"Rawr!" A tiny Jolyne dressed as a purple-skinned zombie jumped out, eliciting a not entirely believable scream of terror from Josuke. "I'm scary!" she stated, having no doubts as to the effectiveness of her costume.
"Definitely," her uncle agreed. "Come on. We've got a couple more houses on this street left." Josuke had come to visit the day before Halloween as a favor to Jotaro. He had some business to take care of (of course) and couldn't take her out to celebrate the holiday. Her mother had come down with a bad cold not long ago, too, leaving him as the only one left to do the job.
That wasn't entirely true, obviously. The first candidate would be a neighbor or friend, but Josuke insisted he fly all the way out to Florida after hearing about the situation. Free candy and he'd get to see his niece? He'd be a fool to pass that up. Plus, when else we he get a chance to wear an almost too convincing Elvis costume?
"You know, we don't really have all this back in Japan," he told her, tossing a broken piece of candy corn back into the pillowcase he was using to collect candy.
"It's the best holiday, though," she said. "You should make them change it."
"Think I could?" It was doubtful, but he certainly wouldn't be opposed to trying. If nothing else, the costumes and decorations were pretty neat, so he might try to get his friends to agree to a costume party next year in Morioh.
"Yeah. And send me special candy when you do."
He laughed. "So that's your real goal." It was a tragedy that the two of them lived so far apart. Spending time with Jolyne was always a ton of fun, but she'd only come to visit Japan three times in all six years, one of which he wasn't even around for. At least now Josuke was no longer in school, freeing him up to make regrettable decisions like taking last minute trips to a foreign country with no notice to anyone who might want to know about that.
"Even though we don't celebrate Halloween," he told her, "we do something called a test of courage. It's where we go someplace real scary and try to make it through without giving up. Want to try something like that?"
"Yeah!" Jolyne was always up for something spooky. Despite being just a child, she was probably braver than anyone Josuke knew. She'd even managed to shake Jotaro with her stories of an imaginary friend called "K" from what he'd heard.
"Then let's see..." As he turned a corner to try and find a suitably scary place to visit, Josuke ran face first into what seemed to be a gigantic reptile. Letting out a much more genuine screech of terror, he composed himself moments later after realizing it was just a giggling child in a costume.
Trying to save face, Josuke said, "Just kidding!" as Jolyne started to laugh at him. "I knew it was just a costume. That was obvious."
"I bet you failed a test of courage," she said, going straight for the throat.
"We'll see who fails," he said, picking her up and putting her on his shoulders. "See if you can find somewhere good up there. And don't grab my hair."
Almost immediately, her arm shot forward. "That one!" It looked to be a haunted house, a faux-decrepit sign in the grass in front of it saying as much.
"I guess that'll do," he replied. Once they reached the house, he let Jolyne down and took her by the hand, the two walking through a doorway challenging them to enter "if they dared," which they most certainly did.
Though it was a step up from most of the haunted house exhibits at school festivals, Josuke wasn't too impressed. Outside of a ghost cutout jumpscare or two, nothing seemed all that scary as they traversed a straight, dark hallway. He was starting to get kind of bored by it and, from the looks of things, so was Jolyne.
"How much longer until it gets scary?" she asked, swinging her free arm back and forth as an unconvincing Dracula cutout sprung up in front of them, eliciting no reaction.
"Wish I knew," he said. "We've got to be getting close to the end, at least. We've been walking for a while." They really had been, too. In a completely straight path. It might have simply been his imagination, but he could have sworn this building wasn't nearly deep enough to accommodate a path like this with no turns.
They continued straight forward with no deviations, the cutouts having mysteriously stopped altogether. The lights seemed to be getting dimmer and dimmer, too, with something sticky apparently being spilled across the entire floor given the squelching noise it made as they walked. While his first instinct was to applaud the makers of this place for lulling him into a false sense of security before gradually amping up the creep factor, something was seriously beginning to feel off.
"It's really dark," Jolyne complained, feeling her way along the way to keep from tripping, quickly withdrawing it as shaking off something wet she touched by accident.
"Not scared, are you?" Josuke asked. Whipping out a lighter, the flame illuminated the area in much greater detail than he'd hoped and sending a chill down his spine. Rather than the cheap wood and concrete from the entrance, the walls and floor of the establishment looked to be made of pulsating red flesh.
"Woah! Cool!" Immediately, she ran up to inspect the undulating mass in the light of the flame. "How'd they do that?" she asked, Josuke having no good answer.
"Hey, let's head back," he finally said, growing more uneasy by the second.
"Too scary?" she asked mockingly.
"Yep, I'm real freaked out." Pride meant nothing right now, so he'd gladly admit to being afraid if it meant they could leave this place.
