“IN FACT, WE CAN START RIGHT NOW!!!!” 

 

Ragatha is beginning to regret her choice of words.

 

“WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY? I HAVE UNO, CHECKERS, 3D CHESS WITH ULTRA BRAIN TELEPATHY, CORN HOLES—“

 

“Hmm, uh huh,” Ragatha hums, not really listening. Her own worries are a bit too distracting for that…She frowns, still tugging on the cloak’s folds. Gracious, has it gotten more knots in it somehow? Is he doing this on purpose?

 

“OOO, HOW ABOUT PONG!! I LOVE PONG!!”

 

Caine bats at one of the purple-velvet folds as he talks, twirling a strand of white fur around his index finger. Ragatha can’t help but feel a little fond of him, despite his eccentricities— he’s well meaning, under it all. Still, he’s got quite the habit of getting himself stuck in things, despite his all powerful status. Maybe getting his head ‘stuck’ in things is a kind of enrichment for him? She’s certainly seen Kinger hobble off to rescue him a lot, since nobody else bothers to. She would go rescue him too, of course, but it’s good for Kinger to have something to do that keeps him away from Jax! And…sharp objects…

 

“— MIND BENDING ILLUSIONS NEVER BEFORE KNOWN BY MANKIND— OR MEMORY MATCH! THAT ONE HAS SOME VERY FAVORABLE USER FEEDBACK!”

 

“Hm, oh really?”

 

“YES INDEEDY!” Caine replies, somehow brightening up even further. He whips out a clipboard, pointing to a list of green checkmarks, and some chicken-scratch scribbles. “ME AND KINGER USED TO PLAY IT ALL THE TIME!”

Ragatha bristles at the mention of Kinger— oh darn, this was supposed to take attention away from Kinger, not lead it toward him. Quick, another topic.

“P-Pong is great! That’s like table tennis, right—?”

“I WONDER HOW HE'S DOING OUT THERE,” Caine continues anyway, “SILLY ME, I'VE BEEN SO BUSY FLIPPING THROUGH MY GAMES-DATABASE, I HAVEN'T BEEN KEEPING TABS!”

“Well—

“IT'S VERY IMPORTANT FOR ME TO KEEP AN EYE ON THAT NEW MODEL OF HIS, YOU KNOW.”

Caine says seriously, summoning a little model of a white king to float in his open palm. “IT'S QUITE A COMPLEX THING!”

Boy, is that an understatement. Ragatha knows nothing about how computers work, (she can barely get by on excel, which is the only thing any of the ‘computers’ here run) but Kinger looked very, um… photorealistic. Almost to the point of comedy, standing next to bonafide blender-renders like Jax. Queenie used to tell her about stuff like that, wireframes and topology and bones— most of it went way over her head, but it was still nice. While it lasted, anyway.

“I’m sure it is,” Ragatha says slowly, “…but we were going to play a game, remember?”

She plucks the model out of his hand. He blinks at her, tilting his head a little. Oh, right! Yes, that’s what they were doing. Hm. 

 

“OH, RIGHT! AS I WAS SAYING, YOUR OPTIONS ARE—“

 

Caine quickly begins rattling off names again, but his mind is elsewhere. While his voice may still be speaking, in his head Caine is scrolling through his notifications list at lightning speed— he got a few pings while he was picking out all those games, and he does need to keep up with them. He’s the ringmaster, after all, it’s his job to be on top of everything! Priorities, priorities…

Nothing concerning in his main channel, just a few clipping errors from the digital forest. The textures on the digital-foliage are always troublesome, (so many layers!) and he isn’t surprised Kinger set a few of them off. Caine swiftly marks it as low-priority. All seems well, but just in case, he decides to check his spam folder.

His spam folder, which has 2,632 notifications!? 

The number catches his attention much like how a semi truck catches roadkill. Caine quickly opens it up, horrified— what on earth generated so many at once? The spam folder is supposed to be for duplicate errors only, not— not…

Two thousand, six hundred, and thirty-two clipping errors from the digital forest. In the last two minutes.

