But Josuke paid Jotaro’s discomfort no mind as he dragged a chair of his own over to the table where the youngest members of the gang Passione had gathered. “We had a stand arrow in Morioh, too,” Josuke told them. The legs of his chair screeched slightly as he scooted himself closer. “It was crazy! There was this ghost guy—he was the father of this psycho serial killer in town—who had it. He kept shooting people all over town in the hopes that they’d turn out to be decent allies for his asshole son. But he was, like, the third guy in town to get the arrow. Before him was this asshat called Akira, and before Akira was my bro Okuyasu’s brother Keicho.”
Bruno Bucciarati, who Jotaro privately thought was the only one of these baby gangsters with any common sense (probably because he was one of the oldest at a mere twenty years of age), looked perturbed by Josuke’s words. “I wasn’t aware that there were more than just the two arrows we encountered,” he admitted. “It’s concerning that what happened in Napoli could happen again elsewhere.”
“You guys had two arrows?” Josuke asked.
“Yes,” said Bucciarati in a serious tone. “The one we were struck with as part of our initiation, and the Requiem Arrow that Signore Polnareff found. It had the ability to essentially overpower a stand, but, if the user wasn’t strong enough, the stand would leave them. That’s, in part, how Signore Polnareff ended up stuck in the turtle. His Silver Chariot went rogue right as he was dying and switched our souls around into different bodies.”
“It's a tortoise,” Jotaro corrected without thinking. He’d seen tortoise Polnareff already and knew that, while both turtles and tortoises were part of the Testudinidae family and were in some ways interchangeable, the term turtle was more closely associated with water-dwelling species while tortoise was typically used for the terrestrial species. Polnareff walked on land just fine and wasn’t all that adept at swimming, and as such, he was a tortoise.
Josuke, meanwhile, was far less sensible in his reaction. He shrieked at the mention of a reptile of any kind, and then demanded to know: “What the hell is going on in Italy that people are becoming turtles?”
This time, it was Giorno Giovanna who corrected their terminology by stating: “Tortoise.”
Jotaro gave the youngest GioGio at the table an approving nod. He hadn’t expected to like the kid as much as he did, especially not after learning that he was DIO’s son, but the teenage mafia boss had quickly grown on him. For all that he had his sire’s blonde hair and ruthlessness, the rest of him was purely Jonathan Joestar. He had inherited Jonathan’s star birthmark, blue-green eyes, and even his ability to see the beauty in everything. There was quite possibly no one who more clearly embodied what it meant to be a Joestar than Giorno.
Despite all of that, Giorno was still a child of fifteen. Those two years between his age and Jotaro’s felt like the decades they nearly were in normal time. Jotaro couldn’t shake the nagging belief that he needed to protect his younger relative somehow—no matter that the boy had already proved himself to be a perfectly competent fighter. Perhaps it was due to how small the kid was compared to the rest of their freakishly huge bloodline.
“I think you’re missing the real question here,” interrupted Cecilia Zeppeli. She was a tall, lean young woman with dark blonde hair and green eyes that were the exact same shade as her Great-Uncle Caesar’s. She also, by sheer coincidence, shared just enough of a passing resemblance to Giorno that half of his friends had initially assumed that she was his older sister. “Bucciarati, was the tortoise also a stand user?”
Bucciarati nodded in the affirmative. “Yes, it was.”
Cecilia made a gesture that could be loosely translated to “Well, there you go.” She clearly thought that the tortoise being a stand user somehow explained everything. Jotaro wasn’t quite as convinced. He’d met two animal stand users already, and neither of them seemed capable of hosting a human soul.
