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Franky came up with his first invention when he was four. There’d been abortive attempts before then, a horn tied to a stray cat’s tail, a saucepan planted in a cactus pot, a hat sculpted from the ribs of an old umbrella, but they had lacked purpose. Divine inspiration struck at last when he found a discarded guitar in an old scrapyard where he’d been looking for rats. He took the guitar home, along with other odds and ends, and he got to work.
“Saien!” Judge called out. “Can you please collect the insufferable fruit of your loins? He’s made a mess of the living room again.”
Saien was Franky’s father, a position that gave him no particular privileges nor responsibilities, insofar as Franky could tell. That didn’t stop Judge from calling on him whenever Franky got on his nerves, which happened a lot.
Saien emerged from his cabin, still clad in his bathrobe, even though it was almost noon. “Okay, okay, no need for theatrics,” he said, rubbing his eyes underneath his sunglasses. “What’s this?”
Even though Saien’s parental status didn’t mean much to him, Franky found him much more intimidating than the other scientists. Unlike Judge, Caesar and Vegapunk, whom Franky instinctively understood to be dorks even though there was no one around to bully them, Saien was cool. He dressed like a punk under his lab coat and wore sunglasses all the time, even indoors. He had a robot arm that could light up, release clouds of steam or launch rocket missiles. At night, he hosted a popular broadcast where he’d tell funny stories, play music from his extensive collection of dials and sometimes improvise songs of his own. Lying in his hammock one day, Franky had once decided that he would be cool like his father when he grew up. No—not just cool but better than cool, so cool he would need to invent a whole new word for it, when the time was right.
“I made a new music instrument,” he said, staring solemnly at his father from behind the improbable structure he’d built out of rods, pans and guitar strings.
“Yeah?” Saien yawned. “Nice work, kid. Now put it away.”
“No,” Franky said. This was it: his one chance to prove to his father that they were alike. If he failed, he’d grow up to be like Judge, already a fussy old man in his twenties, drinking tea without sugar and wearing turtlenecks and complaining about non-existent breezes.
“Alright, alright,” Saien said. “So what’s it do, then?” He was humoring Franky, which was an improvement over dismissal, but not by much.
“You play it like this,” Franky said, running a hammer up and down the guitar strings, which produced a delicate and eerie sound. “Or like this.” He smashed the hammer down on one of the pans. Guitar strings jangled as the vibration ran up the entire structure, and it looked, for a moment, as though it might collapse, though Franky’s calculations had proven correct, and it withstood the test.
“Great, just what we needed,” Judge said. “Another diva with delusions de chanteur.”
“Shut up,” Saien told him without looking away from Franky. “Sit down. No, scratch that. Go get Caesar or Vegapunk. Then you can sit down.”
Judge looked like he wanted to object, but in addition to being the coollest member of MADS, Saien was also the strongest by a fair margin, and he did not hesitate to remind the others of the fact whenever they challenged the pecking order. “Fine,” Judge said, leaving the room with a huff. He returned a few moments later with a grumbling Caesar and a baffled but beaming Vegapunk. “What’s this?”
“Impromptu concert,” Saien said. “Attendance is mandatory.” With a gesture, he ordered the scientists onto the sofa. He himself remained leaning against the door-frame and lit himself a cigar. “Well, what are you waiting for, kid? Show us what you can do.”
Franky hadn’t counted on an audience of this size. He froze, hammer in hand, heart beating so fiercely in his chest that he thought he might die. Then Saien nodded at him, and Franky realized that he didn’t have to play for the whole room. He could play for an audience of one: his father. “Listen to this,” he said, bringing the hammer down again on his creation, and Saien grinned.
To tell the truth, Franky’s musical number didn’t meet his own high expectations. For one, too focused on designing his new instrument, he’d forgotten to compose a song ahead of time, and the beat and lyrics he improvised on the spot were a little disjointed. The sound his instrument made evolved in unpredictable ways as his hammer dented the metal pans and loosened the guitar strings. His audience’s attitude was also distracting. Caesar and Judge shifted in their seats and sometimes glanced at their watches, though Saien’s glare would call them back to attention right away.
Eager to conclude this show that had proven to be more than he’d bargained for, Franky brought down the hammer with decisive energy over the few intact guitar strings that remained. Battered by his musical efforts, the structure quaked, tottered, and collapsed with a deafening clang. Pots and pans rolled all over the living room, one smacking Caesar between the horns on its way down and another coming to rest at Vegapunk’s feet.