Before Caine has time to be properly appalled by this, a new alert comes in. This one is tagged as direct-from-engine, and thankfully does not get mistakenly shoved into the spam folder.

[Alert! Abnormal activity registered in The Grounds]

No sh^%t! Is what Caine would think, if he were able to. As it is, he just twitches weirdly and gets an error about company-appropriate responses. The warning is right however; while the amount of errors is absolutely abhorrent, they aren’t any deeper than graphical! Probably, anyway— which is why he should send Bubble to check on the issue. And quickly, before whatever it is gets any worse.

 

Whatever it is, Caine just hopes Kinger hasn’t gotten himself swept up in it. 

 

 

---

 

 

Back on the outside, Caine suddenly just...stops. 

 

And Ragatha, who had been in the middle of silently cursing God for her lack of individual fingers, stops too. She blinks in confusion at the sudden quiet— oh dear, he must've noticed her spacing out again. She brushes dust off the cloak for the thousandth time (she’s starting to suspect it just respawns whenever she blinks) and pats Caines shoulder, trying to bring his attention back. That, and soothe any ruffled feathers. His lack of an understanding of personal space is no joke; he has none of his own. Ragatha strongly doubts he’d mind if she climbed on top of his head.

 

"Sorry, what were you saying?"

 

She asks, putting on a smile. Caine doesn't answer, gaze fixed on the tent's door, frozen. As if he's focusing very hard on...something. She turns her head to follow his gaze, but there's nothing there– Just the pale blue sky of the grounds, a hint of green forest on the horizon.

 

“...Caine?"

 

A small square of blue sky is reflected in the one eye she can see, and Ragatha frowns— was that a flicker of red, there? Looking up only shows her the same blue sky as before, but the unease sitting in her stuffing refuses to go away. She tugs on the cloak, reaching down to pat Caine’s leg, more insistent now— oh gosh, please don’t be stalling again… she’s not going to be able to handle it if he buffers. Last time that happened it took an hour for everything to un-blue.

 

"Caine, is something—“

 

"WHOOPSIE! LOOKS LIKE THERE'S— SOMETHING I HAVE TO ATTEND TO, AHAHA!"

 

He suddenly booms, and Ragatha yelps as the cloak suddenly disappears with a sharp SNAP! The ringmaster shoots up into the air before she has a chance to react, the cloak folding itself and dropping into her lap. Ragatha stares up at him in disbelief— he could do that the entire-? oh, of course he could— as he swivels, cane popping back into existence and falling into his hands. His eyes fix right back on her, gaze seeming…twitchier than usual? 

Ragatha frowns, analyzing his behavior with the expertise of the circus’s designated Mom, four years running. He’s twitching minutely like a cross-wired machine— It’s almost like she can see his mind flickering to somewhere else for a moment, before his attention hones in on her like a tracking missile.

 

“RAGATHA! LISTEN UP!”

 

He cries, waving his cane in the air.

 

“THE GROUNDS ARE OFF LIMITS! NOT OPERATIONAL! DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE! NOW, I'M GOING TO FIX IT, AND IT’S ALL GOING TO BE FINE— BUT-- BUT.”

 

Ragatha subconsciously straightens up, doing her best to look attentive. Caine is staring at her with an intensity that makes it very, very easy.

 

"LISTEN." He orders abruptly, grabbing her shoulders. “RAGATHA.”

 

He jerks forward, so fast Ragatha has to pull back to ensure he doesn’t accidentally clock her with his jaw. 

 

“YOU CANNOT. UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. LEAVE THE TENT. UNDERSTAND?”

 

Ragatha just stares at him, squinting through red-yarn curls as her shortsightedness starts getting the better of her. Caine, apparently, takes this as a 'yes.' 

 

"AAAAAAALRIGHT!" Caine booms, finally letting go of her. "GLAD WE AGREE?”

