Captain William Wall-eye of the Freedom Pirates had his own file cabinet in the World Government's database. While he had no bounty, the man had left quite a mess in his wake. Every situation that had ever involved him had buckled under his might like a block tower to a toddler; quite loudly, and all but inconspicuous. For that reason, and that reason alone, he was not advertised by the government as a villain or otherwise.
The reason for the man's exclusion from regular mug shots was simple. William knew something that no one on the outside world was supposed to know. It was a dark secret, but wasn't one that involved treasure or royalty. To the contrary, it all began with a simple exchange of words from the mouth of an arrogant explorer of the Grand Line and a marine officer about a hundred years prior.
"This place is a dump. You really should do something about it. Even animals don't wanna live here…" the blonde man said nonchalantly from behind bifocals, shrugging and looking at his militant escort from the wasteland before them. It had been that way naturally, it seemed. The natural wildlife consisted of carrion birds that dropped by from time to time, and there was a solitary dead tree in the center. The place reeked of sulfur.
"Yeah…"
The bearded man beside the scholar stroked his facial hair softly, humming in thought. Recently, the exploration flagship had taken several savage pirates in custody. Currently, they were just taking up space, akin to the dead tree in the vast expanse of infertile dirt. He opened his mouth to speak, but the blonde bespectacled male beside him spoke at the same time. They were going to abandon the criminals at that very spot and return for them later.
To the misfortune of the poor souls(and the not-so-poor souls) marooned on the wasteland, 'later' meant several months, and very few of them survived by hard toil and dumb luck. When a marine fleet returned to bring them to justice, they were surprised to see a small but thriving community of convicts. Somehow or another, they had managed to get the earth to yield them crops, and actually managed to get seed as well.
Unanimously the marines concluded that the criminals in question were far too resourceful to be hung or decapitated, as was the custom. No, they had something far more crafty in mind. With blessing from the heads of the united government, they were able to build something unprecedented.
A city was raised, walls high and powerful as the backs that broke to build it; those of slaves to their own deeds. Criminals and pirates were sent to this prison for a full twelve years, Impel Down forgotten like an old toy of the sadistic system. Their numbers reached over two thousand at one point, causing officials some alarm as their disgruntled unpaid servants began their first uprising. It was quelled quickly enough, the death toll less than fifty, but its legacy remained. Impel Down was once again fully utilized, and the doors to the labor camp were forced shut to future delinquents. Incidentally, they were also shut to those born within the giant prison settlement.
The next generation of the city were both like and unlike any other children. They played, they ate, they whined about toys and clung to their mothers like a burr to a dog. They had dreams, ambitions, and places they wanted to go. Their eyes would shine when offered a sweet or present, and they often shirked and cursed their parents in their adolescent years. Unlike other children, however, were their reasons for resentment.
Unethical and inhumane as it was, the general public and federal society were quite fond of cheap labor. So fond, in fact, that life sentences carried on into the next generation. This fact was uproarious to the public at first, but after a few cover-ups and years of such records having been lost, the island of Fortuna's Tear was supposedly erased from the map. Unfortunately, the map-maker who started the next standard map didn't erase the name all the way. The letter 'F' remained.
'F' was widely regarded as an error in the mapmaking process. This fact alone saved the poor employee from his superior's retribution. People traveling the Grand Line often avoided it, having been taught in school that the log pose pointed in that direction because of the strange chemical activity happening in that corner. At first, that was a lie, but several generations later, that wasn't too far off the mark.
'F' had evolved over the years, its servitude harnessed for the new age. Old factories were burned to the ground and demolished to make way for yet another revolutionary device; the sea-stone smelter. Three giant stacks now embellished the décor of the hidden prison, mountainous in size to be capable of meeting the military's need for the new weapon. Men, women, and children worked on it day and night, their shifts cruel and long. They were a people resigned to their fates. If they were lucky, they were allowed out of the main city to the area accessible to the public. Luxuries like food and clean water were given to such individuals, so as not to give away the government's dirty little secret.
F was a very bleak place. For nearly a hundred years, no one ever escaped alive. So, the surprise of the guards that had faithfully kept the place under padlock, key, lock, another key, another lock, and another key was quite great. If the public got wind of the plight of the plight of the guiltless slave generations of F, bad things would happen. Even Dragon would get involved, most likely. So, notoriety for the rebels was out of the question. Only government officials of a high rank were allowed to touch the file for obvious reasons. Were they to read them, they would see the face of the captain standing before the historian of the future pirate king. William Wall-eye the giant, the man who led his people from their unjust shackles. Of course, everything after the name was omitted for even more obvious reasons involving a conspiracy theorist armed with a screwdriver. Okay, well maybe they weren't so obvious. In fact, they were almost pointless in mentioning.
((A/N: My bad. Also, sorry about this chapter, but it was kinda important for the whole plot thing. If you can find the jokes I placed, good for you. If you can't, congrats. You're reasonably normal. Also, for those of you with a short attention span, I'm sooooo sorry you had to read this at all.))