Two days had passed since the world stopped breathing.
The recording had cut to static at the end. It had not finished. It had been severed, mid-sentence, the way a man's voice is severed when a door slams shut on his throat. The world had heard the voice of Dr. Vegapunk for the better part of a day, and the world had learned what the world was not supposed to know, and then the voice had cut out.
Two days, and the world was still trying to find the breath again.
On the Thousand Sunny, sailing toward Elbaf with the wind at her back, Robin had been re-reading a notebook for the better part of a morning. It was Vegapunk's. One of his. Atlas had given it to her without ceremony, had said only "she trusted you," and had walked away.
Robin had not slept well in two days. The notebook was full of marginalia in three different hands.
Above her, on the upper deck, Bonney was sitting with her knees drawn up and her face turned away from the sea. She had not spoken since they left Egghead's wreckage. Edison had tried, twice. Lilith had not.
Sanji was cooking. He was cooking too much. He always cooked too much when he did not know what to do.
In the New World, in a base whose location nobody had been allowed to know, Buggy the Clown was shouting.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE GOT CUT OFF AT THE GOOD PART???"
"Calm down, Buggy."
"I AM CALM, MIHAWK, I AM EXCEPTIONALLY CALM, BUT IF I HEAR ONE MORE PERSON SAY THE WORLD GOVERNMENT'S NAME IN A SENTENCE THAT INCLUDES THE WORDS 'INSCRUTABLE' OR 'UNCHALLENGED' I AM GOING TO START CHARGING THEM RENT FOR EXISTING ON MY OCEAN!!"
Crocodile, in a chair near the back of the room, did not look up from the glass of wine that had been sitting in front of him for the entire conversation. He had not drunk from it. He had not done much of anything. He had been listening.
"Buggy," he said, eventually, when Buggy ran out of breath, "shut up."
"....Croco-boy?"
"He didn't get cut off at the good part. He got cut off at the part the World Government decided we were not allowed to hear. Those are different things."
Mihawk inclined his head, very slightly.
In a chamber under the Holy Land of Mariejois, the Five Elders had been sitting in silence for forty minutes. The teacups in front of them had gone cold. None of them had reached for one.
Saturn's hand was resting against his abdomen where the Bajrang Gun had broken something that had not yet healed. He had not spoken since the meeting began.
Mars finally did. "We may have to consider that he prepared for this."
"Yes."
"He had backups."
"Yes."
"....the Mother Flame information was not supposed to leave the labs."
"Yes."
Behind the Empty Throne, the figure that sat upon it had not moved. Had not breathed visibly. The room around the Empty Throne had a very particular quality of air, the kind that did not stir even when other rooms had wind moving through them.
The figure listened.
The figure did not speak.
In Marineford, Akainu was breaking a desk.
He had been breaking desks for two days. The carpenters at HQ had stopped trying to keep up.
Sengoku, in a small house on a small island far from Marineford, had been sitting in his garden for two days with a cup of tea and a folded newspaper he had not yet opened. He had not been watching the broadcast directly. He had been listening through his radio. He had heard most of it.
He had not been surprised by most of it.
He had been surprised by some of it, and he had not yet decided what to do about that.
The tea had gone cold three times.
In a fortress on the windward side of a rocky island in the western sky, Dragon stood at his window and looked at the horizon. Behind him, in his office, Sabo lay on a cot with bandages across his ribs and a bowl of water beside him. Sabo had been awake for thirty seconds in the last twelve hours. His eyes had not focused. His memory was returning in pieces and not in order, and Koala had been whispering things to him that were trying to put the pieces into the right shape.
Dragon had been at the window for some time.
He turned, finally, when something happened that he could not see but could feel.
In Hachinosu, in a room that had been meant for something else and had been repurposed into a cell, Garp lay on his back with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes closed. He was not sleeping. He had not slept in two days. He had been thinking.
He had been thinking, mostly, about his grandsons.
He felt the change in the air a half-second before it happened.
On Egghead, in a hidden room beneath the wreckage of what had once been a laboratory tower, an old man with a square jaw and a head shaped like a pyramid sat at a console he had built himself, with his own hands, over the course of forty years.
