Immense thank you's to: sxcond, shimamia, luffys, minty, rainbowpuppies, Jenny123jenjen, Tamago-ya, Guest, gwendolyn-sama, Casual Reader, PippinSqueaks, Lucy Jacob, geckogal077, Nana Lucinda M. H. Cheshir, AdorableRetard, Zyellowz, HOLY CARP, Guest, BrokenFace, nbstarchild, poisoniceblade, Jimin has jam, Trainer Azurite, helichopper, It's me, Rigoudon3, a fan, and student loans!

Nana: I wouldn't say Sophie's part of the crew, but she's definitely their friend. I've always wanted to read a fic where the OC is still an important part of the canon characters' lives without necessarily being one of them, if that makes sense?

nbstarchild: Hhh thank you! I suppose the short answer is: I'm writing these characters, so I might as well make them interesting so writing can be interesting for me! Even shorter answer: Lots of banging my head against a wall.

Thank you to Kinjiru for offering all of her wonderful insights as I spent the past year struggling to cobble this chapter together. I drew a short comic on how Hai Xing and Anko met. If anyone's interested, it's on my tumblr ohpineapples!

I'm sorry. I can't believe it's been a year. I have no idea how this chapter got so ridiculously long, but please enjoy.

—

methyl nitrate pineapples
hypothesis #19

chrysopoeia

—

There was something majestic about a nine-man pirate crew's entire laundry fluttering over the deck.

It was an army of clean linen and unscented bar soap. It was a hypnotizing cha-cha-cha of cotton blends. It was an orchestra of wet cloth, harmonizing into a beautiful solo of tacky boxers and unmatched socks. The evening air was cool and Law was reading his medical book next to her. Bepo, Shachi, and Penguin were practicing some sort of slow, flowy kata on the deck. Sophie felt herself relaxing in this moment of perfect tranquility.

And then a seagull flew into the laundry lines and tangled itself to death.

Law flipped a page in his book. "I had a suspicion someone was going to die the day Anko did laundry."

"Prepare to be eaten, you dumb bird," Sophie heard Anko snarl from the rigging above her, as he untangled the gull from the rest of the clothes.

"You should get black boiler suits," she suggested. "It'll hide the blood better. The temperature of the deep ocean is near freezing, right?"

"I had that idea once."

"What happened?"

"We hit an underwater volcano and almost died from the heat. And as it turns out, seeing blood on a black suit is virtually impossible."

"Huh," she said, trying to imagine it. "So you guys were also novices once."

"We didn't know shit back then. Not a single shit."

The Hearts probably had stories that could fill books from here to the Reverse Mountain. I wish I could've seen them, Sophie thought wryly. Penguin, accidentally lighting himself on fire? Shachi, falling down multiple cliffs? Law, getting his butt kicked by an overpowered Marine captain? Slowly, her smile faded. Then: god, I wish I could've seen them.

Valross burst through the deck door, crying happily, "I have room at the end of my hammock! I can stretch my legs again! It's a miracle!"

"Dude, don't hang your dirty clothes where you sleep," Penguin called.

"That's asking too much of me, and you know that."

Sophie giggled as she watched the pirates on the deck below. "So how come you're the only one who doesn't wear a boiler suit?" she asked Law.

"I'm the Captain."

"Hm," Sophie said doubtfully, and craned her neck to look around the laundry lines crisscrossing from the masts to the deck railings. "Well, I'm sure your fashion line extends to Heart Pirate-themed underwear. The question is, just where are they…?"

Law was resolutely tight-lipped.

"If I join, do I have to wear the boiler suit? Or can I get away with a shirt with paw prints everywhere and a big jolly roger on the back?"

"You wouldn't need to wear the suit."

Sophie looked at him in surprise. Now, hold on. That didn't make sense at all. Wouldn't everyone look better if they were all uniformed and in uniform? Now she wanted to wear the suit out of spite and also is this a woman thing? Does he think women should only wear pantsuits and steel-toed boots? She opened her mouth, prepared to begin her opening remarks with a scorching, A lady can pull off that white sack as well as anybody, Trafeudal Manpenis, and I'm going to prove it to you right now—

"Just the Heart Pirate underwear will do," he continued with zero emotion, still reading his book.

"There are, like, five stages of interacting with you," Sophie told him. "It's called the Five Stages of Interacting with Trafalgar Law. Like the five stages of grief? Only all five stages are you giving me grief."

Law looked at her over the top of his book, one despicable eyebrow arched.

Rolling her eyes, Sophie leapt down the stairs to the lower deck and then onto the pier. The horizon of Machinastein was dazzling at sundown, with all the lights beginning to glow along the darkening coast.

Flocks of Giant Quetzals flew in emerald-green formation against the setting sun. Movement creaked along all ships down the harbor as sailors opened portholes to watch. The sun was fading past the meadow of waving sails, and they watched the birds scatter over the horizon, heading back to the city to roost for the night. Sophie squinted into the sun, shielding her eyes as the birds flew overhead.

As Giant Quetzals were the main pack animals of Machinastein, they were the size of small horses. It was… kind of unsettling, watching them all fly around in a horde—oh, mangos! Giant bird poop! Sophie broke into a sprint, covering her head.

Anko did not seem to appreciate the poop falling from the sky and getting all over the clean laundry. From the deck behind her came a, "DOES ANYBODY KNOW A FOUR LETTER WORD FOR ARE YOU KIDDING ME?"

"FUCK!" the Heart Pirates roared back.

"IT'S 'HECK', YOU NASTY FUCKING PERVERTS."

—

It was morning, and the first floor of the Jaguar Temple was crowded with busy government staff. Sophie pressed up against the glass counter to avoid the commotion of people running around her and drummed her fingers.

"President Ursa is in a meeting," the secretary said, his quill scribbling a mile a minute.

"Yes, but I'd really like to talk to her." Sophie thought of how she'd brazenly smuggled a pirate into the College of Chemistry for the past month, and tried, "Please?"

"Like I said, my boss is in a meeting."

"Seems like sh-she's been in a meeting for the past three weeks. She's probably trapped in there. Been taken hostage."

"You know what, Sophie-san?" the secretary said, not looking up from writing his memo. "You could be onto something. I will start investigating immediately, because this is of the utmost importance to me."

Sophie leaned over the desk. "When the president is found dead, you're going to jail."

Before he could berate her, she scampered away and hurried to the train station. It was now close to a month since she had begun working on Red Sky, and summer's coda was fast arriving on the heels of a scorching heat wave. She squeezed inside the train and clung to a pole, feeling like a disgusting lump of perspiration.

Two teenage girls took pictures with their Cameko Mushis, and a poised woman next to them was engrossed in a book. How did they do it? How were they so energetic at melt-in-a-puddle-o'-clock? And how was their hair so straight in this humidity?

Sophie tried to pat down the mess of untamed curls on her head and stood a little straighter to mimic the posture of the Machs around her.

"Sirius is running about in the heavens above us," blared a Radio Mushi from somewhere on the train, "so I urge everyone to rest well, drink water frequently, and head over to the hospital if you feel unwell. You all voted for a president who wanted to implement free healthcare, so please use it or else I'm going to look really stupid." Scattered laughter around the train, as the deep, disembodied voice chuckled. "That's a full lid, everyone. Thank you."

A different voice took over. "And that concludes President Ursa's daily briefing…."

Sophie got off at the station by the University and went up the hill with the wave of students heading to class. Many of them were wearing their colorful robes as protection from the sun, but more were dressed casually; colorful headscarfs, thin huipils, skirts patterned with flowers.

She self-consciously adjusted her green wrap-dress, Machina-styled all the way down to her sandaled feet. Here she was, ex-World Government scientist, walking along with everyone else. Nobody gave her a second glance. Everyone passed by her like she belonged, and it was almost disturbing how thrilled Sophie felt about it, which was immediately followed by a queasy feeling in her chest. Was this how foreign parasites felt, swimming around in an immune system that considered it one of its own?

She crossed paths with Law just as he was walking under the College of Chemistry's stone archway. He had his hood up and was wearing plain, unspotted jeans; a decent effort at blending in.

"Hey," Law greeted. "I barely recognized you."

"What?" Sophie asked immediately. "Like you couldn't pick me out of the crowd of students just now?"

His eyebrows raised. "I meant, your hair's down."

"Oh. Right, I was in a hurry today." She bent down, shook her hair out, and then whipped it behind her head so fast Law had to jerk back to avoid getting slapped in the face. She gathered her hair in a frizzy clump and wrestled it into her usual ponytail. "Mangos, it's hot, isn't it? And the humidity. Disgusting. I feel like a tumbleweed is growing on my head."

