Franky Franklin

An enormous cloud of curly black-brown hair is Franky's signature, paired with thick red-framed glasses, a short goatee, and a single earring in his left ear. His face is squarish with round dark eyes and an upturned nose, his skin light, his height an unremarkable 166 cm. The hair curls naturally, and he can stash small listening devices inside it.

His usual outfit runs loud: a white dress shirt worn with sleeves shoved up, an orange tie, purple trousers held by black suspenders, striped orange-and-white socks, and brown shoes.

Franky knows everybody. Easy sociability lets him move through every layer of Berlint, especially its underworld, where his contact web makes him one of the city's best-connected informants. He gripes loudly whenever Loid drags him into another scheme, then delivers anyway, whether the job calls for intel, gear, forged papers, or babysitting Anya and Bond, and his mood improves the instant money changes hands. Payment matters to an independent operator, but he is not purely mercenary; he once ditched a date to pull fellow informants out of the SSS's grasp.

He lectures Loid about keeping emotion out of espionage, then falls for nearly every woman he meets. The romances fail with astronomical consistency, a tally he likens to counting stars, yet he stays cheerful and keeps trying. The same optimism fuels his inventing: gadget after gadget malfunctions or serves no real purpose, and he treats each flop as another round of trial and error toward creations that might better the world and make him rich.

The war explains the rest of him. He fought for the Ostanian army in the second East-West war, and what he saw convinced him the whole conflict was a diplomatic failure paid for by ordinary people, and he deserted. Survivor's guilt over his comrades pushes him toward charity work for wounded veterans, and resentment of Ostania's rigid, oppressive system drives his quiet sabotage: running information networks, forging papers, and lending his skills to Westalian agents like Loid and Fiona Frost while belonging to no faction but his own.

Information is his real trade. Franky lifts highly protected material without tripping SSS attention, from copied dossiers on every unmarried woman in the city to the answer sheet for an Eden Academy exam. A wide circle of fellow informants lets him borrow skills on demand and slip through Berlint unnoticed, and those same friendly connections feed intelligence to WISE operatives, Loid and Fiona among them, whenever they come calling.

Inventing is the passion that rarely pays. His catalog includes a color-shifting pen, a cat-shaped listening device, a catnip-scented lure machine, a straight-line grappling hand, a camera that fires a two-meter net, and an exoskeleton power suit a decade in the making that Yor destroyed before its first real use. Later works run from a self-brushing phone handset to the Abso-waker Type-J alarm, which deploys miniature sumo wrestlers and a sword-swinging samurai to get him out of bed, plus a tranquilizer wristwatch built specially for Loid. Very few ever prove practical enough for fieldwork.

His limits are physical. Franky is no athlete, and by his own admission his body rules out frontline spy work, which is exactly why he sticks to intel, workshops, and the occasional reluctant stakeout.