What the...?
Surrounded by darkness, she was extremely confused.
She felt something, blearily. At first, she hadn’t been sure she felt anything. But, gradually, it had come into focus. This was pain. As her pain came into focus, her other senses joined it. They provided seasoning to a solid foundation of pain. Lights, sounds, smells. As her senses woke, so did her sense of self. Remembering that she once had something she called herself, she clutched desperately at it. If she let it go again, she feared her senses would disintegrate and she’d plunge back to the bottom of that dark sea.
Her sight grew clearer. Fragments of information coalesced into a single image. She realized this was the world outside her.
It was a dimly-lit room. An operating chamber? There was a lot of medical equipment around but it was all covered in dust and didn’t seem to have been used any time recently.
She heard a voice.
“Mika-chan, can you see?”
There was a person in front of her. No... She wasn’t certain it could be called a person. From the face alone, it appeared to be a middle-aged woman. But the rest of her was less recognizable. There were a number of pipes running out of her. Pipes sticking out of her chest, belly, and back. Dozens of pipes, each nearly three centimeters wide, running into her body. And the connections between the pipes and her body were less than perfect, so every now and then gross, dark red fluids would ooze out of the gaps around them. Instead of legs, she had two prosthetics with wheels on the ends, and these wheels were spinning uselessly with a hideous whirring sound. But the freakiest part was her head. Her head was missing a piece. There was a tennis ball sized depression on her right temple. It looked like a clumsy surgery had been performed — it was covered with all sorts of scabs.
Despite this freakish exterior, when she looked at the older woman’s face, Mika Furutsuki felt something. Something warm.
“Maorin...?”
She remembered. She remembered who she was. She remembered what she’d done. Her beloved Maori Niizono. The older woman in front of her was Maori Niizono. Her appearance may have changed drastically, but her face was still recognizable. And her own name was Mika Furutsuki. A girl who had died — who had lost to the shattered dreams of being an idol.
“Maori, where am I? What happened to you? How am I...?”
Mika Furutsuki unleashed a volley of questions. Then she realized just how much her voice had changed, and trailed off, stunned. What a voice. It was like someone had forcibly trained a frog, turning it into a musical instrument.
“Mika-chan, what’s the last thing you remember?” Maori Niizono asked, her voice gentle.
“I killed myself. I was so lost. Before I knew it, I was falling from the balcony...”
At the time, nothing had made sense any more. Her struggle to make ends meet, Maori Niizono’s proposal, the shock of her sister appearing... It had all been too much, and having reality shoved in her face had caused her to explode.
“Mika-chan, you died that day.”
Mika Furutsuki was confused. Died? Died, how? She was right here, thinking. The only conclusion she could draw from that fact was that she was still alive, which meant she hadn’t died. She argued as much.
“No, you died. You died, and then came back to life. Mika-chan, look in this mirror.”
A mirror was thrust before Mika Furutsuki’s eyes. What was reflected in it should have been in the shape of herself. A cute girl with twintails bound by ribbons. Instead...
A butcher’s trash pile — that was the closest comparison she could make. What her eyes saw was a pile of dangling organs, hanging there like Christmas tree decorations. Her intestines hung loose, kidneys dumped carelessly in the middle. Between the intestinal tubes she could catch glimpses of thin metallic cords endlessly twitch twitch twitch twitching like horsehair worms. A round, transparent sphere, like a crystal ball, was stuck to the dangling bowels. Exposed muscles emerged from the crystal ball, supporting the intestines like duct tape. Surprisingly, the crystal ball was floating in mid-air, so none of the intestines touched the ground. Above the crystal ball was something puffed up, like a balloon; it seemed like this was keeping the crystal ball aloft. The balloon was made of flesh. Arteries and veins ran across it like a net, and occasionally it shifted like it was breathing. The balloon was a stomach. A stomach puffed up to its limits. The thing pumping the stomach full was a set of lungs. Lungs were clinging to the back of the stomach like a parasite, pushing air into it.
Mika Furutsuki searched desperately for a face. At her lowest points, smiling at her own face had always helped her feel better. But there was no face anywhere. All she found was a reddish-brown brain inside the crystal ball, and a lonely pair of eyeballs moving next to it.
“What is this? Disgusting modern art?”
