Towards Drum
Miss Valentine came to her senses quietly, keeping her breath even and her eyes closed, trying to use her ears to work out her situation without giving away her alertness. Working through the weakness that the sea prism stone manacles forced into her, she couldn't help but notice that she was resting on a soft surface, and while she felt rather parched, she wasn't any more bruised than the odd pain she felt on her kidney, where she had been struck just before losing consciousness.
"You know, it has taken a bit of finagling to manage your continued existence in a manner that made everyone satisfied." the voice that rang in the room audibly sounded like it belonged to someone that was smiling, "But most situations bring something that can be seen as an opportunity, no?"
Grimacing at being caught immediately, the woman opened her blue eyes and saw that she was in a well-lit cabin, her bounded wrists were secured through a small length of rope to an iron link that also supported one side of a hammock, and her interlocutor was the pink-haired brat that Baroque Works assumed was the cabin boy of the Straw Hat Pirates. The boy who killed Mr. Five.
She still had her yellow, lemon-themed dress, and her hat rested over her folded blue jacket near her head. Her boots had been similarly taken care of, and rested not far from the single door that presumably led to the rest of the ship. A ship that was bobbing gently with the waves: "Are we sailing?"
Her slurred question was met by the boy holding towards her a glass of water, raising an eyebrow at the hesitation in the blue eyes of the Devil Fruit user: "It wouldn't make sense to take you prisoner only to poison you later."
Narrowing her eyes, she tilted her head back and let the boy tilt the glass so that she'd be able to drink. While she swallowed the blissfully fresh water, the boy kept talking: "Do you suffer from any allergies that we should know of? Our cook is rather spectacular, it would be a pity killing you by mistake, you see there is no medic to save you on this ship if you try to get sick in order to be freed."
Miss Valentine scrunched her eyes closed while she forcefully kept herself from flinching: with his choice of words, the pink-haired pirate had destroyed the image she had of his whole crew. Besides Roronoa Zoro, they were all naive children, and yet... "I've seen more escape attempts than those that your mind can conceive. Besides, if I wanted to kill you with food..."
Miss Valentine opened her eyes when she finished drinking the glass, which was delicately removed from her lips, and when she saw what the boy was holding, she paled: dangling in front of her nose, there was a pair of blood-red cherries, with a black, curly stem and swirly patterns that she'd never forget. "You know, I suspected, but calling your ship 'Pop Rock Cherry' when your Devil Fruit forms from a cherry is inordinately on the nose. Almost like dressing yourself up with lemons might hint at what kinf of fruit your Kilo Kilo might sprout from if you were to suddenly die."
Miss Valentine froze temporarily as she recalled that she had liked lemons before eating her Devil Fruit, only to admit to herself, with the new, apparently iron-clad certainty that the pink-haired pirate had about how Devil Fruits returned into the world after the death of their user, that she'd need to rework her wardrobe if she managed to get out of her less than ideal set of circumstances.
"You know, I get why Crocodile kept Whiskey Peak stacked with fruits of every kind despite the costs." Coby spoke with an all too knowing smile on his face: "When the naive Devil Fruit users from the Blues croak it with your scam, their powers pass to the nearest compatible fruit, and his run-of-the-mill lackey either eats it and becomes that much more useful to Baroque Works, or it gets kicked up the chain and sold. Even if it's more likely that there are some people whose only task is to keep an eye on the Devil Fruits themselves. I should thank him for that, we have the hull still full, and I made sure to keep a couple of each type of fruit secured under ice, even if I had to hypnotize my captain repeatedly in order to avoid him raiding them in the night."
Miss Valentine gulped hollowly: "I know nothing of that..." she forced herself to compartmentalize and to refuse the obvious implication that Crocodile, one of the Seven Knight of the Seas, was in a position of power inside her own organization, while she filed away that the boy was apparently capable of hypnotizing people. As far as power went, it wasn't that dangerous, but in the current situation, it could be bad: information gathering was that much more effective when you managed to make your victim willingly surrender the truth.
"I don't need you to." the smile of the boy only widened: "I made sure to contact Crocodile thanks to the den-den mushi in the wax-build base on Little Garden, who is Mr. 0, just in case you weren't up to par, and told him all about how you betrayed him."
Miss Valentine felt her soul wither and die as the piece of news was delivered: a part of her could even respect how he had burned all the bridges for her without hesitation, but while she could be as stone cold as the best of the others in Baroque Works, she couldn't forget how Mr. Five had been killed.
