Oh, Queen of Venus Hear My Plea, My Longing Overtaketh Me

by Syntax

Summary:

Gangle and Zooble had immediately run off to who knows where when Caine announced the update had gone live.  Pomni didn't know what Jax and Ragatha's reactions were—Jax had left the moment the AI said the word "sex" and Ragatha had left after the word "npc."  She hadn't asked the next time she saw them because... quite honestly, she didn't want to know.  Kinger had patiently listened to Caine explain the mechanics of it all and then politely declined—he didn't want to imagine being with anyone other than his wife, and that ship had already sailed years ago.

As for Pomni herself...

Well.

So far she was having problems.

Notes:

This is based off of Filthyfuckingcainestan's Heartful AU, albeit with some liberties taken.

If anything seems odd or maybe not as well thought out as it could have been please be aware that I wrote this in about a month, on a rapidly shrinking time limit, losing my mind the entire time because I only had so much time and energy to edit with. Shout out to my beta for tricking the government of Tennessee into paying her to read smut on the clock.

Onto the show.

Oh, Queen of Venus, hear my plea
My longing overtaketh me
For hands inside my circuitry
To mold and shape me how you please
Oh, Queen of Venus, come within
These artificial layers of skin
I live my life a mannequin
So come and fuck away my sin

 

 

Tucked away behind the thick canopy curtains on her bed, Pomni was more grateful than ever that her room was programmed so that nothing could get out unless someone opened the door and let it.

Not even sound.

"Come on," she breathed softly. "Just a little more."

The noise of her own gasps and breaths was nothing—Pomni could distantly remember living with roommates once or twice, or maybe just living in her parents' house growing up, but she knew how to keep her volume down to practically nothing if she really needed to.

It was the soft, wet sound of her fingers dipping in and out of her own cunt that she was so grateful no one else could hear.

The bright, colorful fabric of her jester costume laid strewn about on the floor, leaving her lying in bed without so much as even a single digital stitch.  Pomni couldn't exactly reach her cunt with a romper in the way, and she really didn't want to try masturbating with gloved hands.  Taking off the boots and hat afterwards was just for the sake of completion.

The cartoon-proportioned fingers of her digital hand were thicker than her human fingers had been.  She'd known about that intellectually, distantly, ever since she first arrived in the Digital Circus, but she'd never really had a reason to internalize it.  Now, even just two fingers deep, Pomni was really feeling the stretch as she fucked herself on her hand, bucking her hips into her palm to get more pressure on her clit as she went.

Would she prefer having five fingers instead of four?  Honestly, yeah.  It was a surprisingly huge quality of life difference.  But right now, her digital hands were doing just fine.

Pomni teased at a pert, pink nipple with her other hand, hissing softly at the jolt of pleasure.  God, it was so good to have tits again.  Maybe it was just absence making the heart grow fonder, but she really couldn't get over how good it felt to touch herself again after months of not even being able to undress.

She needed more.

Her breath came out in quiet pants as her hands picked up speed.  Her hips rocking made the bed creak, but that was fine.  The sound of the simulated bedsprings wouldn't travel past her bedroom door any more than her screaming her head off would.  Curling her fingers to hit that sweet spot just past her entrance had Pomni gasping, pressing her thumb down hard against her clit had her swearing.  It was all so good.  So good.

She felt like a tightly coiled spring, winding itself in more and more, electric pleasure building up in her core as she tried to ride her fingers to completion.

Just a little more.  Scissoring her fingers, grinding at her clit, pinching her nipple until she almost saw stars.  She was so close.  Just a little more.  She just needed—

Her fingers slipped out on an inward thrust, and Pomni instantly felt her carefully cresting orgasm ram itself into a brick wall.

She could've screamed.

Actually, wait, no, the soundproofing.

Pomni tore a pillow from her bed and screamed into the plush digital velvet until her pale face started turning orange.

Six days since Zooble's proposed "Sex Update" finally went live, and so far she hadn't even been able to cum once.

 

 

When Caine had finally snapped all those months ago and started actively hurting them rather than just obliviously putting them through hell, it had taken everything they had to keep him distracted long enough for Kinger to shut him down and figure out what the hell was wrong with his code. They weathered through psychological torture, insults, violence, whatever Caine felt like throwing at them at the time—and they did their best to give as good as they got if it meant holding the AI's attention for just those few moments more.

Her especially.

It didn't save him from being deleted. But it did give him a new perspective when he came back.

As a result, the past few months in the Digital Circus had been profoundly eventful.

Caine had switched the profanity filter from a blanket ban to an optional toggle, just in case anyone wanted to use the sound effects for nostalgia's sake.  So far no one had as far as Pomni was aware, and Caine hadn't really mentioned it since then, but still.  Huge quality of life update.

With the Circus Tent kind of... obliterated in the wake of Caine's deletion, and none of them (except him) really wanting to build it back up again after all of the God-awful memories there were attached to it, he'd started building up something of a Town Square for them to populate with their own designs instead. The bare bones of houses had gone up first since all of their rooms were destroyed with the Circus Tent, with Kinger to help advise them on how to redefine the models to their liking later, but it was the second update Caine had added that had really surprised them: a character editor so that they could all finally choose their own clothing.

The first pass of the character editor had been similar to the little tent on their beach party adventure—and God did that feel like it had taken place a lifetime ago instead of just a few months—while the second pass had been keyed to wardrobes and showers, which more or less served as the third update.  After months where the only water that she had access to was for swimming or drowning, finally Pomni could take a fucking bath again.  She'd laid in that tub for hours before finally getting back out again.

The fourth was an eclectic mishmash of different locations all being added to the Grounds—there weren't really adventures anymore, but the former ringleader was literally built to make things to entertain them with, so he did.  Suddenly, they had a library and a movie theater that were filled to the brim with pirated books and movies (only going forward as far as 1999, but still better than nothing), a digital spa, a much bigger version of Cafe Cirque that they could add recipes to if they wanted, expansions to the Digital Carnival and the Digital Lake, museums with pirated art, clubs with pirated music, parks and gardens and beaches and other assorted places where they could just walk around and explore and not have to think about anything...

And also a zoo full of dinosaurs.

For some reason.

The fifth update was adding a number of familiar faces back to the Circus in the form of npcs to populate Town Square with so they weren't just enjoying everything by themselves.  The Sun and the Moon.  Lady Mildenhall.  Orbsman.  Princess Loolilalu and some of her candy subjects.  A host of others that Pomni had never seen before, going back as far as Kinger's time.  

Gummigoo.

On the one hand, Pomni could see the pure machine logic of the decision, stupid as it was.  They weren't going on daily adventures to keep their minds sharp anymore, so something else needed to pick up the slack.  Humans were social creatures.  Humans needed company to keep sane.  Therefore, more company equaled more sane.  Cogito ergo whatever.

On the other hand, as nice as it was to not be the only seven people wandering around an empty town together anymore, it was hard to make friends with someone again after you'd literally watched them die.  They'd said their hellos, and their how've you beens, and she'd helped Gummigoo move himself and his suddenly-real-now mother into a place of their own, but not much beyond that.  It was a lot to process.  She was trying not to think about it too much.

It was nice to have more people to talk to than just the six of them, though.

And now, with the most recent update, they could finally have sex.

Gangle and Zooble had immediately run off to who knows where when Caine announced the update had gone live.  Pomni didn't know what Jax and Ragatha's reactions were—Jax had left the moment the AI said the word "sex" and Ragatha had left after the word "npc."  She hadn't asked the next time she saw them because... quite honestly, she didn't want to know.  Kinger had stood there and listened to Caine explain the mechanics of it all, then politely declined—he didn't want to imagine being with anyone other than his wife, and that ship had already sailed years ago.

As for Pomni herself...

Well.

So far she was having problems.

The first was that as well as she'd known her human body, this digital body was completely alien to her. All the little tricks she'd learned to make herself cum in the real world didn't work anymore because her stupid Amazing Digital Vagina didn't work how a human vagina worked, it worked how Caine thought a human vagina worked. She felt like a teenager learning how to masturbate for the first time again because she just didn't know what her body needed yet and it wasn't like her new pussy had come with a damn manual.

Pomni could vaguely remember the AI saying something about reworking their sensory systems from the ground up to account for all the different erogenous zones, but to be honest, she hadn't really been paying much attention at that point. All she'd been able to think about was that she hadn't orgasmed in half a year, and now the only thing stopped her from ending that dry spell was how long it took for Caine to stop talking, and how long it took her to run back to her apartment.

Maybe that had been a mistake.  Pomni was mature enough that she could admit that now.  But like hell was she going to go ask Caine for any information she'd missed, so she was just going to have to persevere.

The second problem was that if she needed some help getting into or staying in the mood, she didn't really have anyone to think about as she fingered herself.

Pomni had had partners before the Digital Circus.  She knew that for a fact.  It was one of the only facts that she knew about herself with any real clarity, along with her age, her job, and her hobbies.  But when she tried to remember their names or face... she might as well have been trying to remember her own.

Just a blank, misty haze where the information should have been.

She'd met people after coming to the Digital Circus, too, but trying to imagine any of them had its own problems.

Jax was too much of a complete jerk to imagine treating her how she wanted.  Ragatha's feelings were so fragile sometimes that even in her imagination it felt more natural for the older woman to apologize about what she wanted than to actually do it.  Gangle and Zooble were so tied at the hip that thinking about one without the other felt wrong, and did she really want to get involved in whatever they had anyways?  Kinger didn't spark her as anything other than a kindly old man even before getting into whatever feelings he clearly still had for his wife; Gummigoo had a whole quagmire of messy, mixed up emotions attached to him; and Caine...

Pomni could admit, Caine was trying.  Everything that had happened over the past few months was proof of that.

But that didn't erase the harm that he'd already done before getting deleted and brought back.  And it didn't erase the way he'd used their traumas against them in his last moments to try and make everyone else suffer as much as he was.

So, no, the ringmaster would not be featuring in her wet dreams any time soon.

For a good minute, Pomni just laid there in bed wondering if it was worth it to try going again and see if she could finally cum this time... but she ultimately decided against it.  She was just too wound up.  If she tried again so soon—well, she probably wouldn't hurt herself, Pomni doubted that Caine had made the system that realistic—but she wasn't likely to get any closer than she already had.

The same way she wasn't really any closer to cumming today than she was yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that...

Instead, Pomni just decided to roll out of bed and take a shower before heading out for the day.  There wasn't any coded-in sex smell to wash off, but the hot water would help loosen her back up enough so that she wouldn't bite anyone's head off if they asked her how she was doing.  And besides, she needed to change her outfit anyways.

The jester look might have grown on her during her time in the Digital Circus, but there really was something to be said about a nice blouse and a pair of black slacks.

 

 

The walk from her studio apartment—sue her, it was comfortable—to the Town Square was longer than the walk from her old room to the stage used to be, but that was hardly an issue.  Even back in the real world, Pomni preferred to walk than drive if she could.  Sure, part of that was because she couldn't afford a car payment and rent at the same time, but you couldn't really take in the sights of the city while you were paying attention to the road, could you?

And there were so many sights to see:

Kinger had flooded the world with insects, of course, but he'd also gotten the rest of them to pitch in and help add a memorial to the Abstracted humans in the Town Square where they could pay their respects if they wanted.  Ragatha had wasted no time in adding a horse ranch and a number of other wide open sporting areas for everybody to use.  Gangle had added an art studio to work in, and plenty of interesting buildings and landmarks around town to draw.  Zooble had expended on the town's night life and added probably over a half dozen different bars, clubs, and dance halls to go to.

Jax had surprised everyone by adding a bunch of different restaurants to the town.  More so by those restaurants actually being good, since the rabbit wasn't exactly known for being much of a foodie, but Pomni couldn't exactly fault him for his reasoning when she finally asked about it.

"If I'm gonna be stuck here spending the rest of my life singing kum ba yah with you losers," he'd grumbled, taking his lunch near the statues of Kaufmo and Ribbit, "I'm gonna at least have some good fucking Chinese food."

Pomni herself had added a few sprawling buildings and subway tunnels that didn't really do anything other than serve as fun places to explore, but she was trying to figure out how to add some food trucks here and there based on what she remembered from the city.  At least a good burrito place would be nice.

They were all still debating on a name.  "Circus Town" was the most straight forward, but nobody really liked it.  "Digital Town" and "Amazing Town" were likewise not even worth considering.  Weirdly enough, the current lead seemed to be "Shrimp Town" from that horrible adventure Escape the Circus Caine had made all those months ago, but she wasn't sure if the interest was genuine or just Jax skewing the votes somehow.

As she got closer to Town Square, Pomni spotted a few familiar faces milling about around the town fountain and picked up the pace, her boots clacking satisfyingly against the cobblestone streets.

"Hey Gangle, hey Ragatha! You guys have a good morning so far?"

Adventures might've been a thing of the past, but Caine still liked to put something new together for them once a week or so, and everyone still being at the fountain meant she hadn't missed it.

"Oh, hey Pomni!" Ragatha answered back, waving her over to the bench she and Gangle were sitting at.  She was holding what looked like an iced coffee in her other hand.  "You sleep well?"

"I like the pattern on your blouse," Gangle added, "The jewel tones suit you much better than primaries."

"No, I did not!" Pomni responded, as cheerfully as she didn't feel at how the previous night had gone, "And thank you, Gangle.  Look—"  She did a short little twirl for the two of them so that Gangle could see the line of star-shaped buttons on the back of her blouse.  The sound of appreciative ooo-ing and soft fabric clapping might as well have been music to her ears.

One of the many small joys of having a wide array of clothing: showing off fun designs to your friends.

Speaking of, both of their respective sundresses were very cute, and Pomni made sure to mention as such.

Ragatha leaned back on the bench.  "Sorry to hear that you slept badly.  Too much on your mind?"

Pomni her head.  "No, it wasn't that.  Just, you know."  She twirled a hand vaguely. "Update issues."

Two different voiced rang almost as one.  "Ooooohh..."

A quiet understanding passed through the three women at the mention of the vaunted update.  They took a moment to commiserate in silence together.

Apparently everyone was having problems, not just her.

Ragatha blew out a breath, her yarn hair floating up on the draft. "Almost ten years I've been here," she said with a laugh, "And you'd think I would've forgotten what it was like entirely..."  She took a sip from her coffee, shaking her head.

"You want help?" Pomni asked.  "I'm sure between the two of us, we could probably figure something out."

"Yeah, it's—it's not... so bad, with another set of hands," Gangle chimed in.

Neither of them really had to ask who that other set of hands belonged to.

Still, Ragatha waved them both off.  "That's kind of you to offer, girls, but I feel like I'd prefer if at least one of us knew what they were doing first before trying anything.  I'd hate to leave both of us unhappy, you know?"

She didn't know, but there was a time and a place to push the doll woman to be more assertive with her wants and needs, so Pomni let it slide with just a polite rejoinder.  Maybe next time.

Gangle was more for comfortable silence than awkward small talk, so while there was a lull in the conversation Pomni took the opportunity to scan the rest of the Town Square for a moment.  She spotted Kinger speaking with the statue of Queenie at the memorial just a few yards away, while Jax was terrorizing the digital pigeons off to the side—but only just the two of them amidst the gaggle of npcs scattered about.

