The Amazing Digital Gift Exchange

Clearer version!

“Then what is your problem, Zooble!?” Caine got closer, his upper jaw forming what seemed to be quite an eerie frown. “I'm trying my best to remember! But you and my brain won't tell me!”

Zooble observed with mild annoyance how Caine stretched and squished his eyes, finishing his complaint with a glare and crossed arms. He had always had an attitude, they’d noticed that a long time ago, but today, they didn’t have the strength it took to fight Caine’s snarl.

Perhaps they could try.

They sighed and relaxed into the red, plastic couch, the burning irritation melting into something calmer. Something softer. More vulnerable.

“It's me, remember?” they muttered, their voice low and quiet, their usual coldness replaced by a fragile need to be understood. “I don't like…”

I don't like these stupid parts.

I don't like my room, filled with mirrors, that force me to see myself from every possible angle, no matter how hard I try to hide from them.

I don't li-

“myself.”

They squinted in disgust, because even when they tried, that was the only thing they could feel toward their body. With a tired sigh, they grabbed the elongated, stiff plastic arm protruding from their bean-like torso.

It was torture. Humans often joked about wanting to rip off certain body parts (exaggerations, of course). The cruel part was that Zooble could actually do it. They could tear themselves apart and rebuild from scratch, and still, the burning hatred they felt toward their body would remain.

“I hate this body, I hate all of these removable pieces.” They looked back at Caine, their eyes pleading, silently and exhausted. “I just want to find something that feels… good.”

That last good came out softer than they expected. A painful, desperate admission.

“Ah yeah, now I remember why I couldn't remember,” Caine said. His frown vanished, and though he wasn’t as cheerful as usual, his anger had faded. “It's because that problem is already solved!”

With a snap of his fingers and what Zooble assumed was his version of a smile, a plastic container appeared in front of them, shining like sacred loot box.

Zooble stared at it, disappointment sinking deep into their chest. It was the same box abandoned in the corner of their room. If dust existed in the circus, it would’ve been coated in it by now.

“Simply swap out your undesirable Zooble parts for better ones!”

It sounded simple.

Just swap them.

Tear your limbs off. Surely there had to be something better.

There wasn’t.

“I've been trying to find parts I like since the day I got here.”

After that, the conversation drifted back to Caine’s adventures. Zooble wasn’t even annoyed anymore. Their words after that hadn’t been meant to hurt, they were just tired. Too tired to care.

What had they really expected?

That somehow, Caine would finally understand them?

Understand how deeply they hated the body they’d been given?

That had been naive.

Zooble rummaged through the parts box, pushing aside colorful limbs and mismatched accessories. They weren’t sure when that thing had appeared. It was a Zooble’s box (why on earth was there a theater mask in it? It’s not like their weirdly shaped head could wear anything other than the silly accessories they stuck into the top of it), still, they knew exactly who could use that mask as soon as they spotted it.

“I dunno if it will work, but it looks about the same shape as yours.” Gangle let out a surprised “Oh” as she tried to grab it. Then Zooble felt the need to clarify, a hint of mirth in their voice. “And the best part, it’s plastic.” They whacked the mask against their polygonal head to prove their point. “So, it won’t break as easily.”

Gangle took the mask with a dubious look, eyeing it cautiously. Zooble noticed and offered a soft encouragement. “Try it on.”

With a hesitant turn, Gangle faced one of Zooble’s mirrors and carefully placed the mask on. The next question came without thought.

“How’s it feel?”

Not how it looks.

Because, Zooble noticed, for them, feeling good had always been the priority.

They had never felt good in their own body.

“It feels… normal. Like, in a good way!” Gangle said, a smile spreading across her curved face.

“That’s good, right?”

Must be nice, feeling, at the very least, normal.

“Thank you, Zooble!”

At least Gangle felt normal. Relieved, probably. And somehow, that eased the gnawing, self-deprecating feeling curling inside them. There would be time to dwell on it later.

“You are human, you are not his toy.” Zooble sighed, sitting down without taking their eyes off Gangle. While Gangle wore that melancholic expression permanently due to the absence of her comedy mask, Zooble could always tell when there was something deeper behind that artificially generated sadness. The genuine tint of misery was impossible to ignore, at least for them.

Gangle hugged her ribbon legs closer, her ceramic tears caressing the synthetic fabric that made up her body.

“It sometimes doesn’t feel that way.”

Zooble blinked, a painful jolt of surprise running through them. For a brief moment, they couldn’t bring themselves to look at Gangle and simply averted their gaze. Zooble had always found it easy to talk to her; words flowed naturally, and they never hesitated to offer comfort whenever her mask overwhelmed her. But this time, her words left them defenseless.

