Normally, the worst thing Joules had to wake up to was the disagreeable shriek of his phone’s alarm. As his body rebooted, his sense of hearing came back first. He heard shrieks of pain. A man begged for mercy, replaced with wet gurgling somewhere thankfully far away.

Smell came second. The scent of bleach and cheap disinfectant burned his nostrils. But a different odor mingled with the sterile chemicals. He smelled perfume, soft, subdued, yet also hot like sweat and grime. He’d smelled something like that before. It was the smell of sex.

He briefly struggled to mesh the two burgeoning senses, but couldn’t reconcile the sick cries with the libido-stroking smell. His brain, still groggy, ignored the conflicting information as more of his facilities came back online.

His mouth was dry, and tasted like how the room smelled: sterile, sour, like a hospital. He smacked his lips, stimulating his salivary glands to coat his parched throat. Hunger rumbled deep within him. How long had he been out? He had no answer, so he let himself continue.

Something metal dug into his wrists, and he realized that his wrists hung limp over shackles binding his wrists. He tugged in vain; the shackles were bound by thick chains to the wall. Throbbing pain pounded against the inside of his skull like an angry neighbor. Even moving his eyes sent bolts of lightning throughout him.

As his eyes adjusted to the harsh fluorescent light, his predicament came into stark focus. He was in a bright room with steel walls and a cold tile floor. A single door stood at the opposite end of the room, so close. He pulled on the chains binding him, but they were welded to the wall and didn’t budge.

“Oi, you’re awake then,” came a woman’s voice.

He froze. Everything was coming back to him. He’d gone out for a drink, got in a fight, fell asleep, been taken home by a cop… Instinctively, he moved away from the woman’s voice, but the cop - or rather whoever it was pretending to be a cop - was a man. He turned towards the voice. The woman looked to be about his age. She had long hair dyed a vibrant purple that came down past her shoulders. Blood trickled down her face from a split lip, similarly purple. She, like Joules, was chained by her wrists to the wall beside him. Past her was another pair of shackles, though those were empty.

“Good,” she said. “I was getting bored.”

“Where am I?” Joules asked.

She yawned. “Beats me. Doesn’t matter much right now. We need to get out of here.”

Joules pulled on his binds once more, as if to reveal some hidden information to the woman. “And how are we supposed to do that?”

“You’re a Stand user, right?” she asked. “Bust these chains. My Stand isn’t strong enough.”

Joules’ head throbbed as he tried piecing everything together. The not-a-cop had called him a Stand user as well, but he hadn’t known what that meant. Their captor was presumably also a Stand user. He remembered the small, black and white striped creature that had flooded the car with the yellow gas just before he passed out.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “None of this makes any sense. I don’t know what a ‘Stand’ is.”

“Bullshit,” the woman said. “I can tell you’ve got a stand. Now’s not really the time to be keeping secrets.

Did she mean [Do Dope Fuck Hope]? The ghostly figure had single handedly won him his brawl against the bouncer at the bar, but it hadn’t reappeared since then. Thinking back, it would have been pretty handy of [Do Dope Fuck Hope] to have helped him in the car. If [Do Dope Fuck Hope] could break a man’s wrist, it probably could have broken the door or done something to sabotage the car. It similarly could probably get the two of them out of the dungeon, but, just as before, he couldn’t feel it.

He closed his eyes, trying to slip into how he felt on a normal day. The loneliness, the fatigue, the weight of expectation and the rush of missed deadlines. He called out for [Do Dope Fuck Hope], but he received nothing in return except for a blistering heat on his left shoulder.

“I can’t,” Joules said, “it won’t come out.”

Though the woman tried hiding her disappointment, it spilled out over her face. “Keep trying anyway,” she said. “We don’t have all day. What can your Stand even do?”

He wasn’t sure exactly what [Do Dope Fuck Hope] could do, and was only marginally aware of what it had done. It took an ichor of some kind from inside Joules and injected it in the bouncer, causing the big man to collapse. Beyond that, he was in the dark. He explained what he knew to the woman.

“That could help,” she said, perking up slightly. All things considered, she seemed to be taking everything much better than Joules expected. “I tried using my Stand, but it won’t work on him.”

“You have one of those ghosts too?”

“Of course I do. That’s how I know you’re a Stand user. That’s also how he found us. Stand users attract other Stand users. We’re all connected. I don’t know why or how, but that’s what they told us at the Foundation academy. Here, I’ll show you.”

If Joules hadn’t been chained to the wall, he would have stumbled backwards in shock. Standing unbound behind the woman was a hot pink humanoid figure, not translucent like [Do Dope Fuck Hope], but as solid as anything else real he’d seen before. Two cat-like ears and a floating crown topped the Stand’s head. Where its eyes should have been, two $ symbols rested. Halos of bright yellow floated where the ears would have been. It had the general shape of a woman, two arms with long-nailed hands, but the legs taped off into sharp points where feet should be.