Maybe sensing her resentment, the boy put away the Devil Fruit and casually pulled out Mr. Five Flintock Revolver, casually opening the bullet chamber and handling the weapon with the casual, careful ease of those that knew the dangers implicit of every gun. It looked almost like a regular flintlock, with an addition of a six-chambered swing-out cylinder and a rapid-fire trigger: Miss Valentine knew it well, as in the rare occasions in which he had felt himself on the backfoot, Mr. Five hadn't hesitated in using it.
"My name is Coby, by the way." he put away the weapon and returned Miss Valentine baleful gaze with a rather blank one: "Before we begin, you should familiarize yourself with a concept."
Still, she wasn't going to be cowed by a boy with a sharp tongue! They had kept her alive, had they not? And they were green enough to be squeamish about torture: "Kyahahaha!" She laughed as haughtily as she could while tilting her head back, "And what concept would that be?"
"That my captain is your only hope for survival, and that I'm the closest thing to a friend you'll be able to make." when she didn't react, he pulled out a disk made of metal tied to a string, and swung it smoothly while his voice deepened a bit: "On my three..."
The best thing Coby felt he could possibly do with the Explosion-Explosion fruit, which was arguably much better than the Bomb-Bomb one in possession of one of Doflamingo Lackeys, would be to figure out how to make a machine use it to infuse projectiles with its power. To eat it himself had caressed the mind of the pink-haired pirate, but it would arguably more useful to Usopp: and along with it, Mr. Five's chosen weapon.
The flintlock revolver was among the most advanced weapons ever seen in the manga if not for the laser bullshit introduced by the Pacifistas or Franky, and that too would be useful if capable of using a Devil Fruit of sorts. Coby remembered clearly that there was a sword that had eaten an Elephant Zoan, in whatever mysterious way those things happened: but a Paramecia? There was no precedent for such a thing.
Also, Usopp had proved and would end up proving that he was able to pull off some interesting bullshit with his slingshots, and Coby wasn't keen to limit the sniper's potential growth over possible misconceptions on what made the best long-range weapon.
Finding Mr. Five's Devil Fruit among Coby's selection of fruits in the Going Merry had brought a smile to the face of the pink-haired pirate.
Luffy had sent Mr. Three flying once he woke up, enraged because he had missed most of the fight and because people had tried to stop him from enjoying the aftermath of his Banquet. With the new day, the Straw Hat Pirates had scoured the island for the captain's adventure, and witnessed the duel between the giants that ended in a draw.
The girl capable of drawing with colors that directly affected the emotions of those that saw the product of her efforts was nowhere to be found, and while the pirates raided the local base of Baroque Works for everything useful, including an eternal pose to Drum Island that they were currently following, there hadn't been much else to do besides tanning the pelts of the tigers Luffy had killed while defending the flesh of the Sea King, stocking up, and sailing ahead.
Coby was, after his nth rebounded attempt at hypnotizing Miss Valentine, alone in the kitchen. He took out a piece of bread that Luffy had yet to eat, cut it, and placed a piece of salted meat in it, only to proceed to cut thin slices from the Bomu Bomu no Mi and place them over the meat. If the next sequence of events went as planned, he'd be tying up several loose ends, while granting Usopp the Devil Fruit most capable of turning him into something truly extraordinary instead of a comic-relief character.
With the snack ready to be stolen, Coby hid it on his person and walked out of the kitchen, moving instead towards the men's room, which doubled up as a containment room for Miss Valentine. And of course, he could only sweatdrop at what he witnessed. I don't know how I could expect anything else.
The woman he had more or less manipulated the situation to obtain, the Devil Fruit user that Vivi had unexpectedly voiced to keep as a prisoner in the hope of being revealed inside information about Baroque Works, was free from her sea stone restraints and was staring at Luffy with the kind of dumbfounded surprise that Coby had felt on his own skin, back on Alvida's ship.
"Dreaming to survive is kind of dumb." the Straw Hat captain cleaned up his left ear with his pinky finger, "What's your actual dream though? Everyone should live for something."
Coby crossed his arms and leaned into the doorframe, adjusted his glasses, and simply observed what was going on with an arched eyebrow.
"Don't wanna." Luffy's tone was peremptory as he crossed his arms, "I'm going to be King of Pirates, I don't want to take her freedom."
"We're not saying to chain her forever, only to bring her to the next island, without asking for her permission." the pink-haired member of the crew tried to interject, only for his captain to scrunch his nose in distaste. "It's not like she can sail the Baroque Works ship on her own... leaving her here means to basically trap her anyway."
Vivi tried to intervene, adding her own two, unwanted cents, into the discussion: "She could tell us the weak spots of Crocodile, or at least of Baroque Works!"
"That's boring!" the captain declared, "This is my adventure! I don't want to spoil it!"
