Author's Note: Sorry again for delays in getting this piece up.
Franky sighed as he pulled his iron face plate off and glared at the collection of crushed barrels lying on the floor of storage. A conspicuous brown liquid had stained into the wood, leaving a mark that Franky knew would be a pain to remove. But it wasn't the hygiene that was bothering the flamboyant cyborg at that particular moment (though it was annoying).
"Our entire Cola stock… squashed. This was the last set of barrels. How is that even possible?!" Franky groaned before running a hand roughly through the flat part of his hair, "This week is starting off really un-SUPAH."
Franky wandered forward and pulled the barrels apart, searching without luck for a barrel that had been merely overturned rather than broken.
"Guess I'll have to go into town after all," Franky though aloud. "Wonder when the others will be back."
His question was seemingly answered by the sounds of someone running down the steps but his eyes caught a glimpse of a white uniform in their corners. Then Usopp's voice could be heard shouting down into the holds, "Oy, stop! You can't go in there!"
Franky pulled himself against a corner; hiding from view until the thin figure came darting past. In a second Franky had swung around the corner and thrown out his arm, the other man crashing into the crook of his elbow. His hat went flying off his head as his blond spikes popped out into the air, in contrast to his body which had smashed into the ground while he stared up at the sky in a daze.
Usopp came following after, slightly out of breath with a red tinge of exhaustion on his cheeks, giving Franky a thumbs up at he stared at the intruder's unconscious form.
"Thanks Franky," Usopp breathed raspily as he stood back up to his full height. "He must have thought the ship had something worth stealing aboard it. Slippery jerk."
"Why would a Marine want to steal from us?" Franky asked with a raised eyebrow.
"He's not a Marine," Usopp explained while shaking his head. "His name's Onji, he's one of the Pirates running this island."
"Then maybe we should put him somewhere where he can't tell his friends that I just clocked him," Franky said with a conspiratorial glance.
Usopp returned the look, a single sparkle seemingly emanating from their eyes at the same time as they reached down and grabbed the fake Marine by his arms.
Onji later awoke to find his arms chained to a support pillar somewhere deep in the ship, two men with crossed arms standing over him intimidatingly. His head rotated between the two while maintaining a perfect poker face before sitting straight up and maintaining as much pride in his captive posture as he could.
"So, how do you want to do this?" he asked casually, his arms twitching subtly behind his back as he tested the chains digging into his wrists.
"Why did you try to break into our ship?" Usopp questioned in a business-like manner, careful to maintain eye-contact.
With a smirk that Usopp could only interpret as a challenge, Onji responded, "I just really wanted to get aboard."
"No, seriously," Usopp said, his unimpressed frown deepening when Onji chuckled snidely.
"That's my honest answer, the only one you'll be able to get."
"Oy, ignore that," Franky interjected. "Where can I get Cola on this island?"
Onji blinked blankly, hmming to himself in confusion at the seemingly random question.
Shrugging his shoulders, he (eventually) replied, "I suppose you'd have to visit the lock-up. It's where we keep limited goods. You could ask Sakera, she's the one in charge of storage." He bared his teeth in a slightly feral grin before adding, "But, to be honest, that woman is almost impossible to deal with. The worst kind of alcoholic, egotistical hag on all the seas."
"Where's the lock-up?" Franky asked, one hand resting on his chin.
"West of the island's only town, dug into a bunker. You'll find it easy enough. The steel door out front's pretty resistant to damage if you were thinking of charging it," Onji's tone remained politely neutral, something that grated immensely on Usopp's nerves in the circumstances.
"Hey Usopp," Franky said while gesturing with his head, Usopp getting his hint and both men heading up onto the deck.
Unbeknownst to them, Onji smirked widely in the dim of the hulls.
Franky adjusted his sunglasses with his oversized hands, taking a moment to collect his thoughts.
"I burned a lot of energy getting this ship back onto its bottom, there's no major structural damage but without more Cola… the Sunny and me are next to useless."
"Do you think there's any chance they'll just give us the Cola we need to leave?" Franky reached down to adjust his speedo before staring up at the cliff that blocked his view of the rest of the island.
"Luffy and Zoro have been running around for a while, so there's always a chance they won't," Usopp said with an oddly serious expression. "We could always wait for the others, Nami said we had a few weeks to get off the island and the log pose needs time to set."
"Sitting around doesn't seem to achieve much though." Franky's eyes suddenly lit up as he struck his trademark pose, "Maybe I should do some SUPAH reconnaissance, OW!"
Usopp shrugged at the suggestion, "I'll guard the ship then. Something about this whole island seems off to me. The people are terrified of pirates and yet they're ruled by one."
