Leaping back up and out of the hole as ten-point-two tons of Late Cretaceous carnivore surged upward and forward, Alice laughed, feeling almost giddy as she watched the massive tyrannosaur take its first, surprisingly nimble steps up onto terra firma.

"My dear brother, I present to you Tyrannosaurus Rex," she said, flourishing her right hand in the general direction of the gigantic theropod that towered over them where they stood.

She barely had time to get the last word out, before Dio grabbed her around the waist, swung her around, and kissed her deeply on the mouth. Behind them, a sound that the world hadn't heard for sixty-five million years boomed across the plains; it really did sound a lot like the one she remembered from Jurassic Park. After he'd had his fill of kissing her, Dio swept her up in his arms and leapt onto the back of their revived T-Rex, and together the pair of them rode off.

"We're going to have to find somewhere to shelter this find of ours when morning comes," she said, narrowing her eyes as she watched the ground pass by underneath them.

"Yes," Dio said, and she could all but hear her brother grinning. "While I, Dio, can hardly deny that the results were more than worth the time, we did indeed spend a great long while out here in the open."

And so, the pair of them searched for a place to bunker down for the day. As it turned out, the vast majority of terrain around this part of what would later become the state of Montana was large, open plains. And, while there were extremely large rocks scattered about in places, none of them would serve as anything but a temporary shelter for something as large as the Rex they were riding. So, in the end they were forced to dig a large, long shelter out of the ground for their Rex to wait in, while the pair of them made their way back to the small, unnamed settlement near Hell Creek.

She'd taken the precaution of adding hoods to all of their travel clothing while she and Dio had been on the train, both because it was something to do, and because it'd been something that needed doing.

So, the pair of them pulled up their hoods and made their way back towards the small settlement where they had been staying. The people there were still waiting for what passed for a town council to settle on a name for the settlement before it could become a proper town, but they'd been welcoming enough. Particularly the pair she'd taken to calling her two Johns.

And, as if her thoughts had called them – which might not have been as far-fetched a thought as it would have been, considering everything that was true in this world – Jon Bonjovi and John Mellencamp came out from the rustic townhouse that she'd rented for herself and Dio to stay in while they operated in this area.

"Good morning, gentlemen," she greeted cordially, as the four of them all came within earshot of each other; well, human earshot, anyway.

"It's good to see you two back again," Jon said, smiling as he and John came to a stop just a few paces from where she and Dio stood. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"That and a bit more," she said, smiling with profound satisfaction as she and Dio fell into step with Jon and John.

"Really?" John asked. "Well, I'm glad you managed to find… whatever it was that you came here looking for."

"I could have sworn I told you that Dio and I were fossil hunters," she said, thinking back on her previous conversations with the man in an effort to recall just what she'd said to him when renting the townhouse that he and his business partner maintained.

"Well, you know Melonhead here can barely remember what he's had for breakfast, much less anything you actually tell him needs remembering," Jon said, sounding rather amused.

"That's a shameless exaggeration and you know it," John said, sounding more amused than annoyed; everything she'd seen of the pair's interactions gave the impression that they'd been friends for a long time, and what she was seeing now only served to reinforce it. "I just… Couldn't remember straight-away, that's all."

"Of course it is," Jon said, turning a grin back on his partner. "I believe you."

The sounds of an argument-in-the-making faded steadily into the distance, as Jon and John split off from her and Dio when the four of them entered the townhouse.

"Fossil hunters, sister dear?" Dio asked, looking amusedly at her as he sat himself down on his bed.

"Really, you'd be surprised how much even a trilobite will net you," she said, plopping herself down in a nicely padded chair just opposite her brother's position on his bed. "To say nothing of the fully-intact skeletons I was sensing down there when we pulled ours up."

"Trilobites," Dio muttered, as though he was testing how the word sounded. "How interesting. Something that came up in your studies?"

"I'm sure they mentioned it somewhere in all those books I read," she volleyed back, smirking at the amusement she could see plainly on her twin's face.

"And you say these fossils of yours are worth quite a large sum of money?"

=PB=

When he'd come to America with Mr. Zeppeli and Straizo, Jonathan had attempted on every spare moment he was given to sway the man's opinion of Dio and Alice, to make him understand that – whatever other encounters the pair of them had had with other vampires – his siblings were nothing like those terrible creatures. Unfortunately, it seemed as though the more carefully he worded his arguments, the simpler Mr. Zeppeli found it to turn them against him.