"Maybe she's a musician?" Coby wondered out loud, "Or a singer? Her voice is high-pitched enough for that...
The blonde woman cast a glance towards the pink-haired pirate taht was staring at her curiously from the doorframe before returning her attention to the all too insistent Monkey D. Luffy, who asked before she could answer: "Are you a musician?!"
The enthusiasm and hope in his voice rang loudly in the room, coupled with the eager eyes of a child on Christmas morning, made the woman hesitate. She had already been freed while Coby wasn't there to argue, but even with her noticeable ego, she remembered how easily she had been disposed of along with Mr. Five on Whiskey Peak, and then later, much more harshly, on Little Garden. With Seastone cuffs or not, she was on a ship sailing the Grand Line, amidst a crew that had clearly no problems with killing, and that counted some strong members among its ranks. Even if she chose to fight, even in the almost impossible case that she won, how she'd ever manage to get the caravel through the mad weather to a safe harbour?
"I'm not a musician!" she snapped, "I'm a bounty hunter! Although... I once would have liked to be a chocolatier..."
She told of her old hope as if she expected to be laughed off the ship for it, but instead of scorn, she was simply met by the tilted, confused head of the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates: "What's a shock-ah-ter?"
"Chocolatier, captain." Coby instructed him from where he stood as if blocking the doorframe for an eventual escape attempt of Miss Valentine, "It means that she wants to make chocolate."
"WHAAT?" the childish pirate dragged his hands into his hair: "Join my crew!"
"You don't even know my name!" she snapped back, her ego kicking up now that she was being seen as interesting only for something that she had never invested any effort into. She was a bounty hunter, and an accomplished one! Even if the idea of enjoying that particular crew's protection didn't exactly sound bad. She respected Mr. Five as a companion, but...
"What's your name then?" the captain of the vessel wouldn't be denied: "I'm Monkey D. Luffy, I'm going to be Pirate King!"
A silent wave of charisma washed over the blonde woman, who, all too aware of her circumstances, and of the murderous grin on the pink-haired pirate by the door, Miss Valentine answered: "I'm Mikita, and I guess that I could join for a while..."
The boy wearing a straw hat rocketed out of the room, turning Coby's world upside-sown as he was casually pitched against Luffy's might while hollering to the rest of the crew: "Whohooo! She's going to make me chocolate!"
Sprawled on the floor, Coby grimaced while the blonde woman let out her annoying laugh: "Kyahahaha! Serves you right, pinky!"
Mikita sighed to herself while she held tighter the rough cloak made of tiger pelt, observing the snow falling over the couple of Usopp and Luffy, which were busy goofing around as if the Grand Line was less dangerous only because they wanted to play. It took a particularly strong will to hold herself back from antagonizing the others needlessly: she needed them for the time being, and apparently, the only condition for her freedom was to prepare some sweets for the gluttonous captain.
Even if she planned to eventually drop them, for now they were her best chance at survival: remaining in the area of influence of the Baroque Works was tantamount to suicide. If Crocodile was indeed Mr. Zero, Coby had actually burned her bridges by calling her now ex-boss with a den-den Mushi on Little Garden's base, and she didn't doubt him for a second.
Despite the jovial tone and the rather amusing failed attempt at hypnotizing her, the pink-haired boy clearly took upon himself to assume a role that the captain seemed to desperately need: the one of the ship's tactician. It took a uniquely cold, Machiavelli-type of mind to be actually effective in that role, and more importantly, it took ruthlessness coupled with unending loyalty to be trusted with that position.
Coby was dangerous and calculating by nature, she knew because she had met Mr. Three more than once during one of his planning sprees, and she saw how easily the pink-haired pirate would be willing to burn everything around him down if it was for the good of his crew. Mikita grinned to herself as she walked freely on the deck of the Going Merry: she no longer had the parasol she used for her signature attacks, and she felt a bit exposed, but there was nothing to it.
That cold, but otherwise uncaring attitude was shared by the infamous 'Pirate Hunter' Zoro, which besides shooting her some deeply unsetting glances, slept away his non-existent worries.
Unsurprisingly, Mikita had butted heads with Albasta's wayward princess: Baroque Works wasn't exactly a sinking ship, but thanks to the pink-haired devil in human form, she was no better off causing them all the damage she could. The sniper, Usopp, had dutifully taken note of everything she knew about the other officers, and even if he eyed her with little to no trust, his solution was simply to avoid interacting with her.
Under a grey sky that was turning progressively colder, Mikita gingerly touched the fading bruise over her left kidney: the long-nosed boy kept a safe distance from her every time he could, and always had the sea stone shackles that he had hit her with on hand.
