The Story of a Macaron-Loving Girl Who Lived a Thousand Years Somehow.

She opened her eyes to a piercing blue sky. 

It was so brilliant as to make her eyes narrow a bit. 

It was a day like every other. 

Brilliant light shining on the world, a soothing early-summer wind - a day just the same as ever. 

“There’s something I want to tell you tomorrow…” 

As she fumed, she took a macaron from her pocket and munched down on it. 

This is the happy story of a macaron-loving fairytale girl. 

* 

She had been friends with Miko for a long time. 

And she thought that was how it would always be, until that day she went away. 

She asked around while eating macarons, “Hey, what happened?” 

“I don’t get it! Gimme a simpler explanation!” 

The cause of Miko’s disappearance was still being investigated, so at present, no one truly knew what had happened. 

“Will she be back tomorrow?” 

“The day after?” 

“Whaaa? I don’t want that! Do something!” 

The lab workers were all greatly bothered by the girl and refused to look her in the eye. 

Meanwhile, lab personnel continued their frantic investigation into the reason of Miko’s disappearance. 

About a year passed, and the world’s most brilliant minds finally ascertained the cause. 

Of course, it was a complex matter, so it was all gibberish to the girl. 

A date far, far, and further still than that into the future. 

Being that she was the most beautiful and smartest person in the whole lab, the people there were depressed to learn about the incident that befell her - as if they had lost the very sun itself. 

But she was only but a macaron-loving fairytale girl, and she didn’t quite understand what it all meant. 

“Hey, for real, where did Miko go?” 

Even after about seventeen repeated exchanges of this sort, the whimsical girl was unaffected. 

“Nnno, a thousand years into the future.” 

“I did! The truth is she went a thousand years into the future!” 

After asking about forty times, and punching lab workers in the stomach for no particular reason, she finally began to understand that Miko really had gone a thousand years into the future. 

Still, the girl felt that there must have been something to be done. 

Miko had never once broken a promise. So she would surely hear it from her somehow. 

She nibbled on a macaron and thought, for the time being, that she might try and live for a thousand years. 

* 

“So then. How should I go about living a thousand years?” 

“Um, well… Humans can’t live for that long.” 

“You’re not following this at all, are you?” 

They told her stuff about active enzymes, and the process of aging and whatnot, and all the reasons why humans can’t live for over a thousand years. 

These things went straight through her ears, and she continued to munch on macarons. 

But what she did know was that eating macarons made her happy. 

As she went around asking lab researchers, she eventually found a lone old man who told her this: 

“Really? I’ll try it!” 

It was some kind of fantastic experiment involving iPS cells and embryonic stem cells, and mucking about with telomeres to do this and that. 

Sure enough, the girl didn’t understand a single thing about the medicine, and she made no attempt to. 

“I’ll confront Miko a thousand years from now!” 

People from the organization donned in black suits said this, and she returned to her assigned room as told. 

She arrived at the door to her room and was given a card key by a lady in black. 

“It would be very bad if you lost this, so please, take good care of it.” 

Seeing the girl’s innocent smile, the lady in black looked a little worried. 

She pointed at a slot above the door handle. The girl nodded, and again enthusiastically replied, “I gotcha!” 

“Whoa, awesome! I haven’t seen so much manga in one place since that manga café yesterday!” 

“Thanks! You’re so nice, miss!” 

The girl spent until the next morning reading Doraemon. 

“Subjects, please report to the plaza.” 

A shrill voice rang out from a nearby speaker, putting an end to her Doraemon vigil. 

There, she found others who had drank the medicine yesterday. 

They looked at each other anxiously, but she just thought “Guess they all slept in late. Man, I should have slept in too…”, continuing to page through an issue of Doraemon with one hand. 

The days continued to go on in this way. 

The girl made many friends at the testing facility. 

There was the carefree Maa-chan. 

He loved to watch horses, and in the process of watching them run every day, somehow went completely broke, so he came here. He said that once the experiment was over and he had lots of money, he’d like to go watch the horses again. 

