A/N:
So this is the first time I've turned to writing in an attempt to cope with anxiety (mainly from all the news around current coronavirus situation). I hope this could be of help to someone out there who is also feeling anxious. Feel free to join me in writing your own story this month.
The Time Chamber 1
The first time Sanji saw those words, he was barely ten years old. He had just been kicked (literally) out of Zeff's kitchen again for breaking one of his gazillion kitchen rules. He wanted a place to shut himself so that he wouldn't have to deal with the difficult irrational old geezer, and he knew that in their small apartment above the Baratie, there was only one such place: The closet.
He wasn't unfamiliar with the closet, having hid in it plenty of times before for various reasons. He quickly closed the folding door behind him. As he adjusted his back against the pile of clothes in one corner to get comfortable, he noticed a stream of light from the setting sun that seeped through the door gap, lighting flickering dust particles in its path. The stream of light ducked just below the left sleeve of Zeff's hanging jacket touched the base of the back wall.
At first Sanji paid no mind to the sight. He had enough to think about for the moment. He knew he should be thankful for being allowed in the kitchen in the first place, or even being allowed to live here with the old geezer at all. He had nothing before meeting Zeff, not even food to sustain his life for the next day or clothes to keep him warm, let alone a place to live. He had been, and still was, being kept alive entirely by the good will of the grumpy old man. But that was no excuse for-
The thought in his head was cut short by his view of the closet as it caught his attention again. The closet was dark, so it was increasingly harder to ignore the brightening glow coming from the back wall, in the same colour as the vanishing stream of sunlight. It was as if the back wall had somehow sucked the light out of the sun through that single stream.
Sanji's first thought was fire. Maybe the shitty old man hid a magnifying glass in here, and when it caught the light stream earlier, it might have started a flame on the back wall. He quickly pushed hanging jackets out of the way to find that the source of the new light was a square patch the size of a small window. Sanji hovered a hand close to the glowing patch on the wall, and when he felt no heat, he tapped a finger on the bright square. A circular ripple expanded from his finger and bounced off all four edges before fading away.
Curious, Sanji knelt in front of the wall and ran a finger along the left edge of the square, drawing ripples as he moved. The square felt the same as the unlit wall around it. As his eyes followed the finger to the top corner, he saw words in faint fluid cursive carved into the wall along the top edge of the square. He squinted and tried to see the words more clearly, raising his other hand to block out the light from the square.
"If you had all the time in the world," Sanji propped both hands against the wall to lean closer to the writing, "what would you do?"
Before he could contemplate a philosophical answer of this seemingly philosophical question, he felt the wall disappear from under his hands. He immediately lost balance. A blurry mix of the darkness of the closet and the golden light of the square flashed across his vision as he fell forward through the wall.