Tonjit

Age shows plainly on Tonjit: a wrinkled face, small round eyes set above a rounded nose, a gap where one tooth has gone missing, and a full white beard circling his chin. He keeps to a purple-brown fur-trimmed hat and a yellow tunic edged in green, gathered with a purple sash from which a red cord dangles. Zigzag-striped trousers in purple and tan and string-tied purple shoes complete the outfit. Two decades earlier his face carried fewer lines, his beard was shorter and still black, and his teeth were all intact, though the clothes were the same. His look, his yurt, his horse, and his wandering way of life all draw on the nomadic cultures of Mongolia.

Warm, welcoming, and deeply scatterbrained, Tonjit greeted Luffy and Chopper as though they were old friends, then shrugged off the mistake the moment he realized he had never met them. His absentmindedness breeds recklessness: he raised the tallest stilts on record without once considering how he would climb down or that he was terrified of heights, and he happily ate milk that had curdled for ages, earning himself a bout of food poisoning. Beneath the eccentricity runs genuine love for Shelly, and the usually placid old man flew into a fury, ready to attack Foxy, the moment the pirate shot her.

Tonjit poured his adulthood into chasing the world's tallest stilts, so single-minded that even word of Gol D. Roger's execution struck him as trivial. In his early fifties he mounted a towering set carved from local bamboo, only to discover a crippling fear of heights that left him unable to climb back down. His tribe migrated on without him while the bamboo kept growing skyward, and only Shelly stayed behind; he survived by plucking fruit from equally tall trees. About ten years on, Luffy smashed the stilts after blundering into them, freeing the old nomad. Tonjit befriended the crew and shared his knowledge of the land along with some long-spoiled milk, then celebrated his reunion with Shelly, a joy cut short when Foxy shot the horse on a whim. Chopper patched her up, Luffy talked the furious Tonjit out of retaliating with his musket, and after the Davy Back Fight the appearance of Admiral Aokiji, who froze a path across the sea, let Tonjit pack up and rejoin his people within weeks. Two years later he was reading the news with his grandchildren Tonjil and Tonsfer, and during the Egghead Arc he listened to Vegapunk's broadcast while perched on his stilts. Though no fighter, he proved remarkably tough for his years, walking away from that enormous fall with nothing worse than a nosebleed and able to haul a cart many times his own size.