"Make sure Sanji doesn't notice." the unwelcome voice of the boy who had greeted her when she returned to consciousness after the failed ambush on Little Garden made her turn on the spot. "We don't need Sanji kicking Usopp in the face... again."
A cruel smirk appeared at the image summoned in her head, and she replied gibly: "You could just hypnotize me to make sure."
A grimace appeared on the face of the boy at the reminder of his failed attempt: "I don't know why, maybe that Jango fellow tricked me on purpose when I forced him to teach me, but I can only hypnotize myself or extremely simple-minded people."
"Like your captain?"
"Our captain, Mikita." Coby grinned back, turning the conversation upside down with casual ease: "You can thank me later for that: you don't want to sail on a ship where our rations disappear from one day to the next because Luffy has no sense of self-restraint."
She scrunched her nose at the reminder that she was technically, at least for the time being, subject to the whims of the straw hat kid, and she crossed her arms. "Well, it got me out of being interrogated by you, did it not? Kyahahaha! I also get to annoy you with my presence, now that you can't just kill me without making your captain turn on you!"
"Our captain." Coby's smile returned to be as unsettling as ever as he slinked past her, his eyes piercing despite the lack of glasses she knew he needed to properly see anything that weren't random blurs: "But dear Mikita, tell me: what made you think that I didn't want you to join the crew in the first place?"
He walked past her uninterested in her answer to his rhetorical question, and she could only freeze under her tiger pelt cloak: her breath kept coming out in small puffs of vapor, but she immediately started to rewind in her mind every interaction she had with him that led up to the brief chat with the strangely charismatic Monkey D. Luffy, and for a moment, she actually considered that it had been Coby's plan all along.
Then she recalled the unpredictable nature of the captain of the Going Merry, and her shoulder lost some of the tension they had unknowingly accumulated: the pink-haired pirate was only playing mind games. And even if she still had to get back at him for Mr. Five's demise, she found a part of her appreciating how casually ruthless he could be, even sadistic in how he didn't let up his games only because she was no longer 'inoffensive'.
They came out of nowhere: with the splash of water being violently displaced and the sudden clunk of wood on wood followed up by iron hooks grappling the bulwark, enemies began boarding the caravel. They were organized, and clearly a practiced hand at this, since their
In a manner of seconds, the caravel had been boarded by several soldiers in uniform, each with a rifle pointed at this or that member of the Straw Hat Pirates, cries of 'Hold still!' and 'Hands where I can see them!' ringing loudly in the cold air. Besides Usopp, who outright fainted, and Nami, whose expression became guarded, the other pirates gave no sign of distress.
Luffy seemed simply curious at the new development, Zoro kept napping, even if his hold on his swords had tightened minutely, and Sanji merely lit a cigarette as he climbed on deck. Coby, on his part, sported a wide, wide smile that was quckly subdued when the commander of the enemy vessel jumped on the bulwark of the Going Merry.
When it isn't one thing, it is another. Mikita frowned as the whole caravel was occupied by soldiers answering to the walrus that was laughing merrily: it had been a few days since she more or less surrendered to Luffy's strangely decisive whims, but as they sailed the Grand Line, she had faced with them the storms, the occasional sea king, and the rather random changes in weather. This would be the first boarding. And hopefully the last we'll be on the receiving end of.
The man finished his evil laugh before speaking, and when he did, Mikita stiffened minutely, even if she kept her cool, as it wasn't the first time she had been held at gunpoint: "I am Wapol! King of Drum!"
"I am Monkey D. Luffy!" the boy wearing the straw hat seemed delighted at being boarded, as if he was familiar with the concept but had no real context about what it meant: "I am going to be Pirate King!"
The overweight man had an unusual appearance: with dark violet hair and a cylinder-shaped jaw made up of tin plates, he hardly looked dangerous, and he seemed put off by the cheerful disposition of the Going Merry's captain.
Jumping on that hesitation, Coby, who had unthreateningly and slowly walked near Wapol's position, didn't hesitate in pointing it out: "A king would be in his kingdom, not on the Grand Line: you're just a guy with a steel jaw and mooks with rifles."
"Foolish peasant!" the king assaulting the Going Merry sniffed disdainfully: "I ate the Chomp-Chomp Fruit! I'm not 'just a guy'! Even ignoring for a moment my clearly royal disposition!"
Mikita rose an inquisitive eyebrow at the random, sudden dismissal that Coby had chosen as a line of verbal attack, but seeing as none of the crew seemed wiling to intervene, and Luffy's expression became slightly subsided, she too waited to see the next development.