“That’s supposed to happen,” Franky explained. “It’s an instrument that can only be played once.”
Vegapunk clapped enthusiastically. Saien also clapped, more ponderously, and glared at Judge and Caesar until they followed suit. “Are we done here?” Caesar asked. “I’ve got wildlife to poison.”
Without waiting for an answer, Vegapunk left his seat. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a clone that could listen to music for us while we keep working?” he said airily over his shoulder as he left the room. This was missing the point, insofar as Franky was concerned, and he could tell from Saien’s expression that his father felt the same way.
Since their colleague had made his exit without repercussions, Judge and Caesar slunk away. Saien ignored them. “Wait here a moment, kid.”
He vanished into his bedroom and returned a few moments later with two guitars, one of which he tossed to Franky. “Before you start making up new rules, you have to learn the ones that already exist,” he said as he sat down on the sofa with the other guitar. “Now listen up. This is what’s called a ‘chord.’”
Franky’s early childhood education had not been entirely neglected. Disgusted at having to share a roof with an illiterate, Judge had taught him to read. Vegapunk had recruited him to tend to his plants, and he would talk to himself while Franky worked, allowing Franky some insight into the workings of his mind. Caesar had sneaked him vials full of mysterious liquids and gases without specifying whether they should be mixed, consumed or thrown away as far as possible, thereby instilling in him the basic principles of trial-and-error.
Nevertheless, Franky felt like a blocked steam valve, vibrating with a pent-up creative energy that had nowhere to go. He was perpetually talked at, lectured, experimented on. Seldom did he get the chance to say or do anything in return. And yet, there was so much he wanted to share! Ideas would strike him at the strangest moments, at mealtimes, in the shower, in the middle of the night, and he’d run to his notebooks to write them down before he forgot them. His cabin was filled with schematics of the prodigious machines that he’d build one day, once he was trusted with a lab of his own. Fabulous weapons, vehicles and robots fought for space on the walls around his hammock and dreamed of the day when they would fly, swim or explode into the real world. More than a laboratory, though, Franky wished he had someone with whom he could share the fruits of his labour.
The act of creation is, at heart, a social one. To create is to tell other people about ideas no one has ever had before, possibilities they had previously thought impossible, and to hope for an echo of the same wonder and excitement that moves the creator. To create, however, is also lonely. Many times, as he toiled over an equation that exceeded his current abilities, Franky wished that he had guidance. An idea that he’d first taken for a stroke of genius struck him, the next moment, as the ravings of a lunatic, and he would have done anything for someone to look at his notes and give him a second opinion. At last, driven half-mad with frustration, he resolved to initiate his father into his secret world.
Franky would only get one chance to impress Saien. He had to get it right. With a cutthroat ruthlessness, he pored through his notes, discarding all his ideas as trivial, insane or hopelessly flawed, until only one was left. His masterpiece, a work of visionary genius over which he had toiled for many days and sleepless nights, recalibrating his calculations and redoing his sketches until he was almost satisfied with them.
Saien raised his goggles to inspect the schematics Franky had handed him. “It’s a, uh—”
“A fart-powered jetpack,” Franky said modestly. “I’m gonna use it to fly to the sky islands.”
“Right.” Saien clenched his cigar between his teeth as he shuffled through the document. “You’re gonna have a hard time generating enough air to give you a consistent lift.”
“That’s why the user has to adopt a cola-based diet,” Franky said, pointing at his notes.
“Hmm.” Saien studied the schematics in silence while Franky waited, in an agony of suspense. As he was about to slink away in defeat, his father pulled a pen from his lab coat’s pocket, made a few corrections to the sketches and scribbled some annotations in the margins. “Give that a try,” he said, handing Franky the document back. “I’m not convinced this is gonna work, given the limitations of the human body, but it’ll improve your chances.”
Franky stared at the notes in disbelief. He would have liked to hug the notebook, if not his father, but he couldn’t run the risk of ruining the fragile promise of mutual respect that had begun to take shape between them. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
Saien nodded and turned back to the sea he’d been contemplating. “Hey, kid?” he said.
Franky lingered, hand on the doorknob. “Yeah?”
