Chapter 4 - I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody's Business
Meryl felt like she was going to be sick.
That wasn't anything new - she was used to being nervous, especially when she came to Ravenspurn, and not just because her grandfather never followed her there. There were too many people, too many strangers for her to feel anything close to at ease in the pirate town, even if most of them had no idea what she was capable of anymore.
Not after Marshalsea took care of those that abused their knowledge of it.
That wasn't to say there weren't any people she could trust in the town. She could trust Doctor Livesley and Zahlia and, even if she didn't feel particularly comfortable or close to Marshalsea or Pew, they wouldn't go out of their way to hurt her.
They would just do it without noticing or caring, because that's just how they were.
It was just… hard, being alone. Harder being alone in a crowd. And maybe, the hardest bit of it all was that the person who'd made Meryl feel like she was actually doing something close to right for the first time in forever had probably just walked up the stairs to their death, because Marshalsea didn't trust anyone that wasn't one of her own people around Meryl anymore, even if they didn't know about her Devil Fruit ability.
"All you alright, Meryl?" Zahlia asked, breaking away from a conversation with one of her waitstaff. "You look a little pale."
"I'm… I'm fine," Meryl lied, trying not to give away how miserable she actually felt.
For all she'd been calm earlier - alright, maybe not perfectly calm, perhaps even slightly nervous -, all of that had fled with her guest, leaving Meryl behind to squirm awkwardly inside her own skin, the feel of that last gentle touch still weighing on her head like a lead weight. She didn't even know their name and would probably never -
Meryl shook off the thought before it could spin into a proper reason to cry in public. "I just… we both know what Marshalsea is like. She… she's not soft."
The old woman could be nice, could even make a decent pass at being kind if she had a mind to be, but she was never soft. That much Meryl knew for a fact.
"Your friend will…" Zahlia paused, apparently thinking better of the words she was about to say. "Well, like she said, you shouldn't worry until there's something to worry about."
That might have meant something more to Meryl if she couldn't feel that prickle up her spine that said Marshalsea was using her evil eye somewhere nearby. There would be no prizes for guessing who the likely target was, given how 'useful' a tool it was for making people spill any truths they were hiding.
Zahlia pushed a bottle of soda in front of her, dropping a straw in it. "Just focus on this - my grandmother promised not to kill anyone in here if she could avoid it. That's something, right?"
It was, even if it didn't do much to settle Meryl's nerves or stomach.
But that didn't mean she couldn't be distracted from those things by something else.
"Chiell! I see you have returned!" a large voice boomed out from above.
Almost every head in the bar seemed to turn towards the speaker, a large purple Amazon of a woman in tight spandex and a mask standing on the second floor, one foot braced against the railing as she grinned down at the main floor.
"I was beginning to grow bored of this town," she continued, gesturing broadly at her surroundings. "Did you forget me?"
"The Tearer. I'd almost say I missed you," 'Chiell' replied, flipping her long silvery hair over her shoulder, the strands shining against the bronze of her skin. "But I don't think I've been away long enough for that."
"Your words are a wound!" The Tearer cried dramatically, flexing her back and arm muscles as she made another wide gesture, this one apparently intended to be one that conveyed heartbreak as she was hiding her face a few inches behind her elbow. "But also…"
Chiell danced backwards as the larger woman jumped down to the first floor, the wooden boards shuddering under the impact of her landing.
"-quite the invitation for me to give you a reminder of the bond we share!" the Amazon finished.
Chiell, for her part, grinned. "Remind me then! Or resign yourself to being something better left forgotten!"
"Alright, take the dramatics outside!" Zahlia yelled as the two fighters began to circle each other. "Nobody fights in this bar!"
Apparently both of the wrestlers had used the ring name of 'Nobody' before, because the warning did nothing to stop them from launching themselves at each other, reeling and ducking around widely swinging blows and dramatic kicks before bouncing off some convenient - if rapidly short-lived once encountered - piece of furniture to come around for another shot. Occasionally, they would collide in an explosion of physical might that Meryl could almost feel shaking her seat at the bar, and then the dance would shift to a similar but slightly different pattern.
The new patterns might have had something to do with the fact that both wrestlers had landed in broken glass at least two times now, but the effect was still fascinating.
"Chiell, we don't have the money to cover repairs if you break something important!" a horned girl with half-shaved magenta hair screamed, exactly five seconds before the woman slammed her opponent down on a table and reduced it to little more than a pile of splinters and kindling.