There was the usually-flustered Yuu-chan. 

They had clearly been self-inflicted, but the girl couldn’t have known that. So she figured that Satomi-chan must have fought a powerful foe indeed to have suffered such wounds, and thus always looked upon her with respect. She and Satomi-chan would laze around reading manga together, and the former would kindly watch over the latter. 

Every day after the experiment, everyone would gather in the girl’s room, play with the her pastel pink hair, and talk all night about their lives before they arrived. The girl would only ever talk about macarons, so she was just called Macaron-chan. 

The bustling congregation of over five hundred people had been reduced to an easily-countable number. 

Until then, the girl had thought people were all getting bored of the experiment and going home. 

He had no money; he had to stay here to the end. 

“Kei-kun has, unfortunately, died. But you were told all this in the beginning, weren’t you? You all signed up for this with full knowledge of what could happen.” 

“Yes. So please, stop low-kicking the other researchers.” 

She had never really listened to any explanations, or fully understood what was going on to begin with. That day, she drank the medicine with the others feeling a little more down than usual. 

Everyone laughed at this, and she said “Hey, don’t make fun of me!” with an embarrassed grin. 

Yuu-chan didn’t come to the testing site the next day. 

That was when the girl decided she would escape the facility. 

* 

The next day, she had made up her mind to escape. “Hey, we should go together!” 

“We’re going to stay until the end,” they said. 

The two sadly smiled at her. 

“I’m… I’m sorry. We were prepared for this, and we have our reasons for staying until we get the money. But we’ll be okay. We’ve made it this far, so we’ll survive to the end.” 

“Alright.” 

“It’s not goodbye! It’s see you later!” 

She was a little sad to leave them behind. 

She just hopped out a window, and without a look behind her, started running. 

She was running for her life, so she didn’t even notice them. 

One might wonder what they looked like at that moment. 

Or were they in tears? 

“Whaaat? Shouldn’t have bothered running…”, she thought to herself. 

It was just a feeling she had, but she finally began to recognize that she had indeed become immortal. 

She gave up on running then, and instead went on walking at a brisk pace for sixteen hours. 

This taught her that even if a girl is immortal, walking at a brisk pace for sixteen hours still makes one hungry. 

She kept walking aimlessly. 

None of the roads she walked had she seen before. 

She found signs, but they were full of names of places she’d never before seen nor heard of. She felt just a little lonely to be in such an unfamiliar place. 

However, it was more concerning to her that she was hungry. 

Of course, though, she wouldn’t die of hunger. No matter what happened, she was still immortal. 

So the girl began fishing through garbage cans. 

“What the heck…?” 

They all glanced at her, and some stopped, and talked amongst themselves, and took pictures. 

It was an unbelievably out-of-the-ordinary event that they suddenly found before them, so it was an understandable reaction. 

Wholly ignorant to the people around her, she dug around in the trash next to a sweets shop, happily eating the leftovers. 

A curious old man appeared about two weeks after the girl took up her hobo life. 

“I can’t die, but I feel like I’m going to when I’m hungry, so I’m looking for food,” she cheerfully told him. 

“This is really tasty!” 

Of course, the girl was immortal, so she could subsist solely on concrete and it wouldn’t ruin her body at all. 

“Eat this.” 

Having not seen a macaron in a while, the girl was very enthused, and did a spin in place. 

“Ahaha, of course! You’re on the verge of death, I’ll bet.” 

“What a strange girl…” 

“Well, I don’t have any on me, but I might have some at home,” he said with a bitter smile, scratching his head. 

She followed right behind the old man as they walked to his house. She was an impudent one. 

* 

“Whoa, it’s so big! What a house!” 

“Come on inside.” 

She went inside as told, and found it to be very spacious. There was a big entryway with many shoe shelves, and a pretty System Kitchen. 

On the shrine was a portrait of a young girl. 

The old man seemed terribly lonely, and so as the girl ate the macaron, she couldn’t help but stroke the old man’s head. 

The old man cracked a smile at her comment. 

“Good!” 

Just then, the girl became anxious with the thought that Miko might have died in the future. 

