Several weeks had passed since my village was destroyed and I was picked up by the Kuja Pirates' ship.
Today, as always, I was cheerfully working away as the odd-jobs girl.
I'd braced myself when they said it would be odd jobs on a pirate ship, wondering what kind of grueling work awaited me, but it wasn't that tough. Only tasks I could handle well enough got assigned to me.
Mostly dishwashing, cleaning, that sort of thing. Household-chore level at best.
Apparently the reasoning was that giving me anything too demanding and having me mess it up would just create more problems.
If anything, they were impressed that I worked so hard for a five-year-old.
I had the strength and the build for it, so it seemed I'd exceeded expectations in a good way.
The newcomers in particular were grateful. The odd jobs I was doing had mainly been tasks dumped on them before, and, well, they'd clearly considered them a real pain.
Now that I was taking on at least some of that work, they said things had gotten a lot easier.
And within this life of odd jobs, there were two things I was especially grateful for.
The first was getting to read all sorts of books.
One of my jobs was organizing the storeroom, and among the cargo there were quite a lot of books and newspapers. Some were plunder, but others had been properly purchased.
Amazon Lily, their home base, sits within the Calm Belt, an island almost completely cut off from the outside world. Ways to get information about what's going on out there are scarce.
News Coos do come, so they can read newspapers, but getting their hands on books means buying or stealing them during voyages like this one.
Since the Kuja Pirates regularly raid merchant ships, they apparently grab books along with everything else during those attacks.
My job was to sort through all of it, and I'd been told I was welcome to read the books too. For a bookworm like me, this was a blessing.
Only after I'd properly finished my work, of course.
The second thing was about the training I'd made into a daily routine.
This, too, happened after work. I'd been doing strength training, practice swings, and the like in my room, trying not to get in anyone's way. The room was apparently a former storage space they'd assigned me, and I slept there too. Some sailors happened to see me training and said, "Want us to help with your training?"
According to them, for self-taught stuff it was reasonably decent, I seemed motivated, and it would be a good way to kill time. That was roughly their reasoning, but from my perspective, this was incredibly welcome.
After all, the Kuja Pirates are a warrior tribe where even rank-and-file fighters can use Haki. Every citizen dreams of becoming a first-rate warrior and trains from childhood, and their combat ability is high enough to be feared by many pirates across the Grand Line.
If people like that were willing to watch over my training, I might be able to get even stronger. I'd already been thinking that self-taught methods would only take me so far, so the timing was perfect.
From then on, whenever I had free time, whoever happened to be available would oversee my training.
That said, there was always someone or other with nothing to do on any given day, so it ended up being almost like a shift rotation, with someone watching over me every single day.
I learned efficient conditioning methods, how to handle weapons, and they'd spar with me casually, like a game.
When they told me I had better aptitude than expected, I got so happy I pushed myself too hard, and the next day the muscle soreness made household chores absolute agony.
But it wasn't like I could skip work, so I powered through.
In the end, I think it turned into good training for building basic stamina and recovery. Success!
***
Another day, another round of Sue diligently tackling odd jobs with her small body.
From the deck above, Shakuyaku and the others looked down at the sight of her carefully mopping the deck, scrubbing away every bit of grime.
"That new girl works harder than I expected, Captain."
"Hey now, she's not a 'new girl.' It's not like we formally took her into the crew."
"Oh, right."
"But it's true she works hard. She notices the little details, and she's thorough with the cleaning."
The Kuja Pirates had picked Sue up a few days earlier when they stopped at a certain island.
They'd heard it wasn't a particularly wealthy island, so there seemed little point in raiding it, and they'd planned to simply resupply and move on. But the island had already been attacked and destroyed by other pirates.
Looting ruins and robbing graves wasn't to their taste, so they considered setting sail immediately, but since it was already late, they decided to drop anchor there for just one night.
That was when a scouting party, sent out as a precaution to survey and secure the perimeter, found the girl.
Her clothes were singed in places, she wore no shoes, and when the Ship's Doctor examined her, the diagnosis was extreme exhaustion and mild malnutrition.
Given the circumstances, it was obvious she'd fled alone from that destroyed village. More than a few crew members were impressed that a child had walked such a distance barefoot, a distance far too long for someone her age.