He wasn't going to allow himself to give up, of course; he simply had to find the correct way of explaining his position to Mr. Zeppeli.

Looking back down at the newspaper in his hands, Jonathan paused as his eyes glanced over a familiar name. He did not believe what he saw at first, but reading the words again did not change them…

"The newly-minted team of fossil hunters, Dio and Alice Brando," he muttered, scanning the small, not terribly detailed article that had caught his eye.

His smile slowly grew, even as he finished the article and quickly tucked the paper safely inside his vest so that he would be able to take it with him when he left the hotel's dining room. It was a comforting thing, in spite of his own personal misgivings, to know that his siblings had managed to escape from New York under the very noses of Mr. Zeppeli and Straizo. I wonder if I might send them something, he mused.

True, there would be the perhaps-difficult matter of finding out just where the new state of Montana actually was in relation to New York, and also the matter of keeping the fact of his interest – or just the reason for it, if he could not manage the former – from becoming known by Mr. Zeppeli and Straizo. Still, even just knowing that his siblings were all right was a comfort to him in such a time as this. For the moment, such would have to be enough.

=PB=

Adjusting his wide-brimmed hat to keep the lethal rays of the sun from his flesh he, Dio, smiled as he continued to oversee the excavation of the many and varied skeletons that had lain buried beneath the plains of this new American state that he and his sweet sister had born witness to the founding of. It was a struggle not to cackle with sheer, unbridled glee as he beheld the forms of the great beasts being removed from the ground, but if he'd only learned one thing from his life with dear Alice, it would have to be the value of discretion.

Still, watching such magnificent specimens be revealed once more – and knowing that they were his for the asking if he so desired – was a heady thing indeed.

Turning away from the junior archeologists continuing about their work he, Dio, made his way back to the house that he and his dear Alice had caused to be built. Or rather, that the people who lived in this new American state had built for them, once that man who was so very interested in the dinosaur skeletons that those who had gathered about them continued to excavate even as he made his way back to his and his sweet sister's new home. True, it was not yet so large as the Joestar estate, where the pair of them had grown to adulthood and been granted such wondrous power by the stone mask Jojo had been so kind to discover for them, but their own Montana holdings – built just before the instatement of the Montana Territory – were comfortable enough for the moment.

"Sister dear," he greeted, once he had made his way through the more public rooms of their ever-growing home and into their personal sanctum within the building.

As expected, dear Alice was hard at work, this time mapping out the various dig sites that the humans now working in this area had established. There was also a folded newspaper to the left of the space she had cleared for herself, so it was clear that mapping dig sites was hardly the only thing that occupied his sweet sister's attention. Pausing for a moment, knowing that Alice would acknowledge him when she had finished with her work, he waited.

"Good morning, brother," she greeted cordially, once she had finished noting down all of the locations where their cadre of hired humans were working. "Seems we're getting a bit famous."

"Oh?" Catching the paper as she tossed it lightly to him, the large, front-page photo caught his eye. Just as it was meant to. "Renowned, eh?" he echoed, savoring the taste of the word in his mouth. "You don't seem happy, sister dear," he said, watching as a small crease formed between his lovely sister's elegant eyebrows.

"It's a complication," dear Alice said, calmly as ever. "Once these stories about us begin circulating outside of the state, which they inevitably will, considering what we're doing here, we're inevitably going to end up facing a certain pair of idiots again."

He hummed softly, then chuckled. "True, but I would hardly say we're unprepared for that, sister dear."

"I know," his dear Alice said, smiling languidly up at him like the cat she so resembled when she was contented. "Still, it's rather troublesome to have to deal with in the first place."

"Well, I suppose I can't argue with that," he said, smiling amusedly at her phrasing.

Truly, his sweet sister had the most interesting way of putting things into perspective.

=PB=

They had, of course, been given the opportunity to keep some of the fossil skeletons that their people had been digging up with such fascinating regularity; whether by dint of being the first to find them after they'd been buried all those millions of years ago, or by the simple expedient of their vampire physiology allowing the both of them to go without sleep. Either way, when she'd spotted a certain, nearly-intact skeleton, Alice had immediately taken possession of it. Sure, it might not have impressed Dio as much as the Rex that he was still so enamored by, but even he wouldn't be able to deny its utility once he saw it in action.

