Disclaimer: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and all equally bizarre concepts and characters belong to Hirohiko Araki. Original characters and other concepts (as noted) are copyright of me.
REO continued racing around, ignoring the security personnel trying to accost him, and finally found his way all the way up to Jojo's room. Zeppeli was standing in the middle of the hall ,staring at the door, and breathing out in odd rhythms.
"Mr. Zeppeli!" REO called. "What's going on?"
"Robert" Zeppeli said. REO came back in and stopped to catch his breath. "All is not well, I'm afraid. I talked with Jojo...he's feeling contradicted. He gravely injured Dio upon first activating his Stand and has now grown fearful of it, as I once was of mine own."
"Really?" REO asked.
"There are many types of Stands" Zeppeli explained, "but that is a lecture for another time. Right now, I'm sorry to say, our Jojo is beyond our help. He must conquer his own demons and overcome his fears alone if he is to make any progress in his own control. I suggest we...head to the address young Gerald gave you and stay out of Jojo's way."
"How'd you get the address?" REO asked.
"Jojo demanded we inspect it" Zeppeli said "but he also was quite firm in having no part in it. Between the two of us, I'm sure we can perform a dutiful reconnaissance."
"Yeah" REO agreed. "Right...um, what about his roommates?"
"Don't be so foolishly chivalrous" Zeppeli chided, slapping REO hard on the back. "We can do it. I've got enough power for the two of us! This young man doesn't sound so bad anyway!"
"Well" REO hesitantly said, "if you say so. I still feel weird about leaving Jojo behind, but, he's tougher than me. I guess he'll be okay."
"All we can do is have faith, Robert" Zeppeli said. "Now come! My car is out front!"
"Was it the piece of shit?" REO asked mockingly. Zeppeli made an annoyed face and him and delivered a swift tap with his Stand power that made REO trip over his own shoes. He staggered forward for a few steps, determined not to fall, and regained his balance just inches away from Erina's chest. He whipped his head back and followed Zeppeli out, trying hard not to meet her gaze.
Something strange his happening Erina told herself, and by God I'm going to be a part of it! I've been shut out of strange things my whole life, from my parents shady dealings to my teacher's hidden curriculum in my old private schools!
Erina marced righteously to Jojo's dorm door and knocked politely. It wasn't answered for a long stretch of time. As she motioned to knock again it opened slowly with the young black man standing behind it in a business suit with an undone tie.
"Hey" he greeted.
"Hello" Erina replied. "I'm here to see Jojo. Is he...available?"
"Sorry" the man apologized. "He can't talk with anyone right now. He's...feeling kind of depressed. Repressed memories, I think."
"Can I please see him anyway?" Erina pleaded. After a moment of wild assumption, the man nodded and complied. He opened the door and stepped aside, pointing her in the direction of Jojo's locked room.
"Good luck talking to him" he said. "He's got that door bolted up pretty good." Erina nodded and turned her attention to the door. She knocked it lightly and listened for any movement inside. There was none. She knocked again, and this time affirmed herself.
"John?" she asked softly. "It's Erina. Can I please come in?" No response, save for the almost mute movement of Jojo between his bed covers. "I don't understand what exactly is going on, but I still want to help you if I can. Please Jojo, give me a chance here..." Her plea fell on deaf ears. Jojo stopped moving entirely, and she wasn't about to try to use any of her greater guilt techniques to coax him out. Instead, she invited herself to the sitting area of the dorm and sat on the long sofa couch to usurp the television and wait Jojo out.
Within only a few minutes of traffic, Zeppeli and REO had reached their destination. With a parallel park across the street, they got out and eyes down their target. A large apartment complex with three stories and six rows of wide windows. A sign in front of the property, dated several months past, notarized that the building had been legally condemned and shut down to the public.
"Well" Zeppeli stated, "that's quite odd. It seems that this building is no longer in use. Perhaps Gerald gave you some disinformation?"
"He wasn't lying" REO said. "Just to be sure I traced all his calls to the address and matched it all up. A guy named Eric Geirtzz lives there."
"Well then" Zeppeli said "I suppose if he knows we;re coming we may as well march right in, eh?"
"Just a second" REO said. He summoned his Stand into his arm as a long and snaking chain, then searched around for something for him to latch onto. "Let's get closer first, but without going in."
"What for?" Zeppeli asked.
"I can trace electric signals" REO explained "with my Stand. If something has been in use inside that building within the past 24 hours I can find out where it is inside and where that electricity went if anywhere."
"Smart move" Zeppeli said, giving him a thumb up of encouragement. As they illegally crossed the vacant street the finer details of the building started to come into view. The complex itself wasn't very run-down for a decommissioned building. There was some chipped paint down near the door where some obvious damage under vandalism may have may have come up. The front doors made of well-carved, quality wood were undamaged as well. The windows along the ground floor were cracked here and there but none of them were broken. If anything, the building looked perfectly fine for an inner-city hive of former crime.
The Hudson Building, formerly known as the 'Hudson Project', had been the subject of gentrification within the last decade. The entire area had been renovated from the ground up and all the families that once inhabited them either adapted to working menial labor or they moved all together into even deeper poverty. The people who moved in promised to keep the culture of the underground alive in the remodeled sector, changing the blues and jazz clubs into blues and jazz clubs with outrageous door fees and service charges. The cuisine, namely the delicatessens and fast food, were shifted into privately owned exclusive restaurants and fast food was eliminated all together. With no place to work well or live off of easily, most families left as soon as they were able. The ones that stayed behind worked as janitors or maintenance workers just to keep their heads above water.
