It hadn't been easy, getting his hands on Enya's old list of contacts – particularly since Dio had been on what might have easily been called a crusade against anything and everything that had more than the most passing of connections to the hag after what she'd been stupid enough to try doing – but in the end Telence had been able to copy enough of them down that he'd felt at least reasonably sure he would be able to gain at least some kind of success. Even if only indirectly.

Still, knowing that Dio wasn't the kind of person who would think twice before attacking someone if he so much caught a hint of Enya Geil's remaining presence – the man wasn't particularly sane or restrained when it came to those people he considered either personal enemies or a danger to his family as a whole – and having access to the old hag's contact-list would probably be considered a big one. But really, it wasn't like he was going to send any of these guys after the Commander, or anything. No one sane would go after the Commander, and that wasn't just because she had Blackwater on her side, and every Blackwatch agent – in-training or not – was in contact with one of their agents in the person of their handler.

No, anyone who'd seen Alice Brando at work already knew why smart people didn't fuck with the Commander.

Besides, it wasn't like he was actually planning to kill anyone, no matter what kind of ideas had been in N'Doul's head when the Blackwater agent had delivered something that couldn't have been mistaken for anything but an ultimatum.

=SC=

Her first day attending school in Japan hadn't quite been anything like what Loreena had been expecting: aside from having to dodge pretty much every girl in the school – or what had felt like every girl, anyway – Loreena had found herself relying more and more on both Noriaki and Jotaro to figure out what people were saying. Everyone just seemed to talk so fast, seeming to expect that everyone else would be able to follow them when they seemed to be speaking a hundred words a second. Aside from that, no one seemed to know quite what to make of a foreigner who looked like her and wasn't from America.

No one really seemed to know anything about Wales, either, since most of them seemed apt to ask her if she was sure she wasn't American.

It was all fairly strange, but Loreena figured that she wouldn't have to deal with that kind of thing once the novelty of her presence had finally had a chance to wear off; she'd just have to be patient. What was actually troubling – as opposed to the consistent sense of annoyed amusement she felt at almost constantly being asked if she was from a place where she'd only spent a few months during a business trip with her father – was the fact that she seemed to be the target of several of the girls who had been pestering Jotaro when he'd been making his way to school in the first place. So far, it didn't seem to be anything dangerous, but finding herself pushed to use Crimson Ace to avoid being drenched by a bucket of water that had been rigged up over one of the doorways that she'd passed through had been one of the more troublesome things that Loreena had found herself having to deal with during the course of her day.

Still, having the chance to stay with Noriaki instead of being forced to leave with her father when his work inevitably called for him to move was worth quite a bit, as far as she was concerned.

"That was certainly an interesting day," she said, as she, Noriaki, and Jotaro all made their way back to their respective homes.

"It was a pain in the ass," Jotaro groused, before turning a slight smirk on her as she continued to keep pace with him. "Though the way you used your Stand to throw off every one of their stupid pranks was kind of funny."

"I aim to please," she volleyed back, offering a smirk of her own in return.

"I still can't believe how persistent those girls were," Noriaki said, the dubious expression he'd worn for so long coming back as his thoughts clearly returned to the day that they'd all just been through together. "Even after both of us said we weren't interested," he turned an amusedly-chiding look on Jotaro. "Well, I said I wasn't interested; your responses weren't fit to be printed."

"Fuck off," Jotaro shot back, glaring at Noriaki with about his usual level of annoyance for life, the universe, and everything.

"He's so articulate, isn't he?" Noriaki asked, turning to her with an airily-mocking expression on his face.

Loreena tried to stifle a laugh, but given the annoyed expression that she was getting from Jotaro as the pair of them split off from Noriaki to make their way back to the Kujo mansion, she couldn't help suspecting that she hadn't been entirely successful.

=SC=

When he and Daniel had finally taken their leave of the Desert Rose – since none of the people they were interested in were staying there anymore – Telence had made certain to carefully conceal the list of names that he'd copied down from that old hag's list of contacts. He didn't know if Dio had managed to find out about them, but if there was one thing that any sane person would want to avoid, it was a misunderstanding with Dio Brando. Especially if said misunderstanding ended up giving him the impression that you were going to be a threat to the people he cared about.

One thing Dio and the Commander definitely had in common was their intolerance for threats of any kind.

