Diez "Red Flag" Drake

While exceptions exist, most of the information here is applicable across most series. Any large discrepancy will be noted either here or the individual series wiki.

 

"Red Flag" X Drake (pronounced as "Diez Drake") is the captain of the Marine Secret Special Unit SWORD. In order to go undercover as a pirate, he publicly defected from his position as Rear Admiral and founded the Drake Pirates. He is one of twelve pirates referred to as the "Worst Generation", and before the two-year timeskip had a bounty of 222,000,000.

Drake is the son of the Marine-turned-pirate Diez Barrels, and was affiliated with the Barrels Pirates until he managed to escape during the assault of the Donquixote Pirate's on Minion island

In Drake's endeavor as an undercover spy, he and his crew became subordinate to the Beasts Pirates, led by Kaidou of the Four Emperors, over the two-year timeskip. Drake served as one of the crew's Shinuchi, specifically one of strongest six called Tobiroppo.

 

Drake serves as a main character in several series, including The Devil's Polycule, What Brings Us Together, The Third Corazon, Blue Skies, as well as several zine pieces.

Family

Barrels & Maeva

Once upon a time, Barrels was Drake's hero—a perfect Marine who could do no harm. Less boastful of her achievements, notably because of their covert nature, Maeva served as well until her untimely disappearance. It was never discovered what happened to her, though in hindsight, Drake firmly believes his father had, at the very least, a hand in it. The loss of his mother has troubled Drake deeply since.

Basil Hawkins

Related through their mothers, Drake and Hawkins are first cousins, though prior to Sabaody, only met once in their youth. Unbeknownst to Drake, through their maternal line, both men are distantly Alabastan.

Sengoku & Tsuru

The shadow of Sengoku's rank wears heavy over Drake, and despite his legal adoption by the man, stalwartly refuses to ask anything of the man—be it assistance or counsel. Drake fears others interpreting his own rank as earned through nepotism if he seeks aid in any way. As well, he worries about burdening the other man. Instead, he came to trust and rely on (through her dogged insistance) Tsuru.

Kujaku

Tsuru's granddaughter holds a special place in Drake's heart, though their relationship is not without its annoyances. Though ultimately unnecessary for Kujaku, to help "resocialize" Drake in his early days free from Barrels, Drake was instructed more than once to babysit the girl. In return, Kujaku teased him endlessly (and harmlessly) and to this day is one of the few people who know Drake better than Tsuru.

Rosinante

Post-Minion island, while the Marines looked into the details of what happened within Doflamingo's birdcage, Rosinante was placed under house arrest—part for his unaccounted for actions, and part for protection from his brother. Unlike Kujaku, while supportive, Rosinante allows Drake a little more breathing room in their relationship. The two cohabitate for several years in Drake's early years, until Rosinante is brought into SWORD for clerical assistance.

History

Childhood

[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 repeatedly 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.

The Naval Officers' Academy

Drake's attendance at Marineford's Officers' Academy is paid for in full by Sengoku. Rather than spend his early days subjected to grunt work and chore boy duties, he and the others in his year are jettisoned straight into a grueling mix of heavy coursework and specialized training. He studies everything from the variety of cultures spread across the four Blues and the Grandline, to royal legacies and laws—not to mention naval protocol. He learns to sail and navigate by day and night, memorizing star charts to find his way regardless of location or time of year. He learns to survive with and without supplies.

When chosen to receive a Devil Fruit, Drake, still undersize for his age, in an uncharacteristic act of violence, shoulderchecks his way through several others to lay claim to the Allosaurus Ryu-Ryu no Mi.

During Drake's first full transformation into his Allosaurus form, 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. Drake is immediately reassigned as Lind's partner and the two begin to train together.

During weapon training, for a decent amount of time, Drake was pressured to specialize in hand-to-hand combat, based on his instructors' assessment of his physical strength, impressive even before his consumption of the Ryu-Ryu no Mi. Refusing to relent, Drake doubled down until allowed to pursue swordsmanship, and eventually branched into dual-wielding weapons. His four-bladed axe is his concession to his instructors, picking something meant to be wielded by sheer force.

Drake & the Allosaurus

Identity and Overlap

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.