Sticking her tongue out, she immediately started to make fun of him. "Scaredy cat! This place isn't even scary!"
"I'm a real coward," he said, his ears picking up an unsettling dripping noise off in the distance. "So let's get out of here already." He managed to get her to turn around with a bit of reluctance, the two making their way back towards the entrance.
Then, suddenly, they came to a turn. "Did we go the wrong way?" Jolyne asked, distinctly remembering that they'd only gone in a straight line since coming inside. Josuke didn't have time to answer her, though, as she started to scream as her foot was sucked into the fleshy ground.
"Jolyne!" he exclaimed, reaching towards her as he dropped to his knees. The same thing was happening to him, too, the ground sucking the both of them into it somehow. Whatever was going on, it had far surpassed the boundary of a prank.
Putting his arm around Jolyne's waist, he activated his Stand. "Crazy Diamond!" he yelled, a flurry of hits impacting the ground around them. Unfortunately, not a single blow managed to do any damage, the rubbery floor simply bouncing back against each fist.
Thinking quickly, Josuke reached into his sack of candy and withdrew the broken candy corn from before. Tossing it up, Crazy Diamond crushed it in its fist, reforming it immediately after. Keeping a strong grip, it continued to remake the object in search of the part missing from it.
The two continued to be sucked into the fleshy mass, Josuke keeping a tight hold of Jolyne as he hoped beyond hope they'd be pulled out as the candy corn was fixed. That was his intention, at least, but fate had a different plan in store for him. To his utter horror, the missing piece came flying towards them and rejoined the whole.
"Stay calm!" he told her. Crazy Diamond tried fruitlessly to rip the flesh apart from around their bodies, Josuke having been absorbed up to his torso while Jolyne was nearly consumed. It was no use, though. As a last ditch effort to save her, his Stand grabbed the girl's hand, holding fast and pulling with all his might.
His grip slipped, though, Jolyne going under completely. Even if he had continued to pull, all he would have accomplished was ripping off her arm. Josuke followed shortly after, screaming in anguish and apologizing to Jotaro for letting this happen to his daughter. They were done for now.
The "fun" was just beginning, though, as Josuke would quickly find out as he awoke on a hard concrete floor in a darkened room. Shaking his head to try and remember what had happened, he quickly bolted upright and called out for his niece. "Jolyne! Where are you?"
"Good evening," a figure said from a short ways away. Josuke's head snapped towards the speaker, revealed to be a metallic skeleton with blazing red compound eyes staring back at him. Immediately, he concluded this must be a Stand. "It's time for a game," the creature said.
Its words fell on deaf ears, though, as Crazy Diamond immediately emerged to attack. "Dorarararara!" Despite his best efforts, none of the attacks seemed to connect, passing harmlessly through the figure as if it weren't even there.
"My ability is called Waking and Dreaming," the figure explained, continuing with its speech as if it wasn't currently under attack. "Anyone who enters my home must play my game. All you have to do to earn your freedom is to find me at the center of this maze. If you can't, though, you'll spend the rest of your life here with me."
"Wait! Where's the girl that was with me!" The Stand had already begun to float through the ceiling. "I said wait, bastard!" As it fully disappeared, two dim lights turned on to illuminate the tiny stone room he was in. At his feet was a flashlight, nothing else to be found in any of the corners with a wooden door directly ahead of him.
"This is just great," he said, taking the light and flicking it on. "I need to find Jolyne before something bad happens. I'm getting the feeling we're not alone here." Far more pissed off than afraid, he broke down the door and entered the maze.
He stepped briskly down the hallway, light shining ahead and scanning the corners to try and make out any aggressors in the darkness. If there was any solace he could take in the bowels of this terrible place, everything was at least not flesh this time around.
Immediately after thinking that, his optimism was dashed as his light fell upon a splash of red decorating the corner in front of him. Examining it closely, it was almost certainly blood. Even so, it was already dried on by the time he found it, meaning that whatever caused this to happen was probably gone.
Like a bad horror game on PC, Josuke plodded through several minutes worth of absolutely nothing on his quest to reach the end. Each time he came to a crossroads, he had Crazy Diamond etch an arrow into the wall to show which way he'd gone in case he needed to retrace his steps.
"Your game sucks!" he shouted into the air. "I've put together jigsaw puzzles more challenging than this crap! Just come out and fight me already!" Like anyone foolish enough to start screaming in the middle of a place like this, his challenge was quickly answered by one of the denizens of the maze.
Several wet slaps against the ground signaled its arrival, a malformed and rotting arm jutting out behind a corner. This was followed by several more – how many, he wasn't sure, but it was far more than the average person. The same for the legs, all of them dripping some kind of fluid that he couldn't quite place. The creature's head peered down at Josuke, both sides of its split mouth chomping independently of one another, blood and puss and everything in between pouring from its jaws as the innumerable green eyes focused on its target.
