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The moon is humming faintly in the sky, and the night is cool. It almost feels like they’re really out camping.
It had been Caine’s idea—per usual. He wanted to give everyone a “change of scenery,” so he dragged them out to the Grounds to sleep on the hard digital earth instead of their beds. With arms outstretched widely, he had presented to them a proper campsite he conjured himself, fit with tents, a crackling campfire, extremely uncomfortable stumps for them to sit on, and even giant trees to surround the perimeter of the area for effect. He also said there may or may not be a bear roaming around somewhere, but he wasn’t completely sure because he legitimately forgot where he put it.
It…had been a nice day, though, admittedly. After everyone accepted that they would be away from their creature comforts for a short while, they all relaxed and had a good time. They went fishing (Kinger got slapped at least fifty times by the tail of a fish he caught, and Jax attempted to use Zooble’s arm as a fishing rod), went for a hike (they ended up finding the missing bear and had to hide in a tree until Caine deleted it from existence), went swimming in the lake (Pomni swallowed what felt like a gallon on water on accident), and when the sun went down, they all huddled around the campfire and told stories until they fell asleep.
Now, they’re all laying under the artificial sky. Despite the presence of tents, they all decided to sleep outside in their own sleeping bags so they could see the stars. It’s peaceful.
Or, well, it’s peaceful for everyone except Pomni.
It feels like there are metal claws in Pomni’s lungs, tearing the soft tissue to a bloody red pulp. She’s curled into a ball in her sleeping bag, coughing into her blankets, her whole body wracked with pain. It’s like there’s something wet and sloshing inside of her chest, slowly drowning her. Every cough makes her head spin, and it’s hard to breathe, her throat choked with—
A pillow is hurled across the low campfire, nailing her in the head.
“Do you MIND?” Jax barks. “We are TRYING to SLEEP!”
Zooble sits up in their sleeping bag, rubbing their eyes. “There’s a sort of irony in you being even louder than she was being.”
“Well, SOMEONE had to say something,” Jax says.
“Sorry,” Pomni rasps. A thick slew of slime dampens the back of her throat.
“You could have been nicer about it,” Zooble snaps at the same moment, reaching over, grabbing the pillow, and throwing it back at Jax. Jax deftly dodges, and the pillow ends up hitting Gangle, who sits up just in time to get smashed right in the face. Gangle is blown backward by the force and sprawls flat in the grass.
Zooble blinks. “Whoops.”
Jax bursts out laughing, being much louder than Pomni when she was coughing. “Good going!”
A hand touches Pomni’s arm; Pomni flinches, tensing instinctively. She looks to her left to see Ragatha sitting up and leaning over to her, concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Pomni says. “I just have a little tickle in my throat.”
“That cough sounds like more than just a ‘little tickle,’” Zooble says helpfully.
Even with the dying light of the fire, Pomni can still make out how worried Ragatha’s expression is. “You sound sick, Pomni.”
Pomni immediately gets defensive at that. She really doesn’t want anyone to take care of her. “I’m not sick,” she says shyly.
Kinger sits up at that moment. “What’s going on?”
“The jester is sick,” Jax informs him.
“Oh dear!” Kinger gasps.
“I’m not sick!” Pomni argues. She’s not! Just because her chest feels like an open furnace, and her throat is burning hotter than the fiery pits of Hell, and it hurts a lot when she swallows, and she’s got awful chills, and she’s a bit nauseous…doesn’t mean she’s sick! She’s perfectly fine!
One of Ragatha’s hands reaches out to touch her cheek, then slides up to feel her forehead, something that causes her to flinch away in surprise. She almost strikes the doll out of fright but manages to stop herself.
“You’re burning up, Pomni,” Ragatha says, frowning deeply.
Zooble then scoots their way over on their knees and puts the back of their hand to Pomni’s forehead before she can even react. “Damn, she’s right. You’re hot as f[@$&].”
“Guys, I already said I’m fine,” Pomni tries to insist, but her own words sound feeble and weak.
And then Jax smacks the back of his hand to Pomni’s forehead, startling her, and whistles. “You feel like an oven.”
“Stop touching me!” Pomni yawps. “I’m fine! I’m okay! I’m— Kinger, please don’t.”
Kinger, whose hands had been slowly floating over to jump on the bandwagon and feel her face, withdrew quickly.
“Can we all PLEASE just go back to—” A coughing fit consumes Pomni before she can finish. She doubles over, her lungs lighting up with an infernal, burning pain. With every cough, her chest seems more and more like an ocean during a thunderstorm, and she can feel something splashing against her ribs. Is this what it feels like to dry drown?
