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“Today’s adventure is the Murder Mystery of the Robinson Residence!” Caine manifests the name of his new adventure into the form of 3-dimensional text and strikes a dramatic pose, pausing and waiting for validation from the six humans staring up at him from below the stage.
“How original,” Zooble mutters. They turn around and manage to get three steps away before Caine pulls them back with a twirl of his finger.
“Not so fast, my geometric little grouch! There’s a twist! The killer in this mystery will be one of you! It’s up to the rest of the group to figure out who was responsible for the tragic murder of my beloved NPC, Mr. Robinson himself! If at least four of you can reach a correct consensus, you’ll win an incredible prize!”
Zooble’s eye twitches.
“Let’s get this show on the road, now! Off you go!”
The group trudges into the portal single-file, some more willingly than others. Pomni blinks to adjust to the sudden dimness she finds herself enveloped in. They’ve been dropped into what might just be the most generic setting for this trope that she’s ever seen—large house, fancy furniture, wooden floors with red carpet here and there. And it’s raining outside. Then, of course, right smack in the middle of the room in front of the hearth, is a corpse. It’s pretty underwhelming, actually, given that the corpse is just a wooden mannequin with a knife sticking out from its head. Pomni wonders if Caine just didn’t feel like putting in a lot of effort today, or if he’s actually starting to run out of ideas.
“You are not the murderer,” a voice whispers directly in her ear. She jumps, startled, but finds nobody there. Judging by the similar reactions of the others, though, she figures that was meant to happen.
Jax scoffs. “So that’s it? The murder is already done?”
“So it’s you?” Zooble accuses immediately.
“Slow down there, blockhead. I never said that.” Jax grins easily. “Maybe I just wanted to see you softies get your hands dirty for once.”
“You think there’s actually clues for us to find?” Gangle asks timidly, the ends of her ribbon arms tapping together lightly. “If the murderer didn’t even get to do it?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re just supposed to see whose poker face breaks.” Zooble glares at Jax. “Guess it doesn’t hurt to look around, though.”
Pomni opens her mouth to make a suggestion about staying together in groups, but hardly gets the chance to utter a single syllable before a flash of metal whizzes past her face and lodges itself into Ragatha, who topples over with a startled yelp.
“Oh my f%$!ing god, Jax!” Zooble snaps. “Are you serious?”
Jax, now standing next to the dead mannequin incriminatingly, points at the woman he just threw a knife at in mock horror. “She has the weapon!”
Ragatha stands up and winces as she slowly pulls the knife from her stomach, an irritated look on her face. She tosses it on the floor and kicks it away with her foot. “Excuse me, guys,” she mumbles, pressing a hand over the wound. “I’m going to go sew myself up.” She starts towards the hallway.
“Uhh, Ragatha?” Pomni calls after her awkwardly. Ragatha glances back to look at her questioningly. “You’re kind of, uh…losing some fluff there.” She gestures to the floor, where small tufts of cotton stuffing lay scattered about.
“Ah, shoot.”
Ragatha stoops over, trying to collect the pieces of herself while holding her other hand tightly against her stomach. Pomni can see a small tear on her back stretch open as she bends, and she winces sympathetically. “Let me help you with that,” she suggests, picking up the cotton herself. Ragatha smiles at her gratefully. “Let’s go…try to find a sewing kit, I guess.”
“We’ll be right back, everybody!” Ragatha promises over her shoulder.
“Make it quick,” Jax says, still sounding annoyed. As if this whole ordeal wasn’t his fault to begin with. Zooble says as much, and the room quickly descends into a cacophony of arguing. Pomni sighs, rolling her eyes. The two women briefly pop their heads into several different rooms before finding one Ragatha decides is suitable for sewing–a decently-sized bedroom with a large desk. Pomni places all of the loose cotton on the bed and heads for the desk to search through the drawers, but Ragatha interrupts her.