"At least something's happening," he said, Crazy Diamond laying into the beast with relentless fury. Perhaps too relentless, as each blow knocked off a piece of decomposing flesh. Rather than slow it down, though, the creature just used its remaining arms to grab at the Stand, the flesh on its wounds rumbling and birthing replacement parts that were no less disgusting than the ones it lost.
Immortal or not, it was easy enough to put down, though how to keep it down was another matter entirely. A few well-placed kicks knocked the thing's lower jaw off, giving Josuke ample time to run. Being much faster than his attacker, it was a simple matter to smash through one of the walls around a corner and seal it back up after walking through the hole.
While it may be true that a Stand user would be more than capable of navigating this place with little to worry about, a normal person would be in a lot more danger. "Why couldn't there be some kind of signs?" he complained, scanning the floor and ceiling for any kind of indication as to where he was meant to go. The fact that this whole building was either a Stand or controlled by one just made things even more tedious, as he had no guarantee the layout wasn't changing with every step he took.
"Alright, I'm done," he declared. Smashing through the wall had worked so well before, he decided he'd just simplify things from this point on. "If I just break everything down, I'll find the center eventually!"
Even if his noise did attract that monster from before or others like it, he'd already proven they were no match for Crazy Diamond's strength. Unfortunately, this only applied when he could actually fight back, as being grabbed in a bear hug from behind closed off most of his options for resistance.
"Damn it! I was making too much noise and didn't hear it coming!" The monster was weak, but even a bunch of weak things put together could add up to something strong. No matter how many of the limbs that were holding him he was able to tear through, more just grabbed him.
This actually seemed to work in his advantage, though. As the monster's jaws prepared to clamp down around his head, Josuke did what he did best and went to "fix" something. Crazy Diamond began to repair a segment of the wall it had bashed through earlier. In particular, it was a segment splattered with the creature's flesh and fluids.
Violently pulled away from its target, a portion of the creature was trapped into the newly reformed wall. Though it was quickly tearing apart its own body to free itself, the fight was already over. Thinking back to the fight with Angelo, Josuke battered the creature once more, smashing it and the wall behind it into bits.
Once reformed, the pulsing flesh of the monster was safely trapped in the concrete, limbs and eyes jutting out and struggling to try and get free. "Now don't bother me anymore. I've got to find my niece."
Honestly, he felt a little bad about trapping that thing in a wall for eternity, but what little sympathy he had was more or less overridden by his need to rescue Jolyne and get them both out of there. Besides, it was probably just a result of the Stand and not a sentient creature in its own right. How sentient could a rotting ball of killer flesh be to begin with?
Returning to his previous strategy, Josuke continued to tear down the walls while looking for a way out of this nightmare. He wasn't afraid for himself in the slightest anymore; he'd more than proven he could take of anything that might come at him in here. The only fear he felt now was at the prospect of wasting time, as every second spent wandering around aimlessly was another second Jolyne could be in danger.
After a few more walls, he found himself in front of a door. Looking around the area, it appeared to be the center of the whole thing. At least, that's what he gathered given the fact he hadn't seen any other rooms in this place after getting out of his own, and that was off to the side somewhere.
Wasting no time, he punched through the door and stepped inside. "Are you the Stand user?" he asked the silhouette standing before him in the dark. Shining a light on the person, he was taken aback at just how pathetic this character seemed. Withered, paper-white skin over a frame of bones with silver hair reaching almost to his ankles. How long was this guy in here for?
"You made it?" he asked, a tinge of hope in his voice.
"I guess," Josuke replied. "Wait, no. Answer my question!" Instead of doing that, the man just began to weep uncontrollably. "Hey, I'm sorry for yelling. I didn't mean to make you cry. Come on, don't do this."
"I'm so happy," he mumbled through his tears. "Someone else will finally take this from me."
This got his attention. "What do you mean by that?" he asked, suddenly on guard.
Still sniffling and blubbering, the man began to explain. "Years ago, I found this place. I got through all of the traps and the beasts. I found this place in the middle. That thing...it said I was the new owner. And then it left me here." He fell to his knees as another wave of relief forced out even more sobs. "It's been so long..."
"So now I..."
"Correct," he heard from behind. Josuke jumped forward, turning in midair to face the source of the voice. Unsurprisingly, it was the avatar of Waking and Dreaming he'd met at the beginning. "You may now command this Stand and will remain at its center. In turn, I will follow your every order, master."
"So it's like that, huh." He sighed, flashing back to the incident with Super Fly. "Well, that's just great." He stuck out his index finger to prod at the Stand's chest. "Hey! Get my niece! Bring Jolyne to the center!"
