SET SAIL!

Zoan Madness

Junk in the Trunk
When Drake begins borrowing parts from the Allosaurus, either to partially or fully hybridize, one of his favorite changes is the retractible penis! (He’s shy, don’t look at his meat.) A trait shared by many reptiles, as well as some birds—when he’s ready to be randy, with a simple muscular contraction, he can unsheathe it and scare everyone else in the room. Like his trait-sharing counterparts, there is no flaccid state, it’s always ready to go. When aroused, it does plump a tiny bit and sensitivity heightens more so than usual. When retracted while aroused, it gives him a bit of a tummy bulge look. He's not gassy. he's just horny. XD

 

His slit (—or vent, technically. Sort of.) doesn’t self-lubricate. That would be silly. He does however, for whatever reason, produce a wacky amount of pre-come when wielding his fancy dino dongle, and that works just as well for anyone trying to finger his hot pocket. And while it might fry his brain some, his refractory period is pretty much non-existent when wearing these traits. Leave it to a predator to fuck hard, fuck fast, and fuck plenty. It doesn’t help that his zoan side is a big bull male.

 

The knotting bit isn’t even speculatory by any stretch. The author is just nasty. :)

 

First image: Fullbody reference, phallus "at rest". Pelvis, bottom right has the shaft breaching out through the slit. Pelvis, top right has the fully extended phallus.
Second image: All parts of image showcase a retracted phallus, but during an arousal state.

 

Thinking Thoughts
A curious side effect of Devil Fruit zoans combining with their human counterparts is the sharing of information that occurs between them. As the sides communicate, the creature can gain full human-level sapience, the pair can share dreams while unconscious, and depending on how well the pair mesh, can sort through one another’s conscious thoughts and memories, acting less like a tug-of-war for control and more like a truly effective two-person team. (The Allosaurus has many saucy opinions on Smoker that Drake would rather leave unvoiced.)

 

In each series, Drake's relationship with the Allosaurus differs in closeness. In The Devil's Polycule, until nearer the events of Dressrosa and Wano, Drake has a horrific relationship with it, up to the point of trying to surpress its will entirely. In What Brings us Together, they're practically two halves of a Buddy Cop TV drama.

 

Poor Binocular Vision
Unlike the more popular Tyrannosaurus, the Allosaurus sports a very narrow binocular field of vision. Clocking in at roughly 20 degrees, it would have only seen clearly in a very narrow window. So while transformed, though Drake can smell those around him, his peripherals are quite blurry.

 

Sound & Fury
Drake gains a number of new and strange vocalizations from his zoan side—one being a deep guttural rumble that, when supersized in his fully transformed all-terrain-mode, tends to make things shake. Drawing inspiration from modern crocodiles, in writing, I often use for two different purposes: “Fuck off” and “Fuck me”. The bellow itself and the environmental jitter are two parts of the same whole! The jitter is caused by infrasonic vibrations too low for humans to hear. Moving that up into the throat—that’s where it becomes the bellow! As a human, Drake can give off a low-grade version of the rumble, but it takes a full transformation to make the Big Boom.

 

Size Matters
How big was an Allosaurus, anyway? They sure as fuck weren't 40ft long—or fragilis wasn't, as per our understanding (2024). The debunked Saurophaganax or Epanterius might be, but the paleontology surrounding Allosaurids is just a giant sack of cats.

 

In the late stages of drawing the two-page spread of Smoker and Drake walking at night for the Scarlet Letter zine, I remained undeterred in my hunt for the truth. I booted up our copy of Pirate Warriors 4 and plugged into a local two player game, trying to get a sense of scale for the creature, considering we have yet to get a canonical size for it. When I found out the game set his transformed state as (roughly) TALL AS WHITEBEARD, in my horror, I tried to calculate what that might mean for length. It was...it was ridiculous.

 

So thus was Drake scaled back down to a more reasonable 40Lx14H. Really though, this pain serves me right for trying to wring out scientific accuracy from fucking One Piece.

 

A Sense of Identity
The Allosaurus is aware it's an adult male and is rather pleased that physically it aligns with Drake, but thinks human gender roles are absolutely batty and refuses outright to participate it such things. As such, in-text, the Allosaurus is defined with it/it's pronouns. Until people can stop acting weird, fuck the binary.

