Damo was not buying it. Instead of pressing, he went off on the most random of tangents.
You see, he said, at the very beginning, there were flying fish.
Two years earlier, on the deck of a cargo ship, there was a twenty-seven-year-old ship's doctor named Yoshikage Kira. He arrived at the site of an incident in which a man had fallen from high up on a stack of containers, and ordered a few of the crew to bring him his gear and the remains of the victim, since he intended to perform surgery. He asked about the other injured party, only to be informed that the man had fallen from the upper levels after being struck by a school of flying fish.
While examining the scene, Kira pointed out a second pool of blood, and wondered aloud who it had come from. Then he followed it to a shipping container that had burst open, and found a pile of rocks inside.
Getting out a torch, he scanned the boulders and noticed that one of them, cracked open, was bleeding. He wiped the dirt away to get a better look at what the object was, and then Kira went absolutely still, because what he was looking at appeared to be a human being encased in rock.
Curious, he later enquired about the container with the skipper, and learned that it had come from Port Moresby in New Guinea, that its cargo was listed as perfectly legal stones used for decorative gardens, and that the Higashikata Fruit Company was the client. What also stood out to him was that the same company was importing fruit trees in other containers on the same shipment.
A few days later, after they made port in Morio, Kira got off the boat and took up his watch at a café near the docks. During one of his rounds he spotted Sasame eating at a restaurant.
Kira, ever the intimidator, rolled over and stared the surfer out. He quickly decided that the man was no more than a hindrance, and demanded that he stay away from the coast, hitting him with an explosive bubble that would presumably pop if he ever entered the water again. Freaking out, Sasame fled. However, as he did, he accidentally knocked a shaker of pepper into another customer's soup.
Not caring about that random customer, Kira turned his attention back to the docks, where he watched Aisho leave the hangar in which the rocks had been stored. Deducing that Aisho was part of a fruit trade, one that might not even be illegal, Kira decided to tail him and steal the shipment. He turned to leave, and it was in that exact moment that he noticed something odd. The customer whose soup the pepper had spilled into was now somehow extracting that same pepper out of his soup, using an ability made of bubbles.
Back in the present, Josuke was shouting a warning to Hato not to move. He tried to explain to her that the man in the lounge was trying to eliminate their family, but time was running out. He had made some sort of preparations before coming into the house, and the fingerprints were obviously a stand attack. Josuke then tried to escape the area by hurling a flower pot at the glass door to break it. The pot simply ricocheted off the glass and swung back towards him. Unaware of the danger, Hato stood in the foyer with the enemy stand lurking silently in the shadows directly behind her.
To understand where any of this was going, you have to slip into the past again, all the way back to a very specific day on the beach.
There was a young woman there, a Japanese woman named Kiyomi Kujo, who, after being spotted by a couple of men on the sand, was getting hit on by both of them. They backed off quickly enough once they noticed the children's toys resting beside her. Distracted and stressed, Kiyomi shouted at her young son, Josefumi, warning the little boy not to play where the bugs could get at him. Hearing her phone buzz, she picked it up and quickly made an excuse for missing work, only to be fired on the spot for constantly failing to show up.
When Kiyomi finally hung up and turned around, her heart dropped. Josefumi had vanished.
Approaching the rocky shoreline, she spotted him, helplessly drowning in the crashing waves. But in a dark, harrowing moment of weakness, looking down at her son's desperate struggle, Kiyomi hesitated. She hid, and let him drown for a few agonising moments, before a sudden wave of guilt forced her to change her mind and save him.
Once he had been pulled from the water, Josefumi was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, having technically died by drowning. There, a brilliant doctor named Holly determined that the impact against the rocks had completely crushed his occipital bone. Needing immediate action to actually save his life, she called on her own son, Kira, to deal with a lethal blood clot.
Jumping into action, Yoshikage Kira unleashed his stand and used a handful of small Killer Queen tanks to invade the veins of Josefumi Kujo, successfully clearing the clot and saving his life. Then, because it was 1997 and the film Titanic had just come out, Kira left the room, adamant that he was going to go and watch it even if his mother could not come along.
As he left, he caught a glimpse of Kiyomi and updated her on the condition of her son. Noticing the strange expression she gave him, one that did not seem like relief at her son surviving, Kira called her out on it, wondering what else she could possibly be feeling right now.
Forward from that childhood trauma to around the year 2010. Here a former star baseball player was being taught all about how to consume the Locacaca fruit.
Removing a large suitcase from underneath his seat and showing him the cash, Aisho explained the fruit's fundamental law of equivalent exchange, and that there was always going to be a sort of risk involved. With the plant carrying no fruit, he picked it up and carefully weighed it before going to leave the room. Just before he left, though, he warned the star athlete not to try, under any circumstances, to find out the mystery behind the fruit.
But unbeknownst to them, the transaction was not as secret as they thought. Someone had placed a hidden camera to view it, and on the other end of that camera were Kira and a teenage Josefumi.
The star athlete was a man called Atsunori Iwakiri, who a year earlier had almost signed a deal worth three hundred million yen. Days before the confirmation, though, he had severely injured his shoulder, a devastating blow that had obviously destroyed his career. Kira knew that this was exactly why Aisho had targeted the desperate athlete for a deal. In a game that must have taken place a little later, Iwakiri lit up the commentators as his pitch clocked in at over a hundred and sixty-two kilometres an hour.
Kira believed Aisho would never consider most people as buyers, and would only sell the fruit to a few select wealthy people. Apparently these fruits came from New Guinea, but he could not pin down exactly where. He was certain, though, that they could cure any illness or heal any wound. So instead of trying to track down where they were growing, he planned to steal one of them from the dealers.
He proposed a partnership, convincing Josefumi to tag along under the pretence that they could flip the fruit for a fat stack of cash later on. What Kira did not realise was that Josefumi knew exactly why he was after the fruit. He knew all about the devastating rock disease consuming Holly. Driven by pure gratitude for the woman and the son who had saved his life years earlier, Josefumi agreed to help.