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SOMEWHERE IN THE FAR OFF WORLD OF ITALY ISLANDS THERE IS A GROUP WHO HAS FOUND THEMSELVES ON AN ISLAND LESS ITALY AND MORE “Non-bird dinosaurs lived between about 245 and 66 million years ago, in a time known as the Mesozoic Era.” (“When Did Dinosaurs Live?”).
“Hgoly shit,” Narancia Ghirga says, eyes large as the oranges he’s named after, but still not as large as the patagotitan, which is not an orange until it wants to be. The vegetation surrounding our heroes is lush and vast, the air choked with humidity, and the bugs of the land are more monstrous and cute than any nightmare. Their bodies are frozen in shock.
Pannacotta Fugo flexes and unflexes his twitching hands as he assesses the situation from twenty seven different angles. What had started off as a chill casual mission has now put them in a deep dinosaurforest filled with dinosaurs. He is also probably closeted and nonbinary. This means that something— and he doesn’t know what so he writes it off completely— tells him he will have to transform into a dinosaur eventually.
Leone Abbacchio should have never worn leather and also he’s got the diluted feeling of ‘damn, i needa get out of here’ bubbling up within him. But mostly he just feels tired and pissed about all this. Wound up around the veins, because this is obviously a stand attack. Everything is too sticky and hot for his liking now. And the bugs are weird but like okay.
Mista is there too and says, “Woah.”
“Are we all done standing around in shock?? Everyone’s okay?? No organs missing??” Fugo is the first to snap out of it and be proactive, pressing a hand to his stomach to check if he still has all his organs.
Narancia hypes up aerosmith with a sick spin, sweat beading at his brow, “The co2 signatures here are HUGE !!!”
Mista bites his lip and then gets serious because this is serious business. He whips out his gun and looks around with his deadly serious deep dark black eyes, but the shadows of the realm are too impenetrable, and all of the mafia is doomed to be swallowed up by the salivating maw of fate.
“Is this even real? Like, yeah, it’s real, but is this an area or just a stand ability?” Abbacchio asks.
Everyone is now wondering if this is ACTUALLY real when a dinosaur breaks in and starts screaming. It is dead and exploded within 5 seconds. The ball of flesh and ash on the forest floor was a compsognathus. Ohhh oh oh that’s sad why did i write that oh :( oh i’m sorry . i’m sorry baby
“That was a fcking dinosaur,” Narancia breathes in wonder.
Abbacchio shrugs, “Looked more like a lizard.”
“Are you being for real???” Mista frowns. “That was literally a dinosaur. C’mon, man.”
“It would have been helpful if we had anything left to determine what KIND of dinosaur,” Fugo muses, rubbing his chin and looking around, “Then we could probably determine what era we’re in.”
“So this stand was TIME TRAVEL?”
Then Time Travel Dinosaur appears.
Everyone starts hauling ass through the forest, but the foliage is to thick to escape— nobody here has a stand suited for cutting through foliage. Their shoes all make out with mud and roots and a giant bug that skitters over Fugo’s strawberry crocs, which makes him see God for a moment and turn around. It’s a dead end for all of them.
“I’LL DO THE HAND THING FROM JURASSIC PARK!” Narancia shouts, leaping out in front of the group and presenting his hand with a flourish. Fugo nearly kills him for being so fucjin stupid. Abbacchio considers ditching everyone. Mista reloads his gun, but unlike everyone else he actually has some faith in the guy, if not the pop culture of Jurassic park. It’s worth a shot!
The bullets click into place. Narancia stands steady. Time Travel Dinosaur narrows its eyes, currently in the form of a T. rex that stands cramped between the forest trees. The front of its face is particularly concealed in leaves and mud splatters meld with its scales. In the back of everyone’s minds they think one thought: “this is actually pretty lit.”
“You’re all lucky that Jurassic Park (the movie) was released in 1993,” Time Travel Dinosaur rumbles. Everyone’s eyes widen in various levels. “Though I doubt it was available in Italian in Italy in 2001, my five second search on firefox cannot confirm or deny. I spare you from annihilation in this instance, and in this instance only.”
Fugo’s lips peel back, “You’re basing our lives based on a glance at firefox?”