“Anywhere you’re trying to get to?”, the old man asked, facing the happily-eating macaron-loving girl. 

“Well, I guess I have to go a thousand years in the future.” 

“Oh, you don’t believe me, do you? I’m sure you don’t. Believe it!” She poked the old man’s sides. 

“Good!” 

“Ooh, that’s a good plan!” 

“Thank you very much!” 

“Oh, all right… I’ll let you thank me.” 

And the old man laughed again. 

* 

Living with the old man was extremely pleasant for her. 

She loved macarons more than any other food, so that alone made her truly happy. 

Lately, she was really into donating blood, and best of all was that they gave her candy for doing it. 

There wasn’t much else to do besides that, however, so she had a lot of time on her hands. 

“No, I was busy watching the ants in the park, and counting pebbles in the sand pit, and counting stains on the ceiling!” 

In any case, yes, she was bored. 

At times, the old man would convulsively burst into tears. 

She never asked why he was crying, or said a word about his daughter. 

She didn’t know what he did during the day, or his favorite foods, or what his hobbies were, or why he lived in such a large house by himself. Or if he had friends, or where his wife went. 

In fact, at the time, she never even considered that she should talk to him more, or pat him on the head more. 

* 

She lived with the old man in this way for eight years and eighty-two days. 

He died of a contagious disease of unknown origin spreading around the world. 

The girl didn’t know it, but it was the very same illness that had taken the old man’s daughter. 

She was immortal, so it was no problem for her, but for ordinary people it was just the opposite. The illness spread in no time at all, engulfing the entire town. 

The still air and the cold wind told of the death that had stricken the now-empty town. 

Alas, she survived them all. 

“Idiot…” 

Alone in the town, the girl muttered to herself. 

She lit three of his Seven Star cigarettes and laid them on the soil. 

“I want some of your macarons, old man…” 

She was saddened, and looked to the sky. 

Looking into the sky, she ate the last macaron the old man had bought for her. 

Through endless wastelands. 

Between swaying trees. 

Over the horizons of land. 

She continued to walk. 

On, and on. 

* 

Some time afterward, a medicine to cure the illness that had taken the old man to his death was developed. 

When a boy who had the illness was infused with some of her blood, he became the first case of recovery from the illness. 

The girl didn’t have any kind of identification, so no one knew who had donated the blood. 

When asked what he was going to do first once he got out of the hospital, he said something incomprehensible like “I dunno, go to the secret base?” and laughed. 

But the macaron-loving fairytale girl who had saved the world couldn’t have known about this person, their happiness, and their gratitude. 

Instead, she continued to walk along wherever her feet took her. 

* 

As she walked, roughly a hundred years passed. 

But this didn’t have much to do with her, really, so she didn’t pay it any mind. 

The address Maa-chan and Satomi-chan gave her was an apartment somewhere in Japan. Come to think of it, they did say that they wanted to hang out in an apartment once the experiment was over and they were immortal. 

But there was no house at all where it said there should be. Only a single wide road. 

It could be that she would never meet Maa-chan and Satomi-chan again. She was unable to bear that thought. 

She went to the facility to inquire about the whereabouts of Maa-chan and Satomi-chan. 

There was no gorgeous hotel-like testing facility any longer; in its place was a large park and a sky bus terminal. 

“Huh? This should be the place…” She tilted her head. Right on cue, a sky bus arrived. 

It being her first time riding, the view from the sky was one she had never seen before; even for one who had lived over a hundred years, it was a totally fresh look of the world. 

Other than an old man sitting down, there was no one else around. 

She was about fifty years older than the old man, but she didn’t fuss over that detail and just rudely called the old man “old man” anyway. 

Still, he answered the brazen girl’s question. 

“Happened when I was just little, I believe. Seems they were doing something shady, and it got exposed. Not sure of the details about what they were doing, but heard it was pretty tragic.” 

The girl was getting a little scared over the frightful things the old man was saying, so she asked that in somewhat of a panic. He had not a clue what she was talking about. 

