#foolishman

“Are you sure we have to start working on this tonight? Can’t we just, I dunno, wait to get into your files after we go home and get some rest?”

“Ichiro, even if we were going to delay our MASTER PLOT, I still sleep here, and now, you do as well.”

“We could go back to my apartment!”

“You have an apartment? …we’re already here! It’ll take two seconds to get in! Come on, buddy, calm down a little,” Orlando reassured Ichiro, who was pacing back and forth incessantly next to him.

“This is my first time breaking into a real building!”

“You wanted to be a vigilante, right? You were gonna have to do it eventually. Besides, it’s not technically ‘breaking in’ because I’m the principal. It’s just a slightly larger-scale version of locking myself out of my house. Now could you give me a minute? Raking’s not working - Bones must’ve upgraded the locks again. I swear, I dunno if that guy is legitimately trying to improve security or if they hate me and are doing this to be petty. Let me get out my other picks-”

As Orlando was talking somewhat enthusiastically and somewhat exasperatedly about his various lockpicking tools, Ichiro turned around and felt his eyes pass over something he hadn’t seen a few seconds ago. Some shadows in the darkness of night seemed to be moving closer, and as Ichiro squinted his eyes, he started to realize they were the shapes of people. 

“Orlando! Orlando, there’s someone-”

One of the figures darted forward, and before Ichiro could do anything more than bring out his Stand, summoned a Stand of its own. A muscular purple figure with strips of fabric hanging off of it, both from its arms and from a sort of belt it was wearing that looked similar to a professional wrestling championship belt. Its most notable feature, however, was a massive disco ball that replaced its head, each individual mirrored tile seeming to shift back and forth, catching a nonexistent light. 

The Stand lunged forward, grabbed Orlando by the back of the head, reeled its arm back, and threw him through the metal door with force enough to tear it off its hinges and send Orlando sliding into the school a good distance, his body riding on top of the detached door like a sled.

“Orlando!” Ichiro shouted, and dashed after him, but as he approached his friend, a second figure summoned a Stand of its own - a motorcycle, covered in green and yellow decals and with some sort of neon pink fluid running through transparent pieces of its frame. The three colors blurred together from a distance, but came into more focus once the rider shot forward, delivering a decisive kick to Ichiro’s stomach and bringing them both down the hall and into a different room.

Meanwhile, the first figure and its Stand entered the building, reaching around the door to find a light switch and flicking it on, revealing a boy around the same age as Orlando, but nowhere near as tidy-looking, even after Orlando’s little adventure earlier that day. Instead, he was scruffy, with the clearly teenaged beginnings of a beard and a shortish haircut that stuck up like spikes. He wore a thick blue jacket with lots of pockets and a lame sort of scowl you might see on someone loitering outside a mini-mall blasting My Chemical Romance.

Orlando’s body lay there on top of the metal door, completely unmoving.

“He’s not dead, is he?” said a low, soft voice from within the disco ball.

“Nah, of course not,” the boy responded. “He shouldn’t be. We didn’t hit him that hard, did we?”

“You know how hard it is to control this level of strength,” said the Stand, shrugging. The boy rolled his eyes and began to approach Orlando’s body.

Just as he was getting ready to crouch down, Orlando pushed up and swung an arm around to aim at the boy, Chumbawamba wrapped around it. A blast of bubbling purple liquid made contact with the boy’s skin, causing it to break out in a strange pink rash. He frantically shook off the liquid that wasn’t absorbed into his skin, his expression switching quickly from disgust to rage.

“AH-HA! GOTCHA!” Orlando shouted, finally getting a leg up and standing up again. He stumbled a little, but turned to face the boy, brandishing his hammer. “Whoever you are, I hope you didn’t think it would be that easy!”

“Gh! What now, YMCA?” said the boy, turning to the Stand, but there was no immediate response. The purple spirit held its oversized head in its hands, the mirrored tiles rotating faster and faster. “YMCA?” he asked again.

“YOUR DEVICE HAS DOWNLOADED A NEW UPDATE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO INSTALL IT?” the low voice said, this time much louder.

