Disclaimer: See disclaimer from Chapter 22.

~ Witch on the Waves ~

Chapter 23

Five minutes after crushing Lako, Nami blinked and stopped walking. "What's that?"

"What is it, Nami?" asked Robin.

"Something magical. Something huge! It's in the direction of the shore, mind if I teleport us there?"

"Go ahead."

Nami teleported them directly onto the Going Merry. There was a huge galleon in the harbor beside them now, and the rest of the Straw Hats were aboard it along with a spry little old man wearing a lot of scientific-looking technological equipment.

More importantly, there was a large cloud of fog approaching them, all colors of the rainbow. Nami immediately started casting detection charms from a distance.

Robin gasped. "It looks just like the descriptions of the Rainbow Mist!"

"That book series you're always reading? I thought it was fiction. Never mind, this is huge! I'm getting readings of temporal and dimensional magic!"

"Temporal, as in time-travel?"

"Yes. Time travel was real on my world, it required special equipment and ingredients I don't have, and it was incredibly dangerous, and for most people quite confusing. Whatever this Rainbow Mist is, it's filled with temporal magic! That and dimensional, same as what I use for space expansion and teleportation."

The old man on the galleon suddenly jumped onto the Merry and unfurled her sail, starting the ship moving.

"Ahem," said Nami, clapping her hand on his shoulder from behind. "What are you doing?"

"GAH! Where did you come from? Never mind, I have to go into that mist, my friends are in there!"

Luffy and the rest of the crew jumped aboard. The man gave a confusing explanation, and it soon came out that fifty years ago, his friends had all disappeared into the Rainbow Mist, and he wanted to go into it and find them.

"Nojiko," said Nami urgently, "can we trust this guy?"

Nojiko glanced at Henzo and gave Nami a shrug that meant she wasn't sure.

"Sometimes you gotta take risks. Listen Henzo, I'm a witch and I can do magic. That mist is practically made of temporal and dimensional magic, and it's potentially extremely dangerous to the point that it could do much, much worse than kill all of us. Now, you can measure its effects with technology all you want, but I'm going to be casting detection magic to properly measure what's happening, and if I say we need to get out of there, we get out of there. Got it?"

"My friends are in there! I'll take any risk to get them back!"

Nami tried again. "If I say we need to get out of there, we get out of there. Got it?" She reinforced her point with a touch of dominating Conqueror's Haki.

"Got it!" Henzo agreed, sweating.

"Good. Because if you do something wrong when temporal magic is involved, you can potentially wipe out life as we know it. And if you do the wrong things with dimensional magic, you can potentially explode the entire planet into smithereens."

The entire crew was listening to Nami at this point. Even Luffy was caught breathless.

He quickly snapped out of it, though. "Wow. SO COOOOL!"

Nami grinned. "Yes Luffy. That's exactly what I said when I first learned about it. And I still think so."

Usopp disagreed vehemently. "Not cool! Not cool! Exploding the planet is not cool! Can we not go in there? Please?"

"Umm, Nami?" asked Chopper. "How likely is it that those things are going to happen?"

"Ehh… exploding the planet, practically nil. There isn't enough magic in this mist to do that. With dimensional magic, the more destructive the effect, the more magic is required to perform it. However, temporal magic is more treacherous. If you go back in time and accidentally, or on purpose, don't allow events as you knew them to occur, the effects can be totally unpredictable and often disastrous, but if you do things right, things could be perfectly fine."

"Nami-swan is so smart!" Sanji swooned.

Nami glanced at Robin, remembering their earlier conversation, and just sighed.

"Are you saying you can actually perform time travel?" asked Henzo, still a bit subdued from Nami's Conqueror's Haki.

"Nope! I just know the dangers and decided to mess around with dimensional magic instead. Dimensional magic is cooler anyway. With temporal magic the only safe things you can do are traveling to the future, which you can do much more easily by lying down and going to sleep, or using divination to look into the past or future without affecting it. Which would make me a stupid old witch with a crystal ball."

Nojiko and Robin both laughed at that, catching the inside joke hidden in the milder one.

"But with dimensional magic, I can do this." She teleported to the other side of Henzo and said, "Boo."

Henzo jumped, and immediately started fiddling with his equipment. "Did you just teleport?"

"Yup," confirmed Nami. "With a wormhole."

"Then why didn't my equipment detect anything? I have it set to constantly detect anomalies in the spacetime continuum."

