The Siphon: Notes by Robin ("Stands So Far" Series)

It turns out I might be a bit of a Hamon geek.  To be fair, from what I’ve learned, there aren’t many of us left, and other than using oil to imbue my arrows with hamon, nobody’s really invented a technique in centuries.  I’ll have to pick Jojo’s brain later.

Although—right.  From what I’ve heard, maybe we’re not an endangered species anymore.  We’ll have to celebrate that one.

The Siphon was a master, probably.  It’s all due to that genius.  Evil genius, probably, but still.  The guy knew his Ripple.  Some aptitude can be passed down by bloodlines, of course, and the guy had pedigree, but still.

Life Theft Overdrive (more commonly known as Siphon)-The signature move, presumably, and also the one that deserves the evil genius moniker.  Why?  Because this move is complete batshit.  Never mind the fact that you’re just absorbing someone else’s powers and life force, with all the morality issues that entails.  Especially as he’s used it, probably, on at least one human (that Wolfram & Hart Stand User he, Signor Fugo, and Ms. Summers fought).  The life force probably has personality attached, and, well, if Stands are any indication, some powers are entirely bound up in personality.  Can’t separate the two.  Maybe what Pretender does is a weaker version (though, uh, I’m not sure what little ‘Cyborg’ told me about a Lovecraftian entity is ‘weaker’), but still, especially if that personality or personalities are at the forefront, I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to lose yourself in the rush of power and other people.  Maybe that’s what happened.  The other issue is a ‘you might blow yourself up’ issue.  We’ll use lightning for the purposes of this discussion.  Done right, channeling hamon is like having a lightning rod on a house.  The energy passes through without any damage.  Normally, you’re not controlling more energy than you can deal with, because you can only fill to capacity.  With the whole siphon thing, forget turning it up to eleven, he’s overloaded it.  So, if his breathing was interrupted just right when he was entirely full on power, he might have lost control, and you can kill yourself, trying to channel too much.  Again, it hasn’t happened in centuries, but Sendo users have a lot of old crumbly but very informative documents. 

The other half of it, the genius part, refers to how he did it.  I can get the concept behind a Ripple transfer, because hamon is sunlight is life energy, but can’t figure out how he did it.  The other other issue is how it works on things not animated by the Ripple, i.e. undead things.  I can accept as a guess that demons not negatively affected by sunlight could possibly learn Sendo and are animated by hamon, but vampires and other Undead creatures, by definition, are not.  (There are different types of zombies, so I could even stretch the imagination and say zombies that don’t melt in sunlight might have a spark of hamon reanimating them.)  But what could the Siphon have possibly been drawing out of the vampires he used this technique on?  There are definitely accounts of him doing so, though it might be an exaggeration.

Passive Ripple Healing-In many cases, someone else’s hamon has to be used for healing.  From what I understand, it’s a lot easier for a practitioner of Sendo to heal someone else than for them to heal themselves.  For one thing, it’s harder to keep steady breathing when you’re in pain, even if you’re practiced.  For another, it’s…slower, I guess.  Like a doctor, a different person can keep better track of the flow of the Ripple and the healing of the wound.  The thing is, as long as he kept up his breathing, he was healing not slowly, like most hamon users healing themselves.  Hamon can easily be used to ignore one’s limits, but he wasn’t doing that either.  He was pretty much being a Terminator.  Passive healing as long as he kept up the breathing.

As I mentioned, hamon can be used to overcome human limits, so increased strength and speed is not unheard of—but, again, it wasn’t, apparently, consciously done.  Which is harder.

I have the feeling that these things that didn’t require effort because he was loaded up on life power, but I don’t know and can’t test it.

Laser Crystal Overdrive-The last technique he used that was new was another type of distance Ripple.  Previous Sendo users have used wine or bubbles to close the distance (or, of course, the Zoom Punch).  I’ve used oil-covered arrows, which took some experimenting to find an oil that keeps the hamon active long enough to hit a target.  Usually, you need to keep in contact with something to channel the Ripple through it, but I knew that didn’t need to be true, because of the examples of William Zeppeli and Caesar Zeppeli.  Some things naturally transmit hamon, such as the yarn of the Satiporoja beetle.  In my case, I found that the same oil used for training such as for the Hell Climb Pillar can actually ‘store’ hamon just long enough for the arrow to hit its target.  In The Siphon’s case, he figured out that you can channel the Ripple into a crystal and use it like a laser.  That’s awesome enough I think I might just try it out.  Depending on the amount you channel through it, you can just use it as a kind of flashlight, or you can use it like Space Ripper Stingy Eyes to actually damage something with the laser, without being a vampire. 

Other than that, he clearly used Sunlight Yellow Overdrive to melt Undead and a variation on Ripple Beat to short-circuit an enemy’s nervous system.  Just like Joseph Joestar, he also infused his body with Ripple as a sort of trap, though it would probably just sting on a human, unlike the Siphoning.  Hamon can generally be used to sense life, though it of course doesn’t work on nonliving things like the most common enemies of Hamon-users, vampires and Pillar Men.