Time Travel Dinosaur begins pummeling its giant T. rex feet against the ground, “Firefox was released in 2002 (“Browser History: Epic Power Struggles That Brought Us Modern Browsers.”). You will now be eliminated.”
Thousands of dinosaurs which would never hunt together begin descending from the sky. Most of them don’t make it to the group because the treetops are too thick and it looks scary. The group once again starts hauling ass, with Abbacchio in the lead. Dimorphodons cut through the branches overhead, shrieking at the top of their little dinosaur lungs. It’s a bloody battle I won’t describe, with Aerosmith absolutely carrying. Realistically, the group doesn’t make it far, but the sounds of other creatures screaming in agony and tromping through the forest is even scarier than the treetops, so the attack fades out pretty quickly. To the group, covered in cuts from the flora they scrambled through, red with mosquito bites, and drenched in mud and humidity— it feels like it’s been 66 million years.
Narancia, despite himself, starts snrk-snork-teeheeehehehee laughing. It infects Mista, too.
“What?” Fugo and Abbacchio say at the same time. Normally Fugo would laugh, too, but there’s more pressing issues at claw.
“Your hair, Abbacchio,” Narancia giggles, “It looks like you got hit by a lawnmower.”
“No shit,” Abbacchio grimaces.
Fugo cuts in, “Narancia, keep Aerosmith on the lookout. We need to stay focused.”
Narancia gives Abbacchio a glare but complies.
Our dino-heroes end up wandering around until dusk, eventually deciding to try and figure out how to resummon Time Travel Dinosaur. It’s obviously the stand they need to take out. Nothing works, though, and now it’s dusk, and they have nothing to show for their efforts except distance. Creatures stalk them from the bushes, confounded by this group’s weird bipedal gait and soft flesh.
“You know, maybe we could hold a dinosaur hostage. They might be related to the stand, right?” Narancia suggests. His reasoning makes no sense, but so far the group has just been labeling random things— sasquatch, playboy, pokemon, bars— hoping they hit something from after their time that will get Time Travel Dinosaur’s attention. Anything would be better than the current topic, “could you handle having a period,” so they just decide fuck it. Dinosaur hostage time. They find a beezlebufo at the edge of a swamp bleeding into the rainforest.
“Does that even count as a dinosaur?” Abbacchio asks skeptically. All the beezlebufo is doing is sitting there, utterly still, as a gigantic frog.
“It’s still prehistoric, so it doesn’t matter,” says Fugo.
Mista shoves his gun into his pants, “I’ll go see if I can find something to tie it up with.”
“Hey, I wanna go explore dinosaur land too!” Narancia jumps up, hurrying to Mista’s side. Fugo shoots Abbacchio a glance, knowing full well he has no opinions on if he joins or not.
“Stay here and watch the frog, I guess,” Fugo tells him. Abbacchio shrugs noncommittally.
Holy shit. Tying up the beezlebufo does NOT go well. Three mafia teenagers scramble around in the mud up to their ankles screaming and yelling instructions at each other, and the frog doesn’t give a singular kind of fuck. It moves only when it absolutely has to and ends up jumping on TOP of Narancia at some point, completely barreling him over and hopping over yonder before he can get up. Fugo picks him up from the mud by his collar with a sclorch sound as Mista chases down their target. Their faces are all smeared unintentionally with mud like war paint.
“That froggy bastard!” Narancia shouts, fed up. He summons Aerosmith, but it’s already too late. As soon as a single whirr leaves that plane in flight, the beezlebufo has it. It swallows Aerosmith. Narancia screams in confusion, brain blanking from the nonsensical pain-slime sensations.
“So, yeah, that’s why we missed dinner tonight. Yeah.” Abbacchio is sitting on a rock watching the fiasco, manspread definition and flip phone in hand. Buccellati is on the line. “Yeah, that was Narancia, he’ll be fine though. Don’t worry abt it.”
Narancia is writhing on the floor as Fugo shouts at him to call back Aerosmith.
Giorno Giovanna appears and respectfully bites his own tongue before he calls anyone an idiot.
Time Travel Dinosaur shows up behind him with a Newspeak dictionary from George Orwell’s 1894. “Comrade nomeet +4 3longtimes,” It glowers.
