In Bocca Al Lupo

36- Sliding Pebbles

Sick of getting chewed out for my dumb jokes at a horrible time, I waited for Abbacchio to run out of breath so I could figure out what we're supposed to do next. Lo and behold, Giorno was the one to do that for us, boldly announcing, "Since I hold the Arrow, and I was the one who defeated Diavolo, I name myself the new Boss of Passione."

Abbacchio got over my updog joke in about a millisecond to chew Giorno out for this one, "No, absolutely not. You're fifteen and you're a shithead. If anybody gets to be the Boss it's Bucciarati."

Bucciarati sat up, giving Giorno a wholesome pat on the shoulder and stating, "No, I agree with Giorno. He was the one who started this whole thing, so- ah, I... shouldn't have said that. All of you, forget that."

Although everyone looked as though they had just witnessed a nuclear warhead get launched, they did as Bucciarati said and pretended to not hear the last part. Not wanting this whole thing to end on an awkward or otherwise negative note, I stood up and breathed a peppy sigh, "All right, do y'all wanna go and get some food? And then go home? I do. And if we're announcing things we're doing then I say we're going to Denny's."

Narancia looked excited, a small 'ooh' coming from before he asked, "What's Denny's?"

Staring at him, I remembered that I was standing in the Coliseum, "Oh shit, I'm in Italy. Sorry, never mind. Where do you guys wanna go?"

A small argument broke out among everyone over where we should we go, Abbacchio and Trish ganging up and saying the first course of action was to get to a hotel so we could all sleep on an actual bed instead of a couch or the floor, whereas Mista and Narancia fought for the idea of going to get food somewhere since we were no longer about to die. Bucciarati just laid on the floor, trying to recover from being dead for a little while.

Giorno, who had taken to staring at me and waiting to see what my choice would be, finally settled on coming up to me and asking, "Can we go check out Polnareff's corpse?"

"Um..." I gave him a wide-eyed look, nodding slowly, "Suuuure? Since we're here and all."

"What are you doing?" Stuck inside of Coco Jumbo's room out of his own choice, Polnareff's spirit (ghost?) popped out from the top to give Giorno an accusatory look, only to receive nothing as Giorno began to slink away from the group. Shrugging and deciding following Giorno to see what he did to the dead body would be infinitely more engaging than Narancia's threat to throw Abbacchio's barrette into the water.

An escapade of trying to get up the wall to find Polnareff's body ensued, Giorno trying and failing to scale it with the tortoise in his hands and leaving to climb the wall, catch Polnareff, and then pull Giorno up the wall. Amazed that the others were still arguing of what to do, I caught Bucciarati's eyes and nearly burst out into laughter from the exasperated look etched onto his face.

Turning back to Giorno, I watched as he pulled out his Stand to examine Polnareff's body, trying to see if he was wasting time or not. From the floor, Polnareff's spirit seemed to be examining his own body. As soon as Giorno started using pebbles and fractured pieces of Coliseum to fill in the hole of Polnareff's chest, I zoomed over to see what was going on.

Kneeling down beside Giorno, I tried to question his actions without taking too much focus away from whatever he was doing, "What's up, dog?"

Giorno side-eyed me before echoing what I got him with, "Not much, what's up with you?"

Getting virtually no reaction from anybody, Giorno settled on telling me what he was doing, "Ah, it's... I wanted to see if Polnareff was dead for real or if he was just comatose. I turned a rock into some plants to test it out, and they didn't grow off of his body, so I figured that it was worth a shot in trying to heal his body."