Disclaimer: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and all equally bizarre concepts and characters belong to Hirohiko Araki. Original characters and other concepts (as noted) are copyright of me.
It was now evening. Zeppeli and REO conducted their business with Eric at Gerald's dorm in private, while Jojo was still left in the darkness he made for himself. He had become afraid of his power, and depressed that such power had caused him to go mad when he had worked and strove so hard against that happening. He was inconsolable, but even so, Erina refused to leave. She just stayed in the living room with Jojo's roommates while waiting for Jojo himself to come out or call her in. She was adamant on staying and would not leave until she felt she had helped him in some way...
"So Erina" Jojo's black roommate Daryl began, "what major are you studying this semester?"
"I'm in the general business supervision" Erina explained "but I'm planning on moving into stock management so I can help with my family's business after graduation."
"That's right" Jojo's other roommate with chalky-white skin, Tyler, said. "Your dad is part of a huge stock-trading firm, right? Wow. That must be a lot of pressure."
"Not really" Erina said. "I already learned most of what I need to know for the job with on-hands experience, I just need my legal degree."
"I know a guy" Daryl began "who's in that major. He said the classes are ridiculous."
"I'll manage" Erina said. Suddenly, from the hallway, a door opened with a creak. All three looked back from their seats and waited for a shadow to appear from Jojo's hall. Nothing happened. Daryl got up first but Erina got up faster and made her way for the door. A woman's touch was needed, apparently, and she would give it. "I'm going to go talk to him" she told the roommates .They nodded and sat back down patiently. A girl from a lineage like the Pendleton's wasn't one to be taken lightly. She marched into the darkness and found Jojo's door to be just slightly ajar. She peered inside and saw Jojo sitting alone in the lightless darkness of his room, clutching a pillow to his head.
Here goes nothing Erina told herself. She swallowed hard and opened the door. Unknowingly, she had stepped through Jojo's Stand, The World, as it was hovering in front of the doorway. "John?" Erina asked. Jojo looked up with his eyes glistening, full of lifely luster but his head full of pain. "Are...you okay?"
"Yeah" Jojo replied, sounding perfectly fine. Erina sighed with relief and smiled to herself. "Ow! Owowow..." Jojo groaned suddenly. He held the pillow close to his head and reeled over himself in pain. "My head...really hurts. Can you get me some ice?"
"Of course" Erina obliged. She ran out of the room and into the kitchen. Once she was gone, The World closed the door again and hovered with its arms crossed and eyes soulless in front of Jojo.
"I can't understand" Jojo said, looking up at the unflinching Stand. "The personification of my latent mental energies, a powerful being that represents my own inner Ripple power...why do you exist like this? REO and Gerald can control their Stands perfectly, but I can't seem to draw you back into my mind. Why? And why do you insist on keeping me isolated???" The World smirked at Jojo's curiosity and moved back from Jojo to its maximum range to sit on a desk. Erina came back in with a cool pack of ice and handed it softly to Jojo.
"Here you go" she whispered.
"Thank you" Jojo said. He discarded his pillow and substituted the ice pack, which cooled his head but also gave it a sharp sting.
"Does it hurt?" Erina asked.
"It'll be fine" Jojo said. "I'm not sure what happened, but my head was just throbbing with pain. I could barely move, let alone speak."
"No" Erina said, "I mean with REO. He said that...I couldn't comprehend it even if I wanted to. That it was a secret and not my place to know...Jojo, what happened to you?" He found himself cornered, totally helpless without means of escaping her inquisitive, caring stare. If only she could see it it would be easier to explain, but the snide grin of The World only gave him the painful reminder that everything was out of his control right now, including her.
"I'm sorry" Jojo said "that I had to make you worry. Even though I'd like you to believe that I'm alright, the state I'm in will completely contradict my saying anything. You'll just have to trust me when I say that I'll be okay. I just need some time to recover on my own." Erina looked surprised. She came in with the thought that Jojo was beyond help, depressed and regretting some mysterious past deed, but here he was perfectly alright and almost pleasant, aside from this mysterious seriousness he talked with.
"Then I will" Erina said. "I trust you, Jojo. If you say nothing's wrong, I believe you." Jojo felt relieved. The World continued glaring him down from over the tip of its covered nose and case an unknown shadow across the room that faded into the darkness from the setting sun outside. Erina sat next to Jojo and smiled at him while Jojo kept his head cool with the ice and his insides warm with his controlled, Ripple breathing.
When the sun sets on one person it shall always rise at the back of another. For Dio, that sun came in the dark night. With his new regime of power and the confidence that Jojo had been locked away for quite a while with no hopes of fighting in a Stand battle, Dio decided that it was time to flex his new powers. He donned his signature garb of bright yellow pants and jacket over a black UnderArmor shirt for the cool air of the night and his pointed rubber boots. Tonight was his first stage of power as the city's most feared gang leader.
