The Amazing Digital Inbox!

[zero_votes]

Hello!

You've reached me, Caine!

Please leave a message and I'll get back to you right away!

However, suggestions for new adventures or new features to the circus must be submitted to the Suggestions Box! I won't forget it this time.

Comments

[hexstrapper]

Viktor stands there patiently, patting Caine's back as he lets out all of his emotion. It seems their little adventure had broken a floodgate of sorts, which Viktor thinks is probably for the best, if the alternative is isolating himself and languishing in guilt.

Once Caine stops crying, Viktor picks up his unfinished mug of hot chocolate from the workbench.

"Come. Let us sit down, and I will reheat your cocoa." He ushers Caine out to the lounge area again, depositing him on the comfy couch there, and pours the lukewarm cocoa into a small pot which he heats on the fire.

"Will you be all right, Caine?"

[zero_votes]

Caine was quiet, looking down at his hands. It was when Viktor asked his question that Caine finally spoke again.

"If this were the circus, I'd have to be. It's my job as Ringmaster to entertain, to give joy to humans. Especially nowadays with the threat of Abstraction always looming over their heads," he said softly. "What would they think if they saw their Ringmaster crying?"

The voice in his head that sounded like Bubble sneered as it pointed out that they'd probably just think he was glitching. He was just a machine, after all.

"But here...I don't know. I feel...awful. Sick. Tired. But...a little better now than I did before. Like a bad character in my system was corrected. It's not a lot when you look at my code as a whole, but it's still something better than before."

[hexstrapper]

"They would probably think you were sad," Viktor suggests, because does it really have to be about anything but that? He doesn't see why Caine should be disallowed to express his feelings just because he is an entertainer.

"Perhaps that one correction could have a ripple effect." He's glad to hear that he did more good than harm, at least.

[zero_votes]

"Imitating sadness, maybe," he admitted softly. How real were his emotions to his troupe, after all?

"I hope so. I just...don't know where to go from here. I feel somewhat better but simultaneously I don't know if I want to go back in there. Yet it seems like going in there helped somehow?"