“If you get it to work, come and show me.” Saien threw the nub of his cigar into the ocean. “Those guys aren’t gonna believe it.”
Franky had a dog called Test Subject. Caesar had purchased the dog to use in one of his experiments but, as was often the case, he’d gotten attached to her, putting off her vivisection, day after day, until it had become something of an inside joke. “Gotta fatten you up for the big day,” Saien would say as he fed her scraps at mealtimes. “A lady always knows how to dress for special occasions,” Judge would say as he tied ribbons around her neck.
“I don’t get why they can’t just provide us with human test subjects,” Caesar complained. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of people.”
The dog, who’d been called “the Test Subject” so often by the scientists that she’d stopped responding to any other name, wasn’t a pet in the proper sense of the word. She slept under furniture and ate whatever she could charm or steal from people’s plates and disappeared for hours and sometimes even days whenever the Laboratory for Peace docked, although she’d always come back right in the nick of time as they prepared to leave. Test Subject had already been old when she’d been adopted, and one day Franky found her lying still on her side with her mouth gaping wide open and her skin grown cold.
Franky bawled for two days straight. No amount of cola, magic tricks or firecrackers could comfort him. Vegapunk, about to achieve a scientific breakthrough, had locked himself in his lab and remained blissfully oblivious, but Caesar and Judge were on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “I swear to God, Saien, I’ll throw this punk overboard if you don’t shut him up.”
“Half-tempted to do it myself,” Franky’s father muttered. “Alright, kid. Come and give me a hand.” With these words, he’d invited Franky for the first time into his sanctuary.
Saien’s laboratory, like his room, was overrun with an exuberant chaos. The walls were stained with soot and diesel. A submarine shaped like a plesiosaurus sat in one corner next to a life-sized robotic T-Rex. Discarded appliances and unfinished devices colonized every empty space on the counters and the floor, aside from the chemistry station, which was pristine. Saien ran his arm across a table, knocking over dozens of tubes and gears, and dumped the old toaster he was holding in the empty space he’d created. “There’s a toolbox underneath the hand-washing station. Go grab it for me.”
Franky obeyed. His father selected a pair of pliers from the box and used them to pry open the toaster’s cord, exposing its coloured metallic entrails. “All man-made things carry within them an irresistible urge to explode,” he said as he worked. “Everything, from the lowly toaster to the majestic bazooka, will blow up in the most spectacular way possible as soon as it’s given the chance. It’s our job as inventors to delay the explosion for as long as we can. Or harness it for our own purposes, as the case may be! Speaking of toasters, we’re gonna give this one a Viking funeral. Put on your goggles, kid.”
He flicked a switch. The toaster came to life with a shudder and hopped up and down on its feet, as if it had an urgent message to share. Then, with an increasingly shrill whistle that culminated into a screech, it exploded. Springs, coils, panels and grids struck the walls of the laboratory like missiles. When the smoke had cleared, Franky looked down at his hands, which were covered with soot, and realized that he was no longer crying.
“It’s the way of all things, whether born or made,” his father said. “We all carry in us the seeds of our own destruction. You all done now? Go look around the lab, see if you can find any pieces that survived the impact. We’re gonna use ‘em to make a cannon.”
“You know, the King of the Pirates once tried to recruit me to join his crew,” Saien said. He’d been drinking, as he always did before his self-surgeries, and it had put him in a chatty mood.
“Yeah?” Franky said, handing him a syringe full of numbing agent. “You met Roger?”
“Well, not the actual King of the Pirates,” Saien amended, taking a swig from his bottle of whisky. “The man who’s gonna be King of the Pirates one day. Kaido, the King of the Beasts. Damn, that’s unpleasant.” He tossed the empty syringe over his shoulder.
“And it’s only getting started,” Franky observed, passing him a scalpel.
“That won’t cut it today, kid. I’m gonna need a hacksaw.”
Delighted to get to serious business, Franky rooted through the toolbox for the required implement, which his father immediately sank into his own arm. They both looked up, awed, as blood geysered out of the wound. “Whew,” Saien said when the flow had died down, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. “Everything all right, kid?”
“That was gross,” Franky said admiringly, removing his goggles to clean them.
“Not bad, eh?” His father took another swig. He looked a little pale underneath his mask of blood and oil stains. “Pain is like a stack of unpaid bills. You can’t make it go away, but you can forget it’s there when you get drunk enough. Pass me the capacitator.”