Ragatha’s hand gently pats between her shoulder blades, and Pomni expels a thread of something black and phlegmy from her cringing lips. She spits it out onto the ground, and it stains the grass like tar.
They all stare at it.
“Oh, great,” Jax says. “The jester’s lungs are corrupted.”
The moment Pomni hears that, her heart skips a beat. That doesn’t sound good at all. “M-my lungs are what?!”
Instead of answering, Jax tilts his head up and shouts, “Oi, Caine! Pomni’s sick!”
In an instant, Caine appears at the campsite. “Pomni is WHAT!” he yells. His eyes rove her hunched figure, and she wonders if she looks as bad as she feels. “Oh, you poor thing! Let’s see what’s going on, shall we?”
A stethoscope then materializes in his hand, and he puts it on (due to his lack of ears, the earpieces just hook onto his lower jaw). He places the diaphragm against Pomni’s chest, listens closely, then exclaims, “GASP! It seems our dearest Pomni has contracted a lung corruption!”
Jax pumps his fist victoriously. “I knew it.”
None of this information soothes Pomni’s anxiety, and she can feel herself starting to get more and more nervous, and she would really like to not have a panic attack when her chest is replicating a swimming pool full of burning hot oil. “Wh-what is that? What’s wrong with me?”
“Calm down, it’s alright,” Ragatha assures her, seeing that she’s beginning to get worked up. “It’s going to be okay. I know it sounds scary, but it’s not that bad!”
“Your insides are leaking,” Jax says helpfully.
“WHAT?!” Pomni squawks, only to descend into a wet, slimy coughing fit.
“Jax!” Ragatha hisses.
“Don’t worry, my dear!” Caine thumps Pomni on the back with a little more force than necessary. “You won’t die!”
That doesn’t really comfort Pomni if she’s being honest.
“Imagine you have a respiratory infection,” Zooble says. “But your lungs are filled with black gunk.”
“I, personally, have never had it happen to me before,” Kinger pipes up. “But I hear it’s pretty nasty.”
“That’s because you don’t have a mouth…” Gangle says after finally recovering from being sniped in the head by Zooble.
“And you don’t have lungs, so you also haven’t gotten it,” Zooble says to her. “Neither have I.”
Kinger looks pleased, like he’s completely forgotten about what’s going on with Pomni. “Lucky us!”
“Aww, baby’s first digital virus!” Jax titters. “Brings a tear to my eye!” He pretends to wipe a tear from his eye.
Pomni hasn’t forgotten what’s going on with her, though, even though she really wishes she could. It’s like the ‘black gunk’ in her chest is rising alongside her mounting anxiety, and the world around her starts to fade out into buzzing white noise as her nerves take over.
“Wh-why is this happening?” Pomni chokes out.
Zooble offers a less-than-reassuring comparison, “It's like having a computer virus, but in your body.”
“They’re…not wrong,” Caine says. “It's more of a glitch. Something got corrupted in your respiratory tract, and now your body is trying to purge the corrupted code from your lungs. But don’t you worry- it’ll go away on its own eventually!”
“Eventually?!” Pomni sputters in dismay. How long is she going to have to feel this awful?
“It’s not so bad!” Jax says. “Just think of it as your body’s way of redecorating your insides. A little spring cleaning, if you will.”
“This doesn’t look very clean…” Gangle says, glancing warily at the mess on the ground.
“Yeah, that’s why I said it was her guts undergoing the cleaning,” Jax says back.
“It isn’t meant to be clean, Gangle!” Caine says. “What our dearest Pomni is coughing up is basically a concentrated manifestation of the corrupted digital code that’s causing her respiratory system to malfunction!”
Pomni’s response to this is lost in another fit of coughing, her body heaving as she struggles to expel the relentless intruder from her lungs. It feels as though the world around her is collapsing into a chaotic vortex of pain, and her body spasms with the force of her ribs rattling in her chest.
Ragatha lightly bats Caine out of the way and takes his spot at Pomni’s side. She rubs soothing circles into Pomni’s back, and Pomni is sure she can feel the sporadic bunch and tightening of her muscles as she coughs and wheezes.
Pomni tries to breathe, but the air is like gasoline, and her throat is already on fire. Every breath is more fuel to those flames, and her chest is slowly being choked by the smoke. Or, in actuality, some kind of gross black substance.
Somewhere above her head, she hears a sympathetic coo from Kinger, and then a “yikes” from Jax.
Even after the coughing fit subsides, her suffering prevails. Her skin is clammy and slick with sweat, and she’s shivering uncontrollably. She’s got a fever and a bad one at that.
“Ow…” is the only thing she’s able to choke out.
“‘Ow’ seems like a bit of an understatement,” Jax says.