“What the hell?” the boy cried. Orlando released a much-needed evil laugh.

“CHUMBAWAMBA!” he exclaimed. “Your Stand has been freed from your influence! Let’s see if you can “Stand” on your own! Ha ha ha!”

“You bastard!” the boy shouted, but didn’t make any immediate approach to attack. Instead, he took a short moment to shadowbox, and seemed relieved when his Stand mimicked it, although it let out another cry of “ADWARE SPYWARE HAS BEEN DETECTED ON YOUR DEVICE. PLEASE CONTACT SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY.”

“Okay, at least that still works. Now, c’mere,” the boy growled, lunging at Orlando while he and his Stand threw another punch. Orlando ducked and watched the fist make a hole in a brick wall, then gunned it down the hall. He looked back after not hearing immediate footsteps, and saw the purple Stand - YMCA, apparently - tear a set of lockers directly off the wall with one hand, and immediately fling it at him. Orlando leapt into the air and watched the huge metal bulk slide across the floor underneath him. At the end of the hallway, an older person with black-and-white hair slammed a door open.

“Bones, look out!” Orlando shouted unhelpfully.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING O- AUGH!” Bones shouted, as the lockers completely tripped them, smashing into the wall behind them and leaving a huge crack in it. Bones was immediately knocked off their feet and slammed their head directly into the floor, leaving them passed out in a quickly-growing pool of blood.

Orlando grit his teeth knowing there was nothing he could do at the moment and ducked into a side room, which he soon realized was the computer lab he’d added not too long ago. He searched for a place to hide, but as he opened up a wide metal locker, he found it was already occupied.

“Kyou?” Orlando said, but whipped his head around as he heard stomping footsteps coming down the hall, and just as he did so, saw the door ripped off its hinges and thrown at him with two hands like a wide javelin. He ducked, heard it fly through the window, and tried to make as much distance as he could between him and his assailant. Kyou simply stood as still as possible within the locker, and if he could’ve gotten any stiller, he would’ve upon seeing the attacker glare straight at him before hurling a metal chair at Orlando.

Orlando managed to dodge yet again, and turned to the errand boy. “Kyou, what are you doing? Help me!”

The other boy moved his foot out of his hiding spot for just a second before a huge purple finger and a smaller, regular finger pointed at him, a voice shouting “Don’t you fuckin’ move, dweeb!” sending him right back in the locker.

“Goddamn it, Kyou!” Orlando shouted, zigzagging around a number of destructive attacks - for all the collateral damage this guy was racking up, he was a lot slower than Orlando on the defensive. “I know you’re like, Cthulhu’s great-nephew or whatever! Help me!”

“I’m not that strong,” the boy replied meekly and quickly. “You seem to be dodging pretty well.”

“I CAN’T DODGE FOREVER!! THIS GUY’S GONNA KILL ME IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING!”

“I’ll kill BOTH of you if you try anything, goth boy!”

Despite Orlando’s interference, the purple Stand still seemed to be under mostly complete control of its user, and its relentless attacks mostly kept it from having an opportunity to say anything. Orlando dodged and weaved as its fists tore through computers, it picked up chairs and chopped through tables and its kicks destroyed anything that remained. Although Orlando didn’t have much issue dodging at first, without an open space to bounce around in, he was starting to lose the momentum that kept him ahead of his attacker. Eventually they demolished their way all around the room, Orlando having dashed to the side opposite of Kyou before being attacked. The path of destruction was slowly approaching him, smashing through the central and side tables and every bit of the expensive electronics.

Orlando rolled out of the way of another punch and landed on his feet, immediately pulling Kyou out of the locker and grabbing both his shoulders. “HELP ME!” he shouted.

He turned around again just in time to see YMCA throw another punch, the boy mirroring it, and Orlando dropped to the floor, leaving Kyou in the direct line of fire. The student council’s errand boy’s face sparked in fear, and he raised a hand covered in inky black darkness. As the fist collided with it, the purple glow of Stand aura and sheer darkness of Kyou’s powers fought against each other, eventually mixed, and exploded outward in a supernova Orlando was pinned directly underneath.

