Finn opened the list, scanned the first page, and raised an eyebrow.
"This many?"
More than two thousand entries. Not two thousand pirates in general, not two thousand people who had done something interesting enough to get arrested. Two thousand individuals with Devil Fruit abilities, catalogued and currently housed in Impel Down's various levels.
Magellan caught his expression and offered a small, practiced smile. "It looks like more than it is. The number has been... reduced considerably over the years."
"Reduced how?"
"The conditions here have always been harsh. Some couldn't endure the treatment and died. Others were held long enough that illness took them. A few suicides. Natural causes among the older ones." Magellan paused. "And Shiryu, before I dealt with him, had been quietly eliminating prisoners he found inconvenient. The original population was significantly higher."
Finn nodded slowly, turning that over.
Impel Down was built into and under a sea cliff, six levels extending downward until the lowest reached the ocean floor. When it was operating at full capacity in earlier decades, the former warden had once mentioned to Finn, off-hand, that the population could run into the hundreds of thousands. The Calm Belt labor program had drained ordinary inmates steadily over the years, leaving behind the ones too dangerous or too specialized to risk in an open environment.
Two thousand Devil Fruit users, with abilities significant enough to warrant long-term confinement. Reduced from whatever the number had been before. Not as staggering as it first appeared, once you thought it through.
He flipped to the next few pages.
Douglas Bullet. Paramecia. Clank-Clank Fruit.
Byrnndi World. Paramecia. More-More Fruit. (Cryo-suspended.)
Catarina Devon. Mythical Zoan. Dog-Dog Fruit, Model: Nine-Tailed Fox.
Charlotte Cracker. Paramecia. Biscuit-Biscuit Fruit.
Donquixote Rosinante. Paramecia. Calm-Calm Fruit.
Caesar Clown. Logia. Gas-Gas Fruit.
Finn stopped at those last two names and let out a short sound that was not quite a laugh.
Rosinante he had obviously expected. Caesar, though, was a different story. After Alabasta, apparently, the Marines had finally caught up with him and he had ended up here. That tracked. Caesar was not a man built for sustained evasion once someone decided seriously to pursue him.
He closed the folder and held it out to Luffy.
"Go through it. Pick something you want."
Luffy took it like it was a menu, flipped past the first several pages with the efficiency of someone looking for a specific section, and within thirty seconds was pointing at an entry.
"This one. The Calm-Calm Fruit." He looked up. "It silences things, right? If I eat this, nobody can yell at me anymore. That's basically invincible."
Finn looked at him.
He thought about several responses, discarded all of them, and raised his hand and hit Luffy on the back of the head. "Pick something else."
"Why? Are you afraid I'll silence you?"
Finn turned toward Garp, who was mid-sentence with Rosinante across the yard. "Garp. Luffy's asking me to get him Rosinante's fruit."
The yard went quiet.
Garp turned. Rosinante turned. Both of them looked at Luffy with different varieties of the same general expression.
Garp reached down, pulled off one of his leather shoes, and held it at his side. His face had taken on the focused calm of a man who has identified a purpose.
"Today," Garp announced, "I will beat this child within an inch of his life, for the good of all mankind."
"Pick your fruit after," Finn said to Luffy, and then turned to Magellan. "Can you take me to Level 6? Douglas Bullet, Byrnndi World, Catarina Devon. I want to see them."
Magellan nodded without hesitation. The Admiral of the Marine was his direct superior, and Finn's ability to handle himself in a room with dangerous prisoners was not something Magellan spent any energy worrying about.
"Of course, Admiral."
Finn looked at Vergo, who was standing at a comfortable distance watching Garp advance on Luffy with a shoe.
"Stop enjoying the show. Go to the ship and bring me two crates of fruit. We're going to Level 6 to conduct business."
Vergo straightened up, looked genuinely slightly reluctant to leave, and then nodded. "Yes, Admiral." He took two steps, then glanced back. "Vice Admiral Garp, please continue at whatever pace suits you. I'll return shortly."
Garp, who had Luffy by the collar at this point, paused at the interruption, looked at the shoe in his hand, and was briefly uncertain.
Luffy craned his neck around and said, with the particular fearlessness of someone who has not yet fully processed that he is already in trouble, "Stinky old man. The first thing I'm going to do with that Silence Fruit is shut you up permanently."
Everyone in the vicinity took a moment.
Finn, who had been walking away, stopped mid-step.
Garp drew a long breath. "Today, justice requires that I discipline my own bloodline."
What followed was vigorous and loud, and Finn had already moved far enough away that he could maintain the fiction of not hearing it.
Almost. He could just make out, beneath the other sounds, the voice of Rosinante attempting some kind of intervention.
"Vice Admiral Garp, please, you really can't kill him like this. Mr. Garp. He's still a child—"
Finn exhaled through his nose. "Rosinante's sense of mercy never did change," he said, to no one in particular.
Magellan, who had ears sharpened by years in an environment where hearing things accurately could matter a great deal, appeared to have caught Rosinante's words clearly. He considered them, glanced at Finn, and said, with full sincerity, "He really is a good man."
Finn smacked his lips and changed the subject. "Why is Byrnndi World still frozen? He's been under since before you took the wardenship."
"Ah." Magellan thought back. "Honestly, the order was in place before I arrived. The records I inherited said the concern was his ability. The More-More Fruit's multiplication effect was considered too dangerous to allow full mobility, but the higher-ups at the time also didn't want the ability lost if he died in confinement. Freezing him preserved the fruit without destroying it."
Finn nodded.
He had looked into Byrnndi before. Byrnndi World was old, generationally old, a contemporary of Rocks D. Xebec who had refused repeatedly to join the Rocks Pirates on what appeared to be personal grounds of contempt. The More-More Fruit was not a subtle ability. Whatever it touched, it could multiply: speed, strength, size, mass. A hundred times over, theoretically, with sufficient development. In the hands of someone with exceptional talent, it pushed comfortably into the upper tier of Paramecia-class powers.
Finn had spent a moment earlier imagining Garp with that fruit and had decided immediately that the thought experiment was not worth completing.
Byrnndi had eventually been taken down through a combination of CP intelligence work, Sengoku, and Garp, back around SCC 1490, when Finn had been new to the North Blue and still reading about major arrests in the papers. The "World Destroyer" headline had been hard to miss.
Even back then, in an era when the Rocks Pirates' shadow still stretched across the New World's power structure and the names coming out of that organization were routinely terrifying, Ward had been a figure that other major pirates had steered around.
Vergo reappeared at the yard entrance with a crate under each arm and two junior Marines behind him carrying additional boxes. He looked like a man who had jogged the whole way and found the effort agreeable.
Magellan stepped to the elevator, pressed the call button, and held the door when it opened.
"Admiral," he said. "After you."
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