"It's a great thesis, Jotaro. But you can't call it True Facts About the Starfish." Kakyoin set his pen atop the impressively thick sheaf of papers, and cocked an eyebrow up at Jotaro.

"Yes I can," Jotaro insisted, making the most of his stature to loom. As if that somehow made him more correct. "I'm a scientist. I call it what it is."

Kakyoin gave that the derisive snort it deserved.

"Artists do it differently," Jotaro allowed, his negotiation skills having evolved spectacularly in the last ten years to include words alongside fists.

"Not so," argued Kakyoin, for the sake of it.

Jotaro gestured to a canvas on the wall. "You named this painting 'my final Emerald Splash'. It's literally a melted clock."

Kakyoin placed an appropriately dramatic hand over his heart in affected shock. "It's a tribute to Salvador Dali! With aspects of van Gogh!"

That earned him a whack on the back from Star Platinum.

"How do you not know about van Gogh?" wondered Kakyoin.

Jotaro wondered if he should get out Star again to extract whatever had gotten stuck in Kakyoin's windpipe.

Kakyoin interpreted that non-expression correctly. "This is awful," he lamented. "I know all about your field. I've read Cousteau" -

Jotaro was doubtful. "Really?"

- "in the original French" -

Jotaro snorted.

"Ce n'est pas une blague, idiot."

"You sound like Polnareff."

"That's because I'm speaking French," sniffed Kakyoin. "Anyway, I know about Captain Nemo and Ishmael and Ahab and Queequeg and Alvin -"

"Four of those are fictional and one is a class of submarine. I still don't know why the NSF funded a ten-million dollar robot but they wouldn't just let me explore the Challenger Deep with Star Platinum." At his side, Star Platinum nodded sadly.

"If you'd called him Starfish Platinum in your proposal it would've been accepted," said Kakyoin snidely.

"Starfish don't live at those depths!" protested Jotaro.

"I know, I read your thesis. And it needs a better title. Leave it to me."

Jotaro should not and did not trust those words. When he left things to Kakyoin, it tended to get enemy stand users mercilessly eviscerated, battles fought and won that he had no recollection of, or a pile of unwashed dishes in the sink he used to clean his labware.

Master of deflection that he was, Kakyoin quickly went on a tangent. He picked up the document again and leafed through a couple pages. "I still can't believe you broke your lab's fancy high speed camera two weeks after you started and just used Star Platinum: The World and a regular camera to finish your entire project. I'm not an expert on academic integrity, but that experiment method is hardly reproducible."

"No one replicates studies these days," grumbled Jotaro.

"What on earth did your lab mates think of you saying that all the time anyway?"

"They just thought I was speaking Japanese."

Kakyoin's eyes were wide with mortification as he stared up at Jotaro. "No…"

Jotaro decided his looming had accomplished nothing, as was par for the course with Kakyoin as his opponent, and folded himself onto the couch. Pulling his hat far down over his eyes, he muttered a phrase under his breath.

Almost reluctantly, Star Platinum manifested, with a constipated look to his normally expressionless face.

Kakyoin shared a sympathetic look with the Stand. Jotaro was raised bilingual and since moving to the States he'd acquired a flawless American accent, yet it sounded as if he were reading English transcribed to hiragana like a first-year in middle school. Like he had at the beginning of their Egypt trip, when his preferred method of avoiding conversation with Joseph, Abdul and Polnareff - everyone except Kakyoin, really - was by pretending he sucked at English.

Then time stopped.

"I don't care what the enemy Stands are up to, I'm a month out from submitting the revisions to my thesis and there's no way I can work from Morioh. The answer is no." Jotaro didn't slam the phone back into its holder because that would have definitely broken it. He sighed and leaned back from his desk. Sure, he'd like to give the kids a hand, but deadlines were real and dial-up was slow, and sending a single page back and forth for comments would take days, even with his institute email account that allowed attachments as large as an entire CD.

The phone rang again.

Before Jotaro could smash it to pieces - without Star Platinum, it'd be more satisfying that way - his office door opened.

"Aren't you going to answer that, Jojo?" sang Kakyoin, depositing a bag of take-out on top of the documents that covered the desk.

Jotaro frowned a millimeter more than was strictly necessary. Kakyoin only called him 'Jojo' when he was being a little shit with a capital S. "What do you want," he growled.