Chiell, dark eyes bright behind a mask of crimson streaming from a cut on her forehead, flipped her reddening hair over her shoulder to hit her back with a wet smack. "Tables aren't important, Darea."
The effect was immediately ruined by The Tearer jumping to her feet and throwing Chiell out a window.
Meryl watched the fight resume in the street, the sound of random pirates cheering on the blood-covered fighters barely drowning out Darea's continued cries about property damage and repair fees, which were obviously only going to build from there as the fight ramped up further, the attacks becoming flashier and more complicated as the fighters found their rhythm.
That didn't stop the crowd from making their own recommendations, with one of the loudest being something about giving someone a chair, despite the fight destroying a near dozen of them already.
Meryl personally was pretty sure that the fight was going to find a way to return to the bar, probably through one of the fighters getting thrown back through a window - and likely the one that wasn't broken yet. The laws of both bad luck and comedy, as she understood them, demanded it.
Zahlia stared at the destruction, one eye twitching. "Boma, if this was your idea…"
The woman in the mini-dress scoffed as she leaned back against the bar counter, rolling her eyes. "You think I waste time on planning out these sweaty theatrics? No, that's Chiell's scene, not mine."
"But you don't complain when people find her impressive."
Boma shrugged. "If it works, it works. I like it when people think we're tough. Makes the world so much easier, having a reputation without an actionable record. All the benefits of being on the looser side of the law, none of the Marine interference."
Meryl wasn't going to pretend that she understood how any of that was supposed to work. The way she'd always been taught, the Marines wouldn't hesitate to kill her or Zahlia just for being vaguely connected to Marshalsea, and neither of them had ever even left the island in any meaningful way. That was just how the Government worked; no frills and no mercy to anyone remotely criminal.
"Yeah, tell me how that works out when you've finally finished pissing off everyone in West Blue with your attitude," Zahlia muttered. "Shit like this makes me wanna break out the good whiskey, but I'm still on shift."
"You're always on shift," Meryl said before pausing. "At least when you're not asleep," she added for the sake of full truthfulness.
"That's because this town might spontaneously combust if me and my grandmother weren't keeping these lunatics in line. Now that's a full-time job and a half." The bartender glanced down at Meryl's largely untouched soda. "Not going to finish that?"
"No, I don't…" Meryl went to push the bottle away, but something in her guts clenched and she ended up knocking it to the side as she folded over at the waist, arms wrapped around her stomach.
Something splashed, someone shouted, and then glass shattered, but she just couldn't look because her insides were -
"What's the big idea?!" Boma snapped as she dragged Meryl off of her chair. "Are you trying to make me look like a fool, kid?"
"Boma!"
Meryl couldn't hold it in any more.
She threw up. Right in front of everyone and right on top of Boma's shoes.
Doctor Livesley was an unassuming looking man by the standards of One Piece, by which I meant that he looked old as hell, generically handsome, and physically harmless, especially once he plastered on that medical practitioner smile that could have said anything from 'everything's fine' to 'thanks to the oaths of my office, I'm not allowed to react as would be appropriate to the situation; i.e. panic'.
Part of me wanted to trust him on that alone. He looked friendly, friend-shaped even, some childish part of me pointed out. Look at his ponytail and his literal rose-tinted glasses!
The glasses were a nice touch, actually. But this was a pirate town. The odds of this 'harmless' looking old guy being that for real were a little too low for me to feel comfortable hedging any kind of bet on the assumption.
"Meryl's gonna be fine," he said cheerily, closing the door behind him in such a way that I couldn't catch a glimpse of anything in that room. "Just a mild case of food poisoning."
"Mild?" Marshalsea asked, glancing my way.
Sixteen years of being blamed for everything from appliance breakdowns to a car window broken by a tragicomic snowblower mishap had trained me well for this kind of situation, albeit in two very different ways that were, to be frank, not entirely ideal for any situation.
The first would be to assume that the blame was rightfully mine and start a dance of three parts panicking to one part 'try to fix' in a bid to avoid getting hit - or, with non-abusive acquaintances, making them sad -, increasing the panic with every failure at a fix.
The second, polished by both experience and therapy, was to stop giving a shit and put on a blank face as I braced myself for yet another round of 'how am I gonna pin this on you?' poker.