“This is my Stand: [Gold Digger],” the woman said with a proud smile. “And I’m Lorelei.”

Joules couldn’t take his eyes off the Stand hovering above the ground. Its movement seemed too slow, like his brain couldn’t process it. Each movement of its head or arms, even the fingers left a blurry after image. He felt hot. Sweat began to bead on his forehead. An unquestionable urge, primal and hungry, rose up from the depths and broke the dam in his brain. Then it vanished, and the feeling was gone.

Joules panted, gasping for air as if he’d been choked. “What the hell was that?”

Lorelei couldn’t stifle her laughter. “Sorry, but it looks like you like me.”

His cheeks flushed, and he suddenly felt very embarrassed. Lorelei didn’t miss a beat.

“Don’t worry. [Gold Digger] can have that effect on people. [Gold Digger] intensifies lustful feelings. That pressure you felt was my Stand. It’s okay. Lots of people like me.”

He didn’t like having his unconscious feelings laid bare like that. It was true that Lorelei was attractive, but it was hardly the time to be thinking about that. The scenery was all wrong. The least she could have done was buy him dinner first.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “Why won’t it work on Davis?”

“Well it only works if the person’s attracted to me, at least as far as I’m aware. He might be gay.”

“Or he might just not like you,” Joules offered, though Lorelei seemed to doubt that.

“Really?”

He gave his best shot at a shrug given the circumstances. “Wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve heard today.”

Lorelei shook her head. “I don’t think so. [Gold Digger]’s got a good track record. You wouldn’t believe how many other girls it works on too.”

He tried not to think about it.

“I’m Joules, by the way,” he said. The awkwardness still hung over him. He’d never met someone under circumstances like this. Despite the panic gnawing away at the back of his mind, he was growing accustomed to the mounting absurdity of it all. I certainly put his other problems into perspective.

“Okay, Joules,” Lorelei said, “Any luck with your Stand?”

“Nope,” he replied, not bothering to hide his frustration. “I don’t know how any of this works. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.”

“Your Stand is just a representation of your spirit,” Lorelei explained. “You don’t have to do anything. It should just work.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Is there a muscle or something I need to flex?”

By the look on her face, Joules could tell she was growing impatient. Clearly, things were not proceeding according to her plan.

“You’ve used it before, right? How’d you do it then? Just do that again.”

“It just happened on its own,” Joules explained. “Some guy put his hand on me and it just appeared. I don’t know after that. Nothing happened when I got grabbed by Davis.”

“Wel you need to figure it out soon,” she said. “I think he’s almost done with the other guy.”

Other guy?

Joules remembered the screams and cries he’d heard just as he’d woken up. It wasn’t Lorelei, and if she couldn’t affect Davis, then it wasn’t him either. There must have been someone else. There were no more screams coming from outside the room. His heart plunged into his stomach at the implication.

“Was he another Stand user?” Joules asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Or at least he had the potential to be one. He was here when I woke up. It looked like he’d been here a while. Not much of a talker really.”

So not everybody has a Stand, and some people only have the potential to have one.

Bit by bit, he filed away everything Lorelei had to say about Stands. To his untrained ear, she seemed to have a good grasp on everything, and when it came to ghostly spirit-projections, he needed all the information he could get his hands on.

Of course, all the knowledge in the world wouldn’t matter much if he didn’t live to use any of it.

“So, I guess Davis is a Stand user,” Joules said. “He called it [Yellowcard] in the car before it knocked me out.”

“Same here. He pulled me over for speeding. As soon as I got in the car, I knew something was wrong.”

“So what do we do?”

Lorelei rolled her eyes. “No idea. I was really banking on you actually having a Stand.”

He’d only know about Stands for a short time, but he already felt hurt at the assertion that he couldn’t perform. He’d gone from unexplainable superhuman power to bottom of the food chain in a single conversation. Par for the course, really.

“If you take out a Stand, the user goes with it,” Lorelei explained. “And vice-versa. The damn thing’s so small though, and I’m pretty useless without [Gold Digger]. I don’t really know what [Yellowcard] is capable of to be honest. I figure we’d need to be quick if we’re gonna make moves before [Yellowcard] can bug bomb us again.”

Now, Joules empathized with how the bouncer must have felt after tangling with [Do Dope Fuck Hope]. Fighting an enemy you had no concept of, no frame of reference, and no experience to draw upon sounded insurmountable.

“He said something about a ‘time out’ before I went under,” Joules said. “Know what that means?”

“No clue,” she answered, “but he said the same thing to me. It might be related to [Yellowcard]. If we could figure out what he meant, we’ll stand a better chance.”

The sound of a lock tumbling echoed throughout the room. Through the small window of the door, Joules saw a dark figure.

“Well, we better think of something fast, because I think he’s here.” Joules tried to sound brave, but the words caught in his throat like a scared boy. He tried once more to summon his stand, but the pain in his shoulder was the only response.

To be continued...