Mika Furutsuki spoke without emotion. Her voice emerged from somewhere in the depths of the intestinal heap.
“That’s you, Mika-chan!” Maori Niizono said, blissfully. “I made you! You’re my masterpiece. I brought you back from the dead!”
Mika Furutsuki looked at the mirror again — at the organ exhibition. This is me?
“Aren’t you adorable? You’re so cute! You can be an idol again...”
Cute? This? No face or skin, just a heap of dismembered body parts?
Yet Mika Furutsuki understood. She might be a gory pile of body parts, but it was still her, and she was still cute.
Why did she think that? No normal person would. In fact, part of Mika Furutsuki’s brain was actually Maori Niizono’s brain. Part of the frozen brain had been damaged. To replace the damaged section, Maori Niizono had transplanted part of her own brain to Mika Furutsuki. By doing so, Maori Niizono’s obsessive love for her friend had become a part of Mika Furutsuki. The result was that Mika Furutsuki now loved herself obsessively, no matter what condition she was in.
Cute... Adorable... How can anything be so cute... Staring at herself in the mirror, Mika Furutsuki repeated these words, over and over, feelings of love washing through her. She remembered how Maori Niizono had encouraged her. She’d been able to pursue her dreams of being an idol because of her. She may have been tricked by her talent office, and temporarily lost her way so badly she killed herself, but so what? It all worked out. Life has its ups and downs. So what if she died once or twice? You grow as strong as the number of tears you shed. April showers bring May flowers and everything has a silver lining. This was no reason to give up on her dream! She was going to be an idol. The best idol in the universe!
Something sparked within Mika Furutsuki’s brain. With part of Maori Niizono’s brain inside of her, the two brains were like a fish in water — like a Tetris block slotted right into place. Maori Niizono gave Mika Furutsuki a foundation for living. Mika Furutsuki finally had a reason to be alive, and that reason was now a part of her.
“Maorin!” Mika Furutsuki cried. “Tell me! How do I move this body! I want to make it dance! I want to sing! I want to be an idol! No matter what happens, I must take the stage!”
“Mika-chan...!” Maori Niizono was on the verge of tears. She was so happy.
She’d spent decades toiling to resurrect Mika Furutsuki, and somewhere deep in her heart she’d wondered if bringing her back from suicide was really the right thing to do. Every night she’d been unable to sleep, worried that she’d kill herself again the moment she came back to life. She’d killed a lot of people, cut them open, harvested their organs and made a really cute body for Mika Furutsuki, but she was still anxious. Would Mika-chan be satisfied with it? Would she resume her idol activities? Full of doubt, she’d finally brought her back, and to her great joy, she was able to meet Mika Furutsuki again, and found her full of the hopes and dreams of being an idol.
Now, as to what lessons Mika Furutsuki could take in this body, that was an extremely interesting problem, but first, we had better get our terminology straight. From this point on, her talents as an idol will bloom. In recognition of her status as an idol, we’ll call her the 2nd Generation Idol. Mika Furutsuki before her suicide was the 1st Generation Idol, and after she came back to life she became the 2nd Generation Idol.
Under Maori Niizono’s guidance, the 2nd Generation Idol threw herself into her training. Her core methods of movement involved floating with her stomach and expelling air with her lungs. These faint methods of propulsion gave her a top speed of, at best, three kilometers per hour.
Corrosive gas would swell up her stomach, allowing it to rise higher in the air. This functionality was quite well done, and in theory would allow her to go as high as the stratosphere. Food was digested in vitro. Digestive fluids were excreted directly from the intestines, and the food was absorbed after it was dissolved. The swarms of jellyfish drifting across the sky had given the 2nd Generation Idol this means of living. She was quite weak, but she did have ways of defending herself — her nerve jack cables. They were a pair of cords sharpened like a jellyfish’s poison stingers. These were the spinal nerves from the original Mika Furutsuki. If she stabbed the brain of another living thing with these jacks, she could take over their mind, controlling them as she pleased. Even better, she could alter their immune system, allowing any and all of their body parts to function as if they were her own. Use of this function would allow her to avoid death by natural causes; she was functionally immortal. Truly an innovative organ. Naturally, there were Novum Organum living symbiotically within her cells, granting her resistance to UV rays and radiation.