Looking around at all of the people who'd been invited to the party, Noriaki found himself surprised all over again at just how welcome he felt in a place like this. He'd been alone for so much of his life, that even after he'd met Loreena-chan, Mr. Brando, and even Jotaro, that Noriaki found himself almost waiting to wake up. Even after all this time, sitting here in this place still seemed surreal; he couldn't really say that it felt like a dream, not after everything he'd been through, and not after everyone he'd met, but he still felt an undeniable sense of surreality to everything.

His mind knew that everything was real, of course, but there was still that small part of his heart that didn't quite believe it.

Sighing, having gone to wash his hands, the way that everyone else had done when they'd come to the Desert Rose, Noriaki splashed some water on his face to wake himself up just that much more. Yes, there might have still been those parts of him that didn't quite believe that all of this was real, even if he didn't think it was actually a dream, spending time with the people who were so kind to him would at least help a little bit.

Smiling softly as he made his way back out to the party room that had been set up by Mr. Brando for all of them to use, Noriaki curled up against Loreena-chan and continued to watch the party. Loreena-chan laughed at Mr. Polnareff's silly flirting, up until his little sister bopped him over the head with one of the pillows and the Frenchman burst into exaggerated sobbing and apologies.

Really, Mr. Brando and Mr. Polnareff acted a lot more like each other than he thought that either one would enjoy having pointed out.

Smiling as Jotaro's little cousin Gio was passed over to him and Loreena-chan to hold for a lingering moment, Noriaki chuckled softly. Mr. Brando really did seem to like showing him off, and when he looked up to see the way the man was smiling at him, Noriaki almost found himself laughing. He swallowed it, of course, since that kind of thing would have been fairly rude, even if he did kind of think that Mr. Brando wouldn't have called him out for it.

Once the party had started to wrap up, everyone who'd come to the Desert Rose was invited to stay over for as long as they wanted. Jotaro and his mother, though mostly Jotaro, decided to only stay the night before they went back to Japan. He and Loreena-chan volunteered to stay for a bit longer, since there was something warm and familiar about this place; something that made him feel more at home in this kind of place than he'd ever felt in any other place he'd ever been.

Taking the glass of cherry soda that Mr. Brando pressed into his hands as he and Loreena-chan made their way up to the room that Mr. Brando had told them was reserved for them and them alone, Noriaki sipped at it as he and Loreena-chan made it to the top of the stairs and split off from the main group. Passing by Mr. Ice on their way to their room, Noriaki blinked in surprise ad he saw Mr. Brando standing in front of their door. Smiling back as he caught sight of the warm, cheerful smile on Mr. Brando's face as he turned to them.

"Good evening," he paused for a moment, catching himself as the smile on Mr. Brando's face widened and became just that much more amused. "Dio."

"You're learning, my sweet Noriaki," Mr. Brando said, smiling more brightly at the pair of them. "But, there is one last thing I would like to say to you, before you go to your room."

He was just about to ask what that was, when he caught sight of… of Mr. Brando's… Mr. Brando's eyes… Enjoy each other's company, my dear children…

=SC=

Smiling with sheer pleasure as he watched his dear little children leaning in to kiss, already beginning to disrobe each other, even as Vanilla Ice ushered them into the room that he, Dio, had given to them to use, he continued smiling as he, Dio, continued on his way to his own room. There were still a few things that he would need to take care of, considering just what his sweet Loreena and Noriaki were going to be doing for the night – what he, Dio, could already hear happening with more and more enthusiasm, even through the thick, soundproofed walls that he'd deliberately had installed in his Desert Rose – to make certain that his sweet children would have the chance to be as happy as possible.

Even in this simple, flawed world that was all they had at the present.

"Come, Vanilla Ice," he, Dio, called over his shoulder, smiling at the faithful man who had supported him for such a long time, at least in relation to a mere human's lifespan. "We've still some work to do."

"Of course, Lord Dio."

Smiling as he made his way back into his room he, Dio, smiled all the wider as he settled down at his desk to begin preparing for the next phase of his plan. His sweet little Gio would love the new friend he was going to have, even though they would only be an honorary Joestar, at least if the child didn't choose to marry into the line later in life. Still, for the time that the pair of them would be children, the new little one would be closer to his sweet little Gio than any of the others that might have tried to lay claim to their heart.

He would, of course, need to consult his sweet children as to the theme of their soon-to-be-impending nuptials, but as it seemed that dear Noriaki wasn't as close to his own parents as his sweet Loreena was to her father, or especially as his adorable Jojos were to one another he, Dio, felt very little need to make contact with the Kakyoin brood.

