The phrase 'dog days of summer,' he thought, had never been so obnoxious.
Dio stared out the window, his book resting forgotten on the sill. His countenance was that of carefully trained disdain as he looked outside. The only word for what Jonathan and his mutt were doing in the fields was frolicking and the sight of it simply filled him with a sense of dissatisfaction. Not at the fact that he wasn't included, never that, but that his efforts at making the young man outside into a wretch too miserable to ever even consider standing in the sunlight were failing.
He sighed and closed his eyes. His patience was wearing thin, but if he did this right—if he did the next few years of careful planning correctly—then he could claw his way to the top of these weakly-minded and softer-willed upper-class wastes of skin and then— and then—
Where had he gone wrong?
Dio wondered this as Star Platinum crumpled The World under its fists like paper. Years, no, over a century of careful planning, destroyed on the whims of some moody teenager.
The Stand tore him apart from a distance, practically atom by atom—he could sense the ancient base instincts of his stolen spinal cord sending klaxons of alarm that never reached the ends of his dead and dissipating nerves. He desperately, helplessly wanted to hold on to life, but his efforts were in vain. His vision went neither white nor black, but empty.
And then the day began again.
Dio spent over an hour in his closed coffin thinking that it was the afterlife before realizing he could hear faint noises outside. He had been willing to accept waiting for Heaven in a repeat of his underwater purgatory but the reverberations of stale air with sound pricked at his awareness.
He threw the coffin lid aside and looked around. Because his sleeping quarters were in the basement, he had no knowledge as to the time of day.
He skulked upstairs, unsure and suspicious, but the mansion was the same as it had been before the damnable Joestars arrived. He saw a thin sliver of sunlight streaming through the blackout curtains and scowled. He scanned the room further, searching for Vanilla Ice or one of his other confidants, but he froze when he saw himself at the other end of the chamber.
Yellow Temperance would not dare to do such a sacrilegious impersonation, and besides, the stand user had been humiliated by the Joestars long before their arrival at the mansion. Dio narrowed his eyes and put his hands on his hips, expecting his double to mirror him. The other Dio merely smiled wide enough to bare teeth.
"What is this." It was more statement than question.
The other Dio tilted his head, his golden hair shifting against his shoulder. "Take a guess."
"I did die, did I not?"
"You did."
"Am I in Hell or Heaven?"
"What difference do you think there is?"
Dio had no desire to play armchair psychologist with himself. He moved forward with supernatural speed, not stopping time but instead merely using vampiric instinct, and attempted to gouge out his copy's throat.
The other Dio flung the curtains wide. Dio shrieked as the bright rays fell upon his skin as if it were molten metal. Despite the pain, he turned his head to glimpse outside and he saw the sun—
He did not see the sun. He landed by slamming his shoulder, hard, onto a strange and glassy expanse. He could sense the other Dio standing over him.
The other Dio leaned down as if speaking to a child. His tone was at once mocking and playful. "Try a bit harder next time."
And the day began again.
Dio threw aside the coffin lid and stormed upstairs. His eyes flashed as he searched the room—there he was, leaning against the far wall and shrouded in shadow. The World brought time to a grinding halt—
The World stayed but the world did not. Again, Dio found himself upon the glassy expanse. His Stand hovered beside him, as blankly faced as ever, but its hands were raised as if it were unsure about curling them into fists.
His double stood a few paces away from him, his thumbs tucked casually into his waistband.
"Allow me to explain," he finally said, raising one hand to wave it languidly. "I'm indulging myself in second chances, so please, don't make it boring and don't make it predictable."
"What is this?"
The other Dio shrugged. "You won."
He winced at the echoes of pain in his spine. "I certainly did not."
"Not that time," the other Dio assented, "but once. Somewhere. And that's all it takes, really."
Around them grew a gallery of worlds. Dio glanced at the orbiting images with narrowed eyes while his double tilted his head back.
"I did what you couldn't, and it allowed me to see that one victory in a multitude of defeats was not enough to satisfy me." A sharp nail swept across the surface of a miniature Earth, digging out a deep divot. "So now I travel, and I help."
"Help?" His eyebrows furrowed. "Help me defeat the Joestars?"
The scrape deepened, crumbled, decayed. Dio watched as the Earth collapsed into rot in his double's palm.
"Not quite," he answered.
Dio grit his teeth. His double nonchalantly flicked dust from his fingers.
"Think of it as a game," his double said. "that I simply must win again."
And then the day began again.
D'Arby the younger was far more solitary than his brother and so Dio had allowed him to sulk around within the mansion, his elusive and illusive nature providing a fine first line of defense. Dio avoided the chamber upstairs, feeling wary of confronting himself once more, and instead sought out the young man. He felt more relief than he was expecting at seeing him—at least he wasn't the only citizen of his self-made hell. D'Arby was in the middle of killing time, and some sort of racing game was flashing on his television screen. Dio watched silently until D'Arby realized he was there. The young man gulped down a yelp and muted the game as he turned to greet his employer.
"Lord Dio, sir! Is there anything I can do for you?"
Dio was silent for a long while, partially because he was unsure of what to say but mostly because he was entertained by D'Arby's nervous squirming. Finally, he tapped one long black fingernail on his chin and nodded towards the screen. "What are you playing?"
Stark incomprehension twisted his face into a frown. "Just a game, Lord Dio."
"I'm aware of that." He sighed and instead tapped his nails against his elbow with impatience.
"Well, F-Mega is a racing simulator. I've been playing it at an expert level for years now."
Dio hummed thoughtfully. "Oh, yes. Your stand allows you to claim the souls of those you best in your…games."
"Yes, sir." He nodded enthusiastically. "I have to keep my skills sharp, you see."
The car raced in circles ad infinitum. Dio found himself beginning to scowl. "So after you win your game," he said lowly, "you often return to it?"
"Well, yeah," D'Arby answered, forgetting decorum in his excitement to talk to the Lord Dio about videogames. "I like trying to beat my own high score. Though, the older the game, the harder it is to surpass your previous run. There's only so much room in the simulation for improvement, you know? Eventually, your game becomes perfect." He let out a long, satisfied sigh at that, and he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head. "Still, it's important to keep my skills honed. Don't want to risk getting rusty. And when you're the best, there's nothing more satisfying than beating yourself."
Dio felt the urge to reach out and pluck the man's carotid from his neck like a particularly vicious gardener would pull out a weed. He restrained himself. Instead, he muttered a noncommittal "I see."
A game to win again.
He retreated to his coffin.