But the cosmopolitans and elite wealthy that dominated the internal urbanization didn't care. They ignored the obviously' linked raise in gang activity after the remodeling. They ignored the rampant crime in the outer limits of the city. They didn't care, not until Starski and the Lovebugs moved in and started terrorizing on a very personalized scale. The Hudson Building was one of the first targets for mass theft and general terrorizing as a gang. They robbed every rich fat-ass who stayed within the walls blind and left before anyone could figure out anything. No one knew it, but Starski's Stand played the biggest part in the event as it allowed him to keep the oxygen levels at a minimum so his racket of searching and stealing would go undisturbed while the normal, breathable air circulated through him constantly.
Now it was abandoned, deemed politically cursed as every person of wealth that stayed in it in the past years was either robbed or nearly robbed by the gang. After its decommission by the city, urban legends of a ghost representing the wrath of the elite who were robbed started springing up. Anyone who tried to go inside was rightly dealt with and suffered horrible lesions and bruises all over their body, particularly the back. Now it was the task of Zeppeli and REO to enter this building with a high sense of confidence and retrieve the allegiance of the accused ghost, a man named Eric Geirtzz.
They stepped across the threshold of the front gate and the battle began, and invisible threat circling and observing them constantly.
"Now what?" Zeppeli asked.
"There!" REO announced. He spun his chain around and hooked it on an exposed cable box. He channeled all the information of electrical routing he could until he had a definite report to give. It took him only a few seconds, however, thanks to the mental capacity for such knowledge his Stand granted him. "He must be really paranoid" REO noted. "Right now there are twelve rooms that are surging with electricity and outgoing automated telephones. He could be anywhere in there!"
"Then we'll search everywhere" Zeppeli said adamantly. He made a motion for the doors and opened them wide. A cool hiss of foreboding air rushed out and left a snaking trail of odd mist along the ground. REO could feel the freezing cold air from where he stood, but he knew he had to follow Zeppeli into it.
The lobby held a small reception desk built into a cave in the walls so only employees carrying a card or alternative key could enter the desk area. Across from the desk was a sitting area around a dark, silent television. A bar barren of any complimentary breakfast in years was also near the only hallway leading away. Signs pointing out the major parts of the hallway, such as a vending machine and the elevator, were on most of the walls and corners, just in case someone got hopelessly lost all of a sudden.
"Kinda spooky" REO noted. Zeppeli stopped breathing suddenly and listened. REO could see his breath and found it odd that Zeppeli was able to control his breath so perfectly that it didn't even enter the air visibly. Then Zeppeli sighed out and warmed the very air around him and REO.
"The air conditioning" Zeppeli said "has been on for ages, it seems. There isn't very sophisticated central heating for the lobby, is there? Just a few fans and vents to dry the air and keep it around 70."
"How do you know?" REO asked.
"Just a hunch" Zeppeli said "but I'd think that thin vent up there with the 'Central Heating/Cooling Limited to 70 degrees at all times' could lend us some important clues."
"So are you going to be a smart ass" REO began "all day or are we doing something important here? Can you use your Stand to find this guy quickly?"
"Are you mad?" Zeppeli asked. "In such conditions I can't use my stand period! It simply wouldn't work here!"
"Oh, come on!" REO said with great exasperation. "You mean I'm on my own here!?" Zeppeli took in a calm breath through his nose and parted his smiling lips just enough to let a rippling wisp of visible air echo into the chill of the room. It waved and pulsed with the magnificent ripple pattern, five simultaneously concentric patterns around a single point that extended outwards like a star.
"I intend to fight if need be" Zeppeli said. "Hopefully, for the sake of our future ally, I will not have to. I have faith in you, Robert." Zeppeli gave REO an eccentric hat-brim flick by turning his whole arm around and flicking the hat onto its brim with a single, light tap. The ripple traveled into the cloth and forced the hat to stay perfectly erect on REO's head, even if he tilted it to the side completely, until he took it up and placed it normally again. Zeppeli started down the single hallway while REO caught up.
A dark thing slithered away from outside of their vision and returned to an unknown place within the living complex. Once there it disappeared back into the mental void of its owner.
"Fools" a man said from his comfortable couch placed in front of a bright, flashing television. "I have no intention of siding with a bunch of spineless pussies. Let them come and try to convert me! Let the fuckers just try! HAHAHAHAHAA!!!!"
Eric, the man in the room, sat in nothing but a deluxe, fleece bathrobe and slippers. His dirt-blond hair was smoothly combed on the left side of his head, but frazzled and wildly unkempt on the other. It looked like he gelled it and had an epileptic fit with that hemisphere of his skull. His fingernails, for some reason, were also painted a deep green and were chipped from the intentionally freezing air. He had nice, thick lips that complimented his complexly light-blond skin and brown eyes with eyebrows angled in sort of upward arches of deeper brown. His nose was thick at its tip but he had thin nostrils, making him look slightly bulbous.
"Ahh..." he sighed, "it feels good to be able to laugh. Still, I wonder who these men are. Maybe Gerald panicked and told his attackers where I was. Well, they're in for a nasty little surprise." Eric extended a hand to his side above the floor and flicked all his fingers out at once. The misty cold air started to stir as he summoned his Stand. "Go on, Bad Religion, take care of your guests." With a lowing growl the Stand disappeared into one of the vents and vanished. Eric leaned back into his chair and placed his chin on his fist with a smirk. A smirk of evil...