Chapter Text
“Momma! Momma!”
This is a story about a breaking curse. One that has existed for countless generations, and continues to loom within the towering cliffs that have encased its dwelling.
The story begins in a schoolyard, which had been converted into a scene from the arctic by a ravaging blizzard and its army of snowfall. The children of the school were frolicking at recess, tripping over themselves and crunching the snow into knee-high trenches, or scraping off the top layers into dense spheres being rolled into the segments of snowmen.
Among their ranks was a meek little boy 10 years of age, whose sleeves were being wet by the flakes he made fly up rolling up a snowball when he was distracted by the shocking sight of his own mother, having appeared in the midst of the playground, wearing a hood shadowing her face.
“Momma, what are you doing at school?” he skipped up to her, perplexed at the way the sun refused to shine on her features, no matter how close he got.
Her lips, which looked dry as sand, parted and hissed out “Josuke…”
This made his heart pensive, for this name he was scarcely called, usually only by his father. His mother would only forgo using a more affectionate reading when she was scolding him.
A short distance away, two other boys, hatted and curly haired, watched the lad, perplexed. “Why’s that kid talking to himself?” one of them, new at school and tall and broad for his age, asked.
His shorter, pudgier compatriot chimed in. “Don’t pay him any mind. That’s JoJo, he’s always off rambling at shadows,” he explained, observing the small boy staring up at nothing.
“Is something like, wrong with him?” the new boy asked for elaboration, voice flavored with the idea of sympathy, which his friend scoffed at.
“You shouldn’t give a damn! He’s the only son of the Higashikata Family.”
“‘Higashikata?’ Like the fruit sellers?”
“Fruits?!” the short kid laughed. “Listen, you’re new in town, right? So let me tell you, the Higashikata Family are the smuggest, richest bastards from here to Fukushima. I hate rich people to begin with, but that family are the worst of the worst.” He began to speak of scandal, whispering through his cupped hand. “They say that their ancestors sold their souls to evil spirits in order to get wealth, so now they’re haunted.”
“Huh? There’s no way a story like that is true!” the larger boy dismissed.
“Take it from me, this city is full of people and places that are cursed, and nobody moreso than the Higashikata Family…”
JoJo's mother spoke to him again, as her hands finally pulled away the hood obscuring her maternal gaze. “Josuke… Higashikata… Your family is a blight on this world.”
Her voice was soulless, emotions absent as if the words were composed of snippets of other things she had said. The unobscuring of her face was suited for the same uncanny feeling, her expression blank and her eyes glossy. “I will return you all… to the Earth…”
The entire world around JoJo raptured apart. His vision was consumed by a thunderclap of dark, psychedelic colors. He felt himself falling through a spiraling vortex, forsaken by all his surroundings except for the spectre of his mother, who fell beneath him as her skin crumbled apart. Under it was no flesh or blood, but the visage of a skull which was aglow with an unnatural neon blue.
The fake of his mother’s form seized as they plummeted, suddenly bursting open from the middle into shards of dissolving rock. Their grains fell into the eye of the lysergic storm onto the long fingers of grasping hands that had formed themselves out of ghostly streaks, arms extending into an infinitely black void.
JoJo blinked, and found himself back in the snowy schoolyard, standing alone. Elbows feeling stiff as he flexed them, he looked at his hands in disbelief at the vision he had just been through.
A sliver of his wrist poked through between his glove and the end of his sleeve, his eyes being caught the unnatural presence of grey on his skin.
He ripped his glove off, watching the color and softness be drained from his skin, stone crawling up and down his body like the water of a flowing river.
A minute later, he collapsed head first into the snow, petrification robbing him of even the chance to shut his eyes.
His state being dreadfully out of the grasp of the school nurse, JoJo had been lifted by ambulance to a small hospital built the previous summer in cooperation with the local university. He was laid down in a drearily beige room, a solemn looking doctor standing beside him and looking towards the door as it opened inwards.
Entering was a woman of mature countenance. She wore flared jeans and a fine fabric shirt adorned with a flurry of colorful flowers, while her hair was neatly done up with a lone braid displayed as the crown of a curling bob.
“Mrs. Higashikata.” The doctor addressed her, yet he was granted no entry in her mind as she walked straight towards the boy, her son, lying encased in horror.
“He’s coming home,” she said, distantly and matter-of-fact. Her hands moved like serpents under his covers and lifted him by his stiff neck and knees.
“We phoned your husband, ma’am, and-” the doctor kept talking, but was silenced by her stare, which grabbed him by the tongue.
She was wearing a mask of layered, wreathing despair which the doctor has only previously seen portrayed by the master strokes of a Renaissance artist.
“Please ma’am, while you - as Josuke’s mother - are entitled to have him released against medical advice, I strongly enco-”
She cut him off again, “There are plenty of people to deal with what I’m doing.” She took a blink which lasted several seconds, which she spent sharply inhaling through her nose.
“You’re taking him back to your family’s home?”
She looked out the window. “Something like that; We need to go now. Now,” she emphasized, willfully marching out the door, aura too chilling to be stopped.
