Hot Pants

Tall with a middling build and short, straight hair, Hot Pants carries androgynous features that, paired with her roomy clothing, let her pass convincingly as a man. Her frame disappears under a loose striped suit layered with a long fur-lined blouse decorated in metallic flowers and leaves, with an extra panel of cloth drawn across her chest. She finishes the look with a furred deerstalker cap topped by a lone spike or tassel, fur elbow pads, assorted leg warmers, and a belt marked with the initials HP. Cream Starter stays holstered against her hip.

Hot Pants first comes across as prickly and vengeful, storming at Johnny and Gyro over supplies she believes were stolen and lashing out before hearing them out; even proven wrong, she refuses to apologize, which earns her lasting hostility from Gyro. She talks in a deliberately coarse, masculine register, referring to herself with the male pronoun ore, a habit that props up her disguise. Beneath the toughness sits deep guilt. As a girl, cornered by a bear alongside her little brother, she shoved him toward the animal to buy her own escape, and she has carried that secret ever since. Taking vows as a nun was her attempt to earn forgiveness from God and from him, and her hunt for the Corpse Parts springs from that same hope, so much so that she shows rare joy when claiming one and will gamble her life against Funny Valentine.

Hot Pants grew up in a small American town around 1867, and the defining wound of her life came in childhood, when a grizzly trapped her and her younger brother in a rocky crevice and, in panic, she pushed him toward it to save herself. Her neighbors treated the death as a tragic accident, but the truth ate at her until she left home for a convent in Italy, hoping the veil would win her forgiveness. Having gained Cream Starter along the way, she entered the service of Naples and the Vatican, who sent her into the Steel Ball Run under a false name to gather the Saint's Corpse. She placed among the leaders through the early stages, even taking first in the third.

She truly enters the story during the fourth stage, wrongly blaming Johnny and Gyro for a cow she had been fattening and spraying them down with Cream Starter before Johnny talks her out of it. The three are soon boxed into the orchard around Ringo Roadagain's cabin; Hot Pants slices at Ringo, but his time-rewinding gift undoes the wound and he shoots her instead, leaving her unconscious until Gyro finishes the gunman. While patching her up, Johnny stumbles onto the fact that she is a woman. She later quits the race to chase the Corpse Parts alone, helping Lucy Steel slip into the President's compound with a face-altering spray, killing Mike O. by filling him with air, and swapping Lucy's features with Scarlet's to fake her death.

Her guilt catches up with her in a church, where Johnny admits he has learned her true gender and she weeps for the first time, her brother's memory nearly overwhelming her through the power of Civil War before she is finally absolved. In the endgame she allies with Diego Brando to wrest the Corpse from Funny Valentine, battling waves of D4C duplicates aboard the President's train. After Diego falls, she reaches the car holding Lucy, only for Lucy's Stand, Ticket to Ride, to awaken under Valentine's control. Hot Pants becomes its first casualty, insects and a window frame driven beneath her skin to pierce her heart, and she is thrown from the speeding train to her death.