“You’re—” Gently, I lay Kousuke down, and mussed at his hair one last time. Alone, I headed towards the mountain of TVs. It wasn’t far; I got there just by walking a bit. I looked up. “What? Who are you? Torii-san...?” Confused and anxious, I questioned it like an infant.
The thing that looked like Torii tilted its head even further. I didn’t feel like my words were getting through— this feeling, I remember it. “TV girl?” Impulsively, I spoke her name. That thing looked like a girl and a TV combined, I’ve encountered several times while in this alternate dimension. She was probably the same as the smartbug and the giant slug... I had thought that they were probably monsters that lived inside the amusement park, though. Apparently, its condition is strange, because we’re outside of the amusement park... And she looks like Torii. I waited a bit, but there was no response so I got impatient... It was the moment I opened my mouth again to speak.
“Ahh, right... Yeah, somehow, I understand,” said the girl, using Torii’s voice.
I didn’t actually think she’d reply, so I stepped back, startled. It looks like I established dialogue with the person inside the TV screen. “Uhh, you’re Torii-san, right?” I asked uncertainly.
“It’s been so long, I can’t remember clearly...” she mused. “Ah, that’s right. It’s like this, yeah. I get it. It’s fine. Wait a bit, even if you say that there might not be anything I can do about it, though.” She was speaking somewhat brokenly, saying stuff that didn’t fit into a single conversation. It was like trying to pull on the antenna to fix things somehow when the signal for your TV is bad... She was making unfathomable movements, bending her arms and fingers around. Eventually, she looked at me again, her neck still bent at an angle. “It’s been a while since I’ve last had a conversation, really... It’s bothersome, after all. When you say TV girl, do you mean me? The people I met before called me PRIMADONNA, though.”
Primadonna? Ballet? I felt like our conversations weren’t meshing at all, and I became a little scared. I don’t want to have to talk to somebody who I can’t properly communicate with. It’s creepy.
“This is called, ‘Torii-san,’ you say?” She patted her body over and over, grumbling mysteriously. “Ahh, it’s fine. Even if you don’t answer the question, I understand. I borrowed this child’s body, for a bit.” She shifted into a posture that was as close as she could get to lying sprawled out on the mountain of TVs; what bad manners.
This impostor with the face of Torii— probably the TV girl— continued to talk unilaterally. “This is mine,” she said, “but there’s not much life left in it anymore... It’s going to die soon, so I can’t talk for long. So please don’t ask too many questions, okay?”
She’ll die soon. Certainly, Torii was heavily wounded, although I had thought that Kurashima finished her off already. Murder is incredibly stressful. Maybe he left her alone because he thought if he did she’d die eventually, anyway. And the TV girl is controlling Torii, who’s in that state?
Yawning, Torii turned away. The outside is the same, but the insides have been switched out. I guess it’s like she’s possessed, or something? This far outstrips my understanding, though. But at the very least, I can kind of talk to her. At the merry-go-round, the fires avoided TV girl. Could she possibly be someone important in this amusement park? Or something like that, maybe. If I negotiate well enough, she might be willing to let me outside. At the very least, I can stop being stuck, battered in this wasteland.
She told me not to ask her too many questions, but I couldn’t endure it and shouted, “What are you? What is this place? Hey, please tell me! What was that stuff, it’s cruel, I hate this! Get me home, let me out of here!”
“Be quiet... Don’t fuss, I’ll get you home properly.” Frowning at the noise, Torii made a gesture, like she was plugging her ears. It was as if she was a scolded child. “That amusement park, it’s like a feeding ground. A small world, made for us to eat you, like a dining table. When you die in your world, you guys get thrown into this— our world.” She talked brokenly about stuff that I found hard to understand. “This time, it’s an amusement park by chance. Depending on our tastes, as well as the people thrown in, the feeding grounds change. In one part of this world that stretches on infinitely, a limited dining table is built, and then appropriately managed until all those inside are eaten.”
“So this place is, as I thought... A world after death, or something like that?” I guessed. So if we die, we don’t go to heaven or hell— we go to this baffling alternate dimension. No, is this place heaven and/or hell? The world after death? There, the dead are devoured by bizarre monsters. I had thought that we weren’t the intended audience for this amusement park, but to think we were simply feed... So we were just like popcorn, or ice cream, or other foods that would be sold in an amusement park.
As one would expect, I wasn’t able to keep my cool, and Torii was watching me, with her head still tilted to the side. “You guys do that, too, right? Put a bug in a cage, and watch it until it dies?” she asked. “You call this ‘raising it.’ Or something like that, probably. It’s no fun if I just eat you straight away, you know? Although sometimes I fight and play with you.” She said something disgusting as if it was to be expected. “There are also times I just eat them quickly, too. This time, just a liiittle bit...I rewound, and threw you guys into the cage in a healthy state. Well, in the end, you guys didn’t really kill each other much, and mostly just sat still so it was boring, though.”
“What do you mean, ‘rewound?’” I felt some hope at the way she said it, so I endured the creepiness and asked. “Like, healing wounds? Or, reviving someone? If that’s the case, please, Kagamimori-san, Kousuke, and Torii are... Put them back the way they were! Bring them back to life, please!” Kurashima was the one who almost killed me, so honestly, there is a part of me that wants him to die already, but...I had hope that maybe we could go home without losing anything, with no one dying, if those things that were like a TV and a living thing mixed together had supernatural powers.
At the same time, I somehow understood that we were rewound just a little... It isn’t clear how rewinding actually works, though. For example, if we were rewound to the time just before we were caught in the fire... If our memories were rewound, too.
Various things start falling into place. I only remembered up until being bored in the store. The others also, at the shrine, Utena and Torii were attacked by Kurashima... Perhaps, if they were killed by him, they would have remembered that. If so, they would probably have been more wary of Kurashima. Even Utena probably wouldn’t have believed what Kurashima said, and have jumped.
We were rewound and lost various things, forgetting about them. That’s why we started from building up our relationships, with something easygoing like self-introductions. All because of a dumb reason like, ‘It’s more fun to watch if they’re healthy.’