 

General

Training Accident
During Drake's first full transformation into his allosaurus form and pressed to join training with the other newly devil fruit-imbued cadets, when instinct overwhelms him, he swallows his training partner, only to vomit up the horrified man in a panic.

 

Living Family
Related through their mothers, Drake and Hawkins are first cousins, though prior to Sabaody, only met once in their youth.

 

Rizz 'em with the 'tism
If it's ever seemed that in my writing that Drake might be autistic, it's because that's exactly what I've slapped the man with.

 

Lasting Trauma [TW: child abuse]
At some point in Drake's childhood, just before his mother disappeared from his life, his father's behavior shifted. Unbeknownst to little Drake, the change was caused by something painfully simple—an accident on the job that left Barrels with concussive head trauma. The man healed, but was never quite the same. As he shifted from doting father to literal pirate—what began as verbal abuse quickly escalated to physical. The "X" shaped scar on his chin comes from a bottle Barrels hurled at him in a drunken fit.

 

The most lasting mark Barrels leaves is invisible. One day, for reasons Drake can no longer remember, he takes Drake by the throat and squeezes until his son can no longer cry out in the moment. Terrified, Drake begins to withdraw. It causes him to be quite and choosy with his words, often unwilling to speak on anything that brings him joy. Later, even into his thirties, Drake cannot stand anyone touching his throat.

 

In the long term, caught in a spiral of self-minimization, Drake healed as much as one can while refusing a support net. It leaves him perpetually caught between the stress of trying to figure out how to please others while not always fully understanding them, and asking for as little as possible so as not to trigger the outbursts he remembered so clearly from his father. It leads him to be almost entirely self-reliant, while coming off as cold and severe to others—where he's actually an incredible warm man. He's just forgotten how to express it without fear.

 

In The Devil's Polycule, after joining SWORD and meeting Law, when the two begin a physical relationship, this abuse brings baggage in the form of physical pain Law repeately asks for, but Drake refuses to deliver. Leaning on the Allosaurus as a crutch, Drake with bite and claw, but stalwartly refuses to hit Law. Years later, after settling down, Drake initially shies away from fatherhood, for fear of history repeating itself. After meeting Anne however and caring for her, this attitude fades.

 

General

Q. Why does Ace call Smoker "taisa"?
A. (Toucan) His original rank in English is "captain". But that overlaps with "captain" (of a ship) awkwardly, especially when Ace holds Whitebeard in such brutally high regard. Didn't want to conflate the two any or have it get confusing who he was referring to.

 

A. (JJ) That’s the fancy reason. The short reason is I’ve mostly written Ace since we first RPed with One Piece characters and it’s been a tic of his when I write him. It’s affectionate disrespect in the same way Smoker will often refer to Ace as "kid".

A. (Toucan) We were weebs then, we're weebs now. Alas.

 

Privacy
Ace just...doesn’t do well with doors. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t close them behind him. This extends to bathroom use.

 

Bathtime
Much to the horror of many of those around him, Ace swears by his use of 3-1 bath products.

 

Devil's Polycule

Q. Who the fuck is Silver Chase and why has no one on the G-5 base arrested Ace yet?
A. Not to be confused with Silvers Rayleigh, Silver Chase is an alias Ace uses when interacting with the Marines in any capacity, much to Smoker's horror. There's a mustache involved, large enough to make Roger proud. Ace has jumpscared himself with his own reflection more than once because of it. Also bear in mind, canonically, Ace infiltrated G-2 TWICE IN THE SAME DAY with some REALLY half-assed disguises and sat in on meetings with their higher-ups with no one the wiser. G-5 is full of windowlickers. Do the math.

 

That said, Vergo IS aware of Ace's presence on-base and initially lets it slide, in part because of the sheer audacity of chosing a marine base as a place to hide. The majority of his decision to keep quiet comes from his desire to keep higher-ups out of his hair as he does Doflamingo's dirty work.

 

General

Q. Why does Law call Drake "Diez"? He canonically uses his first name! Where did the "-ya" tic go?
A. (Toucan) Okay okay deep Toucan lore time. Had a gnarly speech impediment as a kid, had an AWFUL time pronouncing hard "R" sounds. Flash forward to me getting into OP, around the time Sabaody/Marineford was going on. Between the two of us, I wrote Law. We riff/LARP a lot. We've also slapped the headcanon on Law that he's got a vaguely hispanic accent. While massive improvements in that impediment have been made for me, "Drake" is never going to roll off my tongue. It changed to "Diez" for us in that time. It stuck and now remains no matter who is writing him. It's delivered in the same playful way Ace calls Smoker "taisa".