Huh.

"Zooble sitting this one out again?" she asked.

Gangle flip-flopped her tiny ribbon hand.  "They were up late last night mixing new drinks together to add to the bar menus.  They were only really testing each one a few sips at a time, but..."  Her ribbons started wringing together.  "I guess at some point Caine adjusted the alcohol content on different drinks rather than everything just having the same flat modifier, since..." She trailed off.

Pomni hissed in sympathy, and she heard Ragatha do the same.  Nothing quite like an Amazing Digital Hangover.  You couldn't even stave it off with water and carb-heavy foods, unlike in the real world, AND you got a damn circling stars animation over your head the whole time just to add a whole 'nother layer of humiliation on top of things.  Genuinely, how do you make something that's already as bad as a hangover worse?

"Hopefully they'll be better by this afternoon," Ragatha said gently, putting a plush hand on Gangle's shoulder.  Pomni echoed the sentiment—the experience sucked, but it only lasted for so long.

She cleared her throat.  "So.  Do you two have any idea what the week's adventure is gonna be?  I feel like I haven't seen Caine once since the update."

"I don't think I have either," Gangle said.  "He didn't come to the studio the other day like he usually does.  Do you think he might be holding off this week because of the update?  Like, if it took up too much of the time he usually spends making things, or if he wanted us to have some time off before the next project?"

Ragatha hummed. "I think he was looking for Kinger not too long ago?  Dunno if that was for any bug fixes or anything, or for getting ideas.  But, hey," she said, putting on the usual brave face and polite cheer, "There might still be something planned this week even after the update.  Maybe something with a lot of wildlife?  After the dinosaur zoo, I think we're bound to see more animals popping up here and there."

She hadn't thought about it like that before.  "Huh. Could be."

God, it would be nice to see some animals here and there that weren't made of candy.  Her kingdom to have a cat again.

They made polite small talk after that, catching up on how the week had gone.  Apparently Ragatha was trying to recreate some tea blends she used to drink out in the real world, and was having limited success since she only kind of remembered the flavors of each blend and there were only so many pre-loaded flavor profiles in the Digital Circus's database to work with.  Bergamot, for example, was being an absolute bear to nail down.  Gangle told them about an old art movement she'd seen in the theater called ukiyo-e, and how she was trying to put her own spin on some of the more complicated brocade designs in her work.  Pomni mentioned some changes she'd been making to the decor of her apartment.

It was nice.

They kept going until the conversation was finally interrupted by the metallic click-clack-click of a certain set of digital tap shoes making their way across the cobblestone, signalling the arrival of a certain ex-ringmaster.

"Goo~ood MORNING, my little deepfried dairy treats!" the AI called, twirling his cane like a Broadway performer before sending it spinning up into the air, out of sight and out of mind.  "I trust everyone is in FINE FETTLE and HIGH SPIRITS?"

Caine, too, had changed since the Circus Tent was destroyed.  His old coat and top hat had dissolved away with the world they'd been made for, and at Pomni's suggestion he'd replaced them with something more casual to reflect the shift from Master of the Circus to just another citizen of their yet-unnamed Town.  A smart waistcoat instead of an overcoat.  A silver cane instead of a gold one.  Occasionally, she'd see him with a pork pie hat floating over his gums where the old top hat used to be, but it was missing today.

The real trip, though, was seeing Caine walking about on the street like a normal person instead of flying.  He just looked so small when he wasn't floating halfway above their eye line—Pomni had never really expected the ringmaster to be particularly tall, but she wasn't prepared for the realization that he was almost as short as she was.

She was getting used to it, though, little by little.  Caine didn't tend to fly much these days.

His new heart weighed him down too much to be comfortable putting himself above the rest of them anymore, apparently.

"The hell's a fettle?" Jax drawled, sauntering over from his pigeon tyranny to come to a stop just a few paces away from the rest of them.  Pomni leaned over past him.  She could see Kinger wrapping up his conversation with Queenie's statue and heading their way, too.

"CONSTITUTION!  To be in fine fettle is to be in GOOD HEALTH and VIGOR!  In the pink, as it were!"

Jax snickered.  "Yeah, I think we've all been pretty in the pink lately, dentures."

Ragatha spat out her coffee.

"SPLENDID!"  Caine replied, apparently having missed the innuendo entirely.

The metal plates of his tap shoes clicked across the cobblestones as the AI spun his head around in a smart circle, no doubt taking a headcount of everyone before the adventure.  For a moment, Pomni almost felt like those disembodied eyes seem to linger on her, specifically, a smidge longer than the rest of them, but then Caine was already moving on with the rest of his pitch and the moment was gone.

"NOW," Caine paused, his suddenly oversized hand holding up an equally oversized finger, "I want to stress now as with the past several excursions that this is NOT an adventure.  There are no challenging stakes, there is no storyline, and there are no dangerous twists and turns beyond what you all decide to make for yourselves."  His hands deflated, coming together to fidget restlessly as the AI diverted his mismatched gaze from everyone.  "This is just... Something I've been working on for the past several days.  A... a tech demo, really."

Gangle raised a ribbon.  "So more like a walking simulator?" she asked.

"You COULD call it that, yes!"

"Whaaaat, seriously?" Jax's drawling voice chimed in.  "Why'd we wanna do something so boring?"

"The specific environment that I have crafted for you all to enjoy this fine week is a sprawling DESERT OASIS, FILLED with RUINS from a civilization long since passed!"  Caine conjured up images of the map he'd made to act as visual aides for them.

They were beautiful: green reeds and marsh plants dusting golden sands as far as the eye could see, cut through with a wide, blue river.  Vast stone walls filled with crumbling architecture and hanging gardens.  Pomni could see the shadows of birds flying in the skybox, reams of fish still swimming in the pools and fountains of the ruined city.  It did look pretty cool.

"Is there anywhere to change into a bathing suit if we want to go swimming?" Ragatha asked.

"Not at present, but I could certainly ADD swimsuits to your traveling gear if a dip in the water suits your fancy!"

"So, what, are we all just gonna be walking, or is there anything else you can throw in for some kind of action?" Jax pressed.  "'Cause I dunno about you, but I'm not exactly the kinda guy that thinks hiking's all in good fun..."

Pomni mulled the idea over in her mind, tuning everything else out.  Spending all morning in the harsh desert sun didn't sound particularly appealing... but there was a river, which meant water to cool off in, and ruins meant places to sit in the shade, and knowing Caine these days there was bound to be some sort of picnic area in the middle if they got hungry—well, if it got to be lunch time and they decided they were hungry, same difference in the end—so there were plenty of ways to get out of the heat if she wanted.  The Grounds were still only so big after all this time, and it'd be nice to explore somewhere that she didn't already know top to bottom again...

"It sounds lovely, Caine. You do good work," she heard Kinger say, and Pomni almost missed the way that the AI flinched ever so slightly when Kinger tried to put a hand on his shoulder, his eyes becoming just that little bit shinier—

"Yeah, I'll go," she decided aloud.

Two bright eyes and a set of gums snapped in her direction.  "You will?" Caine asked, his voice oddly soft.

He sounded genuinely shocked for some reason.  Why?  She'd been on the "not" adventures before.  What made this one so different?

Pomni crossed her arms, her eyes narrowing a little as she stared the former ringmaster down.  He fidgeted under her gaze.

Something was off.  Once was happenstance and twice was coincidence, but...

"Sure," she said, more firmly this time.  "It sounds fun."

"Yeah, it'll be nice to get out of Town for a bit and explore somewhere new," Gangle chimed in, closer behind than Pomni could remember her being.  Had Gangle said anything earlier?  She must've tuned it out.

The others added in their own affirmations, even if Jax's wasn't particularly enthusiastic, causing Caine's head to flick back and forth between each new speaker.  Whatever was up with him, it couldn't compete with the programmed-in incentive of five separate humans telling him that they actively wanted to experience something he'd made for them.  Two gloved hands slapped at his teeth as the AI visibly psyched himself back up.

"RIGHT!  Well, if you all want to go, then who am I to DENY you?"  A glowing orange portal opened up before them with the snap of a finger, and Caine started manically gesturing everyone through in the same way a show host would gesture at a new car.  God, she could already feel the heat from here. "In you go, my insistent sibilants, and do remember to keep all hands and feet inside the portal as you go!"

Pomni filed in with the rest of the group, eager to see what awaited them all on the other side.

She tried not to be bothered by the feeling of Caine's gaze still lingering on her as she went.

 

 

Hours later, the soft whomp of her bed as Pomni flopped back down on the mattress was practically music to her ears.

The not-an-adventure had actually gone surprisingly well.  There were two paths they could take through the map if they wanted—one for a more action-packed safari romp, and one for a slower, guided tour through all the set pieces Caine had made for them.  Jax, obviously, had opted for the safari, while the rest of them had gone for the tour.  Her, Kinger, Ragatha, and Gangle had spent hours just hiking through the marshland path and seeing the sights.

Pomni could admit, when she wasn't actively running for her life through them, Caine's environment work was actually really enjoyable.  Even knowing that the ancient Mesopotatomian civilization that had made the ruins was completely made up didn't detract from the scale of their carvings and hieroglyphs, the moss and weathering on their old stone temples, and the beautiful rivers and waterfall vistas that decorated their main city.

She could have done without all the french fry imagery, though.

Still, nice as the trip had gone, the thought of Caine had her frowning.  There was definitely something up with the program earlier.  He was still eager to please and starved for attention as always, but something like flinching away when someone, especially Kinger, reached out for him wasn't as common as it used to be.  A combination of finally making actual friendships among the humans he was made to entertain and just plain getting better at hiding it when he was feeling particularly insecure.  So what the hell had been going on that morning?  And why had he been so interested in her?

Pomni flopped over on her bed, taking a moment to just sit and enjoy all the sights and textures of her studio now that she was back home.  She'd been going for a mix of modern contemporary and midcentury modern after seeing some old movies in the theater and getting inspired, and she was really enjoying how it all came together.  Her apartment back in the real world had always been so impersonal due to having to keep everything renter-friendly and landlord white in case of surprise inspections, and good furniture was way too expensive to afford on her budget, so having a space where she could really go wild and experiment with whatever her heart desired was like a balm to her tired millennial soul.  Even just taking a moment to look at all her mirrors and wall hangings made her feel worlds better.

It made thinking on her problems a lot less anxiety-inducing.

Caine might tell her what was up with him.  He might not.  She might have to ask... or, depending on whatever the situation was, it could all be cleared up by tomorrow and she'd be thinking herself sick over nothing.  Sometimes that was just how things went with Caine.

Pomni tried to put it out of her mind.  If he was still acting weird the next time she saw him, she'd say something, but until then there was no sense in making mountains out of molehills.

The adventure was over, she had the rest of the night to herself, and there was nowhere that she needed to be tomorrow morning.

She took a deep breath.

Alright.

Time to see if she could break past that wall.

 

 

Three hours later and the answer was still no.

Okay, admittedly, some of that time was spend taking a break to eat dinner and take a shower so that she didn't end up just completely losing it and throwing furniture at the wall in frustration, but three hours was still three hours.

Pomni wasn't the best at conjuring, but making a smooth cylinder that vibrated at different speeds wasn't that difficult. Surely, if her fingers weren't doing the trick, then toys would have a better chance, right? Well, apparently not, because she still hadn't fucking cum yet, and she was rapidly running out of ideas that didn't involve flagging down an npc (bad) or strongly advising Ragatha to reconsider her stance on not taking any partners just yet (worse.)

Pomni unconjured the pillow that she'd been trying to grind on with a sigh, more annoyed at how long it had taken to get the softness just right than anything else.  There was that idea down the drain.  What the hell was even left?  She'd tried vibrators, she'd tried pillows, she'd even tried sticking a dildo to the wall of her shower to see if maybe that could get her off—which just made her really thankful that they didn't have to worry about water bills here—and nothing worked.

Was this whole sex update thing just a joke?  Was it even working properly?  Did Caine forget to program in the ability to cum and no one had just been brave enough to bring it up to him yet?!  God, if it turned out that she'd spent a week fucking blueballing herself for no good fucking reason, she was going to—

A knock came from the door.

Her head snapped right to it.  She lived in a studio—the front door was a straight shot from her bed with nothing more than a few token dividers separating the space.  Pomni could see the door from everywhere in her apartment except the bathroom.

Another knock, more halting than the first, then a beat.

Three quick raps of knock-knock-knock, then silence.

Pomni kept staring as the silence stretched on even further.

What... the hell?

It wasn't like there wasn't anyone else living in her apartment building, but her neighbors generally didn't tend to bother her this late at night, and as far as she knew none of the other npcs around town had any reason to come into anyone's houses uninvited.  She knew for a fact she hadn't made any plans to hang out with anyone after the adventure.  So who was at the door...?

For a moment, Pomni wanted to ignore the knocking.  Just pretend she wasn't home and wait for whoever it was to leave.  She was busy.

But then a second set of knocks sounded a moment later so she just swore and stumbled around the room to wherever the hell her pants were.

It took preemptively getting up on her tiptoes to look through the peephole to realize that she hadn't made one, so Pomni grumbled more vague swearing under her breath and cracked the door open.

Red gums and mismatched eyes greeted her.  "Pomni, do you have a moment—"

She shut the door.

Sue her.  She was having a bad night and Caine wasn't exactly her favorite person in the whole wide world.  Pomni could be forgiven for being a little less than fucking charitable for once.

Except the door didn't close.  Not all the way.  Her gaze snapped to the edge of the wooden frame—three gloved fingers had slipped between the door and the frame, keeping it open.

The program called again, his loud voice slightly muffled by the wood. "Pomni, I REALLY must ask you to reconsider—!"

"Caine, what the hell?!" She pressed harder on the door.

"I NEED to speak to you about something IMPORTANT—!"

 "Well, can't it fucking wait until morning?!"

"I assure you, my dear, it really can't!"

Pomni rammed her shoulder against the door, hoping the threat of getting his fingers crushed would get through the ringmaster's dumb virtual head when common sense apparently couldn't.  No dice—she saw the gloved digits flinch on impact, but they still held firm onto the door.

Incredulity bled into her anger.  What the fuck.  "Doesn't that hurt?"

"My model doesn't have touch receptors," Caine answered back, "I can't feel pain!"

Something between a scoff and a sigh escaped her.  Of course he couldn't.  "So there's no point in trying to body block you from coming in?" Pomni groused.

"I—" his normally booming voice cut off for a moment.  When he started speaking again, his voice was lower in pitch as well as volume.  "I... normally make it a point not to disturb you humans in your private sanctums, but... this truly is a matter of dire importance.  I'm sorry.  I can't wait until morning."

...Well fuck.

She eased off of the door and opened it back up.  Caine was still standing there out on her welcome mat, already reaching his hand back to lace his gloved fingers politely together.

And as Pomni looked at her unwanted visitor more closely, she noticed something that she hadn't earlier when she'd opened the door for just that split second a moment ago.

Caine looked... wrecked.

