Credits
Open your eyes.
I don't quite know what, but somehow everyone here just… disappeared. The girl started to absent-mindedly think to herself about the situation she was in.
She remembered that she had awoken from a long slumber. So why was everyone gone? There wasn't even a bed, or any buildings, around her. In their place, growing all over the ground her back lay on, was a bed of blooming flowers.
"I'm sorry."
She apologized to the flowers and stood up. As she'd turned in her sleep, the stems of the sunflowers had broken. Without anything she could do in return, she thought for a bit, and began to sing a restrained chant.
Bibidi-babidi-boop, and so on. As she sang these phrases — a trick that could deceive a child, and in this case, it was definitely doing that — the sunflowers mended and stood up. She smiled. Believing the lies of the adults, the reality-bender who called herself the Witch Child laughed to herself.
… Now that the flowers have been restored, what should she do next? She didn't know, so she decided to look around the surroundings. Though she saw nothing but flowers nearby, something was visible in the distance. Was it a building? To her, shorter than the sunflowers, it may as well be. But she now knew that there was nothing of note here. Nobody was here, or so it seemed.
Ba-dump. At the loneliness she felt, the girl's little heart jumped ever so slightly. Is anyone here? Putting those words to her chest, she began to run straight through the field of sunflowers. Sunflowers, sunflowers, rubble, sunflowers. Facing the building she thought she saw, she ran, and eventually the sunflowers stopped.
Ah, and then, there was nothing.
Her view, which had been blocked by the yellow flowers, opened up, and she could see further now. But all she could see was fields of all different sorts of flowers, continuing to the horizon.
She didn't know. She didn't know that while she was sleeping, the world had predicted its end, and then the world had ended as it predicted, and everything was destroyed. She didn't know the Foundation that had held her captive had not stopped doing so.
And so she fell to the ground. This loneliness was far too weighty for an eight-year-old girl. Yes, that's why — who would blame her for constructing her own "fairy tale"?
"Birdie" — with that, her imagination became reality, and by her side a sky blue bird appeared and flew around.
Before, the flower fields had seemed fantastic. She had to add onto it.
"Sheep," she wished, and soon enough she was lying down on a living bed of wool.
And so, to this canvas on which the background had been painted, she added details.
"Ah, no more…" she wished, and all was well.
The present, reality, truth. She who was afraid of living now believed convenient lies. Somehow, she didn't think of the question of how her fantasy was floating over into reality. And so —
— Forget it all, I'm tired.
"…?"
This was after the end of the world. Born from the machine of rejuvenation, the Mobile Task Force that would execute "Procedure Lazarus-01" would be a bit perplexed when they retrieved that object. It was written in the "Arca" that this object was an extremely dangerous reality warper, able to actively and strongly alter reality around it, and so they took countermeasures and lined up their numbers.
But what was really there was a blue bird flying through the clear sky decorated with a rainbow, fields of flowers gently swaying in the wind… a scene like a fairy tale.
And in the middle of it all was just a girl, lying on the ground.