-Real World-
Morgans had not built the world's most widely-read newspaper by accepting the first answer people gave him, or the second. He was persistent in the professional sense — which was to say, he would continue asking a question from different angles and at different intervals until either the information emerged or the subject physically left.
Yamato did not know who her mother was. She had searched her memory and come back empty, and her face while doing it had been honest enough that even Morgans' instinct for distinguishing performance from reality had found nothing to challenge. She genuinely did not know.
He wrote up what he had and calculated what it was worth. Kaido's son, raised without knowledge of her own mother, trained and imprisoned on Onigashima, now in motion with uncertain destination — there was a column in it, possibly two. Not the exclusive he had wanted, but workable.
In the meantime, Kaido remained the most reliably profitable subject the World Economy News had printed in the last decade. The Sky Screen had introduced the possibility that the man was connected to the legendary Sun God, and the Marine's subsequent findings in the Devil's Triangle had supported the connection rather than dismissing it. The combination had been extraordinary for circulation — readers at every level of the sea wanted to know what it meant when one of the Four Emperors turned out to have a divine lineage threading back through history.
More practically: anything with Kaido's name in the headline moved copies. Morgans kept extensive notes and very few secrets about how this worked.
"You've been receiving newspapers on Onigashima all these years," Yamato said. She was working through her fourth serving and her mind was operating on the part of the problem that interested her. "You have a massive operation. Influence everywhere. And yet the Sky Screen has never shown you." She studied the beak, the white feathers, the large frame that had not taken human form since she'd been aboard. "Do you always stay in Beast Form? Is the human version too embarrassing to show?"
She was imagining something , with the engaged visual imagination of someone who had spent years on an island with limited entertainment options.
Morgans looked at her with the expression of a man who could tell he was being imagined unfavourably.
"I have no interest in the Sky Screen," he said. "I operate behind things. People who operate in front of things are easy to find and easy to target. The World Government and the Marine have both tried to eliminate me through official and unofficial channels. As long as I am not a face, I am not a convenient target." He paused. "Also I have enemies who would pay considerably for that information. Visibility is not a business advantage in my position."
"So you're afraid."
"I am strategic."
Yamato returned to the steak.
Morgans was, in fact, thinking about money. He was almost always thinking about money, in the background, the way a navigator thinks about the current even while having other conversations. The newspaper price question had been sitting in the professional part of his mind for several weeks. The Sky Screen had apparently increased the price of information in its broadcast, which had produced a knock-on expectation among the reading public — if the world's most comprehensive information source had raised rates, then surely the physical newspapers that covered what the Sky Screen did not were underpriced by comparison.
The counterargument was volume. The World Economy News' competitive advantage over every other publication in the world was reach — the news coo network had reduced delivery costs to a fraction of what any competitor could manage, and that cost advantage translated directly into price accessibility, which translated directly into the broadest possible readership, which translated into the advertising and sponsorship revenues that the sticker price of the newspaper did not fully represent.
He needed a good actuary. The calculation between price and volume had enough variables that intuition alone was insufficient, and he had made the mistake of trusting intuition on a price decision once before and had spent two quarters correcting it.
He was still thinking about this when the flagship received a formal invitation from the Big Mom Pirates to proceed to Whole Cake Island for the wedding of Charlotte Linlin and Kozuki Momonosuke.
Morgans read the invitation and had the expression of someone receiving exactly the news he had been hoping to receive.
A Four Emperors wedding. One of the most politically significant events the New World had produced in years, pulling every major dark power together in one location. A groom who was less than ten years old, which was a story in itself. A bride who was Charlotte Linlin, which was always a story. The Kozuki clan connection, the Wano Country angle, the Big Mom Pirates hosting external forces in a context that was officially celebratory and practically a negotiation.
He was going to cover it personally. He was going to sell enough copies of that issue to finance the next six months of operations.
He hummed to himself, involuntarily, in front of Yamato.
Yamato had her own reason for heading in that direction.
Portgas D. Ace. The son of the Pirate King, who the Sky Screen had shown dying at Marineford in the Broadcast's future — stopped there by Admiral Sakazuki, in front of his brother, in front of Whitebeard, in front of everyone who had come to save him. She had read about Whitebeard Pirate in Oden's diary, and she had met Ace once, briefly, when he had come through Onigashima on some errand she had not fully understood. She had not been able to speak to him in any way that mattered.
He was out there now. Moving, alive. She wanted to find him and keep finding him — to be present enough in his vicinity that the thing the Sky Screen had shown simply did not happen.
She was also, she admitted to herself quietly, not entirely sure what to do about Oden.
The Wano Country sections of the Broadcast had been thorough and they had been brutal. Kurozumi Orochi's Eighth Form was not something that existed inside Yamato's model of what humans could become — it was something that required a different category entirely. The form that had almost killed Yamato, that Kaido himself had been needed to contain, that operated with the weight and logic of something genuinely mythological. Against that, Kozuki Oden — brilliant, alive, electric in every account she had ever read — was still a mortal man. She did not know how a mortal man could have changed the outcome.
She did not know, now, if that had ever been a reasonable thing to believe.
"Morgans." She set down her utensils, which was unusual enough that Morgans stopped writing. "You've met a lot of people. Interviewed a lot of them. How true is Oden's diary?"
He looked at her for a moment.
"Tell me what you mean by that."
"It's — it was what I had, in there. The diary. His adventures. Roger's voyage. The things he saw. I read it until it came apart and I put it back together." She was choosing words more carefully than she usually did, which he noticed. "I built something around it. A direction. And now I'm looking at what Wano actually was, what Orochi actually is, and I'm wondering if I built it on something real or if I just — read a book."
Morgans put his pen down entirely.
"Who keeps a diary?" he asked.
Yamato didn't answer.
He turned to the young female editor working at the desk behind him. "Do you keep a diary?"
She shook her head immediately, with the reflex of someone for whom the question had a self-evident answer. She produced words for a living. The idea of producing additional words in her own time, voluntarily, for an audience of one, was not a thing she would have chosen.
"Nobody serious keeps a diary," Morgans said, turning back to Yamato. "Or rather — the ones who do are not recording what they think. They're recording what they want to have thought, or what they want someone who finds the diary later to believe they thought. A diary is a document with an audience, even when the writer says it isn't." He picked the pen back up. "It's not a lie, exactly. It's a curated version. The facts may be accurate. The feelings are shaped for presentation."
Yamato was quiet.
"Oden may have been everything the diary describes," Morgans said, which was more generosity than he typically offered. "The adventures were real — Roger's voyage is documented independently; Oden's presence on it is corroborated. But a diary tells you what the writer wanted to be. It doesn't necessarily tell you what they were." He paused. "If you want to understand Oden, find his son. Sons inherit things from fathers even when they're not trying to. Watch how he moves. Watch what he does when things go wrong. You'll learn more in an afternoon than you'll get from reading the same pages again."
It was not, he acknowledged internally, the angle he had expected to give the interview. But Yamato was looking at him in a way that suggested it had landed somewhere useful, and useful landings occasionally produced better stories than the ones he'd planned.
The flagship continued southeast, toward Whole Cake Island, carrying a journalist with ambitions, a girl who had been looking for a direction, and a great deal of leftover steak.
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