For a second, they considered staying silent. Zooble had just realized how difficult it was to comfort Gangle when her pain resonated and echoed inside their chest, shaking their heart with each invisible soundwave.

“...These avatar gimmicks, huh?” Zooble delicately picked up the mask she had been taking care of, the porcelain cold and stiff beneath their plastic hands. The black paint forming Gangle’s comedy expression reflected Zooble’s disheartened eyes in a mocking way. “Makes you wonder why no one else got them.”

“I just wish that-” Gangle sighed, her ribbon ends covering her teary ceramic face. Then she continued, her voice somber, laced, of course, with sadness, but also carrying deep frustration. “How are you supposed to like the part of yourself that just… makes you worse than everyone else?”

At that moment, Zooble felt a genuine surge of respect for Gangle’s predicament. If their own inconvenient body also affected their emotions so directly, they would have lost what remained of their sanity long ago. Gangle, however, tried every day. She didn’t always cope in the healthiest way, but she stayed. She endured. She tried again, every adventure, every time.

She truly had a resilient mind.

“’Cause… it exists,” Zooble said, suddenly feeling their words flow again. “It’s a part of you that’s real, and the only you that you should care about is the real you.”

The real them.

The real, inconvenient, flawed, and genuine them.

“You have to choose to love yourself,” Zooble added as they slowly stood, offering a hand to Gangle. “Even if it doesn’t make sense.” It never made sense to Zooble, anyway. “It’s not natural, it’s intentional.”

Zooble glanced aside, reflecting on the weight of their own words. Just as Gangle’s pain resonated within them (even if their situations were technically different) perhaps their comfort could help mend their own hatred for their avatar, for their body.

“Have… you ever had to make that choice?”

Zooble’s mismatched eyes widened, their mind slowly processing the question. Would Gangle look at them differently if they answered yes? At that point, Zooble wasn’t sure whether Gangle noticed their silence, their caught-off-guard “Huh?”, or simply thought her question inappropriate, but she quickly retracted it.

“S-sorry, I mean…” She let out a self-deprecating laugh. “Of course not, you are Zooble.”

Zooble’s grip slackened as they squinted, their gaze drifting miles away into the wall. If Gangle only knew. If she suspected that Zooble had to make that choice every single day and that most days, they chose not to love themselves. They chose instead to loathe their body, to hide in forgotten corners of the circus, not only to escape the adventures, but also to avoid their room, filled with mirrors that made them wish they didn’t have eyes at all.

Then, with a surprisingly firm squeeze, Gangle pulled them back to the present. Zooble focused on her smile.

“Whatever happens, I have your back, if you have mine.”

And for both of them, that applied not only to the gun adventure.

Zooble had lost track of how many minutes they had been running. The convoluted scenery around them rivaled the Intermission in sheer sensory overload, a relentless assault of overwhelming colors and flashing lights. 

After the Best Character Awards fiasco, Caine had seemed… different. More distant. For days afterward, the adventures followed what Zooble could only describe as the rule of minimum effort. A beach day. A simple stroll through the park. Fishing in the deeper parts of the digital lake. Zooble didn’t mind calm adventures, on the contrary, they actively encouraged them. Still, they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was deeply out of place. Caine spoke in the flattest tone they had ever heard from him, as though his voice were being filtered through some cheap automated translator. Zooble did their best to enjoy the simplicity. The Digital Circus thrived on saturation, on explosions, chaos, and characters that looked like the result of violently spinning a chromatic wheel, so the lack of visual assault should have been welcome.

And yet…

Everything felt wrong. Uneasy. It was impossible to relax completely.

Zooble had even tried to ask Caine what the point of all of this was. He ignored them outright. Each adventure was announced with the forced excitement of someone speed-running an unpaid chore, opening a portal and disappearing immediately afterward.

In his apparent attempt to invest the least possible amount of effort, Caine began promoting adventures that reused the circus grounds themselves.

Today’s destination was the digital carnival.

Only, Zooble wished he had stuck with his calm-adventure phase.

Because this time, the lack of effort felt different.

The adventure no longer radiated indifference, it carried something darker. Resentment, perhaps. It still had the same rushed, half-hearted construction as the park outing, but now that carelessness had become actively dangerous. It was supposed to be some kind of escape room. Fine. Zooble could work with that. What they couldn’t work with was how badly it was made. 

The hints read as if a generative AI model had vomited out incoherent nonsense. When they did manage to decipher one of the riddles, nothing happened, as if Caine had forgotten to properly configure half the environment. At this point, they were no longer solving puzzles so much as brute-forcing their way forward, at Jax’s enthusiastic suggestion, much as Zooble despised the rabbit’s violent tendencies, they couldn’t deny that there was no fair or logical way to escape that carnival house.

