Musashi Miyamoto (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
floweroftheapex) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
magisteriaexe2024-06-27 10:41 pm
floweroftheapex) wrote in magisteriaexe2024-06-27 10:41 pm
Movie Night Heart-to-Heart (Closed)
Where: Evergreen Terrace, Lucy Kushinada's apartment.
Who: Lucy and Musashi
When: Likely after the high-risk event
What: Lucy and Musashi have a horror movie marathon, followed by a more personal conversation (may or may not take place on the rooftop if we feel like tormenting ourselves)
Warnings: Copious amounts of UST/longing/some Edgerunners-related Adam Smasher trauma/The David Martinez in the room.
Musashi doesn't scare easily as a Berserker. One of the perks of her particular brand of Madness Enhancement; she's too flighty, too impulsive, too reckless to be easily rattled by zombies or ghostly jump-scares.
And having fought real zombies in her time, movie ones just don't hold up very well after awhile.
Still, the idea of a curated horror movie marathon with a certain Edgerunner she'd made the friendship of held a great deal of appeal. And who knows, maybe Magisterian horror was a different cut. Maybe she would get a little frightened by one thing or another. A black cat leaping out of a cupboard without any attention ever being paid to how it got in there in the first place, or the slow, dawning horror of realizing a character in the film is no longer themselves...or worse, it's something else wearing their face.
At least she'll have someone to cling to in that case.
When Lucy opens the door, Musashi is standing in the hall, holding up a bag, in which glass bottles clink together. "What's up, choombarino? I brought drinks!" Horror's thirsty business after all.
She's taken to Magisterian fashions almost as well as she has Night City slang, too. The kimono needs some work done after ending up on the wrong end of a Twisted Tin, so she's settled for a midriff-exposing tanktop with an extremely, loudly colourful design plastered across it, as well as hotpants, sneakers and thigh-highs stockings in various neon shades, and a choker around her neck to replace her put-aside for now magatama. She doesn't appear to have given much thought to attempting to coordinate them colour-wise, though.
The sun is hanging low in the sky, but but the time they're finished, it'll be night. Maybe the moon will be out in full too.
"So, what're we startin' with?"
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She takes her glass of Green and sits back on the couch, one arm draped across its back. The samurai movie is primed and ready to go. "All right, let's get this party started!" Little bloodshed before the horror, just to get the blood good and pumping.
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Plus, the idea of going to the market with Musashi isn't entirely horrible. Sounds kinda nice, actually. Lucy hasn't really checked out any the markets yet, other than the local supermarket, but there's always a lot of shit you can find in places like that. If they've got stuff from other worlds, it's worth checking out.
She settles onto the couch next to Musashi, legs tucked up under her. With her home entertainment system linked up to her cyberdeck, all she needs to do is blink and the movie starts playing.
It starts off with a fight scene, because it's the third in a trilogy and it needs to jump straight into the action, she guesses. For movie choreography, it's pretty impressive, especially since it looks like it was done with actual actors and not just VFX. Lucy's half distracted by Musashi's arm across the back of the couch, the easy sprawl of her body language, and the pleasant burn of the booze as she sips at it. Musashi's... a puzzle. An entirely different kind of puzzle than she ever saw in Night City.
"Gotta say, now that I've seen you fight, it's way more impressive than this," she gestures at the screen. She'd been in a deepdive half the time in their fight against the Fractured, but what she had seen was... pretty impressive. To say the least.
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She glances back towards the other woman, the way she tucks her legs under her on the couch, the distance between where Lucy is sitting and where Musashi's hand rests on the back of the couch, and how her expression focuses on the screen. Lucy is...intriguing. Musashi thinks there's far more to the woman than she's been allowed to see so far. A puzzle. She turns her attention back to the film.
Her counterpart is troubled; he's spent years developing the two sword style as a means to reach enlightenment, but as he enters the autumn years of his life, he feels no closer to Nirvana than when he began. And fighting bandits and honourless ronin is a far cry from the duels against the swordmasters of his youth.