"That's because I'm very, very good at dimensional magic. Oh, and one more thing…" Nami bent down and whispered in Henzo's ear. "I can teleport anywhere in the world. And I'll know instantly if you try telling anyone, writing down, or recording anything about my abilities with magic. So don't."

Henzo shivered and nodded.

"Alright, so all warnings given," – Nami cast another set of detection charms, visible only to her – "this looks safe enough as long as the mist remains stable. There's a pocket dimension inside, most likely a lot bigger than the cloud of mist appears from the outside. My charms say it's temporally isolated, similar to stasis but not the same. So it's probably safe enough, as long as I keep monitoring it and we get out if it destabilizes."

Luffy laughed. "Come on! Into the Rainbow Mist! It's an adventure!"

~ Witch on the Waves ~

The entrance to the Rainbow Mist was dramatic and trippy. The world seemed to twist without affecting gravity, and the mist dazzled them with bright colors and flashes. Nami cast detection spells the entire time, learning what she could.

Then they entered into a wide open space with hundreds of broken ships around it. It was very eerie: everything was still, the mist obscured their vision, it was relatively dark, and there were no waves or wind of any kind.

Henzo gasped and told them this was Ape's Concert. Robin pulled out a book, explaining what she had read about Ape's Concert ("it's a ship's graveyard from which there is no escape") and making Henzo both highly interested and very confused about the book series, though he tried to cover it up by pretending to be the knowledgeable professor.

"Okay," said Nami, having listened in on the discussion about the book. "Here's what I know. First of all, this place is stable, and we're safe here for the moment. Dimensional properties first: this place is a four-dimensional pocket dimension. It's approximately 2.5 kilometers wide, 3 kilometers long, and 5 kilometers high. It's like a tesseract, but not a cube, more like an oblong roundish blob with odd quirks here and there."

"What's a tesseract?" asked Robin.

"Is that some magical terminology?" asked Henzo.

Nami facepalmed. "No. Alright, since everyone's confused about the four dimensions I'll explain it in Luffy-terms so you can understand instinctually. Luffy, if you run off in that direction in a straight line" – she pointed – "you'll come back over there" – she pointed in the exact opposite direction – "after traveling for 2.5 kilometers. If you run off in that direction," – she pointed at a 90-degree angle – "you'll come back from the opposite side after 3 kilometers. Go ahead and try it."

Luffy grinned and did so, running off with Geppo and laughing as he came back on the other side of the ship. Then he tried the other direction, and started going off in diagonals.

"So cool!"

"Alright Luffy, continuing the explanation!"

Luffy reluctantly came back.

"Remember I said it's 5 kilometers high? If you were to dive into the ocean here and go deep enough, eventually you would fall out of the sky. I'll try that myself later, since Luffy can't swim and I'm not sure if I'll get stuck on the 'ceiling' due to the weird gravity here.

"It's also temporally isolated with an unstably stretched timeframe. This is where it gets unpredictable. Those people whose auras we're feeling around here? They could be Henzo's friends, or they could be people from a thousand years in the past, or they could be people from the future like us. From their perspective they could have spent anywhere from a few hours to months, years, or centuries in here regardless of the relative amount of time we spent in the outside world. And when we leave, we could end up at exactly the same point in time where we left, or we could end up years in the future. At the current rate of temporal stretching I would say any time we spend here will end up being three times longer in the outside world. So nothing terribly dramatic."

"Okay, that's good," said Usopp, "but how do we get out?!"

"Oh, that's simple. This pocket dimension is very close to our world, and while the connection we came through has closed off, I can make another way out. Sort of like how I can close off the connection to the expanded space in my knapsack, making it a pocket dimension, and re-open the connection whenever I want."

"You have a pocket dimension in your knapsack?!" exclaimed Henzo. He immediately grabbed his equipment, pointed it at Nami's backpack and started trying to get readings.

"Is that safe?" asked Robin. "I've read fiction that theorized there would be a massive explosion when you a 'bag of holding' inside another 'bag of holding'."

"Perfectly safe," said Nami confidently, "as long as one of the 'bags of holding' is stable and the dimensional stretching isn't sloppy or fluctuating. Which mine are. Professor Henzo, my guess is that your equipment detects dimensional anomalies, gravitational waves, fluctuations in space-time, whatever you want to call it, right?"

"Yes," Henzo nodded slowly.

"So you're only going to be able to detect a sloppy pocket dimension like the Rainbow Mist."