Choosing the second didn't stop me from being anxious - my hands had a death grip on the sword Marshalsea had so graciously returned to my keeping -, but hopefully, my flat expression would point out the fact that this wasn't my fucking fault in the first place, that it was Meryl who shit the bed here; maybe literally, given the usual side effects of food poisoning.
"Well, milder than most of the cases I see around here," Livesley corrected with a shrug, unaware or at least unconcerned with the non-verbal blame game being played in front of him. Probably wasn't paid enough to try taking on that kind of drama on the side of the actual medical practice. "Nothing deadly, in any case, but the young lady won't be having a good week at all, even with the right drugs to take the edge off of things."
"So, it's not actual poison," Zahlia said, her posture deflating with visible relief.
The doctor held up his hands. "Oh, no, no. The most likely suspect is spoiled food in cases like these - anything that's been kept a week or two longer than it should have been, bad preparation technique, maybe some kind of contamination in the ingredients..."
Considering what her kitchen was like, I was pretty sure Meryl was hitting three for three on that score, possibly with a side of 'didn't wash hands or utensils' to round out the bases of 'you done fucked up'.
Despite knowing for a fact that Meryl had done this to her own damn self through entirely avoidable means, I still couldn't help but feel guilty about it. I should have said something. Done something. Stopped her from eating tainted garbage. I'd seen it, known it for what it was, avoided eating any myself. It wouldn't have been hard to just communicate that fact to her. I should have been capable of even that little -
"Stop thinking so loudly; you're giving me a headache," Marshalsea said, her eye flashing red in a way that screamed 'Haki' like nothing else. Wasting Observation on little old me? "No wonder your sword is cursed to shit, if you're fucking spiraling over a little puke."
Considering that every signal I'd gotten so far said she had been ready to kill me over a 'little puke', spiraling was the appropriate response, though I wasn't exactly in a place where I could manage that kind of snappy backtalk.
"S'rry," was the most I could manage through the stranglehold my stress had on my throat, mostly because it'd been hardwired into my reaction process; the same reaction process that threw my hands - and the sword they were holding - up to serve as a shield when Marshalsea whipped around to glare at me.
"Fucking gods above and below, who the fuck worked you over? You can stand up to fucking Conqueror's without passing out but me raising my goddamn voice 'cause I'm irritated gets this?" The old pirate made a disgusted noise. "I mean, I've seen some shit but hell. I've got enough to worry about without some new kid spiraling over… what are you even freaking out about?"
"…not cleaning Meryl's kitchen the minute I woke up."
Once forced out into the open, it sounded pretty stupid, which was a common trend with any subject my brain had decided to worry over. It didn't do much to make that state of panic disappear, but I could feel it start to fade now that the seed of it had been ripped out and thrown into the open.
And yet, the stupidity of that guilt wasn't what got attention first.
"…who the fuck cleans first thing after they wake up?" Marshalsea asked.
There was a Southern twang in her voice, one that I hadn't quite processed before between the panic and her own deadly seriously tone, that now sang out loudly now that incredulity was coloring it.
Where the hell would you even get a Southern accent in this world? Banaro Island? Or had 4Kids accurately recreated the Ohara accent when they made Robin Texan?
"I do," Zahlia answered, crossing her arms.
"That's because you're distressingly responsible. Didn't get that from my side of the family," the old woman scoffed. "Me? I worry about taking a piss."
"Grandmother."
"What? I'm old. Old and beat up to hell. At this point, I'm lucky the plumbing still works. Newgate's on dialysis, you know, and I've got nearly five years on the bastard."
"'The bastard' is an Emperor, grandmother."
"I could have been one if I gave a shit about maintaining a territory. Hate being stuck babysitting this island as-is."
God, there was so much drama here I had like, fifteen percent of the context for, and just about none of it was tied to me or my bastard father's typically inescapable bullshit. Hell, that small smidge of context tapped out at the fact that I recognized Whitebeard's name, what an Emperor of the Seas was, and that I was in the room, which was amazing. Really, the only thing that could have made it better at this point would be popcorn. And Meryl not suffering 'Shit Yourself To Death' disease in the other room.
My unspoken prayer of 'drag Kaido next' went unanswered. Instead, I got thrown back under the spotlight by a question.
"You said that Meryl's kitchen needed cleaning?" the doctor asked, looking speculative. "How bad is it?"
I took a moment to think about it. I'd seen worse, yes, but 'worse' had been complete with dead animals, broken glass, the threat of tetanus, and literal shit splattered on the walls on top of not being an active cooking space, so that wasn't much of a meterstick.
