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Rob understood the Void better than anyone else in Elmore. After all, he’d been in and out of it, fought its dominion over the narrative he called life. But after years of this nonsense, he’d readily admit that he still understood almost nothing about it. Really, his expertise boiled down to two facts: Time and space were meaningless in the Void, and the Void didn’t take defiance lying down.
He remembered the period just after the world ended. Citizens of Elmore scattered to the winds. First came the denial. Then the panic. Eventually, once the initial shock wore off, they got around to the scapegoating. They rallied against him, demanding, begging that he reverse whatever he did, and no amount of explaining would convince them that this wasn’t his doing.
He fled. Fled and hid among the islands that had trapped him so long ago. He hadn’t seen anyone from Elmore since.
Nowadays he spent most of his time consumed by the static, the unconsciousness a brief respite from nonexistence while the Void ferried him wherever it pleased. It must have been years now he’d been here, alone.
He longed for a familiar face. Even if they hated him. He needed to know he wasn’t the only one left.
And then one day he saw it. A little pocket of the Void where the static flickered, like a wall struggling to keep itself opaque. And just beyond, in the flashes of transparency, he saw…
Color.
Not much of it, to be fair—more of a muted palette, like when you leave something colorful out in the sun too long. But it was something solid and real, and more importantly, something that wasn’t Void.
He jumped to the next island and started climbing.
“Holy shit.”
Zooble clapped a hand to her mouth. The swear echoed off the walls of the big top, which had gone still and lifeless.
The quiet didn’t last long. “Well that’s just great,” Jax spat. “You guys know this is all we have, right? It wasn’t paradise but it was something! We had something!” he railed at no one in particular. “Where do we go from here, huh? Now we have nothing!” He spun around, arms wide to indicate the nothing the Circus had become. “And—and—”
He went rigid, his rant dying in his throat. He stared past them, alarm written in his eyes. Pomni followed his gaze, and her heart seized.
After Caine’s…death, several holes had appeared in the tent floor, just another symptom of the Circus’s deterioration. Pomni hadn’t consciously registered them—hadn’t had the time to do so—but they suddenly became very pertinent when a fucking hand appeared over the edge of the hole. Then another. Then—
She had only seen an Abstraction once, on her very first day—however long ago that was. Time was meaningless in the Circus. The details were hazy, but she remembered glitching shapes, wide eyes, and stretched proportions.
This person looked like they were in the process of Abstracting. The silver-blue static of the Void, unmistakably burned by trauma into her mind, coursed over their body and through their limbs. A single giant eye blinked against the stark white environment. Odd polygons jutted out from their model, glitching with every movement. One foot was just gone, nothing more than a wireframe.
They emerged fully from the hole, grunting as they drew themself up to their full height. They were tall, taller than even Kinger, and they sure as hell towered over Pomni. They lurched forward, slowly, and then that eye landed on her.
“Hey,” they said.
Every step closer to the opening was like a breath of fresh air pumped directly into his lungs. Whether that was the adrenaline talking or the Void’s power lessening was unclear and irrelevant because he was finally free!
With a final surge of energy he overcame the Void’s vacuum grip, landing in a heap on the floor. He groaned as he struggled to his feet, desperate to put some distance between himself and the hole he’d crawled out of. Only then did he take account of his new surroundings.
It was a room that could fit a thousand people, but right now it only held six. Rob’s eye swept over them as he approached. From a distance, they didn’t seem all that different from what he remembered of Elmore, and a ray of hope fluttered in his chest. All these years since he’d seen anyone from Elmore—is this where they ended up?
But as he drew nearer, little inconsistencies became apparent. The rabbit was the first sign something was off. Rob had seen rabbits in Elmore—hell, he’d lived in a house with two of them. (The fact that they didn’t know he was there was irrelevant.) They didn’t look like this. The proportions were all wrong. Like someone took the features of a rabbit and stuck them on the body of a cyclops.