(The movie is also clearly playing fast and loose with history; Musashi wasn't even thirty during the duel that is the subject of the film, whereas the man playing him is at least in his late forties.)
Much exposition, including presumably the plots of the first two films, is narrated by a bumbling, comic-relief manservant character to a student Musashi has taken on, a young, hot-blooded youth named Iori. It's clunky and awkward; presumably this is all information both characters should already know, but the writer has to convey the backstory to people just coming in somehow and clearly knows no other way to do it. The stoic, humourless movie Musashi clearly isn't one for excessive dialogue.
On the couch, the real Musashi shifts slightly, her other arm coming to rest under her chin the moment the young boy is identified as "Iori" on the screen. Her eyebrows raise a little. The back of the cover didn't mention the inclusion of this particular character.
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She's a child of the 2060's, she's usually all about BrainDances. Fully immersive, fully reactive, she likes being able to watch from any angle. This 2D screen feels limiting, but it also means it's all so much more... cinematic, she guesses. More purposeful in what it shows.
With her attention half torn between the screen and the bowl of popcorn she's got on her lap, Lucy doesn't miss Musashi's minute movement. It happens the second the comic relief character gets named, and for a second Lucy wonders if Musashi just knew someone by that name, but then she realizes--
No, Musashi claims that she literally is the guy from the stories, or historical events, whatever. Which means she knows other people from that period. Which means that, if this movie is accurate to history, she must have known this Iori guy.
"What? Did they depict him totally wrong?" Lucy asks, curious.
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"Spent some time in an alternate Edo once. Decade or so two after my counterpart passed away. I met the Miyamoto Iori of that world. Actually our first meeting I tried to kill him." An enemy Master and Servant were encroaching on Yoshiwara; Musashi was sent out to deal with it.
"Hadn't realized until they said the name, but the kid kind of resembles him." Look at her, growing nostalgic in her dotage. She smiles, fondly. "It was good meeting him, though. I was impressed how far he'd come."
Meanwhile, on-screen a scene change introduces the audience to our antagonist. It is not a flattering portrayal of Sasaki Kojiro. Played by an actor at least two decades younger and quite a bit prettier than the weathered, middle-aged Musashi, Kojiro is clearly set to be his opposite in every way; Musashi's clothes are roughspun and worn, while Kojiro dresses in fine silk. Musashi takes only basic care of his appearance, but Kojiro wears makeup (severe guyliner alert) and us shown applying perfume. Where Musashi lives in caves and barns to show his humility, accompanied only by Iori and his comic relief manservant, Kojiro resides in a palatial manor, filled with students/henchmen eager to do his bidding. Musashi is stoic and plainspoken, but Kojiro is shown to be volatile, and like any good villain, in love with the sound of his own voice. In his first scene, upon being given bad news by a servant, Kojiro pulls a sword, a thin blade almost as long as he is tall, and strikes the servant down, with dialogue suggesting this is not an uncommon occurrence. Where Musashi is introspective, Kojiro is furious. He has conquered all other schools with his special technique, yet the acknowledgement he clearly feels he deserves yet eludes him. One opponent stands between him and what he sees as his destiny, an opponent that has dropped off the face of the Earth. He will not be satisfied until he has killed Musashi Miyamoto, and assembles a squad of his "five best students", an eclectic squad of thugs armed with a variety of exotic and impractical weaponry that nevertheless promise some exciting and bloody fight scenes in the near future. He orders them to "find Miyamoto Musashi...no matter who stands in your way!"
Musashi watches the screen, idly reaching down into Lucy's bowl for a handful of popcorn. Before she indulges, she grins in amusement at the screen. "Wow, painting with a subtle brush I see."
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She really is an alternate version of this guy, this legendary swordsman from old Japan. Because when she talks about this Iori kid, it's not rote or rehearsed or overdramatic. Musashi's wearing the expression of a woman wistfully thinking back to fond memories with a friend, a real friend, real memories. A woman who really has traveled through multiple worlds, multiple times, met multiple versions of the people she knew.