Once he and Daniel had settled back into their cozy little house, with Daniel still grumbling about the way he kept losing to Joseph Joestar in spite of the fact that it would have probably taken an actual clairvoyant to beat him, Telence made his way up to his room. He knew from long, amusing experience that his brother wasn't going to be fit company for anyone who wasn't in the mood to listen to his grousing for at least the next day, if not the next couple of days. That, of course, would give Telence all the time he would need to contact one of the old hag's remaining associates.

Really, he knew just the one to use, under the circumstances.

=SC=

Falling into a routine at the Kujo house – Mrs. Kujo had insisted that Loreena call it that, even in spite of the fact that anyone with working eyes could see that the place was obviously a mansion – took a bit longer than she'd been expecting, since after all the time she'd spent moving around with her father had kind of made the constant movement seem a lot more normal than staying in one place had been. Still, she had all the time she would need to get used to that kind of thing. Mrs. Kujo had been adamant about that one thing in particular: that Loreena should consider herself just as much a part of the family as Jotaro for as long as she was staying in the same house as both of them.

Loreena thought it was really nice of her, but she also got the feeling that – while Mrs. Kujo loved her son more than pretty much anyone else in the world – the woman was also happy to have another girl in the house.

=SC=

After another day with Jotaro and Loreena-chan at school – another day of having to deal with the weird girls who seemed to have nothing better to do than try to hang around with Jotaro and him, or try to chase Loreena-chan off; or both at once, but it seemed like they'd given up on that after Jotaro had shouted at them a couple of times – Noriaki found himself invited to have dinner with Loreena-chan. Jotaro, and Miss Holly. He supposed that he shouldn't have been as surprised by the offer as he'd initially found himself being, since Miss Holly was the kindest person he knew aside from Loreena-chan, but Noriaki still found himself more than a little off-balance from the whole thing.

Even considering how many Stand users that he'd previously met in Egypt, there were times that Noriaki still couldn't believe that the life that he was steadily making for himself back in Japan was actually real.

Dinner was just as pleasant as he'd been given to expect from the other times he'd been invited to stay and have dinner at the Kujo house, and Noriaki made certain to thank Miss Holly for allowing him to stay and share it. It was far from the first time that Miss Holly had done this time of a thing, but Noriaki liked to think that he was setting at least some kind of an example for Jotaro. No matter how much the other boy rolled his eyes or told him to fuck off.

Both of which he'd actually done when Noriaki had informed him of his intentions, though some of that might have been due to the way he'd phrased things; he tried not to make it too obvious during their respective interactions, but Jotaro was really fun to wind up.

=SC=

Making his way to the place he'd set up for their meeting, Telence checked his approaches to make sure that no one was close enough to see what he was going to be doing; after all, he'd no way of knowing how many of the people in Cairo had been recruited into Blackwatch. It was part of what made the organization so robust: no one agent knew everyone else in their cell, let alone everyone else in the whole of the organization. In fact, he'd heard more than a few of his fellow Blackwatch agents speculating that not even their Blackwater handlers knew every member of the organization.

Really, the Commander herself was probably the only one who could know every member of not only Blackwatch, but Blackwater as well, both since she'd been the one who'd first formed the organizations in question, but also because of what the Commander actually was.

When he spotted the woman coming toward him, with a baby in her arms and an agitated expression on her face, Telence signaled for her to follow him.

"Don't be so jumpy," he said, moving his mouth as little as he could without mangling his speech into unintelligible gibberish; a skill he'd honed during his time in Blackwatch, of course. "I know this probably seems pretty illicit, and you've more than likely heard about what happened to your compatriots that Enya hired – not to mention the old hag herself – but I'm not looking to get into a fight with Alice Brando."

Left unsaid, of course, was the fact that no sane person would; if this was one of the mercenary Stand users that Enya's contact list had spoken of – the user of the Stand Death 13 – then she probably already knew what had happened to a good number of her fellow Stand users when they'd made the mistake of following Enya's lead. All to the better, as far as he was concerned, since it was best to avoid those kinds of misunderstandings. Particularly when you were trying to operate around both Lord Dio and the Commander.

"It's not that, sir," the woman said, gaze darting around at the empty alleyway he'd steadily maneuvered the air of them into – this one conspicuously without the secret entrances to one of Blackwatch's bases in this area concealed in the structure of its walls – even as she seemed to be trying not to shudder as hard as she could.