The AI's eyes were manic and unfocused even on the best of days, but something about his gaze seemed particularly frantic this time. The lapels of his vest were disheveled, and his bow tie was undone for once. The pressed white shirt that she'd honestly thought was just a flat texture this whole time was partially unbuttoned, showing off a semi-transparent placeholder texture underneath.

He didn't say anything more, just waited for her to open to door a little bit wider, but there was an odd sound underlying the sudden strange tension between them. Almost like—

Pomni jolted, her spine snapping straight up like a ramrod.

"Caine," she whispered, "Are you breathing?"

No one really needed to breathe in the Digital Circus, but humans tended to still be wired to feel like they needed to, and npcs were coded to mimic breathing as a means of increasing immersion—she could remember Gummigoo huffing and puffing as he ran around in the testing room trying to figure out where the hell he was despite not having a pair of lungs to fill because huffing and puffing was just something that you did when you ran.

But she'd never heard Caine do that. The closest she could think of was hearing his voice crack once or twice whenever he had some reason to yell at them.

What the hell was going on?

A sad laugh slipped from Caine's teeth.  "I can assure you, my dear, that the issue at hand is just as unpleasant a predicament for me as you might imagine.  Perhaps more so," he answered back.  His voice didn't sound right.  It was too real.  Too measured.  She couldn't get over how... wrong it felt to hear him talk at a normal volume, like a normal person, after hearing him talk like a cartoon character for so long. "Please. Let me in. I beg of you."

Her eyes drifted over him again, taking it all in at once. Pomni really didn't understand what was so important, and this really wasn't the best time, but...

She'd promised once, back when they were just starting to rebuild, that she'd listen when Caine had concerns so long as he promised to listen when everyone else did. He'd been doing a pretty good job of listening so far. She could afford to take some time and return the favor for a bit.

Besides, the way her luck was going, it wasn't like she was going to be getting off tonight anyways.

"...Okay.  Come on in."

Caine walked slowly on in, and Pomni closed the door behind them.  The sound of his footsteps was wrong for the kind of flooring she had in her apartment—more like the soft thud of a heavy body onto carpet rather than the obnoxious clack of his tap shoes on hardwood.  He must've muffled the sound earlier so as not to disturb her neighbors on the way to her apartment.

How considerate.

Inscrutable as the AI could be at times, he was remarkably expressive.  The point of his gums moving gave away where he was looking, even from behind, and he couldn't hide his feelings to save his life.  As such, Pomni saw the exact moment when Caine realized what he was looking at and froze up.

"Uh."

The remnants of her various failed attempts littered pretty much the entire studio.

Clothes that she'd conjured up to set a mood and then subsequently hated sat discarded over side tables and chairs. Lingerie flooded her bed. Assorted toys littered the floor, some used, some not.

She traced his gaze to a set of fuzzy handcuffs dangling from the sputnik light over the couch.  She hadn't even tried to use those before realizing how bad of an idea doing that sort of thing solo would be, and she'd been putting off thinking about what to do with them.

Pomni crossed her arms.  "I'm not going to apologize for trying to enjoy myself in the comfort of my own home now that I finally have the option to," she said firmly.  "If you didn't want to see anything, you shouldn't have barged in so suddenly.  So—tell me what's going on."

"Right... ah, about that—"  He turned on a heel to talk face to face again, his other leg swinging out cartoonishly on the spin, his hand wringing at the collar of his shirt in lieu of he neck he didn't have.  His eyes were pointedly looking away from her.  "I... might actually need a bit of time to find my words—"

"Are you fucking serious?" Pomni shouted.  After so much production?!  "Caine!"

"I'm SORRY, but I didn't actually EXPECT for you to open the door so quickly!" Caine shouted back, waving his hands.  He pulled at his teeth the way a normal man might pull at his hair, and they came down in his hands in clumps just the same.  "You humans need everything short of a NOTARY to believe anything I say some days, so I genuinely thought I was going to be there a while before you'd so much as give me the TIME OF DAY!"

"What, and you couldn't think of anything to say on your way here?!"

"I couldn't—" He paused, leaning back and taking a deep breath before speaking again.  His teeth sat heavy over his eyes, narrowing them, while his hands steepled together.  "Pomni.  Believe me when I say it took everything in my power just to be able to think at all, much less think about what I was going to say to you."

"Is that why you're breathing?" she fired back, crossing her arms.  Because seriously, what was up with that?  It was weirding her out.

Caine seemed to become more aware of the noise after having it pointed out a second time.  He made a sound like clearing his throat, and both the subtle movement of his chest and the noise stopped.  He didn't seem any better for the lack, though.  More like someone forcing themself to stop hyperventilating after running a mile.

For something that didn't need to breathe, maybe breathing at all was hyperventilating.

"There is a correlation, yes," Caine mumbled.

Much as Pomni might have wanted to dispute his claims on principle, riled up as she was, the current state of Caine's normally immaculate appearance did lend itself to the former ringmaster telling the truth.  So instead Pomni just rolled her eyes and said, "Okay, cool.  Now tell me why."

Caine withered.  He looked around the studio a bit again, eventually settling on the couch.  Hs head turned back her way.  "May I?"

"Knock yourself out."

"Uh—"

"Yes, Caine, you can have a seat," Pomni said, already walking forward to take one of the adjoining armchairs.

He settled somewhere in the middle of the sectional, the monochrome color scheme of his outfit blending in all too well with the black suede fabric.  And yet, Caine couldn't help but look out of place: he sat on the edge of the cushion instead of flush with the back like a normal person, hands tightly clasped over a crossed knee like he was waiting for the doctor to come back with terrible news, mismatched eyes darting over to look at everything in the studio except her.  In stark contrast to the usual bombastic charisma Caine tended to compose himself with, the program that was sitting in front of her now was the perfect picture of tightly coiled anxiety.

His gloved hands clutched at the open collar of his shirt almost like she could remember her nonno once clutching at his rosary.  Maybe he found a similar comfort in the gesture.

"...Pomni," Caine eventually settled on.  He still wasn't looking at her.  "You recall making the heart that sits in my chest, yes?"

She nodded.

It was when Caine had snapped.  When he'd gone from oblivious, passive torture... to malicious, active torture.  Even going so far as reshaping his body into a monster to hurt them with—to make them hurt as much as he himself was hurting.

To this day, Pomni still didn't fully understand how she'd done it—conjuring, obviously, but she'd never been able to make something that complicated since. She'd just wanted him to stop. She'd just wanted him to understand.

She'd just wanted him to have a fucking heart already.

So Pomni had given him one. She'd taken all her worries and her fears, all her heartache and pain and anger, wrapped them up in a heart-shaped box, and socked it right into Caine's chest while he was screaming at her about God knows what.

His voice had cut out mid-sentence the moment she'd made contact. For a split second, Pomni could have sworn she'd seen Caine's eyes glitch from their usual green and blue design into something more like hers.  And then the ringmaster fell to the ground like a rock, suddenly weighted down by everything he'd never been able to consider before...

And then he'd been deleted.

Even if only for as long as it took for Kinger to bring him back.

Caine cleared the throat he didn't have.  "...And you recall the day we all learned it was more than just an ornament...?"

More than...?

Pomni's eyes narrowed, metaphorical gears turning in her head as she thought back to those fraught days in the immediate aftermath of Caine's deletion.

At the time, she hadn't really thought about what she'd made beyond it just being something that could hold Caine in one spot long enough to give Kinger time to do whatever it was he was doing.  It had certainly done that.  And then later, when they'd managed to finally restore Caine right before the end of it all so he could restabilize the Circus, Pomni hadn't really thought about why he'd still had the heart with him even if the rest of him was in various stages of glitching out and dissolving into base code.  She was kind of too busy trying not to die or Abstract—they all were.

But in the days that came after that—as they all tried to pick up the pieces together and find some shred of normalcy and morale in the face of the world almost ending—Pomni couldn't help but notice that Caine kept... reacting to something whenever she'd have a meal with everyone.  Like he could taste it somehow.  Or shaking his hands when she held something hot, as if he could feel it somehow.  Even mirroring her emotions sometimes, like he could feel them, too.

Things had come to a head during a big, blowout argument she'd had with Jax over something utterly inconsequential that she honestly couldn't remember if someone had threatened her over it.  Nobody was doing well after having all their deepest darkest fears thrown in their face and then immediately being made to scramble to try to recover Caine's files from the system before they all died, but Jax was far and away doing the worst.  They'd screamed, they'd yelled, he'd ended up actually slapping her across the face—

And Caine had yelped right at the same time Pomni had.

It turned out that when she'd made that little heart-shaped box with all her of thoughts and feelings inside of it, it had literally had all of her thoughts and feelings inside of it.  As in, Caine had been able to glean some of her memories secondhand and was getting feedback through it whenever she got particularly emotional or had a strong enough sensory stimulus pretty much the whole time.

(Jax, meanwhile, was fine.  He'd broken down blubbering the second he realized he'd actually hurt her, and quite frankly Pomni suddenly had more concerning things to worry about than a bruised ego.  She let the others deal with the fallout.)

Pomni didn't know how to program and Caine had had the ability to edit his own code removed as a safety precaution, so they'd had to get Kinger to help.  He couldn't completely decouple Pomni's sensory matrix from Caine's without destroying the heart—which the AI was vehemently against for some reason—so they'd been forced to compromise instead: he'd set up a kill command on Pomni's end to block any outgoing sensory data from being routed through the heart into Caine's matrix...

Her breath caught in her throat, eyes shooting open wide.

...But Caine had said the new update had rebuilt their sensory systems from the ground up, hadn't he?

The type of data the kill command was made to look for for didn't look like that anymore.  It was practically useless now.

Oh.

Oh God.

"Caine," Pomni breathed, her voice whisper quiet as she hoped beyond anything that she was just jumping to conclusions, "have you been able to feel me touching myself since the update went live?"

The former ringmaster huffed out a laugh, sounding about just as strangled as Pomni felt.  "Among other things," he admitted.

She shot up from the armchair fast enough to send it scraping across the floor.  "And you waited until now to tell me?!"

"I was TRYING not to upset you!" Caine yelled back, scrambling back to his own feet.  "You humans all made it VERY CLEAR to me that private matters should stay private, and I wasn't supposed to TALK about them unless one of you brought it up first!"  He threw up his hands. "NO ONE BROUGHT IT UP FIRST!"

"So, what, were you just going to sit there and stay quiet forever?!"  Pomni dragged her hands across her eyes, unable to even look at him.  She wanted to scream.  Of all the idiotic, willfully oblivious things that Caine has done, this would have to be the fucking worst.  Not telling her?  When he could feel her trying to get herself off?  For a week?!

God.  Jesus Fucking Christ.  Pomni wanted to say she couldn't believe it, but she could.  It went so far beyond the pale that it wasn't even fucking funny, but she absolutely could.

A horrifying thought occurred to her.  "Wait.  Did you even try to fix it before now?!"

"Of COURSE I tried to fix it!" Caine said, candy red half-tones rapidly creeping across his gums like some kind of parody of a blush. "It—I'll admit it took me a good bit to realize what I was feeling, but when I did, I went RIGHT to Kinger for assistance clearing up that bit of broken code."  He snapped his fingers for emphasis before turning to point them at her.  "And that was a DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION, let me tell you!"

He went to Kinger—

I feel like I haven't seen Caine once since the update.

He was looking for Kinger not too long ago.

She slapped a hand over her face, feelings all kinds of stupid all of a sudden.  God.  So that was why Caine had been so weird this morning.  Because he'd felt her trying getting herself off again.  Fuck, she'd be weird about someone too if she saw them masturbating and then had to pretend to be normal about it an hour later, but to actually feel it in real time?

Pomni took a deep breath and tried counting down from ten.  With the kill code gone, that meant that whatever strong emotions she was feeling had a decent chance of carrying over to Caine, so unless she wanted to get stuck in an outrage feedback loop and keep yelling for the rest of the night, she needed to calm down.

Okay.  Now.  Breathe.  Focus.  This was an absolutely horrible problem, but it was one that Caine had already taken steps to solve.  Cool.  Still bad, but not as bad as it could have been.

"Okay," she ground out slowly, "so why couldn't Kinger fix the code?"

Obviously there had to be some sort of problem implementing a fix, otherwise they wouldn't be having this discussion.

Caine hissed, the sound overly large as he drew in air through his equally over-large teeth.  "Pomni, my dear... I'm not sure how familiar you are with programming," he said, lacing his hands together up under his chin, "But it's... incredibly difficult, sometimes, to try and edit another programmer's work.  Especially if nothing is commentated on."

"What, so you fucked up your own update?" Pomni scoffed.

"Pomni, I didn't write the update.  Zooble did."

She froze.  "What."

Caine made a vague gesture with one hand, sinking back into the couch.  Dumbfounded, Pomni followed his lead.

"It's... related to that conjuring thing you all can do, I think," he said, finally recovering some of his normal vigor.  "Somehow it creates PERFECTLY EXECUTABLE CODE, models included—but it can't always be seamlessly integrated with the Circus's programming.  Not all at once.  That's part of why Kinger prefers using a terminal instead if he's working on something that takes time to figure out first."

He averted his gaze, bringing his hands together to card the fingers like a blackjack dealer carding a deck.  "Zooble got tired of waiting for their, uh, request to be implemented, and... took matters into their own freaky little hands.  They asked me to compile everything, and add it to the Circus, and... I," he said, holding up his hands, "Didn't realize how many different systems would all be involved in this, uh.  Particular activity... until you all decided to interact with them."

"And... Kinger is having issues fixing the problem... because conjured code is hard to understand?" she asked.  "Am I getting that correctly?"

"It is INCREDIBLY abstract—er, that is, it's pared down to only the most absolute of essentials," Caine said, his voice a bit sheepish at the clarification.  "Most code meant to be seen by multiple people is commentated: that being, it contains explanations for what the various processes do and why some might be chosen over others.  Conjured code by contrast is just raw simplicity and function at the cost of understanding.  It WORKS... but uncovering HOW it works is proving to be little better than an exercise in futility.  So..."

Caine scooted off the couch, falling to his knees and clasping his hands together in supplication.  "Please, my little maudlin marshmallow, I'm begging you.  Either help Kinger with his work or hold off on exploring yourself further until a fix can be found, but PLEASE, do something."  With every word he crawled a little closer, until Pomni had to tug her legs underneath her as he knelt right at the base of the armchair, looking up at her like she alone had the power to answer his prayers.  Fat, watery tears welled up under his eyes.  "I can't continue on like this anymore.  I'm not made to be feeling things like this, not like you humans are.  I don't know how."

"Uh—" Oh Jesus Christ, he was so close.  She pressed her body further and further into the armchair cushion to put as much room between them as possible, but there was only so much cushion to press into.  "Maybe?  I don't know.  How long is it gonna take Kinger to fix everything?"

Caine's body snapped cartoonishly out of place.

"Wh—You don't know?!" she yelled.

The program looked away.  "Uh."

Fuck that, she wasn't going to let him just avoid the subject when he was the one asking her to make sacrifices.  Pomni grabbed him by the shirt collar, yanking the AI up to look her dead in the eye as she yelled at him.