“There’s no need! I keep a sewing kit with me. This happens a lot.” Ragatha pulls the item in question seemingly out of nowhere, shaking it softly in her hand. “Sorry I dragged you all the way here. I just didn’t want Jax to, you know. Try to mess me up or something.”
“I get it. I’m sorry about him.” Pomni rocks on her heels, wondering when her life got so bizarre that a simple “I’m sorry” is an appropriate response to a friend literally being impaled. “Do you need any help?”
“That’s alright. Like I said, this happens all the time. I’ve gotten pretty good at patching myself up.” Ragatha laughs in a charmingly awkward way, popping open the kit and picking out a needle.
“Yeah, but…” Pomni gestures to Ragatha’s side stiffly. “You’ve got a tear in your back, too. I don’t think you’d be able to reach it.”
“Oh…” Ragatha turns her head around, trying to see the wound for herself. “I guess not. But do you know how to sew?”
“I’m not the best,” Pomni admits. “But I know all the basic stitches. I thrifted a lot of my clothes, so I learned how to mend holes and stuff.”
“Okay…” Ragatha tentatively hands over the kit. “Well, if you really don’t mind, I’d appreciate the help. And then you can go back to the others if you want. I can do everything else myself.”
“Sounds good,” Pomni agrees. As she takes the blue thread and attempts to pass it through the needle's eye, she realizes that the last time she had sewn something, she had five normally-sized fingers and wasn't wearing gloves. This is probably going to be a lot harder than she initially thought... She shakes her head softly and tells herself that if Ragatha can do it, she can, too, and proceeds anyway. She manages to work the thread through the needle eventually, tying it. "Jeez...I got it."
Looking slightly amused, Ragatha pulls the stool out from beneath the desk and takes a seat, her back to Pomni. “Okay. I’m ready whenever you are.”
“Here goes…” Pomni sticks out her tongue in concentration as she passes the needle through fabric skin, pulling the stitch tight. Ragatha stiffens as she does so, and Pomni pauses. “All good?”
Ragatha takes a deep breath and loosens again. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just weird when someone else does it, I guess. You can keep going.”
Pomni shrugs and redirects her focus back to the needle. Her fingers are big and clumsy, and the stitching is sort of sloppy, but it’s at least getting the job done. She thinks it’s going pretty well for what it's worth, when suddenly, Ragatha lurches forward, a strangled yelp escaping her. Pomni pulls her hands back immediately. “Are you okay? Did that hurt? I’m so sorry! I didn’t think this could actually hurt you, since you always act so casual about it…”
“It didn’t hurt,” Ragatha reassures her quickly. Her voice squeaks at the end of her sentence. “Sorry. You just…um…did you put your finger inside of me?”
Pomni’s face heats up at her friend’s choice of words. “Sorry! I-I was just trying to push a piece of stuffing back in. Should I have not?”
“It’s fine…”
“Are you sure it didn’t hurt?” Pomni asks worriedly. “I can stop.”
Ragatha turns around in her chair to face her. “It didn’t really hurt, it just felt…” she trails off, as if words aren’t enough to describe the feeling.
“Not good?” Pomni guesses.
Ragatha shakes her head. “Not bad. Just…strange.”
Pomni mulls over her answer for a moment, embarrassment morphing into curiosity. “...Does your stuffing have feeling in it?”
“When it’s inside of me, it does.” Ragatha shudders. “Sorry, this is getting pretty weird.”
“Nah, it’s kind of interesting, actually,” Pomni says. She looks down at her own arm, examining the texture of it. Her skin feels sort of like rubber. Smooth and stretchy and somewhat shiny–nothing like Ragatha’s. It’s been a few months since she entered the circus, but she’s still not quite used to her ridiculous cartoon body or the quirks that come with it. So learning all of this about Ragatha is definitely fascinating, to say the least. “Does touching it feel the same as touching your skin?”
