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 Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2025 2:46 pm
Aruna anxiously chewed the inside of her cheek, checking her phone for the hundredth time. She knew the other senshi wasn't late, and she knew that he would be there, but it didn't stop her from being any less anxious. After all, she had no idea what would be waiting for them on her planet, no idea what it was even like. Finally, a familiar face came into view and Aruna allowed herself to relax just a little. She lifted a hand in greeting, though she was fairly sure the smile she gave Muri showed exactly how anxious she truly was.
"Thank you for this. For saying you'd go with me my first time. You have no idea how much I appreciate it." The shy, quiet little wallflower had gotten a bit chattier lately, and had been gaining some confidence as well. Where before she would never have dreamed of imposing on someone and asking them to accompany her to literal space, she had not hesitated to accept the offer from Muri when he recently extended it to her.
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Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2025 10:20 am
There were few things, even in the whole wide world of possibilities before him as a magical girl, that Muri enjoyed quite as much as going to space. When Aruna had asked for him to come with on her first visit to her home-world, he’d volunteered easily, without needing to pause and think about anything. Yes, they were walking into a lot of mysteries and things that they couldn’t possibly expect, but that was part of the fun for Murikabushi. When he arrived to meet her for the trip up to Aruna the World, he was all bright smiles and positive vibes, eager for whatever they might find when they got to space.
“Of course, hun,” he told her, beaming with excitement because this was such an important trip for her and he got the honor of being here for her during it. “I love going to space and seeing people’s home-worlds. Or Wonders, for Knights. Or taking them to my own world if they want to go. But……” Murikabushi waved a dismissive hand at himself and his own thoughts, pulling his attention back to the moment before him. “You know how to use the app on your senshi phone, right? It’ll get us there super easy.”
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Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2025 12:38 pm
Nodding, Aruna pulled her phone out and readied the app, chewing the inside of her cheek nervously. She reached out, grabbing the edge of his sleeve to help steady herself and maybe soothe her fears. "I've never done this... so I don't know what to expect to find there. I... apologize in advance if it isn't fun."Taking a deep breath, she tapped the app on her screen and closed her eyes as allowed the magic to take them off planet. When she opened her eyes again, dread settled into the pit of her stomach. It was cold, dark, and eerie. Worst of all, were those graves all around her? "Muri....Muri tell me this isn't a graveyard?" No, this was so much worse. It was an entire Necropolis. Aruna itself was one giant Necropolis. "Oh my god..." Her hand tightened in the fabric of his sleeve, utterly terrified and for once not worrying about hiding it.
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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2025 1:20 am
“Psh, don’t let’s be silly,” Murikabushi told her, trying to keep his tone earnest and reassuring, even if the words were a little bit teasing. Playful was all in good fun, but he didn’t want to actually hurt Aruna’s feelings or seem like he was genuinely dismissing her and how she felt. “Space is always fun for me. Well, except for the one incident with the robots who could pull people’s starseeds? But like, there’s probably none of those running around on your home-world.”
Murikabushi sure hoped that there wouldn’t be any on Aruna’s homeworld, anyway. They felt like a one-time sort of deal. Considering how the power to pull starseeds like that was normally relegated to the Negaverse and only them, the robots from that one time didn’t strike him as something that was likely to repeat itself.
When they appeared in the new place, Murikabushi’s face lit right up. The dread and the creep factor stood out, of course, but that only made Murikabushi’s eyes go wide with wonder. Like a little kid seeing Disneyland for the first time, he stared out at the headstones lined up before them, then up at the towering buildings. Although he didn’t wander far from Aruna, Murikabushi took a few cautious steps forward among the graves, eager to see more. Amidst all the dark and gloom, Murikabushi was a bright star, radiating delight and good vibes about everything they’d found here—even if they hadn’t found very much yet.
“It’s more than a graveyard, hun,” he told her, half-breathless and eager. “The graves are a part of it, but the more appropriate term here might be a necropolis. Y’know, graveyard tends to imply a smaller area and fewer tombs. Necropoleis are more elaborate, more purposeful. They’re called what they are because they’re like cities for the souls of the people buried in them.”
Turning back to her, Murikabushi smiled—until he saw Aruna fussing with her sleeve. “Hey,” he said gently, “sweetie, are you okay?”
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Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2025 8:46 pm
Aruna shook her head, looking dismayed and maybe a little horrified. A Necropolis. Of all the things. "How am I supposed to bring something back to life that's always been dead...." Her voice was small and quiet, shoulders drooping as she seemed to lose faith in herself as well as her planet. She looked up at Murikabushi, pale brown eyes looking far more dim than they had any business being. "Does....that mean I failed somehow? If it's always been full of death here?" It was a silly question, had she heard anyone else ask it. But somehow, she felt as if she should feel guilty. As if somehow it was her fault that death filled every single corner of this world.
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Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2025 8:41 pm
Immediately on seeing Aruna’s reaction, Murikabushi softened. Although he remained enthused about her homeworld, she was struggling with what they’d come in to find. (……This made a lot of sense, now that Muri thought about it. Most kids did not grow up asking for Obaasan to tell them the Yotsuya kaidan story at bedtime and Aruna was sensitive about feeling like she’d failed.)
“Hey, no, you, well……” Murikabushi had intended to go somewhere immediately reassuring, but instead, his thoughts derailed into an explanation first: “So, the last Sailor Aruna, they aren’t you exactly? It’s a little complicated, and it might not always feel that way, because senshi always share a starseed.”
And because Muri could not refer to Avatar: the Last Airbender with Aruna specifically. Unfortunate, because it was his usual go-to for explaining how things worked with reincarnation and people’s sense of individual personhood. There was plenty about the show that marked it as very obviously American-made, no matter how much it had tried to respect the Asian and Inuit cultures it had drawn on. But the way they’d represented reincarnation with the Avatar cycle was still a good way to explain things.
