The JoJo Part 9 community project headed from r/part9lore on Reddit. Follow Jolene Joestar and co as they fight back against unfair imprisonment and rampant monopolies. This is not a copy of part 6.
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The snow had lightly coated Pocoloco's hat as he was carried through the streets of Manhattan on January 19th, 1891. He'd been declared the winner of the Steel Ball Run race, and this meant he was now worth 50 million dollars. The day after the race he put his spoils in the bank just as soon as he could, though he took out a good chunk of spending money so he could appropriately celebrate his victory. These parties went on for months, but eventually the endless celebrations had completely exhausted him. After the partying ceased, Pocoloco made his way down to New Orleans to catch a boat out into the Caribbean. He took a long, relaxing trip to a quiet island before finally returning to Georgia in the summer of 1892.
He still had plenty of money left at this point, it would have been impossible for him to spend all 50 Million in just over a year. He purchased bars, theaters, and primo real estate in Atlanta, which saw his money return and multiply quicker than he'd expected. It seemed as though Pocoloco's luck hadn't run out just yet, nearly every business he invested in would become an overnight success. Pocoloco was already famous as an athlete and a champion, but now he had earned a reputation as a mogul in the business world and with this reputation came the burden of being one of the most famous men on the planet. Pocoloco was a household name, and he was noticed everywhere he went.
In a world filled with soulless people pretending to like him to get a piece of his fortune, Pocoloco found a woman who never asked for anything other than his love. She was a waitress at one of the restaurants he owned. The food was remarkable there, so it had become Pocoloco's favorite spot for lunch. Her name was Angie, she was beautiful and kind but what fascinated him was the way she'd speak to him, like another customer. Nobody he'd met since winning the race treated him like that.
He fell for her immediately. She'd actually rejected him the first time he asked her on a date, but he kept visiting and flirting, trying to persuade her to give him a chance. Angie caved and Pocoloco soon realized that Angie was completely uninterested in the luxury Pocoloco was more than capable of providing. She once told him;
"I want a decent man to build a life with, not a financier."
They dated for just 3 months before Pocoloco proposed. They moved to a modest country home on the Georgia countryside and began their family. Twenty years went by like a blur; before the couple knew it they had 8 children running around the house.
Pocoloco's children were good kids, but the realization that your father is extremely wealthy changes people. Some of their children grew to be bitter, greedy adults who would constantly bring up their father's estate, asking what they can expect to get in the will. Pocoloco always planned to leave what he'd earned to his kids, but it destroyed him to see that money seemed to be more important to them than family. As Pocoloco aged, the estate situation was further escalated by a series of lawsuits featuring a long line of mothers with kids of varying ages claiming to have had an affair with him at some point before his marriage. Most of these women were lying, but some were not. The court doctors confirmed Pocoloco had five illegitimate kids, which triggered another series of lawsuits demanding compensation for unpaid child support.
As this continued, Pocoloco spent a lot of time speaking with lawyers. He would blankly stare out of his office window while men in suits chattered, and he would miss the days when things were simple. The days when his kids were running around outside and he was watching them from the deck with his wife, none of them the slightest bit concerned about the fortune they had sitting in the bank. The years passed and age caught up, Pocoloco eventually grew very ill. His family raced to his side, some truly there for moral support, others there with dollar signs in their eyes.
When Pocoloco passed away, his children and grandchildren packed into a room and sat in front of Pocoloco's estate lawyer. He first announced that 25% of Pocoloco's money was to be donated to charities (which upset some of his greediest descendants) but this still left plenty for the family. Everyone got a share, and people bickered for years over how much they got in money, who deserved his car, his house, and pretty much anything else that he had to leave them. A few years later Angie too would die, the pain of losing her beloved coupled with the stress being berated by her greedy offspring after the will reading had weakened her spirit tremendously. Her passing restarted the entire process. This kept happening every single time a family member would die. The family kept gathering and grabbing their share and passing it on to the next generation, who would then bicker amongst one-another about how much they deserve when the next family member's will is read.
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There were a few descendants who got fed up and decided they would rather leave then play this game, one being Pocoloco's great-granddaughter. She'd ran away from home to live with a poor but talented young artist who lived in Tampa, Florida. The two fell in love, married, and had a son. His art was not enough to support the family, so the three of them moved to Miami and worked odd jobs to keep afloat.
The boy would grow to be a funny, quick-witted, easy going kid with a passion for video games. He never blamed his parents for being unable to afford a gaming console for him, he came to understand they worked hard for what they did have and gave him everything they could. He'd get up every day at 5 AM to run a paper route so he could buy tokens for a local gaming establishment: Funkytown's Arcade.
At the arcade, it didn't matter that he didn't own a console, the money in his pocket was secondary to the score on his screen. At FT's he was surrounded by kids that were just like him; willing to stare deeply into those flashing pixels for hours and hours until it hurt, then race to the machine for more tokens. He'd become a familiar face, but the regulars didn't notice his skill until one rainy Saturday.
The boy stepped to a pinball machine shortly after the arcade opened and proceeded to play for the entire day without losing a single ball, shattering the previous record and gathering a crowd by the end. He had the highest score on every machine in the building within 6 months. The regulars had begun to call him "Prodigy" and it seemed likely that the kid was on a fast-track to the e-sports world.
On his 10th birthday, the boy received a used Nintendo DS from his parents. It was the single greatest thing he'd ever received, his very own gaming console. He played it endlessly while at school, after which he'd go straight to the arcade, plug his DS in, and hit the machines. Then he'd hop on the city bus and play his DS until he got home for dinner.
Word had, of course, eventually gotten around to the arcade's owner. The owner was in his late 20s at this point and had taken over the arcade after his father retired. He'd been known for years as Miami's finest arcade gamer, his scores were the ones the kid had been shattering. His vein would bulge from his forehead every night when he'd close up, walk by the machines and see the kids name ranked higher than his own. He hatched a plan, which started with him pointing out that the boy's DS was the only color he didn't have in a collection he was trying to complete, politely offering to purchase it. The owner, of course, knew the boy would refuse, so next he appealed to the boy's competitive nature; "You can game here for free if you win, but if I win, I get the DS".
The boy thought about it for a while, but decided there's no way he'd lose this.
However, after a questionably close match the owner was declared victor, and by losing this bet the boy experienced the bitter sting of forfeiting something that means a great deal to you. His gameplay dropped in quality after the defeat, it seemed as though the owner's plan had worked perfectly. The DS now sat displayed in a glass case, gazing down at the boy while he pumped tokens into the machines, failing to catch his own records.
The regulars stopped calling him prodigy soon after, and the boy felt less confident than ever.
