La Casa Verde (ラ・カサ・ヴェルデ (緑の家), Ra Kasa Verude, lit. The Green House) is the Stand of Dos Santos, featured in the light novel El Aleph.
It can manipulate rhizomes to grow abnormally quickly, destroying its surroundings and then creating an entire man-eating forest in seconds around Dos Santos.
Appearance
La Casa Verde looks like a radish with many taproots. Light slips through it as if its body is made of water. It can also solidify itself, but not all at once. When it solidifies, it scatters dry wood chips like how salt water leaves behind salt crystals when evaporating.[2] The forests that it creates consist of real plants which can be seen by non-Stand users.[1]
Personality
The Stand acts covertly, sneaking around and hiding in the shadows that its trees make. It reveals itself when manipulating its aerial roots.[2]
Abilities
La Casa Verde is a naturally calamitous ability allowing Dos Santos to change the entire landscape around him to a forest that he can use to his advantage, essentially representing both destruction and rebirth. He can wipe out an entire armed police force and their armored vehicles,[3] as well as easily capture two skilled Ripple users by manipulating the roots around him.[1]
Rhizome Manipulation
The Stand controls the growth of rhizomes, making them grow extraordinarily quickly. When La Casa Verde is activated, the ground rumbles loudly like an earthquake. Suddenly, trees burst out through the ground, curving and wrapping around each other. The roots quickly extend, spreading all over the ground and walls, transforming the area into a forest. The Stand's range is within 10 meters of its user. When Dos Santos summons it on a man-made bridge, it transforms the landscape into being comparable to the "Casa del Arbor" tree house within a forest.[1]
Dos Santos can freely manipulate the plants and roots produced by the rhizomes to target his opponents. Even if one root is chopped, the remaining roots and trees swarm their opponents, extending out from the walls and ground in all directions like multiple snakes.[1] He can also ride on the aerial roots to freely move across the air, appearing as if he is flying. He wraps his hands and feet with the roots to provide support.[4]
Joaquín Ruiz-Jorruda deduces that the aerial roots have roughly six different classifications:[1]
- Capturing Roots: Basic aerial roots that attack and coil around their prey.
- Defensive Roots: Aerial roots that serve as a foothold for defending attacks against its user.
- Prop Roots: Aerial roots that wrap around the trunk of a tree to give it strength.
- Respiratory Roots: Aerial roots that radiate or droop down to take oxygen into the forest without being involved in offensive or defensive activities.
- Assimilatory Roots: Aerial roots that bind captives to tree trunks and assimilate their nutrients.
- Auxiliary Roots: Aerial roots that assist the capturing roots by striking their prey like a whip or trapping prey who attempt to flee.
Constriction and Nutrient Absorption
All of the trees that grow in the forest are strangler figs, which are part of the mulberry family. They are massive evergreen trees that are also found in the Peruvian Amazonia. Strangler figs are parasitic plants that coil themselves around other plants and trees, strangling their host tree to adapt to forests where there is a competition for sunlight. After the seeds germinate, the seedlings grow roots into the ground, branch out, tear through asphalt and concrete, and strangle other plants to gain sunlight through the tree canopy. When the aerial roots hang down and reach the ground, they grow roots again and eventually become the trunk.
The roots wrap around the necks, arms, and ankles of whoever is trying to escape, constricting them. Unlike the real trees in nature, La Casa Verde gives the trees carnivorous properties. With La Casa Verde manipulating a tree's aerial roots, it can strangle humans on the spot or entangle and assimilate their bodies into the surface of the trunk, where they become nutrients for the tree. The human bodies will dry up and appear as if they are human-shaped carvings in the tree trunk.[1]
Chapters
Novel Appearances- El Aleph Chapter 4: IV - Peru Arc (1st mentioned)
- El Aleph Chapter 9: IX - Peru Arc (1st full appearance)
- El Aleph Chapter 10: X - Peru Arc
- El Aleph Chapter 11: XI - Peru Arc (Mentioned only)
- El Aleph Chapter 18: XVIII - Final Arc (Mentioned only)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 El Aleph Chapter 9: IX - Peru Arc
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 El Aleph Chapter 11: XI - Peru Arc
- ↑ El Aleph Chapter 4: IV - Peru Arc
- ↑ El Aleph Chapter 10: X - Peru Arc