The following is a fantasy story. 

This story contains NBM (bodily detachment) of a permanent nature. It is written particluarly as a manifestation of the author's peculiar sexual preference for bodiless (trophy) heads, but does not contain explicit sexual content. This is a sequel to "Nikki's Head Problem", but I hope it has merits as a standalone story. By request, MC is a nameless, genderless reader insert.

"Hey!" Nikki said, from inside the backpack I had just zipped open. "Good to see you again!"

Okay, that sentence alone probably warrants some explanation. Yes, you heard right. Nikki, my classmate and friend, was speaking to me from the inside of a backpack. No, she is not an expert contortionist, but a disembodied head. You say that makes it more confusing? I agree.

The latter half of my week had taken a turn for the surreal. A few days ago, my classmate Nikki confided in me about her strange medical condition. Roughly every year, she grew a new head from inside her torso, which worked its way up through her neck until it popped out, displacing the head that was previously there. The new head, an exact duplicate of the previous, would continue life as if nothing had happened, while the older head would remain alive and sentient. "My" Nikki was the seventh head to grow on this body, and because it was not possible for her to take care of an infinitely growing amount of heads, she had asked me to become her caretaker. I had accepted, and today, I had recieved my package.

"Uh, hi. Are you going to keep staring at me or will you take me out of this backpack? I could use some fresh air."

"Oh, of course!" I carefully lifted her out of the bag, my hand under her chin. It felt stragely intimate. Awkward.

I set her down on my desk. "Terrribly sorry" I mumbled. "I'm a bit out of my depth here."

She smiled at me. "Don't worry about it! This is understandably surreal and weird. Hell, I've been preparing for this moment for several years, and it's still a new and unfamilliar experience for me. Take all the time you need to get used to it. I expect i'll be here a while."

"Thanks. May I..." I gestured to pick her up again.

"Be my guest!"

I carefully picked up Nikki's head with trembling fingers, I slowly turned her around in my hands, examining her new state closely. She still had about two inches of neck attached to the base of her head. Without thinking, I tilted her backward to have a closer look.

"Whoaah!" she laughed. "Maybe warn me for doing that next time?"

"I'll try"

I was relieved to find the underside of her neck did not look gory. It was covered with a layer of skin. There was, however, a pinkish hole in the middle, that seemed to extend towards the base of her head. My curiosity getting the better of my manners, I probed it with my fingers.

"Oaoh-aauwch!" Nikki yelped, her head immediately turning bright red. "Please don't- don't touch my stump. It's very sensitive."

I hesitated, realizing I had so far been a terrible host and a terrible friend.

"I'm so sorry..! I was curious...! I didn't mean to hurt you!" I sputtered.

Nikki let out a relieved sigh. "Don't worry about it. Like I said, it's a weird time for both of us." Her blush was quickly fading and she was returning to her usual agreeable mood.

I took the opportunity to address her situation, which had obviously been more important than my own curiosity.

"You look good." I observed. "I mean, considering the circumstances. Headless state notwithstanding. You seem to be taking all of this pretty well."

"Bodiless state" she corrected me. "Yeah, I'm feeling strangely relieved. I was really dreading losing my body, but things have been remarkably good, actually."

"How so?"

"Well, you adopting me, for one, of course. Until recently, I was dreading being religated to the cupboard, or even being moved to less comfortable storage in the attic. Instead I get to hang out in my friend's apartment as a sort of permanent sleep-over. That's quite exciting in itself. The apartment looks great by the way!"

"Thanks! I'll show you around.."

"...But above everything, I was afraid to lose control of my body. I thought it would be like a kind of amputation, that i'd lose all of my body parts, and feel broken and incomplete, just a bodyless head, helpless to take any real action."

"Interesting. And that isn't how you feel now?"