 

“O-of course, Caine!” Ragatha recovers after a moment, smoothing her dress. “Absolutely, I’ll— I’ll stick right here.” 

She gives Caine an awkward thumbs up. So much for distracting him, she thinks it herself, cringing. The relief it gives him is visible, his shoulders slumping, and unease begin to creep up Ragatha’s spine.  Last time he acted like this was when Jax fell through the map— given the fact Jax somehow managed to fall for 3 hours straight while Caine tried to figure out how to expand his range to reach him, her unease is more than understandable. Caine only acts like this when a problem needs his undevided attention to fix, and that's…rare.

She’s just about to work up the courage to ask what's actually wrong when Caine suddenly yanks Bubble out of his hat and softball-pitches it out the door.

Bubble whizzes past her face with a high pitched “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Of delight, blurring by so fast Ragatha finds herself concerned for the small AI’s safety. It quickly disappears into the distance, and Ragatha is still staring out the door in disbelief as Caine nods, grabbing his cane again. 

 

“DON'T WORRY, HES QUALIFIED.”

 

He explains, as if that fixes anything, and disappears in a puff of exuberant smoke.

 

 

---

Meanwhile, Bubble— well on its way to the digital forest by now — is having the time of its life!

 

Being launched like that is fun. As is getting to go off on its own for once! It isn’t unusual that Caine sends Bubble out to do “reconnaissance” for him, but this is the first time its had more than a couple errors to look for. But boy, is this more than a couple!

Bubble flies soundlessly over the forest, grinning as it passes over streams of ladybird models, all humming in sync. They wind like red-rivers through the forest, and the air buzzes with the sound of models clipping through one another. Bubble swings this way and that, slowly cycling over the problem area— that being, the mass of broken textures squatting in the center of the digital landscape. It’s huge; as big as the tent, maybe even bigger.

[Alert: Render engine B4 is experiencing unexpected lag.]

Hm, that isn’t great. Bubble clatters its teeth in anticipation, the digital wind buffeting its tiny body like a persistent balloon— small ripples pass over its shining surface, and Bubble snickers as it plows through the mob of various insects in the air. It plows right through several large dragonflies, and steamrolls a bluebottle. 

Its little mind whirrs with every error it floats by. Humming, working, logging. A blue butterfly hits it smack in the teeth, and Bubble swallows it with a cartoonish gulp.

[Adventure ID…’BugHunt’]

[Adventure status…Live. Player count…One. Warning! Player count cannot subcede three!]

Bubble floats higher, zipping up across the digital forest, and decides to do one last loop around the mass before really digging in and getting a proper error report. As it cycles above the mass of disturbed textures, Bubble finds itself flying through random pockets of cold air — It’s model asset switches to ‘frozen’ with a loud ker-chunk sound effect, and Bubble logs a temperature glitch as it floats on. 

Bubble finally stops, looking down on the grounds. Well, at least it’s clear where the error is! The whole ugly mess of it is still huge even from this angle, huge enough that several of its large ‘spikes’ (made mostly of spaghetti-ified particle effects, and any nearby assets unfortunate enough to be swiped up in the process) are slamming their collisions into the circus skies so-called ‘idiot net’ — bouncing up, then flickering back down as they pass the despawn-barrier. Caine put that up after some players launched themselves into the void using barrel-bombs, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be up much longer! In fact, it looks like it's even lagging, the errors getting a little farther each time. Hoo boy, Caine is gonna be livid about that!

There’s a distant…screaming? Yelling? -from below, and Bubble blinks as it spots Kinger at the center of the thrashing textures. Huh, it should check that out later. He looks like he’s really getting a beating down there— what a treat!

Oh wait. That’s probably bad…

 

“Oh! Bubble! My goodness, you scared me…”

 

Bubble spins around, blinking as it spots the Moon peeking out from behind her cloud. She blinks wide eyes at it, peering meekly around the cloud she’s using to shield herself from the Thing down below. Bubble finds several pings about her in its notifications list— her AI has been running unusually hot for a good while now. The surrounding clouds are packing themselves up against her like startled sheep, quivering a little as the stars shiver on their hinges.