"The majority of my crew have locked themselves in the freezer."

"Well, that can't be good for the frozen meat."

"Or the other various body parts inside."

"Oh," Sophie sighed. "Can you at least, like, act stealthier?"

"I know stealth," Law replied evenly, and waved at the hood over his head. "Look at me. I'm not wearing my hat."

Why did she, against her better judgement, still engage in willing conversation with this man? "In a different universe, I'd be sipping coconuts on a beach, in a pair of too-expensive sunglasses and the frilliest bikini I own, having never met you."

"Wouldn't bet on it," he said, and strode past her.

Sophie ran after him and tugged him away from the path down to the basement. "Over here," she said, turning right and leading him towards the huge stone temples further up the hill. "I was thinking about what we should do today. The research phase is over. Now, to create a cure, we gotta look for ingredients."

"And how do you plan on accomplishing this?"

Sophie dramatically flung her arms wide. "This is Machinastein University! The pantry of knowledge!"

"So, stealing." Her flair was wasted on Law.

"Borrowing," Sophie assured. "And if that doesn't work, I'll start crying. I'm quite good at that. Been doing a lot of it lately. And if that doesn't work, I'm counting on that famous Trafalgar Death Stare."

Law frowned.

"Tone it down a little," she admonished. "You're not trying to seduce anybody."

"Right," he said, clearly having enough of this tomfoolery. "Onwards."

"To victory!" Sophie declared, never having enough of tomfoolery.

—

The College of Ecology was a giant greenhouse, and it housed the most curious assortment of plants that Sophie had ever seen.

There were rows and rows of plants of every size and color, from islands all over the Grand Line. Alabastian shywhifflers that shrunk away when she touched them. Kunlun moon jasmines, blooming across the ceiling. Whisky Peak cacti. Pink hibiscus from Idyll Island. Drum's snowdrops. Even bog flowers from Crawfish Island.

Sophie smelled the purple swamp roses and the bone-white mushrooms until she looked up and saw that Law was already past a grove of bamboo trees, and hurried after him.

"We're looking for valerian and mandrake," he reminded. "Herbs with sedative properties."

It soon became clear that the greenhouse was far too large for Sophie and Law to cover in one day, much less one hour. She found an ecologist tending to a hedge of carnivorous pitcher plants. He had enormous glasses and a red ponytail that reminded her of a rafflesia corpse-flower.

She explained that she was one of President Ursa's guest researchers and told him she was looking for, and the young man's bespectacled eyes went agog with enthusiasm. "Plants as sedative? Fascinating. Follow me. A handful of valerian, a dash of mandrake, a pinch of skullcap…"

Next was the College of Medicine.

"We should break in," Law suggested, looking up at the stone temple.

"What is this, suddenly a heist genre?"

"It'll be faster if I just find their library of molecules."

"No, you should wait outside because the doctors on this island get really weird when they realize who you are. Do you see that student leaving the temple? With the cart? She looks like a student here. I'll ask her if she knows where they hide their disease research—oh, she's coming towards us—act normal, Law-san. Don't look suspicious. Oh my god, she's getting closer—casually lean on something, quickly—"

"There's nothing here to—"

"Just—just cover your serial killer face! Rip off your eyebrows!"

The medical student with the cart stopped before Sophie and Law. She tipped her cap up (it read, apples are my only weakness, and Sophie may have gasped at such a wonderful pun and clutched her heart like a fainting baroness), looking nervously between the two of them.

"Hey," Law said, sounding almost surprised. "We've met before, haven't we?"

Sophie subtly leaned back and checked to make sure the young woman still had her foot attached. Whew.

Law tapped his thumb and index fingers together, and she replied quickly, her hands moving fluidly in the air. "She was heading to the College of Chemistry to look for you," he said to Sophie.

Sophie blinked. "Um, can you sign back—"

"She can hear fine," Law said, and the student opened the wooden chest in the cart as she continued to handspeak. "This… is a gift from President Ursa, who asked the doctors to prepare this for you, Sophie." He picked up a small note. "And there's a message."

That was… incredibly nice of President Ursa. Inside were at least a hundred glass bottles of small molecule samples, each labeled neatly.

"'Go get 'em, kid'," Law read from the note.

Now, all that was left was the coffee. Which was, as any good scientist could tell you, the most important part of the experiment.

Law went to set up the basement with their new supplies and Sophie ended up waiting in line at the University's café as she studied her notes. There was something off with her calculations for the specific molarity of sodium nitrite and valerian extract she'd need for a two-fifty milliliter solution, but she couldn't figure out what.

"That's point twenty moles," said someone behind her, and Sophie whirled around. The purple-robed woman pointed at Sophie's notes. "You missed the zero right there. Proportional reasoning as it applies to measuring rates of chemical reaction, right?"

The mathematician's name was Norma, and she had long black locs that glimmered with golden beads and a shirt that read 'Call Me Sin(3.14159)'. She told Sophie she was working on a way to disprove the concept of infinity. Sophie found her very odd and very excellent.

"Can you believe it's still this hot? Though, autumn here is basically still summer. I rather like the heat, reminds me of home." Norma pointed to herself. "Alabastian."

Sophie's curiosity was immediately piqued. "Really? How are things going over there?"

"Sorry, I didn't catch that." She pointed at her left ear. "This is my good ear."

Sophie quickly moved to Norma's other side. "How's it going in Alabasta?"

"According to my parents, it's still hard. Well, it's always hard after a war. But everyone has water, and I hear Yuba's been dug out of the sand. They say it's unheard of how fast Alabasta is rebuilding itself." Norma smiled, her beaded locs chiming. "We've never had a leader quite like Princess Vivi."

Sophie went up to the barista and ordered an overpriced latte for herself and a cup of black coffee for Law. "Thank mangos Captain Smoker was there to save her," she said, waiting for Norma to order.

"Yeah." Norma moved to underneath a shaded bench to wait, and Sophie followed. "Well, actually, my parents say it was pirates. The Straw Hat Pirates, but they couldn't print that in the newspapers, for obvious reasons."

Sophie's brow furrowed as she tried to think of a polite response. "…Are you sure your parents aren't compulsive liars?"

Norma squinted at her, like she was trying not to laugh. "You're from an Allied island, aren't you?"

"Not everything the World Government has done is bad—which, okay, I get that you never said, but, I mean, it was because of a World Government-commissioned sailor that Machinastein itself was discovered hundreds of years ago, so—"

"Yeah, so, the World Government didn't discover Machinastein. They were already here, and they've been here a whole lot longer than eight centuries."

Sophie frowned. "Oh. Right, I… guess."

"Listen, I once thought the same thing. My Machinastein girlfriend has gotten into plenty of fights in bars over that issue. There's a lot of pride here, considering how the World Government tried to repeatedly attack this island for their gold."

"That ended, like, two hundred years ago, right?" For once, her useless knowledge of history had remembered something!

"And?"

"And Machinastein is clearly doing great now."

"Sure, aside from the constant fear of the possibility that the World Government will bar them from trading with their islands."

"I don't think they'd do that."

"But they did," Norma said, blinking. "Two hundred years ago, they stopped physically attacking Machinastein and then tried to force them into the Alliance by starving them into it. And then President Ursa, before she was president, used her Dial inventions to negotiate with the Government to reopen the trade routes. So they've had to deal with famine, disease, the whole shebang, for centuries."

"…Oh." Was this common knowledge? Maybe it was, from the way this Alabastian was talking about it. Maybe everyone knew, except Sophie. Then again, she had never bothered to ask. Sophie could feel herself turning red from delayed embarrassment.

"That's you, isn't it?" Norma said, pointing to the barista calling her name; Sophie hadn't heard. "Anyway, it was nice meeting you. It's always fun to talk politics with a stranger."

"Ha," Sophie replied, cracking a small grin. "You think this is fun? What is it with young people and government nowadays?"

"Take it from the pirates. They're calling this the New Age." The mathematician got her coffee and left with a backwards wave.

—

The next morning, Sophie headed to the basement, balancing breakfast in her arms. She had fought in two wars, and this was probably the scariest thing she'd ever done.

She leaned against the door, haphazardly trying to balance a dozen coffees against her chest, when a hand reached out from behind her and opened the door. She caught her balance, blinking at Anko as he moved past her and kicked open the door wider so Sophie and her caffeinated cargo could fit through.

"The freezer was getting overcrowded," he said, before she could ask. Anko plopped on the chair Sophie normally sat at and unfurled a newspaper's crossword section. "Shachi said this was where you and Cap were holed up together all day."

Sophie wrinkled her nose. Did he have to phrase it so luridly?