"Starski" Dio said from the shadows. The usurped gangster rose up from the couch in the den, which was now newly furnished with many stolen pieces of jewelry and smaller furniture, to meet the gaze of his dominating don. Starski's wardrobe hadn't changed save the chain that he gave up after his humiliating defeat. "Defend the headquarters while I'm gone. It's time for my raid."
"You going alone?" Starski asked. "We ain't the only Stand users in the city, you know. You ain't from around here, so let me fill you in: this city is controlled not just by us but by three major gangs. We're one of them. The other two are, well were, my rivals up til now. They're Stand users too, and they've got a lot more troops than we have!"
"But they must be weak" Dio said "for you to have risen above them before I came. Do you honestly doubt my abilities?"
"Not a damn bit" Starski answered without a second of hesitation or an ounce of fear. "I was just making sure you knew. I'll defend this place."
"Good" Dio said, stepping out into the dim light and adjusting the feathered collar of his mafioso trench coat. "I trust only you with something like that." Dio left the skeletal building and hopped down to the ground, leaving Starski to blink in the dark.
"Wait" Starski said in a panic. "Wait, I'm here by myself? I've gotta defend this whole damn place by myself!? Are you NUTS!!??"
"Rosalisa" Dio said aside to his cohort, "let's go." The girl got up, dressed in her best take on a slender Victorian dress of frilly black and stiletto boots for the coming battle She wore her hair flat to her head and tied in the back with two huge fabric black roses in her hair, as well as many smaller rose patterns on her dress as if to exaggerate her already outstanding monicker. The guards of Dio's Frozen Nights stood fast and ready, armed to the teeth with guns and bats and knives and other deadly weapons all concealed in the thick canvas fabric that made the cloaks they all wore.
"I feel a fool" one tough gangster said in his robes. He saw the tall, pasty-skinned men that Dio brought with them wearing their robes with a glowing pride. The gangster looked over at his friends drafted in from the Lovebugs and saw that they were at least feigning interest in wearing the garb, and some were honestly looking confident in the thick robes, so he silenced himself.
"Bring the cars around" Dio quietly ordered to one of his more personal guards. The man nodded and went off running. With Dio's monarchy came a resounding boost of power for the Lovebugs. The remnants of Dio's old gang and devious Underworld inhabitants, those not killed or destroyed by MUSE's efforts in his previous kingdom, were brought along with him in his pilgrimage to the place he now calls 'headquarters'. Among those remains, a fleet of stealthy rental cars stolen and redesigned from an abandoned lot just hours before the trucks came in to reclaim them for spare parts. Such cars would be the most unsuspecting for a mobster like Dio to drive in and come rampaging out of. Twelve cars in all, six minivans hollowed out for maximum troop transport and six smaller compacts for more discrete missions.
"Where are we going?" one young thug asked as he tied his coat together.
"The power station" Dio said "a few blocks downtown."
"The power station?" another thug asked. "Why the hell are we going there? Who fights at a power station?"
"We do" Dio said. "Don't question my plans." Dio's hot gaze was more than enough to silence any insubordination in the weaker ranks. Even if they acted up, he wouldn't kill them. They could die in battle for all he cared. "A spy of mine reported that several smaller gangs are going to meet there in an attempt to overthrow one of the larger ones."
"So we're gonna stop 'em?" someone asked. "Shouldn't we just, like, let 'em fight the big guys? Either way, if they all die or if they somehow win, it'll be getting rid of competition." Dio flew backwards with the wings of SoaD and grabbed the speaker by the throat with his powerful hands. Dio's face didn't change a bit from its placid neutrality, but his hand choked the breath and life out of the man. Then he reeled his arm to the side and threw the troop away like a broken toy, straight into a metal girder bolted into a concrete foundation.
"Those small gangs" Dio continued as if uninterrupted "will present us with a larger obstacle if they unite than the larger group they're going up against. If word gets out that a sort of gangster-union is forming under multiple flags, like a Mafia democracy, then all the lesser forces of the city, the petty vigilantes and thieves, will join that league and become a fourth resident power with wide-spread influence. Can anyone see why that is problematic for us?"
"So what will we do, Dio?" the youngest gangster, a homeless teenager, asked. Dio felt some striking sympathy for the kid and, rather than answer him with a brutal backhand, just smiled his gleaming charismatic smile and stunned the poor lad with his masculine beauty.
"We're going to beat them to their goal" Dio said "and destroy that power station before they do." Massive public property damage, the wrath of the armed forces should the incident escalate beyond control, the possibility of an anarchy or worse in lieu of a perpetual blackout; all these fears washed away when Dio looked upon his army. Even the man he nearly murdered with his powerful grip was stolen away with awe at Dio's shining beauty.
