When they'd managed to make contact with Josuke again, Jotaro quickly explained just what in the hell had happened during the time he'd been at school with the rest of his friends, and he'd soon enough managed to secure the cooperation of Keicho Nijimura – short-sighted pain in the ass that he was – and the colony Stand Bad Company.

"I can't believe Tenmei-chan ended up like this," Josuke said, fidgeting on the couch as he folded his arms across his chest.

"Yeah," he said, looking over at where Avdol had been sitting.

He didn't like it, but there really had been no way for them to tell just what kind of Stand the bastard who'd kidnapped Tenmei-chan possessed; it could have been something that'd let whoever the hell it was know that they were being watched when the Old Man tried to look in on them with Hermit Purple.

"Here."

"Huh?" he asked, looking down at the cup of tea that'd been pressed into his right hand.

"You all looked like you could use some tea," Tomoko-san said, looking like she'd been looking in on them for long enough to see the way Avdol had come and gone so suddenly; he wondered if she had questions, or if she'd gotten used to the kind of weird shit Stands brought into peoples' lives.

Josuke had one, so there was the chance she'd known what she was getting into.

=DiU=

She and Jotaro had agreed that Dio – with his penchant for grandiose gestures and his complete lack of anything even resembling subtlety – wasn't to be told what was going on in Morioh. None of them wanted to see the sleepy town razed to its foundations, which was bound to happen if Dio found out what had happened to Tenmei. Still, the fact that her own investigations into the shadow-faction within Passione – a faction that seemed to be under the command of someone who went by the name of "Solido Nazo", a name which could have easily have been every bit as fake a name as "Jack Harper" – were finally starting to bear some kind of fruit meant that she couldn't easily abandon it.

No matter how much she wanted to take a more direct hand in the investigation her family was engaging in, there were still people looking to "Jack Harper" to guide them and unite them in common cause.

"So, that's how many of our cells seem to be infiltrated by that bastard's people, Capo."

"Thank you for keeping me posted, Bruno," she said, feeling again the odd resonance in her throat as she spoke with Jack Harper's voice. "Is there something else you have to report?" she asked, since Bruno was still standing in the room, seeming as though he had something else on his mind.

"I don't mean to intrude, Capo, but you seemed distracted by something while we were speaking," Bruno said, drawing himself up to his full height.

Bruno Buccellati had always been a protective sort, it was what had led him to join up with Passione in the first place, and further to stand with "Jack Harper's" faction within the gang. And now, it seemed, it was leading him to want to take a hand in the search for Tenmei Kakyoin. Not that he knew there was a search for anyone, at least not currently, but there was more than a slight chance that Bruno would insist on finding out.

That was just the kind of person he was.

"A friend of mine has been having some family troubles, but it's nothing you need to concern yourself with, Bruno," she said, suspecting that such would hardly be the end of things.

"If it's family, Capo, you should know that it can't be nothing," Bruno said, folding his arms.

"I hardly said it was nothing, Bruno, but the situation is taking place in Japan, and we have our own problems here," she said, watching as Bruno's expression grew steadily more determined. "And, even if you did insist on going there yourself, you'd spend most of your first day there essentially recovering from jet lag. There'd also be the language barrier to deal with, since you've never given me the impression that you can speak Japanese, Bruno."

=DiU=

"I'll find a way to say what I need to, but if these people are famiglia and they're suffering, then I should be there to help them," he said.

Harper wasn't the kind of person who would doubt his resolve, Bruno knew, but the man had always been a meticulous sort; Harper wouldn't about to allow any of their people to walk blithely into a situation they weren't prepared for. It was one of the reasons Bruno admired the man so much, but sometimes Harper could worry too much about the small details. After he'd gotten Harper to to tell him the details, that a family friend of Alice Brando's had had their son kidnapped by some jumped-up bastard, and when he'd managed to convince Harper that he could help even in spite of the language-barrier and the jet lag, Harper made a call.

Alice Brando's Stand, a strange figure with hidden eyes that apparently went by the name Stardust, appeared in front of him, and before he had the time to so much as blink, Bruno found himself in another place. Giving him a last pat on the right shoulder, and directing his gaze to an empty sofa, Stardust vanished nearly before Bruno had had a chance to call out his thanks. Looking around at the room he had ended up in, Bruno found that he was standing in what seemed to be the salon of a quaint little house.

Not tiny; not like the one where he, his father, and the mother who had left them when Bruno was just a boy had once lived, but just small enough to be cozy for a family their size.

Finding a sheet of paper, Bruno wrote a note to the people who lived in this place, before settling himself down on the sofa to sleep. His meeting with Harper had been late in the night, around ten 'o'clock, but the Capo had seemed particularly concerned with the time difference between their home in Italy and this place in Japan. Once he'd finished with the letter, Bruno looked around for a blanket.