Afterward, helping her in exchange for the belongings she carried was, as they'd told her, nothing more than a whim.
They hadn't expected much from assigning her odd jobs, but that expectation was pleasantly betrayed. Sue was earnest and hardworking.
She had stamina that was hard to believe for a five-year-old. A quick learner too, getting more efficient by the day. As long as she was making their lives easier, everyone welcomed her.
And besides, there were many among the Kuja who liked children, or at least didn't dislike them.
Amazon Lily is populated only by women. Occasionally, one who ventures out into the wider world returns carrying a child, and the islanders cooperate to raise any children born that way. So even women who haven't given birth themselves experience "child-rearing" in some form, helping out with someone else's child.
A crude, vulgar creature known as a "man" would be another matter entirely, but a girl, a pure-hearted, hardworking girl who was useful to them, stirred no ill will among the crew.
Beyond that, it simply came down to their honest assessment of her work.
On top of all that, her studious nature earned high marks as well.
Given that the Kuja were based on an isolated island and inevitably tended to be out of touch with the outside world, it wasn't unusual for some to have no interest whatsoever in external affairs.
What's more, knowledge that would be common sense in the outside world was often completely unknown among the Kuja.
But those who understood, with Shakuyaku chief among them, that knowledge and information could sometimes serve as powerful weapons held Sue in high regard for diligently reading through newspapers and books and absorbing their contents.
'Really, she's remarkably put-together for a five-year-old. Her diligence is something I'd want our younger members to learn from. Her parents must have raised her well.'
"Captain, why don't we just officially make Sue one of the Kuja? That girl's got a good head on her shoulders, and if we train her properly, I think she'd make a fine warrior."
"Oh, I'm for that! If she joined us, things would get so much easier!"
"Hey, you newcomers, that's just because you want to slack off on odd jobs."
"Well, that's... okay, sure, partly, but she really does have talent, right?"
"She does, doesn't she..."
Shakuyaku stubbed out her spent cigarette in the ashtray and pulled out a fresh one, lighting it.
Below, Sue had finished mopping from corner to corner. It looked like she might take a breather, but instead she immediately picked up a rag and moved on to wiping things down.
"...If that girl herself wants it, then maybe so."
'...Though I doubt she'd want to become a pirate, the same thing that destroyed her homeland.'
She swallowed the second half without voicing it.
As if in exchange, Shakuyaku exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke and headed back inside the ship, trailing the sailors who were still chattering away happily.
***
After that, I continued riding aboard the Kuja ship for a while.
...Well, "a while" is an understatement. It was turning out to be much longer than expected. It had been about half a year since they picked me up.
The thing was, this voyage had apparently been planned as a fairly long expedition from the start, and also, being a pirate crew, the places this ship headed were basically targets for plunder.
Those targets varied: coastal towns and villages, unlucky merchant ships they happened upon, other pirate ships, and so on.
Varied as they were, peaceful towns where I could disembark were extremely rare.
Well, it wasn't that there were no "peaceful" towns at all, but towns where I could actually make a life for myself were hard to come by. Not many places would take in a child of unknown background who'd been riding on a pirate ship.
And in this era, it wasn't unusual for communities to have deeply rooted customs of rejecting outsiders.
Between that and various other reasons, we simply never arrived at a place where I could get off the ship.
Also, and I'm not sure if this is related, but compared to the early days, I'd gotten used to life on this ship. Unless I was being self-conscious about it, I was being treated as a full-fledged member of the crew.
It didn't feel like those first days anymore, when I was treated like "a stranger who just happened to be on the same ship."
...Because of that, I suppose, the amount of work assigned to me had grown compared to the beginning.
Beyond household chores and organizing cargo, there was helping with supply runs, gathering information at ports (using my status as a child to lower people's guard during questioning, among other things), and various other tasks.
Among all of these, the one I personally found most interesting was "newspaper-making."
This started when a certain sailor said something like, "Newspapers are so long and hard to follow, I just can't be bothered to read them. I know the Captain always says information is important, but still." That gave me the idea.
First, I'd read the newspaper.
This was already part of my daily routine, so it didn't feel like work at all. No burden whatsoever.