Continuing, the "-ya" tic is dropped because I generally lean further from honorific-usage and just replace it with general smug disrespect on Law's part.

 

General

Q. Hey self, can you leave some scar reference for yourself later?
A. Yes, me. Yes I can.

 

First image: White Wings. Includes canonical collarbone scar, impalement scar, and expansive arm/shoulder/back burn scarring
Second image: Includes canonical collarbone scar, skin graft donation sites, and Ace's hand brand

Q. What are Smoker's Stupid Human TricksTM?
A. Thanks to Hina's insistance, Smoker's learned a number of skills, though not all are especially useful. Those are, non-exhaustively, non-chronologically, as follows:

• Bolero
• Tango
• "—no less than three variants of waltz"
• Horseback riding
• Painting (he's terrible at it)
• Pottery (actually enjoys)

 

Sensitive Skin
Smoker has sensitive skin, acute dermatitus if you want to be pedantic. He can take biting cold and blistering sun without issue, but the wrong fabric or soap can leave him with a rash for days. Because of this, all his bath products are specifically for, in his words, “sensitive bitch baby skin”, and fur trim of his coat extends all the way into the interior of the garment. He’ll wear a fully regulation uniform washed in military-issue detergents when he’s dead.

 

Family
Smoker has a less-than-stellar relationship with his parents, and they'd frequently argue with him over his behavior and future. Smoker would not define his homelife as "abusive", but there's really only so many times a person can be insulted before the words finally leave a lasting mark. As a young man, he wound up bonding strongly with a little old bodega lady in Loguetown. When he would cut class, he’d often hole up in her back room and she’d happily lie to cover for him. His parents, thankfully unaware of this relationship, merely encouraged her to send him home if she saw him, which she never did.

 

Becoming a Marine
During the bedlam caused by Roger's execution, Smoker ran back to his gram's store for safety the moment he was able. Upon arrival, he found the front windows smashed and in a state of raw fury, fear left him and he immediately charged in to chase off the looters. This incident cemented in his mind the sheer necessity of weeding out all of piracy and eventually drove him to enlist.

 

Cats
Because of extended proximity to the bodega cats his gram looked after, Smoker's taken a shine to the creatures. Less intense than most dogs and prefers their company to any other animal. Had Smoker not chosen the Logia Moku-type as his fruit, he’d have chosen a Zoan Neko model as a surprise for her.

 

Logia Body
In the Marines, the first two weeks after eating the Moku Moku no Mi, Smoker struggled with maintaining his control in his incorporeal form. More than once, he phased straight out of his clothing. As told by Hina, “By the end of the year, everyone in our class had seen Smoker naked at least once.” More than once, he woke up floating next to the ceiling, only to come plummeting back down.

 

Q. What are all of Smoker's nicknames for everyone in The Devil's Polycule?
So as a preface, Smoker isn't a man who uses nicknames often, if ever. Hina bears the title of "the Devil" from him (unrelated to the series name) and Drake gets teased with "Nancy" whenever being flighty, and "pretty boy" behind closed doors, but these are all highly situational and rarely used. Then Ace happens.

 

Ace, while cordial, offers playful disrespect by referring to Smoker EXCLUSIVELY by his rank (Captain/Taisa) at the time of their meeting. In return, Smoker returns fire by referring to Ace as "kid". When the pair are assigned to Warlord Trafalgar, initially unwilling to show anyone within arms' length respect, he starts defaulting on disrespect...and as bonds form, these nicknames remain, playful and teasing.

 

• Ace: Kid
• Sabo: Blondie (formerly, "hey you")
• Law: Kitten
• Drake: Nancy (affectionate AND derogatory), pretty boy (exclusively private/teasing)
• Lind: Birdie, Lindy Bird
• Koby: Sunshine

 

Q. What was Smoker being recertified for during the prologue of The Third Corazon?
A. Survival training! HA!

 

General

Allergies
Zoro has a potato allergy. Sanji only finds out when Zoro requests a “spicy meal”, citing potatoes as a favored “kick”.