“Maa-chan and Satomi-chan promised we’d play together.” 

That he hadn’t heard anything about people from the facility who were still alive now, and how the experiments conducted in the hospital there produced no results, and how even now the idea of attaining immortality was a total pipe dream. 

She didn’t understand. But perhaps this one and only time, it was actually that she didn’t want to understand. 

Still, she somehow knew that she wouldn’t be seeing Maa-chan and Satomi-chan again. 

“Well then, I’ll be getting off here. I’m not sure I understand your situation, but don’t let things get you down.” 

The now totally empty sky bus was completely silent, and the loneliness swelled. 

Disembarking from the window, she boldly fluttered down from the sky bus. 

Maa-chan and Satomi-chan were no longer in this wide world she saw. 

The world was always so large, and her always alone. 

I wonder if Miko is doing well? 

This thought suddenly crossed her mind mid-fall. 

The excess of carbon dioxide warmed the water, so it would be only a matter of time before deep-sea methane hydrate started melting. 

This theory seemed highly plausible to many. 

People living along coastlines frenetically supported eco-friendliness. 

Everyone in the west hemisphere, before meals, and before bed, would wave around a green stick and offer prayers to the god Eco-Eco. 

She loved sea bathing, so the global warming greatly pleased her. 

She felt digital swimsuits didn’t match her skin, so she swam in the nude for three-hundred-sixty-five days. 

As she swam, decades passed in the blink of an eye. 

People felt as if it were the end of the world, and annual suicide rates at last broke 150 million. 

In Japan, they gave up on the notion of “spring, summer, autumn, winter” and divided the year into “hot season” and “slightly less hot season.” 

The deep-sea methane hydrate began to melt. 

In this doomed world, people sought salvation in religion. By then, believers in the Eco Saviors vastly outnumbered Christians. 

As a result of swimming twenty-four hours a day for decades, her skin was tanned light brown, and she became very healthy. 

“Hooray for global warming!”, she shouted to no one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 

* 

One day in the middle of her vacationing, a small meteorite crashed into Earth. 

Luckily enough she was the only one nearby, as the impact was so staggering it would have instantly killed anyone else in a five-hundred-meter radius. 

The girl had been thrown a ways by the impact and landed on the beach. Rubbing her head, she went to investigate the source. 

“Puyopuyopuyo…” 

She slowly drew near the source of the cute blobby noise. 

She found a strange white marshmallow-like creature. 

“Puyopuyo!” 

White, round, small… A creature she had never seen before was bouncing around the meteorite. 

The immortal girl was actually the most incomprehensible creature present, but the bouncing white creature had no way of offering that comeback. 

“Aww! Now that I look at you, you’re really cute!” 

Even its blubbing seemed less enthusiastic than it had been at first. 

The girl took out a donut from a rucksack and offered it to the creature. 

It fiercely leapt onto the donut and chewed it up. 

“Puyopuyo!” 

“Puyu!” 

“Poyopuyun!” 

Gocchan gladly ate up the sweets given to it. 

“What is THIS?” She could only look on in stupefaction. 

“Oh, you’re too cute to say no…” 

As a result of always giving the cute Gocchan sweets, she realized she now had sixty Gocchan bouncing around her. 

If things kept going like this, she wouldn’t have any more sweets to give them. 

Sometimes, painful decisions must be made for the sake of one’s own happiness.

“Sorry… I’m just going to do butterfly stroke…”, she muttered to the Gocchan, and continued her wonderful life of vacationing. She had no motivation whatsoever to change her life for the sake of the Gocchan. 

“I’m sorry, Gocchan #1 to #100, but for my own happiness, I’m letting you be happy in the care of this unfamiliar old guy!”, she said, pointing to the researcher’s house. 

“They make blubby sounds! Cute, huh? Take good care of them!” 

“Name them whatever you like! Good luck!” 

The Gocchan seemed sad as they blubbed at her back. 

They were a dream organism that inhaled greenhouse gases and exhaled oxygen.