He'd get some sleep, and then speak to whoever it was that needed help to find the lost member of their family.

=DiU=

After he'd gotten what sleep he could, with Tenmei-chan missing and no concrete direction to begin looking for the kidnapper, Noriaki made his way to the dining room so he could have breakfast with Ichigo-chan and the remainder of their friends and family. Noriaki had no sooner made his way to the dining room than he found Jotaro and Gio Brando, looking down at what seemed to be a letter.

"Who's that from?" he asked, still feeling a bit too tense to be as formal as he usually was.

"Don't know; I brought Gio in here since he's the only one who actually knows how to read Italian," Jotaro said, turning to glance at him, before returning his attention to Gio where he was sitting with the letter in his hands.

"His name is Bruno Buccellati, so good luck pronouncing that," Gio said, the grin on his face making him look even more like his father than usual.

"Funny, kid," Jotaro grumbled, stern expression deepening in the face of Gio Brando's unrepentant grin. "What's he want?"

"He came over because he found out about what happened to Tenmei, and he wanted to help however he could," Gio said, glancing back down at the letter.

Jotaro grunted, not seeming particularly impressed. "If he doesn't have a Stand, all he's going to be good for is moral support."

"Given what he wrote, I don't think he'll mind that," Gio said, orange-red eyes flickering as he read the letter over again.

Finding himself more than little curious about the kind of person who would come all the way to Japan from Italy just for the chance to help people he didn't even know, Noriaki found that he did feel a bit better just knowing that there was someone else so kind out there who wanted to help them.

=DiU=

"It's all right, dear, I know you're concerned about your little brother," Yoshikage said, smiling softly as he patted the inside pocket where he'd stored his girlfriend. "I'll be sure to pick up something nice for him, too."

Making his way through the store, Yoshikage found himself considering just what kind of nice present he would pick up for his son. He also found himself considering just how and where he was going to be able to replace this girlfriend of his. She was starting to smell, and even though he did keep her sprayed as well as he could, he'd been starting to notice it.

There was too much of a chance, if he let things go on from here, that other people would start to notice her, too.

So, keeping an eye out for both a gift for the sweet child with the perfect little hands he'd adopted not so long ago, as well as somewhere he might be able to find a new girlfriend, Yoshikage continued on his way through the shop. Once he'd managed to find a pair of nail clippers that were nice enough to be cute for either a boy or a girl, Yoshikage made his way out of the store. He hadn't managed to find a new girlfriend inside the store, so he'd have to find another one before he got home.

Running his thumb over the nail clippers he'd purchased for his cute little son, Yoshikage spotted something odd out of the corner of his left eye. It seemed to be some kind of remote-controlled toy; a small helicopter, roughly the size of his lower arm, flying just above the heads of the crowd. No one seemed to notice it, so Yoshikage knew that pointing it out would have only served to draw unwanted attention to him. Turning his eyes firmly back to the path he was walking on, Yoshikage continued on his way down the path back to his car.

There would be time for him to find a new girlfriend on the way there, Yoshikage would make sure of it.

=DiU=

Stopping off at the open-air café table, Josuke sighed as he set The Duke's cat form down on the table in front of him.

"That didn't work," he grumbled, beginning to wonder if they were ever going to be able to find Tenmei-chan.

"It's only been a day," Alice Brando said, gently setting her Stand's right, front paw on his folded arms; he hadn't met the woman in person, but had heard a lot about from Jotaro and the other members of their family. "For the moment, we have to concentrate on putting out feelers. Searching an entire town with these methods was never going to be easy, Josuke."

"Yeah, I guess," he said, not particularly happy about how things were going, but not having much of anything he could say in response.

From what he'd heard, Alice Brando was old enough to know just how these kinds of things worked. After the pair of them had waited to see if they'd encounter any more of Morioh's wandering Stand users, and in his case to have an early lunch, he made his way back home with The Duke on his right shoulder in the shape of some kind of a bird. He didn't know just what to make of Alice Brando and her two stands.

Sure, Keicho Nijimura and his Bad Company was an entire army unto itself, but Bad Company did clearly have a theme. There wasn't the same kind of theme uniting The Duke with Stardust, at least not that Josuke could tell, since The Duke could shape shift into all kinds of animals, and Stardust could walk through solid objects and teleport. There wasn't nearly the same kind of connection between the two of them that there was between every member of Bad Company.

It was weird, but it was hardly the weirdest thing Josuke had found himself dealing with lately.

