Ringo Roadagain

Ringo stands a touch above average with a lean frame. His light hair sweeps across his forehead to the left, and his facial hair is distinctive: a thin moustache drawn out to length, a soul patch shaped like a cartoon skull, and two narrow strips of beard framing his chin.

He favors a pale, cap-sleeved jacket with a high collar and dark gloves that leave the thumbs and index fingers bare, plus a finely made wristwatch on his right arm and trousers frilled and studded toward the ankles. As a gunman he carries a revolver with a full ammunition belt and holster, a weapon Gyro pegs as an 1874 Colt.

By the time he appears, Ringo has organized his whole life around self-improvement through combat. Regarding himself as unfinished, he chases a kind of spiritual elevation in the raw killing intent of a duel, and he binds himself to a strict code to get there. He insists on genuinely even footing, going so far as to advise his opponents on their weapons and stance so that nothing tips the fight unfairly before it starts.

He can sense the killer instinct in a person and prefers to face those who will not flinch from taking a life, since that tension is what makes a duel pure to him. He initially declines to fight Gyro, choosing Johnny instead because he reads a genuine will to kill in him. His creed, which he calls the True Man's World, closely mirrors the idea of Dark Determination, the moment a person casts off all morality to pursue a goal, and only once Gyro begins to reach that state does Ringo fall, welcoming his conqueror into that world with his final breath.

Ringo stays composed under threat, unshaken even when caught off guard or outnumbered, though he freely admits to nerves when Gaucho notes his trembling hand. He draws a sharp line between the values society imposes and the ones a man forges for himself, believing true strength lies in the latter and in walking what he calls the path of light. He dismisses Gyro as a conformist bound by his father's religious dogma, then, sensing the man's resolve harden, tries to steer him toward that path anyway. Otherwise he is gravely polite, bowing when he meets an opponent and solemnly thanking them afterward. Against a non-Stand user like Gaucho he refuses to use Mandom's rewind and simply absorbs the blow he takes, and against Stand users he lays out exactly what his own power can do, even when candor works against him.

From birth Ringo suffered a condition, most likely hemophilia, that kept his body from healing and left him bleeding heavily from the smallest scrape. His childhood was marked by loss: his father, drafted during the Civil War, deserted and died imprisoned, and the family, branded traitors, was driven across the country. At around ten years old he woke to find a uniformed intruder looming over him and the bodies of his mother and sisters below, a bloody knife left in the table. When the man tried to assault him, Ringo seized the stranger's own gun; after a coughing fit briefly cost him the weapon, he recovered it with startling speed and shot the man dead.

That killing changed him. His health began to mend as if by miracle, his old symptoms fading, and he built a personal creed around the moment, claiming he had broken through a wall into what he named the True Man's World. He spent the years that followed as a duelist committed to constant self-betterment. Three years before the race he gained his Stand, Mandom, which lets him rewind time by exactly six seconds with a turn of his watch's dial; limited as it is, the trick decides his duels. He most likely obtained it through a brush with the Devil's Palm while training alone in the desert.

During the race, Ringo waits by his shabby orchard cabin while the racers wander, all snared by Mandom, and tells them they will only escape once they kill him. Gaucho, fed up, challenges him and charges recklessly; Ringo takes a graze to the neck and answers by shooting Gaucho through the heart, then finishes him with a second round. Johnny, Gyro, and Hot Pants scheme to bring him down, but his Stand foils them, and the clash leaves Gyro and Ringo wounded while the others drop out. He admits that Valentine hired him to strip the corpse fragments off Gyro and Johnny. Gyro pursues him into the cabin for a last showdown, driving a shard of wood beneath his shoulder before ending it with a hurled steel ball. Dying, Ringo offers his opponent his last words, a greeting into the True Man's World.