The king…He’d seen a handful of chess families in town, kings and queens and their gaggles of pawns. Not that he’d ever known one personally, but he was pretty sure all chess pieces were supposed to have arms. And mouths.
There was something that looked like a cross between a drawn character and an arts-and-crafts project. The head was flat with a drawn-on face, but everything below that was just ribbon. Elmore had drawn characters, and it had crafted characters, but never both in one.
The six stood shoulder to shoulder, none of them more than an arm’s reach away from one another. Staring at him.
“Hey,” he said. They didn’t respond. “I’m Rob?” he tried.
That got a reaction. Eyes widened. Bodies stiffened. Rob took a step back. “Wait. Listen. Please.” Flashbacks of Elmore’s last day played in his head. If he didn’t explain things now, he wasn’t getting another chance.
“Who are you?” someone shouted. A little jester at the front of the pack. Her voice shook, but despite her obvious fear she still stood her ground. She dared another step forward, putting herself between Rob and the others. As if that would do anything to stop him if he wanted to hurt them.
Young, troubled, thrust by circumstance into a position of leadership. A protagonist.
His knees felt weak. Memories flashed in his mind’s eyes, visions of blue fur and evil schemes and unadulterated loathing. Good times.
The sad truth was, he never stopped thinking about Gumball. Goddamnit, the kid was the hero, the main character, the reason the world kept spinning—and he didn’t even know the power he held over Rob. Over all of Elmore. There was an upside, he supposed, in that Rob remembering Gumball meant he hadn’t succumbed to the Void. And if Gumball was still out there, then that meant he wasn’t the sole survivor of a dead world.
It wasn’t much solace at the moment.
He barely noticed himself sink to the ground, or the sob that managed to escape him.
Pomni watched the…not-Abstraction fall to his knees. “…Kinger?” she whispered.
“I have no idea,” he whispered back.
Pomni glanced back, only to find the others looking at her expectantly. Right. Somewhere along the line she’d become the de facto leader of this ragtag bunch of misfits, which was a problem because she had no idea what the fuck to do.
She took a tentative step forward, then another, still keeping a healthy distance. “Hey…Rob, was it?"
His head shot up at her voice, and Pomni bit back a yelp as his one giant eye fell squarely on her. A hand on her back steadied her; Kinger had followed her lead in approaching the newcomer. She nodded up at him in thanks, then turned back to Rob when he spoke.
“None of you are from Elmore, are you?” The words were desperate.
She frowned and looked back at the others, who were slowly starting to inch closer. She got shrugs and shaking heads for an answer. And honestly, there was no way to answer that, not when none of them could even remember where they came from.
She was about to tell him so when he cut her off. “Don’t say it. I know.” His eye slid shut. Beside her, Kinger made a small sound—of pity? Sympathy?
“Well, maybe we can still help,” she insisted. “Are you a human? An NPC?”
Rob stilled. “I’m not…either of those things. I’m a cyclops.” He accepted Kinger’s hand, let him pull him to his feet. “As for help…let me stay. Just for a little while, let me stay.”
“Oh! Um…” Pomni hesitated. She wanted to say yes, she really did, because she knew what it was like to be in the Circus alone and on the verge of a breakdown, but she couldn’t very well pretend that the events of the past however-the-fuck-long hadn’t happened.
Kinger picked up the slack. “Now is…really not the best time.”
“Please. I have nowhere else to go.”
“None of us do.” Jax slid onto the scene, and Rob’s gaze snapped to him.
“What do you mean? Wait…” Rob tore his gaze from them (and Pomni released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding) and turned in a slow circle, as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. A slow, dawning horror came over him, plainly reflected in his oversized eye.
“…Yeah,” she said. “The world is—”
“Dying.” The word came out in a hushed tone. “It’s dying.”
“We noticed,” Jax said dryly.
“No, not that…okay, that too.” Rob shook his head, beginning to pace. “But that’s the world, in here. I mean the world world.” He waved his arms in big circles as if to illustrate his point. His point remained undefined.