Meanwhile in the room further down the hall, Ichiro flew across the floor from the kick, and saw the second figure come into focus - a woman, seemingly a bit older than Orlando, wearing sunglasses, some garment somewhere in between a trench coat and a pilot jacket, and a cowboy hat. She sat atop her colorful bike, revving some engine that surely did not make any sense to any qualified engineer, and Ichiro noticed it had the skull of a horse mounted on its handlebars.

The engine’s hum suddenly silenced, although the vehicle still maintained its otherworldly glow, pink and green reflecting off of her shades, which Ichiro now realized she had kept on even in the middle of the night. There was a pause for Ichiro to get to his feet and catch a few breaths - the kick had really knocked the wind out of him.

“Ichiro Kenshi,” she breathed. Her voice didn’t sound very cowboyish - only the smallest hint of a southern drawl hidden within it. It sounded more midwestern, for the most part - soft, but confident. The kind of voice someone uses to make a major decision about their future.

“How do you know my name?” Ichiro responded, holding his sword in a way that could maybe be seen as menacing if you turned your head and squinted a little. It was still clear to everyone with any sense of swordplay that he had no idea what he was doing with the thing.

“I have my sources. I’ve been getting connected with all kinds of Stand users, Ichiro, and your friend… well, she’s not exactly subtle, is she?”

“What about her?” Ichiro responded, gritting his teeth.

“Nothing about her. She’s gone, right? All that’s left of her is… well, you, pretty much.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I want to help you, Ichiro. You’ve been through something terrible. I’ve been told… she still has some influence over you. You don’t deserve to be tied to her for the rest of your life. You want to be a hero, right?”

Ichiro didn’t respond, so the cowgirl kept talking. “That’s what me and my friend are here to do. We’re heroes. Orlando? He’s a bad guy. You’re really good at getting suckered in by them, aren’t you? We just want to help you, and maybe, in return, you can help us save our friends from some even worse guys. The guys he works with. Do you understand what I mean?”

Ichiro let that hang in the air for a second. He already knew what his response was going to be, but he wanted to let it simmer for a few moments more. “I understand plenty. I understand you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Listen up - Mitsuko never had any influence over me after the fact. I did all that stuff because I wanted to - not because she made me.”

The cowgirl crossed her arms, leaning on the handlebars. Ichiro gripped his sword tighter and continued. “I don’t care what you have to say. If you wanted me to join up with you, maybe you should’ve thought about that before you attacked my friend. Let’s do this.”

Ichiro, Supermassive Black Hole behind him, charged at the cowgirl, who quickly started up her own Stand and quickly backed away. Ichiro slowed down a little, but then watched as the motorcycle revved up and came back around for another kick.

However, as the attack was incoming, Supermassive Black Hole’s green flame flared up. Its slime quickly flew out through the grate on its boiler, sticking all over the front of Ichiro’s body, locking him in place. The cowgirl had no time to slow down as she planted a foot in the slime that Ichiro had layered thick enough to cushion him from the blow’s impact.

Just as her attack connected, the slime seemed to explode off of Ichiro and cling all over her body, leaving her completely unconscious. The motorcycle instantly dissipated, and Ichiro sprinted down the hall to where he’d heard Orlando dashing off to, taking a moment to express some brief concern at the unfortunate mad scientist still bleeding out on the floor.

Ichiro turned to open a door that was no longer there and looked in the room to see what appeared to be the supernatural equivalent of a star collapsing in on itself. The purple Stand’s arm was still being sucked into the inky blackness produced by Kyou’s own ability, and both Kyou and the other boy seemed to be having a very not fun time of whatever was going on, both seeming to be sucked towards each other but trying desperately to pull away as if they were being pulled into a black hole.

“NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME!” shouted the scruffy boy. “I AM YOUR PRINCE OF DARKNESS! I COMMAND YOU, FORCES OF EVIL! YOU WILL BOW TO ME!”

The other boy seemed to be crying incessantly. “FUCK! FUCK SHIT FUCK! NO! I don’t wanna! Don’t make me! I still have things I want to do! I haven’t gotten to make something of myself yet!”