His name was Pythagoras.
He was the satellite of Dr. Vegapunk that the world thought had died at Egghead.
He had not died.
He had stayed.
He had watched the broadcast end. He had watched his sister-self bleed out in a chair. He had watched the others run. He had not run. He had stayed because someone had to stay, and because Stella had told him, in the last conversation they had ever had, that there was one more thing she had wanted to say at the end of the broadcast, and that she would not have time to say it.
She had told him what it was.
She had told him to say it for her, if he could.
Pythagoras had not yet had the courage.
He felt the change in the air, the same one Dragon felt and Garp felt, and he opened his eyes.
The black panel appeared in the mind of every sentient being on the planet.
It had no edges. It hung in the dark center of every consciousness, and on its surface there was no image at first, only a slow swirl of color the way oil moves on the surface of water. Then the swirl resolved into a figure.
He wore a suit. The suit was not casual. The suit was not formal either. It was the suit a man wears when the occasion is uncertain and he has decided to be ready for any direction it goes. His hair was not visible. His face was visible but the eye refused to fix on it, the way a stranger's face refuses to be remembered after a single passing in a crowd.
He floated. There was no ground beneath him.
His smile was patient.
He spoke.
{Hello, players. Hello, world. Hello, Mr. Vegapunk's audience.}
The voice was not loud. The voice was placed directly into every mind, the way a thought arrives without footsteps. It did not echo. It did not need to.
{You thought that was the broadcast, did you not? The truth, the recording, the Mother Flame, the Void Century, the figure on the throne. You thought that was the truth being told.}
He paused.
His smile widened, the way a host's smile widens at the moment the music begins.
{Hooo....no. That was the warm-up.}
In the New World, Crocodile set down his glass of wine for the first time in two days.
{My name is Doolittle. You may call me the Game Master.}
He spread his hands. The suit shifted with him.
{I am not from this world. I am not a Devil Fruit user. I am not a creature of any system you have name for. I have been watching for a very long time, and I have watched many things, and I have never watched a world deliver a truth so clean and so unfinished as Mr. Vegapunk's. So I have decided, with what I am told is excellent timing, to finish it.}
In Marineford, Akainu opened his mouth and closed it.
In the chamber under Mariejois, Saturn had gone very still.
{I will ask questions. I will ask them of all of you, every sentient being who hears my voice. The first to answer correctly will receive a reward. The reward is mine to give, and I have a very generous catalogue. Wrong answers will spin a wheel. The wheel decides the punishment. The wheel is not always merciful.}
Doolittle adjusted his collar with two fingers. A small, precise gesture.
{Some of you will recognize the format. You have just had a broadcast. Mine is similar. Mine is not the same. There will be no recordings here. There will be no editing. There will only be questions, answers, rewards, and consequences.}
He swept his arm from left to right.
{And as is fitting, the first question is the one Mr. Vegapunk did not get to ask.}
The Q&A border bloomed across the world's vision.
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►What did Dr. Vegapunk attempt to broadcast in the final seconds before the World Government severed his transmission?
Time Given: 60 Seconds
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For five seconds, the world said nothing.
On the Sunny, Robin closed her eyes and pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. She did not know. Vegapunk had not told her. She had been allowed many things on Egghead, but not the final pages.
Atlas, on the upper deck, said "....fuck."
Edison said nothing. Edison had not been with Stella in the last hour. Edison had been with the children of Kuma's lineage research. Edison did not have the answer either.
Bonney looked up at the panel. She did not know either, but her hands had begun to shake.
In Cross Guild's base, Crocodile's eyes had narrowed. He had not had the answer. He had ideas. He had three of them. None of them were certain, and certainty was the only currency he ever traded in.
Buggy, for once, said nothing.
In Mariejois, Mars had begun to whisper, very fast, to the others. "If anyone — if ANYONE — answers this, we are exposed. We need to —"
Saturn put up a hand.
"We need to do nothing, Mars. Anyone with the answer is already dead, except the ones we cannot reach."
"But —"
"Anyone with the answer is already dead. EXCEPT the ones we cannot reach."