“That’s not how newspeak fucking works,” Fugo says.
“You didn’t even capitalize it,” Time Travel Dinosaur says, “It’s Newspeak.”
George Orwell himself walks past and takes Giorno by the arm, "Analyze the main character’s treatment of women and theorize whether I was a misogynist or it was actually a part of 1894’s societal commentary.”
“I’m getting the hell away from this guy,” Trish Una says, and immediately leaves successfully, because Time Travel Dinosaur has nothing on the might of being 15 and a woman. Giorno leaves with her on account of being transgender but in a very specific way and also not being meant to be here in the first place.
George Orwell watches them go with a stony expression. “We have to defeat Time Travel Dinosaur.”
“Doubleplusungood,” Time Travel Dinosaur says.
“Dudes I think we should kill this guy just in case,” Mista loads his gun and the bullets start shrieking.
“Wait what the fuck was up with that blonde one??”
George Orwell gets shot by Mista but not before they engage in a fist fight. The frog watches in complete disinterest, and everyone else but Abbacchio starts screaming. Abbacchio watches with raised brows and an even stronger urge to get tf outta there. Even Time Travel Dinosaur is screaming, “YOU’LL DISRUPT THE TIMELINE!!!”
George Orwell starts beating Mista’s face in and steals his gun, but all the sex pistols turn into microraptors and start biting the shit out of his toes and fingers. George Orwell starts screaming deeply and firing the gun at random. Time Travel Dinosaur tries to take away the gun with its stubby T. rex arms, but it’s no use— Now ITS being attacked by the sex pistol microraptors. It starts screaming in agony and almost steps in George Orwell, who dodges to the side but ends up breaking his old man spine. Chinua Achebe watches and shakes his head. He starts a long walk home. George Orwell shoots Fugo in a last act of defiance.
“KYAAAAAA! FUGO!!!” Everyone, including Abbacchio, screams. Abbacchio finally does something and kicks George Orwell into the atmosphere while swearing a fuckton. Everyone shakes Chinua Achebe’s hand before he leaves and Fugo turns into a dinosaur.
Fugo turns into a dinosaur as an ascension of man into nonbinaryism. They, as a T. rex, start pummeling the shit out of Time Travel Dinosaur. They slam each other’s skulls together and try to bite out each others throats, but Fugo is so nonbinary and tastes like strawberries that Time Travel Dinosaur can’t kill them. Fugo starts the absolutely win at the fight, though the beezlebufo still does not give a single fuck, and Fugo throws Time Travel Dinsaur into the atmosphere where they fight as murderbot mechs. Everyone starts screaming and running around, Time Travel Dinosaur falls to the ground as a meteor made of dismembered flesh, and the apocalypse begins. The last thing anybody sees is George Orwell becoming impossibly wide and taking up the entire sky, then everything burns. Nobody escapes but our dino heroes.
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Bruno Buccellati stands and stares at his team. Giorno and Trish are having tea in the background at Libbecchio’s, because while nobody else had arrived on time, these two random kids ALMOST did.
“Abbacchio…” Buccellati begins, and his gaze is slow and steady, but thoroughly shocked, “…Told me some Things happened.”
Fugo, now no longer dinosaur, spits out a tooth into a nearby potted plant. The four of them— Mista, Narancia, Fugo, and Abbacchio— have practically become beat up mud monsters. They’ve tracked blood and muck into the restaurant. Mista is missing chunks of his hat, revealing that he’s bald underneath. The sex pistols are only half microraptors.
“It was pretty shitty,” Abbacchio grumbles. He closes a fist around a burning ember stuck in his hair.
“It looks pretty shitty,” Buccellati agrees. “Why don’t— why don’t you all go home. For today. Give me your reports in the morning.”
Literally nobody has the energy to argue with that. Narancia picks the beezlebufo up off the floor and drags it away as everyone departs to take a fucking shower. The beezlebufo croaks menacingly, but remains compliant.
Works Cited
“Browser History: Epic Power Struggles That Brought Us Modern Browsers.” Firefox, 2015, www.firefox.com/en-US/more/browser-history/.
natural history museum . “When Did Dinosaurs Live?” Nhm.ac.uk, 2012, www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-did-dinosaurs-live.html.