"I bet you don't even remember what that Devil Fruit looked like. Probably the steel jaw is just a side effect of an operation to try and save your memory..." Coby scoffed, matching the disdain of the man only to receive a glower in turn.
"Of course, I remember it!" Wapol crossed his arms: "It was kind of like a purple plum, with the sign of saw-like jaws cutting through the swirly patterns!"
"Then you must be actually strong!" Coby brought his hands among his hairs, threatening to pull them off in which a third-rate actor might think of as distress: "But what kind of skills might a great king like you have obtained from such a fruit?"
No way this guy is so stupid to explain everything only because he was off-handedly praised... Mikita had to hold herself back from laughing when Wapol puffed out his chest and began talking: "Then you peasant recognize my kingly awesomeness when I smack you in the face with it!"
Tilting his head so that it showed off its unnatural profile against the landscape offered by the sails of his own ship, the steel-jawed man began to expound on his skills: "My Devil Fruit grants me the ability to stretch open my mouths to large sizes, it means that I'm able to eat things in massive proportions. It also strengthens my teeth and my digestive system, allowing me to consume things that would otherwise be impossible or toxic to you peasants!"
Coby looked away, suddenly disinterested, while he used a pinky finger to clean up one ear: "Meh, my captain can eat as much as a giant, your power sounds lousy."
"Don't interrupt me, peasant!" Wapol raged, suddenly jumping off the bulwark and coming to stand in front of the much smaller frame of the pink-haired pirate: "I'll have you executed after you recognize the greatness of my power!"
"You said that you can just eat a lot."
"I wasn't finished!" the king crossed his arms, incensed, as he was played like a fiddle by Coby, who leveraged his sense of ego against him, "I can eat everything, from random food to rocks, from objects such as weapons, to living creatures such as humans!" Wapol passed his finer under his nose in a blatant attempt of false humilty that wasn't matched by his tone, "Then I can transform any part of my body into whatever I ate, enabling me to produce weapons, or even fuse together objects or creatures to create new things!"
"And without drawbacks too!" stars were shining into Coby's eyes then, "You're truly a king!"
"Well, it has the side effect of making me constantly hungry, and I can't use anything that I've eaten more than 24 hours before..."
"Oh, I cannot bear the thought of a great king such as yourself suffering hunger!" the distraught tone of the pink-haired pirate would have been enough to make the rocks weep, and slowly, almost hesitantly, he fished out from one pocked a wrapped up sandwich: "Your worshipfulness, I was saving up this for a special moment, but what can be more special than lessening your hunger? Please, accept this gift!"
Wapol swiped the food offering before anyone could truly realize what had brought it up, and Mikita had a sudden inkling about what was going to happen.
"Hey Coby, you jerk!" Luffy was suddenly being held back by Nami, which had long since realized that there was some sort of plan unfolding, "You kept food for yourself without telling me! I am the captain, I should be the one to eat the super special sandwich!"
Wapol let out a loud, boisterous peal of laughter as he raised the food offering as the insult it was towards the captain: "Even your own crew members recognize my kingly might! Boy, I'll have you executed for last after we raid this ship!"
And in a move too fast for even Luffy to intervene, Wapol ate the sandwich. Even if he suspected the possibility of poison, he'd trust his Devil Fruit to deal with it: his stomach was simply too powerful to be damaged by anything, and the outrage on Luffy's face acted as a perfect seasoning for his small snack.
"Oh, you wouldn't have liked that sandwich at all, Luffy." Coby began to laugh just as Wapol fell face first onto the deck: "After all it was fruit based!"
While the men following Wapol began to shout among themselves and trail their weapons on Coby, Mikita's eyes remained fixed on the dead form of Drum ex-king, while her mind went back to the incisive conversation she had shared with the pink-haired pirate back when she first awoke on the Going Merry.
He had said it loud and clear, didn't he? If I wanted to kill you with food...
Not for the first time, she realized that she could appreciate the ruthlessness that Coby kept ready as a naked blade. And after a split second to grasp all that happened, she began fighting back against the mooks with rifles that couldn't hope to punch through her skin when she sharply rose her density.
AN
A bit of a more episode-like chapter, more 'classic' as far as writing goes, with a bit of change in perspective to give the various contexts needed. Still, we have the first big divergence point here. I may have to consider writing two whole separate chapters to deal with Alabasta in order to explore the new elements that I managed to add to the story up to this point.
In any case, we're almost there.
Woohoo! The first big changes are here: Valentine's is temporarily on board, Coby showed off just what kind of mind he has, and Wapol is dead like only a man eating two Devil Fruits can die. Frankly, I'm surprised that Oda didn't exploit this thing at some point in the manga, it makes for the perfect, if costly, assassination method.