Once he'd managed to make it back home, back to where Jolyne-chan, Ichigo-chan, their dads, and those new kids Gio-kun and Bruno-kun. Gio-kun and Bruno-kun were both a few years older than the other three kids they'd met, being young teenagers rather than little kids, but Bruno-kun didn't seem to speak Japanese at all. Josuke didn't quite understand why someone who didn't speak the language would have come into the country, but he'd heard it had something to do with helping them to look for Tenmei-chan.

And sure, it was nice of Bruno-kun to think of them like that, but there wasn't much someone could do when they were constantly on the other side of a language-barrier.

=DiU=

Sitting on the bench, kicking her legs, Jolyne dug in her right pocket to find the picture that she carried around with her. Chewing her lower lip as she looked down at Tenmei and the dummy, both of them gathered around her to celebrate her last birthday, Jolyne tucked her right leg up against her chest.

"Hey, you look down."

Turning at the sound of a familiar voice, Jolyne saw Akira Otoishi making his way over to the bench where she was sitting.

"Oh, hey guitar guy," she said, turning back to look at the guy with the cool, purple hair for a little bit, before turning her attention back to the picture.

"Something bad happen to your friends?"

"Some bastard kidnapped Tenmei-kun," she said, pointing him out in the picture she was holding. "We haven't been able to find him, even though we have everyone looking."

"Ah, so that's what's been getting to you," the rocker guy said, plucking a few notes on that electric guitar of his. "You know, whenever I feel bad about something, I strum out a tune on my axe here," he said, offering it to her. "Why don't you try it out yourself, tyke?"

Biting the tip of her tongue, Jolyne let the rocker guy set his guitar down in her lap, Jolyne started plucking out a tune on it. Thinking about how angry she was about that bastard who'd kidnapped Tenmei-kun, whoever and wherever they were, Jolyne started strumming her own tune on the guitar that the rocker guy had let her borrow today.

=DiU=

Sighing as he continued on his way through Morioh, pausing for a moment to hang up another "Missing Person" poster for Tenmei-chan, Noriaki took a deep breath and gathered his composure again. He wasn't going to be able to make any progress toward finding Tenmei-chan if he let himself wallow in sadness the way he'd been doing since Tenmei-chan had been kidnapped to begin with.

The sight of what looked like a small bug, running by his feet drew Noriaki's attention for a moment, before he turned his attention back to the posters he was hanging; he wasn't going to let himself be distracted now of all times.

"Hey, what're you putting up all those pictures for?" asked the voice of what had to be the user of the Stand that Noriaki had just encountered. "Did something bad happen?"

"My eldest son was kidnapped," he said, glancing down at the small, insectile Stand – roughly half the size of any one of the soldiers that made up Keicho Nijimura's Bad Company – that seemed to be so interested in what he was doing. "We've been looking for him on our own for a long time, but we haven't managed to find anything on our own yet. So, I had these made up," he said, taking another piece of tape and attaching it to the phone pole in front of him.

"What, you mean he's somewhere far away from you, separated from his mommy and daddy?" the Stand user, who seemed to be a child around the same age as Tenmei-chan, asked with what sounded like a quaver in his voice.

Seconds later, a massive crowd of those same, insectile Stands appeared all around him, descending on the stack of posters Noriaki had been carrying around. Each one of them grabbed a poster, then hurried over to take a piece of tape, before vanishing into the distance carrying their prizes.

"Wait a second," he said, sending out Hierophant Green to pick one of them up before it could grab one of the remaining posters and run off with the rest of them. "Thank you for helping me with this, but who are you? I mean, what's the name of your Stand?"

"I'm Shigekiyo Yangyu, and this is my Harvest," the user, Shigekiyo-kun apparently, said though the tiny Stand in Hierophant Green's right hand. "But, I didn't know that anyone else could see these. You said they're called Stands. mister?"

"Yes, that's what they're called," he said, as more iterations of Harvest reached out to take the last few posters he'd been holding, then came up to grab more tape from him so that they could hang them up. "They also have names of their own; mine is Hierophant Green. And you called yours Harvest, right?"

"Yeah, my Stand is called Harvest," Shigekiyo-kun said, sounding earnest and more than a little curious. "Are you going to be okay, mister? My mommy and daddy would be really sad if I went missing, so do you want me to do anything else for you?"

"Thank you, Yangyu-kun, but that's all," he said, finding himself smiling almost involuntarily; it really helped to have someone here to help, not only with the posters, but also someone to talk to. "Thank you for your help."

=DiU=

Making his way into the beauty salon, Yoshikage looked around, quickly finding the woman that seemed to be in charge of the salon.

"I'm looking for a gift for my girlfriend's little sister," he said, making his way over to the desk she was standing behind. "Do you have any suggestions?"