“Listen to me.” His voice took on a panicked edge. “I know you don’t know me and you have no reason to trust me, but please—not this time, not again—”
“Whoa, whoa! Calm down!” Pomni held her hands up placatingly. She really didn’t want someone who looked that close to Abstracting going over the edge. Not when she was right there, anyway.
A soft hand touched her shoulder, and Ragatha was by her side. The ragdoll smiled down at Pomni, then addressed the room. “We’re all on edge. Maybe we should take a minute to discuss things.”
They took him away from the amphitheater with its trembling Void-holes, through winding passages, down a more stable corridor of doors into a dark, forgotten room.
“Is there nobody else here?” he asked, once, when he noticed faces on the doors which weren’t present.
“Nope. You’re stuck with us, buddy,” the rabbit—Jax—answered, and then stomped on his wireframe foot, which was a little like prodding an exposed nerve. He didn’t ask any questions after that.
So now the seven of them were sat in one of their rooms—Kinger’s, if he recalled correctly—where it was as dark as the outside was bright. Introductions were made, explanations were distributed, and answers were doled out where available. They told him how they erased their ringmaster after he snapped and started torturing them, and he told them how the Void ate his world after he discovered it was fictional.
By the end of storytime, everyone was equally shaken.
“That’s fucked up, man,” said Zooble.
“I could say the same thing.” And he meant it. Rob knew the Void was sentient, he knew it could be vindictive and that it hated him in particular—but it had never taken physical shape while it was tearing him limb from limb, a blessing he’d never considered he should count until just now. He cleared his throat. “Thank you…for listening.”
Ragatha shrugged. “Most new people we meet just sorta pop into existence. This really isn’t any different.”
“Yes it is! None of us are from alternate fucking dimensions!” Jax pounded a fist on a bedside table, and Rob instinctively covered his foot.
“He has a point.” Pomni looked at Rob. “How did you get here, exactly?”
He cocked his head. “From the Void.” Didn’t he just explain that?
“There’s nothing in the Void,” she protested stubbornly, in a way not unlike Gumball before her, and Rob had to turn his head to prevent himself from weeping.
“Nothing important,” he corrected. “The Void is where all the forgotten, erased, and obsolete ideas go. It took me when it decided I had no role to fulfill, and it took my whole universe when it got tired of it.”
Pomni hummed. “I think I get it. It’s like Gummigoo.” Rob stared at her blankly. “It’s like…an NPC when you’re done with its story. You don’t need it, so you just…get rid of it.”
“That’s…exactly what it’s like, actually. Well done.” Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. If they already understood the concept…
“So you’re saying what happened to your world is happening to ours?” Zooble leaned closer, their angular head propped up on one mismatched arm. “That’s why it’s ‘dying?’”
He nodded solemnly. “It looks that way.”
“Does that mean we’re fictional?” Everyone looked to Gangle, who had been quiet until now. Rob felt the tension shift, saw each of their faces as they processed the implications, and could feel nothing but pity for them. How could he not? He’d been in the same boat, all those indeterminate amount of years ago.
“I can’t answer that,” he said carefully. It wasn’t even a lie, not really. Despite everything, Rob never claimed to be an expert on the Void. All he knew, he gleaned from painful personal experience, and he wasn’t self-centered enough to confuse anecdotes for data.
On the other hand…look at them. Pomni, the reluctant leader. Kinger, the mentor. Jax, the brooding anti-villain. When he looked at them, he didn’t see people, he saw archetypes. Characters.
What a cruel trick, to escape the remnants of one story straight into another. Perhaps there was nothing real after all. Only fictions on top of fictions on top of fictions, layered together into something somehow even less real.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” he realized aloud. Without a word more he rose from his seat and headed for the door.
“Wait—” Rob closed the door on Gum—on Pomni. They need this, he told himself. They need time to process. He certainly wasn’t running away from the truth. Definitely not. That would be…
He buried his head in his hands and let the tears fall. However long ago it was, the final days of Elmore would forever be seared into his memory. The air was still. The Void was encroaching. His last desperate attempt to save them all was an exercise in futility. If only he hadn’t known the terrible truth, if he had only stayed in the Platonic cave behind the fourth wall, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much.
