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Uhg where am I? Aqua asked herself, blinking away the bleariness in her eyes. I was flying around then something happened. I think I crashed… She happened to be laying down so she stood up. As she was doing that she caught glimpses of her hands and feet though, which scared her quite a lot.
“W-what?” She asked herself, then thrust her hands out in front of her. Her left was covered in a red rubber glove with a large golden bracelet around her wrist. Her right was the same, but blue. Her feet were also clad in rubber but the colors were the opposite of those on her hands. Without wasting any time, Aqua tried to peel the gloves off from below their bracelets, but she couldn’t slip a finger under them. Strange as it was, it was as though the gloves were glued to her skin. Fortunately she could still wiggle her toes so she knew her feet weren’t transformed.
“This must be like other worlds where I’m altered to match it. But this clothing is…” Aqua began to feel the rest of her body. It was while she was touching her frilly, jester-like top and listening to her gloves squeak against it that she discovered she wasn’t alone.
Right in front of Aqua, coming up through the concrete ground via magic, a massive fifteen foot tall mirror that leaned up over her appeared. At the top of it was a jeering heartless who laughed maniacally then spoke. “Welcome home Pomni! Prankster’s Paradise wasn’t the same without you! You look like your best self to me, but I figured I’d let you take a look!”
“Wait, what?” Again Aqua vocalized her utter confusion. The mirror heartless was at least three times as tall as she was and she didn’t have any weapons at the moment. In fact, she didn’t even recall how to cast basic spells, which she chalked up to crash landing here.
“I’m not Pomni…I’m… I’m…” Aqua’s heart jumped into her throat. With her inability to remember her actual name, she realized that there was something more malicious going on here than when she was altered on other worlds. She’d never forgotten spells or her name before, no matter how dramatically altered her looks were. Hell, she’d been a lion before and knew exactly who she was.
“You are THE Pomni. The one and only Pomni. Nobody else can be you, and there’s only ever one of you! Except for when there wasn’t one of you. That was a terrible time.” The mirror heartless sounded eccentric and controlling, but not cruel. He also spoke with authority which was not welcomed by Aqua.
“Stop talking to me like that! I’m…!” Aqua shook her head back and forth and put her fists up under her chin. Her movements made her clowny, embarrassing head ornament jingle, further humiliating her.
“You’re Pomni! And you love to perform!” The mirror declared. Large, elastic green hands sprang from the sides of the mirror and grabbed Aqua’s shoulders assertively. Her eyes went wide and she stared ahead at herself in his body. Not only were her clothes completely new to her, but her face was totally unrecognizable. Her eyes were large and their pupils were distorted. She looked like a cartoon character, not a real person. Again, this was unlike any of her previous transformations and it terrified her.
“I’m not Pomni, I’m someone else, I know I’m someone else! I had blue hair. I had breasts and white skin! D-dammit, what’s my name!?” Aqua was growing increasingly frustrated so she began swinging her hands up into the mirror’s in a bid to smack them off of her shoulders. The bizarre heartless bent and warped his arms around so that she never landed a blow on them. Finally she tried to back away but couldn’t because of the hold he had on her.
“Where are you trying to go?” The heartless asked, and continued. “Your home is in the circus tent right over there. You live, perform, sleep and eat inside of there. You know it’s bad to go outside of it. No wonder you got lost. You should stay there.”
“I need to leave…!” Aqua stated. She wasn’t processing anything being told to her and tried to run in place. Her feet spun up, turning into wheel-shaped blurs of white but she couldn’t escape her foe’s grip. He was quickly growing sick of her resistance too, and lifted her up off of the ground. Before she knew it she was flying through the air into the center of his reflective belly. Expecting to hit him and crack him, Aqua was instead stunned to pass into the mirror. Once she was a trapped reflection inside of it, she was let go, giving her the ability to walk around inside of her freaky prison. She wouldn’t have that freedom for long.
“Let me go…! Please! Please, I’m not this Pomni!” Aqua faced forward so she could look outside of the mirror. It had been nighttime when she awoke, but now all the lights that had been on were off. It was utter blackness outside of her prison. She slammed her rubbery gloves against the glass wall she was inside of over and over again intent to break it, but she was so unbelievably weak in this form that she never had a chance at doing so. All her efforts did was amuse her captor, who chuckled heartily as he slid back into the concrete ground. Now that she was faced with concrete if she broke out of her cell, Aqua turned around to see if she could do anything inside of it.
Facing Aqua was an empty stage. Upon looking up she saw the yellow and red striped canvas of a circus tent way overhead, then heard one yellow light click on up in the center of it. The stage was illuminated and because the plain, wooden floor teaching out all around it was left dark, it looked like the only safe place to be. A cold sweat started for Aqua, and she plodded in her stupid clown shoes over to the stage, forgetting that she’d been inside of a heartless. It certainly didn’t seem like she was trapped in him any longer, but he could still be heard laughing antagonistically all around her.