“Am I… am I gonna die? ” Pomni can’t help but ask. The anxiety of illness is boiling just beneath her skin (or maybe that’s fever- it’s hard to tell), and she’s worried that this sludge in her chest may try to drown her.
“No, no, no, don’t worry!” Caine answers. “Digital corruptions like this tend to run their course in a week or two! After that, you’ll be as good as new!”
But she’s going to have to deal with this discomfort for a week? Maybe more?
Pomni groans softly. Her lungs feel like a child-based content creator tried to make slime in them and left the resulting muck in there to fester, and every cough is followed by something between a gag and a gurgle. Her throat and chest are swamped with the thick, sticky, tar-like substance, a vile mess of dark-colored goo that clings to her airways despite all her attempts to get it out. Every inhale is an agonizing battle between wanting to take a full breath and the need to hack it all back up. When she breathes through her mouth, she can feel the air catch on the sick slop lining her trachea, but breathing through her nose isn’t much better, as that feels like she just snorted a line of cayenne pepper right before sucking up lava through a straw into her nostrils.
“Let’s get you back to bed, honey,” Ragatha murmurs to Pomni.
Pomni is in no shape to argue or disagree, so she complies, though she can barely feel her body moving back toward her sleeping back—if it’s moving of her own volition at all. Ragatha may be having to drag her.
She doesn’t even feel it when she lays back down.
Pomni wakes up sometime later in a daze of heat and pain. A soft groan rises to her lips as the heavy, boggy sensation of congestion registers in her chest. She had been hoping her ‘lung corruption’ was just a bad dream, but the world is not that kind, especially to her.
Simply lifting her head to look around is a nearly impossible feat, as her skull feels about as heavy as a bowling ball. Her eyes scan the campsite, and she sees that everyone is asleep again.
Well, everyone except Jax.
Jax sits by the fire with his feet kicked up on a log, taking in the darkness like a true night owl. His expression remains impassive as always, and he seems rather relaxed. Why is he even up so late? After all, he’s the one that shouted at her for coughing and being noisy when he was trying to sleep.
Can it be…that he’s concerned about her? And is trying to keep an eye on her?
No. That’s impossible.
His eyes flick over to her, and a grin stretches on his face. “You’re awake.”
Pomni tries to speak, but it sounds like an attempt at saying something with peanut butter on her tongue. She coughs and brings up a bit of that black phlegm, which sticks grossly to the roof of her mouth.
“Mmmnnnnggg… Not very good,” she finally gets herself to say, and that’s the truth. Her fever feels like it has spiked, white-hot nails driven straight into her temples. Her eyeballs throb as if they are encased in shards of glass, every blink a torturous grind of sandpaper against the corneas. The pain ricochets behind her eyelids like an erratic lightning storm, making her vision swim with hazy bursts of color—though that may just be from her delirium.
But her chest? Her chest hurts the worst.
The ache inside feels like an orchestra of knives conducting a symphony of agony. Scraping blades whittle away at her ribs, an uncomfortable grinding sensation that worsens with every breath she takes.
Jax’s eyebrows raise up. “Yeah, I can tell,” he says. “You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible,” Pomni mumbles, not even bothering to act like she’s okay anymore because she isn’t. She really isn’t.
Jax releases a breath through his nose, then rises to his feet and begins to walk over to her. Pomni isn’t sure whether to expect a helping hand extended toward her or a foot raised up to stomp down on her and leave her like roadkill.
Much to her surprise, it ends up being the former- Jax reaches out with one hand and feels her forehead. His purple fur is rather soft against her burning hot skin.
“You’re still imitating a volcano, it seems,” Jax observes.
She’s imitating a volcano in more ways than one, she thinks, what with the black gunk she’s been coughing up.
Jax chuckles lightly, though not without sympathy- even his expression is a little more concerned than it usually is. Not so much to make it seem like he actually cares, but enough to make it obvious he isn’t completely heartless.
“Here.” He passes her a bottle of water, and she takes it gratefully. She isn’t sure how much good the water will do for her, but when she takes a sip, it soothes her scorched throat, so she doesn’t care. She drinks some more.
Maybe a little too much.
A cough suddenly crawls its way up Pomni’s throat, and she sputters, lurching forward and coughing mid-swallow, causing her to spray a spew of water, saliva, and black goo out of her mouth. Jax leaps back with a yelp as he gets a nice spritz of fluids on his upper body.
“What the F[@#$]!” Jax shouts, but his anger and disgust are lost on Pomni as she’s consumed in a coughing fit.
It feels as though her body is trying to bring her lungs out through her mouth, the dark gunk being forced out of her in a stream of tarry slime. Pomni chokes and splutters as she rocks rocks back and forth, her arms barely able to support her as she chokes. Her eyes water, and her face turns red. She can’t breathe.