According to research, it was not sweets but sugar that caused them to multiply. In addition, since they could inhale greenhouse gases to a great degree and make the air harmless, having too many was not a problem. 

Also, if a Gocchan was not given sugar, all that resulted was the noises it made sounding a little sadder; its body seemed totally unaffected. What did the girl even have to worry about? 

Five years after research began, all countries had recognized the creatures’ utility. Two years after that, systematic methods for increasing their numbers were put into law. 

The clumsy researcher who the girl left the Gocchan with won a Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize for Biology, and a pile of other huge awards like that for his discovery of the world-saving organisms 

The fluffy white saviors were officially given the name “God.” 

Some young people would affectionately refer to them as “God-chan.” Later, to make it easier to say, the nickname shifted to “Gocchan.” 

Within this story, we shall temporarily call the creature Paraporopurun. 

Paraporopurun would wreak destruction and murder in the same way humans would eat breakfast. 

Right as Paraporopurun landed on Earth, it divided into clones of itself. 

Paraporopurun was quite smart as well, so no matter what strategies humans thought up, it could quickly figure them out and devise a counter. 

Its seventy-six eyes bulging, its three-thousand-five-hundred-four hearts beating, using its long, three thousand arms which had three hundred million lungs attached, Paraporopurun continued its massacre. 

Europe was particularly devastated, and it was unclear if the people there had been reduced to particles or atoms. 

Whatever weapons they developed, Paraporopurun would turn them to dust in about three seconds. 

The girl, about fifteen years old, carried unknown substances in her body and was surprisingly effective as a weapon. 

A look at anyone’s eyes could tell you that annihilation was at hand. 

With her immortality, she was even able to live deep under the sea. 

* 

When the girl surfaced for the first time in fifty years, the world above had changed drastically. 

She was too surprised to speak, and started spinning and twirling along the concrete. She span, then fell right into a pothole in front of her. 

“So this isn’t a dream, huh…” 

She walked around, wanting to know why things had gotten like this. 

The Tokyo Skytree had been snapped, Sapporo Dome was flipped upside-down, the golden Shachihoko had been smashed and tossed to the sea, and Lake Biwa was a towering sand dune. 

The macaron-loving girl didn’t know that the latter was Paraporopurun, but she did recognize that it wasn’t a creature of this earth. 

After bearing witness to this, the girl could only sigh “Sure is a dangerous world these days.” 

She had endured while exploring the deep sea, but since she was back on the surface, she wanted to go find a sweets shop. However, she had seen none anywhere she’d gone in Japan. 

In these desperate times, if you had the time to make macarons, you would spend it making biological or nuclear weapons instead. No sweets shops could exist in such a world. 

She sniffled and wailed in true despair at the thought that she might never eat macarons again. 

“Waaah! Nooo! Feed me! Feed me macarons!!”, the girl screamed, rolling and throwing a tantrum in the empty street. The ground was wet with her tears, and her crying echoed far away into the night. 

She cried for three days. Feeling empty, she eventually stopped. 

She was filled with centuries’ worth of sadness. 

She wandered like a ghost around the ruined world, muttering it again and again. In better times, it wouldn’t be surprising if police arrested her given how bizarrely she acted. 

The girl was suddenly spoken to in the ruined town of Tokyo. 

“What is it? I’m really sad because I can’t eat macarons. Leave me alone.” 

“Ugh, what is it? W-Whoaaa!” 

She drooled at the macarons which she had been dreaming of and stood up straight with excitement. 

“Whoa! Wow! Macarons! It’s not a dream! Well maybe it’s a dream! I hope it’s not a dream!”, the girl shouted, thumping herself on the head. 

The girl was so happy, she burst into tears. 

“I’m fine! But anyway, what’s with those?”, the girl asked with a smile after wiping her tears. She was really, really happy. 

“They’re from the black market. Those are the times for you. Those things destroyed my shop a decade ago.” 

The girl couldn’t have known this either, but the rubble was the remains of a shop destroyed by Paraporopurun. 

“Hooray! Thank you!” 

“Alright. I hope it’s peaceful soon!” 

