! You're hurting her!"
Even Jax seemed taken aback by Ragatha's reaction, his grin fading into a bemused frown as he worked. "You know, you're being a giant baby right now," he chided her, even as he stuck his hand into the cavity he'd just torn open, and her head lolled to the side. "It's not like anything can actually hurt you here. And lookie what I found!"
He tugged his hand out of Ragatha's chest, pulling with it a large, spherical object that looked pretty much exactly like a cartoon bomb, minus the fuse. It was the same shade of red as Ragatha's hair, and it even bore her picture right in the middle, no matter which angle you were looking at it from.
Pomni stared at it. Was it…merch? Like her watch?
Jax was staring at it, too. "What do I do with this."
It was a great question, and it spurred Pomni into action. She snatched the bomb out of his hands and sprinted for the conference room, wrenching the door open and dropping her cargo inside. Barely a second after she got the door shut again, the entire world shook itself to pieces, and she was flung into the air by a wave of heat and force hitting her squarely in the back. She landed on the long dining table, bounced once, then landed hard on the other side of it, rolling to a stop and curling up on herself as the pain lanced through her everything.
She wanted to roll over to check on the others, but couldn't quite pull it off, mostly because of the long chunk of wood that had run her all the way through her back and out through her stomach. An exploded piece of door, she guessed—she probably should have tried throwing the bomb inside, not just dropping it. Next time. There was always next time.
"Ugh." Jax sounded dazed, and was coughing fretfully. "That sucked. Ragatha, if you swallow any more bombs I'm finding a way to kill you for real."
Ragatha wasn't screaming anymore, which probably wasn't a good thing.
"Can anyone see Pomni?" Gangle asked. There was a beat. "Oh, she's over there. Are you okay, Pomni?"
It was weird. Her body wasn't made of meat, wasn't even real. It was hard to tell what it even felt like, since her hands were perpetually gloved, but the way her body responded to being pinched and pulled and squeezed over the weeks she'd lived in it told her that it was far closer to rubber than flesh and bone. She couldn't have blood in her veins, because this body clearly wasn't complicated enough to even have veins.
And despite this, Pomni bled. There was something vital seeping through the hole in her stomach, nothing she could see or smell or touch, but she could feel its loss all the same. It was a cold, sleepy kind of feeling, one that made her want to close her eyes and drift away to somewhere nobody could ever reach her again, not even Caine.
She forced herself fire off a thumbs up anyway, if only to make sure nobody came over and tried to touch her while she bled out.
"Hey. Get up," Jax said, thankfully nowhere near Pomni. For once, there wasn't even a hint of smile in his voice, and it kind of sounded like he was repeatedly kicking a pillow. "Ragatha. Get up."
"Holy [%$!*]," said Zooble. "Holy [!%@*], she's dead. You [*#!@] killed her, Jax!"
Jax ignored them. "I said get up!" he snapped. "Get the [@$!&] up!"
Death was honestly a relief, this time.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize? Lucky! Look, it even has your face on it!"
Pomni smiled, and nodded, and one way or another found herself back in Ragatha's arms, where she stubbornly remained until everything exploded again.
Ragatha was actually really good at hugging.
"Wow, you got a cereal prize? Lucky! Look, it even has your face on it!"
Very reluctantly, Pomni pulled herself back together, and started to think. These were the facts so far:
-
Being stuck in a time loop sucked;
-
A bomb was going to blow Ragatha up at exactly 8:26:48;
-
Said bomb was actually inside Ragatha, and getting it out without killing her was going to be complicated;
-
Somehow, the rules of the world had been altered to make death permanent. Which…huh. That actually raised another question.
"Can I ask you guys something kinda heavy?" she asked. That earned her a few looks around the table, but she didn't wait for an answer. "If you could die—like, permanently die, with no respawns—would you want to?"
Ragatha gasped. "Pomni!" she said, hands over her heart. "Don't say that! It's not that bad here, right? I mean, nobody really wants to die."
"I do sometimes, if we're being real," Zooble admitted. They shrugged when Ragatha turned her horrified gaze on them. "What? She deserves an honest answer. Look, Pomni, I'd have killed someone for saying this in the real world, but in here you really do just need to hang in there. It gets better eventually."
Gangle nodded. "Yeah. It's easiest when I'm drawing, or hanging out with Zooble," she said, entirely without guile, and also without noticing the slightly panicked look she got from Zooble immediately after. "I think I'd want to if I was alone, though. Or, um. Alone with someone really mean."
It was very, very hard not to look at Jax on hearing that, which was probably why Kinger was the only one who didn't.
For his part, Jax looked thrilled. "Wow, Pomni, you lasted a whole three weeks before going all Pagliacci on us," he said. His grin had grown so huge he needed to squint just to make space for it. "Not that it matters. You can cut all you want, but you're not going anywhere. Nobody dies here. The best we're ever gonna get is the Cellar."
"Jax!" Ragatha hissed.
Okay. Right. Pomni counted one "no" from Ragatha, two "sometimes yes, sometimes no"s from Gangle and Zooble, and one very unhelpful answer from Jax. She looked expectantly at Kinger, who continued to mechanically shovel his breakfast into his mouth.
Pomni frowned. Had Kinger said anything? Like, at any point that morning? In any of the loops? She racked her brain, conscious of the time ticking away. "Kinger?" she asked. "Are you doing okay?"
His eyes were closed, like he'd fallen asleep sitting up, and his only answer was the unsettling crunch of unseen teeth meeting dry cereal. Pomni watched in rapt fascination as, at 8:46:44, he lifted another spoonful of cereal up to his mouthless face.
Cereal, and something else—something too big for the spoon, almost comically so. A thin, wooden tube, the same colour as Kinger himself, with a purple, cross-tipped plunger on one end. He poked his face with the spoon, and its contents vanished. Then, heralded by a sharp snap of wood, Ragatha exploded.
"Wow, you got a cereal—woah!"
Pomni hopped onto the dining table again, reaching down to shove her hand directly into Kinger's bowl of cereal. The part that stung the most, as she fished out the detonator, was that it wasn't even particularly well hidden. If she'd just looked at Kinger even once, she probably would have noticed the stupid thing on her own—but to be fair, she'd been a little distracted.
"Got it!" she crowed, holding her new prize aloft. It was obviously merch, just like her watch. Now that she had a closer look at it, she could even see Kinger's face plastered on the side, big enough that it had to wrap half-way around the tube just to fit. Why a Kinger themed toy would be the detonator to a Ragatha themed bomb, Pomni had no [%$!#] idea, but all she cared about right then was the fact that it wasn't going to be blowing up any time soon.
"Hey, is that a detonator?" Jax asked, as he plucked it easily out of her hands. "Neat!"