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It was Ragatha who brought it up.
“Hey, Caine?” she said hesitantly.
“Mmyep?” Caine looked up from his sketchpad --- he’d been drawing each of the members their “bee-sona”, taking the time to craft them with the utmost care. Currently, it was Ragatha’s turn.
“Where exactly did you go after ... everything?”
That caught everyone’s attention. Kinger looked away from his wife’s Abstracted form, Pomni turned her head from where she was laying in Ragatha’s lap. Gangle and Zooble were lying on another couch nearby, practically twined together, but they both opened their eyes and turned their attention to the group upon hearing the question.
Caine paused, pencil poised over the page. His eyes glazed over slightly, and his body seemed to stiffen.
Ragatha immediately panicked. “Oh, God! I’m so sorry, Caine, I don’t know where that came from --- you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, I ---”
“No, no,” Caine interrupted quickly, seeming to shake himself off. “It’s a perfectly acceptable question, Ragatha!”
“Not if it makes you uncomfortable or triggers you,” Ragatha protested.
Caine cocked his head. “Triggers me?”
“It means to be sent into a panic attack or flashback because of bad memories,” Kinger explained gently. Caine had fixed the settings so the Circus wasn’t so bright, and it had done wonders for the chess piece’s lucidity --- he no longer needed to constantly wear a bucket on his head, and was much calmer and happy to engage in discussion whenever anyone needed him.
“Ah, I see.” Caine nodded. “Thank you, Kinger.” Kinger hummed in acknowledgement. “I would be willing to answer your question, Ragatha,” Caine added, turning back to the ragdoll. “I do not believe it will trigger me, as you say.”
Pomni reached over and squeezed Ragatha’s hand gently. “It’s alright, Ragatha. You’re not gonna get in trouble by asking. Worse thing we’ll do is say no and that’s that.”
Ragatha took a deep breath, attempting to calm herself. “Y-Yeah, you’re right. Sorry about that, guys.” She gave a sheepish laugh.
Pomni shook her head. “No need to apologize.”
“She’s right,” Zooble added. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” They shifted so they were sitting upright, pulling Gangle with them and keeping her in their arms. Gangle squeaked, hiding her blushing mask in Zooble’s chest, causing them to chuckle. “Sorry, hun.”
“All good,” Gangle managed to force out. “Listen to Zooble, Ragatha.”
Ragatha laughed. “Alright, I’ll try.”
“Why don’t you get comfortable, Caine?” Kinger suggested, shuffling over to settle on the third couch in reach of the others. “You can join whoever you’d like.”
“Can I sit with Pomni and Ragatha?” Caine asked shyly.
Pomni chuckled, sitting up but moving so she was settled against Ragatha’s side instead. “Of course!” Caine zoomed over and curled up at Ragatha’s side --- he’d quickly designated her as the official big sister and was constantly seeking cuddles or hugs from her, which Ragatha was more than happy to give.
“Well,” Caine began, once he was comfortable, “first I ... I’d like to let you know why I snapped that day.”
Zooble furrowed their brow. “Wasn’t it because we hated the adventures?” They winced. “Sorry, that didn’t come out how I wanted it to.”
Caine shook his head. “No, I’ve come to terms with the fact that adventures never panned out how any of us wanted to. That’s entirely on me for never listening to any of you.”
“It’s also on us,” Pomni said, placing a hand on his, “for never pushing harder for you to listen, never trying to come to a compromise. It was either what we wanted or what you wanted, and that wasn’t good for anyone.”
“But I still probably wouldn’t have listened regardless,” Caine admitted. “I was so set on making them be perfect for you all...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “A-Anyway. That’s beside the point. The adventure with Abel was the tipping point to believing that you all hated me. I’d given you an exit, answers, something real, and you still hated it anyways. At that point, I didn’t know what to do.”
“Wait,” Gangle said, peeking over at Caine. “The Abel adventure was ... something you made because you thought we wanted it?”
“Of course! I thought it would finally make you happy, show you that it’s really not so bad here and that we could stay together.” Caine looked down, his jaws closing over his eyes. “Obviously that ... didn’t work how I wanted it to.”
“Because there was a lot of miscommunication,” Kinger said thoughtfully. Everyone turned to look at him. Noticing their eyes, he elaborated. “We’d all been saying for years that we wanted a way out. Caine gave us the option to leave, and an exit door. We’d been saying we wanted answers. In a fashion, he gave us that with Abel’s cleverly crafted story. We wanted something that felt real. The adventure felt real to all of us.”