"So this is where the science happens," he remarked, his voice quite unimpressed as he looked around the basement. Anko watched her totter in, barely able to see over the cups of coffee. "If you're planning on drowning yourself, the ocean's easier."

"This is fuel, you dumb mango. I pretty much bleed caffeine now, but I haven't had to sleep for three days and I only blink, like, once an hour." She stared at Anko with her enormous, red-rimmed eyes. "So it's definitely worth it. Can you move that petri dish for me?"

The pirate's shoulders jerked up, and he looked to where she was pointing. "Oh," he said, relaxing. "I thought you said f… never mind."

He cleared the petri dishes away to make room, and she set the coffees down on the table. Sophie frowned to herself, then asked tentatively, "You… haven't said anything, right?"

"No, I haven't fucking said any fucking thing," Anko snapped. "It's Hai Xing's own business that he's a fishman."

There was a loud creak at the other end of the room, and Sophie's gazed swiveled in the direction of the noise and landed on a polar bear who was sitting up among the storage crates. Bepo stared at Anko and Sophie. Anko and Sophie stared back.

Then Anko grabbed the chair and raised it over his head.

"Anko!" Sophie shrieked, the same time Bepo waved his paws and cried, "I already know about Hai Xing!"

"What the hell are you doing here?" Anko bellowed, a tendon in his neck actually jumping.

"The freezer was overcrowded! This basement is quite cooler than I expected…"

Sophie was still wrapping her head around Bepo's first announcement. "Wait—who e-else knows?"

"Just me and Captain! And it's obvious, with the way Hai Xing smells. I don't understand how you humans live with your terrible noses…"

"What the fuck?" Anko said, staring at Bepo. "What does he smell like?"

"Like a half-fishperson," Bepo replied, as though it was the most apparent thing in the world. "When did he tell you two?"

"It was a whole thing with chocolatiers. It doesn't matter," Sophie said. "I'm just surprised no one else noticed for this long."

"Yeah, well, he's good at secrets," Anko said roughly. "How the hell were we supposed to know?" And then he said, "Damn it," and laid his head on the table. "He's so much cooler than me. Fuck."

Sophie patted his mohawk. "To be fair, you set a low bar."

Bepo chortled.

"Fuck the both of you."

She laughed as she sat down and reached for her research papers. Anko was still resting his head on the table.

"It's fucked up, you know," Anko muttered, his head turned away from Sophie. "What the World Government does. Spreading rumors that fishfolk are… diseased, or sick, or dirty, whatever. Killing them. Making them so afraid they can't even swim to the surface. It's some fucked up shit."

"Yeah," she sighed. "I know."

"You ever seen a people auction before?"

Sophie's mouth tightened. "No."

"I didn't know Hai Xing was a fishman when I saved him. I just wanted a fuckin' bounty. I should've figured it out. I should've…"

"Does it matter? You still would've called him names," Bepo pointed out.

"That's 'cause I'm also fucked up, Bepo, and that's what fuck-ups do," Anko snapped, and then looked down. "Anyway, you don't fucking know that."

Sophie and Bepo glanced at each other over Anko's head. Thankfully, Law arrived and that put an end to the conversation, if only because Sophie immediately grabbed him and showed him her new theories. Bepo came over to see what they were doing, and Anko was left to brood with his crosswords.

—

The Hearts appeared, one after another, gravitating towards their captain. It was becoming oddly familiar to step inside the basement and be greeted by loud laughter. In another lifetime the noise would've driven Old Sophie mad, but now she was comforted by it and how it seemed to fill up all the empty corners of the basement. New Sophie liked sound; sound was better than the absence of it.

She even appreciated that Kamasu was here, though all he contributed were the snores coming from the corner and when she tried to introduce herself properly to him since they'd never actually formally met, he called her Strangesalt Snafu and rolled over.

Hai Xing and Bepo were dropping tiny chopped fruit into Goliath's cage. Bepo asked if the rat's poop was also contaminable, because it was definitely building up, so Sophie got Law to help her Room away all of Goliath's toxic poop into the hazardous waste bag. She made a mental note to throw it out later.

"Which island should we head to first after this?"

Sophie's quill stopped writing. She tried to keep focusing on the words in front of her (mandrake, 2-PAM chloride, likely combination), but she couldn't help but eavesdrop, a sinking feeling in her chest.

The pirates debated between Pucci, San Faldo, Water 7, and St. Poplar. They were all popular destinations, and the market sold plenty of Eternal Poses to let the average sailor take their pick.

"All five islands are connected by Sea Train," Sophie interjected, "so it doesn't really matter where you go first. You can get all the meat and see all the festivals your heart desires."

Penguin counted on his fingers. "And the fifth island is?"

"Enies Lobby, of course! The Final Courthouse, which sits upon the Precipice of the World, that leads to the Gates of Justice and beyond that, Marineford. They say that the glorious light of the sun never leaves it, and its rays burn the taint of evil from all criminals who walk across the Bridge of Hesitation. I've always wanted to see it. Though I guess I can't now, since I'm technically also a criminal…"

Penguin turned to his crew. "So, yeah, Water 7 has those famous shipyards, and if we visit before Aqua Laguna hits, maybe we could see the shipwrights in action."

A reaction she should've expected, if Sophie was being honest with herself.

"No. It's almost Aqua Laguna season, and Water 7's historically been dead center of the tsunami," Law said.

"What if—" Sophie cleared her throat. "What if you go after Aqua Laguna passes?"

"You have everything set up. There's no reason for my crew to stay longer."

"You'll be off on your own adventure, too," Shachi said cheerily. "You're taking this to Vira, aren't ya?"

"…Soon, yes." Law was right; she had everything set up. But she wanted to have at least some antidotes developed before she left Machinastein.

"We'll send you postcards from Laugh Tale," Shachi assured.

"There better be a photo of One Piece attached," Sophie replied with a smile.

Their voices still echoed in her ears as she laid down on her blankets later that night, looking up at the painted stars on the ceiling and listening to the silence.

—

The Chocolate Dial scientists were all in a rush when Sophie arrived. She peeled open the door in a bit of a daze after another sleepless night, and nearly fell into the garbage bin where the chemists were dumping broken Dials.

A swan-necked chemist, Cygnus, said that it was take out the trash day, and they had to gather up all their unusable Dials. Dials that spat too much chocolate at once, Dials that only produced pepper without any of the mint, and Dials that did not provide any chocolate but instead released a discordant wail that sounded like a ghost shrieking from beyond the grave.

"I'll go with you," Sophie volunteered. "I have something I need to get rid of, too."

She ran down to the basement and grabbed Goliath's hazardous bag of poop, stuffed it in an empty wooden box she found lying with the other storage items, and hurried back upstairs.

The furnace for hazardous waste was in-between the chemistry and medicine colleges. Cygnus hitched her bike to a small cart filled with broken Dials and Sophie stuck her poop-filled box in the cart and walked alongside her as she biked slowly. The shady stone path was pleasantly quiet, except for a man walking behind them, whistling. After asking Cygnus if she was okay with it, Sophie took advantage of the open air by lighting a cigarette.

"I appreciate how strong Machinastein's pun game is," Sophie commented, looking at the chocolate chemist's shirt that read, I Make Chocolate Periodically.

"Thanks." Cygnus smiled. "I'm glad we're talking, Sophie-san. You rarely join in any of the conversations in the lab."

"Right. Um. I'm just—tired. Also, I'm not very good at talking, so you should count yourself blessed."

"You sound alright to me."

"Yeah, but you don't. Really know me. So."

The older woman shot her a funny look. "Ah, so you're that sort of scientist."

Sophie blinked. This conversation was heading into familiar territory, one that she used to hear all the time on G-13. "To be honest, I used to be that sort," she admitted, over the creak of the old wooden wheels. "I'm trying to get better. Um. Little by little, I guess. I'm still not very good. Then again, I don't really know if I'll ever be good."

"Change is essential to the fundamentals of chemistry. Everything undergoes change at some point or another. When applied an appropriate amount of energy, it's not a matter of if, but a matter of when."

"That sounds ominous," Sophie sighed, blowing out smoke.

"Doesn't it?"

Cygnus' bike rolled slowly over the path, and Sophie realized that the whistling behind them stopped.

"Um," Sophie said, "can you bend down a little bit?"

"What?"

The man behind them passed by the cart, his hand reaching for a Dial—

"Never mind," Sophie said, and leaped over Cygnus. She grabbed the man by the beard and slammed him into the ground, digging her palm into his throat before he could take a breath to yell. She loomed over him, digging her knee into his gut.

"Stay back, Cygnus-san!" she barked over her shoulder, patting the chocolatier down for guns or knives. "You know this is a school, right?"

