Just as she tried to refuse, the doorbell rang.
Putting the conversation on hold, Mika Furutsuki went to the door and opened it.
“Onee-sama!”
The door was yanked out of her hand, and a girl came in. The girl’s face looked exactly like hers, but she was even more petite. It was Miya Furutsuki, Mika Furutsuki’s sister, who she hadn’t seen since their parents divorced.
“Miya-chan?! What are you doing here?”
Mika Furutsuki was very confused.
“What am I doing here? I should ask you the same thing! I came to bring you back to your senses! You’re possessed by a demon! The demon called ‘idol’! Idol! Oh, what a loathsome word. Idols destroyed our family and now they’re trying to destroy you! Come, Onee-sama. It isn’t too late! Your office going under was a sign! Quit this idol nonsense and come back to the real world!”
Miya Furutsuki spoke with a passion. Convinced idols had caused her parents’ divorce, she had sworn to eradicate all idols from this world. When she’d heard her sister was trying to be an idol, she’d been unable to sit idly by.
“Mika-chan, company?” Maori Niizono had grown tired of waiting and joined them at the door.
“Hello. I’m Mika-onee-sama’s sister, Miya Furutsuki.”
“Mika-chan, you have a sister?”
“Yeah... We haven’t seen each other since our parents divorced in middle school.”
“But my heart has always been with you, Onee-sama. So, who is this other person?”
“I’m Maori Niizono. Mika-chan and I were idols together in high school.”
“Idols...?” Miya Furutsuki’s teeth ground together. “So you’re the one who destroyed Onee-sama!”
“Whaaat?!” Maori Niizono was naturally flabbergasted.
“Onee-sama was supposed to go to a decent college, get a decent job, get married, and have a good life! But, instead! Oh! She’s living alone and depressed in this awful, dirty room, her life in shambles! She’s a failure! By any measure!”
“Not by mine,” Maori Niizono replied, quietly.
“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She is not a failure. I will provide for her.”
It took several seconds for the meaning of these words to permeate Miya Furutsuki’s head.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I am.”
“...fuck off!” Miya Furutsuki kicked the wall so hard a flower vase fell off a shelf and shattered. “First you drive Onee-sama to ruin, and now you’re turning her into your personal plaything?! Huh?! I bet you’ll get bored and abandon her down the road! You too, Onee-sama! You’re going to just leech off this woman? How low are you willing to sink? Get a grip! Everyone’s sick of your idol bullshit! Take a look at reality for once!”
Miya Furutsuki raged like a woman possessed. Every bit the kind of angry, fight-the-power youth that people on the news were so scared of.
“Hah?! What does that even mean? Why should I have to answer to you?”
Meanwhile, Maori Niizono was not the type of person to stand there and take it. Sparks flew in the air between them. Lightning might have struck them at any moment.
Before things could come to blows, Mika Furutsuki stepped in between them.
“...get out,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. It was said quietly, but with a fierce will.
“But, Mika-chan!”
“Onee-sama...”
Both instantly forgot to be angry and tried to calm her down.
“I said, get out!”
She shoved both of them out the door and locked it behind them. She heard them pounding on the door, but ignored it.
“Look at reality, huh?”
Mika Furutsuki smiled wanly. Her heart broke with an audible snap. Maori Niizono’s proposal had shattered her pride, and Miya Furutsuki’s declaration had forced her to recognize her own lack of talent. Combined, they revealed the reality of her current situation.
That’s right. This was reality. She would never be an idol. The harder she worked for the impossible, the deeper her wounds would become. It was time to stop. Time to end it. To end it all.
Everything that had once shone brightly within Mika Furutsuki had gone out. All the shining light that should have grown within her from idols and her idol activities was gone.
If she could not be an idol, then it was all over. She had nowhere else to go.
Mika Furutsuki carried a chair out to her tiny veranda and stepped onto it. The view before her was gorgeous. It was an ordinary city night, just narrow streets and vacant lots lit by the streetlights, but she felt the beauty of it. She’d stepped onto this veranda any number of times, but never before had the view seemed so beautiful to her.
She was glad that she could end things feeling this good.
Mika Furutsuki let out a satisfied sigh and threw herself off the veranda.
Her body fell, obeying the laws of gravitational acceleration. She fell seven stories, roughly 21 meters, so by the time she landed she was going approximately 70kph, about the same as if she’d been thrown from a car on the highway. The shock to her body ruptured blood vessels and destroyed brain cells. For a moment she experienced the worst — and last — pain of her life, and then it was gone.
Mika Furutsuki was dead.
But her death was not the end. It was the starting line. This is where the Idol begins.
Maori Niizono and Miya Furutsuki heard the sound of Mika Furutsuki’s death. Horrified, they ran out to the front road and found her lying there, covered in blood. She looked less like a human being and more like a pile of garbage that had been disposed of improperly. Maori Niizono wasn’t going to med school for nothing; she lifted up the chin and checked for respiration, seeing if she was conscious. Her actions seemed calm, but her mind was a total blank. Her classes had pounded these actions into her so much she could do them without thinking. Meanwhile, Miya Furutsuki didn’t even manage to call for help. She was overwhelmed with a feeling of powerlessness. There was nothing anyone without medical training could do.
An ambulance came blaring in, the sound of the siren distorted by the doppler effect. The EMTs loaded Mika Furutsuki into the back. Miya Furutsuki rode with her as her family member with Maori Niizono joining her, insisting she was also family.
Her body was taken to one of the hospitals run by Maori Niizono’s parents. There was no particular reason why that hospital was chosen. Of the nearby hospitals, that was the only one ready to take a patient. But this coincidence would change the fate of the universe.
“Time of death.”
The declaration came after running her through the most advanced resuscitation techniques. The doctor in charge had been convinced from the start that these efforts were futile, and they were.
When the two of them heard the news, they both went slack-jawed. They must have looked extremely stupid, but when someone you love dies unexpectedly, that’s the face you make.
Mika Furutsuki’s death was enough to drive both of them mad. Maori Niizono was the first to snap.
“Daddy! Please!”
She phoned her parents, who ran the hospital. They doted on her and accepted her request without a second’s thought. She requested they pull the doctors from the operating room and let her in, instead.
Madness caused by the death of a close friend would drive most people in a more spiritual direction. They might claim to hear voices from the afterlife or see ghosts. But she was a scientist and only believed in the physical world she could observe. When materialists like that go mad, they place all their faith in technology. Maori Niizono was convinced that future technology would be able to revive Mika Furutsuki. She had no choice but to believe this. Anything else would plunge her into the depths of despair.
But if her body was cremated, even if there were a chance that technology could save her sometime in the future, that chance would be gone. Thousands of years would pass without the technology to rebuild a body from ash. The second law of thermodynamics stood firmly in the way. She had to preserve the body no matter what, especially the brain, for several decades. And Maori Niizono had a way to make that happen.
She prepared a razor, a scalpel, an electric drill, and an electric saw. She started with the razor.
“Sorry, Mika-chan,” she muttered.
She began shaving Mika Furutsuki’s hair. Her trademark twin tails fell ruthlessly to the floor. The exposed skin on her scalp was already starting to darken; oxygenation of the dead skin cells was turning the color of her beautiful pale skin to a dull brown.