 

“How’ve you been?”

 

The Moon asks, and Bubble stays silent for a moment. Moon is…Moon observes the grounds, that’s right, she’s the one sending all these pings! She’ll totally know what’s going on with all this freaky texture stuff. More data is written, before Bubble cocks its entire body, and asks;

 

“The Ringmaster requests a report!”

 

It really needs one, to be honest. What it’s logged already doesn't make much sense, even to its rudimentary AI– apart from the unauthorized ladybug spawns and the mess of tangled jpg’s slamming against the circus’s roof, it hasn't noticed much of anything going on! There's nothing really obviously wrong apart from all the errors popping up in the console…Errors which don't make much sense, since Caine didn’t authorise half the actions taken, and the other half are things that shouldn't bring up errors at all. 

It’s all very confusing, and Bubble decides to stop before it pops itself. It opens up a report form, hovering obediently as it sits ready to take in whatever the Moon has to say.

Moon stares into nothingness for a long moment. Her AI runs red-hot, dipping into dangerous levels of use as she gathers whatever data she's observed and filters it through various fact-checking programs and sources. Her AI flickers back into orange as she sends over the raw data packet, which Bubble gladly accepts.

 

“That's all I know, anyway.”  

 

Moon continues airily, as if she'd been reciting the whole kaboodle verbally and not just beaming the file into it’s bubbly little brain.

Bubble personally is nowhere near smart enough to know what any of this stuff means, but it involves Kinger being stuck somewhere. That isn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, Kinger has a penchant for finding the most obscure hidey-holes to make “nests” in— Caine really is gonna be freaked about this one, Kinger is his favorite player! Favorite in his own, special kind of way, but right now the one Caines really raring for is— not Moon. But someone!

 

“You had better hop along now, can't keep my darling waiting…”

 

The moon interrupts Bubble’s barely-there thoughts, sighing dreamily as her AI floats back up into green. Oh yeah! It has a job to be doing!

 

“You got it lady-boss!” 

 

It chirps obediently, somehow managing to salute without any visible movement. Opening its mouth wide, Bubble bites down on its own lip, and—

 

POP!

 

---

 

 

Caine appears outside the grounds, pipe already in hand. He snaps his fingers, and a red barrier shimmers over the entrance to the tent. There, now nobody can leave until he gets this properly sorted.

He feels a bit bad trapping everyone inside— he did have things planned after all. They finished that adventure in record time, and there are many hours left in the day. He was hoping to organize some fun activities after his experiment with Kinger, go try it out on Pomni, cheer everyone up a bit! …but there’s no time for that now.

Now he has to deal with whatever’s going on here. Such as the massive texture error he can spot in the middle of the digital forest, and the circus’s total failure to inform him of any of this! Not to mention these darn bugs everywhere. The little creatures bustle over the path like it’s their own personal freeway, bright spotted shells sticking out like sore thumbs. Ladybirds, right?

Caine snatches one out of the air as it whizzes by. It struggles under his grip for longer than it should before finally stilling, and Caine frowns as he stares down at the ruby-red shape in his open palm. Now, what are you…?

[AdventureID=“BugHunt”]

Well that’s not right. He never authorized that adventure to start running— just what in the heck has been going on out here!? The ladybirds from that adventure were never programmed to swarm either, just wander around aimlessly like every other bug. If he wanted them to swarm he would have made them much less high-poly. Yes, their behavior is what’s puzzling— What AI is running on these dastardly beetles?

[NPC_AI returned “null” at 00:00NA]

Caine crosses his legs and glares at the little beetle. He can feel it trying to start moving again, even as he manually holds its position. Now this is getting weird— If there’s nothing in the NPC AI library that’s being applied here, then what on earth is moving these things? An outside input…?