“What was he like?” Franky asked. “Kaido.”
“Mean son of a bitch, but strong. Canny, too, in his own way.” Saien squinted with effort as he shoved the capacitator into the gaping hole in his arm. “Alright, gotta weld this panel shut and I should be just about done here.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a pirate,” Franky said wistfully.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind it either.”
“So why didn’t you go with him? Loser.”
“‘Cause I had my girl at the time, and I had you, you little fucker. A pirate ship ain’t no place to raise a child.”
Saien had spoken lightly, but Franky sensed that he’d stumbled onto something secretive and dangerous. For the first time, he realized that his father was not happy.
“I still think about it sometimes,” Saien said. “Like destiny came and I sent it packing, as if it was a door-to-door salesman, ya know? Thinking it’d be back the next day, only it wasn’t.” He extended his freshly refurbished robot arm and flexed the fingers.
“What’s it do now?” Franky asked.
“Check it out. You’re gonna love it.” Saien pressed a button located next to his elbow, and a panel popped open on his forearm. A disco ball emerged and, with a click, began to spin. One after the other, its hundreds of mirror facets released rays of light that painted lines of colour across the walls. Father and son watched the ball’s revolutions, struck into an awed silence by the mechanical wonders they had wrought.
“Pretty funky, huh? But it gets better.” Saien pressed a different button. There was a zap, and a smoking hole appeared in the opposite wall, smelling of ozone, burnt wood and singed hair.
“Saien! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Judge yelled from the other room. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t report you to Lu Feld.”
“Whoops,” Saien said, unrepentant. “Guess I better not destroy the dining room again.” He pressed the first button. The disco ball quavered, moved up and down on its stand and, after a brief thoughtful pause, released a barrage of multicoloured lasers.
“That’s it, you’re getting defunded!” Judge shouted as he made an expeditious retreat. Laughing, Franky ducked under the table while Saien fought his rogue blaster into submission. “Phew,” he said, mopping his brow with a dirty handkerchief. “Still needs a little fine-tuning.”
Once he was sure no more lasers would be forthcoming, Franky crawled out from underneath the table. “Hey,” he said, crossing his hands behind his head. “Have you ever thought about replacing every part of your body with something different?”
“Can’t say the thought’s occurred to me, kid. I’m pretty attached to some of them. Why?”
“I wonder,” Franky said dreamily. “Would you be a different person if you did?”
“We’re all different people anyway,” Saien said. “Pass me that hacksaw again.”
Shortly after Franky’s seventh birthday, Saien, who now went by his stage name of “Queen,” launched a contest on his broadcast, asking fans to call in to answer questions about nautical trivia. The ten winners were promised free VIP tickets at his next live show, an exclusive in-person interview with Queen, and a third, secret prize.
“Welcome!” Queen greeted the lucky winners as they were ushered backstage by his hired goons. “You have been selected to join my crew, the Science Pirates!” A judicious application of cocktails, expensive cigars and knuckle sandwiches silenced all protests, and the newly-formed Science Pirates, under Queen’s flag, commandeered a ship and set sail for Paradise.
Queen’s mood brightened the further they sailed from the Laboratory of Peace. Pacing on the deck, shouting orders and exchanging jokes with his makeshift crew, he could finally express the natural leadership that had found no outlet in MADS. After an initial dismay at their abrupt change of career, the Science Pirates had embraced their fate with philosophy. Sailing with Queen meant front-row seats to a free, round-the-clock live show, after all, and all the backstage interviews with their idol they could want.
As for Franky, he shed a few tears when the only home he’d ever known was swallowed by the horizon, but his sorrow made way for excitement as the world opened before him, promising him all new malt shops, new concert halls, new junkyards and most of all, new adventures with a father who no longer brooded alone on the deck late at night, mourning the opportunities he’d lost.
“See that?” Queen said, pointing at a distant island on the horizon. “That’s Water 7, the so-called Capital of Water.”
Franky raised his binoculars to his eyes. “Are we gonna stop there?”
“Can’t. Got a show in San Faldo in three days.” Queen brought out the eternal log pose his agent had provided him. “You should check it out, though, kid. You’d love it.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s home to some of the best engineers and shipwrights in the world, and the only reason I say ‘some’ is because I don’t live there! Went to their junkyard once and picked up enough bomb materials to raze at least five medium-sized cities.” Queen sighed, lost in nostalgia. “You and me, we’d fit right in, in another life.”
