Once upon a time, in a small country called Denmark, there lived a very special young boy…
I can't tell you how much I wish I could start my story that way. I've always loved fairy tales. 'Once upon a time's and 'happily ever after's have brought me most of the happiness I've had in my life. But then, my story isn't a fairy tale. It's real and it means so much more to me than any fairy tale ever could.
My name is Johan Andersen, and I've had a Stand my whole life.
I bet you're probably wondering what a Stand is, right? I still kind of wonder the same thing sometimes. They seem like they can be a lot of different things and they don't always make a whole lot of sense. But let me see if I can describe it simply.
A Stand is a manifestation of someone's inner strength. It is a near-physical form of your will to manipulate the world around you. Basically, it's a visual and physical representation of your spirit. Only other Stand-users can see Stands, and those are few and far between. So I've always been pretty alone in the fact that I can see my Stand! The only reason I know there are other Stand-users out there is actually because of my Stand.
My Stand is called Over The Rainbow. He's a rainbow colored dragon who follows me around. He lets me see people who are dead. At first, it was really creepy, but I really don't mind anymore! Because the dead talk to me, and they tell me stories of their lives. Some of these people had really interesting lives! Some of them are just happy to be able to speak with the living again. And some of them were even Stand-users when they were alive!
Nobody ever really understood me. In fact, almost everyone thought I was crazy. For a long time I believed them, but I don't anymore.
I was sixteen when my parents kicked me out of the house. I guess my constantly talking about the dead people I talked with terrified them. More than anyone, they thought I had lost it. They decided not to deal with me anymore. Yeah, it hurt, but I can't really blame them. I probably would have kicked me out too.
Rather than dwell on it, I decided to try and learn more about the ability I had been gifted with. So I took to traveling where I could.
That's how I wound up going to Japan. Through my connections to the departed, I had heard of a town there where Stand-users were more prominent. I had also heard a legend about an arrow that gave people who were pierced with it Stands. I thought maybe I could learn more through this town - Morioh.
But I never made it to Morioh. Life took me in a different direction before I could even make it there.
Because I met someone very important in a place called Domino City. This is actually his story, not mine. I'm just here to tell it.
Johan wasn't unused to big cities. Having grown up in the urban settings of Denmark, he'd practically spent his entire life around cities. Domino City was something outside of what he was used to though - larger and, more notably, very foreign.
Quietly, the young man ran over his limited Japanese vocabulary over and over again. He'd been working for months to try and learn as much as he could, but it was difficult when you could barely afford food and a place to live and you were constantly on the move. So while he was confident in his ability to hold a solid conversation, he was sure that anything more than that would leave him looking like a bumbling idiot. That was the last thing he wanted to do.
Then again, he was pretty sure that his conversational abilities wouldn't be called into question if he couldn't even maintain anyone's attention for more than a few moments. Every person he tried to greet turned away from him quicker than he could start talking. Maybe it was because he was so obviously foreign.
While the treatment was disheartening, Johan didn't let it slow him down. After all, his plan was only to stay in Domino City for a day or two before starting his trek across the country to find Morioh.
At the very least, Johan was still able to see the spirits around him. As he waved to them and greeted them, they began to flock to him, in awe of him. Actually, they were a lot more welcoming than the living of this city - and there were a lot more of them than Johan was used to seeing too. He began to practice his Japanese with them and found that a number of them could speak English too at least, which made translation a lot easier.
It was smack in the middle of trying to get directions to the nearest hotel from one of those spirits that Johan ran headlong into someone. This sort of chance encounter really seemed like something out of stories. Except for the fact that he wound up knocking the other boy down in the process of running into him.
"Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry!" He spoke in Danish without realizing it to begin with. But when he caught himself, he winced and leaned down to offer a hand to the boy, speaking again in Japanese. "Sorry," he repeated.
Feeling the grip on his hand, he pulled the boy up and found himself face to face with one of the widest grins he'd ever seen.
"You really hit me hard there!" A laugh followed that statement and Johan couldn't help but just stare at him. This boy was nothing like the other Japanese people he'd met here. On top of that, he felt a strange draw towards him. Like he knew him? But that wasn't the case, there was no way he knew anyone in Japan.
"Yeah, sorry," he responded quietly, feeling a little overwhelmed for a moment.
He was about to say something else when he suddenly felt a squeeze on his hand. The boy was still holding onto him and was looking at him very intensely. "Have I met you before? You seem familiar."
Johan sucked in a breath before rubbing the back of his head with his free hand and laughing. "I don't think so. I just got here." As if it wasn't obvious by his horrible accent that he wasn't from Japan.
"Ha, yeah, I guess it's just a feeling." Finally, the boy pulled his hand away from Johan, leaving the Dane's hand feeling suddenly cold. "Hey, who were you talking to? You seemed pretty distracted."
Just as Johan had suspected, he was starting to have a hard time keeping up with the conversation as much as he would have liked to. He had to silently consider the boy's words for a long moment before answering, slowly. "Ah, no one. Sometimes I talk to myself."
Of course he wasn't going to tell this stranger about his Stand, no matter how much he felt an ever-growing connection to him. Maybe it was just the magnetic personality that the boy seemed to have. He hadn't stopped grinning yet and Johan actually couldn't bring himself to stop smiling either.
"Oh. Wow, I thought maybe you could see some of the shadows too. That's what I'm usually talking to." He laughed and gestured vaguely to the side. "But no one else can see them. I thought maybe you could!"
Eyes widening, Johan found himself reaching out to grab the boy's hands, pulling him closer suddenly. "You can see them?" He couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice and the boy's reaction showed him that the other was just as excited as he was.
The boy's name was Judai and he actually wasn't much of a boy at all. He was eighteen, just like Johan himself was. It took a lot of discussion and a good deal of double-checking his word choice with the spirits around them for the two of them to figure out that what they were both talking about were two different things. While Johan saw spirits of the dead, Judai saw shadows of people who seemed to be stuck in another dimension. They weren't actually dead, but they somehow inhabited the same plane of existence that the dead did. When Judai pointed out one of his shadows, Johan found he could see them. Somehow, they seemed much more distressed than the dead did and, more often than not, they were rude and angry with Judai.
In the end, Johan wound up calling out Over the Rainbow to see if Judai could see him. When he could, Johan knew he had found his first Stand-user. Even more than before, he felt the draw towards Judai.
"I think we were meant to meet each other!" he exclaimed, forgetting all boundaries and grabbing Judai's hands once again. "I think… I think you're what I was looking for!"
He wasn't sure if something got lost in translation during that statement because Judai looked a little uncomfortable, but he couldn't help himself. All his life he'd been alone and now here was this person who knew exactly what he was going through.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had met the most important person in my life in that moment. He changed everything for me without even meaning to. In fact, he changed a lot of people's lives.
He just didn't know it.