=SC=

Narrowing her eyes, behind the transparent polymer of the painted lenses in "Jack Harper's" face, Alice paused for a long moment, looking up at the waning moon and listening as the footsteps pacing her stopped. It seemed as though she had picked up a tail while she'd been speaking with the shadow-faction of Passione; rather annoying, since whoever it was seemed bound and determined to follow her back to the storehouse where she was aiming to store her prosthetic for the night.

It seemed as though she'd a few loose ends to tie up, before she could head back to her Naples compound to begin putting together what little she knew from the information she'd managed to gather this past evening.

Continuing on her way back to the storehouse, Alice tracked a second presence that seemed to be following in the footsteps of the other presence, though in their case she couldn't track their footsteps so much as their heartbeat. It seemed as though this one wasn't actually walking, in favor of some other kind of means of moving. Inhaling deeply though her nose, turning slightly so that she would be able to better catch the scents of anyone close enough, Alice found to her annoyance that the wind was against her. Focusing on her tremor-senses once more, Alice tracked the two humans who were trying to track her.

She could've easily vanished from their weaker senses, but considering the fact that she wished to preserve the illusion that Jack Harper was merely human, she couldn't really go after either of them since someone human wouldn't have been able to tell that they were being tracked in this low light. Narrowing her eyes behind "Jack Harper's" animatronic face, Alice continued on her way to the outpost she'd disguised as a house so that she could lay down her present disguise and deal with whoever the pair was that was following her.

Once she'd made it back to the "bed", actually a table that had been set up to look more like something that someone might sleep in, Alice laid "Jack Harper" down, tucking him in and then having Stardust teleport her to the other side of the room. The sound of footsteps making their way into the room drew her attention, and Alice narrowed her eyes just that much farther as she watched whoever it was on the outside twisting the doorknob. Leaning lightly against the far wall, Alice stretched open her slit-pupils and folded her arms, watching all the more intently as whoever had been following her made their way inside.

The first of them, at least.

Stretching her slit-pupils just that much wider, as whoever it was that had been following her revealed himself to be a man. He was rather lithe, with a moppy haircut that fell over his eyebrows but was just short enough not to fall into the eyes themselves, and Alice quickly determined that – whatever else this man was – he was both young, and completely human. To say nothing of the fact that she could clearly hear the young man's heartbeat, the way he was looking around told her plainly that he couldn't see her nearly as well as she could see him at the moment.

Might as well test the waters, she mused. "Is there something you're looking for, young man?"

As the brazen invader stopped dead in his tracks, heart hammering loudly enough that Alice was sure that even he could hear it, Alice smirked slightly at how clearly off-balance he clearly was.

"You know, it's rather rude to invade someone else's home, to say nothing of walking right into their bedroom without even a by your leave," she said, folding her arms and stretching her pupils nearly as wide as she was capable of; currently, she could see nearly as well as she could at early dusk, though the colors of everything within her field of view were muted from the lack of actual light in the room where she and the more brazen of the two stalkers she'd been tracking were currently standing. "So," she continued, when the man standing before gritted his teeth, peering deeper into the darkness that shrouded her like an insubstantial cloak. "Where's your accomplice?"

"I came here alone," the man insisted, his heart beginning at last to settle down from the panic-speed it'd been racing at; an interesting development, considering that he was obviously lying.

"Of course you did," she deadpanned, stalking forward. "Still, we shouldn't be having our discussion here. My associate may be a deep sleeper, but even he can't sleep through everything."

Wrapping her left arm firmly around the man's shoulder, Alice called on Stardust to jump them to the faux living room of this little outpost. Her larger, more humanoid Stand had demonstrated this short-range teleportation a few days ago, something that complemented its intrinsic ability to phase through solid objects, enabling the pair of them – or the three of them, counting The Duke – to move between rooms in whatever building they were in without crossing the actual space in between said rooms. It was at least marginally useful, particularly in situations like this.

Dropping the intruder to the floor, Alice paused for a long moment as she caught the sound of the second intruder's heartbeat drawing steadily closer to the outpost. Narrowing her eyes as she tracked the second as they moved closer, still with not the slightest sound of footfalls to indicate that whoever it was, was actually walking. Before she could think any further about just what was actually going on with that second of the two intruders that she'd been tracking, the man laying on the floor of the outpost's main room glared up at her.

"Green Day!"

"Stardust."

