Ermes Costello

Ermes stands taller than most women around her and carries a toned, medium frame kept sharp by her athletic background. Her dark hair falls in braided locks fastened with a scatter of barrettes.

Two sets of long, triangular scars run near her eyes and mouth, marking her forehead and chin. She favors a yellow top with bands around her upper arms, and she once had her chest surgically altered so she could stash cash out of sight.

Behind a hard, combative surface, Ermes is proud, fiercely loyal, and stubborn to a fault. She never backs away from a brawl and will gamble almost anything to gain an edge, whether that means wagering her own organs or slicing her body apart with her Stand despite knowing the painful reunion that must follow.

Her endurance borders on the absurd. She stayed upright after Marilyn Manson claimed her liver and pushed through the borrowed agony of Thunder McQueen's suicide attempts. She holds a strong, if brutal, sense of justice, punishing anyone who wrongs her without restraint.

Bluntness defines how she speaks. She talks with rough familiarity, curses freely, and has a temper short enough to send her shouting at the slightest provocation. Toward Sports Maxx, the man behind her sister's death, that anger hardens into a readiness to kill.

Before prison. Ermes grew up poor, the daughter of an immigrant father of Mexican descent whose family ran a small restaurant in the slums. Her sister Gloria, ten years her senior, eventually inherited the place. At seventeen she clashed with Gloria, who wanted her working the counter while Ermes chased a sports scholarship and a way out. Fleeing into the city one night after a quarrel, she was spotted by Sports Maxx just after he had committed a murder. Gloria caught him in the act and testified, and police negligence cost her life for it. With her family gone and Maxx handed only a light sentence, Ermes deliberately committed a string of armed robberies to land herself in Green Dolphin Street Prison, where he was held.

Stone Ocean. She first crossed paths with Jolyne Cujoh while the two were briefly held side by side, and Jolyne's blunt honesty won her respect; soon after, Jolyne's newly awakened Stone Free saved Ermes from a beating, sealing their bond. A pendant grants Ermes her own Stand, Kiss, able to duplicate any object she marks with a peelable sticker. She hunts down the janitor Thunder McQueen over stolen money, endures the shared torment of his cursed ability, and finally puts him down. Alongside Jolyne she confronts the disc-guarding Foo Fighters, who becomes an ally, and loses a rigged wager to Miraschon that costs her a tooth, her cash, and her liver before Jolyne wins them back.

Ermes at last avenges Gloria by tearing apart Sports Maxx's reanimated corpse. Gravely hurt, she recovers in time to stand among the final fighters against Enrico Pucci, where she dies in the struggle, her body left adrift and decaying under the priest's accelerated flow of time. After Emporio brings Pucci down, a counterpart of Ermes surfaces in the reshaped world that follows.