"Bite the hand that feeds you, will you," said the other mildly.

The phone kept ringing.

Kakyoin picked it up, and immediately burst into a shit-eating grin. "Yes, hello. You don't say. We did, in fact. Perfect. Two hours? Oh, no, better make it six."

Jotaro blinked. He had the distinct feeling he wasn't going to like any of this. "Was that the Speedwagon Foundation again?" he asked. He hoped against hope that it had been a telemarketer.

"Yes, now eat up. We've got six hours to be at the airport."

"We? Also, I already told them no."

"That was before your editor decided to come along with you."

Jotaro blinked. "Professor Aronnax is coming to Morioh with me?"

"No, silly. You've done all the content editing; all that's left is the style! And who better to advise you on style than an artist!"

"No," declared Jotaro.

He was ignored again.

"This way you don't even need to pack any of that heavy office equipment or find a suitably outfitted establishment in Morioh, the sea cable's not always reliable, you know, and -"

"No," Jotaro said again, louder. "You're not even a native speaker. You can't be my editor."

Kakyoin had a way of talking around problems that… could actually prove incredibly useful to Jotaro's struggles with phrasing scientific arguments. "My English grammar is flawless, thank you very much. Better than yours, Mr. Never-Formally-Studied-These-Things."

That was a fairly good point; having grown up speaking the language, Jotaro had been able to get away with a lot of shit when it came to his formal education. He still didn't know which one was an adjective and which was an adverb.

"All my things are here," he tried next. "Besides, they don't really need me, they need a babysitter for Josuke. You can go alone."

"But Jotaro, who would introduce us? You can't expect his mother to just hand over custody to someone claiming to be a Joestar family friend."

"Why not?"

"Jojo."

Jotaro had learned that nothing good ever followed Kakyoin's tone of infinite patience.

"Do you know who else was a Joestar family friend?"

"Uh…"

"DIO. DIO was the original Joestar family friend. And then there was von Stroheim. An actual Nazi."

Jotaro wanted to protest that his great-great-grandfather's and grandfather's choice in friends wasn't any reflection upon himself, but then again he had Kakyoin. Sure, Kakyoin was neither a Nazi nor a vampire, but he was a scheming manipulative bastard, even though on most days he managed to be charming about it. Right now being a prime example.

"Ugh. Fine. But if you're my editor, you're in charge of packing up all this shit." Jotaro indicated the veritable mountain of paper underneath the bag of take-out. He vindictively started unwrapping the food as Kakyoin affected a put-upon sigh before getting down to work.

"Heirophant Green!"

"Lazy cheater."

"I know I'm not the brightest person out there," said Okuyasu, digging around for loose change in his ear. "But I didn't think it was possible for Jotaro-san to have friends? Outside of us, I mean."

"I'm pretty smart and I'll agree with you there," Josuke contributed. "Once you get past the badass exterior though, he's a great guy! So I shouldn't be surprised he's got an active social life." He paused. "Although, that sentence felt really weird coming out of my mouth."

"Maybe he's not friends with this person," said Koichi. "Grown-ups aren't always friends with the people they work with."

"Whaaaat?!" exclaimed Okuyasu. "Being a grown-up must really suck."

He was on a roll. Neither of the other boys had disagreed with him yet.

"Look! Those people must all be coming from the long-distance train, judging from the amount of luggage they've got with them. I bet we'll see them in a minute or two!"

They did, because as much as Jotaro stood out in a crowd, the man beside him managed to as well. He had dark sunglasses and a dark suit, complemented by a green-and-gold scarf and a cane topped with what looked like a large faux emerald, the entire ensemble brightened by a head of cherry-red hair.

"Boys." Jotaro's one-word greeting to their enthusiastic torrent was almost as predictable as the way he tugged his hat brim further over his eyes.

The red-haired stranger was watching all this with a slightly menacing smile stretched across his wide mouth, until one of the boys demanded: "Who are you?"

Jotaro cleared his throat. "This is Kakyoin Noriaki, he's -"

"A reluctant associate of the Speedwagon Foundation, currently acting as Jotaro's editor, full-time PR manager, light of his life, bane of his everyday existence-"

"I was going to say a Stand user," interrupted Jotaro.

