"'Known to distort the perceptions and experiences of those within the user's presence,'" read Lucien. That was the entire entry. One line. Every other fruit in the book had at least a paragraph. He had one line and an illustration he had already memorised by smell.
He put the book back, and they walked out.
"So you can manipulate people?" asked Idris. "Like a puppet master?"
"That could mean anything. I think whoever wrote that entry barely understood it, or got it entirely wrong. We know it's not physical, that's something." Lucien pushed the door open and squinted into the daylight. "How about I try it on you?"
Idris shrugged, and they made their way to the outskirts of town and into the forest.
They stopped in a small clearing at the edge of the trees. Dense cover on all sides, no sound from town, just the occasional animal moving through the undergrowth.
Idris took up a position across the clearing and drew his pistol. Lucien stood opposite him, still thinking. Sitting and thinking about the fruit would take too long. A fight was always the faster answer.
"Alright, no rules. Go for the kill, and I'll try not to die while working this out," said Lucien, looking up at Idris.
He did not get a chance to set himself. The first bullet came before his sentence was finished; he felt it leave the barrel through Haki a half-second before it arrived. Escaping the bullet, he kept looking at Idris as he tried to strip the devil fruit powers from inside him.
Lucien figured it had something to do with perception — how the other person was reading the world around them. He kept his eyes on Idris's face and pushed.
The next few exchanges were the same: dodge, focus, split attention, fail to do either well.
He tried pushing somewhere in the second exchange. Some outward intention, a kind of directed pressure he couldn't have explained if asked. Nothing came back. Idris didn't flinch, didn't slow, didn't do anything except put a bullet through the space Lucien had just vacated.
The sixth exchange was where it happened, and he almost missed it.
Lucien had his attention on Idris's trigger hand, specifically the index finger, the half-breath before the pull, when Idris took a step back. Small. A half-step. The pistol came up at the wrong angle, and there was a pause, not long, less than a second; it didn't seem that out of place in the heat of the battle.
Then Idris reset. Feet back under him, pistol tracking again, expression unchanged. Lucien, who was completely concentrated on Idris, noticed how his new crewmate paused for half a second as he didn't pull the trigger in the usual place and knew he was holding onto something.
He spent the next several exchanges trying to get it back, which mostly didn't work.
Once, Idris read a feint wrong by a half-second. Recovered immediately, but the read had been wrong. Twice, nothing. A third time, something that might have been Lucien or might have been Idris genuinely misreading him, no way to know.
He started to get a feel for the texture of it. When it worked, it wasn't like pushing something outward. More like interference. Static fed into whatever Idris was pulling from him, the small physical tells that told you where a body was going before it went. He wasn't sending a signal. He was corrupting one.
The question was whether he could do it clean. On purpose. And know it while it was happening.
Idris hadn't said anything, but something had shifted in how he was reading the exchanges. Not visible, exactly. A slight recalibration. Something wasn't adding up for him, and he hadn't found it yet.
He would. Given enough time, Idris would always find it.
Lucien picked a moment and went.
He chose his line, chose the angle he wasn't going to take, and fixed his attention on Idris's gun hand the way he had since the fourth exchange. Not pushing. Just looking, with the kind of focus that had apparently turned out to matter. He came in, made the movement he'd decided against, and felt something give.
Idris moved for an angle that wasn't there. The pistol tracked left, clean, committed, and put a shot through empty air. Lucien was already stepping right through the gap. He had his blade at Idris's side before the correction could happen.
"Stop," he said, and stepped back.
Idris looked at him. Then at the gun. He turned it over once in his hand, slowly, the way you'd look at something that had just done something it shouldn't have.
"Your body moved left," he said. "I was sure of it. I fired, and you weren't there, and then the blade was already on me." A pause. "Like something slipped in my head."
Lucien nodded. He'd been feeding it to him the whole approach — the slow, patient suggestion of leftward movement, consistent enough that Idris's body had just reacted. Trained instinct. The perception had been wrong before the decision even happened.
It also hadn't lasted. The moment the shot went off, Idris had him exactly where he was. One clean error in perception, and then nothing. The window was short.
Lucien looked up.
"Again."
Before they knew it, the sun had already set as both of them just kept looking at the stars while lying on their backs. Both of them were spent as Lucien didn't even stop for any breaks the entire time.
After the first clean trick, he managed it once more in the exchanges that followed. The rest of the time, he spent running. Idris adjusted quickly, and the window kept getting shorter. He also noticed that using the devil fruit was similar to Haki; it drained a lot of energy from him and made him feel very weak.
"I need to get stronger. A lot stronger," commented Lucien.
"You and me both," replied Idris.
Before Lucien could respond, his stomach made its position on the matter known. He stood up, pulled Idris up with him, and they walked back into town. He had a clearer picture of the fruit now than he'd had this morning. It was not much of a picture. But it was a start.
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