“Momma? Momma, what’s going on?” It was freezing cold outside; All he could see with the limited light peering into the darkest of wherever he was was meters of thick, bitter snow. “Where are we?”
“We’re in the big pine tree! Isn’t that so cool, JoJo? We’re inside that tree that's split in half! Bet you never thought it was big enough to climb inside of, but there’s a whole big cave underneath the shrine box!”
“Mom, what happened?" The boy's body felt as though it was weighed down by rocks scraping against each other and turning into a pile of fine grain which clouded up his mind. "I don’t remember, I was at school, wasn’t I? I thought I saw you at recess, but then-”
“Shhh. It’s okay sweetie, you’re gonna be okay soon," his mother reassured him, wrapped in a heavy winter jacket and a hat that shadowed her eyes. You could hear the tears welling in her eyes in the cadence of her words.
“Mom!” JoJo’s voice shook as the ground surrounding them did. “We have to go back inside! There’s an earthquake!”
The frost littered dirt beneath them was indeed trembling, but this was no earthquake.
“Honey, you know your invisible friend, right? The Puzzle Goblin? He’ll protect you.” She gazed longingly into the further depths of the pine tree’s underground cavity, towards what stood at the end of the small tunnel. “It can’t hurt you if you have one,” she said to nobody.
The boy screamed in pain as his leg lit on fire with a sensation of something biting deep, deep into it.
“Don’t worry, it can’t hurt you! It can’t hurt you!” His mother screamed at him as she fell to her knees bawling.
“JoJo, I love you.”
The pressure on the boy’s leg vanished as he was left only the airy stings of a bite mark.
Clumps of earth started piling in around them, shouting out the little light he had to see with. In what he assumed would be his last moments of thought, JoJo felt confusion, for being buried was making him feel lighter than he had for the last year.
JoJo awoke on the surface, and the first thing he noticed was the way the snow around him had melted. He stood in the shadow of a stone pillar that was built into the base of Twin Pine Trees which stood on the grounds of his family’s home. He reached around it in hopes of finding a way inside of the obelisk, dazed as to whether or not what he had just experienced was dreamed. He was distracted away from the prospect of the secret passage a la Narnina by the sudden realization of just how good he felt, as though the weight of 100 years was lifted from his body and mind in equal measure.
“Momma?”
The empty fields around that tree were shaken by his Hell-worthy scream, as he found his mother, dead, body completely stiff and hardened like stone.
Over a hundred people had been congregated into a legion of black and mourning who stood before the off-white marble mausoleum which housed the fallen of the Higashikata Family. A new tomb had been added to its collection of the departed, engraved simply with “Tomoko Higashikata | 1932-1971”.
JoJo stood outside, alone in the snow, much the same as the moment of his salvation at the cost of his mother’s death, huddled in the shadows of stone.
The crinkle of powdered snowflakes alerted him to look up as a new shadow joined the eclipse: His father appeared standing over him. He seemed to carry with him a wind swirling around his neck, blowing a muffler which popped its pattern of blue and orange sharply against his pitch suit, donned to shield him from the cold alongside a swamp green bomber hat he was scarcely seen without.
“Josuke, there you are.” He placed his hand on his boy’s shoulder. “I know it’s hard, son, but-”
“Jun told me everything,” he interrupted - an action which had become out-of-character for him - as his mind flashed through the bitter words of his sister, who was one year younger and one head taller than he. “We told everybody that mom died because of a heart attack, but that’s all a lie isn’t it? She’s dead because of me.”
His father looked at him, managing the impossible feat of matching the heartbreak in his eyes. “Josuke… Listen to me. Your sister, she doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. Nobody could understand what you’re going through right now…” he tugged down the hat over his eyes, leaving them replaced by a knitted bunch of grapes patched onto the middle. “Save for me, son. I experienced the same that you are right now, when I was your age. And before me was your grandfather, and even his father before him, all of us have had somebody taken by the Rock Syndrome.”
“What you are is a Higashikata, one set to inherit fortune and power over this city. However with it comes a Curse, that your thriving and survival must come at the cost of another. That is the burden that has haunted our name for hundreds of years.”
The Curse sleeps for twenty years, and recurs.
The year is now 2011, and the city of Morioh has been ravaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Many of its 47,000 inhabitants are left dead, injured, or homeless. Not as many as its counterparts though; Instead of the ruins of collapsed buildings shaking apart and home-demolishing floods pouring in from the Pacific, Morioh had a unique problem. No first responder, fireman, politician, or geologist was quite prepared for finding block upon block of houses completely safe from the devastation, high up on cliffs.
Cliffs which had never been there before.
Children called them the Wall Eyes, named for the deposits in their grainy sides which seemed like twisted faces staring back at you. They were sections of ground which had simply risen up, extending into mounds and hills within seconds while the rest of Japan was torn apart by devastating but scientifically normal seismic activity. They ripped apart roads so no supplies could come in, burst power and water lines which left people with a blackout of utilities. But still, they were safe, and so were their homes.
They all curved outwards towards the sea, as if patiently waiting to guard the people of Morioh once again against some calamity from the ocean.
The Curse continues to sleep within them, on the verge of waking up. Here you will find JoJolion, the epic of breaking it.