"You're quite the brave cat, aren't you? I don't know what you went through before, but those must have been some rough days. That's probably what gave rise to your Stand ability that lets you transform into a canine."
Avdol flashed a broad, white-toothed smile at Iggy. "I'm not sure you can understand me, but we're not planning to keep you locked up forever. From now on, just relax and be a cat, okay? No one's going to—"
"BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK!!"
Even with the iron cage between them, Avdol still took half a step back.
"No good. It's completely uncooperative."
Whether it was the feral ferocity of a wild cat or the creature understanding every word yet refusing to accept that it was, in fact, a cat—hard to say.
Compared to Iggy, still imprisoned in that cage, the other cat who'd shared it not long ago was enjoying a vastly different standard of living.
When Iggy started howling, Suzi Q scooped Yimi up before the girl could even react and carried her to the other side of the room.
"There, there, nothing to be scared of. Want a lollipop? Do you?"
"Yes."
"Here, Obaachan will unwrap it for you."
"Ma'am, please—let me handle that..."
Yimi sat nestled in Suzi Q's arms, Joseph's oversized coat draped around her like a blanket. The weather was still cold enough that letting a child run around in summer clothes was out of the question.
Setting aside the ears on her head and the tail behind her, she looked every bit like a mixed-race child who'd inherited nothing but the good genes—fair-skinned and adorable.
As for those two oddities, Joseph simply chalked them up to changes caused by her Stand. In fairness, for a man who'd personally fought Vampires, cat ears barely registered as strange.
Yimi reached for the unwrapped lollipop, but Suzi Q playfully held it just out of reach. "Nuh-uh! You have to call me 'Obaachan' first."
"Obaachan."
"Good girl! So cute."
"Phew..." Joseph exhaled. "Almost got branded as the kind of vulgar old creep who'd have a bedpan slammed on his head by the orderlies even at a five-star nursing home."
He fumbled with the prosthetic hand Suzi Q had broken, trying to get it functional again. They'd been married for decades, but when that woman took a swing, she didn't hold back one bit.
"Well, whose fault is it for not explaining properly?" Suzi Q snatched a bag of cat food away from Yimi's hands. "Oh—sweetie, you can't eat what's in that bag anymore, okay?"
A twinge of guilt flickered through her. They'd been husband and wife for all these years. How could she have doubted his character?
"Gave me quite a scare, too." Joseph studied Yimi.
The fact that she could talk proved it—she was actually a little girl whose ability let her turn into a cat.
No, wait. If he put it that way, then bringing an unaccompanied child onto a plane and flying her out of Manhattan was... basically a textbook kidnapping, wasn't it?
"Oh shit!"
"Oh shit." The little cat echoed him perfectly.
"Joseph!" Suzi Q raised her umbrella again.
That crisp little voice parroting profanity was quite possibly the worst sound she'd ever heard in her life.
Joseph ducked frantically. "That was just an expression! An expression!"
Suzi Q ignored him. She looked down at Yimi, her expression softening. "Don't worry, sweetheart. Since he brought you here, he's responsible for getting you home. Where do your mommy and daddy live?"
"In another world." Yimi answered honestly.
"Oh... Well, do you have grandparents? Or an uncle or auntie looking after you?"
"I have a nana. Also in another... world."
The two old people fell silent for several seconds. Suzi Q pressed on: "There must be some adult around you?"
"There's... a geezer." Yimi answered just as honestly.
"That doesn't sound like a very nice thing to call someone. So where is he now?"
Yimi thought about it. "Sometimes he's there. Sometimes he's not."
"I can't make heads or tails of this." Joseph scratched his head with the repaired prosthetic hand. "So why were you on that street? Is your home nearby?"
Communicating with a child under ten was proving extremely difficult.
"I'm traveling." Yimi didn't fully understand the word traveling—she only knew that System had described its purpose as helping its host travel.
She looked at Joseph and began gathering intelligence: "Do you know where Heaven is?"
Joseph crouched down to her level. "Now that's a question I can't begin to understand, let alone answer. I think I can guess, but can I ask why you're asking?"
"I need to go to Heaven. To find my mom and my nana."
"Oh, you poor little angel." Suzi Q hugged her tighter. "God, how could you..."
"Boingo."
Cairo, Egypt.
The blond man standing in the shadows set the book in his hand back on the shelf and turned his gaze downward to his most inconspicuous subordinate. "Inconspicuous" not because the boy had a forgettable face, but because he was, quite literally, a child.
"L-Lord D-D-DIO-sama." The boy dropped to one knee, head bowed, not daring to breathe.
The man he'd addressed as DIO descended the shadowed staircase in measured steps until he stood beside him.
"The power of Future Prediction—a Stand I acknowledge as remarkable, even by my standards. But if all it can do is predict without any ability to intervene in the outcome, what meaning does such power truly hold?"
Boingo's head trembled. Not merely from reverence—there was that oppressive, suffocating aura.
"P-p-prob... probably so you c-c-can prepare yourself in advance."
"Those who are prepared are happy, then?" DIO wrote the phrase in his Diary. He paused, then added a question mark at the end.
His enmity with the Joestar bloodline spanned generations, but in truth, the enemies in his eyes extended beyond the Joestar line to include something far more abstract—fate itself. Since emerging from that coffin, he'd been collecting every scrap of knowledge about how to "attain Heaven."
As for this notion that "knowing what will happen makes you happy"—he dismissed it with a sneer. That was not Heaven.
Leaving Boingo behind, DIO placed his hand on a crystal ball.
Because this body belonged to Jonathan Joestar—Joseph's grandfather—even as the dissonance between himself and this borrowed flesh remained acute, he could still, to a limited extent, invoke the Stand ability of Jonathan's descendants: Hermit Purple.
"The Joestar bloodline truly is something extraordinary."
What he sought through the crystal ball wasn't any Joestar heir. It was a substance intimately tied to the concept of "Heaven" itself. Previous attempts had yielded nothing.
But now, as his fusion with Jonathan's body deepened and his grasp of Hermit Purple gradually weakened, the image had paradoxically grown clearer.
A strange little girl with cat ears. Perhaps it was "fate" again—or something equally intangible—guiding him to catch this critical glimpse.
Fine cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of the crystal ball.
"Heh."
Population registries in this era were far from convenient. Even an organization as vast as the Speedwagon Foundation couldn't find what simply wasn't there to find.
Abrupt as it was, Yimi had been temporarily taken in by Joseph. She'd been living at the residence for several days now.
The good news was that everyone seemed to know what "Heaven" was. Somewhere in her young mind, the concept existed too—but a seven-year-old's understanding amounted to nothing more than "Heaven is a nice place." The historical myths she'd absorbed in the Holy Grail world rarely touched on this supposedly famous concept.
The bad news was that every time Yimi grabbed a random adult to ask, they put on the exact same expression: I know where Heaven is, your mommy and nana are doing just fine there, you'll understand when you're older.
"Humans are truly despicable creatures." Yimi sat on the child's bed Suzi Q had set up for her.
"Cats are even worse than humans! And you—you're clearly a person, you little brat!" From his cage, Iggy howled in dog-speech that Yimi couldn't understand.
He'd more or less gotten the hang of controlling this cat-transformation ability by now... Like hell he wanted to be a cat!
"Heading out?" Suzi Q's voice came from the doorway.
Yimi's ears shot up. She scurried over and pressed herself against the door to eavesdrop.
Were they going to Heaven?
"Going to Japan to check on Jotaro. That kid's been nothing but trouble." Joseph's voice answered. He still hadn't told Suzi Q the truth.