She'd wondered briefly just how in the hell a Quetzalcoatlus had ended up in a fossil bed in Montana, then remembered that she was a vampire created by some kind of weird brain acupuncture and that she planned to raise this particular Quetzalcoatlus as an undead zombie, and gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Slashing open her palms the same way she'd seen Dio do that first time, Alice watched the transformation with interest. It was fascinating, watching flesh growing over the fossilized bones that she and some of the archeologists working around the expanding dig site had excavated; seeing the wing-membranes filling in, to watch the re-growth of muscle-tissue and scales, and the sprouting of what seemed to be feathers, of all things. She hadn't known that Quetzalcoatluses – Quetzalcoatli? – had even had feathers in the first place.

Of course, the closest she'd come to seeing an actual Quetzalcoatlus in her life as Sarah Williams had been a CGI model on a television program that she could only remember in the broadest of strokes at present; even then, she didn't think anything like that could even come close to what she was seeing taking shape and form before her in this moment of moments.

=PB=

It was the sound of Mr. Zeppeli's footsteps – hurried, harsh, rushing inevitably toward the room Jonathan had been staying in while the pair of Hamon users had attempted to hunt down his siblings while he strove to convince them otherwise – that prompted him to hide the article he'd clipped from the New York Times. Hiding it away within the small wooden box that he had surreptitiously purchased with some of the funds he had brought with him, Jonathan quickly tucked the box itself away just as he saw the knob of his door beginning to turn.

"It seems we were deceived," Mr. Zeppeli said, his tone as grim and serious as the expression that Jonathan could see on his face. "Come; we'll need to make plans quickly if we're to get back on their trail."

"I thought you were already searching," he said, feeling a stab of apprehension; he didn't think the either of them would have searched his room for anything other than the most dire of circumstances, but for a heart-freezing moment all he could think of was that Mr. Zeppeli had discovered the collection of newspaper clippings that he used to keep track of his dear siblings.

It was all he could truly manage, considering that – even with every well-reasoned, passionate argument that he had mustered – both Mr. Zeppeli and Straizo seemed utterly determined to force a confrontation even when Dio and Alice were continuing to demonstrate their devotion to humanity with every action they took.

"There's no need for you to fret, Jojo," Mr. Zeppeli said kindly; Jonathan still found it odd to have the man call him by his nickname, to be so kind to him while at the same time seeking to hunt his dear siblings as though they were nothing more than beasts. "You had no way of knowing; we'll simply have to adjust our plans while we travel."

Jonathan was just about to ask what it was that Mr. Zeppeli intended to prepare for and where he intended to go, though he was beginning to suspect that he knew, when the pair of them arrived in the salon. Straizo was just settling down on the old, scuffed settee that had been placed by the side of the low table in the center of the room, and Jonathan noted that he also had a newspaper with him.

"So, you saw it too, Straizo?"

"Yes," the other man said, eyes narrowing as he stared down the large picture that took up fully half of the front page.

Dio was there, frozen in a pose of triumph before a truly immense bone: arms folded, and grinning out at the world with that same, confidant grin he'd always worn when something was going his way; there was even the hint of gentle teasing that lurked in the shadow of every smile Jonathan had seen on his brother's face. It was a nice thing, to be able to see his siblings again, even if it was just in still-frames and photographs. He could still remember Alice's photo from the continuation of the article several pages in: the way his sister had been posed with a pickaxe over her right shoulder, standing at ease and relaxed in a sensible outfit and the kind of wide-brimmed had that allowed his dear siblings to go outside when the sun was high in the sky.

Alice had been wearing nearly the same kind of smile that Dio had worn on the large, front-page photograph that had brought the attention of Mr. Zeppeli and Straizo back to them, even with all of the ways the pair of them had tried to escape it.

"You know what we need to do," Mr. Zeppeli said, the stern expression on his face drawing a soft sigh from Jonathan; he'd been hoping that the pair of them, deprived of their targets for so long, would return to England, or else turn their attention to some other matter that needed attending to.

Still, Straizo answered in the affirmative, and he and Mr. Zeppeli began to make plans for traveling to Montana. Excusing himself to take a walk, Jonathan found his feet almost instinctively bringing him towards the post office. Pausing outside the building for a long moment, torn between the thought of Mr. Zeppeli's disapproval and the need to warn his dear siblings about what was soon to be coming for them, Jonathan gathered himself and made his way into the building. Family, after all, came first; every true gentleman knew that.

=PB=

Looking down upon the very clouds themselves as they drifted lazily by he, Dio, laughed aloud in the thin, chill air so high above the small town of Jordan in the state of Montana where he and his sweet sister had found so many wondrous things. The human fools who had first excavated the bones of these magnificent beasts they had chosen to call dinosaurs knew nothing of their true majesty. Even he, Dio, had thought them to be insipid, lumbering beasts, and if his sweet sister had told him just what it was that she had been seeking in Montana… well, there was entirely too much of a chance that he would have foolishly refused.