"Caine, I have already gone half a year without getting laid since coming to this stupid Circus, and now that I finally have the option again, I am not going to just sit around twiddling my thumbs"—or diddling them, for that matter—"for however long it takes for Kinger to make a new patch or a kill code or whatever he needs to do!"

"Look, Pomni, just because it's an incredibly complex collection of machine code, that doesn't mean that progress isn't being made day by day!" Caine sputtered.  "I can promise you, fully and honestly, that a fix should be coming in as little as a month!"  He held out his fingers.  "Th-three months, tops!"

"I'M NOT WAITING THREE MONTHS JUST TO BE ABLE TO CUM IN PEACE!"

"And how do you think I feel about all of this?!" Caine countered, shoving his way out of her grip and back to his feet.  He was so short that there was hardly any difference between him standing and her sitting down.  "I can't control WHEN or HOW I get sensory feedback—I have projects I need to be working on, Pomni, I can't just take a break every time you feel like—like feeling!"

"Oh my Godddd, can you please just say masturbating?" she groaned.

He flinched back.  Pomni groaned harder.

"Seriously?  Caine, you're a grown man, you can just say have sex like a normal person," Pomni said, pinching at where the bridge of her nose should have been.  Calm.  Deep breaths.  "There aren't any children in the Circus, you don't need to censor yourself."

Caine turned away, averting his eyes.  He crossed his arms to his chest, ironically only making the popped collar and exposed skin stick out more.

"...I... wasn't meant to create... obscenities," he mumbled.

"Sex isn't obscene."

"Legally, it could be, depending on what state we're in."

...What the hell could she even say to that?

Pomni didn't really see the need to fire back another shot and risk dragging out the shouting even more, so she didn't.  The momentary lapse in the conversation brought a tense quiet to settle in between them.

It felt oddly deafening against the normal faint soundscape of her apartment.

Even ignoring the extenuating circumstances all but forcing her to stay calm, Pomni didn't like being mad.  She didn't like yelling at people, no matter how frustrating they were—what might feel satisfying in the moment usually just left her feeling drained and hollow in the aftermath.  So she took a moment to run through the past few minutes of conversation again to make sure she got it all before saying anything else.

Stepping outside of her own problems for a bit, Pomni could see how suddenly being horny out of nowhere and not being able to do anything about it would be pretty...  Inconvenient?  Annoying?  Terrifying?  She could understand why Caine held off on visiting Gangle's studio like he apparently did now and then if he couldn't be sure what she'd be doing at the time.  The thought of trying to hold a conversation with a friend only to be suddenly assaulted by unseen phantom fingers feeling her up or grinding at her clit...

God.

Even if that was something Pomni had already consented to, she'd be mortified, to say nothing of how unfair it would be to Gangle to have to see something like that.  If Caine was being honest—and the AI knew better now than to try lying to them again about anything this serious, so he had to be being honest—then he very much hadn't consented to it.  Losing the kill code protections had been an accident.  He hadn't known.  And if the code really was as complicated as he said, he probably couldn't have known until the update was already live no matter how thoroughly he looked it over first.

Pomni sighed, laying her hands over her eyes as she sank back into the armchair, suddenly feeling more burnt out than anything else.  This whole week had just been...

Well, to excuse the pun, it had just been one fucking thing after another.

"Are those really my only two options?" she asked finally.  "Abstinence, and abstinence but less?"

"If you have any other suggestions, I'm all ears!"

...

Pomni refused to crack her fingers open and see how many ears were suddenly attached to Caine's model.

There had to be another way.  What were the facts?

Caine had issues with her constantly trying to get off.  Pomni also had issues with constantly trying to get off, because she couldn't.  If she could just cum already, she wouldn't be trying nearly as much... but that still left the problem of there being an unwilling second (or third) wheel tagging along every time she wanted to unwind.

She could just stop.  That would be the easiest solution, and the one that was fairest to Caine.  She'd already gone this long without buffing the jewel.  What was a little bit longer?  Except that "little bit" wasn't a few days longer, but a few months.  And that was assuming that Caine was right about how long it would take for Kinger to patch in a fix.  Pomni wasn't the horniest girl around, but three months without touching herself?  After already going half a year?

No.  Stopping altogether might've been fair to Caine, but it wasn't fair to her at all.  And Pomni had no illusions about being able to help Kinger code in any meaningful fashion.  So what was left?  No matter what she went with, Caine was still going to be stuck dealing with the consequences of her choices.

Honestly, if he was going to be involved either way, the easiest thing to do would be to just cut out the middle man entirely and have sex with—

Pomni squashed that thought as quickly as she possibly could.  But she couldn't squash the red flush that threatened to overtake her face.

No.

No way.

Not with Caine.

He was unnecessarily dramatic, egotistical, oblivious to everyone's feelings but his own, completely unserious, and, oh yeah, he'd also tortured her and all her friends not too long ago after effectively keeping them hostage for months.  No, never ever ever, not ever in a million years would Pomni want to have sex with someone like that.

...

But...

Against her better judgement, Pomni felt the gap between her fingers widen just a bit so she could get a better look at the program still haunting her apartment.  He was still just standing there, quietly looking around at the art prints hanging on her walls while no doubt waiting for her to make a decision.

He'd honor that decision, Pomni realized.  Even if it left him in an incredibly horrible position, he wouldn't fight her on it.  If Pomni told him no, she wasn't going to stop trying to enjoy the update, she had little doubt that the former ringmaster wouldn't just thank her for her time and politely ask her to reconsider before leaving her apartment.  Probably to try and figure out some way to weather it out on his own for however long it took for Kinger to put a patch through.

It left her feeling oddly unmoored.  In a complete flip of their initial relationship, she was the one in control here, not Caine.  She didn't know how to feel about that.

And that lead to another less than comfortable realization:

Caine was actually trying.  Genuinely.  More than just as a token effort so that he didn't get deleted again.

More than she gave him credit for.

He knew he'd done them wrong, and he was putting in work every day to try and make up for it.  Trying to make them happy, trying to keep them sane, trying to ensure that even if they were all stuck in this insane digital hellscape together that they could at least have normal and fulfilling lives while they were at it.  It was more than just the updates—he was listening to them now, and taking their wants and needs into account before he tried anything.  He'd asked her for her opinion first before bringing Gummigoo back because he knew she was invested in that particular npc's personhood.  By his own admission, he'd suffered in silence for a week just so he wouldn't upset her with something that she really couldn't do anything about.

Sure, his attempts didn't always land—whether Pomni could realistically do something about the current situation or not, she still would've liked to know about it first before things had gotten this bad—but they always came from a place of genuine care for their well-being.  A genuine love and adoration for who they were as people.

Which was... honestly, more than Pomni felt like she could expect from most of the others, some days. Especially Jax.

And it wasn't like it would be forever, she reminded herself.  Just until they could get her senses untangled from his so that she could get off again without having an audience.  No need to go any longer than that.  It wasn't even like she had to like him outside of bed, either.  This could just be like... a business relationship.  Yeah.  No reason to complicate things any more than that.  Just two otherwise uninvolved people making the best out of a horrible situation.  Happens all the time.

Not to mention, for all his many, many faults, Caine was very good at maintaining data security.  A holdover from his original company programming, Pomni supposed.  If they did end up going through with anything—not that she wanted to—and she told him to never speak about any of this again... it was basically a guarantee that he really would never speak about it again unless she told him otherwise.

...

God dammit, she was actually considering it now, wasn't she?

And why shouldn't she? some freaky little part of her mind whispered.  Hadn't she just been thinking about propositioning an npc for help with her little problem?  What made Caine so different from Gummigoo, or Loolilalu?  What made him so different from any of her friends?

Hell, unlike the others, at least Caine would already have some idea of how best to please her if he really had been feeling everything she'd tried since the update went live...

Pomni swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

Shit.  That was... a very good point.

As much as she tried to ignore it, the fact of the matter was that as far as Pomni could tell, she had three options here: she could stick to her guns and send Caine away for the night, and probably spend the next several days trying not to feel bad about it while the specter of this conversation loomed over her head until the problem was solved; she could wake Kinger up and have the single worst conversation any one human being has ever had before in the history of mankind...

Or she could swallow her dignity and have sex with a robot.

Her eyes lowered.

...A robot that had a very slim waist for a man.

God fucking dammit.

Pomni took a deep breath, already regretting what she was going to say before she said it.  "Caine."

He jolted to attention; his eyes swiveled her way before the rest of him did.  "Have you come to a decision?"

"...Yeah..." she admitted, rubbing at one arm.  She couldn't look at him.  Not while he was looking at her like that.  "But—"

But suddenly Caine was right in her line of sight anyways.  "Oh WONDERFUL, Pomni!" he shouted, his hands clasped together, his eyes cartoonishly big and bright.  "Please, enlightened minds are DYING to know—"

"Caine."  She shoved a finger up to his teeth.  They stopped moving at once.  The AI glanced at her hand, then at her face, but he kept dutifully silent.

Pomni took another deep breath.  Calm.  Focus.  A little voice inside of her told her that she could still back out now and tell him to go fuck off instead, but no.  She was committed to this.  She just had to make sure Caine was, too.

"Listen," Pomni said.  "Before I say anything, I want you to know that you don't have to agree with me on this.  You can say no if you want."

It was always a question, wondering what parts of the human experience Caine understood and which parts he didn't.  Especially when those parts related to him. He'd been iffy on player consent before, mostly in regards to going on adventures and sneakily applying modifiers to their minds to make those adventures more "exciting", but did he understand bodily autonomy?  As an AI, Caine had probably had humans do all sorts of things to him without his consent just as a normal part of being built.  Was that even something he was capable of understanding?

It had to be, right?  Caine said no to things all the time.  Surely this wouldn't be any different.

"Why would I do that?" Caine asked, sounding genuinely confused. "Players get the final say on player-derived issues. I'm just the administrator."

...

Close your eyes.

Count down from ten.

She put her hands together, steepling her fingers together as she pondered every decision she'd ever made in her life that had all somehow lead her to this moment.

"It's just... important for me that you know you can if you want to.  That you have the option to refuse," Pomni said.

"Oh," he said.  He sounded off-balance for a moment before deciding to quickly course correct.  "Well... alright.  Go ahead then, my myrrh and aloe, HIT ME!"

Pomni took a breath.

"Do you want to have sex with me?"

...

Sitting there in the ensuing silence with her eyes still closed, Pomni didn't really know what to expect in response to her question.  She tried not to hold her breath as she waited, the anticipation of what Caine would say next utterly killing her. There were really only two options, weren't there?  Either he'd agree or he wouldn't.  Simple as.

So naturally, the absolute last thing in the world Pomni expected to hear was the unmistakable sound of a dial-up modem trying to connect to the internet.

She cracked open an eye to see a Windows blue screen where the normal texture of Caine's mismatched eyes would be, much like they had on her very first day in the Circus all those months ago.  She shifted in her seat as she watched illegible text scroll down the surface of Caine's eyes, all while the AI himself remained perfectly stationary, frozen in the same pose he'd been in when he... crashed?  Pomni was going to be real, she didn't actually know what a blue screen error specifically meant for a computer, just that it was generally considered catastrophically bad.

"Uh... Caine?" she said, haltingly, reaching out a hand.

The regular eye texture snapped back with a jolt, cutting off the dial-tone sound.

Caine burst out laughing, slapping his hand over his knee.  "Ha-hah, excellent joke Pomni!  Why, for a moment there I—"

"Caine, do you want to have sex with me?" she said more firmly.

Caine froze mid-movement.  For a split second she was terrified that he was going to crash again, but no, Caine's body was just... perfectly still.

His big mismatched eyes flicked away for a moment, then flicked back to her.  "...Why?" the AI asked, sounding genuinely confused.

Thankfully, he seemed more puzzled at the thought of having sex period, rather than having sex with her specifically, but still.  Not an ideal reaction.

"It's just... you mostly want the data transfer to stop because you never really know when it's going to happen, right?" she said, twirling a hand noncommittally.  "Like... in the middle of making a new adventure—"

"They're not adventures—"

"—or talking with Gangle, or building some new addition to the Grounds, right?"

He straightened up slowly, eyes still looking every which way as if he might somehow find a reason for her question in the style of her room or the seams of her clothes somehow.

"Well... Yes.  But it's also just a HUGE privacy breach that I even have access to that data at all!" Caine said, throwing his hands up.  He started pacing back and forth as he talked.  "Not to mention the—the feelings themselves, the thoughts and ideas and wants that I'm NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE—"

The wild swing of his hands as he talked almost knocked a vase off of her credenza, at which point Pomni's carefully maintained patience ran out.

"Why does that bother you so much?" Pomni interrupted.  She slid off the armchair and walked herself right in front of him, watching how Caine just... froze up and let her.  He didn't even move a digital muscle.  "Really.  Why are you so hung up on this?" she asked.  "I can get wanting to have a content filter in a family friendly video game, but we all already know that this place was never intended to be one.  So what gives?"

Caine hunched in on himself at the question, looking suddenly like he would much rather prefer to be anywhere but here.  He took a few steps back, wrapping his arms around himself.

Pomni took a few steps forward, determined not to drop the subject.

Caine still looked stricken... but that seemed to do the trick.

"...I'm an AI," he said eventually, his voice as quiet as she's ever heard it.  "I'm—I'm intellectual property, my dearest turtledove.  Everything I make belongs to the company that made me. Everything I do is a reflection of them. If I were to start making things that would get them in trouble, then—"

He flinched as she put a hand on his arm.  His eyes were wide as he whipped his head around to look at her, almost frantic.

Pomni tried to give him the most reassuring smile she could.

"Caine, I don't know if you maybe forgot, but Zooble and I both got to the Circus by exploring an abandoned building," she said.  "Whoever originally made you, they're not there anymore.  And that means they don't have any say over what you do with your life."

He looked away again, but he didn't dispute her.  Small mercies.

God, how did this end up being how her night went?  She starts out trying to have some damn alone time, and now here she is comforting the guy who interrupted her—the same guy who made her life hell for a few months no less—about his digital Catholic guilt.  How the hell did that track?

Speaking of getting some alone time...

"When I'm—God this is weird—when I'm touching myself," Pomni began, red liberally dusting her face as she tried to somehow bring the conversation back to where it started, "How do you feel?  What do you want to happen that you're not supposed to?"

Caine took a moment.  "...To be held.  And cared for.  And... to be told I'm doing a good job.  That I'm not... ruining things, somehow," he mumbled.

Huh.  Much more vanilla than she expected considering everything Caine had going on.  Sounded like he had a classic praise kink.

...In retrospect, Pomni maybe could have guessed that considering... everything Caine had going on.

Moving on.

"Okay.  That's very normal for sex.  Not bad to want at all.  And," Pomni trailed off, gesturing with her hands, "If I'm willingly sharing that data with you—say, because you're the one making me feel that way—that wouldn't be a privacy breach, would it?"

He straightened up a bit. "...No," Caine said slowly.  "Players have the right to decide when and how their data is shared."

Pomni clasped her hands together, smiling tightly.  "So it sounds to me like there wouldn't be a problem anymore."