Next, I'd summarize the news from the paper, distilling just the key points in an easy-to-understand way.
As short as possible, quick to read, simple enough for even a child to understand.
Then the crew members who couldn't be bothered to read the actual newspaper would read my summary. That was the system.
This "Sue-chan Newspaper," as someone had dubbed it at some point, turned out to be quite popular. A fair number of people eagerly awaited the edition that came out around early afternoon and passed it around to read.
Shakuyaku-san praised the effort too, saying it was an interesting and useful initiative that helped reduce the number of information-poor people on the ship.
...On the other hand, she was exasperated with the readers, or rather, the newcomers who were essentially having a five-year-old explain the news to them.
I genuinely enjoyed doing it, so I didn't mind at all.
I've always liked working with the written word. Reading and writing both. Thinking about how to phrase things so they'd be easy to understand, how to write them so people wouldn't lose interest, and then putting the summary together. That was fun for me.
On top of work, I was still keeping up with training as well.
I'd become much more mobile than before I boarded the ship, and I'd been told my weapon handling was starting to look respectable.
Of course, always with the qualifier "for a child" attached. Same as ever.
And actually, just once, I'd even experienced real combat.
During a battle with another pirate crew's ship, the Kuja Pirates had been dominating one-sidedly, but a few enemies had made a desperate attempt to sneak aboard our ship under cover of darkness.
I happened to be looking out a window and was lucky enough to spot them, so I immediately alerted the people on the ship.
The infiltrators were swiftly taken down, but one person got lucky enough to slip past all of that and tried to make it inside. The moment that person opened the door, I was right there. I lunged out from a low position and swung my wooden sword (the one I always used in training) upward, smashing it right into the jaw.
Whether it was just a good angle or what, I managed to rattle the brain nicely, and the enemy toppled over backward.
Not quite knocked out, but before the person could get back up, other crew members finished the job.
Everyone was half-exasperated, saying "Don't be so reckless," but they also praised me, saying it was a solid hit that showed my training was paying off.
It felt like I'd gotten even closer to everyone, and that made me happy. ...Even if they were pirates.
One night, after this kind of life had been going on for a while.
I was summoned to the Captain's Quarters by Shakuyaku-san.
In that room with just the two of us, the thing she told me was:
"Me... join this pirate crew?"
"That's right. If you'd like, why not keep sailing with us and be a pirate?"
It was, of all things, an invitation to join the Kuja Pirates.
Well, to be precise, the topic came up as part of a broader conversation about my future.
"Soon we'll be finishing our expedition and returning to Amazon Lily. But the island has a law forbidding outsiders from being brought in. Men are out of the question, of course, but even women who aren't Kuja warriors cannot be freely allowed onto the island."
I see, I see. Makes sense.
Outsider equals me, in this case.
"So as things stand, we can't bring you to the island. But if you formally become one of us, a member of Amazon Lily, then you would be allowed in. And naturally, you could continue sailing on this ship as well. Properly, as a fellow member of the Kuja."
"...And if I were to decline?"
When I asked this timidly, Shakuyaku-san showed no sign of offense and answered with a smile.
"In that case, you'd disembark as originally planned. The last island we'll be stopping at before heading home is one that's effectively treated as Kuja territory. If you get off there, no one will look at you strangely for having been on a pirate ship. In fact, it should be quite easy to live there."
I see. So I'd get off there and make my own way from that point on.
Become a pirate... or go back to being an ordinary citizen.
Freedom paired with danger and a life of crime... or a somewhat constrained life with moderate safety...
For a five-year-old to decide, this was an enormously weighty choice.
"I won't blame you no matter what you choose, so relax. If you do become one of us, of course I'd be happy, but someone who joins reluctantly is more trouble than anything. Be honest with your heart, and choose the life you want to walk."
"..."
"You don't have to answer right now. Let's see... by the morning after tomorrow, please."
That was where the night ended for the time being.
I returned to my room and lay down on the hard bed whose feel I'd grown completely accustomed to.
Over these six months, I'd gotten entirely used to this firmness. Normally I could fall asleep the moment I lay down, but that night, understandably, sleep wouldn't come easily.
And before I knew it, the deadline for my decision arrived. That morning came.
My answer was...
To be continued...