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It is bitterly cold outside, and Pomni is less than happy. Every step is a struggle as she shambles in the snow, struggling to breathe through the cloth wrapped around her head to protect her face. This fabric is soaked in her own snot and the condensation of her heaving breaths.
She hates this. This may be one of the worst adventures Caine has had them go on yet.
It’s supposed to be a pretty, scenic nature hike, but there’s snow everywhere, and the path is up a slope. A hill. More like a mountain to Pomni.
She’s never been much of a hiker. Or an outdoorsy person. She much prefers to stay indoors, where nature can’t try to kill her.
She doesn’t know how long they’ve been hiking, but by this point, she’s beyond exhausted. Every inch of her body hurts, she’s so cold her skin starts to burn even beneath her protective layers, and it’s so, so hard to breathe. She feels more like a zombie than an actual person, trundling sluggishly, one foot after the other.
“You okay back there?” Kinger calls. He seems to be having a whale of a time, along with Ragatha.
Pomni groans, her voice muffled by the wrapping over her mouth. She sniffles, trying to keep snot from dripping all over her face, but it’s becoming too much of an effort at this point.
“This is actually the worst,” Jax complains. His arms are wrapped around himself tightly, and whatever fur is visible through his winter clothes is frosted to a shade of icy white. For once, he’s wearing shoes, boots shoved on his rabbit feet to protect his paws from the snow.
Pomni can’t believe she’s doing it, but she nods in agreement, for once uniting with him over something. This is the worst. Having to slog up a mountainside is bad enough, but in the cold and snow? Absolutely awful.
They come to an incline in the trail, where the path arcs upward at a sharper angle. The earth has been iced over, turning it into a slippery, rocky slope. Pomni has to bite her tongue to keep from wailing in anguish.
It actually isn’t that big of a slope, but to her, when her feet ache and her knees wobble with every step, it may as well have been the Lhotse Face on Mount Everest. There’s a rather steep gully, prickly with pine trees and rocks, very close to this part of the path, and she worries that if they slip, they’ll fall into it.
“Well,” Ragatha says, taking charge of the situation. “Let’s get moving!”
Ragatha scales the slope like a mountain goat, making her way up to the top with seemingly zero difficulty. Kinger follows, and even though he looks to struggle a little bit more, he doesn’t make a big deal out of it.
Jax forces out a breath that clouds in front of his mouth. “Wonderful.”
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” Gangle says with a light shrug.
“Shut the f[@#$] up.”
“Oh.”
Zooble shoots a glare at Jax before following Ragatha and Kinger, shortly succeeded by Gangle.
It isn’t long until it’s Pomni’s turn, and it’s an embarrassing attempt. Her feet slide unsteadily, and a few rocks dislodge, tumbling their way back down.
She steps forward. Then, she takes another step. Her knees wobble uncontrollably. Her mind reels.
What would happen if she fell?
She wouldn’t just fall. She’d fall through the earth, forever, and not even her loved ones would find her remains because she’d be dead in a digital world. She’d be buried in this mountain, in this digital purgatory, for all eternity.
Then, gloved hands grab her by the arms and hoist her upward.
“I got you, hon,” Ragatha says. “You okay?”
“Mmmnnnuuuggghhh…” Pomni grunts.
Ragatha chuckles, then pats her shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll be over soon! Let’s keep going.”
So, they do.
It isn’t long until they make it out through a cluster of tall pine trees and are met with a magnificent sight. They break out into a plateau resembling a moonscape, which is bordered by teeth-shaped mountain ridges on all sides. At the center of it is a frozen lake. In the half-light peeking out through the grey clouds above, the sparkling sheen of ice makes it look like it’s actually made from some kind of rare crystal.
There’s a chorus of amazed coos from the group, but Pomni can’t appreciate the beauty. The air feels too thin up here, and it’s hard to breathe. Every breath is an ice knife dragging down her throat and puncturing her lungs. Her heart beats fast, fast, faster, and she grows more and more overwhelmed. She can’t do this. She can’t stay up here. She needs to leave.
Turning around, Pomni starts to hurry away, going back the way they came. Her breathing is too fast, and it hurts. The burn of the cold assaults her from every direction, prickling pins and needles that sink through her coverings and into her flesh.
Her legs shake as she descends the path, trying to make it back down the mountain as quickly as she can. She’s having a full panic attack at this point, and her anxiety muddles her thinking.
Whenever she tries to inhale, she only brings in plumes of ice that scrape the back of her throat. Yes, she can feel the icicles growing inside of her chest, sharp little crystals coming to life every time her lungs expand and contract, turning the pink muscles a worrying shade of blue.
Shivering quickly consumes Pomni from head-to-toe. Her teeth are clattering, and she’s sure her brain will rattle right out of her head. And it hurts, oh it hurts, the ice sinking deep into her bones, so cold it’s hot, stinging her flesh, giving new meaning to the word “freezer burn.”
Wait—
So cold she’s…
Hot.
She’s hot.
Pomni blinks bleary eyes. How much time has passed since she left the others behind? She thinks, but then realizes she doesn’t care because she’s hot, she’s hot, and she swears she’s burning up. She has to be- why else would there suddenly be such a shift in temperature?
She needs to get out of these clothes. She decides it right then and there- she’s going to burn alive if she doesn’t take all these oppressive layers off. They’re so heavy and so hot, and she needs to cool down.
Frozen fingers fumble for the zipper of her bulky red coat. Who’s idea was it to wear this again? It doesn’t matter. As long as it gets off she’ll be happy.
