Franny K. Stein

Franny Kaboom Stein is the main protagonist of the book series of the same name She is a mad scientist that,though lacking height, is extremely intelligent and as tough as nails when she needs to be.

Personality
Franny likes everything that is scary and icky and also likes to use her genius to make things better for everyone. While she is a mad scientist, she does not like using her inventions and experiments for evil.

History
Lunch Walks Among Us begins with Franny moving to a new school and having difficulty making friends. She resorts to drinking a potion to turn herself into a normal girl in order to fit in, but ends up having to change herself back when a Pumpkin Crab Monster terrorizes the school, saving the day by creating a Lunch Meat Creature. Fortunately for Franny, her classmates were grateful that she saved them and welcome her with open arms.

In Attack Of The 50-Ft. Cupid, Franny learns about Valentine's Day and also gets her own lab assistant when her mother gives her Igor after noticing how miserable her daughter is when not everyone is interested in her experiments. Franny initially saw Igor as a burden and gave him quite a tongue-lashing when he accidentally created a 50-Ft. Cupid, but forgave the dog when he saved her life and helped her take the Cupid down.

The Invisible Fran has Franny annoyed that her classmates Erin, Lawrence and Phil have hobbies that aren't as interesting as mad science, so she turns herself invisible to try and convince them into showing interest in working on her Two-Headed Robot, only for the three to make adjustments to the robot when Franny isn't around, resulting in the robot becoming a destructive idiot that goes on a rampage vandalizing the school. Franny eventually finds that Erin's interest in Irish dancing, Lawrence's skills in playing the accordion and Phil's passion for stamp collecting are useful after all when they help in destroying the robot.

In The Fran That Time Forgot, Franny wins the science fair with her Time Warp Dessert Plate, but is embarrassed when everyone laughs at her for her middle name being Kissypie. Franny gets the idea to modify her invention so she can use it to go back in time to the day she was born and change her middle name to something less embarrassing, getting the idea from her infant self to make her middle name Kaboom. Out of curiosity at how she'll be when she's older, Franny goes to the future, but is horrified to find that her teenage self plans to make everyone pay by unleashing an army of elephant monsters because Franny's classmates still laughed at her middle name. After Teen Franny boasted that her younger self can't stop her, Franny then went back to the day she won the science fair and prevented the bleak future from happening by not getting mad and agreeing with her peers that her middle name actually is quite funny.

Franny gets annoyed by Igor's tendency to provide assistance when she doesn't need it in Frantastic Voyage, so she creates a television set to keep her dog occupied during her more delicate experiments. Unfortunately, Igor ends up eating a doomsday device Franny had built as a security measure for her ideas falling into the wrong hands because he was snacking on grapes while watching TV and couldn't be bothered to take his eyes off the set long enough to look at what he was eating. Franny then shrunk herself so she could get inside Igor's body and deactivate the doomsday device before it went off. Franny eventually gets out of Igor's body and deactivates the doomsday device in time by taking control of the TV set inside Igor and switching it to a root beer commercial so Igor would want to drink root beer and end up burping Franny out. Franny almost destroyed the television, but was convinced by Igor to keep it after he switched the set to a documentary on baby spiders.

In The Fran With Four Brains, Franny finds her gourmet cooking classes, soccer practice and bagpipe lessons to take up too much of her laboratory time, so she creates three Franbots to handle these obligations in her place, but soon finds that they are running her mother ragged because of their obsession with excellence. Ultimately, Franny tricks her robot doubles into getting themselves destroyed and is able to convince her mother to limit her classes to a more manageable number.

The Frandidate has Franny learn about the election process and become interested in running for class president, winning the election (or, rather, persuading everyone to inaugurate her on the spot) by creating a Frandidate suit that enables her to take on the form of whatever the people who look at her like and to tell them what they want to hear. The suit eventually gains a mind of its own and tries to suffocate Franny while she's making a speech to the entire world before manipulating everyone to elect it King of the World. Igor saves the day by making it so that the ICU2 (an invention of Franny's that enables her to look at people from their televisions) focuses on Franny's mother's face, forcing the Frandidate to release its hold on Franny and confess that it had no intention of keeping its promises. Franny then made the Frandidate into a new couch to replace the one she had accidentally destroyed earlier.

Bad Hair Day had Franny asked by her mother why she isn't bothered by Igor being ugly, which leads to Franny doing experiments involving cosmetics. Franny uses her new growth formula on her hair, resulting in her pigtails detaching themselves from her head and becoming giant, gluttonous monsters that go around eating everything that's made of hair. Igor ends up swallowed by one of the pigtails, but later comes back by cutting his way out of the pigtail that ate him after cutting off his own fur to prevent getting swallowed again. After taking the pigtails down, Franny is able to reattach them to her head and makes the leftover hair into a coat for her mother that can change shape, adding some of Igor's fur to the mix to prevent it from also becoming a ravenous terror.

In Recipe For Disaster, Franny finds that her school's bake sale is failing and is motivated to help when Mona and Vincent point out to her that art and music are just as important as science. When Franny's own attempts at baking aren't as successful, she uses the school's old furnace to create a robotic baker called the Muffin Man, who proceeds to create muffins that are very delicious. Franny soon finds that the muffins are highly addictive and that everyone at school has ignored their usual pursuits just to eat more muffins. In the end, Franny uses her Visualizer Helmet to show everyone their futures so they'd see what would happen if they don't kick their muffin addictions and the Muffin Man decided to turn himself into a kiln so he could teach children to make pottery.

Trivia

 * Franny is the only character in the book series to appear in every book.
 * The book series' author and illustrator Jim Benton was originally going to draw Franny with long hair and name her Angeline Frankenstein. He named her Franny K. Stein instead because he liked that name better and gave Franny pigtails because he realized that long hair wouldn't have been very practical for laboratory work.