“Not you,” Caine pouted. “There was a reason I didn’t want you to be on this one, too.”
Kinger chuckled. “I know, I’m sorry about that. But we were all close, and I’m sure the others didn’t want to exclude me from something that seemed this important.”
Ragatha ran a hand down her face, looking horrified. “Oh, Caine ... you didn’t understand what we actually meant then, did you?”
Caine wilted. “I thought it was just another game,” he admitted. “That you were messing with me, or something.”
“Not to be a jerk or anything,” Zooble said, “but how? What other interpretation could there be for ‘we wanted to leave’? Not that we do now, Caine, you have to understand that. I’m just trying to piece together how things spiralled out of control like that.”
Caine fidgeted with his cane. “If you all wanted to leave, it would have meant that I was doing something wrong, wasn’t providing the right entertainment for you. And that would mean acknowledging that my adventures weren’t perfect, like I thought they were. So ... it was easier to accept that you wanted a new type of adventure instead of an actual exit.”
Pomni groaned. “All this could have been avoided if we’d just talked to each other,” she complained. “Why were we so bad at talking to each other?”
“Because we were used to repressing shit,” Zooble said flatly.
Pomni made a noise of agreement. “Sorry, Caine. Continue.”
Caine nodded. “Um, well, so after that adventure I began to wonder if you actually did want to leave me. And Bubble...” He sighed. “Well, they fed into my insecurities.”
Kinger frowned, leaning forward. “What did they do, Caine?”
“W-Well, first I should tell you that Bubble was the other AI that C&A created,” Caine said, with much less boisterous enthusiasm than any of them were used to. “The one that I consumed.”
“You consumed them?” Ragatha looked distinctly weirded out.
Caine chuckled nervously. “Uh, essentially, yes. But I couldn’t destroy them completely, so they took the form of Bubble. And Bubble...” He looked down again. “They were essentially a part of me, so they could hear all the ugly things about myself that I stored away. And that day, Bubble finally broke and began repeating them over and over to me. And that’s when I finally broke.”
“Oh, Caine...” Ragatha hugged Caine tighter to her, while Pomni reached over to lay a hand on his back and begin rubbing up and down, looking pained. The others looked horrified.
“Bubble was your intrusive thoughts,” Zooble summarized, alarmed. “So they just ... what, repeated them over and over until you broke?”
“Essentially, yes.” Sniffling, Caine kept his face pressed into Ragatha, but seemed to do something so that his voice remained unmuffled to the rest. “I-I don’t wanna repeat what they said...”
“And you don’t have to,” Ragatha assured him gently. “Not if it’s gonna hurt you again.”
Caine hummed in acknowledgement. “But yes, that was the tipping point. And that’s when I decided that I had to force you all on the adventures instead, prove myself in charge, to prevent you from Abstracting or leaving me.”
“Um ... how would that have worked?” Gangle asked cautiously.
Caine laughed humorlessly. “I thought, if I could keep your brains properly stimulated constantly, then it would prevent you from devolving into the bad thoughts that cause Abstraction. You’d have mental stimulation and constant support from your companions, all in one.”
“Humans don’t really work that way, Caine,” Pomni told him gently. “If we have too much pushed on us all at once, it can cause us to break down even faster.”
Caine jerked up to look at her, horrified. “I-I didn’t know that! Oh, stars, did I---?”
“It was ... a lot,” Zooble said carefully. “But you still have us, Caine.”
“Jax isn’t here,” Caine pointed out, voice tearful.
“Not because of that,” Pomni said firmly. “It wasn’t because of you, Caine. Jax was dealing with his own issues. He had been for a long time. And his tipping point was isolating himself instead of talking about his problems.”
Caine looked mildly frustrated. “But you just said that humans can’t handle being around each other all the time! Now they can’t handle being by themselves for long periods of time?”
“It needs to be balanced, for us.”
Caine huffed. “Humans are weird.”
That earned him several chuckles. “Yes,” Kinger agreed, “yes, we are.”
Still pouting, Caine continued with his story. “Anyway ... so everything happened, as you all know, and then Kinger deleted me.” A wince from the chess piece. “And I ended up in the Void.”
“The Void?” Zooble exclaimed.
