Character · One Piece
Rob Lucci
The government's best assassin spent five years working as a shipwright and let a pigeon do the talking for him.
In Otakana the clue reads: Government agent with a pigeon on his shoulder
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Rob Lucci belongs to Cipher Pol Number Nine, an agency whose members are trained from childhood in a martial art that lets them run on air, kick through steel and shut off their own bleeding. He also ate a fruit that turns him into a leopard, which is a rare stack: an animal transformation sitting on top of a body already built to break things.
The undercover work is the good part. Lucci spent years in a shipyard as a mild carpenter who never spoke, letting a pigeon named Hattori perch on his shoulder and appear to talk on his behalf, a routine performed with total commitment by a man who kills people for the state. When the cover comes off, the tone of the whole arc comes off with it.
He is one of the few One Piece antagonists offered no sympathetic reading. Lucci believes the government has the right to erase anything it decides is dangerous, and he says so calmly, having done it. The fight that ends that arc runs for chapters and gave the anime one of the longest sustained sequences it had attempted at the time.
Spelling LUCCI
LUCCI is five letters with a doubled C, and the double is what the row is testing. The Japanese marks exactly that doubling with a small tsu, so the kana and the English agree for once, which is rare in this series. The ending is I rather than Y or IE. Two C's, two vowels, one L, and no long vowel to strip out.