“S[@#$],” Pomni hears Jax hiss. He then moves away from her, to someone else, and he’s saying something, but she can barely make out the words over the sound of her own coughing. It’s a sharp, rasping sound that assaults her tender ears like a heavy hammer.
“…the f[@#$] up, the jester is f[@#$]ing dying…”
Pomni coughs and coughs and coughs, and then, without warning, she gags. Then dry heaves. Then throws up.
What comes out is dark, chunky, and looks like the love affair of an oil spill and a tar slushy. It is one of the most foul things Pomni’s body has ever gone through, and she gags, trying to hold in the rest of the vomit, but that’s about as successful as trying to swallow a live frog in the middle of croaking.
A hand is set on Pomni’s trembling back and begins to rub it gently. “Just get it out of your system, sweetheart… Breathe. It’ll pass, I promise.”
It’s Ragatha. That must be who Jax frantically woke up.
“Just get it out… There you go… It’ll be over soon…”
But even as Ragatha says this, trying to soothe Pomni, Pomni can feel herself fading into the abyss. She hacks and retches, nearly choking because her body is still attempting to cough at the same time. The taste in her mouth is something burning and vile. It makes her feel even more sick.
And then, without warning, her elbows buckle beneath the weight of her body, the world tilts on a sharp axis, she hears someone shout something unintelligible, and then everything goes dark…
An unknown amount of time seems to have passed. Pomni’s eyes flutter open, and she wakes up to another daze, just like before, except this one comes with a lot more aching and soreness. It feels like someone shoved a vacuum down her esophagus and sucked out all her insides. Her chest is heavy and congested, as though it’s filled with mud and tar, and it’s hard to take a deep breath. Her throat is raw and stinging, like it’s suffering the aftermath of the most aggressive deepthroating session with an entire barbed wire fence. Her head is lying upon something soft, and there are fingers running through her hair. Something cool and damp rests on her forehead.
“Mmmm… wha…?” she croaks. Her mouth burns like it’s been scrubbed with steel wool.
A head looks down at her- it’s Ragatha. “Oh, you’re finally awake. Good.” That’s her hand stroking Pomni’s hair, but it pulls away when she sees that she’s woken up. Pomni wants to say that it’s okay that she continues, but she’s too shy to do so, and her throat hurts too much to speak anyway.
“How do you feel?” Ragatha asks. She adjusts whatever is on Pomni’s forehead- a rag, probably being used to soothe her fever.
“Still not very good…” Pomni answers weakly. She tries to breathe again. It feels like there’s razors in her lungs, slowly dragging down, down, down every time she tries to breathe in, creating an ever-agonzing line of torture inside of her.
Dizzily, Pomni looks around. They’re still at the campsite, and she has her head resting in Ragatha’s lap. She sees Gangle a few feet away, curled up into a little ball, asleep again. Kinger and Zooble are talking softly on the other side of the campfire. Caine is nowhere to be seen. Jax is laying in the grass with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, and at first she thinks he’s fallen back asleep, but then one of his eyes opens, and he looks over at her.
“So you’re not dead then, huh?” he says.
“Jax,” Ragatha scolds.
“Whaaat?” Jax says innocently. “We were all thinking it! She even looks like a corpse!”
“She’s just a little sick,” Ragatha says. “Don’t be rude.”
“‘A little,’” Jax parrots with a snort. “If you say so.”
“What… what happened?” Pomni mumbles.
“You did your best impression of the Hoover Dam breaking open and then passed out,” Jax says. “That’s what happened.”
“Oh,” Pomni murmurs, her eyes watering. Jax’s reply was so blasé, so casual, and it’s making her feel a little self-conscious about having essentially been reduced to a half-dead Black Plague victim of sorts.
“Jax!” Ragatha snaps, sounding for all the world like a mother.
“Come on, that was a good one,” Jax counters without hesitation. “You’re telling me no one else was thinking it? Pomni was spitting up enough black s[@#$] for the United States to come in and claim her as its own oil source!”
“Jax! You’re not helping!”
“I am, actually! I’m keeping it light-hearted! What did you expect, a ‘Get Well Soon’ card?”
Pomni groans softly at the sound of their arguing, and they both go silent. Ragatha strokes her hair again, and she can’t help but lean into her touch.
“How long was I out?” Pomni asks.
“A few hours,” Ragatha answers. “You really needed the rest.”
“And I still feel awful,” Pomni says. “This sucks…”
“And just think!” Jax says, grinning. “You still got a full week of this to go through!”
Pomni stares at him in dismay. “Oh god…”