"Jotaro, that goes without saying," Kakyoin scolded. "Anyway, it's a pleasure to finally meet you all. Now we've got Stand users to catch and traps to set, so if you don't mind -"

"Traps?" complained Okuyasu. "Can't we just go beat up whoever it is?"

"Yeah, Kakyoin," grumbled Jotaro. "Can't we just do that?"

"Oh, no," Kakyoin replied, tone airy. "But don't worry, Jojo. You just have to work on your thesis like a good little piece of bait."

The three boys - well, Josuke and Koichi, who forcibly dragged a clueless Okuyasu along with them - rapidly found excuses to be much farther away from Jotaro.

Under the brim of a white hat, an eye twitched. "Piece of what?"

"Bait, Jojo. Didn't you listen to anything the Speedwagon Foundation said? The Stand user wants to murder you, so we're going to let them try their best."

"The Speedwagon Foundation told me exactly none of that shit."

"And I can see why, that could really ruin a person's day," commented Kakyoin in a sympathetic tone. "But isn't it great that you came right to them, instead of having some mysterious Stand user with a grudge cross the ocean to hunt you down in the town where your small daughter also lives?"

"You have a DAUGHTER?!" exclaimed Josuke. "Man, does this run in the family or what." He gestured to himself vaguely.

"I was married," snapped Jotaro, offended to be grouped in the same homewrecker category as Joseph, although on most days he felt he honestly wasn't much better.

"You're MARRIED?!" chorused the boys, predictably.

"Does he tell you nothing about his personal life?" wondered Kakyoin over Jotaro's correction of their tense. "That explains so much." He turned a toothy smile on the group. "Hi, once upon a time I went to Egypt with Jotaro, his grandfather, and two other powerful Stand users to hunt and kill an immortal vampire whose body was Jotaro's great-great-grandfather's and whose Stand was Star Platinum's evil twin. You probably never heard of me because, well, Jotaro, and also I was dead for a while and in a coma for much longer."

"Jotaro. Dude. My dear, much older nephew. I am, like, extremely disappointed in your communication skills," said Josuke, before cowering behind Okuyasu as Star Platinum appeared and loomed menacingly. "Jotaro-san," he squeaked in apology.

"I told them about DIO," said Jotaro. "What they needed to know, at any rate. Which is more than can be said of the Speedwagon Foundation in this situation."

"Touché," allowed Kakyoin. "Still, I think even you can see where they're coming from. With you in Morioh, it's far more likely that the Stand user will attempt to either kill you directly, or take one of these three as hostage to lure you in -"

"Hostage?"

"No one said anything about hostages!"

"- rather than going after your six-year-old, currently Stand-less, daughter."

"I'm okay with being a hostage, in that case."

"I'm not, but just let them try!"

Two boring days filled with watching Jotaro and Kakyoin argue about grammar and spelling later, the Stand user finally did try.

They took Kakyoin instead. This did not end well for them. It did, however, end very quickly.

"Great. Can we go home now?" Jotaro grumbled as Josuke took care of all the remaining scrapes and cuts from the battle.

"You just got here! And summer break starts in a week and a half, then we can hang out all the time!" protested Okuyasu.

"Even more reason to leave."

"Jotaro. Is that any way to treat your friends?" tutted Kakyoin, sniffing disgustedly at the blood and viscera that had splattered onto his jacket.

"Told you we were friends," Koichi whispered to Okuyasu.

"You certainly have an interesting way of treating your friends, Jotaro-san," commented Josuke, with a devilish glint in his eye. "Do you often share hotel rooms with them?"

"Do you have any idea how low PhD stipends are in Florida?" Jotaro growled.

"How is it a trap if you leave your bait unobserved? Really, I hadn't thought high school education standards had fallen so far," added Kakyoin, snippily.

"Is that why there's only one bed?" deadpanned Josuke.

"Do you sleep on a stakeout?" countered Kakyoin. "Oh, wait, I know the answer. There's plenty of photographic evidence that suggests that you do."

"Burn," whispered Koichi, who was the second most likely person to commit that offence.

"I'm not going to babysit any of you while you're on summer vacation," Jotaro declared bluntly. "I have an actual child if I want to do that."

"And also a daughter," added Kakyoin, noticing Jotaro's lingering glance at his thesis.

Okuyasu cackled, rolling onto his back and kicking his legs against the floor. Jotaro grumbled a yare yare daze in his direction, before going back to observing Kakyoin. He found a lot in the redhead's expression that he didn't like.