"I wasn't gonna attack anyone!" the chocolatier snapped. "I'm not even carrying a weapon! What do you take us for? Marines?"

Glaring, Sophie dug her knee harder into his stomach.

"Aw, hell," the chocolatier wheezed gruffly, his eyes widening in recognition after getting a good look at Sophie's face. "You again, Eyebrows?"

"Do I know you? Wait…" She squinted. "Did I ever hit you in the head with a-an éclair display?"

"Come on. Let me have a couple of those Dials. We have to fill our chocolate quota 'fore Sundae arrives."

Sunday? "I guess you have a long week ahead," Sophie snarled, and the chocolatier said some very unkind words to her, but she couldn't really hurt him in front of a civilian. It was sort of in bad taste. "Get out of here. When I get up, you," she prodded him in the chest with her cigarette and he hissed in pain, "start running."

She released him and watched him scramble to his feet.

Sophie turned back to Cygnus. "Let's get going—"

There was a clatter as the chocolatier bumped against the cart and was sprinting away with something clutched to his chest and jumped onto a Giant Quetzal that Sophie hadn't noticed was waiting behind a tree.

"Hey!" she shrieked, punching the air. "I was being nice, you pineapple! What did he steal? Was it something important, or just the one that screams like a demon, because, well, maybe we can let him have that—"

The cigarette dropped from her mouth. Sophie grabbed the cart. Her box with Goliath's radioactive poops was gone.

Muffinfudger.

—

She took off on Cygnus' bike, pedaling faster than she ever had in her life. From a far distance, one would've seen a cloud of dust making its way down the University hill.

If the chocolatier opened the box, if he looked inside the waste bag, if he threw it on the ground or, mango forbid, the river—Goliath's toxic poops would get into the water, and then the fish, and then she'd have to murder all the fish and set fire to everything and everyone nearby, and then—

Gritting her teeth, Sophie pedaled harder.

The intersection at the bottom of the hill was congested with afternoon traffic. The streets rumbled with the grind of wagon wheels and the air was heavy with heat. She saw a glimpse of the chocolatier in-between the wagons.

"Face me like a woman, you coward!" Sophie shrieked at the top of her lungs, but all she got were several stares and one approving 'yeah, girl!'

She ducked and weaved through the traffic. The chase went up another hill, through the meandering back streets, and Sophie briefly lost him in a wind-chiming alley filled with artisan shops, swearing at how distractingly beautiful Machinastein was, until she saw him and his Giant Quetzal beneath the bridge, riding east.

She biked on the street above, struggling to keep him within her sights—but up ahead, a big stir was occurring on the sidewalk. A familiar mohawk tumbled out of a patolli gambling parlor.

"I told ya, I don't have any more money!" he was shouting, as he was encircled by large men cracking their knuckles.

Sophie reached her hand out and as she zipped by, snatched him by the collar and plopped him in the seat behind her. Anko lurched forward to grab her before he could tumble off.

"What the—SOPHIE?"

"I need you to get your captain for me! I want him to kill that guy!" Sophie pointed at the chocolate gangster on the street below. "You see that box? That's mine!"

"Who needs Cap when you've got me?" Cackling, Anko jumped up lithely and his feet landed on the bicycle seat in a crouch. He held onto her shoulders for balance. "Throw me at the fucker!"

"I don't think that's a good—"

"THROW ME AT THE FUCKER!"

Sophie reached one hand behind her and grabbed his shirt. With a great heave, she lifted him up and launched him into the air.

Anko fell through the air, landed in a hay wagon, and disappeared into the wheat. "WRONG FUCKER!"

She heard his muffled scream as she passed the wagon. Sophie was plenty strong to lift a man one-handed, but she was not an expert people-thrower. Ah. Well. Rest in pieces, Anko, you will be missed! Not really by me, but by somebody, probably.

It was clear the chocolatier knew she was following him, because he rode into the twisting, curving roads up to the ballgames court, intent on losing her there. Sophie pedaled so hard it felt like her lungs were going to implode. She made it through the winding streets and out into the dusty exterior of the stadium.

"Here they are, folks!" The ball games announcer echoed over the gates; a low, womanly tenor. "The worst ball team on Machinastein, who's never won a game, the Palmettoooo Pantheeeers!"

The roars from what seemed to be a massive crowd were so loud they shook the ground. Sophie biked past the golden pillars that surrounded the stadium. Massive carvings of Mach soldiers and ball players streamed by her, each taller than giants.

She narrowed her eyes as she drew closer to the chocolatier, huffing and puffing. Giant Quetzals were much bigger up close, and this one looked a head taller than Law so it was very intimidating to maneuver around, but Sophie didn't need maneuvering when she had the powerful alto that was her voice.

"HELLO AGAIN," she greeted, pedaling up to the chocolatier.

"What's this!? The Palmetto Panthers have gained the upper hand! What a once-in-a-lifetime experience!"

"Get away from me! We need this, Eyebrows! Our chocolate supply is nearly out!"

"There are no Chocolate Dials inside, you idiot!" Sophie roared, and punched the Giant Quetzal in the butt.

The bird squawked, and she grabbed the chocolatier's arm and struggled to yank his limb off or throw him off the bird, whichever came first. Holding onto the handlebars with one hand, she scratched and clawed at him, and they were both screaming as they hurtled through the crowd of tailgaters and spectators who were listening to the announcer on their picnic blankets.

"They're fighting for the ball! The Panthers are rolling with the punches! History could be made today, folks!"

The Giant Quetzal's leg came flashing out and kicked her bicycle. Sophie was barely able to grab hold of the handlebars before she fell over, and she went careening into a shaved ice vendor.

"A messy fumble from a sucker punch! The Panthers weren't expecting that at all!"

The crowd around her was roaring and the vendor was yelling at her. Sophie staggered to her feet, apologizing dizzily. There, in the middle of the chaos, the chocolatier's Giant Quetzal took off into the sky. She hobbled forward desperately, her knees stinging, dragging the bike behind her.

"The Panthers are on the ropes now! The ball seems down for the count, we're waiting on the referees for—"

Sophie nearly missed the flashes of movement on the rooftops—there was Bepo, and Shachi, and Penguin, searching the crowded street. And behind them was very disheveled Anko with hay sticking out of his hair meeting her eyes—he shouted something and pointed at her, and the pirates all leapt from the rooftops to where Sophie stood. With one glance at Anko, she had an idea and dropped the bike.

"HOLD ONTO YOUR HUIPILS, FOLKS! PANTHERS INTERCEPTION! THE BALL IS STILL IN PLAY!"

She pointed up at the chocolatier in the sky. "Bepo-san! Throw me up there!"

Bepo picked her up and flung her into the sky with the force of a speeding javelin.

"—BY THE GODS, THEY'VE HAVE LAUNCHED A HAIL MARY!"

Sophie hurtled through the sky like a small-range missile. Wind howled past her ears. Tears sprung in her eyes. Bepo's aim was true. As the chocolatier glanced back over his shoulder, she crashed into him in the clouds.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" he screamed, his elbow in her face.

"BOY, THAT IS A LOADED QUESTION," Sophie screamed back, and her legs flailed, trying to kick him as they tumbled round and round, plummeting upwards and everywhere.

The Giant Quetzal smacked her with its wing and clawed at her, and she considered, maybe, that this was how she was going to die: getting clawed alive by a stupid-looking bird as she yanked on a box filled with rat poop. The wood was coming apart, the metal clasps plucking off one by one—

"THE BALL GOES FLYING OUT OF BOUNDS!"

From the stadium below, a rubber ball whistled by Sophie's ear and smashed into the chocolatier's face.

His grip went slack, and with a mighty tug, she wrenched the box away.

Sophie glimpsed the chocolatier swearing and tumbling off into the wind, and then her world inverted. Everything was brilliant, blinding sky and sun, and she inhaled like she'd forgotten how to breathe—fields of clouds streamed for miles above her, fluffy-white meadows and snake-white ripples, and somewhere out there was a flying automaton cat named after a constellation in the sky, a cosmic object that was never coming back to earth.

Then the air underneath her feet became solid stone, and Sophie jerked forward at her sudden meeting of the ground again. The burst of wind from her fall caught up to her and she hastily grabbed her dress and yanked it down.

Law caught her round the shoulders, and Sophie wrapped her arm around his neck, flushed with adrenaline and feeling more alive than she'd ever been.

"What," he said, "the hell."

"It's c-called tripping w-with style. No, not really. But look! I saved this from a chocolatier—"

The wooden box was open, and it was empty inside. Panic engulfed Sophie. Where was it? Where—

She looked up. The hazardous waste bag was falling from the sky, about to hit the plaza.