Franky took a mental stock of his supplies. “I have been looking for some carburetors. Wait right here!” He ran off to his workshop and came back with a salvage bag, empty except for some sandwiches and the lucky screw he took everywhere. “Alright, let’s go.”
“Be back before sundown or we’re leaving your ass behind.”
“Roger that.”
“I’ll give you a boost, if you want.” Queen released his in-built rocket launcher, lowered his robot arm and allowed Franky to climb on the projectile’s head. “Ready?”
Franky put on his goggles. “Ready,” he said, quivering with excitement.
“You better be, cause I can’t hold her back anymore!” With a hiss, the rocket left its pod. Franky clenched it between his legs and held on for dear life. The sky became the sea and the sea became the sky as the missile spun on itself, cutting fantastical cartwheels before finishing its course in the ocean, within sight of the shore. Franky waited for the underwater explosion to carry him closer to the island before he began to swim.
As an ardent connoisseur of junkyards, he knew, from the moment he set his eyes on Water 7’s, that he’d found an inventor’s gold mine. Abandoned ships, discarded weapons and strange appliances reached for the sky, in a demented monument to all the imagination and hubris of mankind. Indifferent to the broken glass and metal that dug into his bare feet, he ran from one scrap pile to another, collecting his best finds into a stack for later sorting. As the sun hit its zenith, he paused to eat one of his sandwiches and watched his father’s ship bobbing against the horizon. It seemed smaller than when he’d first stepped ashore, though that was probably an optical illusion caused by the noon-time haze.
When Franky emerged from the junkyard, two hours later, the ship had shrunk to a tiny dot, and he knew that his father was gone.
Usopp had given Chopper lying lessons. “The key to making yourself sound awesome is to make your opponents sound even more awesome,” he’d explained. “Then when you defeat them… Bam! People won’t see it coming!” Chopper had taken the advice to heart.
“Queen stood in front of me! A hideous cyborg the size of a mountain.” Chopper morphed to his monster form to drive the point home, though his head bumped against the ceiling, forcing him to shift back. “‘I eat reindeer like you for breakfast,’ he said. I told him—”
“‘Raccoon dog,’” Usopp corrected him smoothly. “That’s what he said.”
“I’m not a raccoon dog!” Chopper bristled, though he couldn’t stay mad for long. “That’s what I said, actually. He charged towards me. I grabbed him by the neck, and pow! Slammed him into the ground! He roared with anger. Rocket launchers came out of his arms, and chainsaws, and lasers… Oh, hey. You know what, Franky? He reminded me a little bit of you.”
“Oh yeah?” Franky said without looking up from the control panel in his arm that he was retooling.
Sensitive to some subtle change in the atmosphere, Sanji stepped in. “That scumbag had nothing in common with any of us,” he said. “Now run along. I need the table.”
“Race you to the deck!” Luffy told Usopp, using the doorway to catapult himself out of the kitchen. A distant crash told Franky he’d landed in Robin’s flowerpots.
“Aw, no fair!” Usopp and Chopper fought laughingly with each other as they followed him.
“Just gotta finish this up, bro, and I’ll get out of your hair,” Franky said, fiddling with a troublesome panel.
Sanji leaned against the counter and lit himself a cigarette. “It’s fine,” he said. “Got tired of their nonsense, that’s all.”
Franky nodded thanks and traded his screwdriver for a pair of pliers. Sanji blew some smoke rings against the ceiling, and they shared a companionable silence.
“You know, I’m the one who fought him,” Sanji said at last, putting out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Queen, I mean. And not once during the fight did it occur to me that you were anything alike.”
“Yeah?”
“Thought you should know.” With a final nod, he turned his back to Franky and started on the dishes.
Franky put in place the last screw and contemplated his work. The flesh encasing the panel was red and irritated, but it would heal. The replacement parts he’d found in Wano were smooth and sturdy, made with the same steel legendary blades are forged from. Underneath, his body was still studded with odds and ends he’d found all over the world, springs from Water 7, coils from Baldimore, wires from Punk Hazard, even the single screw he’d taken from the Laboratory for Peace before he’d left, a long time ago. Franky had considered replacing it, now that he had the chance, but he’d thought better of it. Regardless where it had come from, it was his now.