Just as soon as the intruder's Stand had emerged – a large- stocky, green figure with what seemed to be paler green pinstripes and some kind of pipes on its head – Stardust grabbed the thing, jumping it up through the roof of the outpost and phasing its bottom part – what would have been the Stand's ankles, if Green Day had actually had anything resembling legs or feet – into the rooftop to strand the thing. Inside the outpost, the intruder yelped and fell to the floor, clutching at his ankles.

"Wha- what the hell was that?" he demanded.

"What, did you think you could sic your Stand on me without consequences?" she asked, smirking slightly.

Adjusting her pupils as Stardust toggled the lights, revealing the true colors of the admittedly young man she was speaking to, Alice folded her arms and narrowed her eyes as she stared down at him.

"Who sent you after me?" she prodded, wanting to see just how this little man would jump, metaphorically speaking.

"I came on my own," the green-haired man – hardly the strangest thing she'd seen in this world, but amusing for all of that.

"Indeed," she deadpanned, narrowing her eyes as the man on the floor tried to stand back up; he seemed to regain his composure, then, so presumably he'd recalled his Stand.

The man shuddered as he stood back up, brushing himself off and arranging his clothes so he presumably would look or feel less rumpled than he clearly was. Watching the man as he struggled to look at her, shaking, his heart pounding almost as hard as when she'd first called his attention to her back in the storage room where she'd dropped "Jack Harper", Alice lightly chewed the inside of her lip when the man turned to look at her with the same expression on his face that she'd seen entirely too many times when anyone unfortunate enough to have drawn her brother's attention would look at him, at least once he'd finished working on them.

All other considerations aside, it was rather annoying; she'd no real use for the kind of worshipful minions that Dio went out of his way to cultivate.

"Well, if you did come here on your own, you might wish to know that someone seems to be following you rather closely," she said, wondering how the man would react to having the other – who was more than likely his companion – outed to him. "It doesn't seem as though they honestly trust you."

The man standing in front of her shuddered. "You found-" he said, before seeming to strangle the rest of whatever he was going to say right in his throat, muttering something at a volume he seemed to think that she was incapable of hearing.

"Were you trying to say second? Or is Secco someone you know?"

=SC=

What in the hell is this woman?! It was all Cioccolata could do to keep himself standing; looking at her, right there in front of him, looking like there was nothing in the world could possibly faze her… She was like something supernatural, almost as though nothing so mundane as terror or despair could take hold of her at all… Grinding his teeth, even as he saw the woman narrowing her eyes as she seemed to loom over him, Cioccolata forced himself to look up into those blood-crimson eyes of hers.

Even if she had managed to find Secco with the power of that strange Stand she'd attacked him with, there was no way she'd be able to deal with the power of both Green Day and Oasis. Secco was closer, beginning to move under the floor of the house that he'd followed Jack Harper to, before this strange, infuriating woman had emerged from the shadows to torment him.

"It seems we're about to have another guest," the woman said, her eyes momentarily shifting, just before Secco – wearing Oasis as the suit that allowed him to hide in the ground and evade detection by anyone who wasn't this infuriating woman! – was thrown into the room where the both of them were standing.

Clearly after having been dragged by that infuriating woman's Stand, if the way it came sauntering into the room after tossing Secco down on the bare, hardwood floor. Just as he was about to call out for Green Day again, in spite of what had happened the first time, so he would be able to make this woman suffer for looking down on him. When Green Day emerged, however, that woman's Stand buried it in the floor beneath them.

=SC=

Narrowing her eyes as she watched the messy-haired man fall to the floor, gasping as he found his Stand shoved deep into the floor beneath their feet, Alice turned to watch as the other man – this one wearing a suit and actually swimming through the floor beneath their feet; it seemed that this one had a rather interesting Stand – rose from the floor. The first man struggled to rise from the floor, clearly having dismissed his Stand if the way he was no longer gasping for breath was any indication, but before he could either try to rush her or re-summon that odd-looking Stand of his, Stardust appeared behind him.

"Are you familiar with the mechanical aspects of respiration?" she asked, feeling slightly amused at the way the man was focused so completely on her, to the exclusion of the clear and present danger closing in on him.

"What?"

"The mechanics of respiration, specifically in humans," she reiterated, smirking slightly as Stardust snickered silently. "In particular, the role that the ribcage plays?"

"I'm in training-"

"That's good to hear," she said, grinning as Stardust moved forward, phasing through the man's skin so that it could grab hold of his rib-cage, pulling it out and leaving the man to gasp and twitch on the floor like a landed fish. "At least you'll know what's happening to you."