Quietly, while Kojiro is introduced and waxes dramatic, Lucy's brain explodes a little. And then when it settles down, when she's more settled in the knowledge of what Musashi is, Magisteria seems a little less weird, relatively speaking. She's gotten to used to this magic-tech city, and people from lands straight out of fantasy novels, and now two people who are alternate versions of famous historical figures.
Her brain feels full enough to burst. But it's a nice distraction from her own thoughts. So.
"Real subtle," she agrees dryly. "Was this Kojiro guy as much of a dick as this movie is making him out to be? No, don't tell me-- he was even worse." Her eyes are bright with the teasing, a little smile tugging at the corners of her lips.
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She does turn to look at Lucy when she asks about the Kojiro she remembers. "Dunno. Back home, I never met the guy!" She admits cheerfully. Then she has to think for a moment; her memory is long, and it's been a very long time since she left her original timeline. "...Actually, come to think of it, I don't think he existed in my original world." She admits. "He doesn't exist in a lot of them. He's one of those, you know, narrative devices. A way of symbolizing all of my opponents and my philosophy in a single encounter." Something cooked up by later authors to dramatize the life of Miyamoto Musashi, and inadvertently provide lots of fodder for future anime and video game writers.
"I've met versions of him that existed in other worlds. Don't think any of them were quite as bad as Mr. Personality here. Good fights though, when I could get them. Oh, yeah, you're about to see why."
On the screen, the actor Kojiro stands alone in the gardens of his manor, concentrating, nodachi in hand, ready to strike. On a nearby branch sits a bird, a swallow, hopping about. Everything about this sequence attempts to build tension, cutting from Kojiro to the bird, and back again. Kojiro's sword is also shown prominently as the music builds. Finally, the swallow takes flight, and Kojiro's eyes open in a flash of anger. The sword strikes once, but this is followed by three cuts of it attacking from different angles, as if it was somehow three different strikes in one. Of the swallow, we only hear it cry out once, and the sound of something hitting the ground. The screen is suddenly filled with the text, both in katana and translated English Tsubame Gaeshi; Swallow-Reversal, Kojiro's signature ability, rather hamfistedly showcased on an actual swallow. A single sword stroke that cuts three times. For the production values the movie has shown thus far, it's actually quite competently executed.
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Then again, that's just how real life is, right? There are no protagonists and antagonists, just people, and most of the time you don't have an arch-enemy or whatever. If she had one, it would undoubtedly be Arasaka, but no one single person.
For David, it would be--
No. She's not going down that particular thought path right now.
With effort, Lucy wrestles her attention back to the movie, and finds herself caught up in the scene that's unfolding. She isn't immune to the building tension, and when Kojiro's sword lashes out in a strike and three cuts happen, her eyes narrow. Her head tilts. If she were a GIF, transparent mathematics equations would be floating around her as she visibly struggles to comprehend that.
"I think that just broke my brain," she admits, tossing a piece of popcorn into her mouth. "Is that real? Or is that just a narrative device to show how stupid strong he is?"
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And it's not like Musashi ever tries particularly hard to hide her identity, though admittedly Iori-kun showing up so early into the Waxing Moon Ritual and recognizing her kind of made it irrelevant anyway.
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She'll admit, she's still not sure about this Heroic Spirit stuff. It's kind of complicated, and while she's normally good at complicated... not this kind of complicated. Not weird magic systems and alternate history. Still, it's actually pretty interesting now that she's mostly gotten over how fucking confused it all makes her.
Lucy takes her verve vape out of her pocket, and draws in a long drag, blowing the smoke up and away from Musashi. She's got watermelon flavor at the moment, which mingles interestingly with the aftertaste of popcorn.
"So what's your big move?" she asks, a hint of playfulness in her voice as a pale gaze cuts toward Musashi. "I don't think I've seen it yet. I definitely haven't heard you shout some named attack like all the anime heroes do. I bet it's super impressive."