"I dunno. I certainly am a bodiless head, and there is precious little I can do beyond talking, but it feels different than I expected, somehow. I've completely forgotten how it feels to move my arms or my legs and so it doesn't feel like there is something missing. I just am a head, and that head is all of me. My other heads had warned me losing your body isn't as bad as I feared, but I think I realize only now how intuitive, how "right" it feels. It's a huge weight off my shoul- of my mind"

I could only sit there and nod. I was happy for her, but man, this was not a conversation I ever imagined myself having.

"Sooo, will you show me around the apartment? I'm curious to see where you'll put me."

"Sure, I'll give you the tour" I awkwardly placed my left hand below her chin to pick her up. She gave me an encouraging smile.

"I appreciate how careful you are with me, but if this kind of grip makes you uncomfortable, try another way. If you prefer to grip my neck, that's fine too, but when I still had a body, I used carry my heads around by the hair"

"Doesn't that hurt?"

"Only if you do it wrong. If you firmly grip my hair by the roots, the only thing you risk hurting is my hairstyle, and that I don't really mind."

"Thanks!" I grasped her firmly by the hair and lifted her up. Her head felt heavy and robust, her hair felt soft and pleasant to the touch.

I showed her my apartment. It wasn’t very big, but it had everything a single student wanted; a small kitchen and bathroom, a decently sized desk, a bed, and even a small lounge area containing  a lounge chair, acoffee table and my TV) On seeing the room, Nikki wiggled her neck stump back and forth, which I understood as an attempt at nodding.

"Looks really cosy!" Nikki concluded. "Have you already decided where you are going to put me?"

"I've given it a lot of thought, but I haven't decided yet. I thought you might want some input." I carefully set her down on my lounge chair (she instantly fell on her side) and, with some effort, produced a large cardboard box from under my bed, labelled 'Nikki Stuff', and opened it. "I thought I needed to be prepared, so..."

"Awww! You went way too far! I told you I really don't need that much!" Nikki said, slightly embarrased.

"It really isn't that much, though." I pulled out a number of small pillows of varying textures and styles. "I know your other heads like to rest on pillows like these, so I bought a few. I was thinking I could have a few around the house, and then move you from place to place, rather than keeping you stuck on a single spot."

Nikki smiled warmly. "That's so thoughtful. Thanks!"

For the next half hour, went through the collection of pillows together, judging them on looks, material and stability. A lot of the pillows were not really stable; and Nikki's head, made more unstable by the stump of her neck, frequently fell over. One time she nearly fell off the small coffee table we were using this on. After a while, she seemed to settle on a flat gray cotton pillow.

"This works, I think. If you put me on the coffee table, you can face me to watch the TV? I'd like to be able to watch TV when you're out or something."

"Yeah, I thought of that" I informed her. Hesitating slightly, "But maybe you'd prefer... nevermind"

"What are you thinking? C'mon! don't be shy!"

I pulled out a dark gray trophy plaque from the bottom of the box "I thought you might want.."

"You want to mount my head on your wall as a trophy?"

She'd instantly figured out my intentions. I had a long-standing crush on Nikki, but since I learned about her condition, the prospect of fixing her helpless form to the wall had perversely excited me more than I would like to admit.

"I mean, I thought i'd offer it as an option. I know it's weird, and I don't want to demean or..."

"What?  How would that be demeaning?" Nikki laughed. "I'm flattered!"

"Flattered?"

"Yeah, Duh! I take it as a compliment! You think I'm nice enough to look at that I could be a kind of decorative ornament?"

I was relieved she didn't seem to mind, but still hesitant to share my perversions. "Yeah, I mean, obviously. You are really pretty... I mean, you're really, like pretty... good looking for someone who's just a disembodied head. But more importantly," I lied "This way you have a nice view of the TV and the rest of the room, AND there's less risk of you tumbling over!"

She rolled her eyes at me. "Frankly, I prefer to believe the version where you're enchanted by my exquisite beauty." I took a mental note. "Shall we begin? I can't wait to see what I look like mounted on your wall!"