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 suppress its will entirely. In What Brings us Together, they're practically two halves of a Buddy Cop TV drama.

Senses & Abilities

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.

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.

Size

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.

Genital Reconfiguration

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.

Said phallus slit is also a dead end, rather than a true all-purpose cloaca. While Drake is fully aware of how reptile anatomy works, though modern science isn't sure how close that overlap is between reptiles, birds, and ancient theropods, Drake is utterly horrified by the idea of his genintals being any closer to his bodily waste than absolutely necessary. This iron-strength refusal actually bends his transformed anatomy into a further modified state. It's pleasure (and reproduction) in the front, waste in the back. Lind gets to gawk at this firsthand in a pre-timeskip piece in The Devil's Polycule.

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

_{Left 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.
Right image: All parts of image showcase a retracted phallus, but during an arousal state.}

Pheromones

Each zoan is a little different, so the function can change from person to person. For Drake, stuck with a bull Allosaurus with a fixation on breeding within its immediate pack, its phereomones can actually trigger ovulation in folks with uteri. Sex isn't necessary for the release of the pheromones and the act is largely involuntary on Drake's part. It works by creating a feedback loop through mutual arousal state. A party inhales/ingests it in some form (air particles, sweat, etc). If they are receptive (specifically sexually, in Drake's case) to the zoan, they undergo chemical changes that release a 'response' scent that therein triggers more pheromone production.

Effects overall are largely benign, though can manifest in states that resemble drunkeness (inhibited decision-making, slurred words), though this fades anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of entering the body. "Stale fumes" don't trigger responses. The peskiest part of this acts in a longer timeframe and mimics the effects of addiction. Receptive parties (and Drake) exposed to the pheromonal loop often find themselves fixated on one another for a timeframe that can last up to several weeks before it fades entirely. Drake and Law both build up a tolerance to one another within a few months of contact in The Devil's Polycule, and thus only find themselves affected by the short-term effects when exposed. Considering they're dealing with a breeding male actively trying to build a harem around itself, none of these traits come as a surprise once Drake begins to document them in earnest.

Not unlike any other chemical sensitivity, some people react more severely to the pheromonal release. Koby, for example, is knocked near-flat on his ass after a single sniff of any zoan pheromone and all short term effects are drastically exacerbated for him.

Notes

• 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.
• Aboard the Liberal Hind, Drake keeps a number of reptiles, the majority of which were liberated from the cargo of a ship his crew raided. Unwilling to part with animals who would or could not be cared for by the local population, or were invasive, he kept a handful. The largest and most most obnoxious of these is a female monitor dubbed "Jessica" by Blackpol. Drake, like a champ, raises his own stock of insects to feed the smaller ones.
• Drake's growing hair is actually a mark of defiance against the memory of his father. The front crest of it, oddly enough is actually natural.
• Thanks to the Allosaurus, Drake can consume raw meat without issue...unless one considers parasites. Law has treated him more than once for tearing into something he shouldn't have.
• Though he doesn't consider it a hobby per say, Drake is a fairly talented artist. After drawing up the joint charter with the Heart Pirates in The Devil's Polycule, he begins fax correspondance with Law and sends over an untold amount of doodles, explaining various reptile and dinosaur traits and eccentricities This culminates in Drake painting a mural of Sora: Warrior of the Sea characters engaged in battle, in Law's bedroom.
• Despite having one of his own, Drake is quite standoffish about tattoos, and prior to meeting Law considers them family unattractive. In The Devil's Polycule, over time, he winds up designing several for the other, including one that Drake himself takes on that acts as a devotional piece toward their partner Lind. [ tattoo image below ]
• Drake's room on the Liberal Hind has a defined design! Most of it's his giant fucking bed because it has to be sized to fit both his human and hybrid forms! This has also been painstakinging recreated in our Free Company house in FFXIV [ room plan below, screencaps pending ]

_{Left image: Full back tattoo of the partially exposed fossilized skulls of an Allosaurus and a Utahraptor.
Right image: The floor plan for Drake's quarters on the Liberal Hind.}

Related Pages

• Diez Maeva
• Collart Lind
• Mayweather Blackpol
• Mallie
• Jessica