When the other man, the one who'd been stalking her just as long as the first with his Stand – Green Day, with whatever strange, esoteric abilities such a Stand might possess – leaped out of the ground with a shout that sounded more than a little animalistic. Narrowing her eyes as Stardust intercepted the man in mid-leap, Alice smirked as her Stand pulled both the man's thigh bones as well as his upper-arm bones right out of his body. As the man tried to pull himself back into the ground, presumably in order to attempt to make an escape or else to try attacking from a different angle, Stardust jumped him up to the ceiling.

Her Stand had also managed to jump the man out of his own Stand, but the other man recalled it nearly as soon as he'd begun falling, so it didn't make that much of a difference in the end; though the man who'd been wearing his Stand rather than commanding it did look a fair bit younger than his compatriot. All in all, it was a rather curious situation.

"Right, since you've probably been sent to tail me by whoever it is that's been trying to move in on Caesar's territory, I suppose there wouldn't really be any point in asking you to work with me," she said, twitching her ponytail up into her right hand. "Still, asking isn't my only option."

She'd always found this sort of thing – the buds of vampiric flesh that she, Dio, and every other one of their kind who'd managed to discover the ability were capable of creating – both odd and mildly distasteful. Useful, to be sure, but it always felt… Well, Alice had the feeling that human words hadn't been invented to describe what she felt those times when she'd been forced to make use of this particular aspect of her abilities, but she got the feeling that H.P. Lovecraft would have figured out some way to describe it.

Pulling the flesh-bud free from her hair after it had finished forming, Alice turned to look back down at the man gasping on the hardwood floor; time she finished with this.

=SC=

Finding himself in bed, with someone warm and soft wrapped around him, Noriaki tensed slightly as he found that he couldn't quite remember just how he'd ended up in what was obviously his room, and when he looked over to see that Loreena-chan was the one curled up with him… As Loreena-chan's eyes fluttered and she turned to look over at him, Noriaki could see the same confusion he was feeling right now visible on her face, as well. Pulling away as gently as he could, shuddering as he found that neither of them were wearing any of their clothes, Noriaki stumbled as he got out of bed and started making his way to the attached bathroom.

He was trying not to think about the dry, sticky feeling all over his skin, but even given what he wasn't trying to think about… Noriaki shook his head, forcing his attention back to the present, tossing his clothes into the laundry-chute that'd been neatly built into the far wall as he continued on his way into the lavish bathroom. He'd never quite understood why Mr. Brando had put two showers in their bathroom, but now he found himself grateful for it in a way that he hadn't been before.

It probably was just because Mr. Brando enjoyed his luxuries so much.

Once he'd managed to get himself clean again, Noriaki made his way back out into the room that he and Loreena-chan shared, continuing on his way over to the closet so he could get dressed for the day. Standing in front of his and Loreena-chan's closet, Noriaki blinked as he found an odd, sweet taste in his mouth. Rubbing his eyes, Noriaki yawned as he gathered up another of the uniforms that he'd brought with him the first time he'd come to this place.

"You're still wearing those?" Loreena-chan asked, giggling cutely at him as she dressed in a colorful blouse and long skirt. "We're not even in school right now."

"Just because you don't care that we're both still students, doesn't mean I'm going to let your laxity rub off on me, Loreena-chan," he said, leaning over to kiss her cheek as the pair of them dressed up again.

Out of the corner of his right eye, Noriaki caught sight of Mr. Brando as he made his way into the room that he and Loreena-chan had been given by the man. Pulling on his jacket, Noriaki turned to look at the blond as he made his way inside.

"Good morning," he said, not entirely sure how he should react to Mr. Brando this time; on the one hand, the Desert Rose was his house and not just the place where he worked, but on the other, he had given this particular room to him and Loreena-chan, and it was rude to come into someone else's room without even announcing yourself.

"Good morning, my sweet children," Mr. Brando said, grinning at the pair of them.

Almost before he could blink, Noriaki found Mr. Brando standing right behind the pair of them, right hand on his right shoulder and left hand on Loreena-chan's left shoulder. He'd always had the feeling that there was something different about Mr. Brando, something even beyond his Stand that set him apart from everyone else, but even seeing – or not seeing, in this case – the way he moved when he'd made his way inside… Noriaki still didn't quite know what was going on with the man.

Still, as he and Loreena-chan were gently escorted out of their room, with Mr. Brando walking just behind the pair of them and seeming all too eager to guide them to some place that even amid all his chatter he didn't seem to want to talk about, Noriaki couldn't help the feeling that there was something he was forgetting…