He didn't want her to see it on his face.
So the moment Vivi came through the doors, Cobra put the worry somewhere she couldn't reach it and smiled. But a daughter knows her father. She saw it anyway, the shadow underneath, the thing he was trying to tuck out of sight.
She knew exactly what it was.
"Father, I brought something back for you. Something amazing."
She slid down from Karoo's back and held up the record with both hands.
"My precious daughter brought her father another gift?"
The smile became real. There was nothing in the world that worked on Cobra quite like this.
"What is it this time? A flower wreath? One of those grass rings?"
Ever since Vivi had started spending her days with the Sand-Sand Clan children, she came home with little handmade things tucked under her arm. They were never useful. He kept every single one.
So naturally, he assumed.
"Nope." Vivi shook her head and stood up a little straighter, pleased with herself. "Guess again. I'll give you a hint. It has something to do with what you've been worrying about."
Cobra laughed. "Making me guess now. Something I've been worrying about..." He thought for a moment. "New clothes?"
She shook her head.
"New shoes?"
Still no.
He threw his hands up. "Then I truly have no idea."
The truth was that even while he smiled, part of his mind was still back in that room with Pell and Igaram and the numbers that kept getting worse. He didn't have much left over for guessing games.
Vivi let him off the hook and held the record out properly.
"It can bring rain. That's what you've been worrying about this whole time, isn't it?"
The word landed in the room like a stone dropping into still water. Cobra's expression shifted immediately. Across the hall, Pell and Igaram both turned.
Rain. It always came back to rain.
But then they saw what she was holding, and the excitement died before it could take shape.
"Vivi." Cobra's voice was careful. "The thing you're saying can bring rain is... that record?"
She could see it on all their faces.
"Princess Vivi." Pell's tone was gentle but firm. "This isn't something to joke about. His Majesty has been carrying this burden for a long time."
"I'm not joking, Uncle Pell." Vivi's voice went tight. "It really works. Mr. Amon promised me."
"Kwa!"
Karoo planted himself beside her as if his presence alone could settle the argument.
Cobra studied his daughter's face. "It can really make it rain?"
"It can. Try it and see."
He looked at her for a long moment. He didn't believe it, not truly, but he loved her too much to say so, and she was right that it would cost them nothing to find out. Whatever came of it, she had gone out of her way to bring this back for him.
"All right. We'll test it."
Vivi lit up. "Good! And Mr. Amon is still waiting for us, so let's hurry."
She had someone bring out a record player. The disc was set in place, and music began to drift through the hall, clear and strange and oddly delicate for something sitting in the middle of a drought.
Then the sky changed.
Thunder rolled over the palace. Dark clouds spread outward across the heavens with an urgency that had nothing natural about it.
Cobra stood very still, staring upward.
It was working.
Vivi hadn't believed it would be this fast either. She seized Karoo by the wings and hauled him into a jumping, stumbling circle.
"It worked! It actually worked!"
Outside the palace walls, Amon looked up at the darkening sky and paused. He hadn't quite expected this. The Rain God's record wasn't doing anything subtle. The clouds kept rolling in, heavy and black at the edges.
This was going to be a proper storm.
The Sand-Sand Clan children crowded around him, necks craned back.
"The weather just changed!"
"I haven't seen rain in over a year!"
"Is it actually going to rain? Really?"
"Mr. Amon is incredible!"
They had all worked it out. Vivi must have played it already. Their feelings toward Amon, already warm, shifted into something closer to reverence.
The title Rain God had not been decoration after all.
Then it came down.
Heavy, relentless sheets of it, hammering the courtyard and the rooftops and the dry cracked earth of Alubarna. The people inside the palace hall went silent. Cobra, Pell, Igaram, all of them standing there watching the water pour past the windows, each one quietly rearranging what they thought they knew about the last hour.
They had thought Vivi was trying to cheer them up.
"It's raining!" Vivi shouted, and before anyone could say anything she had already sprinted out into it. "Mr. Amon didn't lie to me!"
Karoo bolted after her without a second's hesitation. He was a duck. He had been waiting for this longer than any of them.
Cobra stood at the threshold and watched the rain fall on his kingdom.
Then he came back to himself.
"What exactly has been happening out there? And who is this Mr. Amon?"
He was genuinely lost now.
Vivi didn't hold anything back. Standing in the downpour with her hair plastered to her face, she told him everything. Meeting Amon. The attack, and how he had pulled her out of it. The Jars and what they did. Robin, and what she had said about treasure hidden somewhere in Alabasta.
"A Jar merchant," Cobra repeated slowly. "And someone is hunting for treasure in our kingdom."
His expression had gone quiet in the way it did when he was thinking hard about something.
He stood.
"We're going to meet him."
He owed Amon a debt, for Vivi's life if nothing else, and the rainfall on top of it. But that wasn't the only reason.
Vivi blinked and glanced out at the city being soaked to its foundations. "Now? In this?"
"Yes. Right now."
He was too unsettled to wait. A person who could do what Amon had apparently done was not the kind of person a king could afford to leave as a question mark. He wanted to see the Jars himself. He wanted to look the man in the eye.
He also wanted to be sure about something.
There was another way to manufacture rainfall. He knew it well. Dance Powder had nearly torn this kingdom apart once already, and the memory had never fully left him.
Before he let himself feel grateful, before he let Vivi go on trusting this stranger, he needed to know.
Was Amon actually helping them?
Or had he found a more convincing version of the same trick?