Muse

Chapter 2

After a long nine-to-five at Sestra Towers Assisted Living, I was on my way to the train station to go to my lightsaber combat class, when I realized that the trains were down. I had to walk everywhere now that I was living in Japan. We had to leave behind our cars during the move and it was too crowded and expensive to park in the city, let alone own one. It's not like I went out all that often when I did have a car, but having that taken away completely was like having a basic freedom stripped away. I could still drive them at my other part-time job, having retaken my licensing test so that it was valid internationally, but that was hardly comforting when you didn't have a car to drive.

Today was particularly bad. All of the train lines that ran through the Dantooin ward had been shutdown due to a villain attack causing a subway transformer to get taken out. It was a long walk back to Takodana where I lived, but my hourly walks around the neighborhood gave me some stamina and hopefully some of the trains would be working in the Korusanto district in Chiyoda if I backtracked and took a separate line from there. I would have to buy a new subway pass for the Toei subway line and walk the rest of the way, since mine only worked with the Metro, but it would be worth it versus waiting around for the power to get fixed or walking three hours back home that would normally be a commute of forty five minutes. I always arrived early at the Irumu Rec Center, but with the amount of time it would take to get there with the train, I would barely squeak by on being four minutes early and that's if the trains were running; that didn't account for my having to fill up my water bottle and change into my workout gear and special wrestling shoes, which always took me about five minutes to put on. My Garmin watch already said 5:25pm. I could already feel the blocks of anxiety just layering on top of one another. That combined with having to walk six blocks in rush-hour traffic, I decided it was better to just skip my martial arts class that night and go home, wanting nothing more than to get in a shower and crawl into bed to binge-watch Netflix.

My makeshift lightsaber case jutted out at an awkward angle on my back, making it difficult to navigate in large crowds without knocking into someone and added to the growing frustration of having to readjust it twisting inside my chest. I was pushing past a particularly thick quagmire of people when I noticed my alternate route home was obstructed by cop cars and police tape. Police sirens in Japan were so much different than in the United States, gummier and more high pitched. The change hurt my ears.

I tried controlling my stress by diverting it into a more constructive outlet by playing Tamaru Yamada's cover of "Scarborough Fair" for the five millionth time in a row for inspiration, my noise-cancelling Bose headphones acting like a nice safety cushion from all outside noise. Once I had safely retreated inside my walls, my mind was filled with thoughts about my writing (as per usual). I had currently hit a snag in my Vigilante Knights comic for the next arc of my story. I wanted to introduce a new hero but I had yet to come up with an interesting, original superpower to give them. Elemental powers, super strength, and speed were a dime a dozen in stories because of how versatile they were, and as a result it was challenging to come up with newer ways of expressing how their abilities worked in a fresher perspective that was also memorable. A couple of my favorite hero support magazines and a few of my sister's fashion magazines were stuffed into my bag for references, but so far nothing new leapt out at me. I tried thinking back to earlier plot-lines in my story, thinking of potential foils or counterparts I hadn't yet exploited to help carry my heroine Arisa Burraku forward that could be an equal balance for her superpowers- maybe give her a potential love interest if I liked the character enough. I needed to start developing one fast- my schedule for posting had to be consistent if I wanted to keep my readers, and I was almost out of buffer pages.

I was pulled out of my inner turmoil by the sudden roar of the crowd that blasted over my music, screaming like they were at a rock concert. A hero in a green jumpsuit was fighting a muscle-bound villain that looked like one of those 'roid-monkey lunks you saw at the gym that only seemed to exist to workout and just made you feel bad about yourself. The hero was nimbler, about two times smaller than his opponent and wore thigh-high black padding and boots with opera-length arm bracers and gauntlets. He spun around with kicks that landed in mid-air and was jumping at such incredibly speeds that it was hard to keep track of him during the brief moments he stopped to get a foothold, looking like something out of Shonen Jump. Green lightning crackled off of him as he darted between the nearby buildings in a zig-zag pattern. I couldn't see his face, but he definitely wore a mask of some kind that looked like antennae or long ears.

Huh... he's kinda like a big, turquoise bunny-rabbit... was my first initial thought, and that was the end of it. Suddenly given a massive boost of endorphins, my anxiety was forgotten as I began scrapping dead-end ideas and shifted onto something new at a rapid-fire pace. Everyone did bunny girls- it was practically a given trope for sex appeal at this point, which certainly made the rabbit hero Mirko popular -but it was a rare instance where someone saw a bunny boy character, and a masculine one at that. The way his long boots came up to his thighs, the quick bounds, leaps and jumps he did so effortlessly, the long ear-like protrusions on his mask, it was hard to picture him as anything else. Plus, a tough rabbit to go with a shy kitsune girl-? Hell YES! This could work!

I dug around in my bag for my flower pen and Harujuku Girls notebook, my eagerness increasing rapidly along with my stockpiling of ideas. Thoughts were like produce: they were only good when they were fresh. Where was my pen? I could have sworn I stuffed it into my purse. Oh no... did I lose it?! Nooooo that was my favorite pen! It still had a ton of ink left and everything! My pleasant high dimmed somewhat- I really liked that pen. It was memorable enough for me not to lose it like all the others that came before it -but I compartmentalized that feeling for later as I prayed to come up with some other writing utensil and managed to find my worn down 2B Faber pencil that was almost smaller than my thumb and reluctantly began scribbling ideas and notes down like I was possessed. Almost forgetting a crucial step, I whipped out my android phone and clicked on my camera app. I needed to get a reference shot of the hero first. There were so many heroes working as pros that doing a Google search based on point-blank appearances would be like trying to find a grain of sugar on a beach.

Holding up my phone, I took quick snapshots of the fight, but the fight was so fast paced that my camera captured the photo too late or it resulted in a candid green blur. Finally, the hero managed to stand still long enough for me to snap a picture of him that didn't look like a horrible blurry mess and tucked it back into my pocket. I could also make him anthropomorphic, maybe give him some cybernetic enhancements... The wheels in my head kept on turning as I continued down the street once I was clear of the crowd, already uninterested in the fight taking place behind me.

Author's Note: I love Horikoshi's little references to the SW Universe, so as a Star Wars fan I thought to carry on that tradition. References to Star Wars include the planets Coruscant (and one of its locations in Thrawn, Sestra Towers), Ilum, and Takodana. Chapter one also had a reference to Dantooine, Batuu, and Fulcrum, an alias for rebel informants utilized in Star Wars Rebels, along with references to the Marvel Heroes Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Deadpool. Expect more Star Wars and other nerdy references. Thanks for reading!