I’ve got to relax. Being stressed isn’t making this easier. I’m not in danger, it’s not like he was trying to fight me. This is all a big misunderstanding… Aqua coped. The bleakness of this new environment made her feel so alone, but as she got onto the stage, she slowly noticed hundreds of sets of glowing, yellow eyes peering at her. Beneath those eyes, toothy grins started to form and clapping could be heard as well.
“Start the show.” The mirror heartless’ voice boomed. “Entertain us. You know you want to, Pomni.”
Aqua was at a loss. She looked for a door to run to, somewhere she could escape to, but the sea of heartless surrounding the stage blocked out anything that might have been behind them. Worse still, she didn’t know what to do even if she wanted to perform. It wasn’t like she had balloons to make animals out of or a unicycle to ride.
“C’mon, c’mon!” The simple heartless taunted her. On the spot, she started to shuffle around in a sort of dance. Aqua wasn’t one to dance in general, so this added to her feeling of shame. Her face couldn’t turn pink though, as it was locked in a permanent white state. The dance she was trying to pull off was making her spectators laugh at her even louder.
What am I doing!? I can’t take this anymore. I can’t stand it, I have to get out of here. Aqua decided, and despite how much she felt compelled to stay on stage and be a good girl, she forced herself to step down off of it and push towards the mob of heartless.
“No, no Pomni!” The boisterous mirror spoke to her again. “You don’t need to sleep yet. You need to dance. Splits, cartwheels. The acrobatics, that’s what we want to see!”
Aqua ignored the heartless and pushed through the small, ordinarily easy to handle grunts. Her new body was so much smaller than her true self, so these little guys were actually giving her a lot of resistance. Throwing punches and scrambling through them, she started to make some headway and saw a green EXIT sign behind them all. The sight of it encouraged her tremendously and she sprinted at full speed towards her perceived salvation, pulling and yanking at her sticky, squeaking clothes the entire time.
Since none of the heartless were trying very hard to stop Aqua, she managed to run to the dark corner of the circus tent just below the EXIT sign. She could see a black frame that had to have been her way out and lunged for it. However, as she passed below the exit sign through the doorway, she fell into the blackness. Free falling for almost five seconds, she hit the base of the latex bowl she’d jumped into then bounced high into the air as though she’d just jumped on a trampoline. The sounds of this were very cartoonish too. She hit the ground again, then bounced a few more times. When she finally stilled, the bowl she’d fallen into had become a shrinking, black sphere of rubber that had no exits anywhere on it. Heartless eyes started appearing all over it though, and gradually the baddies started forming fully and falling on top of Aqua.
“Just let me leave already! Let me out of this freakshow!” Aqua was throwing her arms and legs around to beat off the heartless, but none of her attacks landed. In fact, as time went on the creeps managed to secure each of her limbs. A perpetual chorus of elastic snaps and pops filled the sphere she was in. “Get off of Pomni!” She caught herself after she said this and shut her mouth.
“Pomni needs to perform or she won’t become a star!” The mirror heartless stated. Mired in darkness and completely stacked on top of by smooth, rubbery heartless, Aqua’s entire world became a flurry of pops, claps and muffled grunts. None of these small creatures were molesting her really, but they were touching her absolutely everywhere. She felt like she was going to be turned into a heartless snowball as her vision faded… Then came back again as she felt the cold wood of a stage under her butt. She blinked, and found herself smack dab in the middle of her stage surrounded by heartless shouting at her once more. This time, there was a box of balloons as well as a classic clown’s horn and a tambourine.
“Ahahahaha!” Aqua began to laugh. She was conscious of it and actively tried to stop doing it, but she couldn’t. Her laughter ramped up and the sound of her voice became more juvenile; youthful. She no longer sounded like herself at all, so it was like another person was inside of her laughing. Standing up, she continued to laugh raucously and put her rubbery hands onto her squeaky face.
“Entertain us!” The heartless shouted at Aqua. She blinked hard a half dozen times but her laughter continued.
“Pahaha! Ahahaha!” Aqua was tearing up now. A need to cry was contending with her deep satisfaction while she laughed. “Ahaha! Ahahahaha! Pahahaha!” Unconsciously she walked over to the tambourine and grabbed it. Once it was in her right hand she began popping her rubber wrapped ass back and forth in very gratuitous motions that showed off her meager curves. Each time she did this, she smacked the tambourine against her behind or thigh, making an absolute fool of herself.
“I hate this so much, ahaha! I wanna leave so bad!” Aqua didn’t look like she wanted to leave. No matter what she felt, her face was lit up with a gleeful expression. Her mouth was stretched so wide that she looked more like an emoji than anything else. There really was nothing left of her old self here at all, and now that her voice was perverted as well…
“PFAHAHAHA! Do you like my show that much?” Aqua asked. The heartless all around her clapped and cheered, making her feel even more sublime. The ‘performance’ she was putting on was in a word, childish, but it was just the sort of thing that these less developed heartless liked.