Then a shadow leapt overhead from the direction of the stadium, and a silver cane plucked the bag from gravity, as neatly as one plucked an apple off of a tree.

A tiny, snowy-haired woman somersaulted through the air and landed deftly on the street. Most of her four-foot stature consisted of a tall bun and an even taller hunchback, and beneath her plain old-lady tunic were two fuzzy pink bunny slippers.

Sophie gulped and smiled nervously. The old woman smiled back. She had very few teeth. Her small eyes glimmered like jade stones.

Then she cleared her throat.

"STRANGWAYS SOPHIE, HOW DARE YOU LET A CRIMINAL IN MY UNIVERSITY WITHOUT TELLING ME."

The voice of the ballgames announcer echoed down the street. Law threw his arm out in front of Sophie. His fist was glowing blue.

"Wait wait wait!" Sophie grabbed his arm. "That's—"

"YOU SHOULD'VE TOLD ME SOONER! I WOULD'VE SKIPPED MY MEETING WITH ALABASTA'S TRADE AMBASSADOR. YOU KNOW I CAN'T STAND OLD BORES."

"I-I'm sorry! I know you wanted me to stay out of trouble—"

"NONSENSE. I THOUGHT YOU'D BE CONSORTING AROUND WITH THOSE CHOCOLATE HOOLIGANS. BUT PIRATES ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!"

Two elegant women swooped into view, armed with clipboards and formidable reading glasses, and they draped a glimmering silver robe patterned with gold stars over the old woman.

One of them leaned down and bellowed, "MADAME PRESIDENT, YOU'VE FORGOTTEN TO ADJUST YOUR VOLUME LEVELS."

OH, FORGIVE ME!" She touched her neck, and there was a metallic sound, like several gears clicking into place. "Ahem!" She gave her large wizened head a shake, and fastened her robes around her waist. "That's better, isn't it! I don't often announce at competitive events, but when I do, I get so wrapped up in the energy!"

The President of Machinastein stood before them, the woman of famed legend who harvested sunlight and grew seeds in the desert: Ixchel Ursa. Her pink bunny slippers were still sticking out from the bottom of her robes. She bore a startling resemblance to a wrinkled potato.

"Radioactive rat poop," Sophie explained timidly. "I was heading to the furnace, but—one of the chocolatiers stole it accidentally. Thought it was a Chocolate Dial."

Ursa handed her the poop bag and nodded, her aura filled with ancient wisdom and sagely advice. "Could one say it's ratioactive?"

Sophie gasped. "One could."

"But should one?" Law asked from the background.

"I've been trying to see you," Sophie explained. "But it's very hard to get a meeting."

"That I can't deny. Though next time, let's not suggest to my secretary that I've been taken hostage, yes?" Ursa suggested, and Sophie rubbed her neck. "I've been wanting to check up on you, my dear. Make sure you're happy, nobody's dying, and you've haven't blown up my school."

"These are very responsible pirates," Sophie assured, "and they have my complete confidence."

"THAT WAS SICK, STRANGWAYS!" Anko slammed into her back and would've shoved her into President Ursa had Sophie not been built like the sturdy tree trunk that she was. Bepo, Penguin, and Shachi appeared behind him, hollering their agreements. "You got your box, right? Who's this dinosaur? You look older than the barnacles in my—"

Anko was pointing at President Ursa—and then he was flying backwards and slammed into the side of a building, two knives pinning his shirt to the stone wall. Ursa's secretaries lowered their arms and the rest of their weaponry disappeared under their silk sleeves.

"Did anyone else get a sense of déjà vu?" Penguin asked.

"Now, now, Dubhe, Benetnash, the child was just curious," Ursa rebuked mildly. "And I'm one hundred and ten."

"You look barely over ninety," Law said cordially, Rooming Anko back (who was looking utterly delighted by the new holes in his shirt).

"And I handle like I'm seventy-five." Ursa winked. "Now then, before I let you scamper off…"

Her voice barely changed in tone, but Law took a step back, taking Sophie, who was standing behind his shoulder, with him.

"Trafalgar Law, if you're taking advantage of being in my country and your intentions are wicked," President Ursa rested her hands on her cane, "I'll kill you where you stand. And don't think of lying to me, dear. Better men than you have tried."

Law was speechless, perhaps because he'd never been threatened by a hunchbacked fossil before. But the secretaries were reaching towards the insides of their sleeves again, so Sophie donned her Knight in Tinfoil Armor cap and gallantly rushed to his aid. "If Law-san tries to hurt your country, I'll be the first person to give him a good whack." Sophie mimed punching the air beside Law's head. "I'll be all, 'bang bang bang'!"

"Those are gun sound effects," he remarked.

"I'll be gentle."

"I'm not hiding the fact that I'm a pirate," Law said to Ursa. "But the point Sophie failed to make—" ("Hey…") "—is that I'm here to help her with Red Sky. I harbor no ill intentions towards your country."

"Not like Crawfish Island?" Ursa pondered.

"Um, yeah… the World Government sort of blamed that one on him." Sophie shrugged. "But he is still a moderately famous criminal."

"Moderately?" the Hearts repeated angrily.

"Well, there are plenty of those in my country," the president chuckled. "And speaking of criminals, I forgot to thank you for cleaning up some of those chocolate hoodlums last week. Several of them were treated in my hospital for some kind of starfish poison."

"Starfish poison?" Shachi smacked Sophie on the shoulder. "Where'd you find that?"

"Maybe on a beach, dumbass?" Anko muttered.

"Alas, the sign of a healthy economy is a manageable black market. Constrict too much, and the honorable thieves who keep the order die off—or worse, get recruited by that Yonkou, Big Mom." The tiny woman motioned for Sophie. "Now that I have you here, come take a walk with me."

Sophie hesitated. "We should really get back to…"

"I humbly request that you humor an old lady," Ursa said, and though her voice was warm Sophie felt that there was something about it that was impossible to say no to. She gave the pirates a dismissive flick of her wrist. "Not you, dears. You're free to leave."

Law didn't move, but his gaze flicked from Ursa to Sophie, who gave a tiny jerk of her chin. She gingerly handed him the bag of poop and told him where the incinerator was, and then a Room spun out of Law's palm. Ursa's secretaries gasped, and President Ursa made a noise of admiration. The pirates vanished in a flash of blue.

"Well, then," Ursa said, "shall we?"

Without waiting for an answer, Ursa headed down the street. She waved at the citizens she passed by, hopping along in her pink slippers. How did someone so old have so much energy?

"And your teacher, he's doing alright?" Ursa asked.

It threw her for a loop; Sophie felt like she hadn't thought about Hippo in weeks, she had been so busy with other matters. "I d-don't actually know where he is or what he's doing—"

"He's currently residing in a quaint tavern called Aloe View, and he's spending his time hustling grannies in games of Go."

"How the pineapples—"

"He's a marine, my dear, and marines don't walk around Machinastein without me and a platoon of guards knowing their every location."

"…Wait, have you been tailing me?"

"Only for a little bit. We've deemed you as a non-threat, but the pirates you've been smuggling into my University…"

"Okay, that's fair. I'm. I'm very sorry about that." Maybe it was an invasion of privacy, but Sophie had grown up supporting a totalitarian government that used its force arbitrarily and laughed at due process.

The president eventually slowed down on a long, shaded pathway that was lined with golden willows. It was a quiet, secluded area overrun with colorful foliage, the lazy hum of bumblebees, and the sweet fragrance of overripe papaya. Her secretaries gave them privacy and followed from a short distance away.

"Though, might I add, out of all the pirates you could've bumped into, well done for picking that one."

"That's not—I didn't—" Sophie inhaled, then settled on the truth. "Yeah, I'm pretty lucky."

"You should say that a little louder. Trafalgar's keeping an eye on you from beyond these willows." Ursa looked around Sophie's waistline and called, "You might as well come out, dear!"

Sophie whirled around as Law stepped out from the shadow of a tree.

"How did you know?" he asked warily.

"How could I not have known?" the old woman shot back with a wry smile. "If you're so interested in my conversation with Sophie, then stay and listen."

Law crossed his arms, leaning against the tree.

Ursa rested her palms on her cane. "What does a former World Government scientist think about my city?"

That was hardly a difficult question. "It's a-amazing! Your food, your architecture—everything is so beautiful."

"I'm glad you think so. It took many years to rebuild after centuries of war."

"This is a huge city," she said positively. "Not as big as, say, Kunlun, but I'm sure it'll get there someday."

President Ursa smiled. "Have you been to the desert, my dear?"