It was an eerie reminder of his own encounter with N'Doul; not something Telence really needed at the moment.

"Look, there's no one following us," he said, trying to put the woman at ease, even as he found himself starting to get more and more annoyed by her histrionics, subdued as they ultimately were. "I made sure of that when I led you here. So calm down, all right?"

=SC=

Finding himself having to deal more and more with all of those annoying, chattering girls who kept trying to get him to notice them in all of those ways that they did, Jotaro made it a point to stay close to Loreena, even if it meant that he also had to deal with that annoying bishonen boyfriend of hers. None of them wanted to get near her, not after she'd successfully used Crimson Ace to turn each and every one of every one of their stupid pranks back on them. And as long as he stayed close enough to her, none of the annoying girls who seemed to want to throw themselves at his feet day in and day out were either brave or stupid enough to try anything like that.

It was nice to be able to have some time away from them, at least.

When the three of them all made their way back to Mom and the house where they lived, Jotaro rolled his shoulders as he made his way back inside. He suspected that Pucci had called and left a message again, the way he seemed to be doing a lot more, lately. The guy seemed to be eager to share every little thing that was going on back at the Desert Rose, and while it was kind of interesting to know what was going on with his little cousin, Pucci always seemed to want to talk about how he was doing. And really, after the third day spent talking about all the shit that went on at school with those pain-in-the-ass girls – after Pucci had actually expressed some weird kind of approval of them, and Jotaro had hung up on him in return – he'd seemed to have gotten the message and backed off.

Jotaro knew damned well that Uncle Dio would have been leveraging the unholy fuck out of all those girls if they'd been throwing themselves at his feet – the same way he did with anyone else he found that went in for that kind of shit – but as he'd been more than willing to explain to Pucci, not everyone went in for that kind of shit even when it was all but forced on them day in and day out. In fact, it just made that kind of shit all the more annoying, really. He'd done his best to explain that to Pucci, too, though he didn't quite know if he'd made any kind of impact.

At least he'd gotten the man off his back about all of the other shit, though.

=SC=

When the woman he'd been trying to talk to had pushed her baby into his arms and then stumbled off like she didn't know why she'd even come to meet him in the first place, even when he'd tried to get her attention without the risk of drawing the attention of people who might have been Blackwatch to himself – any of his fellow agents had been trained to investigate disturbances that might have proved to be the work of either hostile Stand users or other enemies of the corporation – Telence found himself wondering just what in the hell he'd ended up getting himself into. He also found himself starting to feel more than a little drowsy, even as he tried to press on through the city in search of that strange woman.

Sure, he had more than his fair share of doubts that she was the Stand user Death 13 at this point, but he still wanted to know just what in the hell had been in her head when she'd pushed that baby on him and taken off.

Shaking his head, once he'd managed to get out of sight of the sparse crowds that were still out now that the sun was starting to set in earnest, Telence made for one of the hidden Blackwatch stations in this part of Cairo. This one wasn't one of the larger bases where several members of a cell – or potentially of multiple cells, since one of the first things that any Blackwatch agent learned if they wanted to survive their first year was not to go blathering about other cells; you never really knew when Agent Zero was prowling – could meet to discuss strategy or to blow off some steam, but the small outposts where a single agent would be able to recover after a particularly difficult task.

It was one of the many ways that the Commander looked after her people, and Telence found himself more grateful for it now than he had been in a long time.

Once he'd managed to make his way to the outpost, Telence pulled a catch that had been hidden by the architecture of the alley walls that now surrounded him on all three sides. Ducking into the small room that his efforts had just revealed, Telence settled down in the cot as the door silently closed behind him. Yawning deeply, as the fatigue that he'd been determinedly pushing away for so long caught up with him at last, Telence closed his eyes…

…Blinking in surprise as he found himself sitting up, his head resting against some kind of hard surface, Telence looked around in confusion.

"The hell?" he muttered, finding himself staring down at what looked like some kind of abandoned amusement park, from the vantagepoint of what was obviously a Ferris wheel. "What even is this place?"

