Clou D. Clover

In his later years Clover resembled a living plant. The crown of his head was shaved while his green hair flared out at the sides and rear, and paired with a broad beard the entire silhouette suggested a three-leaf clover flipped over. His clothing included a striped red-and-white shirt held by a wide belt, plain trousers, plus a jacket in blue and black that carried a tiger's face across the back. In his adventuring youth he was lean and clean-shaven, the top of his hair clipped into a clover, already partial to a jacket much like his later one. By the age of eighty-one he looked fresher than at his death, streaks of darker color still threading his hair.

Gentle and compassionate, Clover never regarded Robin as the monster the rest of Ohara took her to be. He let her pore over the library's books, taught her the world's history, and gladly certified her as an archaeologist. His ban on the forbidden Poneglyphs came solely from a wish to keep the World Government from targeting her. When he learned she could already decipher them, he was sorry he had not realized it sooner and had not done more to spare her from feeling like an outsider, and he shed a tear when Olvia and Robin were once more pulled apart.

Clover was raised beside an elder brother who was slain merely for carrying the initial D. Cornered by the killers, the young Clover disowned any tie and claimed to be only a friend, and the shame of that denial drove him to learn why the name invited death. Fixated on the Void Century, he grew into a celebrated explorer who roamed the world chasing rare texts, was captured by Marines on ten separate occasions, and broke out each time, which only swelled his legend. Admiring archaeologists trailed him back to his native Ohara. His mastery let him read Poneglyphs, granting him rare access to the secrets of the lost era, and his learning ran so deep that even Silvers Rayleigh spoke of him with praise; among his findings was the existence of a great vanished kingdom.

Twenty-six years before his death he stalled in his research and went to Punk Hazard seeking help from his old friend Vegapunk, who refused him and warned of the dangers ahead. He later welcomed Robin after catching her trying to make off with a book, eventually certifying her as an archaeologist, yet he kept her away from Ohara's Poneglyph so she would not share her mother Olvia's fate. When the World Government uncovered Ohara's work and dispatched CP9, Clover took his case to the Five Elders across a Den Den Mushi line, insisting that humanity had every right to its untold past. He revealed that a Great Kingdom had once been crushed by the faction that would become the World Government, but a shot from Spandine cut him down before he could speak its name, and the Buster Call descended on Ohara. While flames consumed the Tree of Knowledge, the professor and his fellow scholars stayed to rescue every book they could, casting them into the lake and laboring until the tree toppled with them still inside. His sacrifice helped move Dragon to found the Revolutionary Army, and the salvaged books, later carried by Saul to Elbaph, allowed Vegapunk to carry on the research Clover had begun.