It was not as easy as I had hoped to mount her to the plaque. The plaque was designed with a kind of stumpy iron rod, so that you could fit your hunting trophies with a corresponding hole, and slot the trophy onto the plaque. This wouldn't work for Nikki, who wasn't a carefully taxidermied hunting trophy. I didn't want to hurt her by pushing the rod in her clearly quite sensitive neck hole.

"This isn't going to work" I informed her. "We need to put this part into some kind of hole. I'll need to figure something else out."

She nodded. "If you say so..." A silence fell as I looked through the trophy's manual hoping to find an alternate solution. "But I don't mind if you just use stick it in my neck hole."

I looked up. "I thought that was painful for you."

She blushed, and gave me a flustered glance. "It's certainly sensitive," she explained "but not really what i'd call a painful feeling. If you slide my neck on there slowly, and keep me on the plaque for at least a few days, I think it'll be all right."

I nodded and set to work, sliding Nikki's neck over the stump at an agonisingly slow pace, while Nikki turned increasingly redder, and made increasingly less coherent remarks. After a few minutes had passed in this manner she gave out a contented sigh, as her neck stump finally made contact with the face of the plaque. We both took a breather to recollect ourselves.

"Ph... Phew!" Nikki panted. "So, how do I look?"

"Gimme a second, we're not done yet." I replied. I fished out an extra piece from the box. It was a dark steel ring with a magnetic clasp, all of the same color as the trophy plaque. I fitted it snugly around the base of Nikki's neck, and closed the clasp, firmly fasting her to the plaque. I stepped back to admire my handywork.

"You look absolutely jaw-droppingly stunning!" I told her in all sincerity. She did look beautiful. A bit scruffy and exhausted from her affixment to the trophy, but still beatiful in her own happy and playful way. It was a surreal and appealing view, better than I had hoped for.

"Let me see! Let me see!"

I got out my phone and made about a hundred pictures, from different angles, with Nikki in different poses, funny, pretty, sweet, charming and even suggestive. I think Nikki agreed that the trophy plaque suited her.

That evening, after I had my dinner (decapitated heads don't need to eat, apparantly), I decided to unveil the last gift for her. I had bought an iMazon iLexy, as well as a multimedia kit for my TV. With such a device Nikki could use voice commands to tune the TV or to browse the internet when I was gone.

"That's amazing! Why did we never think of that?!"

"I have no idea? That seems like the first thing you would do in your situation, right?"

"I guess so?" Nikki thought about this for a second. "Whatever. Point is, you're so much better at this than me and my parents seem to be! I'm afraid if you tell this to other Nikkis, they'll want you to adopt their heads too!

For some reason, that didn't seem like such a terrifying possibility.

The rest of the evening went extremely pleasantly. Nikki had tried to cue a Star Wars movie, but voice recognition being what it is, we watched an intelligent historical Korean comedy without subtitles. We had fun nonetheless.

As I laid down in my bed, I glanced up at Nikki's gorgeous head, drowsily nodding away on the trophy on my wall, and I knew that I would be having sweet dreams that night.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next morning I met Nikki (That is, "Nikki 8", the one who was currently in control of Nikki's ever headswitching body) in the park before class began. I was still a bit uncomfortable, being friends with someone who seemingly "stole" my friend's body, but I started to undersand she really was like "my" Nikki in every possible way.

"So how is our mutual friend?" She asked me casually.

"I think she's enjoying herself quite a bit." I showed her a few photo's where my Nikki was making silly faces at the camera.

"You mounted m-., You mounted her head on your wall as a trophy?" she asked, blushing slightly.

"Uh, yes, she told me it was okay. Isn't-"

"You think my head looks good enough to be a decorative ornament like that?"

"Uh, yeah, but there are also other rea-"

"That's really flattering!" She beamed. "Say, when my turn to use the body is over, do you think you have room on your wall for another one? You seem to have a knack for headcare!"

I smiled, and told her I would cross that bridge when the need arised. In some aspects, Nikki was always Nikki, and Nikki knew herself well.