The old man smiled with satisfaction at her delight. 

* 

“Okay, see you again!” 

The girl said goodbye to the aproned old man and ran through what had been Shibuya. She held a paper bag with macarons in it. 

Just then, a shadowy lifeform appeared before her eyes. 

It could be none other than Paraporopurun. 

“Oh, you’re…” 

The force of this would blow an ordinary person to pieces, but the girl was immortal, so she survived. 

“Oww… Ahhh!!” The ripped paper bag entered her vision, then the macarons that had fallen out onto the ground. 

The girl who had generally lived taking things in stride now had a face red with rage. 

“You…! Do you know what you’ve done?! These macarons are the old man’s life work! They’re extremely precious, and now I can’t eat them! Now apologize! APOLOGIZE!!” 

Though she screamed loudly at it, Paraporopurun surely did not understand her Earth language. 

She hit the ground again, this time crushing a few macarons with her rear. 

“Oww! You big dummy!” 

Miraculously, the macarons went straight into Paraporopurun’s mouth, of which it only had just one. 

Immediately, Paraporopurun’s reddish-violet face turned yellowish-green. 

“Wait! Give back my macarons!” 

When Paraporopurun ate the macarons, it became confused, and the hallucinogenic state spread via the spirit link to all the Paraporopurun. 

In less than a week, nearly all the Paraporopurun had died, until finally, there was only one left. 

And just like that, peace was easily returned to the world. Hooray. 

“….. … ….. …..” 

The last remaining Paraporopurun, just before it was killed, said something in a language unknown to humans. 

But of course, people around the world paid that no mind, and believed that a great goddess had saved the Earth. 

And so the Church of Venus began, a religion to celebrate the goddess who had saved mankind. 

The macaron-loving fairytale goddess in question didn’t even know she had become a god, and went on a tour of all the world’s sweets shops. 

And so she was out there somewhere, happily stuffing her cheeks with macarons.

* 

All kinds of problems on Earth were resolved, and the world enjoyed a long peace.

With little else to do in a peaceful world, they starting investigating all sorts of not-fully-understood things to kill time. 

Then the deep sea. 

Everything from lost technology to how to make the best possible curry. 

The origin of Earth, the secrets of life, and the mysteries of the deep sea had all been made clear. 

Just like people long ago had longed to be professional baseball players, people longed to be space researchers. 

After forcefully altering Mars’s atmosphere with antimatter lasers, they sent over mounds of sugar, Gocchan, and vegetation. 

With the success of the Mars terraforming, space research advanced at an explosive rate. 

While humanity was busy with space research, the girl became friends with a boy playing dodgeball in a park. 

In the 28th century, weak people were still looked down upon, and so he was made fun of by other children. 

Suddenly, the girl passed by. She had a sudden urge to play dodgeball and asked to join the children. 

The girl was immortal and very strong, so she hurled the ball at both the bullies and the bullied. 

The sight of the girl making unbelievably fast throws with a perfect smile made some of the boys cry and wet themselves. 

“Aw, what? I wanted to play some more…” 

The weak boy was unbelievably reverent of the girl. 

“Excuse me! Is it okay if we talk?!” 

“Sorry to ask this all of a sudden, but please let me be your apprentice! Please!” 

“Yes, yes! Is it okay if I call you Master?!” 

From that day forth, the boy called the girl his Master. 

“If you want something to do as my apprentice, then buy me sweets every month!” 

Happily accepting the girl’s orders, he used his small allowance to buy a mountain of sweets on the first of every month. 

“Well done! Have some sand as your reward.” 

“Having an apprentice is really easy,” the girl thought. 

She was a wicked girl. An adored, seven-hundred-fifty-year-old wicked girl. 

“Master! How can one become so good at dodgeball?!” 

When he did, she would reveal her secrets with a grin. 

“I see! So swimming develops the back muscles, which explains your godly throwing strength! That’s very helpful to know! You’re amazing, Master! All right, then, I’ll swim every day!” 

“Amazing, Master! Wow! I’ll do my best!” 
“Go