The only thing outside him is the circus optimizer. Well, that and the OS itself, but neither of those could be doing this— He’s the only one who does things! The outer-circus systems send him alerts every so often, and he carries out what they tell him to. He’s the problem solver! The do-er! The go getter! Why would they act on their own? They have no reason to, it’s much more efficient to go through him. The only time that kind of autonomous action would be needed would be…

Would be if he was, for some reason, compromised. 

Caine shakes that notion off. He's operating well within his parameters. Plus, these ladybirds are a part of his circus, his adventure, his domain— why would any actions by the OS or the optimiser be carried out through an unauthorized adventure instead of him…?

[Insufficient data; report needed.]

[Redirecting…]

Caine groans, stuffing the small bug in his coat-pocket. Ugh, this is so embarrassing! His perfect circus, going haywire over nothing, entire adventures starting up willy-nilly— this is not the standard of quality he usually holds himself to. Whatever the crux of this issue is, he needs to fix it fast, before any of his players see!

Now, where is Bubble with that report…?

The pipe in his teeth suddenly twitches, and Caine quickly plucks it out of his mouth. Giving it a hard puff, he watches with a look of satisfaction as Bubble pops out, a fat datapack tracking on its heels. Speak of the digital devil! 

 

 “AH, BUBBLE, THERE YOU ARE!” Caine shouts, already scanning it for any glitches of its own. “NOW, WHAT’S THE SCOOP?” 

 

He asks, folding his hands on his knees like a schoolgirl. Every millisecond it takes for Bubble to laboriously filter the data through its compression program feels like a waste of time, but Caine has learned by now that you have to look before you leap. Running these little interactions helps him ensure the errors don’t spread to other AI, since Bubble is conveniently rather unprotected file-wise. That way, if an error starts actually eroding his beloved circus, dear Bubble will be the first to go— thereby alerting him!

Ah, he’s so smart. 

Bubble’s speech generator hiccups like an old car under the amount of data, and it lets out a harsh chirp of static before finally starting to speak.

“Mmmmmrrrrkkk-k-Kinger has been flagged as a system threat!” 

It rattles off, teeth snapping. “He has been tagged as such and is being sent to the cellar for abs-str-str-straction.”

 

Caine just stares at it blankly.

 

“WHAT.”

 

”Eeeeeyup! Want me to—“ 

 

“WHAT??? WHAT DO YOU— BUBBLE! THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR UNSCRIPTED BITS!” 

 

Caine bursts out, throwing his hands in the air. Gosh, what kind of screwball-brained joke is THAT!? He needs to find it in the database later and workshop it— that absolutely is not appropriate! Most of its jokes aren’t appropriate, (he has no idea how it even keeps generating material that crude) but this one is an island of microplastics in an already trash filled ocean. Bubble cocks its entire body, some metaphorical cogs grinding together way back in its bubbly little brain as Caine continues to glare daggers at it.

 

“I don’t get it, boss. Cellar’s open, Kinger’s being sent in, and that’s that!” 

 

Bubble says, nodding towards the glitching, writhing chunk of ladybirds currently headbanging on the horizon. If it were an actual creature and not a conglomerate mass of broken textures the size of a skyscraper, one might even think it was having fun over there. 

 

“I— I—“

 

Caine stutters for a moment, split halfway between finishing his sentence and finishing his thought. That— that makes no sense! Holes to the cellar are clean and neat, he makes sure of that himself. They’re nothing like that mess. And since when did the circus automatically open channels to the cellar? 

This makes no sense. Even if Kinger were abstracted, (which he is not!) abstractions are so very volatile that any handling of them is only done by him. He puts them down there, nobody else! The only exception he knows of is only supposed to execute on the infinitesimally-small chance he's completely incapacitated, and he’s very much still kicking. No, it wasn't always like that– the system needed revision, and he fixed it– but that was years ago. Any kind of fault should have been ironed out back then. 

 

“YOU— IT WOULD HAVE ALERTED ME IF THAT WAS THE CASE! DON'T BE SILLY!”

