Time is Silver

Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece or its characters. I only own Silver and the Doctor and the plot.

Chapter 1: A Prologue written by the Fates

Imagine you have the power to harness time. In other words, control it, manipulate it. It sounds pretty cool right? I mean, you can stop time if you want to or you could make a certain moment last longer or you could slow things down to super slow motion to see what it was like. Pretty cool right? Wrong. No one should have the power to control such a thing that is very misunderstood by almost everyone on the planet. It's too risky. Many things can go wrong if we could make time flow our way. Consequences that many would not understand the full severity of or even cannot predict.

So reading this, dear reader, you have come to understand somewhat that controlling time is never to be done. Besides, it's downright impossible to do so. Humans are bound by the laws of physics and are carried by the flow of time. That's the way it's supposed to be.

So imagine this. The power of controlling time given to a mere 7 year old human girl. Immature, stubborn and too curious for her own good. Disastrous.

Of course, we, the Fates, cannot interfere directly with this. This was destiny. Fate. Ironic as that may sound. She was destined to have the god-like power of time in her tiny little hands.

People misunderstand our roles as the Fates. We are like weavers weaving out a piece of cloth. We only merely set the stage with the threads provided to us in advance by the almighty Creator and the weaving machine out. Humans choose their own pattern.

So, dear readers, we can only merely watch as the pattern Silver made unfold before our skillful fingers.

Your average day has 24 hours, and in an hour there are 60 minutes and in one minute there are sixty seconds. That would give you an average total of 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds in a single day. Well, that's how the math is done but nothing is set in stone.

Time is relative to the beholder. Time is ever-changing yet standard to the average life form on Earth. A paradox. A contradiction.

On the 14th of July in one of the early years during the Golden Age of Piracy, a perfect example of the previous explanation.

Tyto Island was a mere chunk of rock somewhere along the Grandline. Blessed with a tropical climate, the island enjoys sunny warm weather for most days of the year. On the 14th, that was not the case. It seemed almost fitting that it rained heavily that day. It was the day Silver's parents died. Da and Ma died because of a raging hot fever that ravaged the village for months during that fateful year. It was inevitable that her Da and Ma caught it and ultimately died. But that did not make sense to a 7 year old girl. It was not fair.

It was not fair that they died.

That was logic for a 7 year old. Who could blame her? Nothing was ever fair but that's life. Silver, of course, did not understand that yet. She was devastated and she cried her little heart out as seemingly cold and silent adults buried her parents in the ground from which they came. She stayed there for a long time as her tears mingled with the raindrops. The hours ticked by and one by one, the adults left until she was all alone at her parents' grave. She was all alone in the world without anyone to take care of her. She became an orphan the day her parents stopped breathing.

Silver was a strange child and even her parents admitted it when they were alive. She was patient, persistent and stubborn. A fantastic combination. So she decided that day if she waited long enough, maybe her parents would wake up and that they could go home. And she did.

It was then, for some reason we cannot question, the almighty Creator thrust the power of Time into her balled up fists. The power entered her quietly so she wasn't aware of it when it did. Like the disease that killed her parents.

A kid like her had no straight perception of time so with that kind of power in her hands and her decision to wait it out in the rain, 3:15 PM on the 14th of July that year on Tyto Island stretched on for days. She wasn't aware of it and as well as the other islanders but we certainly noticed. A long continuous streak of cold grey on the colorful woven cloth pattern we have weaved since the Beginning of Everything. It was troubling but we continued our job. It was not our place to question the threads we are given nor the pattern we are weaving out.

But what amazed us was that a human managed to see the distortion in time. He was a remarkably observant and almost obsessive to a fault. His name was Doctor Yaniv Quantum who would eventually be the founder of Quantum Physics in this dimension and countless other theories in different fields of science. Yaniv had observed that the shipments from Tyto had always been dated the 14th of July but it had been weeks since that day so what was happening? No one else cared. If the shipments were brought in and that it didn't concern them, they didn't care.

Yaniv cared. He was a scientist and naturally curious of many things especially in a very strange case as this so he packed his bags and left for Tyto. In Tyto, he continued to amaze us by realizing that time had indeed stretched on and continued to stay at 3:15 on the 14th of July and eventually found out the cause. He took Silver and like the grandparent she never had, coaxed her to stop crying and took her under his wing. From that day onward, Silver had stayed with the Doctor. She had someone to care for her again and all was right in the world. Not exactly. Time had always been off on Tyto Island ever since but everyone besides the two ever noticed.

Now, the Doctor had realized that Silver had an incredible power that many would not understand and would definitely take advantage of it if the wrong people had found out about it. He also understood that her being young and naïve, she did not yet understand the magnitude of her power and she could do far worse than she had done to Tyto. It was a difficult situation to be in.

So he did what any sensible intelligent pacifist would do. Hole up in a faraway almost unknown island where practically no one could get to.

Now this would be the part fairytales would put "And they lived happily ever after" and as much as we would love to add that line in here, that did not happen. We are the Fates, and one thing we do is not lie.

Life for Silver did get a harder after she had been taken in by the Doctor. How could life get any harder you may ask? She's got someone to look after her and be a sort of parent stand-in to fill in the gap when her parents died. She's also kept safe from anyone who might potentially take advantage of her power by living on an island where the only way you could reach it was to know the exact time and date the whirlpools around it subsided and the timeframe for that was only for a few short minutes. She was safe and she was not alone.

So how did it get harder? Simple, she had to train. She had to learn. And she had her young naïve mind forced open to the severity of the world prematurely. It was deemed necessary by the Doctor who only knew one way of teaching, to tell the exact truth. At a young age, Silver was driven on relentlessly by him everyday with lessons on every subject he knew of, especially on the delicate subject of time. She was also given these training sessions with him she had three times a day to focus on time itself and set it right in case she had done anything to nudge it in any unnatural direction. She had to know the value of every second. Dates and days were memorized. Calendars were made in advance and also memorized. Timing had to be exactly or close as possible to normal. Everything was committed to memory and written down by Silver herself in notebooks that had increased in number everyday. It was harsh but it was necessary. Necessary so that the world's time would function and flow as normal. The Doctor was the timekeeper and Silver was the clock.

So she had this sort of lifestyle for the next decade but she did not waver in her determination and sanity. She in fact got used to it and it soon became routine for her. Consistency was her forte. She had kept time flowing as normal as possible for last decade. There was no major distortion in time like the one that happened on Tyto Island.

So what happens when something out of the normal everyday timekeeping routine happens? Life is riddled with ups and downs and even Silver, as well hidden and unreachable as she was, cannot completely escape them.

To be continued...