Saturn's voice was quiet, and the others heard what Saturn was saying without him saying it, and the others looked at each other with a slow horror that did not need to be named.
In a small garden far from Marineford, Sengoku set down his cup of tea. He was not the answerer. He did not have this one.
He waited to see who did.
In a hidden lab beneath Egghead's wreckage, Pythagoras put his hands flat on the console.
He had been told. Stella had told him.
He had not had the courage.
He had it now.
He pressed the panel.
The world held very still.
Doolittle's voice was warm, the way a host's voice is warm when a guest he had not expected has stepped forward.
{We have our correct answer. Given by....Mr. Pythagoras.}
The world inhaled.
In Mariejois, Mars made a sound nobody in the room had ever heard him make before. Saturn's eyes closed.
In Cross Guild's base, Crocodile said one word, very softly: "....alive."
In Marineford, Akainu picked up the desk he had been about to break and put it down very carefully.
The screen of the world cut to a small lab beneath Egghead.
Pythagoras sat at his console. The lab around him was lit by the orange of a single lamp and the blue of the panels he had built himself. He was old. He was tired. He was a man whose sister-self had just died, and he had stayed where she had died, and he had stayed alone for two days, and he was choosing now to be seen.
He looked into the camera with the eyes of a man who had decided to stop being afraid.
[►Submitted Answer: The given name of the man we now call Joy Boy.]
The world inhaled again, and this time the inhale did not stop.
Doolittle did not speak for one breath.
It was the kind of pause a man makes when something has happened that he had hoped for but had not been certain of.
He adjusted his collar with two fingers.
When he spoke, his voice was the same voice. Smooth. Theatrical. The host had returned. The line under it had not.
{Well done, Mr. Pythagoras.}
He paused, half a second.
{Stella would be proud.}
The line landed flat in the middle of the broadcast like a stone dropped into still water.
In a hospital island in the New World, a man with blond feathers in his hair and a coffee cup that had not been refilled in an hour, looked up sharply. Marco the Phoenix did not know who Doolittle was. Marco the Phoenix did not know what Stella's pride had to do with anything. But Marco the Phoenix had heard a tone shift, and Marco the Phoenix had heard a man on a global broadcast say "Stella would be proud" the way another man might have said "I am sorry for your loss," and Marco the Phoenix filed it.
It was the first thing Marco filed.
It would not be the last.
Doolittle, on the broadcast, recovered. The smile returned in full.
{Mr. Pythagoras, your reward time. As is the rule, you have three options.}
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►Knowledge Fragment — The given name of the man we now call Joy Boy. The name will be delivered to you privately, as a single word spoken in your mind. The world will not hear it. You will know.
►Sealed Memory — Recover one suppressed memory of your choice, fully. The memory will play for you in complete sensory detail, private to you.
►Bounty Cloak — One person of your choice has their bounty hidden from active hunters and Marine eyes for thirty days. Their wanted posters fade. Their face slips from memory.
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Pythagoras looked at the menu for a long time.
The Cloak would shield him. He was the one the World Government wanted dead now. The Cloak would buy him thirty days.
The Memory would let him recover something he had not allowed himself to access in years.
The Knowledge would give him the name Stella had carried into the dark.
He pressed the Knowledge.
A pale gold disc of light appeared at his temple. The size of a coin. It rested for a heartbeat, two, three. Then it sank into him the way light sinks into water.
His old eyes widened.
His mouth did not open.
The world saw him hear the name. The world did not get to hear it themselves.
Pythagoras whispered something to himself, very softly, with his lips closed enough that no microphone could have caught the syllables. Then he leaned back in his chair with his hand over his mouth, and he closed his eyes, and he did not cry, but it was a very near thing.
The world stared.
Doolittle let the silence sit. He let it sit longer than the broadcast had ever sat in silence.
Then he clapped, slow, three times.
{Mr. Pythagoras has chosen Knowledge.}
His voice was bright again.
{The world will be very interested in keeping Mr. Pythagoras alive in the coming weeks, I imagine. I hope his hosts treat him well.}
In Cross Guild's base, Crocodile stood up and walked toward the room where the maps were kept.
In the New World, on the Sunny, Robin opened her eyes.