Things became downright unbearable when they stepped on a trap.

A rug. No floor beneath it.

They plunged downward.

Their plastic parts clattered violently against the slide’s surface, and through the noise, Zooble caught the cut-off scream of Gangle calling their name. At least she hadn’t fallen too, the drop would have probably shattered her comedy mask.

“[$&%#]!”

Zooble took a few seconds to suck in a deep breath, curse the entire situation, and figure out where the [$&%#] they had landed.

They tried to recall the original instructions given by the mannequin NPC. The escape route was through a skylight in the attic, which, for some incomprehensible reason, counted as the third floor. They had just found the stairs leading up when they triggered the rug trap (Dirty movement on Caine’s behalf, to be honest).

Which meant they were back on the first floor.

Again.

They had to clear the entire damn house again.

Except… the more they examined their surroundings, the more dread crept in.

They had already torn apart the first floor. None of this matched what they remembered. If it had, they could have simply used the exits they had violently created earlier. This place, however, didn’t even look like part of the original structure. Mirrors lined the walls, dozens of them, angled and arranged to create the illusion of endless space. Infinity stretched in every direction. It was nearly impossible to tell where the corridors ended and where the glass began. The difference between passageways and reflective traps could only be discerned by touch.

They had to get out.

All of them did, in fact. The portal wouldn’t appear until everyone escaped. And by now, Zooble knew better than to play by the rules.

With an exhausted sigh, they grabbed one of their arms and used it as a blunt weapon, shattering mirrors in their path without giving them a second glance. They advanced carefully. While pain was fictional, it didn’t make it any less unpleasant, and if they could avoid smashing into the glass, they would.

The idea of looking at themselves in a broken mirror was… quite an uncomfortable prospect.

It would have been so easy, if that was the only thing to do; walk out of the mirror maze.

But of course it wasn’t that easy.

They had only managed to take a few steps when they heard the loud, boisterous music start to play. The lights dimmed, the only source of brilliance was the mirror edges, which now shone with an awfully colorful variation of neon lights. 

Fine, a sensory overload would make this even more annoying, but they could deal with this. 

They were Zooble, they could-

That’s when they heard it.

Their pulse spiked, an unreal, crushing sensation in their chest. An otherworldly shriek tore through the static silence of the room. They turned in every direction, desperate to locate the source. That was when they saw it: a horrendous creature that Zooble, as an educated guess (based on Pomni’s words), recognized as the cursed entity haunting the Mildenhall Manor.

What a horrible moment to recycle assets.

Zooble wasn’t sure if it was coming for them, or if it was only a mirror illusion. They ran anyway. They tried to stick to their original strategy, now fueled by adrenaline and urgency, clinging to the fact that crashing into the mirrors would only slow them down.

That was how they died the first time.

While silently walking through the maze, they failed to notice the creature beside them. With a shriek, Zooble’s vision was swallowed by blinding static. Then, instantly, they reappeared in a different place, a few meters above the floor, only to complete the humiliation by falling gracelessly onto it.

When they opened their eyes, they realized they had been sent back to the starting point. They recognized it immediately: the ceiling trap loomed overhead, the same one they had fallen from.

They told themselves what Gangle had told them.

They were Zooble.

They could deal with this.

They couldn’t.

Fuck. They really couldn’t.

Each time the creature even brushed against them, the shriek, the static, and the ceiling trap returned, stripping away every amount of progress they had fought for. That was problem number one.

Problem number two was worse.

After the first run, they noticed their arm was missing, the same arm they used to break mirrors. Each time the creature caught them, their avatar was only relocated, not reset.

And this wouldn’t have mattered so much if the impact after each relocation hadn’t been so brutal.

On their third reset, their eye popped loose from its polygonal head when they hit the floor. As they scrambled to grab it, they caught sight of the creature behind them, or maybe its reflection. Zooble didn’t wait long enough to find out. They bolted, leaving the eye behind.

First, their eye.

Then one antenna.

Then the other.

On their thirteenth reset, they lost their second arm.

Reset twenty-nine: their left leg.

Zooble had lost count of how many times the creature had caught them. Still, the hollow rush of terror flooding their chest never dulled. They were hyperventilating now, hopping desperately, searching for an exit they barely believed existed.

Their original strategy had been abandoned long ago. Now, their only choice was to crash through mirrors, one after another. The pain (artificial as it was) was beginning to break them.

That was when they saw it.

A window.

Zooble forgot how to breathe as they ran. They tripped, skidded across the floor, and crawled toward it. For one reckless second, they ignored the creature entirely.

All they wanted was out.