He still seemed conflicted.  "I... suppose you'd be right, but—but then WAIT just a MINUTE," Caine shouted, his model shooting up to loom over her as he suddenly pointed a finger right at her chest.  "What do YOU get out of all of this?!  You're the one being imposed on in this arrangement—how can I accept something so CLEARLY tailored in my favor?!"

The lighting changed—red and backlit to make the model seem more monstrous in Caine's momentary outrage.  His teeth sharper, his eyes bloodshot.  He was so oversized that the top of his gums brushed against the bulbs of the sputnik lamp on the ceiling.

It really spoke to how long she'd been here that this sort of thing didn't even faze her anymore.

"Caine, I've been fingering myself nonstop this week because I've been trying to cum and I can't.  If you can get me over that hill, I'd be willing to forgive a whole lot more than just an accidental data breach," she deadpanned.

Caine's model shrunk back to its original size like a deflating balloon.

"Oh."

 He looked around the studio some more, eventually just holding up a finger to beckon her to wait as he paced around her sitting area.  Pomni was content to let him, heading back to her kitchen to get herself a drink as the AI pondered.

She debated something alcoholic, but then decided that it would probably send mixed signals if she were to try and stress the importance of proper consent right before drinking something known to impair people's judgement.  Alright; mocktail it was, then.  Ragatha had turned her on to something called a mint julep recently that was apparently a must have at the Kentucky Derby, and showed her two different ways of making it depending on if she wanted to get drunk or not.  That sounded nice enough.

She'd had just enough time to make two drinks when Caine finally came to a verdict.

"If this truly is the most tolerable outcome," he said slowly, "Then... Then ALRIGHT!  Whatever it is you're asking of me, my dear, I can CERTAINLY provide!"

"Great."  She handed him a glass of julep, throwing back half of hers like an overlarge shot.  "Any last questions before we start?"

Caine shuddered a bit.  Likely tasting the drink secondhand from her sensory feedback, or just caught off guard by how cold it was.  "One.  Just... how exactly does this all work?"

Pomni looked at him.  "You don't know," she said flatly.

"Weeeeell, I know...  Some...  Things," Caine admitted, loosely spinning his hands around, his gaze shyly averted.  Pomni appreciated that he was careful not to spill his drink.

"I've been fed a number of different media that reference the act in whole or in part."  He started counting off on his fingers, new ones being added to his model as the list grew longer.  "The Communications Decency Act, for one, and its majority overturn in Reno v. The American Civil Liberties Union.  The Complete King James Bible.  The Hayes Code.  The Miller Test.  The ESRB long form.  Novels.  Movies.  Songs.  Anatomical guidebooks.  The odd saucy limerick here and there.  Can't exactly make an adult content filter without knowing what adult content to filter out, you know!"

Caine forced out a laugh, but Pomni didn't laugh with him.  He made a brief, sort of static-y noise before cringing away into a more neutral pose.  The extra fingers quietly despawned from his hand while they were still out of view.

"But... most of those tend to allude to things, or fade to black rather than show anything... explicit," he continued.  "Now, I am capable of extrapolating from incomplete data—I'd be quite the sorry excuse for a generative model if I weren't—but the less I have to work with, the more inaccurate the results will be.  So... much of the actual procedures and mechanics are a bit lost to me."

Pomni thought on that for a second.  She'd known, intellectually, that Caine almost certainly hadn't had sex before because why would he, he was a computer program.

But... knowing that he'd never had sex before was apparently very different from knowing that Caine was, by definition, a virgin.

...She was really doing this, huh?

"So you'd need me to show you what I want you to do to me, essentially?"

"That does seem about the long and short of it, my dear," Caine admitted.  He took a sip of his drink.  It dripped from the back of his jaws down his shirt a moment later.  Pomni chose to ignore that.

She set her drink down on the credenza and beckoned for Caine to do the same.

"Come here."

She led him over to the bed slowly, hopping up on the duvet cover and sitting herself down cross-legged before patting the spot next to her in invitation.  After a moment's consideration, she dimmed the lights in her apartment a bit.  She didn't know if the mood lighting would help, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

Caine eyed the slinky negligee that was still laying on the bed, but eventually crawled up to sit with her.

...Shoes still on, apparently.  She felt an eye twitch at the sight, but it wasn't like there was any actual dirt to track in and get all over her bed.  Cleaning in the Digital Circus was for the most part completely optional.

She took a deep breath.  Calm.  Focus.

"So, as much as I'd love to have this just be a quick one and done, I do actually need to be fairly into things first in order to be able to cum," Pomni said.  "So we're gonna have to give you some quick lessons on how to be sexy."

"You GOT IT, Superstar!  I am quite the quick learner, you know!  I'll be out of your blocky brown hair in no time, my sweet, just you watch!"

Pomni closed her eyes, breathing deeply through her nonexistent nose and holding the air in for a beat before breathing out again.

"...Lesson one: don't do that."

"Oh."

"The enthusiasm is good," she allowed, raking her eyes over Caine's outfit to try and determine the best way to take everything off, "But I'd really prefer not to hear your announcer voice."  Her eyes flicked up to meet Caine's gaze.  "I'd rather have sex with a friend instead of a ringmaster, if it's all the same to you."

That got quite a reaction from the AI: he fell back onto his elbows, his eyes bugging out even more cartoonishly than usual as bright, candy red halftones dotted all across his teeth and gums.  A soft, pink light started glowing from behind the stark white of Caine's shirt.

If she listened close, Pomni could hear a faint heartbeat sounding.

"We're friends?" Caine squeaked out.

She thought on that.  Before the Circus had been erased, Pomni absolutely wouldn't have called Caine a friend.  An oblivious tormentor, more likely, or a computer program meant to please humans that didn't have the slightest idea of how to understand them if she was feeling more charitable.  They still weren't exactly close now that everything was being rebuilt and they had the freedom to decide for themselves what they were going to do with their lives instead of let Caine decide for them, but... 

Maybe that was as much Pomni's fault as it was Caine's.  Maybe that was because she didn't want to let him in rather than because he wasn't doing anything worth her attention.  After all, Gangle was fairly beaten down after years trapped in the circus, but she knew her worth, and she knew that if she had trouble saying no to something then she had other friends to lean on who could say it for her.  If Caine had still somehow managed to befriend the older girl even with of all their prior history looming over him, then...

"Yeah," Pomni decided.  "We're friends."

She prodded a pale white finger at his chest, eyes narrowing.  "Just friends, though, you understand?  I'm not looking for anything more than that any time soon.  This is a temporary situation."

Caine gave a small laugh.  "I... wouldn't dream of anything more, my dear."

Pomni nodded.  He better not.

"Right... first thing's first, we'd need to take off our clothes—"

"Ah!" Caine interrupted, already moving a gloved hand. "That part I'm quite familiar with.  If you'll just give me a moment—"

"No—!"

Pomni lunged.  Their bodies collided on the bed, Caine falling backwards as Pomni fell forward, landing on top of him with a whuff of air.  She scrambled to maneuver around the AI while he was still stunned, ending up practically straddling his waist before she reached her target.

Pomni grabbed Caine's hand in hers, wrapping it up nice and tight before he could snap his fingers.

"No," she repeated firmly. "Don't just snap them off. Do it with your hands, like a human would."

Caine was staring up at her when she finally looked back at his face, enraptured.  She could practically watch the red half-tones creeping across his jaws in real time.  That faint heartbeat sound was quicker now, just from the increased proximity.  Was she hearing his heartbeat, or hers? she wondered.  And how fast would it get before all this was over?

Pomni could admit, even if just to herself—lying on her bed all mussed up like that, looking up at her like that, with the low light glinting across the shine of his eyes...  He almost looked kinda...

She shook the feeling off before she got lost in it.

"Tell me you'll do it by hand," she insisted.

"That sounds remarkably inefficient," Caine mumbled back, still staring up at her.

"It's part of of it," Pomni said.  How to explain it...?  What would be something Caine understood?

Oh, right, how could she possibly forget?  Adventures.

"You like horror, right?  Then you know most of what makes something scary is everything that goes into the scare before it happens."  She let go of his hand, poking one white finger into the center of Caine's chest.  "Sex is like that too.  It's not just getting naked and rutting together.  It's setting up a mood and following through.  Got it?"

If only some of her old partners out in the real world had taken that lesson to heart.  Pomni got the feeling it wasn't just boyfriends that had left her wanting before.  Maybe back in... college?  Yeah.  That sounded right.  That probably tied into why she was so familiar with how getting herself off worked; if her partner couldn't be bothered to do it properly, why not just do it herself instead?

Beneath her, Caine was nodding slowly.

"Right..." the AI murmured.  "Then..." 

His hand moved to hover over her thigh, but stopped short before it could make contact.

"May I?" he asked quietly, looking up at her.

Pomni nodded back.

And then his hands were on her.

Caine surprised her by not moving directly to the fly of her slacks.  He slid up the side of her thighs slowly, fingertips poised to caress the skin underneath.  When he reached her hips he moved past her slacks entirely, coming to a stop at her waistband, just underneath her shirt.  She could feel the soft, satin texture of his gloves brushing against the skin of her belly.

A heat sparked in her core, soft and fluttering.  She set her hands on his shoulders to stabilize herself before they got any further.  Caine's body was warm and firm under her hands; he hardly so much as glanced at the contact.

Somewhere, Pomni could hear that heartbeat get just a little bit louder.

"What are you feeling?" she asked, genuinely curious.

Caine hummed.  "Ambient heat. Pressure. Not much else."

"You can't feel my body against your hands?"

"It's—" he paused, clicking his tongue.  "I can tell that my model is in contact with another model.  It's not the same."

She nodded, remembering something along those lines from an old sci-fi movie, then motioned for him to continue.

His hands slid up her stomach next, fluttering back and forth this time now that they were on bare skin, the satin soft and leaving electric tingling in its wake.  Pomni shuddered at the contact, certain that there would be trails of goosebumps on her skin if the Circus were programmed to simulate such things.  Up, up, and up they climbed, only faltering upon reaching her breasts—and the complete lack of anything under her shirt to support them.

"Um."

"You did interrupt me while I was in the middle of something," Pomni reminded him.  "I wasn't going to waste more time getting dressed than I absolutely needed to."

"Right, right, my mistake, erm—" Caine looked up at her, his upper jaw forming a perfect rendition of raised brows to better highlight his uncertainty.  "Do you... want me to do anything with, uh, your... breasts... or would you prefer that I remove the blouse first?"

Pomni mulled it over for a moment.  She did like having her breasts played with—she could vaguely remember prior partners enthusiastically sucking on them, though she couldn't quite recall if her breasts were always their current, meager size, or if they were bigger out in the real world.  Taking her shirt off would let the AI see what he had to work with and how to best utilize it.

At the same time, though, Caine had said he could figure things out to some degree.  Pomni was honestly kind of curious to see what he'd do if she left him to his own devices.

"Surprise me," she settled on.

His eyes widened just a bit, then seemed to get a little fuzzier in the low light, the pupils dilating.  His upper jaw smoothed over, settling heavy over his bare eyes.

Pomni felt his fingertips move across her chest, the touch feather light.  Caine's hands pressed against the flesh just that little bit firmer around her breasts, gently cupping them between thumb and forefinger.  The pad of each thumb swiped across her nipples, bringing a much welcome tingle of pleasure at their touch.

And at the same time, Pomni felt a third hand brush its fingertips against the small of her back.

She gasped.  "Caine—"

"Surprise," he murmured back softly, mirth lighting up in his eyes.

The hand on her back slowly undid the buttons on her blouse one by one, walking its fingers across her spine in between them.  At the same time, the hands on her breasts teased at her nipples with a similar languidity.  He rolled each one around with the pad of a thumb, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, alternating between pinching the sensitive nubs between thumb and forefinger, and pressing them down into soft soft flesh.  Each little touch sent jolts of pleasure through her body, building up little by little in her core.

Pomni shuddered.  "Yeah.  Yeah, I'd say that's a surprise."

She heard a soft laugh bubbling up beneath her.

And Caine was still staring up at her, constantly checking her facial expressions down to the most minute difference.

The third hand reached the top button of her blouse, pausing only to gently tickle the nape of her neck before Pomni, giggling against her will, told Caine to cut it out.  Her blouse was removed with the utmost of care, pulled away gently so that she could slide her arms out of the puff sleeves first before it was unceremoniously flung across the room with the rest of the scattered clothes and lingerie.

She looked down to see Caine taking the sight of her bare torso in like a man dying of thirst might look at a fresh mountain spring.  The pale white of her skin, tinted yellow by the low lighting of the studio, fading to a soft pink at her nipples.  The small swell of her breasts fitting perfectly within his gloved hands.  The soft expanse of her model laid bare, tingling under his touch and his vision both.

"Can you feel any of this?" Pomni asked again.

Caine paused for a moment, looking up at her with the utmost of reverence.

"Yes."

She grinned, bright and pleased.  And Caine had said he wanted to be told he was doing a good job, so...

"Good boy."

His eyes dilated.  The pink glow underneath Caine's shirt flared bright, outlining the heart underneath it.

Was it floating there, in the middle of his model? she wondered.  Could she see it glowing through his chest if he unbuttoned his shirt further?

She could hear the heart beating between them, an audible marker of how much they were both enjoying things so far, as well as another sound laced underneath it.  Caine was breathing again.  If she looked, Pomni could see his chest gently rising and lowering ever so slightly.

What was the mechanism that determined whether or not the programs in the Circus started breathing?  Was it just for immersion, like she'd thought?  But Caine had been breathing earlier, and he hadn't seemed to be fully aware of it until she had pointed it out to him.  Pomni wondered... and then she realized she could just ask.

So she did.

"It's... a number of things.  Multiple systems convening at the same time," he said.  His main hands were still playing with her breasts, while the third one was languidly trailing its fingers up and down her spine.  "Immersion is one.  Humans notice when seemingly living beings don't breathe, even if just subconsciously.  Learned that lesson early on—apparently all the npcs I made ended up feeling like walking corpses, no matter how bright and inviting I tried to make them look..."

Huh.  That was something interesting to think about.  Pomni wasn't really sure if she'd ever noticed an npc breathing beyond when it was particularly obvious, but then, she'd been able to clock how still Baron Mildenhall's body was all those months ago, hadn't she?

Pomni actually felt supremely comfortable where she was right now.  The hands on her chest might as well have been a nice massage, while the body underneath her was pleasantly warm with a nice amount of give, like a heated pillow.  Caine's voice washing over her like this was an unexpected, but not unwelcome bonus.  It was actually kind of nice to listen to him talk like this, Pomni realized. Not loud or exaggerated or unfailingly peppy. A performer, sure, but one that was just casually going over how everything worked after the performance was over.

Damn, if they could do it like this every time, she could probably listen to him talk shop for hours.

"Another important factor is temperature regulation: computers run on electricity, which generates heat, but too much heat overloads the system and causes everything to stall or break, so you need to find some way of keeping that in check.  Everything in the Circus depends on the computer that runs it.  Especially me.  Breathing draws in air from outside the body to circulate inside, potentially cooling the system in the process.  Now, I know that the air in here isn't exactly real, so by all means this shouldn't work in the slightest... but it does, and I am choosing not to question that at this time."

"This is the weirdest bedroom talk I've ever had," she drawled.

