I’m not Biologist,[citation needed] so I’m probably going to get a lot of this wrong, but bear with me for a minute. Stem cells are like the fundamental beginning of other cells. They don’t really have an identity themselves, other than what they can turn into. Kinda like Eevee. It doesn’t excel in anything on its own, but its versatility is its greatest asset. These cells then differentiate into their very specialized forms, like muscle cells, blood cells, neurons, and Umbreons. This is necessary for things to work—an organism needs to do various things, so it develops cells to do those things. Each cell has a purpose that it must fulfill, and they’re all different from each other. This is the natural process.

Anaplasia is when this happens backwards. A cell that was once fulfilling its purpose has started to de-differentiate. It’s going back to its generic, non-purposeful form. It’s like if your Vaporeon’s gills started falling off, or if your Espeon started losing its psychic powers. It’s a problem, to put it lightly. If it keeps going, the whole organism is just going to turn into a puddle of purposeless goop.

For Biologist, that was no longer a disease to avoid, but now a goal to achieve.

Rose thought it was funny when she put on my clothes. She was in the full getup, the yellow hoodie, black jeans, even my glasses. Rose said they didn’t look that loose on her, but I think she was just trying to be nice to me for once. Bunny didn’t take it so lightly. She was weary and on edge. She must have felt like Biologist was trying to take my place, now that I was dead.

“Come on Bunny, it’s still me. I’m not Mina, I’m just wearing her clothes. Nothing to be weirded out by.”

“...No” was all she responded with.

Biologist was sitting on my couch, watching my Youtube history. Oh shit, that’s probably how she came up with the dungeon thing. Anyways, she was also eating my food, listening to my music, and playing my games. For several hours. Rose didn’t want to ask what was going on, because she said that sort of felt like asking what a joke means after everyone has already laughed at it. After all, this was her plan; to kill me and revive me, so what was going on? Eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Biologist, what the hell are you doing?”

“Getting into character! Wait, I should bicker with you a little bit. You… mugwort.”

“Okay, that’s nice and all, but it’s not really human culture to start acting like someone after they died. In fact—and I cannot believe that I am the one saying this—it’s a little disturbing.”

“Oh, I apologize. I just thought it would help a bit.”

“To ease the mood?”

“To help change my perspective. This is what Mina was like. Not so much the Mina we saw, the public one, this was how she really was. What she did when she didn’t feel forced to do anything else.”

Suddenly, something clicked inside of Rose. Maybe it was some sort of psychic connection, or her amateur demonic abilities bearing fruit, or maybe just a weird guess. I thought it was a freakish long-shot, but she was right. She always knew Biologist could do this… she just wasn’t aware of how until right now.

“You know, out of everything Mina did, that made her her—I’m surprised this is what you’re doing.”

“Why is that? Did she not do these things?”

“No, you’re not wrong. But if someone asked me what Mina did in her spare time, I’d have an answer that’s much more characteristic of her than any of this.”

Biologist’s smiling face soured a bit. She realized Rose knew something was up. Okay, well, it was pretty damn obvious something was up, but she managed to pierce deeper into it than Bio was expecting.

“Don’t badger me. Biologist you can push around, but for a little bit, I’m Mina—and Mina doesn’t take any of your shit!”

“Oh yes, she absolutely does. Did you forget I intentionally traumatized her to use as a vessel for a demon?”

“Please, uh, don’t do that to me. I’m supposed to be angelic. That would cause a huge conflict of interest.”

“Then do it.”

“D-do what?”

“It. What Mina would be doing, right now. We both know what it is, but you aren’t doing it. You haven’t done it once this whole time.

“I, I suppose you’re correct… I’ve been having so much fun doing her relaxing things, that I forgot about her responsibilities. I’ve been selfish. I can’t believe this whole time, I haven’t fed Leo.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Bunny fed him already. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

There was a long pause of silence. Rose was a master of words, but she knew that their most powerful application was to withhold them. Rose would have stared her down for hours. Biologist was the first to speak.

“I’m scared. I’ve never been scared before. Actually scared. Because once I do this, it’s done. Just… over. I don’t even know if this will work, or if it’s the correct thing to do.”

Rose let her speak. She kept rambling on, turning into a mess.

“I could have shot her! I should have just done it when we met! It would have worked out so much better, for all of us! But I screwed up and didn’t listen. Why couldn’t I just do as I was told!”

“Because there was something better for you to do. At least, I think it’s better. Mina would too.”