“Not exactly,” Ragatha says. “It’s hard to explain. I’ve had to re-stuff myself plenty of times, but…like I said earlier, I guess it’s different when somebody else does it.”
“Huh.”
Neither of them say anything for a bit. Ragatha quietly fidgets with her hands while Pomni contemplates. The more she thinks about it, the more tempted she gets. Curiosity has always been her greatest enemy, but even after suffering the consequences of trying on a strange headset she discovered in an abandoned building, it appears she still has not learned her lesson. She allows it to gnaw at her mind for a few moments more before she decides to just ask.
“Can I put my hand in you?”
Ragatha sputters, profoundly flustered.
Pomni quickly backtracks. “Sorry, that was a really weird question. Never mind.”
“No,” Ragatha says, shyly brushing a few strands of hair out of her face, only for them to fall right back into place. “You can. I don’t mind.”
“If you don’t want me to—”
“I want you to.” Ragatha speaks with an almost uncharacteristic boldness. Although, upon meeting Pomni’s eye, she seems to get embarrassed again. “Um, i-if you still want to, that is. Heh…”
Pomni hesitates, then inches forward, cautiously extending her arm. She continues to carefully monitor Ragatha’s expression as she gives the tear in her stomach an experimental poke. The soft, exposed cotton gives beneath her finger, and rises again when she takes it away. Ragatha’s breath hitches, but she doesn’t say anything. Pomni waits for a nod of permission before she continues, pushing in a little harder this time. That doesn’t get as much of a reaction. So she slowly begins to sink her hand in deeper. And deeper. And—
Ragatha gasps. “Oh!”
Pomni’s hand stills, her eyes locking onto Ragatha’s with concern. “Everything okay?”
If Ragatha looked flustered before, she’s a disaster now. Her mouth hangs open for a good few seconds before she’s able to mumble out some sort of an answer—but even then, it’s borderline incoherent. Pomni frowns, not daring to move her hand. “Hello?”
“Y-yes, I’m fine…but I think you just…did something...” Her voice trails off at the end of her sentence. She then clamps a hand over her mouth, eye widening.
It takes a moment for Pomni to put together the pieces. Her friend’s expression, the noise she made, her embarrassment…
Oh.
The silence is deafening as the both of them process the implications of what just occurred, and the cold room they’re sitting in suddenly feels about twenty degrees hotter. Ragatha looks absolutely mortified—and also as though her entire reality has just been shattered. Pomni looks back down at her own wrist, still burrowed deep in Ragatha’s fluffy insides, and contemplates. Explicit content is strictly forbidden within the Amazing Digital Circus, and all of the residents lack the features to do explicit things in the first place. Did they seriously just discover some sort of…loophole?
She hopes so. Because the idea excites her. A lot.
Maybe it’s a stupid thing to say—then again, there’s probably zero possible appropriate responses to being caught in this situation—but Pomni’s mouth moves before her brain does. “Do you want me to keep going?”
Ragatha’s eye snaps onto hers once more, wide with disbelief. “I…” she says, uncovering her mouth just enough to whisper out a response. “Do you…want to?”
“I’m asking you.”
“I wouldn't mind...”
“You wouldn't mind, or you want me to? Because I'm—”
“Please.” Pomni's jaw shuts automatically, surprised by the intensity in the other woman's tone. "Please, do it..."
Her stomach erupts with butterflies (for what must be the tenth time today). Ragatha’s pupil is blown wide, her voice gravelly with the desperation of someone who’s been deprived of proper human contact for far too long. And sure, this is a pretty strange method of fulfilling that need, but what choice do they have? Since getting trapped here, Pomni’s tried to get herself off several times to no avail, and she’s sure the same goes for everyone else. But if Ragatha is capable of feeling this way, maybe she is, too. So even if this “workaround” is weird as fuck, she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t eager to exploit the crap out of it. Her initial tentativeness melts away completely, replaced by an enthusiasm to continue to push this boundary—to find out just how far this can go. To find other loopholes. To reclaim something real, something human, that had been taken from her. “Just tell me if you need me to stop, okay?”