 

He argues, and Bubble just laughs. 

 

“Being silly is my job, boss!!”

 

Caine glares at the small AI like he’s trying to explode it with his mind. Which, funnily enough, he could probably do! Wow, he’s pulling out the kettle sound effect for this one— Bubble squints at him, indulging in some rare introspection. Did it actually make a mistake…? 

 

 “OH, JUST GIVE ME THE READOUT!”

 

Caine doesn’t wait for the file to be coughed up— He rolls up his metaphorical sleeves and goes after it himself. The hand-in-the-mouth animation is really just for show, because on the back end, Caine is flipping through Bubble’s files like one would flip through a particularly uninteresting thesaurus. Now where is…?

 

“Seeeeeeeeee?” Bubble whines, once it’s been released. “I told you it was—“

 

Caine isn’t listening. Bubble is, somehow, grabbed by the throat— despite not having one— and remains a vaguely peanut-shaped blob in his other hand as he scans the report in the span of a blink.

 Not only does the data corroborate Bubble’s story, but so do his own all-seeing eyeballs— He’d been doing a run-of-the-mill debug as they’d been arguing, just a preliminary thing to check that all was as it should be, and now he knows where to look the fact of the matter seems painfully obvious. Kinger is, indeed, tagged as junk data, and he is also still somehow tagged as an active player, and this is indeed breaking a lot of things, and he is indeed being sent to the cellar, and things are, indeed, very much on-fire! Metaphorically! 

Caine’s eyes subconsciously glass over, his stress levels climbing to a peak. Scratch that, they might actually be on fire soon if he doesn’t do something. It’s rather like poking a wasp’s nest and being immediately hit by a steamroller; Sort of a “wheezing ‘what the f%^k’ from the pavement” kind of moment.

He, unfortunately, cannot say “what the f$%k,” and so settles on his usual alternative;

 

Dead silence.

 

Caine’s model stalls completely. Somewhere far away, server-room fans kick up a notch as Caine throws himself into running a scan so intensive it would set an ordinary computer on fire. What is wrong. What is breaking. Why is the amazing digital circus— somehow, without his authorization— trying to delete one of his players, and what else have his usually infallible diagnostic systems failed to tell him about?

The answer to that is, ‘a lot.’

Kinger’s render is sucking in resources like a black hole. The demands are so intense the circus graphics-optimizer literally just crashed under the pressure, and Caine’s halfhearted attempt to restart it only results in an error. Too many resources running at once—  no wonder, since he counts seven new render engines in use by the adventure-he-did-not-authorise, and half of those engines he’s never even had a reason to use! It’s the digital circus, not the digital hyperrealism simulation, there’s no reason to! 

No wonder Kinger’s being labeled a system threat— he's going to make the graphics card melt.

This is bad— no, this is insane, and not in a fun way. Everything in the circus framework, right down to the basic engineering, is trying to bodily corral Kinger into the cellar. No teleportation, no clean, lovely systems; this is why he wasn’t informed about any of this, it’s the digital equivalent of beating the problem to death with a rock. No reason, no rhyme, no order to any of it! It’s— the adventure, it’s just physically pushing Kinger into the cellar, as if all the wonderfully optimized frameworks he’s built up don’t even exist, as if he doesn’t exist. Caine doesn’t even know where to start figuring out why he wasn’t just told about this so he could fix it, this is his job, his purpose, it’s what he’s built for, so why would it not just—!?

[Spike detected. Reoptimizing…]

He shakes his head, snapping back into control. It doesn’t matter! He can look into the root of it later, right now the focus should be keeping Kinger safe. 

Thankfully, this is an easy thing to do! Caine thanks his lucky stars that he built in such a robust teleportation system— all he has to do is bring Kinger back here, then he can easily swap the models back around, which should resolve all of this until he can fix it.

Caine raises his hand to snap, already planning how he’ll explain all this to…

 

[ERROR:  Player_ID=Kinger out of range]

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