"Luffy."
"Hm?"
"We need to go to Egghead."
"....Egghead??"
"Yes."
"OKAY!! NAMI!! WE'RE GOING TO EGGHEAD!!"
"WE ARE GOING TO ELBAF, IDIOT!!"
"WE'RE GOING TO BOTH NOW, NAMI!!"
In Marineford, Akainu had already begun shouting orders.
In Mariejois, the Five Elders were no longer pretending to drink tea.
Doolittle watched the world react for a few seconds with the expression of a man watching a fire he had set himself burn nicely.
Then he swept his arm.
The Wheel appeared behind him, the size of a small island, the surface scrolling with billions of blood-red letters that no eye could read fast enough to fix on.
{And now....the Wheel. Let us see what fate has decided for those who guessed wrong.}
It spun. Slower than it would later. Doolittle tapped his foot in the air to its turning.
The Wheel slowed. Stopped.
Doolittle read it.
He smiled.
{Punishment this round is....."Voiceless."}
He clapped his hands together once.
{Every player who answered incorrectly....for the next 24 hours....you cannot speak. Your voice will not leave your throat. You may write. You may gesture. You may sing if you find a way, but you will not.}
He paused.
{Mr. Vegapunk would understand the choice.}
The world reacted in waves.
A noble in West Blue who had answered wrong with great confidence opened his mouth at his servants and produced no sound. He tried again. Nothing. He tried, with mounting fury, a third time. His servants, who had been waiting for years for this exact moment, very calmly continued not to bring his lunch.
A Marine officer in Logue Town who had answered wrong tried to call his squad to attention. His mouth moved. His arms gestured. His squad, slowly, began to laugh.
A pirate captain on a no-name spring island who had been mid-rant tried to finish his rant and could not. His first mate, who had been listening for two solid hours, began to sleep where he stood.
In a tea shop in the Gobi Kingdom, the same baker who had been Marked twice in another life and another timeline (had this been that timeline, which it was not, anymore) — in this timeline, a different baker, who had answered wrong on a whim, opened her mouth to ask her customers what they wanted and could only mime. Her customers ordered through pointing. The transaction took twenty minutes and ended in laughter.
In a small fishing village in East Blue, a grandmother who had answered wrong tried to scold her grandson for tracking mud onto her clean floor. Her mouth moved. Nothing came out. The grandson took advantage and tracked more mud, deliberately. The grandmother chased him with a slipper, silently, and the slipper made the only sound in the chase.
In a Marine vessel halfway between Reverse Mountain and Sabaody, the captain on the bridge tried to give an order. He could not. The first mate quickly took command, with what could only be described as a polite cough.
In a back alley in Loguetown, a thief who had answered wrong opened his mouth to threaten his rivals, found nothing, and was beaten unconscious.
In Hachinosu, in a cell that had not been locked, Garp lit up. He had not answered. He had not bothered.
He laughed. He laughed quietly, because he was alone and there was no one to see, but he laughed for a long time.
Doolittle watched the world stay quiet for one more moment, a perfect moment, the silence of a thousand wrong answers held in the throats of the wrong answerers.
Then he turned back to the camera.
{Wonderful. The world is briefly more peaceful, dear players. Make use of the time.}
He set the cuff of his sleeve.
{Now....the next question. This one cuts deeper into the structure.}
The Q&A border bloomed back.
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►What grants the Five Elders their unageing immortality, and what would happen if it were severed?
Time Given: 60 Seconds
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In Mariejois, all five of the Elders looked at each other. None of them moved. None of them spoke.
In a small garden far from Marineford, a retired Fleet Admiral set down his teacup.
He stood up from his chair very slowly. He had not been planning on standing today. He had been planning on continuing to do nothing.
He had changed his mind.
He walked toward the panel that was hovering, very politely, in the air of his garden.
Behind the Empty Throne, the figure that had not moved in many days lifted one finger.
Just one finger.
The world saw it.
Doolittle hovered in front of the world's eyes, his suit immaculate, his smile patient, his hands folded neatly in front of him.
He did not say a word.
He just watched the timer.
59....
58....
57....
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