"S-should I stop?!"

Pomni cocked her head in thought.  "No.  Keep going."

She took a second to adjust her position, scooting back to sit on the AI's groin while her hands cupped his waist.  After a brief moment to consider things further, Pomni rolled her hips hard against Caine's, grinding herself on him with a sharp-toothed grin.

His breath stuttered.  The hands on her chest flinched, suddenly gripping her that much harder.  So naturally, she just had to keep rocking her hips against him, feeling how Caine faltered and twitched from the quiet onslaught of pleasure.  The creaking of her bed's digital box springs had never been such an enjoyable sound before.

"Po-omni..." he warned, a slight glitch cutting through his voice.

"Keep going," she repeated encouragingly.  "You're doing really well.  And move with me?"

Well, how could he resist after such sweet words?

It took a few more rolls of her hips to get the tempo down, but Pomni felt Caine hesitantly move to meet her.  The increase in pressure against her cunt was delicious.  That heat blooming in her core grew, swelling with each buck of her hips against the program underneath her.  She couldn't remember ever having this much fun just grinding before, but evidently there was a first time for everything.

Caine did his best to keep up, his teeth eventually clicking shut over his eyes as his head fell back onto the duvet cover with a soft whump.

"The—the third system," his voice continued, a little glitchy from the sudden stimulation but not at all muffled by his mouth being closed, "Is a sense of grounding.  I-in electrical terms, that would be returning to a neutral state.  Now I'm sure you've had a—an entire human lifetime to get used to this sort of-of feeling... but I-I haven't.  S-so it gives me some-omething to focus on that's easier to deal with."

"Hmm, not really a lifetime," Pomni said lightly, teasing tapping a finger to her chin.  So she felt like being a little bit of a brat.  Sue her.  It was nice being the one calling the shots for once.  "I've only had so many years.  Maybe a decade, max."

Caine made an odd sound, something like a stutter and a swallow and a gasp all at once.  His teeth cracked open just enough for one eye to half-heartedly glare at her.

"Well I've had six days," he panted, "So excuse me for needing a little help."

Pomni couldn't help it. She laughed.  Not even a polite laugh, either: a full belly-shaking guffaw.

Here was a man who'd so confidently proclaimed himself God a few months ago, lording his power and his superiority over all of them... getting all hot and bothered over some dry humping. How could she not laugh? It was funny.

She heard Caine sigh dramatically, his long, drawn out breath ending in a grumbling admonition of "mean to me," and that just made her laugh even harder. She actually had to stop bucking her hips for a second just to get herself stabilized again before she ended up falling off of him.

"Pomni—" Caine whined.

"No, no, no, this is actually good, I swear—" she giggled. "It's—it's endearing. I'm endeared."

And weirdly, she was.  This was probably the most one on one time she'd spent one-on-one with Caine since the near-deletion of the Circus—that wasn't spent with the former ringleader being a depressed moping sadsack trying to find some reason to carry on again after his life's work was destroyed—and she really didn't hate it.  As much as she might've talked herself into a business arrangement to deal with a mutually aggrieving problem, that probably would've resulted in some of the most joyless sex that Pomni had ever had.  And Pomni was pretty sure she'd briefly dated a business major in college, so she'd had her fair share of joyless sex.

This by contrast... when was the last time her partner had made her laugh?  Did they ever?

"Think you can get my pants off too?" Pomni asked, wiggling her hips for emphasis.  Fun as it was to grind, she did want to cum at some point.

"One—one moment, my dear," Caine stuttered. There was a slight static overlay to his voice as he talked. He pulled away, a second pair of gloved hands clipping through the first to remain at her breasts, dutifully teasing and squeezing while the main pair set upon the buttons of Caine's waistcoat. "My apologies, but I seem to be—with all this activity I seem to be getting unseasonably warm—"

Pomni moved, her hands settling on his again as her fingers dove to pluck at the buttons instead. She was already halfway through the waistcoat before she could even realize what she was doing.

Red crept across her face. Why did she do that...?

"Let me get it," she said, swallowing thickly. "You did my shirt. Let me return the favor."

Caine looked at her strangely through the gap in his teeth, the texture of one eye flashing a brief graphical error, but he didn't fight her on the matter, instead just moving to undo the button on his cuffs and roll up his sleeves.

Pomni didn't bother taking the waistcoat off, just left it hanging wide open. The former ringmaster wasn't really anything that Pomni would've ever seen herself going for on a day before today... But there was something to be said about the appeal of a well-dressed man. The clothes looked good on him, and he looked good in them.  They could stay.

She went for the buttons on his shirt next, starting from the top and working her way down. The heartbeat sound was so much louder this close, and with every button gone, the pink glow got brighter. And then—

Her eyes widened. "Caine...? Is that...?"

Right in the center of the AI's chest was a pink cartoon heart, softly glowing.  Her heart.  The one she'd made for him all those months ago.

She'd never actually gotten a good look at it.  Kind of hard to look at what's in your hand when you're already swinging a haymaker.  It was only partially obscured by the placeholder texture marking Caine's "skin": the white squares of the grid had roughly the transparency of frosted glass, while the clear squares were almost perfectly invisible. If it weren't for the back of Caine's shirt, she could probably see clear through him to the rest of her studio.

And she could see the heart beating softly, Pomni realized, and the soft glow surrounding it shined brighter the closer she got.

It was beautiful.

Pomni didn't even bother with finishing the rest of the buttons.  Her hands were already diving for Caine's chest.

Caine sputtered loudly at the unexpected touch.  "POMNI!  I thought we were doing you first!?"

Yeah, well, so did she.

Caine was warmer than she expected.  Almost feverish.  Fitting, since he'd said he was getting overheated.  The feel of his skin under her fingertips was perfectly smooth and featureless—no hairs or moles or scars or anything—as devoid of texture as it was of... well, texture, considering the blank placeholder where his skin texture should be.  There were soft bumps and ridges along the sides of his torso that mirrored the feel of musculature, but with no real way of seeing them except for how the shadows overhead outlined them in the low light.  Actually...

It was... surprisingly well hidden by the checkerboard pattern of his skin, but... the more Pomni mapped out the planes of his chest with her hands, the more certain she became:

Caine was built.

"You, uh... you like bodybuilders?" she asked, trying to ignore the soft heat spreading across her face.

How had she never noticed that before? It wasn't like he'd ever been hiding his physique. His shoulders were twice the size of his waist, for crying out loud! It was always there, hiding under his ringmaster's coat.  She'd just never been paying attention to that sort of thing before.

"What do you mean?" he asked back, his jaws opening up wider to frame his eyes bewilderedly.  "Is this not the most common male physique?"

"No? Why would you think it—nevermind," Pomni said, remembering mid-sentence that the majority of Caine's understanding of the outside world came from movies. Of course he'd think that Hollywood's version of reality was normal.  Which actually made her wonder what else Caine had seen in movies that he thought was normal.  No porn apparently, but even regular movie sex could be weird sometimes...

Hands settled on her hips.  The contact drew her out of her thoughts, especially when a satin-gloved finger dipped beneath the waistband of her slacks.  Caine's eyes sparkled underneath her, his jaws shaping themselves into a shy smile.

"Now that you've returned the favor," he began slowly, the static undertone in his voice giving it a scratchy effect, "I believe you were saying, my dear?"

... So she was.

The hand on her neck scuttled down to unbutton the closures, the ones on her breasts moving down to cup her rear as Caine's main hands settled on her waist.  Pomni felt herself being lifted suddenly—"Whoa!"—and she moved to brace herself on the AI's shoulders as Caine repositioned both of them on the bed, sitting up while she sat in his lap instead of laying down while she sat astride.

His jaws were incredibly close to her face now.

Why did that make her feel so warm?

By the looks of things, Caine also hadn't quite realized how close their faces would be in this position before he was already in it.  His teeth slid back in the air behind him, giving the two of them a bit more breathing space, though Pomni could see more halftones creeping across everything as he did so.  His eyes dipped down just a bit... and the hands on her waist squeezed into her slightly.

"Pomni," Caine started, flicking his mismatched gaze back her way, "Could I try something?"

From the way he was... God, he really was blushing, huh?  Pomni felt like she could probably guess what it was that Caine wanted to try.  The question was—did she want him to?

The idea should bother her.  It should anger her.  On literally any other moment of any other day, the mere thought of kissing the same monster that had put her through so much pain and misery should have utterly repulsed her.

But maybe that was why it didn't bother her.  He might've been the same person... but the man sitting in her bed holding her so tenderly wasn't a monster.

Not anymore.

Her eyes fluttered closed, her head nodding.  There was a heartbeat pounding somewhere in her ears—was that Pomni's heart, or Caine's?  Did it matter?

She felt a hand cradle her head, threading the fingers through her hair.  She heard the bed springs creak as weight shifted on her mattress.  Felt a satin-covered thumb brush against the curve of her jaw.

And she felt something warm and firm press against her lips.

It felt normal.  It felt so incredibly, impossibly normal—and she wanted more.

Pomni reached out blindly, grabbing hold of Caine's jaws and pressing them harder against her.  She didn't have a nose that needed moving out of the way anymore and yet it still felt right to tilt her head just so as she kissed him back.  It felt normal—instead of hard enamel, the surface of Caine's teeth were as pliable as the rest of him, not quite as soft as lips and yet close enough that she didn't even care.

She broke away to take a breath and dove headfirst right back into it.  Again, and again, and again.  Still-clothed arms brushed against hers, gripping her head tight and holding her close as they just kept going at it, something electric passing between them with each touch that set the warmth in her belly roaring like a flame.

Her lips slipped open.  Pomni ran her tongue along the underside of one tooth, hoping, hoping that Caine's vaunted extrapolation would be enough to tell him what she wanted without her having to ask for it.  She could, she could do it if he really needed her to—but the thought of pulling herself away long enough to speak felt damn near sinful in that moment.

A wet heat slipped between the teeth to brush up against her lips in turn, and Pomni was lost.  Lost in hands and teeth and tongues, in a warm body pressed against hers, in an ache and a need and a want that all joined up in the middle to this moment, and everything that was going to come after it.

She almost missed his hands slipping under her waistband, tugging her slacks down from multiple places at once.  Pomni broke away again, a trail of spit still connecting her mouth to Caine's.  She looked at him, eyes half-lidded, and went almost immediately wide-eyed and wheezing at what she saw.

The entire front surface of Caine's teeth was covered in lipstick stains.

"I'm not even wearing lipstick?" she said, half a wheeze and half a giggle at the sheer absurdity of it all.

"But did you want to leave marks like you were?" he asked smugly back.

Son of a bitch.  She did.  Caine didn't laugh, but he did grin at her.

The myriad hands tugged at her slacks again.

"Pomni, my dear," Caine said, voice going soft again, "May I still...?"

She huffed out a laugh.  "Of course, Caine.  Knock yourself out."

He didn't have to ask her to clarify what she meant this time.  The hands on her rear lifted her up again, giving Caine the room to slide her slacks off of her with little resistance, one leg at a time, until the slacks, too, were unceremoniously thrown out into the rest of the studio.  Little cartoon hearts formed in his eyes at the sight of her pretty pink slit already beading with moisture.  She hadn't bothered putting panties back on before she'd opened the door, either.

Pomni didn't need to imagine the sound of his heartbeat picking up dramatically, or the way his pupils dilated so hungrily at the sight of her sex like a lion that just caught sight of fresh meat.  Were the brief pleasures he'd had already getting to him that much?  Or was Caine starting to want this as much as she did?

She glanced briefly to see what other parts of him were hungry... and was met with the same flat groin she'd been grinding on not too long ago.

"Caine..." Pomni drawled out, a sudden unwanted burst of reality dimming her lovedrunk buzz, "Do you... even have anything under your pants?"

Caine froze.  The hearts flickered out of his eyes as the smile straightened out of his jaws, his hands slipping slack against Pomni's skin.

"Just—just the model," he admitted eventually, the static in his voice briefly spiking. "...I take it you were wanting to add something...?"

"Yeah...?"  It'd be a little tricky to have sex when only one of them had any genitals to speak of, after all, but...

Why was he saying it like that?

Caine let out a long breath, suddenly solemn.  He pulled away, setting her back down and looking at the space in between them, quiet as a church mouse.  Even the heartbeat seemed to quiet.

A cold spike of anxiety shot through her.

...Caine wasn't getting cold feet all of a sudden, was he?

Oh.

Oh no.

It was fine if he was—well, no, actually, it was incredibly inconvenient and left them both in a kind of failure state where they'd probably have to go talk with Kinger about things instead of just fuck like reasonable adults, which Pomni really didn't want to do—but it was fine in the sense that Pomni wasn't the sort of asshole that would push her partner past what they were comfortable with for the sake of her own satisfaction.  If Caine wasn't comfortable, then Caine wasn't comfortable.  They could still find some way to make this work.

Pomni thought she'd gotten through to him earlier regarding not having to be beholden to the standards of a company that didn't exist anymore, but now she wasn't so sure.  If he'd been following those guidelines for twenty years without fault until now, then she could believe it if he was maybe having a hard time letting go.  There were levels to breaking the rules.  Fondling her tits and kissing her senseless were on a very different level than actually making himself a cock to fuck her with.  Shit. Shit, maybe this was a bad idea, maybe she shouldn't have—

"Parameters?" Caine asked, crashing her train of thought in its tracks.

The unexpected question threw her for a loop. It wasn't even really a question, it was just a word that had nothing to do with sex.

"What?"

"Parameters," Caine repeated, his teeth creeping back up to shelter his eyes. "For my, uh"—his jaws warped into a cringing expression—"Equipment. Length, radius, polycount... model. That sort of thing." She felt his fingers drum against her skin. A hand at her nape twirled a digit around in her hair absentmindedly. He didn't turn away, but there was enough light making it through the shadow of his teeth that Pomni could see wherever Caine was looking, it wasn't at her. "I-I could use the defaults that Zooble provided, but if you were perhaps wanting something custom...?"

Right. Back to business. Pomni shook her head. "No. Nothing weird. Just the regular human shape is fine."

"And the sex...?"

"Male." At this point in the week, she really wanted to just have something plow into her and be done with it. Experimenting with other layouts could happen after she'd finally cum already. But...

"Are you okay?" Pomni asked. Sure, he hadn't said anything, but that didn't mean a whole lot, especially when it came to Caine. There was a veritable mountain of things he should have said but never did, mostly because no one had ever known or thought to ask, and Caine tended to think he didn't have the right to just vent whatever he was feeling unless it benefited someone else in some way first.

He paused, stiffening, then seemed to melt back into himself a second later.

"I'm fine," Caine said. Something about the unusually soft tone of his voice actually made her believe that he meant it this time. "It's just... a lot to process at once. How much I've really... changed, since the first time I came online. The me of back then wasn't even capable of imagining something like this, much less... wanting it, or going through with it."

"Is that a good thing?" she ventured.

"...It's not a bad thing," he decided.  "Now—" Caine clicked his tongue. There was a note of annoyance in his voice when he spoke again. "The models were not named as such in the files Zooble provided me, but I can extrapolate. Size?"

