Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Shadowed Suspicion Chapter 374

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure/Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU
Chapter Summary: The sound is investigated.
Word Count: 1123
Note: HERE THERE PROBABLY BE BUFFY/JJBA SPOILERS

         They send the Stand through first. Buffy isn’t so foolish as to think it’s immune to everything; she’d fought Jotaro to prove herself, and then almost managed to cut the arm off Three Days Grace, so she knows it’s possible to hurt a Stand. Maybe not kill one. She hadn’t tested that part personally, and from what Kakyoin and Josephine had said, people they knew only managed to kinda, like, banish their enemy Stands, not kill them, and that was when the actual User was dead. Still, it’s safer than sending even a Slayer out by her lonesome. So they venture in after, the Stand, then Giorno, then Buffy, then Antonio, then Ivete. Antonio lets the flashlight play over the room. He’s not perfectly experienced with clearing rooms, it looks like, but he at least has some idea of what he’s doing. It’s more needed in here, too, because while there’s still some bioluminescence in here, it’s darker. More clangy metal, too, which is good in some ways and bad in others. It kind of announces their approach, sure, but also could do the same for approaching enemies.
         Buffy doesn’t spend too much time in labs or other science spaces. The last time she’d been in anything similar was in college, in an intro class. She even thinks they’d had one in the ISWC base, but she’d kind of tuned out when Andrew was talking about it (honestly, he might’ve just been talking about a ‘stuff every good secret base should have’ wishlist; she doesn’t know), and she didn’t really bother to look for it. She’s much more familiar with morgues and funeral homes, and while there’s definitely more scientific stuff around, she definitely spots more of the morgue elements here, integrated into the rest because there’s no need for the usual concerns about getting an infection or the human sensibilities about the dead. Maybe that crematorium was where he disposed of the bodies, but this is where he interacts with them—and by the blood on the scalpel, she’s going to guess that they might not have all arrived here dead, either. Getting real Dr. Frankenstein vibes up in here.
         Okay, it’s not a human corpse on the wheely cart for the dead. At least, it’s not a human corpse now. But it’s something that had been human, and sure, maybe it had actually been one of those weird vampire dog things before Rush even got its hands on it. Maybe. It’s hard to say, really. That being said, she kind of hates that there’s even some similarity between the way she and Rush would react to things, though it’s obviously not like they’re the same. She just would want it dead. Rush actually wants to dissect the thing. Though—
         Ugh. Now that’s got her wondering how the hell he managed to actually kill a vampire and interact with its body like that’s a normal thing. She’d say maybe because their vampires work differently, but no, that’s absolutely not it. The Slaypires pretty much proved that one, no help needed.
         They do get attacked by some of the eyes. Buffy had wondered if that would be a thing, given that they hadn’t seen any. Either Rush had better control of them than they’d thought and was biding his time, or he didn’t really see the need to have the weird surveillance absolutely everywhere, just in this one room. For some reason.
         Fortunately, it turns out that they turn to stone with the application of hamon. Given that that’s apparently what happens with Pillar Men in the presence of the sun, and the Ripple is somehow based on the power of the sun, she’s going to go with the idea that maybe Rush actually is a Pillar Man, too. Unfortunately.
         Luckily, too, Rush has left some jars around, at least, so gathering up a bunch of eyes turned to stone and throwing them in a glass jar is a thing they can do. It’s especially useful when they can throw some of the Ripple in the water. It’s not foolproof. It’s going to dissipate over time, but in the meantime it at least buys them some time to look around. Just in case, they end up putting the lid on real tight.
         She briefly wonders whether the eyes were what was making the noise in the first place—they’d probably been scuttling around for a bit, although whether it’s, like, a pre-defined ‘patrol’ pattern or actually had been controlled is something there’s no way for her to answer, not with the information she has, currently. What looks like dangling nerves feed into a bank of computer monitors, and while she didn’t see exactly how any of that worked exactly, she’s pretty sure a bunch of them went dark at the same time the eyeballs attacked in unison, and her instincts are saying that while pretty gross, she’s not wrong. Somehow, Rush had managed to feed nerves into tech, get them to see what he sees. If he’s close enough, he can probably just ‘plug’ into them directly, but while that would somehow be less gross, this is more convenient, probably. Rush could probably find a way to record this, and maybe it’s also less of a pain to be able to see the inputs from several of the different eyes at once through monitors rather than trying to parse them all at once with your brain.
         She’s seen biotech in other contexts—for example, when Xander with enthusiasm pushed her to watch Babylon 5. Though they’d been busy enough they’d never gotten through fully. She still remembers one of the races had biotech ships, though, and that didn’t seem super gross—but then, that wouldn’t capture the full reality of it, would it? Because biotech can bleed and drip and be gooey and all the other icky stuff that actual living stuff does. And Rush’s combined tech abomination here does.
         Her assumption about the source of the sound is quickly proven wrong, though. Because it’s the head in the glass jar that Giorno reacts violently to.
         Giorno hisses a curse. “Diavolo!”
         “I take it you know him?” Sure, maybe it’s weird to be using the present tense here, but she’s pretty sure she saw it twitch, and mobile heads aren’t the weirdest thing she’s ever seen.
         Giorno’s face is blank for but a moment. “His name is Diavolo,” he corrects with great patience. He turns to face the head again, and the atmosphere becomes oppressive. “You can stop pretending. I can feel the flame of life flickering within you.”
         It moves, to Antonio’s gasp. Sneers as it opens its eyes and sees Giorno’s face—apparently the hatred is mutual. “What do you want?”