When Pomni enters the circus, Caine is too busy fussing over her arrival to see Kaufmo abstract. He takes Pomni right to her bedroom to decompress and get used to her surroundings, providing her with everything she might need. Think of it like bringing a kitten home and quarantining it in a single room until it’s not so nervous. It isn’t until Zooble breaks into Pomni’s room and scares the shit out of her to tell Caine that Kaufmo abstracted that he finds out. He leaves Pomni in her room, promising to check on her the next day. When he gets back to find Gangle and Kinger helping Ragatha’s glitching hand and Jax running around waving a red flag trying to keep Kaufmo away from the others, he reassures everyone that it will be ok, fixes Ragatha and asks everyone if they would like to say anything to Kaufmo before gently placing him in the cellar. (The cellar situation is subject to change as lore from the show continues to drop).

The next morning Zooble knocks on Pomni’s door to introduce themself and apologize for scaring her and invite her to Kaufmo’s funeral, which they are having that evening. Caine shows up to check on Pomni and tries to dissuade any “adventuring” until she feels fully stable in her room, Pomni urges to go to the funeral, asking Caine to join her. She felt comforted by Zooble’s forwardness and wants to make connections with the people here, even under such sad circumstances.

This is the first funeral Caine attends and it puts a lot of things in perspective for him, even if he does not fully understand most of it. He gets to see how much the humans love each other, how they miss each other when they’re gone, how they cling to each other for comfort. In a way, Kaufmo’s funeral makes Caine feel a little bit human. He treats the humans much softer after that, really worrying about how certain things will affect them and their relationships.

He craves the humans love as well, he wants them to love him as much as he loves them and after the funeral he realizes the key ingredient to love he was missing the whole time was tenderness. This causes him to feel incredibly guilty over the abstractions. The human’s hallway stresses him out, makes him sad and reminds him of his failures, of the people he lost because of his callousness.

He asks the humans if he can remove the pictures of the abstracted characters in the hallway and instead create a memorial room they can visit whenever they want. The humans think this is a lovely idea to honor their friends and keep the thought of abstraction separate from their daily lives.