That seemed to be what it took, to get Biologist to stand up. After taking a few moments to compose herself, silent as she wiped her tears with my hoodie sleeve, she started to walk up the stairs to my room. Rose followed behind her. Biologist hesitated to open my door, but somewhere, she found the courage.

Inside… was a mess. A hideous mess. It had gotten even worse since the last time I mentioned it. The carpet literally couldn’t be seen except for one tiny path to my bed. Every shelf, every cubby, every surface was completely covered in circuit boards and their parts. Wires crossing, alligator clips twisted in knots, strange chips and sensors pointing in every direction. My room was blanketed in a patchwork quilt of integrated circuits.

I think, just a little, I had finally come close to the machine I was trying to build. One that was transformative, it could take things in and put something much different out. That’s what all processes are, anyways. But this one was different, it could match things perfectly, or at least close enough to perfect. It was all hypothetical, of course. I imagined it like the Philosopher’s stone—a contraption that could turn lead into gold. Not physical lead into physical gold, but… something like that. I just didn’t know what domain I was operating on—or what I was alchemizing. But still, the logic was there. All those microcontrollers and logic gates and connections to various databanks of instructions had some kind of merit to them. I just didn’t have the tools to operate with.

But Biologist did.

In the center of the machine, near my bed, was the unfinished “core” of the thing. The nucleus of the cell. I just needed to plug something into it, to act as an interface to the “real world”, so that it wasn’t all just bits and bytes. Biologist got on my bed, standing on her knees, and opened the case it was in. The inside was all kinds of extender arms, servos, and low-powered motors. It was designed to give a bunch of tubes maximum flexibility and precision. The tubes were in varying diameter, and there were about two dozen of them. They were packed in the case in a pretty trypophobic way, like some inconsistently sized bugs had burrowed inside. Those holes were really ports, to put “implements” into. Implements to do whatever it took to turn your kind of lead into gold.

Biologist had a case of her own. She must have been studying this machine, somehow, sometime. That’s pretty scary, because I never saw her do it, and it’s in the room I sleep in. I can’t even imagine the hours it would take to interface with such a weirdly designed piece of machinery, did she do it all in my room while I was sleeping?

Inside the case were more electrical parts. These ones fit perfectly into the tubes of my core. They were literally designed to be used with my machine, despite the fact that I didn’t even know how to use it. But somehow, Biologist did.

“This whole thing—it’s something I’ve seen before. I know what she was trying to build. She couldn’t describe it, and I couldn’t either, at least to a human. And the poor thing, she though she was being really inventive and clever… I guess she was, in a way. But really, this machine is so, so common. They’re everywhere. It isn’t a new thing, she just put it in a weird form.”

Inside the first tube, she shoved in a large metal plug. On the end was a big silver mechanical arm. Not a human arm, but something like they use at a dentist’s, that they pull over you so they can grab their tools while working in your mouth. Actually, I think that’s exactly what it was. No idea where she got it, but someone must be selling them, since they exist.

One by one, she filled every tube in the core.

Two had hoses connected to tanks of gas.

One of them was like a needle used for sewing, with a small roll of yellow string..

Three were vacuum nozzles; a small one, a large one, and one specifically for liquids.

A few of them I thought were just weird silicon shapes that tapered to a point, but Rose said they actually had hundreds of microscopically-sized tools on the ends.

One had a roll of gauze.

Another one had a spray nozzle of disinfectant.

Fourteen had scalpels of different shapes and sizes.

Biologist, laying on my bed, began to make noises. Desperate high-pitched ones, like she was panicking. Something like she was trying to reason her way out, or avoid what was happening. It was hard to say, because they all came out half-formed and muffled by the mucus in her throat and sinuses.

Rose said a quick prayer for the angel, and mercifully flipped the power switch.

That’s all she told me. It’s all she could tell me, without turning pale and becoming unable to finish her sentence. But the following night, she left her laptop open on the couch when she went to the bathroom. Inside it was a document she had been trying to write for hours, but all it said was this:

“It’s said that a single human’s nervous system, its pulsating strings put end to end, could wrap around the world twice. Strings of fate, and strings of tissue. Polymers, chains, ropes. Bloody yarn tangled in knots, smell of ammonia. Purple tubes, spewing acid, a half-formed liver trying to escape. I no longer feel confident I know what a human is, or what shape it takes—but I am now confident in its resiliency. I hope to never experience the sensation of my bowels strung across my shelf, while my fingers are assembled from secreted liquids, and my neurons wrapped in a foul-smelling ball of cobwebs strung across the wall like a tapestry. I don’t want to live in a world where that could happen to me, one where I could survive my own dismemberment and reconstruction. But now, I know that I do.”