A sudden pothole on the road shook the Mystery Machine, and Fred could hear Shaggy's snoring broke as the jostle woke him up. Scooby-Doo was still asleep as the rocking and swaying van was not enough to wake the old dog. Over his shoulder, Fred saw Shaggy poke his head over the seat and rub his eyes awake, but Fred kept his own eyes on the road, following the Pink Cadillac in front of them.
"Like, where's the rush? We skipping town or something?" asked Shaggy.
"Hardly," answered Fred, "apparently Velma and Johnny were up all night talking and going over some old books and working on the case while we slept. But neither one of them were tired so they told us to come out to a diner for breakfast."
"Reakrast?" said Scooby-Doo as his ears perked up and his tail started wagging even before he opened his eyes from sleep.
"I guess this is the place." said Daphne as they drove up the curb and parked next to Johnny's car.
"Pop's Diner. Kinda has that old-fashioned, rockabilly vibe. Let's hope the food is half-way decent." said Fred.
The interior was like a time capsule of the 1950s, down to the checkered floor tiles and jukebox. A bald, elderly gentleman was polishing vintage toasters and shake machines on what seemed to be more of a display counter than anything else.
"Morning Pops! What's good on the menu today?" asked Johnny, warming greeting the owner.
"Johnny my boy!" exclaimed Pops as he leaned over the counter to give Johnny a powerful slap on the shoulder. "Been too long since you've come by. Ever since you started that gym of yours I was afraid you'd gotten wrapped up in that health food nonsense on top of everything else."
"Nah Pop, I stopped coming here after that case of salmonella you gave me. The one that downgraded your place from a B to a C, remember?"
"Those chickens told me they were going to have their revenge."
The lack of explanation for that made Fred nervous about eating, here. Looking over his shoulder, Fred saw the sanitation certification sticker on the window of the building was actually an A.
"Oh, I get it. You two were just teasing each other." said Fred.
"Tease what now?" asked Pops.
"We'll take the corner booth Pops. Bring us out some orange juice and coffee." said Johnny.
"Recaff rease." said Scooby-Doo, and all at once Fred remembered the last time Scooby had accidentally gotten coffee in his bowl.
Placing books on the table, Velma started organizing a pile of notes that were as tall as the rim of a mug as everyone slid into the seats on either side.
"A little late-night research?" asked Fred.
"Let's order breakfast first, I'm starving." said Velma, as Johnny gave her a gentle nudge in agreement, which she playfully returned.
"Here's the drinks," said Pops, sliding cups and mugs along the table before pulling out a sales book, "have anything in mind for breakfast? Our specials are country fried steak and gravy, build-a-bowl-of-grits, and French omelets with fresh-baked croissants."
"I was leaning steak, but if Gustav made croissants we'll have about a dozen of those." said Johnny.
'Gustav? Nah, couldn't be.' thought Fred as he leaned back in his seat to peek at the kitchen. The bald man with a Greek-style beard was unmistakable. Chef Gustav from the Academie Versailles in France; arrested for dressing up as a ghost to scare away students from the cooking school so he could steal their valuable artwork.
"Where did you hire your chef?" asked Fred.
"Oh Gustav? Poor guy came to America after his parole back in France, said he wanted a new start, but nobody would hire him. He must have been some special kind of desperate to ask me for work, but he helped turn this place from a dump to a dive." said Pops proudly.
Leaning forward in the booth, Fred covered the side of his face and quietly ate breakfast hoping the Chef hadn't noticed them.
Gulping down the last of her orange juice, Velma stacked plates at the end of the table before returning to scribble down a few more notes before nodding in satisfaction.
"So, it's like this gang. Bryce Bravo, Johnny's great-great-grandfather was in the Steel Ball Run race back at the end of the old west. He came in last place, but earned a fortune afterward by working with Steven Steel. In one of the volumes of family history that Johnny's mother has, was an alternate version of Volume 24 of the Steel Ball Run Archives. Where the original version was a biography of the racers, the alternate version was a little bit different. It read like a catalog of superheroes, metahumans." said Velma.
"It's more of a comic book than a history volume. Mama read the stories to me as a kid as a bedtime adventure and I never thought much of it." said Johnny.
"The other twenty-three volumes of the archives are dry, they catalog racecourses, local supplies bought by the racers, places they stayed, arrangements made by the Steel Corporation."
"Like they were intentionally written to put people to sleep." said Shaggy.
"But the secret volume mentions battles between the racers, conflicts, fights, intrigue, and government conspiracies. Most of it almost too fantastic to believe. And at the center of it all was a struggle to collect the body of a corpse." said Velma.
