-Real World-
The story of the Devil's Triangle spread the way stories always spread when the official version is late and the facts are genuinely strange—through speculation, embellishment, and the specific creativity of people who had witnessed nothing and were therefore unconstrained by what had actually occurred.
By the time the rumors had circulated through a week's worth of taverns and ports and news-hungry ships, several versions had established themselves as competing truths. One held that Kaido had been reduced to pieces by the coalition forces and rebuilt himself from the wreckage—more intact than before, unkillable, a horror of regenerative spite. Another insisted that Uchiha Madara had killed Fleet Admiral Sengoku outright, or one of the Admirals, and that any Marine official who hadn't appeared publicly within three days of the battle's conclusion should be assumed dead. A third, circulating primarily among male audiences of a specific inclination, involved Boa Hancock being taken as a personal prize by one or both of the enemy King-class combatants, a story that was false in its specifics and ghoulish in its appeal.
The people who knew exactly what had happened said nothing verifiable. The people who said things verifiable knew nothing.
The world kept talking.
The Kingdom of Arabasta was currently hosting, without its knowledge, a small operation that had begun as a manhunt and had not yet decided what it was becoming.
Portgas D. Ace, Marco the Phoenix, and Vista of the Flower Swords had spent considerable coin on black market intelligence and had arrived in Arabasta with information about Blackbeard's whereabouts that had been accurate for approximately as long as it had taken them to act on it.
They were now looking at a location where Blackbeard was not.
"We were close," Ace said, which was an accurate statement.
Marco stood in the empty room with the expression of someone reviewing a sequence of events and finding each step individually reasonable and the collective outcome unfortunate. "Your father's call was correct. We don't know what happens to the Dark-Dark Fruit if Teach dies when his body is in the condition it apparently is. We don't know if that fruit would allow him a second resurrection. Going in without that information—"
"I know," Ace said. "I know."
He knew. He was still standing in the empty room.
The call from Edward Newgate had interrupted them at the moment they were prepared to move—the Den Den Mushi crackling with everything that had happened in the Devil's Triangle, Whitebeard's voice carrying the specific weight of a man who had processed catastrophic news and was distributing it calmly to prevent worse responses.
In the broadcast Teach's Dark-Dark Fruit had done something that nobody had seen before. The nature of Blackbeard's body—abnormal since birth, the rumors said, capable of containing more than one consciousness—made a dying Teach an unknown variable. Better to know. Better to wait.
By the time they had processed the intelligence and were ready to proceed regardless, Blackbeard had processed something too—specifically, the information that the operation to find him existed. He had moved his people into the Arabasta rebel population with the efficiency of someone who understood crowds as cover.
Finding him now required either penetrating the rebellion's internal structure or waiting for him to surface voluntarily, and neither option had a clean timeline.
"The rebellion itself," Vista said, from the doorway. He was looking at the streets below—busier than they should have been, carrying the particular energy of a populace whose frustration has exceeded its patience. "Kaido's sea level information is feeding into it. People believe the nobles have places to go if the water rises. The common population does not."
This was accurate. The Mu Continent revelation had arrived in Arabasta at the same time as everywhere else, and the specific form it had taken here—absorbed into existing resentment about Dancing Powder and drought and the perception that the powerful were insulated from the consequences they caused—had accelerated what had already been building.
Ace looked at the window.
He had seen the Sky Screen's footage of Tama—the future Beast Disaster, decisive, cold-efficient, moving through situations that would have stopped a younger version of her without a break in stride. He had known a girl who would rather not eat than take food that was meant for someone else. The same eyes, years later, and nothing else recognizable.
"What happens to her," he said
Neither Marco nor Vista answered this, which was the appropriate response.
In Water 7, the mayor's office had been dealing with problems of a different scale.
Iceberg—a man who had built his career on the principle that useful work done clearly was worth more than impressive work done obscurely—sat with a stack of reports that all said the same thing in different forms: the sea level data was real, it was not improving, and it was going to become someone's problem at a timeline that differed by report but not by direction.
Kalifa had been his secretary and had been useful, and had then been exposed as a CP9 agent on the Sky Screen and had departed without the social formality of a resignation. The selection process for her replacement had been conducted through the municipal system, through layers of interview and assessment, and had produced—through a process Iceberg trusted precisely because he had not intervened in it—a girl who was not yet ten years old and who had an organizational mind that the interviewers had marked as exceptional.
He looked at the assignment he'd just given her.
Gather the boatmen. Meeting on water infrastructure and flood response.
She had written it down in handwriting that was considerably neater than his own and had left to begin the arrangements. Iceberg did not feel guilty about employing an underage secretary; he felt responsible for ensuring the work was appropriate and that she was learning something useful. These were different categories. He had been working since younger than she was.
He was still at his desk when the window moved.
"I have a gun in this drawer," he said, without looking up. "And I am not in a patient mood."
"Put it away, old man."
Iceberg had been prepared for several possibilities and not for this one. He was on his feet before the thought completed.
Franky filled the window frame in the way that things built to exceed standard human dimensions fill architectural spaces—too much in every direction, requiring the eye to revise its assumptions about the room. He was intact in all the ways that mattered, which was more than the charred ruins of Franky House had suggested as a probability.
Iceberg crossed the room.
He checked: limbs present and functional, structural integrity maintained, the specific look in Franky's eyes of someone who had survived something that had cost him and had not yet finished deciding what to do about the cost.
He stepped back when he was satisfied.
"Lucci," Franky said. "Kaku. CP9. I'm going to deal with that eventually."
"Eventually," Iceberg said, which was the word of a man who understood that eventually was doing significant work in that sentence.
"Not now. Now I need to get stronger." Franky looked at the city through the window—the water channels, the sea train tracks that had taken years to build, the skyline that had the particular quality of something people had worked very hard to make and were still in the process of defending. "If I go to Straw Hat, I can grow quickly. I need to not be a liability when the situation calls for me." A pause. "Also, there's research I need access to. On mechanical ascension. Getting rid of the ceiling that flesh puts on you."
Iceberg said nothing for a moment.
"You're not asking permission," he said.
"No," Franky said. "I'm telling you where I'm going so you don't spend resources looking for me."
This was, Iceberg reflected, the most Franky thing Franky had ever said to him. He did not argue with it.
The sea was rising. The city needed planning. A secretary younger than the problem she was being asked to help solve was already in the building, making lists.
And Franky was going to sea, which had always been where Franky's problems found their solutions, even when the sea was the source of some of them.
"Come back when you're done," Iceberg said.
"Obviously," said Franky, and went back out the window.