"As you wish." Almost instantaneously, a hole opened up in the ceiling, dropping the girl into Josuke's waiting arms.
"Uncle Josuke?" she said, slightly confused as to how she'd ended up with him again. As an answer, he hugged her tight, relieved that she seemed to be unharmed. Returning his hug, she apologized for being gone so long. "I got lost after we fell through that hole. I'm sorry."
"It's okay," he told her. "We're all fine now." As he set her down, he clenched his teeth, eyes narrowing on Waking and Dreaming. "Jolyne, we're about to get out of here. See if that guy behind us needs anything while I find us a way out.
She did as she was asked, meeting the old man and asking why he was crying so hard. As she did, Josuke walked up to the Stand. "Hey, I touched you earlier, right?"
"Correct."
"That's because I'm in charge, right?"
"Correct."
He smiled. "You said follow every order I gave you, right?"
"Correct."
What he did next was a risky move. He very well could be considered the master of this Stand now, meaning anything he did to it would risk harming himself. Even so, he didn't have much of a choice in the matter. "Then..." He balled his fists, Crazy Diamond appearing behind him. "I order you to go to Hell!"
Josuke put all of his rage into this attack, unleashing a beatdown that even Jotaro would find impressive. Each strike was calculated to smash a different part of Waking and Dreaming, the logic being that if its avatar was destroyed, the rest of the Stand would go down with it or at least take the damage.
His hunch proved to be correct, as each hit against the Stand shook the building they were in. As it crumbled to pieces, so too did the house around them. "Look out!" he shouted, shielding Jolyne and the old man with his body as Crazy Diamond punched rubble out of the way overhead.
And just as suddenly as they'd found themselves in the house, they were back on the surface in a pile of rocks and wood. As the dust settled around them, a few more people pushed their way out of the rubble in various states of injury and exhaustion. There was no telling how long some of them had been there or even how long the house had existed. The only thing they knew for certain now was that they were all free.
"I think Halloween's over now," Josuke said with a smile, taking everything in stride all things considered.
"But we never got to the end!" Jolyne complained.
"We were just at the end!"
"I didn't make it there by myself! I want to go back and do it again!"
"The house is all gone! What do you want to do, build it again?"
"Yeah! Build it again!" Jolyne was entirely ignorant of his Stand or what it could do, so she actually meant for him to build her an entirely new haunted house just like that labyrinth.
Shaking his head, he walked over to the old man. "How are you feeling?" he asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.
After taking a deep breath, he replied, "Fresh air...the moon...stars… I didn't think I'd ever be free." He smiled, his aged face being one of the purest forms of joy Josuke had ever seen. "Thank you, young man. Now get that niece of yours home. It's been a long night."
"Are you going to be okay? Do you even have, like, a house or something?"
"I'll figure something out," he said, dusting himself off. "I was a drifter before I got trapped there, so it's almost like I'm starting over again. Take care, kids."
The strange old man began walking off down the sidewalk, Josuke and Jolyne heading in the opposite direction shortly after. "Man, I can't wait to get to bed," he said. "Tonight was way too heavy."
"I'm telling mommy how scared you got," Jolyne said.
Rolling his eyes, a thought suddenly popped into Josuke's head. "Hey, while we were stuck in that maze, no one tried to hurt you, right? Like, no big monsters?" He figured there had to be more he never got to see down there.
To his shock, Jolyne nodded. "Yeah, this big scary dog tried growled at me. It was okay, though. K used his green thing to protect me. He made the dog go like, 'Boom!'"
"Oh, well, that's nice." It took him several seconds to register what she'd just told him. "Huh?" Needless to say, Jotaro would definitely want to hear about tonight.
I wish we got to see Jolyne interact with her relatives at any point in time. That includes Shizuka since she's a member of this bizarre family tree, too. Honestly, imagine the AU where Jolyne grew up being like Shizuka's older sister. Someone should write that.
I wanted to do something for Halloween, but I ended up posting this early. Mainly because I've got stuff to do that day and I don't want to end up forgetting. Either way, here we go.
It's always kind of funny how Stands basically make you invulnerable to most conventional damage provided you're overpowered like Josuke. Any other type of person thrown into this situation would be in some real trouble and would keep the tension longer than a few minutes, but Crazy D is just too strong. And we all know he makes the best Elvis on top of that.
Unflappable baby Jolyne is the best. I feel like she'll think back to this time one day and realize that it was her first encounter with a Stand, but until then, she'll be entirely convinced it was just a fun haunted house. Also ghosts, but we don't talk about K.
Have a nice Halloween, kids. Don't get axe murdered while you're out there. Thanks for reading. Always remember to get Rohan to write "knows English" into you before you go traveling to America.