"You think he's the problem?" Franky guessed only to have Usopp confirm it.
"When we visited Nami's village two years ago, a fishman named Arlong had control of it. There was a tension in the air that was similar to what I felt when I was following Onji back to the ship. But it's all just nervous stares and avoidance… not much to really go on."
"I'll keep that in mind," Franky said as he climbed the rope ladder he'd set up down to the sandy beach. "I'll try to be quick."
"As quick as you can," Usopp said with a very slight crack in his tone. "The more I think about it, the less I like this place."
"Got it, so relax," Franky assured dismissively.
It hadn't taken long to find the dip in the land that Onji had talked about, the bunker's location being fairly apparent even at a distance. Franky decided to wander along the side of the path, just inside the trees to make himself less obvious to the one guard standing at the door's side with a rifle.
This was just as ridiculous in practice as it would have sounded to anyone the gigantic cyborg had voiced the thought to. Three voices whispering in the bushes seemed to agree with that as they stared at the obnoxiously obvious attempt at stealth.
"Is he trying to hide?" "Couldn't be, no one could screw it up that badly." "What is he anyway?" "He looks kind of like a robot… how awesome would it be if he was one!" "Yeah!" "Shut up, we need to stay quiet or we'll be spotted."
"What are you doing?" Franky's voice drifted down to the three, his eyebrows quirked at the badly coloured and overly round 'bush' the three were sitting inside.
"Ah, we've been spotted!" one of the voices screeched. "Go to Plan B!"
The bush was thrown into the air to reveal the three boys hiding underneath, not one of them looking a day over ten. The trio immediately pounced forward with their weapons of choice swinging for Franky (a hammer, a frying pan and bit of broken branch to be precise).
The three objects harmlessly bounced off Franky's bullet-proof body, causing the three boys to land side-by-side, screaming as their eyes popped out of their head in a display of sheer terror.
"Ay, put those eyeballs back in your heads! What were you attacking me for, that's completely un-SUPAH?!"
"We won't back down from pirates!" one of the boys shouted defiantly while the other two began desperately pleading for him to stay quiet. "The Uro Defence Force is going to take back our home!"
"Ah, don't tell him that!" "Yeah, he might kill us, Ida!"
"Come on, be men! We can't keep living like cowards!" Ida shouted before freezing when he noticed Franky's sunglasses-hidden eyes staring down at him emotionlessly. "What are you looking at?!"
"Why are you living like cowards?" Franky asked with an unusual calm.
"You're not one of Sakera's men?" Ida asked nervously, looking down when Franky nodded in confirmation.
Ida bit his lip before agreeing to explain his side of the story.
"The Hornless Jinn Pirates came when I was seven. My dad was one of the Marines that were slaughtered by their captain," Ida revealed, his fists clenched aggressively at his side.
("I lost my dad as well," "I lost my mom," his two friends interjected with expressions more tailored to misery than rage.)
"That's why we became the Uro Liberation Force, to free our island!" Ida claimed passionately while his hands moved about with an angry energy to them.
Franky stood stock still for a moment before sniffling loudly and covering his face with his arm to partially mask the streams of tears that dropped to the ground.
"That's so touching," he wailed while the three boys looked between themselves, Ida's two accomplices looking like they thought Franky was a dangerous lunatic rather than the relatively harmless (to them) lunatic that he was. "Please listen to this song I've written about the touching story I just heard!"
Freaked out by the guitar Franky had seemed to summon from the ether, all three boys took a cautious step backwards as Franky started his tune.
"Look we really need to get back to figuring out a way inside the storage. They have a weapon's supply in there that we could spread to-" Ida was cut off by a loud slap on Franky's chest with his giant robot palm.
"Then let's go!" Franky shouted as he charged forward, the three kids jumping on him in a vain effort to hold him down.
"Franky Radical Beam!" Franky shouted as he brought his hands together in a circular shape while aiming it directly at the door.
"Beam?!" the three boys shouted excitedly with a bright yellow shine in their eyes as they froze in their ministrations to halt Franky's progress.
A few moments of silence passed before Franky stared at his hands blankly, "Am I that low on power?"
"Hey, freakshow, beat it!" the guard shouted, slightly humiliated that he'd flinched when he first heard Franky shouting (then developed the same sparkle in his eyes that the boys had).
"Run!" Franky shouted comically as he gripped the entirety of the Uro Liberation Force by their scruffs and bolted from the angered (and slightly disappointed) guard as quickly as possible while the kids squealed in protest at their undignified position and Franky's idiocy.
Author's Notes: This chapter could also be titled "Franky Gets a Subplot".