Ragatha nods and covers her mouth with her hand once more, clearly trying to hold herself together and failing miserably. Pomni sinks her hand deeper into cotton flesh, relishing in the various responses she receives. She experiments by moving her hand in all kinds of ways—flexing, squeezing, and even gently scraping her fingertips against the underside of Ragatha’s skin. Ragatha squirms and falls apart further at each touch, until she’s practically panting, shamelessly needy and vulnerable in a way that Pomni never thought she’d be able to see in this heavily censored digital hellscape. She only wishes Ragatha would move her damn hand away so that she could hear it, too. “Still good?” she checks.
Ragatha makes some muffled, indecipherable noise. Pomni growls under her breath, frustration making her bold.
“Use your words, dolly.”
Ragatha finally uncovers her mouth. “Still good,” she confirms, not acknowledging the nickname. She uses her newly free hand to grip the edge of the chair she’s still on. “I think—unghh…”
“What was that?”
“Pomni…” she whines, so softly that Pomni might have missed it if her ears weren’t trained on the woman’s every sound, aching to hear more. It sends a wave of heat straight to her gut.
She suddenly realizes that she really wants to kiss Ragatha.
She isn’t sure if that’s something she’s always wanted to do, subconsciously, or if it’s just a heat of the moment sort of thought that comes naturally when you’re elbow-deep inside of a friend. She gulps and decides to push that thought away for now, instead focusing on her other big question. “Ragatha…” she murmurs back. “Do you think you’ll be able to…?”
“I don’t know, maybe, please keep going, I—” Ragatha ducks her head. “F%$#.”
Pomni picks up the pace of her movements, trying to repeat the ones the other woman reacts to the most. Ragatha's body curls towards her, the short pleasured whimpers falling from her mouth turning into gasps as Pomni continues to knead her insides. It all seems to be reaching a boiling point, when suddenly—
“S!#%!”
Someone screams profanity from the other room. Both of them freeze, heads whipping around to stare at the door. They’d got so caught up doing…whatever the fuck they’d been doing that they’d completely forgotten they were in the middle of an adventure…and three rooms away from being caught.
“You think they heard us?” Ragatha whispers frantically.
“We weren't being that loud.” I hope. “I-I’m gonna pull my hand out now, okay?”
Ragatha looks perturbed, for obvious reasons, but she nods briskly. Pomni slowly draws her hand back until she can feel the cold, stifling air of the house against her skin once again. She waits a few moments for her friend to catch her breath. She looks surprisingly well put together for someone who was just gruesomely edged moments prior, but Pomni supposes that’s one of the few benefits that comes with being a cartoon ragdoll with perpetually perfect hair and the inability to sweat. Aside from the gaping stab wound still embedded in her abdomen, there’s no visual evidence of what just occurred. “Well…that was interesting.”
“Yeah…” Ragatha straightens suddenly as she remembers why they’d stopped, and quickly rises to her feet. “We should get back to the others,” she says hurriedly.
“You’ve still got a massive hole in your stomach,” Pomni points out. Ragatha looks down at herself and jumps, as if she’d gotten so lost in whatever she was feeling that she’d forgotten how they got to this point in the first place. She curses softly.
“It’ll only take me a minute—hold on…” Ragatha fumbles for the sewing needle that had been forgotten on the desk and begins to patch herself up at an almost frightening speed. Somehow still maintaining precision. Within what must be less than a minute, the repair is seamless. “There we go.”
“That was impressive.”
“Thanks.” Ragatha smiles at her, her lips wobbly from the adrenaline. “Let’s go.”
Pomni suddenly remembers that the hole in Ragatha’s back still isn’t entirely repaired—but she decides not to mention it. It was almost done. That’s good enough, right?
