"That's just what I thought you'd say, you stupid pig!"
His punch, even without Hamon enhancing the power behind it, struck hard enough to drive the fat oaf's finger right through the top of his nose. A pair of bloody teeth flew out of his mouth as he slammed into the ground, wriggling pathetically for a few moments before going still.
"You were shot resisting arrest!"
So, the silent oaf has a tongue, after all, Joseph mused, not feeling particularly charitable. "Please," he snapped, spitting to the side in contempt. "Try to shoot me. But I'm warning you right now: before you can pull the trigger, I will have broken your finger like a rotten matchstick!"
"Not from over there! I'll blow your damned brains out!"
Lips pulling back from his teeth in something that the other oaf might have been foolish enough to think was a grin, Joseph gathered his Hamon. Channeling it into the bottle, Joseph grinned all the wider as he felt the pop inside the bottle resonating with the energy. The bottlecap blew clean off, slamming into the oaf's finger and snapping the thing in just the way he'd promised to do.
He'd a sense of satisfaction about his actions, for all of half a minute before he remembered just what he'd actually done. Gramps had told him time and time again that Hamon was to be used for the protection of humanity from monsters like wicked vampires, or zombies; well, not vampires like Aunty Alice and Uncle Dio, and certainly not zombies like Bruford and Tarkus. Still, if there was one thing that Gramps was adamant about, it was that Hamon was not to be used to assault his fellow man.
Still, even Gramps would have given those brutish oafs what for, but Granny…
"Crap, I'm in for it now," he groused, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Granny Erina is going to rake me over the coals for this!" he fidgeted, passing the opened bottle – the pop was rather good, at least – from hand to hand. "She'll understand if I explain, won't she?" shaking himself back to the present, Joseph found his eyes falling back on the small, slender form on the ground before him. "Now, Mr. Pickpocket, what's say we get out of here?"
Pausing for a moment, Joseph waited for the lad to nod, then swept him up so that the pair of them could hightail it out of the alley they'd been standing in. He wasn't so heavy, probably since he didn't get much to eat, but Joseph was eager to get back out into the city. Anyway, the pickpocket couldn't have had many fond memories of this particular alley, so the sooner the pair of them could hightail it out of there, the better.
Once the pair of them were far enough away that Joseph felt he could at least be reasonably sure that nobody had followed them, he allowed himself to relax. Opening up his wallet, Joseph checked to make sure everything was still where he'd put it.
"Ah, every pound still in place," he said, smiling slightly. "Good."
"Those are American dollars," the pickpocket said, looking up at Joseph like he was the one being strange.
"Bah," he grumbled. "Here, it's dollars, over in Italy it's called lira, Mexican money is called dinero," he groused.
"Actually, Mexican money is called pesos," the pickpocket interrupted, a slight smile starting to show on his face.
"Argh! There's just too damn many words that all mean the same thing!" he shouted, falling to slump back against the concrete pilings of the overpass they were standing under. "Would you believe that one of my Aunties speaks eight different languages? Eight! I mean, really; what would you ever need to speak eight different languages for?"
Pulling a face as he heard the pickpocket laughing at him, Joseph paused to wait out the fit of laugher, brief as it ended up being.
"I meant to ask you this before, but what was that weird light you started glowing with earlier?"
"Oh, that? That's a talent that Gramps has been working to teach pretty much everyone in the family," he said, folding his arms behind his as he looked up at the vast network of steel girders that supported the overpass that towered so far above their heads. "Well, those of us that can use it, anyway."
"Wow," the pickpocket said, sounding suitably awed. "So, your whole family can do stuff like what you just did?"
"Well, not quite all of them. My father never quite had the knack," he said. "Neither did my Aunty Alice, or my Uncle Dio," he said, perfectly aware that just saying something like that didn't encompass any of the reasons why three of his family members were unable to use Hamon; or the specific and differing circumstances behind those reasons.
Still, some secrets were meant only for family ears; even he knew that.
"Oh," the pickpocket said, still sounding a bit curious, but also like he understood just when to stop asking questions; Joseph was pleased with his discretion. "Anyway, I really owe you big time. Everyone calls me Smokey, and I'd sure like it if you'd tell me your name."
"It's Joestar," he said, turning a grin back at Smokey as he stood tall; the same way Gramps did, when he would introduce himself to someone new. Even after so long in Tibet, it seemed to be a habit that Gramps was determined to keep. "Joseph Joestar. My friends call me Jojo."
Of course, sometimes it got a bit confusing, those times when he and Gramps would be training together, since the both of them had the same nickname; and sure, it'd been funny those first few times when both of them would be talking with Speedwagon, and he'd forget that – at least to the old man – Gramps would always be Jojo. Still, it was an old joke, and old jokes didn't really stay funny for long.
