Whitesnake

Whitesnake stands roughly as tall and lean as Pucci himself, dressed only sparsely in black beneath a mask that hides its face up to the nose and climbs into a jagged, crown-like row of peaks overhead, a design Araki based on the figure of an executioner. Pale skin runs in narrow horizontal bands, and on alternating stripes the letters GACT repeat, standing for the four nucleobases of DNA, with a delta swapped in for adenine. Its irises look as though they are dripping. Nearly every appearance renders it in white and black, and the anime occasionally swaps in a CGI model.

Even under Pucci's command the Stand carries its own awareness, and it wears a cold, contemptuous, spiteful streak. It serves as his voice and stand-in throughout Green Dolphin Street Prison, keeping the guards and staff in line while the priest himself observes from a safe distance.

Being a long-distance Stand, Whitesnake reaches out roughly twenty meters, which lets Pucci operate unseen across the prison. Even so it hits with the force of a close-range type, driving precise, lethal strikes thanks to its own powerful ego, and it can trade blows with a Stand like Stone Free without quite overpowering it. Pucci therefore leans on its stranger gifts to spring ambushes and finish foes in a single stroke.

One such gift is illusion. The Stand secretes an acid that slowly digests matter the way stomach fluids do, and while a victim melts away they drift through a convincing dream, able to break free only by catching contradictions between the fantasy and the real world. Because that dissolving takes considerable time, its speed rating sits low. It can also weave detailed disguises, once posing as Weather Report to close in on Jolyne and the Green Baby.

Its signature power, though, is the crafting of discs. Whitesnake can draw out part or all of a person's psyche as a solid disc and slot it into someone else, provided it touches the target and takes the time to pull the disc free, since a partial extraction fails. Memory discs hold a person's recollections and Stand discs hold their Stand; either can be pushed into another head to be read or wielded, and Pucci can even saddle a victim with a harmful power, as when he forces a water-boiling Stand onto the water-dependent Foo Fighters. He can plant discs of pure instruction that compel obedience or trigger a body to explode, turn a man into a living music player, or strip a single sense such as sight. Losing one's Stand and memory discs drops a person into a near-dead coma; returning a memory disc revives them, but a restored Stand disc does not, and a body left with only its Stand slowly wastes away, with Weather Report the lone exception.

Enrico Pucci is the sole wielder of Whitesnake, and the Stand grew out of his longing to preserve his late sister's soul and memory. The melting-dream effect draws on the X-Files episode Field Trip, while the delta replacing adenine hints at a missing piece, a quiet foreshadowing of the forms he later takes, C-Moon and then Made in Heaven.