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You don’t know how long you’ve been here. Maybe years, maybe months, maybe only a matter of seconds, but you do know that whenever you see those girls on the stage, you feel imbued with something. It’s hard to explain, given that you don’t seem to be given to thought that often, but it’s almost like you live for those girls. Because of them.
They sparkle, up onstage, those girls. Two of them stay here all the time, the pigtailed girl and the blonde. You’ve never seen them leave, and they seem to have boundless energy, always calling out undistinguishable things to the crowd and twirling onstage. They sparkle just like the rest of this world, a little inhuman, shining among the light like teal and yellow gemstones.
But it’s those other four girls that only come around sometimes that are different. When you see them, your whole heart swells and lifts and you’re confused, because that’s new, and different. They don’t sparkle in the same way that those other two girls sparkle. It’s not as obvious, but by the third time they’ve come around you realize that they glow from the inside out. The brown-haired girl has a strong shine around her, the darker blue one sparkles charmingly, the light-blue girl has an elegant, graceful air, and the pink one has a bold glow, like jewels.
You wish you could get closer, your fingers itch to touch those girls’ shiny hair and milky skin, you want to see their shine up close.
But you can’t, that’s the problem. You don’t even know if you can try, if you can walk, because you’ve been stuck in the same position for as long as you can remember. The only thing corporeal about you is your hands, glued to the glowsticks, bobbing up and down endlessly. Sometimes they change color, and all you can do is stare as they wave side-to-side, up and down.
You keep trying to move, of course, sending all sorts of mental messages to yourself is to just get up and walk. It’s hopeless, though. And soon, you start to resent those girls for keeping you stuck here. Gradually, you begin to understand the senseless things they say, lines about bringing hope for a better tomorrow and creating a world where smiles are everywhere, and the thing you understand most is that they don’t mean it. How could they, when they see you and hundreds, thousands of carbon copies of you, waving their glowsticks in an endless nightmare? They just stand up there, doing nothing to save you, spreading their sparkly lies.
You watch them change, as they come time and time again. Over and over, dancing onstage, singing, telling everyone to smile and have hope until the sound is burned into your ears. You watch their hair grow long, watch them grow taller.
And then one day, they stop coming.
The pigtailed girl—you’ve learned what they call her, they call her Miku, and the blonde girl—Rin—they cry, of course. It’s different from the times you’ve seen the other girls cry, these tears are tears of joy, you think. They sit on the edge of the stage and bury their faces into their hands and cry, the most human thing you’ve seen them do, but when they’re done, they stand up and smile, and then they’re gone.
Your hands fall to the ground and you realize this feeling within you, your entire body aching and sore and sobbing for relief. You have a body now. You’re free. Maybe, perhaps—
One step forward. Another. It hurts, another foreign feeling, your body hurts after so long, but you’re walking, finally. You look around, free from the same view of the same stage you’ve seen since the beginning of time and existence.
There are multiple stages surrounding you. The lights are off, the first time you’ve seen things like this, and everything has lost a special quality to it. Without those sparkling girls, nothing else sparkles anymore, and you’ve been abandoned in this dark place of endless stages that will never shine again.
You walk forward, between alleyways that line the stages. There’s nothing else there, no other avatars that were standing beside you, doomed to waving their glowsticks endlessly. You can still see them, stuck in place in front of the stage, moving in synchronization even without any performers.
You walk, and walk, and walk. After a while, the stages start repeating, copying each other over and over. You haven’t found the end yet, but you hold out hope that sometime, you will reach an end. The music that used to play through somewhere fizzled out, eventually. As you walk further and further through this world, you can see the breakdown of the stages. Or maybe it’s just the passage of time.
Either way, you know you’ll keep walking until you find the end.