"Honestly? I'm surprised that she hasn't come in for food poisoning before or that it wasn't worse," I said, throwing away even the mildest temptation at sugarcoating the situation.
In my experience, you got your best results when you didn't fuck around with the doctor - you told them exactly what the problem was and how far it went and answered all of their questions and tests the best you could. Anything went wrong after that was on them.
"I don't know what's going on with her life or who taught her to take care of herself, but I can say that the level of mess in that kitchen takes time to develop. A month, month and a half at minimum for a two-person household-" I would know, having fucked up my home kitchen a couple times myself, though never anything close to the extent Meryl had. "-but probably longer; I didn't exactly go on an archeological dig or try carbon dating the contents of the fridge."
I didn't say anything about Meryl's grandfather - I hadn't got the vibe of there being another person living in the house, so he probably lived somewhere else -, but I didn't have a high opinion of anyone that could even glance at a situation like that and then let it lie.
I had too much familiarity with the type for that.
Sucking in a breath of air - and giving myself a little mental pat on the back when the sound barely rattled in my throat -, I continued speaking. "Anyway, I didn't eat anything that came out of her kitchen after that - or before, really, but she did serve me tea at one point. I was planning on cleaning it up after today's meeting, but…"
"But then that happened," Zahlia finished.
I grimaced. "Yeah. That."
"How hard do you think it would be to clean it?"
'Honestly? It'd be easier to burn the house down.'
Zahlia had assumed that the answer she'd gotten was a joke.
But no. Looking at the mess in front of her, she was tempted to make like Meryl's stranger had suggested and commit arson. Very, very thorough arson.
She'd had seen… a lot during her time in Ravenspurn - a lifetime, even one clocking in at a hair under thirty years, spent in a pirate town would allow for no less, even if she was protected from most of it by her grandmother.
This? This might not have been theworst, but it was a lot closer to that title than anything she wanted to see in Meryl's house.
Grime seemed to be ground into every surface that wasn't satisfied with merely being splattered or smeared with the unidentifiable splash of what Zahlia hoped had been food at some point. The sinks - a proper double set, meant for cleaning up, which made this disaster zone of a cooking area even worse - were full of dirty dishes and water that had just an off-enough cast to look properly foul, while even more dishes cluttered the counters, every single one liberally caked with traces of… well, what she hoped was just the remains of food that hadn't been rinsed off when it'd been fresh.
The only mercy was that, despite that visual, there was barely any smell from the door, just the faint olfactory trace of something that said some neglected soup was brewing a mess of bacterial cultures on the verge of social revolt.
Somehow, that wasn't much of a reassurance. The minute she got closer, she knew, something truly terrible was going to hit her senses like a tidal wave.
"Yeah, that's about how I felt when I first saw it, too," Raine - as she'd introduced herself during the walk to the Dacey house, not that Zahlia believed it was her real name - said, moving past her with a bucket full of cleaning supplies in each hand. "Shakes you down to the bottom of your civilized soul, doesn't it?"
Zahlia, personally, felt that they were a little past 'shaking' and into the territory of horrified crying, even if there wasn't really time for that - though she could take a moment to recoil away from whatever the hell was going on in one of the sinks.
Yech. There was no washing anything until that was empty and scoured itself.
"Ugh, that stuff's always the worst," her cleaning partner said with the calm of someone used to this sort of thing as she cracked open the fridge. "Anything that's in a sealed container, that's easy enough to just toss out but god, once the dishes start sliming…"
Slime. Fantastic. "Got firsthand experience with that, I take it?"
"I'm not the best at keeping house myself, but I've never let things get this bad. I'm very particular about food going funny," Raine explained, her voice pitching oddly as she globbed the remains of a bean soup that Zahlia had given Meryl almost a month back down the closest trash bag. "You wanna check the cupboards for anything past date? Shouldn't have any problems with smells there. Ah, or you could sweep. I'll handle the sink."
Zahlia almost protested before remembering what constituted the better part of valor. Better to let someone who'd offered take this particular bullet.
For the sake of the sea gods, how was kitchen sink slime a thing.
For all she had a thousand and one misgivings the moment she laid eyes on the kitchen, the task of cleaning it wasn't that bad. Yes, it was a nightmare and one that was most certainly going to run for a couple days at the rate they were going, but Raine seemed more than happy to shift the less awful tasks to Zahlia, letting her sweep and sort the cookbooks and handle the canned and dry goods no longer fit for human consumption while handling the actively wet problems - admittedly while taking the odd break away from the biohazards to get uncontaminated air.
