Death Thirteen

Death Thirteen, occasionally written as DEATH 13, serves Mannish Boy during Stardust Crusaders and answers to the Death card of the Major Arcana, hence the thirteenth number in its title. Fittingly, its silhouette is nearly a copy of the tarot image it stands for.

The Stand looms as a cloaked figure under a dark robe, its face hidden behind a grinning jester mask whose eyes curl downward, a look drawn from Venetian carnival masks. Metal gauntlets, shoulder guards, a collar, and a tall hat complete the outfit, and it wields an oversized scythe. Under the mantle there is only emptiness: apart from its head and arms it has no solid frame, so blows aimed at the cloth pass straight through nothing. As a projection of its master's mind, it echoes his crude, cruel streak, mocking and torturing its prey and once forcing Kakyoin to swallow eyeballs purely for the horror of it. It likes to cry out Lali-ho as it works.

What sets this Stand apart is that it can act only within a dream, so its quarry must first be asleep near Mannish Boy. Anyone who dozes off close by, human or otherwise, is pulled into a sprawling amusement park of Ferris wheels and coasters, along with whatever they happened to be wearing or holding. That element of ambush makes it terribly deadly, and the Joestar group only lived through the ordeal by luck.

Inside the dream, sleepers cannot call on their own Stands, since a slumbering spirit sits defenseless, leaving them helpless. The one loophole is that a Stand kept active before its user fell unconscious carries over into the dream intact. Death Thirteen otherwise commands the entire dreamscape, spawning objects from nothing, building killing machines from ordinary gadgets, and reshaping the world however it pleases. It cannot always tell a real intruder from its own fabrications, and it wrongly assumed Hierophant Green was another fake until the Stand proved genuine.

Every injury the Stand inflicts with its scythe, up to and including a lethal one, transfers onto the victim's flesh in the waking world, and it can reverse the process to heal if pushed. No one can rouse themselves from within, but an outsider can wake them and buy time until the next time they sleep. Survivors forget the dream entirely, retaining only a lingering dread of a nightmare, unless they managed to bring a Stand inside, in which case the memory stays. Practically unbeatable while its foes cannot fight back, it is nonetheless frail once challenged by an active Stand, relying almost entirely on scythe swings, which is how Hierophant Green cut it down.

Mannish Boy is the wielder, an assassin who wears the guise of a harmless baby. His disguise is both his shield and his weakness: while awake his targets suspect nothing, but the Stand strikes only in sleep, and his infant body leaves him powerless if anyone catches on before they drift off. The pairing has been likened to Freddy Krueger, another killer who hunts through dreams, and its nightmares resemble the night terrors that afflict small children.