In that point of contact, the purple light and the darkness were mixing together into a more light-bluish light that shined out with an otherworldly brightness that Ichiro had to shield his eyes from. Bolts of some sort of neon-pink energy seemed to burst out of the contact point, energy crackling all around it. Orlando was lying just underneath it, seemingly completely immobilized.

“ORLANDO! ARE YOU OKAY?” Ichiro shouted. It was hard to tell what could be heard over the sounds of the two boys screaming and the lightning-esque discharges from their powers being sucked into each other.

“Ichiro!” Orlando shouted in return, a bit weakly. “Get out of here! I don’t know what’s going to happen if we stick around here, and… I think I’m stuck! There’s… a lot of energy being discharged, and it’s mostly hitting me!”

To punctuate his point, one of the bolts of energy struck Orlando, causing him to cry out in pain. Ichiro took a deep breath, grit his teeth, and started to run towards his friend as best he could. 

“Ichiro, what are you DOING!” Orlando shouted with what energy he could.

“I’m not losing another friend! I’m getting you out of here!”

Despite those two being sucked into each other, from Ichiro’s position it felt more like he was getting pushed away. A bolt whizzed past him and left a scorch mark on the wall, but he pushed forward through the strange force field. He tried to push his Stand forward as well, but found it was even more difficult to move through the strange energy field being created.

Ichiro was hit by a few bolts as he moved closer to the center of the energy, but kept his footing for the most part. He tried to cover his eyes as best he could to keep himself from being blinded, and finally managed to reach a hand out to Orlando, who found the strength to lift his hand. They made contact, grabbed onto one another, and Ichiro began to pull away.

“I…” said the scruffy boy.

“I…” said the goth boy.

“WE…” they said together, “GOT IT!”

In a smooth, parallel motion, both boys set their feet in a steady position and tried, with all their might, to move their bodies away from each other. The bright ball of energy pushing Ichiro away began to dissipate… and instead, the point of contact grew dark, pitch black, even. As the two boys managed to start actually pulling away from each other, Ichiro could swear he heard a crackle in the air as he felt himself being pulled towards the center now, not pushed away.

The darkness at the center of this completely insane situation started to grow further, bigger and bigger, filling the space between Kyou and the mysterious attacker as they managed to untangle their strange powers. Ichiro looked on in horror as Orlando’s body began to be consumed by the darkness.

“ICHIRO!” he shouted, trying to free his hand. “LET GO!”

Ichiro just grabbed on with his other hand. “NO! NEVER!”

Ichiro had been managing to maintain his position for a while, but at the point where the ball of darkness seemed to be the biggest, he began being pulled into it, watching Orlando’s face sucked in and feeling his entire body go cold as he was sucked in just after.

Orlando and Ichiro could barely see anything besides each other now, both of them seemingly suspended within the darkness bubble as if they were skydiving with no parachutes. The darkness around them seemed to whirl and whip as if they were trapped in the middle of a tornado. Ichiro had maintained his grip, and so used it to pull himself closer to Orlando. 

The maybe-wind around them was almost deafening, but it felt as though they weren’t really going anywhere - not falling, but not hitting any kind of ground, either.

“ORLANDO!” Ichiro shouted, trying to make himself heard above the wind-esque sounds. Even with the cacophony surrounding them, Orlando could tell he was crying a little. “YOU’RE THE BEST FRIEND I EVER HAD!”

Orlando pulled Ichiro in for a hug and shouted back, “I TRIED TO BE! I REALLY TRIED!”

The two of them screamed as the darkness consumed them, granting them some unknown fate.

Outside of the bubble, Ichiro’s slime dissipated. The cowgirl was coming to. She heard the noise outside the room she was in and quickly got up, dashing down the hall to see what was happening.

The ball of darkness was immense at this stage, barely peeking out of the door of the computer lab. The unconscious person was beginning to be pulled into it, and the cowgirl, knowing that Darkness = Bad, summoned her bike and attempted to grab them before anything terrible could happen. 