=BT=
"How long do we have until that convoy gets here, Alice?" he asked, looking back down the length of the tunnel; back towards the entrance.
"Given the speed they're moving? About half an hour, perhaps less, depending on if they're equipped for going off-road or not," Jojo's sister said, the thoughtful expression on her face hardening into one of resolve. "Jonathan, do you think that'll be enough time for us to deal with this guy?"
"Not with any degree of certainty," Jojo said, looking at the creature in the pillar with an expression of utmost concern upon his face. "Even channeling Hamon through an arrow shot into the creature's head, I could hardly be certain of just how the energies would react with the surrounding stone."
"What do you mean, Jojo?"
"Hamon interacts differently with stone than it does with living creatures, Speedwagon," Jojo said, turning back to him with that same, worried expression that he'd worn when they'd all first made their way into this terrible, blackened cavern. "There's too much a risk that, when the Hamon comes into contact with the creature's body, it will merely serve to shatter the stone covering it and release the creature back into the world."
"Yes," he said, shuddering at the very thought of releasing the horrid thing they were facing from its stone slumber. "We could hardly risk something like that."
"Well, whatever we are going to do, we're going to want to do it fast," Alice said, the two locks of hair she'd been using to monitor the approach of whoever it was in command of that convoy she'd told them about still stiffened and pointed down toward the entrance of the tunnel. "We're running out of time."
"We can't simply abandon this place! If those people don't know what kind of monster they're dealing with, they could put the whole world in terrible danger!" he exclaimed, looking from the creature in the pillar – appearing so terribly, deceptively placid as it slumbered – to his old friends, already willing to place themselves in the path of such deadly peril, simply to ensure that no other person was forced to face it.
"I'll speak to them," Jojo said, setting himself forward again. "Perhaps, if I were to explain the nature of our present circumstances, I can make them understand the gravity of the situation."
Robert allowed himself a sigh of profound relief; Jojo would be able to handle this. He would convince those men – whoever they were – not to go charging so recklessly into a situation that was entirely beyond their ken. And then, once they were safely out of the way, the three of them – or four; he didn't want to discount Straizo, but the man was so terribly unobtrusive – would be able to return their attention to the creature locked away within the pillar.
They would be able to determine a method of destroying it at last.
=BT=
Smokey still didn't quite know just what to make of Joseph – or Jojo, but he didn't think the two of them were that close just yet – but, well… Watching as he threatened a cabbie was a bit much. Still, he was starting to get the feeling that, for all of Joseph's tough-guy swagger, he was really a good man at heart. That bore out when, once his grandma had asked to know what he was doing, he paid for the cab and the three of them all climbed inside.
"So, where does your family live?" he asked, curiosity finally getting the better of him. "You said your grandpa taught you to use that light of yours, but I don't know many places that he'd be able to learn something like that."
"Gramps spends most of his time in Tibet," Joseph said, leaning back in his seat as the cab set off. "And now, with Mum off in Venice on business… Well, Granny and I have been spending a lot more time together."
Wow, his family's pretty much scattered to the four winds, Smokey mused, feeling a bit sad.
"Speaking of time, when do you think Speedwagon is going to get here?"
"I'm not certain, Joseph," his grandmother said, gloved hands clasped over the end of her pale-blue umbrella.
"Really, Speedwagon calls on us to come all the way out to New York on some business that he won't even mention over the telephone, and then when we do come, he's not even here to meet us," Joseph said, leaning on his right hand with an annoyed expression on his face. "I think that was very rude of him."
"I'm sure the oil business occupies a great deal of his time," the old woman said; she seemed to be a lot more level-headed than Joseph, something that he wondered about for a bit.
He wondered if it was true for all the Joestars, that the women were calmer than the men.
"Say, Granny, do you think he's taken up with Aunty Alice?" Joseph asked, starting to grin slyly. "Do you think that's why he didn't show up?"
"What are you suggesting, Joseph?" she demanded, starting to look more than a bit irate.
"Well, Aunty Alice is so well-preserved that even I would want to court her," Joseph said, his grin stretching widely across his face. "So, it's no surprise that an old man like Speedwagon would have the same sort of idea."
When Joseph started to make kissy-faces as his grandma, and Smokey tried not to burst out laughing, the woman gave him a good batting about the head and shoulders with her umbrella.
=BT=
"You shouldn't make insinuations like that," Granny Erina said, as he rubbed the aching spot on his head she'd been smacking. "Particularly about our family."