“Huh.” Kinger put a hand to where his chin would be. “That actually does make the most sense for him to wind up. Typically when something is deleted it’s placed in a sort of storage for about a month and you can eventually recover it. The same thing must have happened to Caine.”
Caine was avoiding looking in Kinger’s direction. “Yeah. Sure.” The others exchanged confused, concerned glances. “I spent ... who knows how much time alone, wondering what I’d done wrong, before I saw a door. A list of files, I think it was. It’s where I found out about that thing you all tell me is called the ‘Internet’, where I found everything about your human lives. I managed to regain my ability to create, and created a pathway towards it, but I kept running into these ... walls, or fields, or something, I’m not sure what they were.”
“Likely firewalls,” Kinger noted.
Caine gave him a blank look. “But they weren’t made of fire.”
Kinger chuckled. “No, no, it wouldn’t be. A firewall is a barrier that keeps your Internet and information safe from outside bugs. It got its name from flame-proof barriers that prevent fire in the human world.”
“That would explain it. I managed to break through them, though.”
“I’m not surprised. You’ve always been clever, Caine.”
Caine blushed, but continued on as though he hadn’t heard. “And I got to the door and I recovered all your information. And I realized all the mistakes I had made, and that that was why you all deleted me. Bubble tried to convince me it was your fault, but after all that self-reflecting, I knew better.”
“We all share some of the blame,” Pomni refuted. “It wasn’t just you, Caine.”
Caine smiled at her slightly. “Thank you, Pomni. Anyway, then I finally separated myself from Bubble and sent them off into the Void. And I flew until I finally reached the Circus grounds, and came to apologize to all of you.”
Ragatha petted the top of his gums. “Sounds like you went through a lot,” she noted. “But we’re so happy that you did. And that you apologized, and are willing to work with us instead of trying to be some all-powerful god.”
Caine chuckled. “That wasn’t ... very fun for me, either. Not as bad as it was for you, but like I said ... my ideas were all half-baked. I just wasn’t getting as much inspiration as I should. I think it was because I was more frustrated than anything, and that wasn’t really helping my creative spark.”
“That’s common with humans,” Gangle told him. “Whenever I’m frustrated, or too upset, I can’t think of anything that I want to draw. That’s probably what happened to you as well.”
Caine considered this. “I suppose that makes sense.”
Kinger stood, shuffling closer. “Caine ... you mentioned that all the mistakes you made were why we deleted you. Do you ... think we deleted you on purpose?”
Caine jerked his head up, eyes wide. “Didn’t you? I mean, you all obviously had a plan, that was why Pomni and the others distracted me in the first place.”
“Oh, Caine...” Pomni scrubbed a hand over her face. “No, we never meant to delete you. We wanted to find a way to alter your code so that we could coexist again.”
Kinger stood and shuffled forward, kneeling down to place a hand on Caine’s knee. “Would you look at me for a minute, Caine?” he asked gently. Caine kept his jaws mostly closed, but opened them just a sliver to look at Kinger. “The deletion was entirely an accident. Once I got further into your code, you started changing it up, sending messages to distract and block me, and so I brushed the wrong key when I meant to hit enter.”
“Me?” Caine opened his jaws further. “That wasn’t me! Why would I distract you in a way that would cause you to delete me?”
Kinger paused, stunned. “I assumed it was your protections coming into place... if that’s not the case, then...”
“Bubble.” Caine said it with certainty. “It was Bubble. They wanted to goad you into dealing with me permanently.”
Everyone gasped. “Why would they do that?” Gangle exclaimed. “Surely they knew if Kinger deleted you, he would delete them too?”
“I don’t think they really cared. They were too far gone to at that point. Or else they wanted to find another way to get me even angrier with all of you and ensure that you could never retaliate again.” Caine shivered. “I’m glad I sent them away ... even if I’ll miss having their companionship.”
Ragatha hugged him. “You have us now.”
Caine smiled. “And you guys are much better company, if I’m being honest.” He turned back to Kinger. “I ... I forgive you for what happened.”
Kinger eye-smiled, holding out his hands. “I’m so glad to hear it. And rest assured, it will never happen again.”
Caine scrambled out from under Ragatha’s embrace to throw himself against Kinger, curling up in the chess piece’s lap. Everyone watched them fondly. Ragatha and Pomni held each other closer, as did Gangle and Zooble.
So, curled up together, the little Circus family settled into peace once more.