Santana

Towering and heavily muscled, Santana keeps his long, light-colored hair loose and bears a pair of small horns rising from the crown of his head. He goes almost entirely bare save for a modest loincloth, and a gear-shaped mark, either painted or tattooed, sits just below his right eye.

Like the rest of his kind, Santana is cold, aggressive, and aloof, yet also strikingly clever, able to take apart unfamiliar weapons and absorb new languages after only brief exposure. Kars is said to have left him behind as a watchdog, charged with guarding the secrets of the Stone Mask. He regards the humans around him with total detachment, freeing himself from his prison without a flicker of concern and dismissing them as primitive creatures reliant on tricks. Even his first taste of Joseph's Ripple leaves him unbothered enough to play with the sensation, and he stays composed under sunlight by hoisting Stroheim up as a shield. Only when Joseph rattles him with mockery does his calm crack, and true fear grips him solely as the sun begins turning him to stone.

Santana came into the world around 8,000 BC among the Pillar Men of Mexico. When Kars turned on their race and wiped out most of it, the infant Santana and Wamuu were taken in and raised by Kars and Esidisi. Judged fit only to serve as a guard, Santana was left behind while the others sailed for the old world in search of a perfect Red Stone of Aja, and so he never learned of the Ripple. He eventually sealed himself inside a temple pillar to slumber. As a Pillar Man he can reshape his own body at will, squeezing through the tiniest openings, dissolving living matter with an acidic secretion, and lashing out with elongated rib blades or leech-like scraps of flesh that drain blood.

In 1938 a Speedwagon expedition uncovers him within a Mexican pyramid, only to be betrayed by Straizo. The dormant Pillar Man is later handed to a Nazi team under Major Stroheim, whose Stone Mask experiments feed him enough prisoner blood to wake. After devouring a vampire and stunning his captors by reciting Stroheim's full name, Santana shatters his own bones to pour himself through a ventilation slit, invades a soldier's body, and cuts down the room with bullets launched from his fingertips. Joseph, disguised among the Nazis, shields the survivors with Ripple channeled through Stroheim's hair, then lets himself be swallowed so he can release that energy from within and tear the Pillar Man in two. Dragged toward the sunlight, Santana burrows into Stroheim's body to escape it, forcing the major to sacrifice himself. A final charge sends both Joseph and Santana tumbling down a well lit by reflected sun, which petrifies the creature once more. His stone remains end up locked away under ultraviolet lamps at the Speedwagon Foundation, still alive, his ultimate fate never resolved.