Tower of Gray

Tower of Gray appears as a large, dark stag beetle roughly the size of a hand, its shell etched with intricate patterns. Hidden within its mouth is a toothed secondary jaw that can spring outward, and it also carries teeth despite its insect form. It is usually drawn with red eyes, a jet-black shell, and blue markings. The Stand answers to the Tarot card The Tower, an omen of a journey broken by the unexpected and of chaos. It shows no character of its own beyond its user's will, and its method is to use speed and its second mouth to rip out a foe's tongue. Avdol notes that it stages many deaths as accidents, blamed for arson, plane and train wrecks, and lately a disaster in England claiming around three hundred lives.

Small and fragile, Tower of Gray offsets its frailty with astonishing speed and agility, and its concealed jaw lends it unexpected killing force. That secondary jaw extends into a long stinger dubbed the Tower Needle, which drives through flesh with enough power to tear victims apart or bore straight through a skull, letting the Stand slay several people in moments.

Its speed is its greatest asset. The beetle outmaneuvers even fast Stands like Star Platinum and slips through Hierophant Green's Emerald Splash again and again unharmed, and Gray Fly boasts that a ring of guns firing at point-blank range still could not touch it. Its flight control runs to writing words in cursive on the wing. The one real weakness is an attack it never sees, as when Hierophant Green seizes it unawares with an extending appendage.

Gray Fly is the sole user of Tower of Gray, striking at the Joestar Group early in their journey. Araki drew inspiration from imagining the nuisance of an insect trapped aboard a flying airplane. The English disaster the Stand is said to have caused may echo the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Britain, which fell in the same year Stardust Crusaders is set.