Born This Way

This Stand comes as a pair: an armored rider and the motorcycle it straddles. Wrapped in black riding leathers and a visored helmet, the figure passes for an ordinary biker until the helmet comes off, revealing a squat, robotic head that leaves it hunched. Araki gave it that jarring face so no one would mistake it for a human once unmasked. The bike is a bulky, near-armored sport model, its hubcaps stamped with flowers and its front fork stitched to echo the rider's face. A skull emblem sits under the helmet, matching the mark on the Stand of Kei's brother. When something knocks the rider loose, it hisses a Shuu and springs straight back into the saddle. Built tougher than most Stands, its frame shrugs off blows from Soft and Wet, and the machine can simply ram a person down.

Kei can mark anyone she has touched at least once, after which she is free to move about while the Stand does its work. Born This Way only shows up beside that target at the instant they open something, a door, a notebook, a phone, though never a body part like an eyelid. The act need not be deliberate: brushing an object as it opens counts, such as backing into a taxi whose door swings out or catching a thrown pen as its cap pops off. The Stand vanishes just as fast if anyone shuts the relevant object.

Once present, it summons bitterly cold, gale-force wind. The blasts can shove a grown man back and fling objects around, but the true danger is the plunging temperature, which drops far enough to start freezing a person's eyes. Sustained long enough, the wind heaps up snow and lets the Stand drive shards of ice through its victim like darts.

Kei Nijimura is the wielder of Born This Way. The power was first named Going Underground before the fourth collected volume renamed it, a history preserved in the initials GU still stitched onto Kei's outfit.