Sophie nodded. The train ride there had been long. She and Hai Xing had walked for hours and hours, and then only made it halfway back to the city. There'd been wooden houses and ramshackle buildings and dusty wrinkled men shadowed by wide-brimmed hats. But mostly, there'd been nothing. Just cacti and coyotes and nothing.

"The ancient metropolis of Machinastein once stretched from this city," Ursa pointed a bony finger out, and Sophie followed it past the trees, past the street lights, and looked out into the distant desert nothingness, "all the way to the farthest outcrop at the other end of the island."

"…What happened?"

"Eight hundred years ago, the beast appeared."

"Oh my god, what beast?" she gasped, and received a flat look from both Ursa and Law. "…Oh, you meant—oh."

Ursa beckoned them to follow, and as she turned from the path and walked into the undergrowth, asked, "Out of everything we teach, do you know why World History isn't included?"

Sophie shrugged. The thought never crossed her mind. Law was also silent.

"It was a part of a deal my ancestors reached with the World Government. They would allow us to trade with their islands, and we could only teach Machinastein history, nothing else. We would also bar any foreign archaeologist or historian inside our borders. You could say it was part of the tragedy that came after the Void Century."

Sophie passed that term before, in G-13's history books. They all had the same footnote: The Void Century was an age wherein nothing of historic note happened.

"But bits and pieces of our past still remain."

Ursa's words echoed eerily in the shaded grove. In the middle of the grove was a massive ceiba tree, so big that Sophie and Law could both comfortably stand on one of its bare white branches. There was a majestic ancientness to it, how it twisted and spiraled everywhere. On its trunk were some sort of carvings that Sophie tried to make out as she got closer.

"Our history was once passed down through logkeepers, sage singers, and root women. Then the World Government came and killed them all, and killed their families to be safe. Generations, wiped out. And the reason? That is lost to us, as well."

The carvings were of people running through a city filled with temples, forests, and giant animals Sophie didn't know the name to. Chasing after the Machs were soldiers thrusting swords and World Government flags in the air. Marines.

The sound of Sophie's breathing was very loud in her head.

"After suffering internal wars and famine, we had to come crawling back to the World Government and their kings, begging to trade with their islands. Our civilization recovered, but it came at a cost."

Sophie traced her gaze over the smaller stone figures, clearly meant to be children, and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to see this. She could've spent her whole life without seeing this. All she'd wanted to do today was throw away a bag of rat poop—

What did Ursa want to accomplish by showing her this? Did she want Sophie to feel even more ashamed of her home? Did she do it just to rub it in her face? Did she think Sophie would naïvely believe her, like she had no pride in the World Government anymore? Like she would just listen to somebody who had never been a marine, who had no idea how the high the cost of loyalty was, this ridiculous insurgent slander is what I expected from an idiot like Jacques Straw, but—

Rage curdled between her teeth.

"Don't lie to me," Sophie snapped, and pointed at the gruesome carvings, looming over the tiny old woman. "This can't be real. And if it is, then Machinastein m-must have done s-something truly awful to d-deserve this."

"Sophie," Law said in cold warning.

"It's alright," Ursa said, with surprising calm. "We have done awful things. We were exactly the same as the World Government, achieving prosperity due a society rooted in classism and inequality—"

"I don't know what that means."

"Slavery. It means slavery."

Sophie turned her horrified gaze on Law, as Ursa continued, "Yes. The old empire was built on the backs of slaves. But we learned from our mistakes. We were capable of change—"

"I-I'm sorry, but how is this m-my problem?"

"I wanted to show you that even deeply-ingrained beliefs have the ability to change, to transmute; like how chemists say, from lead into gold—"

"I don't CARE about that! I don't—why would you think—I-I'm not a part of them anymore!" Her voice rose into a shriek and Sophie stabbed her finger into the old trunk, filled with carvings of the dead. "I would have never done something like this!"

A silver knife flashed under Sophie's chin, and she was being whirled around by Law before Ursa's secretaries could cut off her head. They stood between their president and Sophie, armed and ready.

"Stand down!" their president ordered. "My dear, I didn't mean to imply—"

"And chrysopoeia is a fool's tale," Sophie spat, and turned on her heel. But before she could get far, a hand grabbed her wrist.

She shoved Law away from her, really shoved, wanting it to hurt, and he actually stepped took a step back. She covered her face, feeling like her tongue and her heart were going to jump straight out of her mouth. She couldn't speak. She felt like if Law tried to get her to speak, she'd start screaming.

But he didn't, and he let her go without saying a word, and Sophie stumbled all the way back to the ballgames stadium. Her brain was in a fog of anger and something like grief, but she didn't even know why it felt like grief, only that it did and it ached. She was only half paying attention to where she was going, so it was by some miracle that she managed to retrace her steps to Cygnus' bike, lying on the dirt.

Her hands were trembling too hard for her to hold onto the bike, so she squatted next to it and buried her face in her knees, tapping her fingers against her feet and counting in even numbers over and over again. The anger subsided after she reached one thousand, and then Sophie felt sick to her stomach. She felt exhausted. And then she felt terrified, which was worse, because she didn't know of what.

And then—and then she felt nothing but numbness. Sophie listened to her breath rattling around her ribcage and wondered how it would feel to slip out of existence, without a breath or a sound, to vanish completely.

The crowd exiting the stadium milled past her, and a conciliatory hand patted her on the back. "Chin up, kid. The Panthers will win one of these days. It's just probability, you know."

—

Eventually, Sophie picked up the bike and made her way back to the University to return it to its owner (apologizing profusely for the burned rubber). Then she headed down to the empty basement, where the silence was deafening.

She inspected Goliath and his rat cage, and sighed. "More poop? Hai Xing-san is feeding you too well. You don't even look like you're dying."

Sophie finished up the last batch of cultured cells and carefully aligned the final petri dish with the rest. She cast a scrutinizing eye over her work and nodded. There was nothing to do but wait and see how the Red Sky cells responded to the different molecular combinations.

She considered all the petri dishes and microscopes and papers, thinking of the logistics of her grabbing everything and running away on some nameless ship. It might work. She'd have to think about it.

…But first, coffee.

The sun was setting when Sophie headed to the café. The lights of the University were going out one by one as students and teachers headed home, and sky was a deep-blue velvet. She ordered her expensive cappuccino and sat on a nearby bench, waiting for her order. Sophie kept thinking about how, if it were possible, she could run away with all her Red Sky ingredients when a voice broke her daydream: "Long day?"

Sophie looked up. Norma was smiling at her, a cup of coffee in hand, her beaded locs clinking together.

"Long couple of months."

"Oof. You doing alright?"

She grinned tersely. "I'm great."

"Anyone who says that with that kind of tone is flat-out lying."

Norma broke off, her eyes brightening. A tall, willowy girl came running past Sophie and pressed a kiss to Norma's cheek, and the two of the women were briefly locked in a warm greeting. With a swish of her long hair, the medical student from that morning straightened up and smiled at Sophie.

"Oh, your girlfriend!" Sophie realized, then blushed. "Sorry. Hi."

"Celaeno! Norma!" came another voice.

Sophie turned around. "Really? All of you know each other?"

The rafflesia-haired ecologist with daisy earrings walked over to them, looking like he was heading home.

"Musca-kun!" Norma greeted, and said to Sophie, "This school is pretty small. Most of us know each other."

The ecologist blinked slowly Sophie, like he was trying to remember her face. "Oh, shit," he said in realization. "How's it going, chemist?"

"Fine. Can I please wait for my overpriced coffee in peace?"

"We were about to grab dinner," Norma said. "Why don't you come with us?"

"You've never experienced a real Machinastein night out until you're weeping for your mother after eating raw cayenne peppers," Musca said.

The barista called her name, and Sophie stood up and got her coffee. "Thank you, but that sounds terrible. Goodbye."

Celaeno stepped forward and smacked the coffee out of her hands. It went flying onto the grass somewhere. She jabbed her finger at Sophie, who was standing there in stupefied shock, then pointed down the hill where the city glowed in the sunset, then rounded it all off with a cheerful thumbs-up.

"You still need to pay for that," the barista drawled.

"…Okay, let's go," Sophie said quickly, and the four of them bolted down the hill.

—

With Musca recommending what to eat at the night market, Sophie grabbed a dinner of hot tamales and lima soup. Norma suggested honeyed desserts to go with her papaya drink, and Celaeno's eyes gleamed as she got Sophie to nibble on a raw cayenne pepper. Trying to disintegrate your tongue was a regular Machinastein pastime, and the three students started taking bets and passing around peppers.

"At leath ith great fuh thtuffeh notheth?" Norma sobbed, wiping the tears from her eyes.