"Oh. I see," said Henzo, a bit crestfallen and starting to think about what changes he could make to his methods.

"In any case, who wants to go find those people? We did come here to search for Henzo's friends, after all."

~ Witch on the Waves ~

They eventually found Henzo's friends Rapanui, Isoka Pukau, Akibi and Rongo; the group of kids who had declared themselves the Pumpkin Pirates. After a good deal of personal drama from Henzo and Rapanui, Nami cast some detection spells on the kids.

"Okay," she said, "what we have here is a temporal anomaly. Sorry kids, I'm afraid when you come back with us you'll be shunted back to your own time. I expect you'll find yourselves drifting out of the Rainbow Mist wherever it happens to be at the moment. And everyone, this is very important. Try to tell the kids as little as possible about what has happened in the outside world. If they try to change things intentionally, it could cause a temporal paradox and lead to things like one of us not being born."

Usopp, ever the dramatist, declared in a panicked tone, "I like being born!"

"So Rapanui, who's the older person in the middle of the ship? Most of us can feel their aura."

"He's one of the Wetton pirates! We made him a prisoner because he treated us badly and he was a terrible leader."

"Okay. Just be aware that when we leave he'll go back to your time with you, so make sure to plan for that."

Rapanui nodded.

Then there was a call on Henzo's Den Den Mushi. It was Mayor Wetton.

There was some more personal drama as it was revealed that the Mayor was the same pirate, Captain Wetton, who had attacked and burned Ruluka fifty years ago, and that Henzo had reluctantly teamed up with him to get into the Rainbow Mist.

When the call was over, Nami said, "Okay, you kids have gathered all the treasure from the ships around here, which is great, but what about books and other materials? There could be information from the Void Century in here, preserved by the odd timeframe!"

Robin gasped. "Do you really think so?"

"No idea. It's just a possibility."

Robin was off immediately.

"Would we be able to take things back with us?" asked Nojiko. "Or would they disappear back to their own time when we left like the kids will?"

"I'm not sure. That galleon came forward in time well-preserved, so it's possible that objects are different. There's a chance that they'll disappear, and since there will be no one holding them they'll probably sink to the bottom of the sea. But I can just duplicate the books, and we can take the copies with us."

"So the treasure…?"

"Might be an illusion, sorry kids."

Some of the kids were disappointed, but Rapanui shrugged and said, "The treasure's not as important as getting home anyway."

Nami smiled. "I think to Henzo, you guys are the treasure. And don't worry, you'll see him again. I guarantee it.

"Now I'm gonna go help Robin look for books. Is there anything anyone wants to do while we're here?"

"Whee!" Luffy flew past, still having fun with the four-dimensional nature of the place.

"Oh right, I wanted to check that out." Nami stuffed her sword and gun into her backpack, sealed it and closed off the space inside, and dove into the water. A minute later she came falling out of the sky.

"Yeeehaaa! Guys, you have to try this!"

They spent the next few hours collecting books, treasure the kids had not bothered to collect, and diving through the sea into the sky. Even Luffy tried it, which turned out to be safe for him because even though he lost his ability to move and sank like a stone, he fell out of the bottom into the sky before he drowned. The kids did it too, forcing Nojiko, Luffy and Zoro to catch them before they hurt themselves slamming into the water at terminal velocity.

Finally it was time to go. Nami waved her hands and a thick cloud of rainbow mist appeared before stabilizing and showing a portal to the sea beyond it.

"See," said Nami, "this is what a stable connection to a pocket dimension looks like. All that trippy flashing and twisting stuff from when we entered is a product of wasted energy from the weird connection. You kids ready to leave?"

The kids were in an intact lifeboat they had prepared, ready to leave with their prisoner tied up and gagged thanks to Isoka. They also had a heaping share of the treasure collected from all the sunken ships.

"One last thing before we go through," said Nami as they were about to reach the portal. She pulled out a coin purse, looked through it, and tossed a brand new silver 100-Beri coin to the leader of the Pumpkin Pirates.

"Rapanui, it's very important that next time you see me, you return that to me."

Rapanui was confused, staring at the coin.

"You'll understand when the time comes."

As they sailed through the opening, the kids started fading away, and from the kids' perspective the Going Merry faded away. They shouted their goodbyes to each other before they vanished completely, and then they were out of the portal. Nami quickly closed the portal again.

"Why did you give Rapanui a coin?" asked Luffy.

