Cioccolata

Taller and sturdier than most, Cioccolata keeps his hair cropped except for the rounded tufts crowning his head, which call to mind a microbe or a clump of mold seen under a lens. Small markings speckle his cheeks, forehead, and nose, and he sports earrings alongside a dark band at his throat.

His outfit is a flashy long coat, cinched short to bare his midsection, laced in a cross shape across the chest and punched through with T-shaped gaps along the sleeves. He is most often colored with a white coat, blue lacing, gold earrings, green facial marks, and blackened lips.

Cioccolata is a gifted, manipulative sadist. Per Diavolo, he once worked as a surgeon until a supposed accident cost him his hospital post a couple of years ahead of the Vento Aureo events. In truth those deaths were no accidents: he faked diagnoses on healthy people just for the chance to cut them open, sometimes rationing anesthesia so victims woke mid-operation and he could savor their agony.

His Stand Green Day only sharpens this cruelty, seeding a merciless flesh-eating mold in anyone at all. Even Diavolo, who rarely feels revulsion, brands him the lowest kind of trash, and the rest of Passione view him as a monster. He is a compulsive gloater, forever lecturing on his so-called theory of happiness, which holds that true joy comes either from despair turning to hope or, the flavor he prefers, from watching another person sink into despair.

A brilliant student, Cioccolata as a teenager volunteered to look after bedridden elders and was even praised by the town mayor. Behind that mask he fed them tainted food and illicit drugs while whispering that no one cared for them, driving several to suicide and filming their final expressions; Diavolo later found more than twenty-five such tapes. Only after pushing nine of them to kill themselves did he resolve to become a doctor.

As a surgeon he simply moved his cruelty onto unsuspecting patients, misdiagnosing them into needless operations and mistiming their anesthetic so they roused on the table. A couple of years ahead of Vento Aureo he deliberately killed one patient, was caught and fired, yet the murder was written off as a mishap. One intended victim, Secco, he spared and kept as an underling and pet; together they slipped into Passione and awakened Stands of their own, though the Boss deemed them too volatile and untrustworthy for missions.