If only he had let them stay ignorant, maybe the inevitable would be easier for them.
He pressed a hand against the wall, feeling the buzzing of the world’s very being beneath his fingers. And he noticed something.
When Elmore fell, it fell. The world was still throwing out plots like it always had, until it was forced to stop. That was the real tragedy of it: knowing that it still had so much to give, if only the powers that be gave it the chance.
Not here. The vibrations of the story were slow, but they were deliberate. Here, for lack of a better word—there was structure. This world wasn’t crumbling, wasn’t dying—it had always known its limits and was simply living out its time.
He pulled his hand back. He didn’t need to save them. There was nothing to save them from.
Every show ends, after all.
Back in Kinger’s room, the atmosphere was tense, the silence heavy.
“We can’t give up,” Pomni said desperately.
Jax barely looked up. “You know, Pom-Pom, there’s a fine line between optimism and delusion, and you passed it about three hours ago.”
His eyes shifted. “I think I always knew, on some level,” he muttered, barely audible in the enclosed space. He forced a smile. “But I wish you all the best in your respective existential crises.”
Pomni wanted to argue with him, but she just didn’t have the willpower.
A sliver of light pierced the darkness as Rob stepped through the door, disappearing just as fast when he closed it behind him.“I was wrong,” he said.
They stared at him, mutely, until Gangle voiced what they were all thinking. “The world isn’t ending?” she asked hopefully.
Rob opened his mouth, then closed it again. This repeated several more times before he finally sagged and sighed. “All I know is that the situation here is different than mine. And that you…” his eye swept over the room, all the various states of hopelessness. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Suddenly, the door to Kinger’s room was thrown open with an unearthly roar. Beyond it, instead of the hallway of bedrooms, a flickering silver-blue abyss waited.
“It’s okay.” Rob addressed them, his voice calm over their screams. “I expected this. There’s no room for me in your story.” He began inching toward the portal. “You guys…there’s a plan for you. Be thankful. Not everybody gets that these days.”
“Wait.” Pomni stood. “What about you?”
Rob looked at her, an odd expression in his eye. There was a weary resignation about him as he turned his back. “I’m used to it.”
He stepped through, disappearing into the Void. Pomni stared at where he had been.
“We’re trapped!” she heard Ragatha shout and snapped back to reality. The only exit to Kinger’s room still led to the Void, and judging by the flickering textures creeping over the walls, it wasn’t content to stay outside.
Ragatha’s eye shot to her, wide, panicked. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know!” Pomni cried, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know what to do! I’ve never known what to do! So please, stop asking!”
“I’m going in!” Jax dashed for the portal—
—only to be held back by Zooble. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Me? You heard the guy! There’s nothing left for us here! There never was!”
Pomni felt herself slipping. Jax was right and they all knew it. They all heard Rob. They could all read between the lines of his non-answers.
The yawning maw of the Void loomed over her. “Please,” she choked out. Rob had made it sound like it was sentient. “Please,” she repeated.
The roar quieted just for a moment—then came back even louder as a concussive blast sent her and everyone else against the back wall of the room.
Pomni landed on the floor of the big top, sore and disoriented. The last thing she remembered was—oh. Gummigoo and—and the alligators. The teeth ripping into flesh. The torture.
She dared to look up, fearing she might see Caine there ready to strike. Instead she saw the Circus, its color washed out and faded, like someone had opened a window and let the sun bleach everything.
“Ugh…what happened?” Pomni hadn’t noticed the others strewn across the ground until Ragatha spoke up, one hand clutching her button eye.
“I-I don’t know, but…” Kinger stared at his hands. “I think I accidentally killed Caine.”
Silence reigned as the implication of those words sank in.
After what seemed an eternity, Zooble was the one to break it. “Holy shit.”