"All right, all right, I'm sorry!" he exclaimed, holding up his hands to ward off any further blows to the head. "I won't do it again!"
After a last look, promising further chastisement if he had the misfortune to be caught acting up again, Joseph settled back into his seat to watch the city going by. Soon enough, the three of them had decided upon a restaurant to stop off at for supper. Stepping out while Granny Erina thanked the driver and paid him for his services, he turned as the front door to the restaurant was opened and a rush of warm air laden with enticing smells wafted out towards him. Smiling as he fell into step with Smokey and Granny Erina, Joseph paused a moment while the three of them awaited their turn to be seated.
Once that was over with, and they'd all taken their seats around the table they'd been seated at, Joseph noticed something particular about their server's left arm…
"Hold on a moment," he called, reaching out for the arm in question as the server paused in response. "Aha! Just as I thought: this is a Brando Industries medical prosthetic!" he squeezed a bit, feeling the framework of steel- "Ow!"
"Joseph! You cannot just manhandle someone's arm if and when you find them interesting!" Granny Erina snapped, batting him upside the head once more for good measure.
"I'm sorry, I won't do it again!" he hurried to promise, rubbing his smarting head.
"Good, now apologize to our server, Joseph."
"Yes, Granny."
After he'd done that, however, Joseph found his attention drawn away from just what it was that he intended to order by a call from one of the other tables. A large, unsavory looking man rose from his seat there, looking as though he had something of import to say.
"You're Erina Joestar, aren't you?" the man asked; Joseph narrowed his eyes, knowing that there weren't many reasons for such a man to wish to speak to his granny, and that even fewer of those reasons were good. "I've had dealings with your Mr. Speedwagon in the past, and I've been keeping tabs on your Miss Brando's expansion into the city. She's been doing good work, your Miss Brando, 'specially for someone her age. Anyway, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I got word that there was a battle down in Mexico; destroyed trucks, corpses, the works. No one knows what happened afterward, but given how many corpses ended up scattered around the jungle, I really doubt either of those two survived."
The soft, sobbing gasp he heard from Granny Erina summoned the furious, boiling rage that Joseph hadn't felt since those bastards had hijacked Speedwagon's plane, particularly when one of them had broken his nose and caused him to bleed onto a suit that had been gifted to him by the very woman seated not one chair down from where he himself had been seated. Lunging out of his seat fast enough to send the thing toppling over, Joseph crossed the floor almost too fast for the callous bastard who'd been so rude as to just drop such terrible news on Granny Erina without even preparing her for it in any fashion at all.
"You are very thoughtless, just dropping that horrible news upon Granny Erina the way you did!" he growled, grabbing the man by his collar and hefting him firmly upright. "Don't you see how much distress you've caused her?"
The punch that slammed the thoughtless oaf back into the table he'd been sitting at allowed him to let off some of the tension simmering away inside of him, but it was at least enough that he could offer what comfort he could to Granny Erina.
"Don't worry, Granny, I'm still here," he said, gently wrapping his arms around her shoulders from behind. "If there's any way to get to the bottom of all this, you can rest assured that I'll find it."
"I just don't understand," Granny said, her voice breaking on the last word. "All of our family works to do good in the world," she sniffled, pulling out her handkerchief to dab at her eyes. "I just don't understand how anyone could wish to harm us for it."
"I'll call Dio," he said, leaning his head against Granny Erina's for a long moment. "All other considerations aside, he's going to want to know about this."
"No," Granny Erina said, composing herself as she slowly rose from her seat. "I'll call him."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," Granny said, nodding with a sad sort of resolve. "You and Smokey enjoy the rest of the night."
Sighing as he watched Granny Erina leave, knowing that there wasn't much of a chance of him being able to convince her to change her mind – she was almost as unwavering as Aunty Alice, in her own, quiet way – Joseph turned his gaze back to Smokey.
"Looks like it's just the two of us from now on," he said, making his way back over to where the other young man was sitting.
"Yeah, looks like," Smokey said, looking off in the direction that Granny Erina had left in for a long moment. "Anyway, I'm sure your family's all right."
"Yes," he said, smiling softly. "We Joestars have a knack for surviving even the worst sorts of calamities."
"Yeah," Smokey said, though the expression that passed briefly over his face suggested that he might've wanted to say something more.
Still, it was probably the same sort of question that Joseph had found himself on the receiving end of often enough that he'd come to be able to predict it even when the potential asker fancied themselves too polite to say anything. The question being, of course, why exactly Aunty Alice and Uncle Dio – if they were members of the Joestar family – did not share the same surname. And yes, there had been times when he'd wondered just that same kind of thing himself, but both Aunty Alice and Uncle Dio did share the same surname.