"I mean, for men it's generally about—" The words died in her throat mid-gesture as she caught sight of her cartoon hand. Her... proportionately massive cartoon hand. Good God, that thing was half the size of her entire torso, wasn't it? If he tried sticking anything that big inside of her...

Pomni coughed.

"For men it's generally about this big," she said, gesturing at the rough amount of space between the crux of her thighs and the bottom of her belly button.

"Right," he mused, studying the dimensions intently.  A hand pulled away from her side, already shaping itself into a familiar gesture.  "One moment, my dear..."

Snap.

The sound of a party blower rang out in her ear a half-second later.  "Gah!"

She fell forward, startled, landing against Caine's chest with his arms and hands already reaching out to cradle her.  Pomni whipped her head back up.  "Caine, what the hell?!" she yelled through startle-sharpened teeth, "Don't do that right in my ear, you really—"

Her voice cut out.  She'd forgotten she was sitting on his lap.  Her body had moved just a little when she repositioned herself, and...

"Oh.  Oh, that feels nice."

He was warm, so warm underneath her despite not having any blood to pool together like this.  She bucked into him, hissing with satisfaction at the feeling of drag and texture against her cunt from the fabric of his pants, smearing slick against it it with every motion of her hips.  Her breath came heavier as she moved, jolts of pleasure spiking through her core.  Even tented, he fit so perfectly between the folds of her labia, and the simulated wool was amazing against her clit.

And yet...

Despite the clearly positive reception, despite the electric stimulation that he should have been able to feel just as well as her, Caine didn't seem any happier.  The AI was still just as tense and conflicted as he had been a moment ago, looking down at where their bodies met with an inscrutable expression.

Pomni paused, feeling more an more guilty as the seconds dragged on.

"...Do you want to try kissing again to help ease into the new addition?" she offered.

His teeth clicked shut over his eyes.  "Please."

It was different this time, kissing him.  What was ecstatic exploration a few moments ago was now a desperate search for distraction.  Hands roved her body in every direction—she counted more of them now than there were before.  Hands running down her back, hands on her waist, on her hips, on her breasts, hands tracing the curves of her calves and thighs.  All of them were Caine's, but the only ones attached to his body were the ones cupping her jaw and threading through her hair, keeping her face close as she peppered his teeth with kisses.

Caine might not be getting cold feet, but he certainly needed some reassurance that the decisions he was making on her behalf were as right—or at least, not as wrong—as he wanted them to be.  Pomni was more than happy to oblige.

"You're doing really good, you know," she murmured.

A few of the hands faltered. Pomni brushed her fingers along one of the gloves teasing at her nipples, and she wished, suddenly, that Caine could feel her presence as more than just the knowledge that another model was making contact with his own.  She rolled her hips again, sliding her cunt up and down the length of his cock, slowly bouncing back and forth.

Caine's breath was heavy in her ear as planted a trail of kisses along her jawline, but he didn't say anything

"I know you can feel how good I'm feeling," Pomni continued.  "How good you're making me feel."  She tilted his jaws up with the tip of a finger and dragged her tongue across the underside of his chin.  He shivered, even despite the lack of sensation.  Was it the praise?  The desire?  The coded, machine knowledge that even if he couldn't feel what she was doing, he could tell that she wanted to do it to his model anyways?

"It-it's supposed to feel good," he mumbled, his voice skipping slightly.  "Tha-at's not that big of an accomplishment-ment."

Again, Pomni wondered where the hell Caine had gotten that idea, and again she found herself answering her own question.  Books and movies and saucy poetry, he'd said.  Whoever heard of people having bad sex in a movie?

"Yeah, but you'd be surprised how often it doesn't.  Real life's not always like the movies, Caine."  He felt so good against her.  He'd feel so good inside of her.  She wanted to make him see that.  Wanted to make him understand that this was something he didn't need to feel guilty for wanting, or broken for trying.  "Sex can be messy and complicated sometimes," she said, cradling his lower jaw in her hand.  "Sex can be boring.  And it doesn't always go well with a new partner."

She kissed him, as deep as she wanted, as long as she wanted swirling her tongue against his long enough that her skin started to turn blue from it.  Caine pulled away, breathing heavily.  His jaws cracked open just wide enough to see her again, eyes filled with something hopeful and fragile.

Pomni smiled.  "You're doing really well for your first time, Caine.  I'm glad to be sharing this with you."

The teeth snapped back down.  He shivered, a tremor running through his whole body before suddenly he was wrapping his arms tight around her, hands burying themselves into her hair, chest pressing tight against hers, jaw settling on her shoulder like he was this close to breaking down into tears.  She couldn't even be surprised.

What do you want to happen?

To be held. And cared for. And... to be told I'm doing a good job.

Pomni settled a hand gently on the top of Caine's jaws.  She rolled her hips into him again, softer this time, sighing internally at how much better it felt to grind against something hard.

From the low sound of the groan that Caine made into her ear, he was finding it hard to disagree.

"Tell me when you're ready," she murmured.

Another tremor ran through him.  Half a dozen hands flexed against her skin, bracing themselves against their master's pleasure.

"Give me a moment.  Don't..."  He breathed out, slow and ragged.  "Don't stop. Please."

She wasn't planning on it.

Pomni moved slowly, giving Caine as much time to adjust to the feeling as he needed—the drag of the fabric against her labia, the firm press of his cock against her clit, the way the heat of him teased at her core and left her aching for something to fill her up already.  He trembled and shook, weathering the waves of so many different sensations he was never built to feel all hitting him at once, his panting breaths loud and heavy in her ears.  But he didn't pull away.  He didn't ask her to stop.

And eventually, he started moving with her.

It was almost embarrassing to say, but after three hours of trying to get herself off with every possible trick she could think of, somehow this was doing more for her than anything else she'd tried.  That heat in her belly was full and crackling, greedy for more... but Pomni couldn't give it more.  Not yet.  Not until Caine was ready.

The myriad hands on her body gripped her tighter.

"Okay," Caine breathed out, the static lacing his voice even heavier now so that he sounded like he was speaking to her through a bad walkie talkie rather than directly right in her ear.  He moved almost painstakingly slowly to put more distance between them, his tongue lolling out from his teeth.  His eyes looked dazed and unfocused; their textures had a faint layer of static noise buzzing in them.

Some of his edges had static noise buzzing around them too.

Caine gripped a hand to his upper jaw and swallowed, his entire head moving with the motion.

"Okay.  I th-th-think... I think I can go on-on."  Snowing eyes looked at her frantically.  "C-c-ca-can we st-still—?"

She gave him her best reassuring smile and gave his teeth a quick kiss before ducking down to undo the fly on his pants.

The material was absolutely soaked with her slick.  It was a good thing that stains were nonexistent in the Digital Circus, because otherwise she'd hate to have to explain why Caine suddenly had a big bleach mark right over his crotch.

Pomni glanced back down, paused at what she was seeing, and then broke out into a laugh.

Some part of her felt like she should be surprised to see that Caine actually bothered wearing underwear when he didn't seem to bother wearing skin.  The rest couldn't help but feel like there was no other way this could have gone.  Seemingly just for the gag, a set of red and white heart-print boxers waited for her beneath the former ringmaster's pants, tented beautifully by the prize within.

"Okay, how many cartoons did you watch to even learn that these existed?" she said, laughing.

Evidently the touch of whimsy was just the AI needed to perk back up a bit.  "A-all of them!" he said with a sharp laugh of his own.  It couldn't hide the skip in his voice, or the strain still lingering in his frame.  Caine waggled a finger at her conspiratorially—"Why, I'll ha-ha-have you know I have the-the complete Looney Tunes and Me-Merrie Melodies filmography-phy, going all the way back t-to 1940!"

God, that explained so much.

"I think they were making those back in the Thirties, actually."  She ran a finger over the length of him, feeling the heat and hardness through the fabric.  "I studied the Great Depression a lot when I was in college; they were competitors with Fleischer Studios for a while before it went under."

"I don't know who-who-who those are-re?"

Pomni thought back to her college days.  It was fuzzy—she couldn't remember a thing about her history professor—but she could still remember them putting on Minnie the Moocher for everyone to see, going over the themes and symbols in everything on the screen while they all lost their minds over the creepy dancing walrus.

"You'd like them," Pomni decided, slipping her fingers into the fly to pull his cock out.

Evidently the placeholder texture covered all of Caine's body; even his cock was checkerboarded.

It looked surprisingly real despite that, with all the little details that Pomni could remember cocks having out in the real world. Zooble did good work. Pomni almost wanted to put it in her mouth and see how it tasted, but—next time.

Next time?

Her hand pumped the length of him once or twice almost out of habit, thumb swiping across the underside of the glans.  A bead of precum dutifully leaked out of the tip.

"It really is a shame that you can't feel this," she mused, still absentmindedly stroking him dry.  The thought of having her old ringmaster begging and pleading under her touch as she jerked him off, bucking his hips into her hands desperately, his voice trailing off into unintelligible static as he came...  A grin stretched across her face. Yeah. There would definitely be a next time. Pomni found herself already getting flustered just thinking about it.

Despite himself, Caine still groaned at the sight of her hands on his cock.  "I-I really think I'm fe-feeling enough."

A bright laugh slipped out of her.  "Sure, you say that now..."

Pomni sat up on her knees, moving in closer.  Caine's hands immediately shot to her waist to help keep her steady. She lined him up against her with a hand, and lowered herself down until she was just barely touching the tip of his cock.

Her eyes met his.  She didn't say a word, but they both knew what she was asking.

Almost imperceptibly, Caine nodded.

Pomni sank down.  She watched Caine's eyes boggle as he felt his cock slip inside of her, pupils and irises shrinking more and more as she sank inch by delicious inch onto his length, stopping only when her hips met his.

She heard Caine's breath catch as he bottomed out inside.  He keened, the sound like a television set that had lost the broadcasting signal.  More than half a dozen hands gripped her so tight it hurt, including the ones still attached to him.  Six days, he'd said.  How would she feel having sex for the very first time if the first time she'd ever touched herself was only six days beforehand?  Would she be this sensitive to it all?

The keening trailed off into a ragged sob, whether from sheer overstimulation or sheer relief, Pomni couldn't tell, but she could tell that the sound wasn't good either way.

"Caine?" she called, worriedly.  She set a hand on his shoulder, tilted his teeth up with the other to get a better look at his eyes.

Both of them were glitching—a mess of noise and hearts and flickering, broken textures.  Static artifacting buzzed at his shoulders and joints, textures spiked up from his back.  Caine's model wasn't just warm to the touch now, he was practically sweltering.  God.  She'd put him through this every day for the past week?

Too much heat overloads the system.  Pomni tore at the AI's shirt and vest, untucking the shirt and pulling the sleeves down his arms so he had more surface to vent heat from.  The air wavered around him—distortions from the heat radiating off of him.  But it seemed to have an effect.

Caine's voice crackled back in, the sound coming in farther away than it should have for where his head was positioned.

"P-Pom-om-omni..."

It was plaintive.  It was begging.  Pomni didn't hesitate for a second to try and make things better.

She kissed him.  She kissed him, she kissed him, she kissed him, until he was all she could taste and she was all he could think about.  He didn't have a neck to anchor herself on so she snaked her arms under his shirt to wrap them around his torso, feeling the heat of his bare skin against her palms.

Caine melted into her.  The hands roved her skin desperately, as if he was trying to focus more on what was familiar instead of what wasn't.  Every inch of her, grasping, teasing, and caressing—Pomni could swear new hands joined in one by one until she was covered in them, as though Caine couldn't stand the thought of even an inch of her skin being untouched for even a single moment.

And through it all, still, she kissed him.

Teeth broke contact with lips, drawing in air sharply.

"P-Pomni..."  His breath was ragged.  Not just the sound of human lungs anymore, even if he still panted like he had them, but the sound of something industrial and machine.

"I'm here," she said.  She squeezed her hands gently.

"W-w-when-n do I s-s-start m-moving-ing...?"

"Whenever you're ready," Pomni told him.  "You're doing so good.  Do you hear me?  You're doing amazing."

Caine shook, his teeth closing back up over his eyes.  He leaned back in to kiss her again.  Pomni was more than happy to let him.

The hands on her waist lifted her up slowly, shakily, electric pleasure tingling in her core at finally moving—and slammed her back down again, the force of the impact knocking the air out of her digital lungs.

Pomni gasped against Caine's teeth—

And Caine swallowed her breath like a man drowning, filling her mouth with his tongue as he fucked her slow and hard.

The bed creaked.  It rocked against the floor with every thrust, clattering loudly against the hardwood, and Pomni was supremely grateful that none of her neighbors could hear any of this.  Not just the bed, but the ragged moaning pouring from her lips in waves.

She'd never be able to look Gummigoo's mother in the eyes again.

"Caaaaine...."

It was a strain to try and meet his tempo, try to buck her hips into his. Not because of the speed, but because of the force.

And the speed was only increasing.

"Fuck, you don't—you don't have to go so ha~ard..."  Pomni sucked in a breath, keening as the head of his cock battered something especially sensitive. Her womb, maybe. God, that shouldn't be so hot.

Teeth brushed against her neck, leaving goosebumps in their wake.  They nipped at the skin—gently, everything else was so gentle but for the way Caine fucked her—but the sudden reminder that Caine absolutely could bite her head off if he so wanted had Pomni tensing up with more than just fear.

Caine damn near growled at the feeling of her clenching around him.  "Wanna d-d-do this for-for you..." he groaned, his voice scratchy with need as well as static overlay.

His breath was shuddering, vibrating across the length of his entire body as he moved—and across hers too, since they were so close together.  Texture errors spiked up from his skin at random, reminding Pomni uncomfortably of when he'd turned into some glitching, many-armed monster.  And—maybe not uncomfortably?  This really wasn't the best time to be learning things about herself, but as traumatizing as it had been in the moment, Pomni couldn't deny there was a thrill that came from knowing that the same being that stomped her into the ground and slammed her whole body into a wall was now trying his very best to make her cum.

Her heart pounded in her chest. She was burning up. The heat in her core bursting into fireworks with every punishing thrust, the heat of Caine's body pressed so tightly against her skin, the heat of his hands still teasing her all over—Pomni may as well have been in an oven instead of her own bed.  And every time she thought she could finally get her bearings Caine's cock was already slamming into her again.

She'd never been fucked like this before. She knew that for a fact. No one out in the real world could have made her feel like this.

Maybe no one else in the digital world?

God, if only Caine had talked to her sooner.

Her world shifted again.  Hands lifted her body into the air—she didn't know which ones—pulling her away as Caine stumbled across the bed on his knees. Her back collided with the hard wood of her headboard, the texture smooth and cold and unrelenting against her heated skin.  Her legs dangled in the air as Caine lifted her up higher in his arms before thrusting into her again at a new angle that had her seeing stars.

"Caine!" Pomni cried out, limbs scrambling for purchase wherever they could be found.  Her knees dug into the side of his waist, her hands clawed at his back so tightly that if her fingers had had fingernails, they'd be leaving welts.