That didn't mean that Zahlia wasn't running into some horrifying things though.
"Mice droppings, again," she muttered as she dumped a box of thoroughly tainted biscuit mix into a garbage bag, followed by a couple cloudy glass jars of what might have been mushrooms at some point five years in the past and what looked like a bag of dried peaches that had probably belonged to Meryl's TT… who'd died almost a year ago. Definitely couldn't be keeping those around. "You think it'd be worth it to put out poison?"
Pulling away from the dread sink as she dumped another potful of clouded water down the drain, Raine made a face. "I honestly don't think we can trust Meryl not to mistake a poison trap for something she's supposed to eat at this point. At least a cat wouldn't immediately strike most people as a food item."
"True." Though there might be a future issue with Meryl, given that Raine's suggestion involved bringing an animal that went after birds as often as rodents into her household, it wasn't something Zahlia felt much like worrying about just this second, because even that potential argument would be better than another cleaning session like this. "You know a lot about cats then?"
"Grew up on a farm with a semi-feral colony of them and was better at making friends with them instead of people."
"Ah." Yet another similarity between Raine and Meryl that Zahlia had to add to the pile she'd discovered over the course of the day - though compared to how uncannily similar their faces were, the little snippets of casually mirrored behavior and backstory weren't much worth commenting on. It wasn't like she hadn't had to make due with less than ideal playmates as a child either. "I'll keep an eye out then."
Raine hummed a vague sound of assent as she shook some barkeeper's cleaning powder into the sink, awkward chatter replaced by the rasp of wire scrubber on steel.
By the time Zahlia escaped for the day, she had a plan.
Three days later, when Zahlia came to help finish the clean-up, she pushed a basket into my hands. Before I could ask, the basket mewed.
"What?" she asked as I stared. "You said you needed a cat."
Author's Notes
AKA: the protagonist sidesteps not knowing the local date system by offering to do a different and worse task that doesn't require reading.
Guess who's been having fun cleaning what feels like half my entire fucking house, amongst other assorted bullshit?
Spoilers: it me. I redid my whole bedroom to better display my One Piece stuff (apparently it's awkward having Brooks scattered around the living room around the photos of dead relatives, but there was also a matter of the movie shelf getting crowded out by my 4Kids and Funimation One Piece DVDs) and place other things where they can actually be used, which also somehow requires me to do about 25 loads of laundry and mop 3 different floors.
*cries in Lysol*
Other reasons for delays - me and Monica getting hit by the inspiration stick with regards to other islands and arcs (I've taken up IRL painting again after nearly 10+ years of not doing that, just to make art for this story), other projects with other people, health issues, Taxes (being adult hard), general burnout, and other stuff.
This chapter was named after the band 'I Can Make A Mess', formerly known as 'I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody's Business'. It was almost titled after a line in The Ballroom Blitz by Sweet, but then I realized that for all there was a fight, it wasn't actually impressive enough - at least in scale - to really justify it.
I also snuck back to Chapter 3 to splice in a mention that there's a fight going on in the background because of the way Chiell and The Tearer's wrestling match developed, I realized that there'd be no way to miss it happening in the background - though direct application of Conqueror's Haki would be a pretty damn good distraction…
Boma, Chiell, Darea, and Mimzy (unnamed, so far, but the Lovely Legs character from last chapter) are all based off of the members of the group 2NE1 (Bom, CL, Dara, and Minzy, respectively) with their 'themes' being taken from the group's various music video outfits (this is more obvious in the art, which is on tumblr).
Doctor Livesley is another Treasure Island reference (to Dr. Livesey, natch), like most of Marshalsea's former crew.
The Tearer (proper noun, definitive article) isn't based on anyone specific.
I had Meryl describe Marshalsea's Conqueror's Haki as 'the evil eye' mostly because, while I'm sure she'd be educated on stuff like Devil Fruits and the like, the finer details of Haki would probably be left out of her education since she's a 'civilian' who, by all signs and inclinations, won't ever be joining the piratical scene or going anywhere where such knowledge is important.
As those of you who have been reading both here and on my tumblr (same username as here) might have guessed by the fact that she's a major character and I've got multiple arcs planned on multiple islands, this does not end up being the case.
The cat is also important.