"Well, if she's looking for luck in love, you can bring her this lipstick," the woman working the counter said, picking out a tube of bright, pink lipstick from a holder with a great many other colors.

Yoshikage chuckled. "She's a bit young to be thinking about love. Do you have something else?"

The woman at the counter – Yoshikage was trying not to think about her hands, since there was too much attention on her as the owner of this salon for him to go back to his quiet life if he acted against her – turned to the small rack of lipstick again, picking out a paler, powder pink.

"Well, if you want something for a young girl, this lipstick will bring her happiness if she wears it every day," the woman said, handing over the tube to him.

"Yes, thank you," he said, paying for the lipstick and then turning to leave.

He'd found a new girlfriend on his way home, and the little boy he'd adopted was cute enough to be a girl when Yoshikage found himself in the mood for that, so after he'd paid for the lipstick and some cute hair ties he'd spotted Yoshikage left for home again. Smiling as he climbed back into his car, Yoshikage patted the front pocket of his jacket.

"Don't worry, dear," he said, taking the last turn that would lead him to the house that his family had owned since before Japan had been a united country. "Your little sister is going to love the gifts I've picked up for her."

Parking his car in the driveway, Yoshikage made his way back into his house for the night. He was pleased, at least, to have managed to find something to bring home for the child he'd adopted. Something cute for the little girl she was going to be for as long as this current girlfriend of his was around. She always had enjoyed cute things, and Yoshikage was certain that she would love how cute her new little sister looked when he brought her into their new home.

Making his way deeper into his house, into the room where he'd left the child he'd adopted not so long ago, Yoshikage smiled all the wider as he made his way over to the large bed.

"Here she is, dear," he said, making his way over to the bed where he'd laid the sleeping child out. "Her name is Yoshiko," he said, having finally decided on a name that could be easily changed depending on whether his next girlfriend wanted a little brother or a little sister. "Isn't she cute? Oh, that reminds me," he said, taking out the lipstick he'd bought earlier.

Smiling as he gently braced the back of Yoshiko's head against his left hand, Yoshikage carefully applied the pale pink lipstick that he'd bought to Yoshiko's soft, full lips. She really did look cute in the lipstick he'd bought for her. Yoshikage didn't quite know if it would bring the kind of happiness that the woman working at the salon had implied, but it was cute, all the same.

=DiU=

Glancing down at the form of the fate-reading manga that Oingo had shown to him when he and his brother Boingo had come to the Desert Rose in search of answers as to just what or who the mysterious figure that seemed to be steadily revealing itself at the back of the manga that Oingo carried with him. As of yet he, Dio, hadn't managed to determine anything but the most basic appearance of the figure. He, Dio, knew that it possessed four arms, two legs, and held the same pose as one of the Shiva statues that he, Dio, had come across during his travels.

However, it was not the mysterious figure steadily appearing on the back cover of Oingo's fate-reading manga that held his attention at the moment, it was the smaller figure in the bed. The one that looked more than a little like his sweet little Tenmei Kakyoin.

"When did this appear?" he, Dio, asked, narrowing his eyes as he looked down at the page open in front of the three of them.

"Just a few minutes before we came out here to tell you about it, Mr. Dio, yes!" Oingo exclaimed, looking up at him, Dio, with enough earnestness that he doubted the boy was lying to him.

Oingo had always been a rather interesting mix of excitable and shy, but one thing the boy firmly was not was deceptive. He'd no talent for it, for one thing, and he lacked the confidence for another. So, there was little chance that the image they were looking at could be anything but what it seemed.

No chance that it could be anything but an image of his sweet little Tenmei Kakyoin, with some interloper hovering over him as he slept.

"Have you managed to determine where this is taking place, Oingo?" he, Dio, asked; there would be little that he, Dio, could manage personally if he didn't find out just where it was that his little Tenmei Kakyoin was being held.

And just who he was being held by, but that could come once he knew where the interloper had hidden himself; there was no question that sweet Noriaki would have already ripped the room he'd glimpsed in the comic to absolute ribbons with his Hierophant Green if he'd known just where his dear firstborn was currently being held.

"Unfortunately not," Oingo said, sagging slightly into his seat. "I don't recognize anything in the room, and none of the pictures in my comic have been of the outside."

"Troublesome," he, Dio, muttered as he picked up the comic, flipping through it in an effort to determine if there was anything that he, Dio, could recognize.

He saw pictures of his Littlest Jojo, his sweet Noriaki, Little Lori, and some other boy they seemed to have just met. The entirely-too stylized illustrations of the comic made it difficult to tell, but there seemed to be some kind of familiarity between the pair of them.