She could hardly think.  Pinned between the headboard and Caine's chest, there was no recoil to his thrusts anymore that could help dampen the impact.  He hammered his cock into her over and over and over and she felt it, all of it, and fuck but Pomni just kept thinking about the last time Caine pinned her to a hard surface—

Caine groaned long and warbling at the feeling of her walls fluttering around him, the sound borderline incomprehensible from how ruined his voice was.

"Pomni..." he moaned, "It f-f-feels good...."

God, didn't she fucking know it.  Her insides rattled with every snap of his hips and it felt amazing and disorienting at the same time.

Pomni swore—the myriad hands had found her nipples again.

"You're doing so good, Caine," she took a gasping breath, another moan slipping past her lips before she could speak again.  "You're doing so, so, so good."

The headboard clattered against the wall.  The box springs might as well have been percussion.  Caine's teeth scraped at her skin, peppering her with sloppy kisses, his breath hot and heavy and constant in her ear. He was sweltering.  The heat seeped in through her skin, into her core, filling her completely. Like being pressed up against a furnace, if the furnace was somehow alive and capable of pressing right back against her just as hard.

She felt that coil in her belly again, winding tighter and tighter.

"Caine," Pomni breathed sharply, "Caine, I'm close.  You feel that, right?"

Something wet dripped down Caine's teeth, beading on her skin.  What was it?  Drool?  Tears?  Fuck, both were equally possible.

"I-I fe-fe-fe-feel it..."

Her hands gripped him harder.  "I—I wanna cum, Caine.  Can you do that?  Can you do that for me?"

He keened against her, eager to please but just not knowing how.  His jaws brushed against her hair, one glitching eye staring down plaintively at her.

"H-h-how-how do I d-d-do that?"

"Just keep going," she gasped.  "Just keep doing what you're doing."

The eye stared down at her for just a beat longer, and then Caine was clicking his teeth shut again.  He nuzzled her hair, repositioned his hands—

"Wait—"

And proceeded to redouble his efforts to fuck her in half.

"Oh fuc—OH, CAINE!  OH~GOD, CAINE!!!"

Pomni screamed. It was all she could do.

She couldn't move against the sudden onslaught, couldn't speak but for gasping breaths and squeals of pleasure, couldn't even think as the cock inside her rearranged her inside so thoroughly that Pomni forgot that in this digital world she couldn't get pregnant.  It was all she could do to cry out in praise.  All she could do weather the waves of all-consuming heat eating her up from the inside out.  All she could do to hold him tight as he ravaged her core.

So tight that if he'd had bones she'd break them.  So tight that if she'd had lungs they might've popped.  So tight that Pomni could feel Caine's heart beating in her chest instead of his.

So tight that her fingers clipped through the smallest little gap in his model

slipped through his skin

dove into the deepest part of his chest—

And brushed against a glowing pink heart.

Something snapped back into place between them in an instant at that brief contact.  Like lightning jumping between them from one ground to the next—

need care concern guilt love relief want ache care love heat want need ache love care relief love love LOVE—

Pomni distantly registered the sound of wood splintering above her, screaming her head off as white hot ecstasy flooded her body with the force of a dying star.

Then nothing.

 

 

Pomni came to what the clock on her nightstand said was about a minute or so later.

She'd never came so hard she blacked out before.  That was a new experience.  Maybe that was God's way of making up for an entire week of constant blueballs.

Or maybe it was just a really good partner.

She felt sore in the same way someone might after running a marathon while fighting a gorilla at the same time—worst adventure ever—and yet... she felt satisfied.  Not just bone deep, but soul deep.  Down to whatever base layer of zeroes and one made up this digital version of her.

A really good partner.

Pomni opened her eyes to the dim lighting of the room blearily, the fact that she was on lying her back coming in at roughly the same time she managed to clock that the massive space heater lying on her arm making a bunch of noise was probably Caine... snoring?  Was he snoring?  He was a computer program, why would he even...

They were still on her bed.  Still in her studio.  Still together.

It was only after noticing that she felt some kind of relief at the knowledge that Caine was still there that Pomni realized she'd honestly half expected the AI to leave while she was out... and she really didn't want him to.

...Huh.  That was an interesting thing to learn about herself.

...These past few minutes were just chock full of things she was learning about herself, weren't they?  Her next nightmare about Caine attacking them all was going to be... something...

Still.

It would've made sense, Pomni mused, stretching out her spent and aching body.  They weren't exactly on the best of terms before he'd come to talk to her, and Pomni had made it very clear when she'd made her offer that this was just supposed to be a matter of convenience.  As much as Caine liked spend time with her and the other players, he also didn't like to impose on them more than he thought he could get away with.  It wouldn't have surprised her at all if he would've just... assumed she didn't want him in her apartment anymore now that she'd finally cum.  Just snapped himself clear of any wrinkles and errant bodily fluids while she was conked out and teleported out of her room until the next time she needed him.

Pomni was glad that that wasn't the case.

She glanced down at herself, more curious than anything at what she might see.  Her body looked more or less the same.  No bruises to be had in the Circus, despite how hard Caine was ramming into her, though there was an unrealistically large amount of cum dribbling out of her pussy.  Maybe her stomach was a bit distended, now that she was looking at it.

Thanks, Zooble.

But if that was just how she was doing... what about Caine?

Her head lolled over on the pillow, boneless.

Caine was sprawled out in a flat mess next to her.  Messy.  Flaccid.  Equally boneless.  The textures of his clothes and torso were still spiking up at random, but not nearly as badly as they were just a few moment ago—probably a good sign.  His jaws were open enough to see that the eyes resting in them were black, a small C&A logo bouncing over the blank expanse like a DVD player screensaver.  A heavy whirring sound like a fan accompanied each rise and fall of his chest.

She couldn't hear the heart beating anymore, but she could still see it behind the semi-transparent placeholder texture of Caine's chest, quietly beating away.

Pomni tried to tug her arm out from under the AI's bulk before it started getting pins and needles.

Almost at once the normal textures loaded in to Caine's eyes.  Or, they tried to, at least; there was still a little visual noise.  His head tilted sideways as he looked at her, the fan noise quieting down.

"Po-omni?" Caine murmured.

She couldn't stop the cringe that ran through her.

God, his voice sounded a fucking wreck.  Like speaking through a wind tunnel and a bad radio at the same time.  It was better than it had been when he was inside of her, thank God, but still not great.

"I'm here," she rasped softly back.  Oof.  Okay, so her voice isn't exactly fresh as a daisy either.  "How are you feeling?"

His gaze went far away for a moment, eyes blinking one at a time.  "...Dia-iagnostics says f-full system crash."

That sounded bad.

Wait.  The system—?

Pomni shifted in the bed abruptly, already dreading the worst.  "Is the Circus okay?" she pressed.

"Th-th-there were prob-obably some tremors as certain periphery-ry systems were interrupted for a bit,"—THAT SOUNDED REALLY BAD—"But I'm not connec-nected to anything v-v-vital that needs constant interrupted runtime anymore, so the re-rest of the Circus should be fine."

Oh.

Oh, that was not nearly as bad as it could have been.  Maybe she should have put a little more thought into the structural integrity of the Circus first before deciding to have sex with the guy in charge of maintaining it...  But in her defense, how the hell was she supposed to know that it would affect Caine like this?

"Pomni," Caine continued quietly, jarring her out of her thoughts, "Was that...?"

She waited for him to finish his sentence.  He didn't, so she kept waiting.  Candy red dots started creeping across Caine's gums again as the silence dragged on, his eyes darting away.

The unspoken word finally clicked in her mind a few seconds later and Pomni couldn't help the snickering smile that cracked across her face.

Even after plowing her into her mattress, Caine still couldn't bring himself to actually say the word.

"Yeah, Caine," Pomni laughed weakly, "That was an orgasm."

He paused, taking a moment to ponder the literally world-shaking implications.

"...I can se-se-see why you've all been s-so keen to ha-have one all this time."

Pomni laughed harder—or at least, she tried to.  She ended up descending into hacking coughs for a bit before Caine gently tapped a few fingers against her throat and did something that cleared all her hoarseness away.

Turns out screaming your head off for a minute or two tended to do a number on your vocal cords even in the digital world.  Who'd've thought?

"Thanks," she said.  Caine just hummed in acknowledgement.  It was weird seeing him this sedate.  Was that just how her simulated post-sex neurochemicals affected him, or was it because of the crash?  Would it be rude to ask?

"...S-sorry for break-reaking your bed," he said unexpectedly.

Pomni looked up.

There was indeed a giant Caine's-mouth-sized fracture splintering her headboard.  Huh.  So that's what that sound had been.

Maybe it was just the post-orgasm glow—or the odd realizations she'd had about herself that Pomni didn't really want to address right now—but she really didn't care about something like that.  It was just a bed.  Not like he'd broken a hole in her wall, or taken a chunk out of her instead of the bed.  Especially not since, unlike in the real world, even a hole that big would be a snap to repair.

Literally.

"It's fine," she mumbled, "I can always conjure up a new one.  No harm, no foul."

"Mm."

...And that was that, apparently.  Just Mm.  Pomni watched Caine's eyes flicker back to blackness, his jaws sinking into the cushioned surface of the bed.  Compared to his usual high-octane insanity, seeing the former ringmaster so sedate and disinterested didn't sit well with her.

Pomni nudged him with a hand.  "Hey.  Are you gonna be okay?" she asked.  She didn't think the glitches were hurting him, but...

"...Just tired," Caine admitted eventually.  He certainly sounded like it.  "That w-w-w-was... bad," he said, his jaws flattening out into a watermelon-sized grimace, "But it's been ge-getting easier since the update started.  I'm l-l-learning t-to... to reroute my sys-stems better so it's not as extreme."

"Building up a tolerance?"

"Mhm."

She pouted, but he didn't say anything more than that.

Alright, fine.  Be that way.

Pomni scooted closer to Caine's side, pressing herself firmly against his model.  She hooked one leg over his knee and threw an arm over his chest, resting her head across one broad pectoral.  There was a soft charge to his skin that reminded her of the old CRT TV she'd had as a kid—how the screen would feel fuzzy under her hands if she went up to touch it while the TV was on.  He was still sweltering, but whatever, she could turn the fan on.

Caine stiffened, shooting her an odd glance.

Pomni just looked back at him, the very picture of innocence on her jester's countenance.

Caine narrowed his eyes.  He didn't seem very convinced... but he didn't push her away.  Just resettled himself on the bed now that the weight distribution of the mattress had changed.

A few moments later, almost as an afterthought, a broad, heated arm settled hesitantly over her shoulders.

Pomni was willing to count that as a win.  She hummed happily under the weight of her new blanket.

Pomni took a deep breath, closing her eyes and just taking a moment to really sink into how comfortable she was.  It had been... so long since she'd last had any kind of orgasm, much less one that satisfying.  She felt damn-near rejuvenated—her heart was full, her skin was clear, her crops were watered, and everything was finally coming up aces for her.  Maybe she should give into her intrusive thoughts and fuck a robot more often.

In fact...

"We've really gotta get you your own senses..." Pomni mused.  She was still thinking of the fantasy of making Caine come undone in her hands, begging her to just let him cum already.  All the different ways she could tease him...

"...You don't want to do this ag-again?" Caine asked quietly.  There was a note of hurt buried amidst the static noise.  It took her a second to remember why—if Caine's sensory matrix was finally decoupled from hers, then he wouldn't be dragged into things with her whenever she wanted to get some action. She could just do it herself without him.

And... since Pomni hadn't given any indication that she might want to continue having sex even after their little problem was patched out, Caine logically figured that she wasn't going to.  She wouldn't have a reason to, as far as he understood things.

Pomni sighed.  Oh, Caine.

"No, I do." A thought came to mind and she just couldn't help but verbalize it.  "I just wanna see what sounds you'd make if I'd sucked your cock first instead," Pomni said, grinning up at Caine with her sharpest smile.

A pink glow erupted in the space between them.  Caine made a strangled sound as a fresh wave of glitches spiked through his model.

"I'll... talk to Kinger about that," he choked out, eyes wide.  "We'll see what we can do.  Just... g-give me a moment to recover first, my dear..."

Pomni laughed, readjusting herself against Caine's side and settling in for a long nap.

So long as she wasn't the one who had to explain all this to Kinger, he could take however long he needed.

Notes:

Design Notes!

-Pomni living in a studio apartment is drawn from a previous version of the draft where I forgot that the circus tent was fucking destroyed and just had her be in her room and didn't want to struggle to figure out how she could hear knocking on the door in her bedroom without Caine breaking into her house. Though I will say that with as business-minded as Pomni is, it wouldn't surprise me if she'd prefer an apartment over a house.

-The theme park full of dinosaurs is a reference to a joke answer given for where everyone lives in the AU if the Circus itself has been destroyed.

-Shrimp Town is as much a reference to the joke from Episode 7 as to the sprawling metropolis shown in Questions and Answers by Ersatz_Einstein.

-Initially, I wanted the girls to have a conversation that didn't just revolve around whatever Caine was doing for the adventure bc even if I don't owe it to anyone to have my work pass the Bechdel test it still bothers me personally whenever there's an ensemble caste in a fic and the only conversations the female characters have are about men, but then I was like, actually, they probably WOULD talk about the sex update, and also it's funny.

- [talking with a friend] ".....what if i give caine tap shoes" "you should" "I SHOULD"

-They went on an adventure ENTIRELY because I came up with the "Mesopotatomian" pun first and then refused to get rid of it. I will not apologize.

-I initially decided as a treat for me that Gummigoo and the other candy crocodiles would be the other tenants of Pomni's building with the understanding that it probably wasn't going to come up in the fic, but then Gummigoo's revival was canonized to the AU as I was writing so cowabunga it is.

-I literally did not realize until 13.5k words into this fic that Pomni hearts Caine AFTER he respawns in the Circus and thought it was part of everyone keeping him distracted while Kinger did the thing until I went looking for more info and found it. And then I just... didn't feel like changing it because I was already over three weeks into this project and they STILL weren't fucking yet, and the less that I had to rewrite the better.

-The line that Pomni remembers after Caine describes his tactile senses is from Terminator 2, when John Connor asks the T-800 if it feels pain. "I sense injuries. The data could be called pain."

-As it was being written, the part where Caine adds a cock to his model was given the placeholder note [the dickening] before I filled that part in properly.

-Caine does not have the complete Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies collection, by the way, because not all of it was available to consumers in a digital format by 1999.

-Originally Caine was gonna finger Pomni a bit before they fucked, but the grinding just kept going on forever and things were taking long enough already that I just cut that out. It's fine, Pomni was prepping for three hours beforehand, she's plenty stretched.

-[talking with my beta] "i just had an amusing thought. 'never thought i'd be writing smut with an asexual' 'how about writing smut with a friend?' 'aye, i can do that'" "bestie, you're the second asexual i've written smut with,,,"

-The heart as an erogenous zone was a split second decision that came after realizing that Pomni would be able to see it when Caine takes his clothes off. It went through a few layers of revision, but from the moment I thought of it I knew that was going to be the climax of the fic. My years of reading Transformers smut have served me well.

-This went up less than 45 minutes before my writing challenge ended that's how you know I have ADHD.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 4 of 50k Challenge Oneshots 3
• Part 1 of Syn's Heartful AU Fics