"You're telling me the Steel Ball Run was a race over a mummy?" asked Fred.
"Essentially, yes. And people who came in contact with it gained powers that could only be described as… bizarre." said Velma
"The guy who attacked the hospital. I was wounded too fast to know who it was, but the way y'all described it," Johnny flipped to a post-it-note marked page in the book and pointed at an entry, "Magenta Magenta, special agent of the Secret Service, an assassin working for then-president Funny Valentine. He had to power to redirect any attack or force away from his body." said Johnny.
"You mean like those Stands?" asked Fred, trying hard not to listen to a gentle sound of laughter coming from over his shoulder.
"Most of what is in this book are from interviews with survivors of the race, most of it reads like a dialogue between Bryce Bravo, Johnny Joestar, and the unnamed author of the volume." said Velma.
"Any guesses who wrote it?" asked Daphne.
"My best guess is Lucy Steel, but I'm not entirely certain. She describes some very wild things, stuff that still doesn't make sense. Like how she was fused with the 'corpse' and became a 'holy, protective forcefield' or something. A lot of it feels like unfocused conjecture, from someone afraid of what they were writing about, but desperate to record it for fear that it would be lost or forgotten."
"The rib bone," said Daphne, setting down her mug as her eyes widened, "things started getting weird for us after we came into contact with that rib bone. It had to be connected."
"That's the conclusion I came to last night around 3 a.m." said Velma, taking off her glasses to rub her eyes.
"If there's one, super-power granting mummy, there's bound to be another." said Fred.
"Like all those mummies that Hawkgirl fights against in Egypt." said Shaggy.
"Rorry ruys." said Scooby-Doo, looking sad.
"Nobody blames you Scoob. You taking that bone was just what felt natural." said Shaggy, giving the dog a scratch behind his ear.
"So, the fact that Magenta stole the bone from us means that whoever he's working for could potentially make an army of super-powered people to come after us?" asked Daphne.
"These are not typical super-powers Daph," said Velma, "from what I've learned, normal people can't see Stands at all, only other people with Stands. They can effect the world around them, but the powers are all over the place from combat-oriented, to practically useless."
The light tapping of metal finally caught Fred's attention as he looked over his shoulder to see the strange, little man tapping the jukebox across the diner. With one final kick, a record came down onto the needle and started playing an Elvis tune. Raising its arms in triumph, it quickly lost focus before floating to the underside of a table where it laughed at all the dried pieces of gum it found there.
"We're caught in a trap, I can't walk out because I love you too much baby." sang Elvis from the Jukebox.
"Like, I still don't know if I know what's going on." said Shaggy.
"Reah." said Scooby-Doo, agreeing with Shaggy, but Fred knew the old dog was lying.
"So, these Stands. They seem to manifest themselves in their own ways and time." said Fred.
"And some of them change over time as well, get stronger." said Johnny.
"I say we stick around, get to the bottom of this." said Fred.
"The bottom of what? Johnny's family history, the stolen artifacts, the strange rib bone… after being threatened the other day by Amanda Waller of all people, it seems like any move we make is going to get us in danger." said Daphne, setting down her mug she put her head in her hands and tried to steady her heavy breathing. "No more caffeine for me please."
"We'll split up for now." said Fred, surprising nobody at the table. "Daphne and I will go to the racetrack, find out what we can about Johnny's grandfather. Velma, you go with Johnny on whatever errand the government has for him. Shaggy, Scooby – I want you two to see if you can track down that Magenta fellow, maybe track down that bone again."
As the song built up to a crescendo on the jukebox, Johnny and Velma were starting to nod off as their all-nighter finally caught up to them while in the corner of the room Chef Gustav was eyeing them wearily from the kitchen door.
"I think it's a good plan Freddie." said Daphne.
"Thanks, Daph." said Fred, taking a big bite out of the croissant, he quickly realized he put the delicious pastry away in two bites. "These are really good."
Looking back at the kitchen, Chef Gustav's face twisted in a smile as he muttered, "Un repas bien cuisiné est la meilleure vengeance."
Looking down at the table, Fred saw the little floating man dancing on the table to the closing instrumental of its namesake song. And the only thing that kept Fred from running to the Mystery Machine and driving back east as fast as he could was Daphne's reassuring grip on his arm.
Reference:
Chef Gustav was the villain in the episode Scooby ala Mode of The New Scooby and Scrappo-Doo Show.
(Scrappy-Doo is not appearing in this series, but the Scrappy-Doo series I will consider as semi-canon if I want to borrow any additional characters)