"My tongue ith falleh awf," Sophie wailed, and then suction-cupped a glass of milk to her mouth.

Celaeno and Musca looked pitifully at the two non-Machs as they licked the pepper juice from their fingers.

Afterwards, they tried a less life-threatening activity and walked to a small plaza filled with restaurants and open-air seating. Two men were playing a trumpet and the drums in front of a tamale shop. The men had long red hair, fashioned quite like Musca's. Sophie's observation wasn't wrong: Musca told the others to watch, then took out an ocarina from his robes and ran towards them, sitting on the empty seat next to his father and grandfather.

The music was light and airy, a good song for dancing. People were leaving the seats where they were dining, and the women were pulling their skirts up and the men were tapping their feet. Sophie followed Celaeno and Norma, looking for a seat to watch the dancers. But then Celaeno whistled at someone in the crowd, waving her arms and pointed at Sophie.

Out of nowhere, a spry young man—one of their friends, maybe, or just a complete stranger—grasped Sophie's hands and spun her around. Her green dress twirled up around her knees and her breath flew out of her lungs.

Celaeno and Norma clapped enthusiastically, then clasped hands and went swaying into the growing crowd. Okay. Now here was a Machinastein activity Sophie could get behind.

She waved her arms and kicked her feet, and probably looked like a flailing idiot, but the music was beautiful, and she felt it from her toes to the tips of her fingers. It was pure noise: ocarina, trumpet, drums, and the sound of dancing feet and clapping hands, swishing skirts, laughter, feverish as a summer night. She spun to a woman, who caught her in her arms and twirled her around.

Sweaty and flushed and breathless, she barely noticed that some Hearts had come to see what the commotion was, until she came face-to-face with Penguin.

"Yo," the mechanic said coolly, and then immediately yelped as Sophie grabbed him.

Hand on each other's backs, they parted the crowd, twirling with a flourish that could in no way be described as proper dancing. Penguin threw his head back and laughed, and his eyes—forever shadowed by his hat—gleamed under the light. He whirled her to Shachi, and she mimicked his bopping movements. He looked quite snazzy in those sunglasses in the golden lamplight, his long red hair flying all over his forehead, calloused mechanic fingers snapping to the beat.

"Remember that time in Lvneel?" Shachi called over the music.

"With the squirrel and the snowcones?" Penguin hollered. "Always!"

Sophie took light half-step back, then more as she watched them dance together, laughing about an island in North Blue that she'd never been to. Norma and Celaeno twirled by her, their hands clasped together, their silk dresses swishing about their legs.

Sophie closed her eyes, losing herself among the dancing bodies and the music. She felt the noise and the bodies and the atmosphere press up against her chest, pressing up so tight there was no room to feel anything else.

She used to dance with Hippo all the time when she was small, standing on his toes as he whirled around the room. He'd play old, scratchy records and hold her in one hand, the other carrying a glass of gin. She'd balance herself on his scarred knuckles and tell him she was gonna have big ugly hands like him someday, because her hands were gonna carry so many stories like his did, and Hippo laughed and laughed.

He could sing up a tune, her sensei. His voice was whiskey-sour-smooth, he could dazzle all the marines like it was nothing, and whenever she visited G-13's memorial with him, she'd watch him lay a wreath at the bottom of the black stone tablet and sing, The ocean sees the beginning of the world, the ocean knows the end of the world—

Her eyes flew open and her breath quickened. The music was deafening, and there were too many people, and her brain felt overheated.

She pushed through the crowd and managed to extract herself onto an empty sidewalk. There was a grassy hill nearby that was still close enough to hear the music, so Sophie stumbled up the hill and found a soft patch of grass to sit on. The night air was nice and cool. If she closed her eyes, she could be on G-13's battlements again, swinging her legs off the parapets—

I miss G-13, she thought, and squeezed her eyes shut. She missed the coral beds, and the ocean that seemed to have no ending, and the times when she used to look up at the stars and think they were all hers.

What was wrong with her? She was on a new island, surrounded by new people, trying to be a new person. Why couldn't she just… forget about it all? Sophie braced her head on her hands.

The grass rustled. Footsteps. "Feeling ill?"

When she made out the silhouette walking towards her, Sophie exhaled. Law sat on the grass with his legs spread out and handed his mostly-filled bottle of rum to her. She accepted, sniffed the edge of the bottle's mouth, and took a little sip. It tasted like dark, spiced honey.

She set the bottle down and muttered, "I shouldn't have blown up at President Ursa like that."

"Yeah, that was hysterical."

His voice was neutral, but she remembered how angry he'd looked. She made a face at Law. "Pineapplebutt."

"You took it too personally. The president wasn't talking about you."

"I know. I know! I just—I couldn't take another person reminding me how awful the World Government is. Even after everything Hippo-sensei did to me, if you tried to bad-mouth him, I would kick your apricot—"

He snorted.

"I would! I know that's stupid, but I would! He's my teacher, and G-13 was my home, and the World Government was—" Sophie took a deep breath, almost laughing because it sounded so dumb. "And I know that's stupid, I know. I know I don't have the right to say that. I set my home on fire. But—it was still a part of my identity. It still raised me. It was m-m-my—culture, my island."

Sophie wiped her mouth, her fingers tasting like sweet rum. The blissful horizon of palm trees and temples glowed in the dusk, slumbering with a million ghosts.

"I can't pretend like it never existed, because that's like pretending a big part of me doesn't exist. But then I get so ashamed that it is a part of me, that I think I could die."

"That's a piss-poor reason." Sophie's head whipped around to glare at him as he laid down on the grass. "All I'm saying is, at least make your death useful in some way."

"…Wow. I know your only interest is piracy and being a stupid mean pineapple, but—"

"I'm trying to be rational—"

"Oh, wait, you also like poisoning cute girls. And kidnapping them, and throwing them onto giant birds. Oh my god, if you ever get a girlfriend, I'm going to have to rescue her from your clutches."

"I can surgically shove your hand inside your eye socket."

"I'd also rescue your boyfriend," she replied, "that goes without saying. I'd be a very good hero."

"How's that heroism working out for you so far?"

"Quite well, as you can see by my current situation."

Law grinned. And then he said, "You're more than what you were raised to be."

Sophie tucked her chin on her knees. "Easy to say. Not so easy to believe."

"You've only been at this for, what, a month? Give it time. At least a decade. Then you'll probably be okay."

"Is that how long it took you?"

"Don't compare yourself to me. I was put in a situation that I had pretty much no control over. But for you, this is a choice. You changing is happening because you wanted it to happen. That's quite badass."

Sophie fidgeted. "…Even if the future makes me scared out of my mind? Even if I don't know how to… be this different person that I want to be?"

He thought about it. "No, you're right. I take it back. Your entire presence brings me immense embarrassment."

"Thanks, Law-san," Sophie said sarcastically.

"Anytime."

A pause, and then she said again, "Thanks, Law-san."

A slow song rose from the plaza, and fireflies drifted over the grass like little stars. The hill gave them a perfect vantage to see the winding streets and palm trees lit by golden lamps, and all the temples that shone silver under the moon. In the distance, a group of people could be heard faintly singing, "Someday the Panthers will reign agaaaain! It won't be today nor tomorrow, but we won't abstaaain!"

"Why did the Twenty Kings even create a government for the entire world in the first place?" she wondered, reaching for Law's bottle of rum and taking a drink. "Why was it necessary? I've always been taught that it's for peacekeeping, but most countries already have a militia in place. And the Void Century."

Law exhaled, blowing dandelions into the sky. "One hundred years that no one in the world remembers."

"How is that possible? Why did the Government kill all those Machinastein historians to hide it? The world deserves answers, right? We deserve answers."

He shrugged. A firefly drifted over his hair.

"Aren't you even a little bit curious?"

"I don't care. It's all built on rot. I'd rather see it burn."

Sophie didn't feel the same. She needed the World Government intact if she wanted to learn its secrets. Somewhere in the West, somewhere beneath the constellation of the crown and the dragon, stood the Holy Land, Mariejois. Mariejois, which had spent eight hundred years complicit in slavery, genocide, and war. Because the World Nobles were gods? No. True gods couldn't die, and Sophie had slain one herself.

But what could she possibly do? She wasn't anyone. Her namesake was nothing but a shipwrecked boat. She had tried so hard to rise up in the ranks, to be somebody who mattered, but it had been pointless. She'd walked out on her faith, been excommunicated, eternally damned.

But how she had screamed at President Ursa, how she had raged—

G-13 was still there, beating inside of her.