The sight of a large number of balloons – of all things – flying up past the gondola where he was currently sitting drew Telence's attention then, and without quite knowing why, he made his way over to the left side of the gondola, grabbing what seemed to be a Tarot card from the end of one of the strings as they drifted their way up past him. Narrowing his eyes as he caught sight of just which card it was that had been basically presented to him when he'd found himself obeying what was clearly the will of the Stand user whose world he was currently in, Telence spoke aloud for the benefit of the one who'd probably been listening in from the very beginning.

"Death 13."

"Rally-ho!" called the voice that had to belong to the Stand user he'd been looking for for such a long time. "So, who do you want me to kill for you?"

"I'm not hiring you to kill anyone," Telence said, folding his arms as he looked up at the scythe-wielding Stand that resembled nothing so much as the oddest sort of cross between a clown, the Pope, and the Grim Reaper.

Really, he'd seen some decidedly odd looking Stands during his time, but this one stood out even among those…

=SC=

Finding herself with a lot less free time than she'd become accustomed to, even when she and her father had been moving between more than their fair share of countries during the course of his work for Brando International, Loreena still tried to make as much time as she could to work on her sketching. She knew that she couldn't really expect to be able to paint anything, not with school taking up a lot more of her time than either the tutors that her father had employed, or most of the schools that she'd spent an appreciable amount of time at, but painting was a messy business anyway.

Really, she wouldn't have felt right doing that kind of thing outside of a studio, considering how meticulously clean Mrs. Kujo seemed to keep her house.

One of the things she did find herself enjoying – over and above the chance to stay in one place with Noriaki rather than to go bouncing between all four corners of the Earth with her father the way she'd done for so long – was the sheer variety of landscapes visible in Japan. Sure, the place was more than a bit urbanized in quite a few places, but the parks more than made up for that.

"Lori-chan, Kakyoin-kun and Jotaro are coming!" Mrs. Kujo called, sliding open the door to the room that Loreena had fully settled herself in some time ago.

That was another thing that she'd found to like about living in Japan: every month seemed to bring some new kind of festival for people to enjoy.

"I'll be right out!" she called back, pulling on the kimono that Mrs. Kujo had bought for her when she'd first been settling into the house.

Suiting actions to words, Loreena made her way out of the room and over to where the rest of their group was waiting. She always thought Jotaro looked more than a little strange in a kimono, mostly because he stubbornly refused to take off his hat, but there was also something else that made the attire seem distinctly odd on him; not something she could have put a name to, but something there all the same. Still, given Mrs. Kujo's sheer, unrelenting determination to hold to the traditions of her adopted country – except for, interestingly enough, when it came to celebrating Christmas – Loreena got the distinct feeling that she was ultimately the one responsible for getting Jotaro dressed to go to the Cherry Blossom Festival Loreena had been hearing so much about.

But it was starting to seem like not even a particularly determined Stand user could separate Jotaro from his hat.

Smiling softly, both for the thoughts she was having and the way that Noriaki had come right over to help her with tying up the kimono that she was wearing – there was something about tying it up right-handed that seemed to be taboo for pretty much everyone, but Loreena could never quite recall the reason when she tried – but Noriaki had all but jumped at the chance to offer his services at tying the stays that held her kimono shut. Though he didn't actually call them that when he'd made the offer.

It was another thing that she'd gotten used to while traveling with her father: everyone seemed to have different names for the same kinds of things, and while Loreena did try to learn them so that she'd be able to speak clearly to those people when she needed to, the names she'd first learned for those same things were always the ones that first came to mind when she thought of them. It was something that she and Noriaki teased each other about, off and on when Mrs. Kujo had first bought her the kimono that she was wearing. And, it was also something that seemed to be shaping up to become a private joke between the pair of them, as well.

As the four of them piled into the car that Mrs. Kujo had directed them to, each being as careful as they could not to rumple the clothes that they were wearing – though Loreena got the distinct impression that Jotaro was only so careful so he would be able to avoid a lecture from his mother – she and Noriaki settled themselves in the back seat, heads leaned together as Mrs. Kujo started the car and they all set off to the festival grounds. Stifling a yawn with her right hand, as a strange, sudden feeling of lethargy crept up on her all unawares, Loreena found that she wasn't the only one who seemed to be having trouble keeping her eyes open at the moment.

Noriaki was blinking slowly, in that way he did when he was trying to avoid falling asleep but knew that he couldn't quite manage with the state that he was in at the moment…