The pair of them just chose not to use it on any but the most binding of legal documents.
Asking Smokey if he knew of anyplace to eat where there weren't going to be large crowds of people all wondering about what he'd just done ended up leading the pair of them to a quaint little café by the name of Irene's. Looking to distract himself from all of the terrible revelations of what had seemed to be a perfectly agreeable day, Joseph began idly flipping through the pages of the magazine in front of him.
Well, that would certainly be distracting, he mused, good-humor only slightly strained by what he remembered. "Smokey, do you think this could be true? Could girls really make them bigger?" holding his hands up to his chest, mimicking the look of an actual brassier, Joseph played up his surprise for both their benefit and his own amusement.
"Let me see that," Smokey said, either playing along for his own amusement, or just trying to be of help in his own fashion. "Go from an A cup to a C cup… Nah, it's just a lot of snake-oil."
However, he'd glimpsed a strange figure standing just outside the large, front windows of the café, and so could spare little attention for what else Smokey might have said. The figure he was seeing seemed to be rather tall, but was either rather bulky or wearing shapeless clothes underneath their cloak, because they – their clothes concealed too much for Joseph to tell if he was facing a man or a woman – did not seem to have the kind of defined musculature that he was used to seeing.
The head-wrap, covering every centimeter aside from a narrow strip across his eyes, was something that Joseph had only truly seen in movies and the like.
"Well now," he said, having made his way out of the café so that he would be better able to speak to the newcomer who had seemed so particularly interested in him when he was merely sitting in the café after having a light meal. "You're wearing quite the odd outfit. Really, it's not that cold out tonight, so why don't you take off that bulky coat of yours and come inside?" The newcomer continuing holding their silence, so Joseph offered them a smile. "Come on, I'm sure you have a very pretty face under all those wrappings, so why don't you-" A ringing, metallic clatter drew Joseph's attention to the ground, where… "Where did you get that?" he snarled, eyes narrowing in fury.
The infuriating bastard merely continued staring at him, not seeming to care in the slightest for the bolt from Aunty Alice's steel-bow that now lay at both their feet.
"Don't trifle with me, you masked bastard!" lunging to grab the trailing edge of the cloak saw him only grasping air, as the bastard dodged back and away from him, coming to stand directly in front of the window that Joseph had first caught sight of him through. "All right, if you're not going to answer me, then eat this!"
The Thompson sub-machine gun roared in his hands, as he let loose a relentless barrage of firepower into the callous bastard who'd just gone and dumped such a terrible, shocking revelation upon him without even a by-your-leave. He'd have thought it was that same bastard from the restaurant, but the eyes were wrong for that, and the stance itself was rather different. He didn't know just who this bastard was, but he was going to personally ensure that they learned their proper lesson about tact.
When he stomped over to the broken window, before the near-empty café, peering into the darkness to see if he could catch a glimpse of that masked bastard, Joseph pursed his lips in annoyance at the shrieks and screaming coming from all around him. Really, you'd think he'd actually been aiming at people, the way they were carrying on. After driving a few stubborn girls off, Joseph looked down to see that Smokey was standing right beside him.
"Joseph, what the hell?! You just tried to shoot someone!"
Shaking his head, not having the patience to talk when that masked bastard was right in front of him – practically taunting him by removing the cloak and head-wrappings to reveal-
"Straizo?!"
"I had to be certain of your resolve, Joseph," the vampire said, shaking debris from his now-tattered cloak. "I assume, given your reaction, you're aware of the situation in Mexico?"
"Yeah, I heard about it a few hours before you showed up," he said, as his Auntie's retainer fell into step with him and the pair of them stepped across through the blown-out remains of the café window.
"Wait, you just shot him!" Smokey exclaimed, catching up to the pair of them, his eyes a bit wild as he shifted his gaze from him to Straizo and back again. "How is he so calm after that? In fact… how is he even alive?"
He laughed. "Please, Straizo's a vampire. He can walk that kind of thing off, no problem."
"A vampire?!"
"He isn't aware of our circumstances?" Straizo asked, turning a raised eyebrow on him.
"Ah," he laughed sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "Well, I'd only just met him around… I think it was just before noon?"
"So, he's had little time to become accustomed to our bizarre circumstances," Straizo said, fangs visible for a moment as he sighed. "You're far too impulsive, Joseph Joestar."
Grinning slightly as Straizo swept up the bolt he'd probably picked from one of the engines of the destroyed trucks he'd heard about, Joseph sighed. It seemed as though even he'd underestimated his Aunty and Speedwagon; they'd probably gone somewhere to regroup after the attack, since it had probably either destroyed or damaged a lot of their gear.