The more she kept it a secret, the more she tried to cover it up with pretty silk dresses and straw-woven sandals, the more she became aware of it. She was an anomaly, a glitch. Nothing about her belongedon this island. Her blood was the blood of the World Government; it was the blood of legions of island-murderers and greedy warmongers. It was in her bones, down to the very last molecule of her being.

A thought, then, occurred to her. A terrifying thought that had been building up for weeks, and Sophie finally knew how to put it into words.

"Law-san." She shook his shoulder, and the fireflies glowing in his dark hair scattered. He rose up on his elbows and looked at her and the snot dripping out of her nose. The horizon of the golden city washed over Law's face, over his grey eyes and his earrings, and she was terrified all over again. Sophie wiped her nose and whispered, "What if… what if I n-never r-really leave G-13? What if it s-stays with me, f…forever?"

Law had been through this. He'd know.

He was quiet for a long moment, and said finally, "It stays. And you live."

Her cigarette was stub between her lips. She held her breath, waiting for something that wasn't so utterly depressing—

"That's all I got." He looked away, briefly, then back at her. For a moment, just for a moment, this seemed to take a herculean effort for Law to admit. "That's all I know."

Sophie thought about it again, and if she listened closely she might've heard the hum of their entropic bodies, releasing minute amounts of heat into the universe, tending towards chaos and randomness the constant dispersal of energy, and maybe, maybe there were no perfect answers. It stays, and you live.

She exhaled a river of smoke up to the stars, and said, "Okay."

—

Even when they had finished off the bottle of ale between them, Law felt no immediate desire to head back to his submarine. He was settled flat on his back and Sophie was lying next to him on the grass, relaxing on her side, her head resting on her palm. Her hair was coming out of its ponytail and it tickled his shoulder. Somehow, during their conversation, she had scooted closer to him. Or maybe he had to her.

"Where'd you get that?"

He raised his arm and looked to where she was pointing: a long, thin scar down his bicep. "I got sliced up with a broken bottle. When I was sixteen, by an asshole in a bar." Sophie pointed at another scar on his wrist. "That's from when I practiced knife-fighting as a kid."

"And then you discovered how bad you were?"

"Hilarious." He paused. "But, yes."

"How was it like, being sixteen?"

"How was it like when you were sixteen?"

"I was holed up in a laboratory all the time. I didn't go out, I didn't have friends… but you must've had some grand adventures."

He had. "I traveled all over North Blue. Spent a year living in a forest, studying and practicing my Devil Fruit… bummed around Lvneel for a while after that… stole a whole bunch of shit. Got chased out of three different islands. Such was the life of a burgeoning teenage pirate."

Sophie was quiet. He couldn't see her face unless he angled his head and looked up at her, so he did. Her face was close—closer than he thought, and he watched her gently bite down on her lip. When she exhaled, her breath smelled like honeyed rum.

"I would've liked to have met your crew back then."

"No, you wouldn't have. Trust me. This thing inside us, it's not something that—heals. It's… day by day, learning how to live with it. But you don't know what to do with that when you're sixteen."

"If you were sixteen, then I would've been twelve…" Sophie looked into the sky with a thousand-yard stare. "God, I was an acne-covered, pubescent monster."

"So, nothing's changed."

"Rude. Adult acne is normal, I'll have you know." She flopped on the grass. "But yeah, the more I think about it… I would not have gotten along with you even if we'd met at the Beginning of the Beginning of All Stories. With any of you. Well, maybe Bepo-san." Sophie nodded firmly. "Better here and now instead of nowhere and never." Her brow wrinkled. "I guess that's… kind of obvious. But. Anyway, it feels good to say out loud."

The dance was winding down in the plaza and the last note of an ocarina faded away. Law glanced at Sophie to see if she was about to get up and leave, head back to her ivory temple. But she made no move to go. Her eyes were bright with stars.

"Chrysopoeia," she said, repeating the strange word from earlier. "You ever heard of it?"

Law shook his head. He hadn't.

"The Great Work, or so science-mystics say." Her voice was theatrically hushed. "According to legend, it's made with prima materia: the original matter. Aether, or chaos, or the world soul, the connection between all living things on the planet. It grants the alchemist the ability to change base metal into gold, and blesses them with eternal life."

"What a… convenient combination of powers."

"It's ridiculous," she said with a yawn. "But, well… in theory, if all the ingredients are right and enough energy is applied… transmuting lead into gold isn't a matter of if, but when…"

She trailed off, and then a loud snore came from around Law's shoulder. He raised himself up on his elbows to look at the chemist, who was lying on the grass, her head lolling over her shoulder and drool puddling out of her mouth.

—

Listening to the quiet hum of the submarine, Sophie opened her eyes.

She didn't remember much of last night, but she knew she must've fallen asleep talking to Law. He brought her back to the sub? What a proper, murder-inclined gentleman. She sat up in the hammock and stretched out all the creaky bones in her body. Crawfish's bioluminescent mushrooms washed her room in aquamarine. The jar hung from the ceiling, and it looked well-kept. If Sophie didn't know any better, she would've thought a pirate had been taking care of it.

She stepped outside in the galley, blinking away blue sunlight. The walls rippled with underwater reflections of the ocean surface. It was morning again. How strange, that the world was still the same even as she felt so different. It felt suiting for the ocean to breathe rampant fire and the stars to drop out of the sky and fly away like fireflies.

But the world rotated just the same as it did when she was a proud World Government soldier, and it rotated just the same when she was a good, servile daughter, and it would rotate just the same now, when she was neither of those things.

Hai Xing was in the galley, preparing breakfast. He barely glanced at her as she came inside and leaned against the counter.

"Nice day," Sophie began.

"I made coffee," Hai Xing said.

"Oh, thank pineapples." She poured herself a cup with extra extra sugar, and watched him dice up vegetable. "I'm really glad you guys stayed for so long. I feel bad from holding your crew back from your next pillaging adventure."

"We didn't stay for you," the cook replied plainly. "Pirates don't exist in a vacuum of constant adventure. It's important to be content with your life in order to risk it in a battle." He raised his shamonji. "Today we live to the fullest, so that tomorrow we might die a satisfactory death."

"Huh. So, to you, piracy is basically the pursuit of a happy ending."

"I hear that's the best kind of ending," Hai Xing said, and she had to agree.

Sophie fingered a strand of her hair. Another good wash, and the black dye would finally be out and she'd be a blonde again. From lead into gold, she thought, and smiled.

"Are you ready for your next adventure?" she asked, and was quite proud of herself for sounding so poised about it. It's not like the Hearts were going to disappear from her life altogether. She could follow along in the newspapers, after all.

"Death has a way of finding those who want to be found," Hai Xing muttered, and passed her a butcher's knife. "Hold this."

"Wait, wha…?"

Then, Sophie heard it: beneath the low metallic hum of the submarine, there was the sound of the deck door creaking open.

Someone had boarded the submarine.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway, one by one. Hai Xing continued prepping breakfast, because he apparently followed all his grim forecasts with casual tomato-peeling. Sophie was now fully awake. Wait, Death? What? It's too early for this! I haven't even brushed my teeth!

The doors swung open and plump silhouette stepped into the light. The woman was—there was no other way to describe her: she had the appearance of a gentle, middle-aged mother, or an angelic cake baker, or the sweet lady who sold muffins down the corner. Her cotton-candy pink hair was softly permed, and her round cheeks were rosy with blush.

"So ye be the pirates who took out half my sweets operations on this island," she greeted.

"Uhhh…" Sophie stared, one hand on the knife. "Who… u-um, who a-are… you?"

The woman smiled beatifically and trilled, "Were ye dropped on the head, ya stammering, empty-headed, pig-nosed wretch? Charlotte Sundae, Minister of Gelato. I sail under the flag of Big Mom. And I do believe your gormless whoreson of a captain owes me some fuckin' chocolate!"

to be continued

trivia

chrysopoeia: the transmutation into gold, which also foreshadows sophie's eventual epithet.
celaeno: was going to have her fellow six sisters (the pleiades) appear, but that was scrapped because the pacing was slow enough as it is!
norma, musca, cygnus: all named after constellations.
norma's shirt: it's… sinpi (senpai).
patolli: a mesoamerican game of strategy.
ixchel ursa: ixchel is an aged jaguar goddess in ancient mayan culture of medicine and midwifery (all the citizens of machinastein are her children), and ursa is for the constellation of ursa major.
dubhe and benetnash: ursa's secretaries, named after the stars of the ursa major constellation (alpha ursae majoris and eta ursae majoris).
the ceiba tree: ceiba trees are pretty important in mesoamerican cultures. ceibas have been depicted as a world tree, or an axis mundi connecting the underworld, earth, and heaven.