"Let me guess," he started. "Your next line is going to be, the Speedwagon Foundation only booked our return tickets for the end of the month."

"The Speedwagon Foundation only booked our return tickets for the end of the month," Kakyoin obliged, before making a face. "Ugh. So… kitsch. I don't see how Joestar-san does it."

"Wait, seriously?" asked Josuke, looking between the two of them. "First of all, old man Joestar was cool once, and secondly, you're not leaving yet?"

"Jiji was never cool," corrected Jotaro.

"Your mom would say otherwise," Okuyasu told Josuke. A bigger fight than the one against the Stand user broke out, and in the end everyone just assumed that the answer to the second part of Josuke's question was yes.

"I'm so bored," declared Josuke. "Please kill me, I'm so bored."

"Nah, bro, we're way past that," said Okuyasu.

"Koichi, you've never tried. Wanna give it a go?"

"Eh, Josuke-kun, I really don't think Echoes Act III is the best matchup for Crazy Diamond, but I'm sure if we call Yukako-san she can…"

"They told me marine biology was fascinating," Josuke continued his lament. "I thought Jotaro-san was cool. No one told me he was a boring middle-aged divorcee."

"I clearly recall him telling you one of those things." Kakyoin looked up from the notes he was making on Jotaro's notes.

"Which one?" asked Okuyasu, while Josuke emphasized that it was the boring part he had a problem with, not the middle-aged divorcee.

"Why don't you watch one of his videos, then?" snapped Kakyoin, employing the tried-and-true babysitting technique of sitting the brats in front of the television.

"He makes videos?"

"I'm not so sure I want to see videos of you two together, heh."

"Oh my God," Kakyoin hissed in English, hating how much he sounded like Joseph just then. "Research videos. They're about starfish. If you're bored, they're over there. Watch them, or don't, I don't care. Just shut up and leave me alone."

One of those three things happened, and Kakyoin wished he'd been awake enough that morning to have the foresight to accompany Jotaro on his "last-minute field research" that he could now see was a clear excuse to have the space to actually finish any one of the thoughts that were floating around in his mind.

"Kakyoin-san, they're in English."

"You learn English at school."

"Yeah, but this is like, fancy English. It's all science-y and shit."

Which, coming from them, translated yet again to boring, because if they couldn't understand Jotaro reading out starfish measurements they were definitely going to fail this year. "What do you want from me?" Kakyoin beseeched the universe.

"Can you translate?" answered Okuyasu. Figured that one would be stupid enough to confuse himself with God.

"Fine," Kakyoin relented, because he certainly wasn't getting any work done either way. "'This sample is in the early stage of regeneration. Here, partial growth of the disc is evident. No signs of infection make it a likely candidate' -"

"Can you make it less boring?" asked Josuke.

"Can you make it less smart-sounding?" asked Okuyasu.

"Can you make it -" started Koichi, and then wisely shut the hell up.

Kakyoin continued translating calmly, although he was already building a web with Heirophant's tentacles so that he could hang these annoying little shrimps out to dry.

"I don't understand," Okuyasu stage-whispered to Josuke not twenty seconds later.

"The starfish is re-growing its leg, I think," Josuke commented. "If it's got part of the center starfish bit left, it can just pop out a new one in a couple months! Unless it's a special type, in which case it just grows it out of nowhere," he paraphrased.

"Hey! Thanks, man! Kakyoin-san, you should tell Jotaro-san to say it like that. Then everyone would be sure to get what he means."

Kakyoin stopped plotting the boys' demise for long enough to appreciate their innocence. Unfortunately, pretentiousness was just as much a part of the scientific world as the artistic one.

Well. He was nothing if not considerate.

Kakyoin laughed to himself at that, because as Jotaro correctly pointed out, Kakyoin was the most not considerate person Jotaro knew. Which was why Kakyoin made it a point to go out of his way to be considerate to Jotaro, just to mess with the big guy.

It couldn't hurt to keep the little guys on their toes as well.

Kakyoin put in a different tape - the one with a more general overview that Jotaro was planning on using for his thesis defense - and did his very best to imitate the slight lisp the head of the marine biology department had.

"The starfish not a fish. It is an echinoderm of the class Asteroidea, making it tangentially related to rocks that fall from space, while being on fire."