The sun was finally gone, and Dio's sun, the silver Moon, was high overhead. The time of the attack was upon the city, and a legion of miscellaneous gangsters and thugs had gathered just outside the gates of the nexus of all power for the city, the Electrical Management Plant...
"This is Red Wolf" one man said over a closed radio channel. "All signals are reading strong. My team has made their way into the complex. We are ready to engage the attack."
"This is Blue Sparrow" another man said. "We have reached out checkpoint and are inside, waiting to disengage the security."
"This is Yellow Toad" a fatter man called from a parked van. "I've hacked the channels. The security office has no idea what's going on. Operation is fucking go!"
"This is Green Snake" a girl called. "We're armed and ready. Moving to position 'G'."
"Roger that" Red Wolf said. "Commence the operation!" A cascade of events followed. The Red Wolf group had tunneled their way into the complex and came out under the main power lines, which they would cut when the power was disengaged by the Blue Sparrow team already inside disguised as workers. The Blue Sparrows began unlocking doors and stealthily taking out guards while the technically inclined Yellow Toad team kept the camera feed interrupted by looped video and the audio totally cut to cover the killings.
The Green Snake team moved into the facility through the unlocked doors with silenced guns and quieter knives. All of the members of the Green Snake team were women, all of Red Wolf's were muscular men. Yellow Toad operated from nearby locations and public terminals in the library at synchronized intervals to optimize their operations. Most of Blue Sparrow had been recruited and bribed the morning previous so they would be inside the whole day.
The quickly conglomerated mob executed their plan so fluidly, so gracefully, that all of their movements seemed predestined. All the security personnel and original workers within were dealt with in short bullet bursts and knifed backs and skulls. The first great act of the 'Pendulum Crimeforce' was going perfectly...up until they came.
Dio and his army arrived from half a block away, parking their cars in the cover of streetlamps where no one would care to notice and moved from there on foot. In their black garb they were invisible, not a soul on the street to point out the outlandish procession of uniformly cloaked individuals with weapons in hand. Dio himself took to a high roof a quarter of a mile away from the plant and prepared to enter from the air while Rosalisa went under heavy escort with her Stand ready to go. Her team approached a suspiciously parked van from which an even more curious hum came. Rosalisa demanded an inspection with her eyes, prompting one of the pale guards to rap on the van's doors.
Oh shit! The Yellow Toad leader thought. I've been caught! Maybe I should just wait and stay as quiet as possible.
"Shoot the door down" Rosalisa commanded. A gun was loaded with a click just outside the door. The Yellow Toad, a heavy man with tapped glasses and no particular criminal history at all, retreated to the front of the van where he had hidden a single glock pistol in case of an emergency. Now was that emergency. Two quiet, silenced bullets were fired and dented the area around the handles of the van doors. Then the guards snapped those doors off with quick-fingered wrench and screwdriver skills. Rosalisa entered alone and looked around.
"Call Lord Dio" she ordered. "Tell him we are ahead of schedule."
"Who's Dio?" the fat man asked, holding his pistol up to Rosalisa's head. The guard aimed their guns up reflexively but had no intention of shooting the man. They knew he was already dead. He still wrapped his arm around Rosalisa and attempted to use her as a human shield while he made his way for his computer-array console. "Nobody move! Just step away form my vehicle! And don't even fucking think about calling this 'Dio' guy!"
"Do what he says" one of the guards said. The stepped away and even lowered their weapons as they did.
"That's right" the man growled. "Don't fuck with me!" Wow! Look at me! He thought with great amusement. I'm like...like Tony Soprano, or something! I went from being an ordinary computer technician and programmer to a bad-ass mob-man! It was now that he noticed Rosalisa had calmly broken her arms free his his grip and pulled out a small, black notebook and pen from the folds of her dress. "What're you doing!?"
"Do you have any daughters?" Rosalisa asked. "If you did, you would know the seriousness girl's hold when they have a diary and that privacy is second to none when they are writing in it. Please, do not look while I write or I will become cross."
"You're a hostage!" the man shouted. "You don't get to tell me what to do! Besides, what're you gonna write about, huh? How scared you are! Hehehe..." The man went to aim his gun at her head again but, strangely, he couldn't. He peeked over her shoulder and saw that she was writing some peculiar orders in her book.
He aims the gun at himself and she had written. The man couldn't help but think it was crazy until he felt the cold metal at his temple and heard the barrel hammer click next to his ear.
"Dear Diary" Rosalisa narrated as her guards fearlessly drew up their arms. "Today I killed a man..." One loud gunshot later it was over. The man behind her shot himself straight through the head without a flashing moment of second thought. Rosalisa closed her book, ending the entry with the words and shoots the gun, killing himself instantly. She closed the book and placed it back within the folds of her dress while she tucked the pen in her tight bosom. "Take this over and contact Lord Dio at once" she ordered of her troops. "I will be moving ahead of schedule..." Rosalisa has escaped harm's way by means of her Stand, but just exactly how!?