The zipper, crusted in little flakes of ice, comes undone, and Pomni wrestles the thing off. Instantly, the freezing cold wind billows into her, and she doesn’t care. It cools her down slightly but not enough. She’s still too hot.
It is then, as she’s struggling with her second jacket, that she hears something whistle through the wind. At first, she thinks it’s just the harsh breeze, but then it sounds again, clearer this time, and she realizes what it is.
“Pomni…”
It’s her mother’s voice.
“Pomni…”
“Mom?” Pomni raises her head. She perks up like an alerted deer, nearly toppling back over, throttled by the wind.
“Pomni… Pomni?”
“Mom!” Pomni calls. She abandons her effort to undress and shambles forward, her eyes wide. Mist and snow whips around, making it hard to see where she’s going. Tears well up in her eyes, and she feels like a small child lost in a corn maze, not knowing which way to go.
“Mom… Mom!”
A figure swims up through the sheets of white pelting down from the sky.
“Pomni.” That must be her mother. It just has to be. “Pomni, honey, it’s okay. I’m here now.”
Pomni sobs softly, relief flooding through her. She never realized until that moment just how much she misses her family back in the real world. “Mom. Please— I wanna go home. I hate this!”
She does. She really, really does. She’s tried to grin and bear it, she’s tried to accept it, but she just can’t. She wants to leave this digital hell and go back home. She wants to see her family again.
“Please take me home,” she begs. The tears on her cheeks sting her skin. She’s hot, then cold, then hot again, until she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be feeling in the blizzard.
“I will, darling,” her mother says, coming closer. “Just close your eyes and rest. When you wake up, you’ll be at home.”
“I— I can’t rest, Mom,” Pomni wheezes out. “It hurts.”
“Then take my hand, sweetheart,” her mother says. “Mommy will make the pain go away. I promise.”
Desperate to be free from this place, Pomni reaches out to the figure of her mother, her entire arm shaking with the weight of her shivering. And right before she can take the ghostly pale hand outstretched to her through the blizzard, she feels the ground suddenly disappear beneath one of her feet. She pitches forward, panics, and then hits the snow. A sharp, piercing pain tears up through her leg, and she notices that she’s stepped into a narrow crevasse split in the earth, which puts her into an extremely uncomfortable position with one leg dangling in a trench and the other stretched out behind her.
Pomni looks around, jarred out of her freeze-induced daze. The figure of her mother she thought she saw is nowhere in sight- she’s all alone. Not even the whisper of her mother’s voice remains.
Maybe it was never there to begin with.
Pomni is sitting on a rock she brushed the snow off of at the start of the trail, hunched over slightly. When the rest of the group emerges from the tree line, she tries not to look at them.
Now that the panic attack has worn off, she’s extremely embarrassed. She feels like she overreacted. Sure, it was cold, and it was getting hard to breathe, but she didn’t need to storm off like she did, especially when it could have been dangerous.
Snow crunches over to her. “How are you doing, honey? Are you okay?” It’s Ragatha.
Pomni shrugs a little. The lingering feeling of humiliation does not leave her, festering like the cold still icing her bones.
“Hey, it’s alright…” Ragatha gently puts an arm around Pomni. She’s warm, and Pomni can’t help but lean into her ever so slightly. “The altitude and the cold was too much for you. That’s nothing to be ashamed of!”
“I miss my mom.”
“Wh— huh?”
That statement takes Ragatha off guard, Pomni can tell. The doll sputters a bit, not expecting that. Ragatha blinks at her for a moment.
“What did you say, Pomni?” Ragatha asks, wondering if she heard her right.
“Nothing,” Pomni says. “It’s stupid. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no!” Ragatha assures her. “It’s not stupid!” She sits down beside Pomni on the rock. “You miss your mom?”
Hearing someone else say it makes Pomni even more embarrassed for a whole new reason. At her grown age, she shouldn’t be missing her parents like she’s a child. But she does. She really, really does, and it’s an ache that feels too great for her chest to contain.
She nods faintly.
Her shame must have been obvious because Ragatha says, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Pomni. It’s completely normal. Who wouldn’t miss their parents when they’re in our situation?”
“I thought…” Pomni starts tentatively. “I thought I heard her while I was walking back. And it was definitely just my head playing tricks on me because I was cold and overwhelmed, but…it made me realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen her and how much I miss her.”
“Oh, sweetheart…” There’s both sadness and sympathy in Ragatha’s voice, and Pomni wonders how many times the others mourn the separation between them and their own families. “I’m so sorry you have to feel this way. It’s… it’s hard.”
“Do you think we’ll ever get out and see our parents again?
The answer she gets is an honest one: “I don’t know. I can only hope.”
“Do… do you miss yours, too?” Pomni then asks hesitantly. “Your family?”
Ragatha gives a small, rueful smile. “Yeah. Every day,” she concurs. “I miss my family, I miss my friends…” She sighs. “I miss who I used to be. But…” She trails off for a moment, before looking up and shaking her head. “Nevermind. At least we have somewhat of a family here. A very weird, dysfunctional one, and it’ll never replace the real ones we had…but it’s something. And I’m grateful for that.”
Pomni looks over at the others. Jax throws a snowball at Gangle, laughs, and then is pelted directly in the face by a snowball thrown by Zooble, knocking him to the ground.
She leans her head against Ragatha’s shoulder. “Yeah. It’s better than nothing.”