Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Shadowed Suspicion Chapter 376

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure/Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU
Chapter Summary: The Slayers find Rush's lab notebooks.
Word Count: 1140
Note: HERE THERE PROBABLY BE BUFFY/JJBA SPOILERS

        Well, Buffy has had enough standing around. She’s grown up since she was a really young kid, so she doesn’t immediately start smashing everything in sight, but that might just be on a delay. Mostly, if destroying the eye is going to hurt Xander, she wants to make sure to consult with him (and Willow and Giles) before she does anything. “So we’re not allowed teleportation, but do you think the locals might get the need to contact the outside?” If not, she’s fully willing to escalate and make her case.
        Daniela smiles a little. It looks like satisfaction, more than just amusement. “I can ask,” she responds with assurance. She grabs Antonio to accompany her, which is smart in that none of them, probably, should be alone in Rush’s lab, but Antonio isn’t the guy Buffy would choose as backup. Still, Buffy does get it. The choice was deliberate. She’s not being invited for the discussion—which is fine, she gets it, as the outsider, but it also means she has to figure out something to do with herself in the meantime. She could help out Giorno, but it looks like he has this whole interrogation thing well in hand. Then again, he’s only half asking stuff about Rush and half covering job specifics in a profession she specifically does not want to know about for the case of plausible deniability and all that.
        Fortunately, she doesn’t get to think about that too long, because one of the monkeys runs up, waits, a little confused, a little impatient, and then turns to her instead, pushing a notebook in her direction. Another one watches, with something else in hand, and then follows suit, in this case offering one to Ivete. The rest are looking very carefully at the rest of the lab, though in most cases they look like the encounter with the barrels in the corridor was enough to scare them into not just touching everything. Which is probably for the best, honestly. She doesn’t want to think about what would happen if they hadn’t learned some caution.
        By silent agreement they move to a corner of the room, away from Giorno. Close enough to still see him, keep an eye on him, and be able to dive for him, if necessary, but not so close that a conversation from them is going to interrupt him somehow. “This one’s talking about moving on from tests on something called Montezuma grey to a virus—he doesn’t have a name for it yet, it looks like. There’s numbers for tests and changing hypotheses, but I can’t understand those,” Ivete whispers, and that’s interesting.
        “I think that’s later than this one.” Or maybe it’s more of a case of concurrent laboratory notebooks, just different subjects? Because this one isn’t about his efforts in biological warfare. It looks more like philosophical musings, the kinds of things that she wouldn’t have expected from a ‘practical at all costs’ enemy, but exactly the sort of thing that it’s really, really helpful to know for when you’re fighting someone, because then you get a better idea of how they work, how they think. (That might be part of why he hides it so strongly, actually.) “The actual passage there is ‘Pity about the Stone—flawed. Didn’t need to act, and useless. Try private space flight? Possible test against Montezuma grey, other biological functions.’” On the face of it, there’s no reason for him to be interested in, say, NASA, or whatever, but also it’s pretty obvious that his boundless curiosity into a bunch of different scientific disciplines has proven to be very useful for him. It’s...a really good thing he hadn’t been grabbed by the Initiative, actually. He would’ve figured out a way to make the whole Actual Frankenstein’s Monster thing work out for him.
        “It looks like he’s been trying to get his hands on a Mask or Mask vampire blood to compare to the kind we often hunt, but failed. And is also experiencing difficulties culturing the virus. We’ll probably have to warn the Speedwagon Foundation—perhaps even knowing about this,” Ivete punctuates by lifting the notebook, “...will enable them to be better protected. From everything we know, Rush doesn’t relish a confrontation unless he’s fairly certain he has tipped the odds in his direction.”
        “It’d help, but…” Buffy shivers. “It’s hard to know how far he’s planned out in advance, just waiting to trigger a trap until he’s ready.”
        That actually might be reproach on her fellow Slayer’s face. “Yes, but we can’t do nothing. We have to act, even if there’s danger.” True enough.
        Buffy nods, to let her know that her point got across, and continues reading. “He’s making an interesting point about immortals being ‘stuck in stone’. They don’t feel like they actually have to adapt to the modern day, and that’s why humans beat them, because as a younger-lived race they’re ‘not so set in their ways’.”
        Ivete bares her teeth, joyous and fierce, scaring the monkey who runs up to hand her another notebook. She apologizes briefly and starts flipping through that, too. “I think this was the one where he started planning on attacking Wolfram & Hart. He notes specifically that he’s going to have to try something new, because otherwise their weapons division might be able to counteract it—maybe that weapons division is how they got on his radar in the first place.”
        Buffy nod, trying to listen and read at the same time. She’s a little out of practice. She ignores the picture of the space-rock—okay, maybe the fact that it looks vaguely humanoid, if you squint, might mean something, be the reason he has any interest in space at all, but it doesn’t help her now. They can look into that later, if it ends up being relevant at all. “That would make sense. After all, this Nazi scientist caught his attention, too. And, based on this passage, I think he’d definitely categorize weapons as tools. ‘Intelligent animals are the ones who learned how to use tools. Unintelligent animals rely on their natural abilities—claws, fangs, teeth. Kars wanted to use evolution without even a basic understanding. Evolution is not unambiguously good, some holy ideal to be worshiped. Without a goal, without direction, attempting to harness it is meaningless.’”
        “More notes about trying to induce pneumonia. Ah, the other scientist had been experimenting with holy water from the Vatican. As far as he can tell, demons dissolved with holy water are just gone. No moving on to any other dimensions. But the same is true of his eyes, apparently.” Good to know, too—but Daniela and Antonio are returning, looking triumphant, so anything else in the notebooks will have to wait. She hands them over to Antonio to put in his backpack.