And truly, that would have been a terrible shame.

"Well, you're certainly happy," his sweet sister said, a smile plain in her voice.

"You can hardly blame me, sister dear," he laughed, nuzzling the back of her head as the pair of them flew on.

And truly, this had been the dream of those pitiful, ground-bound humans, likely since the first of them had looked to the birds with impotent envy in their eyes. Truly, he and his sweet sister had accomplished in a day what every one of those credulous humans so far below them had hoped in vain for over the entirety of their pitiful lives. It was a wonderfully heady experience.

So, it was with some reluctance that he obeyed his sweet sister's direction to brace himself as their majestic flying beast – so fittingly named for the feathered serpent of Aztec myth – circled lower, diving beneath the clouds as his dear Alice directed it back to their shared home. Said home had, of course, inevitably expanded into a compound that was nearly half the size of the Joestar estate back in England. Smiling as he saw the open deck of the landing pad his sweet sister had designed to allow them to depart from and return to their holdings with ease he, Dio, allowed himself to relax against his sweet sister's back as she guided them to a steady landing inside the tower built to accommodate their takeoffs and landings.

He could see the way his sweet sister's extendable veins snapped out, releasing the latch and letting the open door of the tower snap shut, and smiled as he heard the spring-latches lock back into place

Sliding down and landing neatly upon the smooth-polished floor, Dio smiled slightly as he heard his dear Alice speaking softly to the flying beast she had raised not so long ago. His sweet sister had a habit of speaking gently to all of their pets, drawing them in close and binding their loyalty to her with soft words and touches upon the shoulder or arm. It was a rather interesting sight, watching all of their pets flock to her as she presided over the dig sites and the day-to-day running of their expanding estate.

Not quite as interesting as the pets he, Dio, was gathering to himself, but suitable for the kind of work they were doing.

=PB=

Boarding the train that would take them to the new state of Montana, Jonathan found himself wishing that those articles that he had found in the New York Times had never been printed. Yes, it would have meant he might not have been able to reconnect with his beloved siblings so swiftly as he had, but it also meant that they would not be in Mr. Zeppeli's sights once more. All through the week, he'd attempted to reason with the older man, citing the fact that Dio and Alice – vampires or not – had been working to uncover more about the world they all lived in.

That the pair of them had, in fact, contributed more to humanity's knowledge of the past as vampires than Jonathan himself had; though he did still intend to go into the field himself, someday. Still, the thought of having Dio and Alice working alongside him, if in a subtly different field than the one he himself intended to go into, gave him a warm feeling of comfort when he thought about it. However, Mr. Zeppeli had remained unbending in his convictions; he still insisted that, as vampires, Dio and Alice needed to be destroyed.

And he would always say destroyed, never seeming to understand the fact that – if Jonathan allowed him to carry through with his plans – it would be nothing short of murder, killing Dio and Alice when they had done no harm to anyone; they drank the blood of beasts, and they bought it from the butcher shop.

More and more, it was beginning to seem as though his only ally in the matter was Straizo. Straizo, who had begun to take some interest in his recounting of his siblings' exploits when they had first become vampires. In particular, he seemed to be interested in the way they shielded themselves from the sun, and the defenses they had developed against Hamon. To hear Straizo tell it, he himself had encountered some of those defenses; Alice's own, in fact.

Listening to the man speak, it seemed as though he had developed some sort of respect for Alice; or, at the very least, for the tactics that his and Dio's sister had brought to bear against him.

The sound of the train's whistle forced his thoughts back to the present; back to the battle that awaited them. Back to his fading hopes for reconciliation between Mr. Zeppeli and his dear siblings. Steeling himself for what seemed to be inevitably coming, Jonathan Joestar stepped down from the loading platform and into the train station in Billings, Montana.

=PB=

He could see the anguish on the young Joestar's face, and while William knew that he could wipe it all away with but a handful of words, he was not about to lie to spare the young man's feelings. Such could only lead to more problems in the future. In any case, dealing with the vampires that wore his siblings' faces would – while causing him great grief and anguish in the short term – do only good for humanity as a whole.

The longer those creatures were allowed to exist, the more blind each and every one of the Joestars would become to their growing evil; he could not allow such a situation to continue, hate him though the Joestars might for what he was duty bound to do.