She kept her bike’s speed up for only a few more moments before it went flying off down the hall again, and she was only barely able to stop it before hitting another wall. A bit awkwardly, she turned the bike around and drove slowly back, dropping her passenger off in a position that was a bit less precarious.

She looked into the computer lab and fumbled for a light switch, finally turning it on to see her partner and some kid she’d never seen before lying face-down, unconscious, white smoke seeming to come off her partner’s body and black smoke coming off the other. The room itself was practically empty of anything else.

“Holy shit,” was all there really was to say.

After a pregnant pause where she tried to figure out how to resolve this situation and all the collateral damage they’d just caused, her partner’s Stand emerged again from his unconscious body, turning its head as if it were looking around, but not having eyes to do so with. It lifted its user off the ground, carrying him like an eight-year-old might carry a baby.

Without thinking, the cowgirl reached into her pocket for a phone, and took a picture.

“Vi, why would you do that,” the Stand said flatly.

“Blackmail material? Joey would never be caught dead looking this… hm. Vulnerable. He looks like a little baby when you’re holding him.”

“...huh.” It didn’t really comment further on any of that.

They sort of looked at each other.

“What now, miss leader?” YMCA said.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot happening. I think I just need a second.”

Luckily for her, her soon-to-be break was interrupted by the sound of coughing. She turned around to see the other boy taking deep breaths, suddenly conscious again. She quickly adjusted her glasses.

“Well, hey there,” she started.

“Auuuuuuuugh,” Kyou moaned. Vi lowered her eyebrows and tried to flip him over, but slowly lowered him back down when he responded by chittering “Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow…”

“What happened here?” Vi asked, getting straight to the point.

“I- I dunno…” Kyou coughed. Vi gave him a few moments, hoping for him to continue, but instead he asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m going to be asking the questions here, unless you want my partner to… do whatever he just did to cause this again.”

“Please… no…” Kyou begged. “The pain… I… I felt my existence merging with his. Our powers are too similar - when we pushed them together, they started to try and fuse - and our minds fused as well, and got mixed up…”

Vi looked between the two of them and saw smoke was still coming off of them, though it was tapering out at this point. “What happened to the other two?”

“We were untangling ourselves from each other, and it created… something. In the middle. They got… sucked into it.” Kyou paused for a moment, completely silent, but then tears started to well up in his eyes. “Principal Kincaid… I’m sorry…!”

Vi pondered this for a few moments while she let Kyou cry it out a little. Her partner, Joey, coughed a little, but whatever little bit of consciousness he had regained, he almost instantly lost, going back to sleep in his Stand’s arms.

Eventually, Vi crouched down again next to Kyou, half-whispering. “Listen to me, buddy. I came here to do what I came here to do, and I need to get out of here without raising much of a fuss, understand?”

Kyou, silent for a moment to recover, eventually said “What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, how good are you at cleaning up messes?”

“Relatively speaking, I’m… okay, I guess…”

“‘Okay, I guess’ will have to cut it. I’m getting out of here with my crew. You fix this whole mess. No one knows we were here, or else I’m gonna force you to mindmeld with my friend here again, get me? You take care of this for me, you never see me again.”

“Ugh…!” Kyou seemed to have more Feelings™ about this topic than he could probably admit at this current moment, but seemed to be mostly fixated on the sheer amount of pain he was still in. “Just… just go. I’ll… take care of it.”

“Good,” Vi stated, and then began to walk out the way she came.

YMCA floated after her, user in tow, and said, “So… that’s it?”

“We technically accomplished what we came here for. Kincaid’s gone, and so is Kenshi… so there’s nothing really left to do about either. We’re out of here.”

Vi summoned her bike Stand, waited for YMCA to mount it as best it could for being vaguely intangible, and then sped away.

Several hours later, the school day began anew. Kyou Kagemori had dressed Bones’ wound and set them down somewhere nice to sleep it off. He and his eldritch companions had spent the night and what resources they had slowly rebuilding everything that had been destroyed using whatever means they had, getting a little desperate as they cut it pretty close near the end.