The boys got a laugh out of that. At least they weren't complaining any more.

"If said space rocks fell directly into the sea," Kakyoin continued. "Which is why most scientists now insist on calling them sea stars. Starfish - or sea stars, if you're of that particular brand of scientist - move around using their tube feet."

"What's a tube foot?" asked Okuyasu. "I've always thought mine were oddly cylindrical."

"Tube feet are operated by a hydraulic system," Kakyoin answered, still affecting the voice. He was met by a look of incomprehension, and sighed. "Imagine trying to move around by vomiting out of a giant straw," he tried.

"Whoa," the boys gasped, and immediately went hunting for straws.

"I said imagine!" yelled Kakyoin.

"Kakyoin-san," said Josuke, some time and a plethora of cleaning supplies later. "You know what we've got to do, right?"

Never suggest anything to any of these people ever again was at the top of Kakyoin's list, but he replied with a flat look that a wiser person would have interpreted for the death threat it was.

"We've gotta help Jotaro-san make his video better. Or else no one's going to know what he's talking about. Here, Koichi and I wrote a script. You should do that voice you were doing, it sounded really official-like. I bet it sounds even better in English!"

Kakyoin momentarily stopped his mental argument of the pros and cons of slow evisceration versus possessing the boys into beating their own heads against a wall. That was actually an idea worth listening to.

After all, suffering was only worthwhile if you dragged everyone else down along with you.

A slow grin spread across his face. Later, the boys would learn to recognize that as something to be avoided as much as a crown-of-thorns starfish. "Josuke-kun. What an absolutely fantastic idea."

"And that's a wrap. All right kids, see you in a week," announced Kakyoin.

"Wait, aren't you two going back to America?" asked Koichi.

A red eyebrow arched. "Yes, and?"

"Well, we'd love to come watch Jotaro-san defend his thesis but, eh, you know that million yen we won…" Josuke broke off with an awkward laugh. "Eh heh heh, turns out you can spend that pretty quickly in a year."

"So I heard," said Kakyoin, with a dubious look at Josuke's shoes. "That's why you're paying your own way with work study!"

"Work?" echoed Josuke, face falling.

"Study?" exclaimed Okuyasu, eyes bugging out in horror.

"Think fast!" shouted a new voice, and then multiple bags of art supplies were flying at their faces. They managed to catch them all, although Koichi was bowled over by one.

Josuke was sneakily fixing a half dozen broken pencils and hating his life as the newcomer sniffed haughtily.

"You'll need a better reaction time if you're going to be my assistants," Rohan declared. "There's a lot of details to organize for the first international tour of the acclaimed mangaka Kishibe Rohan!"

Josuke turned his very best pleading look on Kakyoin, but was ignored.

"Is this a nightmare?" Okuyasu whispered to Koichi. "Pinch me."

Koichi did, but it didn't help. Things only got worse.

"Oh, and don't forget to set aside enough time to get through the backlog of samples in Jotaro's lab!" chirped Kakyoin.

"Lab?" Koichi asked nervously, and got clapped on the back by a giant hand.

"Thanks for volunteering to catalog all those limbs," said Jotaro by way of announcing his arrival. "It's a major pain but someone's got to do it."

He caught Kakyoin winking at them with a devilish smirk as they turned to go, and eventually thinking about it troubled him into speaking. "Did you fund their trip with an insurance scam? Or one of Josuke's Ponzi schemes?"

"Of course not, I'm an independent artist," Kakyoin protested.

Jotaro had his doubts. "Your bestseller is a pack of tarot cards where The World is just a yellow hand giving the middle finger, surrounded by roses that, if you look closely, are exploded vampire skulls."

Instead of ceding the point to Jotaro as he should have, Kakyoin just sighed contentedly. "Art therapy."

"This is art therapy," argued Jotaro, holding up the copy of Science magazine he'd had to go to the next city to buy. He was extremely proud of the cover, displaying his groundbreaking series of ultra-slow-motion photographs showing a starfish in the process of turning its stomach inside out.

"That's like the opposite of art therapy," said Kakyoin, to be contrary. Jotaro could hear the pride underneath the dismissive tone though. "It's giving me flashbacks to the hospital, the way its stomach is on the outside digesting stuff." Nevertheless, he held out a hand for the issue. "May I?"

