Carmel

In old age Carmel was a tall woman with a broad, deeply lined face and a squared jaw. Long wavy gray hair framed her features, and she wore lipstick beneath dark blue nun's robes trimmed with pale blue frills, paired with a matching headdress. A cigarette was almost always between her fingers or her lips. Decades earlier, at forty-three, she had blonde hair, smooth skin, and no lipstick, and was regarded as a beauty.

Carmel was a calculating dealer who gathered all kinds of children purely to resell them. She prized ties to the influential and powerful, staging a public act with the Marines to gain a foothold in Elbaph and a supply of higher-value orphans. Her endless motherly smile was pure performance; she privately admitted she could not stand the children and found the loving-mother role exhausting. Proud of her trade, she was never shy about citing her own successes when bargaining.

She entered the Underworld child market around the age of thirty, roughly one hundred thirteen years before the present. After the Giant Warrior Pirates disbanded and some were captured, she conspired with the government to fake a merciful rescue, weeping pleas for peace between the races that fooled the giants and earned her a home on Elbaph. There she opened the Sheep's House and, once every two years, handed an orphan to the World Government to be molded into a Marine or Cipher Pol agent, even providing the Marines their first giant recruit, John Giant. She took in the abandoned five-year-old Linlin and forgave her every rampage. During the island's fasting festival Linlin snapped, fatally wounded the hero Jorul, and set fires that Carmel quenched by spawning the sun homie Pandora from a shard of her own soul, the power of the Soru Soru no Mi.

Carmel bargained with the giants to take Linlin away and relocated the orphanage to another island, deciding that selling the immensely valuable girl to Cipher Pol would be her final deal before retirement. At Linlin's sixth birthday party, however, Carmel and every other child vanished as Linlin devoured the croquembouche; that the Soru Soru no Mi passed to Linlin confirms Carmel's death. Only two ever saw what happened, a watching giant and the cook Streusen. Linlin, ignorant of the truth, kept a portrait of Carmel at every Tea Party, and its destruction by Brook later sent the Emperor into a vengeful breakdown.