What will happen to me here? What was I doing before I came here anyway…? Blissfully unaware that she was hemorrhaging memories, knowledge and her past identity at a rapid rate because of her gyrating, Aqua continued to move but constantly bounced towards the side of the stage. She knew that she needed to get out of here, but as she approached the stage she couldn’t leave it easily. She had to really focus on a mental image of what she used to look like to manage it. With that image of her brown hair, flat chest, clown shoes and striking blue eyes that she wished to reclaim, she managed to fall off the stage. Everyone watching her liked that too, so the cheering didn’t stop. Now that Aqua was off the stage her compulsions to entertain everyone came to an end and she found herself plowing through heartless towards the EXIT sign once more.
This time around when she tried to enter the door, she crashed into an elastic, sticky barrier made out of jelly-like latex. Unable to fall back away from it, Aqua sputtered and flailed, then began sinking into the stuff. Her world went dark and she felt like she’d done something extremely bad. A sense of dread and shame shocked her mind. She wanted to apologize for trying to get out of her performance but her mouth was filled with rubber. Luckily, she wasn’t being punished, she was simply being taken back to her platform. Exactly like the last time she tried to escape, she fell from the air and landed on stage with her tambourine still in hand.
“Ahaha, sorry! Pomni’s sorry!” Aqua’s eyes crossed when she called herself Pomni again. It felt so good to say it. So, she said it some more. “I’m Pomni! Everyone, I’m Pomni, your entertainment! The one and only Pomni!”
Pomni began to smile again, forgetting that she’d ever been someone else. The memories were still in there, but she couldn’t connect any of them together in a meaningful way. To her, the blue haired woman that she thought of once in a while must have been a fan or something.
“Ahaha, everyone, watch this!” Pomni dropped her tambourine, grabbed her clown horn then jumped onto her unicycle. With all those useless memories she had being cast out, her noggin was filled with new insights. Riding this complicated toy was one of the things she knew now, so she balanced around on the one tire while honking her clown horn embarrassingly. Her dopey grin never went away either, and as she rode around on her stage everyone cheered for her. Pomni’d never felt this good in her entire life, but the joy that she felt was disrupted a little bit by one thing.
Glancing past the crowd, Pomni saw the green EXIT sign glowing in the darkness. The mere thought of leaving the stage terrified her so she looked away from the sign before the terror it invoked within her could ruin her show. She was here to make all these friends of hers happy so they could do whatever it was heartless did.
“Ahaha, this is my favorite! I love you guys! I’m so happy I get to show off for you!” Pomni declared then gave her horn a few squeezes.
HONK! HONK! “Ehehehehahaha!” HONK!! HONK!! “BWEHEHEHAHAHAHA!!!” Pomni’s mind was smoothing and becoming so much simpler as she wheeled around and squeezed her horn. HONK!! HONK!! “AHAHAHAHAHA!!!! YES, HAHAHA, ROUND AND ROUND!”
If Aqua had seen another person like this, she’d have pitied them for their simplistic existence. She had so much she needed to do after all, that a life of fooling around wasn’t something she could even consider. That said, Aqua was no more. Aqua wasn’t even a memory for Pomni as she did her fifteenth lap around her arena. By the time she stopped cycling and cast her horn into the audience, the people that used to know Aqua were actively having their memories of her blotted out without their knowing.
“Aha, look! Look!” Pomni was so excited to work with the long, silly balloons again. “I was practicing some new animals in my room last night! Look, ahaha, look!” Somehow her voice had grown even more high pitched. “I invented a few new animals too, but first…”
Conventional, professional clowns had a pump filled with helium that they used to make their balloon animals. Pomni was her own pump though, thanks to her elastic, weird body. Since she didn’t need to breathe any more than she needed to eat, she picked up a long, pink balloon and stuck it into her mouth. Blowing into it, the only powerful part of her body, her lungs, contracted and pumped it full of their contents. In the blink of an eye, Pomni’s balloon filled completely and she tied it off with her teeth and tongue. Her whole body was designed to be the best performer in Prankster’s Paradise - there wasn’t a heartless out there that could blow up balloons as fast as she could even with a helium pump.
“Ahahah! One done!” Like anyone else who had inhaled helium, Pomni’s voice grew absurdly high pitched, distorting her very spirit. Said spirit was in the process of Pomnification at the moment as it deformed, ensuring that if there was an afterlife, no Aqua would get to enjoy it - Pomni would.
“Here, here, ahaha, look!” Pomni’s hands moved fast and she tied the balloon over itself a few times. When she was done she’d made a yellow giraffe and tossed it into the crowd. “I’ll do an armadillo next! It’s way harder! Ehe!”
As Pomni’s new true self was solidified in her mind, she fastidiously set about crafting more balloon animals for the weak heartless all around her. She never forgot about the EXIT sign and the terror it caused her though. Careful not to look at it lest she remember what it’s like to be out of a jester gig, she expelled helium from her lungs into balloon after balloon, pausing only to ride her unicycle, honk her horn and laugh with her audience.