Jotaro passed it over, and it almost immediately opened to the correct page. Kakyoin hid a grin. He wondered how much time Jotaro had spent admiring it already, and skimmed over the glossy pages to the only part of the article that held any interest for him. "'J.K. would like to thank the anonymous reviewers -'" he started reading, then paused. "Really, Jotaro? I recall you having some choice words for them, and they didn't sound much like thank you."

"I'm ninety percent sure who they are and they're people I don't want to piss off," explained Jotaro. A far cry from the boy who'd beaten a vampire who pissed him off to a pulp ten years ago. Kakyoin wiped away a faux tear before turning back to the page.

"'As well as his research assistant'… eh? Who's this? Is that even a real name?"

Jotaro was hiding behind his hat in the way that he did when he was trying not to smile. Kakyoin squinted at the letters again.

"If you switch romanji for kanji, what would it look like?" Jotaro offered.

Matching sounds to symbols in his head, Kakyoin felt a smile building on his own face. Star, the first one was clear… the next could then be platinum, and then world. He laughed. "Jotaro, you sneaky bastard! Am I starting to rub off on you?"

"Please don't," said Jotaro, deadpan. "Hey. Kakyoin. What do you think of the title the editor wrote? Maybe I should use it for the thesis."

Kakyoin was pretty sure half the title was in Latin, but he still pretended to consider it for an appropriate amount of time before remarking: "It's okay, but… True Facts About the Starfish has really grown on me."

Jotaro tugged on his hat again, while Kakyoin concentrated all his efforts into not breaking out into a shit-eating grin.

"Do you see them? Surely you must by now."

"I'm tall, not psychic. They'll get here when they get here."

Kakyoin huffed but decided against sending Heirophant out for an even better viewpoint than Jotaro's two meters. "Maybe they're lost, it's their first time in the States and I don't trust Rohan not to get sidetracked."

Jotaro grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like yare yare daze, and continued to do his best to look completely unexcited and partly annoyed.

It turned out the yare yare daze was completely called for, however, when the three Morioh boys appeared, wearing brightly colored Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts. They almost made Rohan, dressed in what resembled a pink fluffy bathrobe but was probably high fashion, accessorized with a neck pillow and sleeping mask, look normal.

"Wrong state," sighed Jotaro.

"Aloha!" Kakyoin greeted them cheerfully, whipping out flower necklaces from nowhere. He had to have planned this.

Koichi looked lost, and his companions didn't look too much better themselves. "Wow, everyone's so tall!" exclaimed the short boy.

Kakyoin followed his glance to where a group of tall, athletic women in matching suits were awaiting their transport, and being swarmed by another group of younger but no less tall or athletic ladies and gentlemen.

"America's scary different!" exclaimed Okuyasu.

"What are they?" Koichi wondered, entranced.

Kakyoin hummed to himself and tried to recall. The younger ones weren't familiar but they were wearing the colors of the university, which made the older ones... the recently established Miami Sol? "Surgeons," he declared, since none of the boys really stood a chance of becoming professional athletes.

Josuke let out a low whistle at that. "Am I tall enough to be a surgeon? I always thought I could be one because of Crazy Diamond, but I don't think I'll be growing much more."

"You can be anything you put your mind to," said Jotaro unexpectedly.

This jarred Rohan out of his jet-lagged stupor and directly into an argument. "Not if you don't have talent," he sniffed. "Or a life that's even remotely interesting. I spent the whole flight reading my seat neighbors with Heaven's Door"-

"Not our fault, he switched seats without telling us!" Josuke hurried to explain.

-"and I have never been more bored in my existence on this Earth. I was only able to come up with one panel worthy of drawing, and this is what I had to call it!"

Rohan whipped out a sketch, and the others instinctively averted their eyes. "Cowards, I didn't say Heav - it. You can look."

They looked. It showed… exactly what it was titled: "Florida man caught on security camera licking doorknob for three hours."

Rohan shook the drawing, pointing at it dramatically. "How can this be the pinnacle of one person's entire life?! Do you blame me for being in an existential funk?"

"You didn't even remember his name after reading his life story?" Kakyoin scolded. "Kishibe-kun, you know that I hold you to no standards of normal human behavior whatsoever, but that's low."

"Seems about right, though," Jotaro shrugged, indicating the drawing. "Welcome to Florida."