“So, a helpful way to think about this is to think of the soul as having two parts,” he said gently, coming to stand beside her because he had an idea for how to effectively use his hands right now, and this seemed like the best position. “That’s an idea that several different cultures have come up with, probably without even knowing anything about starseeds. I learned it from my grandmother when she had to explain how the ghost stories I liked as a kid could happen if people reincarnate like my grandfather said. Turns out when I awaken as a senshi, the old ideas about people’s personal business in this life being different from some unique essential core of their soul weren’t entirely wrong.”
To begin the gesture-based portion of the explanation, Murikabushi held one hand out between them, not a fist but curled up as if he was holding something. “You have your starseed, right? This is the fundamental core of a person’s soul. In the case of senshi, it magically ties us to our home-worlds. But then imagine like, as a starseed exists in the universe, the person who has it develops this protective fog around the starseed.” He waved his other hand in the air, tracing it around the hand being used to represent starseeds. “That protective fog is made up of things like their specific experiences. Where they were born, what opinions they have, their friends and loved ones and enemies, their unfinished business.
“The existence of the starseed does not negate the existence of that earthly soul—to adapt a term that I think came from my grandfather’s Buddhist practice?” Expression soft and earnest, Murikabushi shifted away to stand in front of Aruna again. Still close to her, but looking at her directly. “I have the same starseed as Airan, the last Sailor Murikabushi. But we aren’t the same person at all. For one thing, he had quite pale skin and pointy elf ears, which……” Murikabushi gestured first at his face, brown skin and all, and then at his ear, turning his head so Aruna could see that it was, as Grieve so often lovingly reminded him, round and boring and definitely not as pretty as Airan’s pointy ears had been.
“In the same way, you aren’t the same as the last Sailor Aruna,” he went on, getting near the end of this lengthy thought. “You’re still your own person in this life, and you. did. not. fail. Your phone taking us to this necropolis could mean an infinite number of things. Maybe this place was sacred to your world’s people. Maybe if we look around, we’ll find more things to help us piece together your world’s story, like structures in here where living people stayed, or evidence of their culture outside of the grave markers.”
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Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2025 12:51 am
Aruna listened as Murikabushi explained, desperately wanting him to be right. "I.... okay." She gave him a small, almost watery smile as she tried to pull her courage together. "Alright. Let's....let's see what we can find then, right?" She wanted to take his hand, to stay as close to him as she could, but didn't quite know how to ask for that. Instead, she remained right beside him as they began making their way through the Necropolis. The building itself seemed to go on forever, expanding out and down as they made their way deeper into it. Despite the countless dead within, there was a stunning beauty to the old building as well. The vast majority of the architecture had been preserved, being unexposed to the elements of whatever the surface of the world was like, and undisturbed for god only knew how long, and Aruna found herself more than once stopping to admire the designs here and there. Little by little, the fear and sadness she had upon arriving was replaced by wonder and curiosity. Arriving finally at a large shut door, Aruna paused, frowning a bit. "All the other doors were open before this..." Reaching out, she rested her hand against it and gave a push before making a face. "I think I'm going to need help opening this. Can you lend me a hand?" She looked over at Murikabushi, nodding towards the door.
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Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 11:21 pm
It was for the best that Aruna didn’t ask to take Murikabushi’s hand. Yes, of course Muri more than knew how to handle himself in heels, even on difficult terrain and considering the heft of his enormous sleeves (being powered up helped with maintaining his grace and balance quite a bit). Still, given the length of the walk, he needed to do something with his hands. Needed to fuss with his fingers as they walked because as he drank in the splendor of the massive city before them, Murikabushi’s nerves itched with anticipation.
The longer they walked, the more questions flared up in his mind. What would they find? What would be waiting for them when they found……whatever felt like the most important thing to find tonight? Would anything trigger a past life memory for Aruna, and if so, was she ready for that? Should they have been looking for secret doors, considering all the open ones? There had to be more things around here than that, right? What about trick puzzles that functioned as locks, like in one of Yuki’s Resident Evil games or all over the ominous black tower at Kaifeng’s Wonder? Should they have been looking for candles that needed to be lit in a very specific order that would unlock a hidden passageway?
(Nothing that looked like that hypothetical candle puzzle had appeared yet, but in case it did, Muri did have one of Uncle Mitch’s old Zippo lighters in his subspace, a black one with a design of a silver dragon—a gift from his godfather while Uncle Mitch and Bennett had been cleaning things out and since Uncle Mitch hadn’t been a smoker for over fifteen years, he hadn’t minded his teenage godson taking his old lighter.)
Ultimately, coming to a door that was just closed……felt a little too easy. Straightforward, Muri guessed, but as Aruna gave it a try on her own, Murikabushi held back, combing his eyes over the doorway, the door itself, and everything around it. When he found nothing that looked like it might have been a secret lock, he looked back to Aruna. “Sorry, force of habit,” he said. “A lot of the time when I go to space, a locked door means there’s some overly intricate puzzle lock……and a lot of those locks were made by one specific drunk-a** Saturn Knight, whose reincarnation is openly having the time of his life every time he finds some new potential death-trap lock at his Wonder.”
Not that Muri could begrudge Kaifeng his excitement when Murikabushi got similarly excited about finding places like the spot where Airan had been executed by his own lover for spurious allegations of counterrevolutionary treason, but that was beside the point.
Right now, the point was helping Aruna get further into the city around her, which meant helping with the door. Sidling up behind her, Murikabushi leaned on the door, pressing against it with one hand and his shoulder, all the better to put more force behind his push. “Count of three, then let’s both give it everything we’ve got. One……two……three—push!”
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