So close.

They were so close.

They lunged, and the only thing that greeted them was the deafening sound of shattering glass.

Not the window.

A mirror.

Zooble stared at the place where the window should have been. It was still there, glowing softly in the fractured reflections, untouched and unreachable. Like a cruel joke.

Something inside them snapped.

They threw themselves at every mirror in the area. One of them had to be real. One of them had to lead out.

There had to be a way out.

When they crashed into the final mirror and slammed violently onto the floor for what felt like the hundredth time, their remaining leg tore free from their plastic body. They collapsed in a heap, helpless, the false window reflected endlessly around them, mocking them, torturing them. 

“CAINE, LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

Their voice cracked. They dragged themselves forward, rubbing their head against the floor, sobbing, crawling without limbs, without balance, without dignity. Every movement was agony. Every second stretched into eternity.

Hot tears blurred their vision as they clawed uselessly for their missing leg.

If only it wasn’t for this horribly designed body.

If only Caine didn’t hate them so much.

If only he’d given them something they could actually feel good in.

If only.

If only.

If only this body was good.

They had stopped breathing, they knew because their vision had begun to spiral with their head. A whirlwind of colors drained what little sanity they had left, second by second. At this point, they weren’t sure if the creature was still near, or if its shriek had simply looped itself permanently inside their mind.

Peace.

For a brief instant, the overwhelming colors, the torturous sounds, and the crushing weight of self-hatred dimmed. They faded into the background, muffled and distant.

How delightful.

How desperately they wished to stay like this.

Maybe they would.

“Zooble!”

The cry shattered the fragile, psychedelic bubble surrounding them.

How awful, they thought, to be dragged back into reality.

Still, reality felt kinder when they were in Gangle’s arms.

Gangle held their limbless body with equal parts worry, fear, and devotion, whispering soft, uncertain reassurances. Zooble wasn’t sure if she was trying to comfort them or herself. Either way, they accepted it with quiet gratitude.

They were perhaps a little too far gone to fully process what happened next. Jax and Pomni worked together, Jax swinging Pomni through the maze to shatter mirrors in their path. Somewhere else, in a way Zooble barely understood, Kinger deciphered the maze itself, perhaps it took a fractured mind to solve a fractured place. Ragatha kept watch for the creature, guiding them all forward, keeping them together.

But what Zooble remembered most was the way Gangle held them.

At Kinger’s suggestion, Zooble left their body behind (Jax tossing it toward the creature, they were too numb to resent him for it). For someone so fragile, Gangle cradled their head with fierce care, tying one of her ribbons around it, as though it were something precious.

And maybe it was.

Soon, with everyone’s help, they escaped the maze. They found themselves back on the second floor. It wasn’t over yet, but at the very least, they were together. 

Pomni, Jax, and Ragatha led the way. Zooble and Gangle lingered behind, walking in shared silence.

A silence Zooble felt compelled to break.

“Thank you… for coming back for me” they said quietly.

“I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine” Gangle replied, as if it were the most obvious truth in the world.

“Yeah…”

Oh, how good it felt to be looked after.

“You hold me as if I were the lake’s treasure,” Zooble joked, trying to ease the tension still clinging to them both.

“Well,” Gangle said, smiling softly, “you are valuable to me.”

Zooble let the words settle.

Their body still felt wrong. Awkward. Inconvenient. A collection of parts that never quite fit the way they were supposed to. That wasn’t something they could change.

But maybe they didn’t have to fight it, either.

Maybe they could just… ignore it. Work around it.

After all, their body could change. It could bend, twist, and come apart in ways no one else’s could. It let them rest in Gangle’s arms, let them tilt their head back and look up at her face. Let them feel (if only faintly) the comfort of being held.

And that wasn’t nothing.

Zooble glanced up at her, their voice quieter than before. “I never answered you… but I do make that choice too…it always isn’t easy, but it helps me get closer to the idea that… maybe this body doesn’t suck that much ”

Gangle blinked. Then smiled. “Only maybe?”

“Only maybe,” Zooble echoed, a small huff of laughter escaping them. “But I think I’d like to do this more often.”

“Do what?”

“This,” they said, shifting slightly in her arms. “Being held. Looking up at you. It’s… nice.”

Gangle smiled shyly, and her grip tightened just a little, careful and warm.

Shootout to Silas for reviewing and approving the Jax™ 😌

Also, if anyone has a question about why Pomni's body looks cropped, I don't know the answer. Pretend it's a sticker design please 💀.

I don't know guys, I made a lot of mistakes while making this drawing. For example, I only noticed after adding my signature that Pomni's right arm looked strange ???

Like, her arm was supposed to be behind Jax???