"The experiment was designed specifically to test photoperiodic regulation of oogenesis in Sclerasterias mollis," said Jotaro, in what Josuke was pretty certain had started out as English and ended up in something like Latin.

Josuke had no idea what was going on, but he did know two things. One, that being in this overly-air-conditioned room meant that he wasn't currently a slave to Rohan's petty, passive-aggressive whims, and two, that he was thankful for one of those things and freezing his ass off because of the other. He sneaked a look at the people he was seated with, and tried to imitate Kakyoin's expression of discerning interest rather than Okuyasu's open-mouthed confusion or Koichi's glaze-eyed incomprehension.

At the front of the room, Jotaro was speaking while occasionally pointing a stiff finger at something projected onto the screen behind him. Even though Josuke knew pretty much all the individual words he was saying, they didn't hold much meaning when put together. The net effect was both very impressive and very off-putting towards any future thoughts of medical school.

"Previously published morphological data sets from five of the major higher taxa - Paxillosida, Forcipulatida, Valvatida, Spinulosida, and Velatida - generate a well-supported, though unrooted, phylogenetic tree," Jotaro was saying, which, again, didn't even sound like an actual sentence.

Josuke found himself distracted by thoughts of what exactly the steady air current through the vent was doing to his coiffure, until Jotaro turned down the lights in the room. He immediately perked up, breaking into a huge grin, as Jotaro started playing the video.

"True Facts About the Starfish," declared Kakyoin's pompously disguised voice.

Two things happened then that Josuke had never seen before. First of all, a horrified expression crossed Jotaro's face. Secondly, Josuke found himself (why him? It was clearly Kakyoin's voice, and thus Kakyoin's fault) the victim of a murderous ocean blue glare and a stiffly pointed finger.

The third thing, Josuke could have easily predicted.

"Star Platinum: The World!"

When time resumed, every trace of panic was gone from Jotaro's once-again blank slate of a face. The picture on the screen was slightly different, but more importantly, Josuke was still alive. He had Okuyasu pinch him just in case, to check. Cool, cool. So probably Jotaro had beat him to death but Crazy Diamond had put him back together again.

At the front of the room, Jotaro muttered some vague excuse about an old version, and resumed the video.

"Oh no, what a disaster," he said, perfectly inflectionless, when the narrator's voice turned out to be none other than Josuke's, happily chattering about entirely unrelated and mostly fabricated oceanic fun facts. "It's in Japanese, a language which no one in this esteemed committee speaks. Let me translate."

Beside Josuke, Okuyasu and Koichi were doing their best not to laugh as Josuke's voice narrated a juicy marine drama and Jotaro talked over it with his English-sounding non-words.

Josuke wasn't sure where Jotaro had gotten their draft tape from - he eyed Kakyoin's open bag suspiciously - but it was worth it if only to keep himself awake for the rest of the hour. Sometimes the existential fear of your adult nephew who has most of the same powers as God just wasn't enough.

All three of the boys were pleasantly surprised that they made it out of that room alive. Koichi chalked it up to Jotaro being in the middle of something extremely important at the time, but later they found out that Jotaro had already taken his revenge. Okuyasu discovered it on a trip to the men's room. Josuke immediately pulled out his pocket mirror when his friend started pointing and gesturing in horrified yowls at his head, and found a wad of old, old chewing gum stuck in his precious pompadour.

After a minor breakdown over the thought of having to find a barber in a foreign country, Josuke finally remembered he had a Stand and used Crazy Diamond to revert the gum back to its original, less-sticky less-germy state, and his hair to its usual robustness.

He'd probably deserved it, he admitted to himself a good hour after the trauma had subsided. "At least Jotaro-san's not one to draw out revenge," he mused mournfully to the others.

"No, that'd be Kakyoin-san," said Koichi helpfully. "Although I doubt Jotaro-san's going to speak to you for the rest of the week."

"It's not even my fault!" Josuke wailed.

While Jotaro indeed did not say a word to him during the entire celebratory reception, he did let Josuke have a sip of the whiskey he was nursing.

"And the true criminal gets off scot free," Josuke complained, watching Jotaro hand Kakyoin another glass of fancy champagne, with an indifferent expression that was almost fond, coming from him.

Hours later, Josuke would amend that statement.

