The Grateful Dead

"What's the big deal, anyway? Every year, passenger planes crash all around the world. This won't be as brutal as those!"

- Prosciutto

The Grateful Dead (ザ・グレイトフル・デッド) is the Stand of Prosciutto featured in Vento Aureo. It has the simple but deadly ability to rapidly age any living organism, with the rate of aging being proportional to the organism's body temperature.

Appearance
The Grateful Dead is a humanoid torso covered with eyes. It has no mouth. It lacks legs but has large arms, and it walks on its hands, where each has four huge metal-like and segmented fingers evenly spaced around its circumference. Hanging from its waist, where its legs should be, are four segmented tentacles. The eyes all over its body give it the look of a yokai. Araki originally intended to draw the lower half of its body but changed his mind.

The Grateful Dead emits a light mist, but it is unknown if the mist is linked to its power. The anime adaptation seems to imply that the two are connected, as Pesci reacts with shock and fear when he sees it manifest.

In the digitally colored manga, The Grateful Dead is portrayed as purple, with yellow sclera on the eyes, and orange fingers. The Grateful Dead's appearance in the PS2 game is mostly the same, but the Stand's mouthpiece is yellow.

In the TV anime adaptation, its body is ice blue, the metallic parts of its body are dark purple, and its eyes have lime green sclera with yellow pupils. The anime adaptation also changes the shape of its fingers, being more claw-like in appearance.

Unlike most humanoid Stands, The Grateful Dead is shown directly walking on the ground with its hands.

Abilities
The Grateful Dead's greatest asset is its ability to forcefully age people over a large area, a terrifying power because of its potential for a massacre.

Thankfully the aging can be slowed, and while The Grateful Dead isn't weak, it isn't a match for other close range Stands like Sticky Fingers.

Accelerated Aging
The Grateful Dead has the ability to cause organisms to age physically and mentally at an accelerated rate.

There are two ways The Grateful Dead can deploy its power. The first mode is to spread the aging over a large area and indiscriminately attack friends and foes, which is dangerous for Prosciutto's companions. The second mode is to direct its power precisely by grabbing someone, in which case the aging is faster than one can react. The activation of this ability manifests itself as mist spreading from The Grateful Dead although it is unknown if the mist is directly connected to the aging. When under the effect of The Grateful Dead, people age rapidly with all the effects it implies: their skin develops wrinkles, their teeth begin to fall out, the tips of the limbs start to necrose, the bones and joints shrink, and their cognitive ability is reduced. Infants would succumb to the effect of "aging", with their skin wrinkling and hair falling out, rather than merely growing into an adult quickly. Even fruits and flower wither and dry up.

Because the spirit is also aged by The Grateful Dead, enemy Stands are also weakened. Their power and stamina are sapped, and even a powerful close-range Stand like Sticky Fingers can become slower than the rather slow The Grateful Dead. Prosciutto is normally immune to The Grateful Dead and can stay young inside its range. However, he can freely toggle the aging on himself, notably fooling Mista into thinking he's a mere civilian.

The rate at which people age is dependent on their body heat. The warmer one's body is, the faster they age. Because of minute differences between men and women's bodies, women also age more slowly. Thus things warming the body like intense physical activity will accelerate the aging but exposure to cold, like ingesting ice, will counter and reverse The Grateful Dead's power immediately, although both effects balance themselves and insufficient coldness will not have an effect.

Gallery
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