"Oh, that's simple." Nami explained, "He's the Marine officer who fired that coin at us when we were being chased by those four ships earlier this morning."

Henzo gasped. "You know where Rapanui is?"

Nami nodded. "They're actually on Ruluka already. My assumption is that they know what's happening today and in order to prevent a temporal paradox, they decided to wait until you came back from this.

Nojiko asked, "Is that how you knew the kids would go back to their own time when you weren't sure about the objects?"

Nami grinned and nodded. "I recognized Rapanui and Isoka's auras and just drew the logical conclusion."

"Wait!" said Usopp. "If they're the Marines, won't they try to arrest us? Why are we sailing back there?"

"Relax, Usopp," said Robin, looking up from the pile of newly-acquired books she was going through. "I don't think Rapanui is going to try and arrest us."

~ Witch on the Waves ~

Nami had intentionally opened the dimensional connection on the opposite side of the Rainbow Mist from the harbor, so no one saw them exiting. When they sailed around it into the harbor, they saw Wetton and his men lowering what Henzo explained was the Rainbow Tower and extending it into the Rainbow Mist.

Nami winced. "That's going to have rather unpredictable consequences. Having examined the Mist properly, I don't think it will cause a catastrophe like destroying Ruluka, but even if your protective equipment works, Henzo, they could cause the pocket dimension to become even more unstable."

"Should we stop them?" asked Nojiko.

"No," decided Luffy. "It's their adventure. We shouldn't prevent other people from going on adventures!"

Nami snickered. "It will certainly be interesting for them. Even if they won't find any of the treasure they're looking for."

As expected, Wetton grew furious when he couldn't find any treasure in Ape's Concert, smashed his own Rainbow Tower with his powered mecha suit, and destabilized the pocket dimension, making it close and forcing all his men to flee in panic, barely making it out before the Rainbow Mist disappeared.

Then the Rainbow Mist reappeared above the highest mountain and sucked up Wetton's mansion. Cash rained down on the town as the mansion was partially destroyed as it flew up into the whirling portal.

"Okay," said Nami. "That was odd."

As if to add insult to injury, the Rainbow Mist moved over the harbor and made a loud farting sound, dropping a few broken ship parts, before disappearing entirely.

"Oh my god, I think it's actually become partially sentient!"

"Sentient, Nami?" asked Robin. "As in, it's becoming intelligent?"

"Yes!" said Nami. "If people live in a highly magical dwelling for long enough, it will sometimes magically take on characteristics of the residents. Magic is based on intent, after all. And with that much chaotic magic collected in there, and the templates of the Pumpkin Pirates living in there for so long, it's entirely possible that the Rainbow Mist has started to model its intelligence after them! Hence the targeted destruction of Wetton's mansion and the followup insult."

"Fascinating," declared Robin.

"As if that place wasn't creepy enough!" declared Usopp, shivering.

~ Witch on the Waves ~

The reunion between Henzo and the rest of the former Pumpkin Pirates was… tearful and awkward. Rapanui got dramatic again, arrested Wetton and his son, grandson, and chief cronies, and made some ridiculous excuses why he couldn't arrest the Straw Hats.

On meeting the older Rapanui, Nami immediately cast a detection charm on him.

"Good. You're back to your proper place in the time stream, no more chance of paradoxes."

"Phew." Usopp wiped his brow. "I was worried for a moment that one of us would suddenly disappear!"

"Oh, you never know, Usopp. It's entirely possible that the effects have already happened and we will just never know it. Fifty years is a long time! Who knows, maybe Rapanui ran into Gold Roger in his younger years and suggested that he get a more intimidating hat, which led to Roger passing his straw hat on to Shanks. Or maybe Isoka saved the life of a fellow Marine thirty years ago who ended up arresting the man who would have been your father, which resulted in you being born four years younger and with a long nose."

~ Witch on the Waves ~

As the Going Merry sailed away carrying the Straw Hats, Nami asked, "So Robin, any interesting finds in those books? I was rather distracted by the magic of the Rainbow Mist while we were there."

Robin sighed. "Some," she said. "There are a number of old books from centuries ago, some of which aren't in print anymore. But there's nothing from the Void Century or before it."

"Sorry for getting your hopes up. It's possible that the Rainbow Mist just isn't that old, or perhaps it came into being during the Void Century. Or it's possible that someone else has already been through it and took anything truly interesting."

Robin nodded. "At least I have a lot of new reading material."

Then a half-destroyed ship fell from the sky.

Almost on top of them.