Kakyoin and Rohan were in jail, following too much champagne and despite the fact that everyone had deliberately told Rohan the wrong room for the reception. Apparently, if Koichi were to be believed (Josuke couldn't trust his own eyes right now with the way his head was pounding), they'd tried to do some urban artistry on a statue of a dolphin that "had Jotaro's eyes", somehow gotten most of the spray paint on Rohan (it was a definite improvement, Josuke thought) and now were incapable of bailing themselves out because Kakyoin would only speak French and Rohan kept turning anyone who got close into a book. The last glimpse Josuke had had of him, the mangaka seemed to be getting on famously with some cockroaches, until Kakyoin ate one of them.

Jotaro had that same expression on his face right now, which belied an interest that went beyond yare yare daze. "Hi. I'm Dr. Jotaro Kujo, here to bail out my…" He made an appropriately hopeless gesture at Kakyoin and Rohan.

"Thank God," Josuke thought he heard someone sob, and then he was trying to trade Rohan (eewww) for Kakyoin, or better yet to foist him off on to Okuyasu (he would have tried Koichi if Rohan's weight wouldn't have flattened the boy).

Later, he found out that the bail had been paid with money that Heirophant had pinched from his own wallet, but it was all good since it was money Josuke had talked Koichi into using his only-friend status to con Rohan out of in the first place.

He also learned the name of that expression of Jotaro's. Revenge. Utter and humiliating.

"It only took three years and a pending international move to get you to finally toss your old notes, huh." Kakyoin's eyes were judging Jotaro mildly from where they peeked over the top of his easel.

"They have sentimental value," Jotaro lied, shuffling through yet another stack of papers. God, what had he even been thinking back then?

"The Dr. Jotaro Kujo?" Kakyoin fake-gasped. "Has sentiments?"

Jotaro grumbled, pulled his hat further over his face, and picked up the stack to move to the study, shedding papers as he went. There was another box in the study, after all, and he ought to look through it before recycling everything. Just in case there were some half-decayed starfish limbs he'd forgotten about, or -

He pulled an old camcorder cassette out of the deep corners of the box. It was labelled, in Kakyoin's neat handwriting, True Facts About the Starfish.

Jotaro almost felt his face flush with remembered embarrassment, but Kujo Jotaro did not blush. Much less from embarrassment. The study was the warmest room in the apartment, that was all. South-facing in a southern state.

He put the cassette in the camcorder, and started watching.

In retrospect, it was hilarious. Kakyoin did an admirable job of keeping the fake voice the whole way through, and his paraphrasings of starfish behavior were surprisingly scientifically accurate, if bordering on vulgar at times. Jotaro found himself letting out snorts of amusement now and then, especially when he imagined the Morioh gang's reaction to it.

The video ended, and Jotaro reached to turn it off, when a new segment began.

The screen showed a collection of photographs - that one polaroid from the road to Cairo, Jotaro with his mother and grandparents, him and his ex-wife and a newborn Jolyne, Kakyoin and him and the Morioh crew. "True Facts about Dr. Jotaro Kujo." Kakyoin's voice - his true voice - began the narration.

Jotaro found himself frantically pausing the tape, heart beating fast. Three years ago. This had been recorded three years ago… so much had changed since then. And yet so little.

"Noriaki," Jotaro called, wandering out of the study with camcorder in hand. He came around the other side of the easel to be met with an inquisitively raised eyebrow. "What's this?"

A smile played around Kakyoin's lips as he teased: "What does it look like?"

Jotaro swallowed, unsure. "Can I... Can I keep watching it?"

"What are you afraid of, Jojo?" asked Kakyoin, and looking at him Jotaro found that there could only ever be one answer.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

He pressed play.

A/N: … yikes that got sickly sweet at the end there, sorry about that.

Kakyoin basically has Loki's outfit from the opera scene in the Avengers, except really dark green instead of black (what? It's a good look). Rohan is wearing an actual bathrobe in the airport scene, and managing to get away with it.

Josuke and Rohan eventually collaborate on Sad Dog Diaries, with help from Heaven's Door. They hate every second of it, but it makes Josuke a lot of money.

The only things I know about marine biology (that I didn't learn from Ze Frank) I stole from these articles, which I'm pretty sure are totally unrelated (links available on AO3 version).

Also I never got past hiragana in Japanese so most everything on the linguistic front is made up but hopefully plausible