They make their way back to the others. Somehow, everybody is still arguing. Pomni wonders how they haven’t run out of energy.
“Geez, what took you so long?” Jax snaps. The snarky, mischievous smile he’d been wearing earlier while throwing around murder weapons is long gone, now replaced by a frustrated scowl. Even he’s gotten tired of the fighting.
“We had to find a sewing kit for some reason,” Pomni answers, unable to help the slight bite in her tone. She turns her attention to everyone else. “Any luck on figuring out who it is?”
Four voices echo completely different answers all at once. Jax looks back at Gangle and Kinger, looking almost bewildered. “Are you both crazy?”
“It’s obviously f$*%ing Jax,” Zooble growls. “He was ready to tamper with the evidence and attack people as soon as we spawned in.”
“I do that every adventure!” Jax retorts. “Zooble’s the one desperately trying to deflect the blame onto everyone else.”
“Just you, actually.”
“It’s not me, you idiot!”
“I still think there’s a possibility it might be Kinger,” Gangle pipes up meekly. “The roles were randomly assigned, and he hasn’t said anything to help his case…”
“Thank you, Gangle,” Kinger says earnestly. Jax scoffs.
“Fine. How about we all vote for Jax and see what happens?” Jax says sarcastically. “It’ll be hilarious when you’re all wrong.”
“Sounds good to me,” Pomni agrees, though honestly, she just wants to get this stupid adventure over with as soon as possible so she can take the time to process what the hell just happened.
“Me too,” Ragatha chimes in.
“Alright, I guess,” Gangle mutters, even though she looks reluctant.
Everyone turns to Kinger, the only one who hasn’t “voted” yet. “Do you agree?” Zooble asks.
“Sure, Zooble!”
“That’s bull!@#$,” Jax grumbles. “I vote for Zooble.”
Everyone goes quiet after that, waiting for something, anything to happen. Ten seconds pass, the only sound being the crackling of the fireplace and the rain outside. As sudden as a bolt of lightning, Caine suddenly appears out of thin air, looking as ridiculous as ever. “You’re all incorrect!”
Jax flips off Zooble.
“What?” Zooble demands. “Who was it?”
Caine claps his hands. “A fantastic deception! An incredible betrayal! A performance so stellar, she managed to get away without a single vote! The killer was none other than…”
There’s a drumroll sound. Pomni isn’t sure where it’s coming from.
“Ragatha!”
Everyone turns to stare at the woman in question. Ragatha folds her hands across her lap innocently, looking away as she smiles sheepishly. “Eheh…”
Pomni stares at her in disbelief. “It was seriously you?”
“My poker face is pretty terrible,” Ragatha admits. “I wanted an excuse to get away, and Jax dropped the perfect one right into my hands.”
“I should’ve seen that coming,” Zooble mutters.
“I hope you’ve learned a valuable lesson about following the rules, Jax!” Caine booms, hovering intrusively in front of the purple rabbit’s face.
“You didn’t give us a set of rules,” Jax grumbles. “It was fair game.”
“And I hope the rest of you learned a valuable lesson about actually searching for the clues I spent hours of my time planning, creating, and hiding around the map!”
The portal back to the circus opens up, and everyone trudges back into it. Caine presents Ragatha with her “prize,” which ends up being a gift basket full of “exotic” spices. She politely declines, instead making a request for Caine to reset her damaged avatar, which he obliges. Pomni quietly waits for everyone to finish up either their congratulations or their complaints until she and Ragatha are alone once more. “So…you wanna talk? About that?”
“Um…right, I guess we should, huh?” Ragatha laughs nervously. “Let’s go talk…somewhere…else…”
“Your room?”
Ragatha goes red, likely assuming that Pomni wants to finish what they started. She isn’t entirely wrong. “S-Sounds good…”
Their fingers brush, and then latch onto each other. Ragatha squeezes Pomni’s hand gently–a quiet confirmation. Pomni grins, and squeezes back.