"What do you think?" Amon didn't answer her. He lobbed the question straight back.
Vivi's eyes slid sideways, a sly little glint catching there. "I think Mr. Amon is absolutely a man of his word."
"Ha. Wrong guess. I've never studied your kind of energy magic. There's nothing in it I could teach you."
He pinched her cheek lightly and laughed. That part was honest. Her transformation sat well outside anything he understood.
"Ah..." Vivi's face dropped, her shoulders sinking with it.
"That said, I can teach you how to train your spiritual energy."
Her particular brand of magic was beyond him, but training… he knew inside out. It was the same method he ran through with Lily. His only real worry was whether Vivi had the patience to stick with it. At this stage in her life, she was still the restless sort.
"Really? That's wonderful!"
...
The celebration carried on inside the royal palace. Across Alabasta, the mood ran colder. In the Rain Dinners casino on the far side of the kingdom, a man in a fur-trimmed coat sat with a smoldering cigar between his fingers, listening as one of his subordinates delivered a report. By the time the man finished speaking, Crocodile's face had gone very dark.
"You're telling me the rain over Alabasta was caused by some Jar merchant named Amon?"
He set the cigar down. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything."
The drought gripping Alabasta had nothing to do with weather. It was his work, planned and executed from the first move. He had arranged for enormous quantities of contraband Dancing Powder to be released across the surrounding regions, pulling every drop of moisture away from Alabasta and making sure the rain would never come. Year after year, the kingdom baked under a relentless sun. That was exactly what he had wanted.
The plan was to let the drought tear the country apart from the inside, stoking resentment and desperation until he could walk in and claim Pluton, the ancient weapon buried somewhere beneath the sands. A full year of patient, deliberate work. And some merchant had unraveled it in a single afternoon.
"Yes, Mr. 0." The Baroque Works agent kept his voice steady, though the fear on his face was easy to read. Crocodile's back was turned, but the anger came off him in waves you didn't need eyes to feel. He told him everything he knew.
"According to our informants, a Jar merchant named Amon gave Princess Vivi some kind of item, and shortly afterward the rain began. Our people couldn't determine exactly what the item was. There were only four people present at the time, but word has spread all across Alabasta by now. The story checks out."
He wiped the sweat from his face and went on, picking his words. "There is one more thing. It also appears to be the same man who dismantled the team we sent to capture Princess Vivi."
Crocodile said nothing. He turned his iron hook over slowly in his other hand and clenched his jaws.
The silence was worse than shouting. The agent didn't know whether to leave or stay. He just stood there.
"You may go." The voice came from a dark-skinned woman seated at the windowsill, running a small knife idly along her fingernails. Robin. She had only just returned from Alabasta.
"Yes, Miss All Sunday!"
The agent fled the room. Out in the hall he noticed his clothes were drenched, and couldn't say when it had happened.
"What's your read on this, Miss All Sunday?"
With the subordinate gone, Crocodile turned his chair to face her. Robin kept her attention on her nails a moment longer before looking up with a calm smile.
"You've already made up your mind, haven't you, Mr. 0?"
She knew him well enough not to waste words. The Seven Warlords might technically answer to the World Government, but underneath the title, every last one of them was still a pirate, and a vicious one. A full year of planning dismantled by one person in a single visit. If Crocodile let that slide without a response, he wouldn't be Crocodile.
"That's not what I'm asking." He drew on the cigar, eyes half-lidded.
Robin set the knife down and rose to her feet. "He mentioned at the banquet that he intends to come to Rain Dinners soon. So your reputation as a hero has nothing to worry about."
Crocodile's expression sharpened.
That was exactly what he had been waiting to hear. He wanted his revenge, but he couldn't march into the royal palace to take it. Right now, Amon was the most celebrated man in all of Alabasta, the one who had brought back the rain and handed the people hope. Crocodile had spent the past year building his own image in the kingdom, using his status as a Warlord to publicly hunt pirates and cast himself as Alabasta's great protector. That reputation was a load-bearing piece of the plan, twelve months of patient work. He couldn't afford to crack it by openly moving on someone the entire population currently worshipped.
So the real question he had been putting to Robin was this: how do I settle this without that image falling apart?
Robin, as his chief strategist, had understood perfectly. And the answer was simple. Amon would come to him.
It had been said openly at the banquet, with witnesses. Getting that piece of information had cost nothing.
Robin did hold a certain quiet regard for Amon, but she saw no point in hiding something Crocodile could confirm the moment he asked anyone else. She told him plainly, and left it there.