Bleah. This took me a long time, probably because it's kind of boring. Still, challenging Anwar galvanized me into finishing it. GALVANIZED I say! Anyway, it bridges the story from Smoker's leaving Travis and Joruus to having to fight Anwar, weeks later. Also, in-jokes for fans of One Piece, Metalocalypse and other canons, not to mention in-jokes for people who have been following all the tournament's fights.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters here. No, really, none of them. I only own the contents of this story.

A Winner Is Two: Where There's Smoke…

Intermission

Doubts

Smoker reached the top of one of the lit pathways out of the mountain, his smog hog roaring away, only to find it closed off with a set of blast doors. He grumbled until he noticed a keycard slot in the wall with a sign that read 'SILVER CLEARANCE OR HIGHER' in very clear lettering. Swinging his leg around to step off the bike (and making a mental note that using his smoke form to 'ghost' off the bike was something he should get into the habit of), he approached the keycard, only to be stopped by the soft clearing of a throat behind him.

He whirled in place, only to notice Ofdensen standing in the mouth of a side path, apparently a lit tunnel that lead back to the rest of the base. He was clutching a briefcase. "Solidus told me you agreed to becoming an Enforcer," he said flatly. "I have a contract drawn up to make it official – you wouldn't mind coming with me to the closest office to sign, would you? It shouldn't take more than ten minutes."

Smoker sighed and grabbed his vehicle gently but firmly in both hands, carrying it to the side of the underground road so it would be easily avoided. "Why not? It's not like I have a choice, do I?"

"No, not really." Ofdensen turned and strode confidently down the way he had come; he walked surprisingly quickly, but Smoker was taller and didn't have any trouble keeping up. After about forty-five seconds of walking through the tunnels, they emerged back into a more complete-looking section of the base. Another minute and a half led them to a room Ofdensen seemed satisfied with; it turned out to be a small office with all the standard accouterments – desk, chair behind the desk, chair in front of the desk, fluorescent lighting, cabinet, computer, plastic plant (actually, it was made of steel, and it was a slightly abstract sculpture of what was probably a cactus). There was a window, but it looked out on only dark smoke lit with a hellish glow. "This office currently isn't being used for anything, but that, uh, doesn't matter – I have the pen and the contract right here." Ofdensen took a seat behind the desk, produced said contract from the briefcase, and passed it to Smoker, who looked it over.

"I, Captain Chaser – what the fuck is this?" Smoker handed the document right back. "Who's Captain Chaser?"

"I'm sorry, you were apparently still a Captain when they first told us they were sending you. As for the name… that's the name we got in the mail, I don't fully understand what –"

"Chaser? Seriously? I've made it my mission for months now to chase a guy. Chasing, chasing, all the time…" Smoker took his cigar out of his mouth to gesture menacingly with it for a moment. "Chasing is practically the action that DEFINES me! Can you imagine if I was named something as obvious as Chaser?!"

Ofdensen just stared and quirked an eyebrow for a few seconds before recovering. "Yes, I'm sorry, that error never should have gotten this far. Of course you would never be named something so obvious." He briefly revised it with a red pen, and handed it back to Smoker. "The contract basically says that you honor your pledge to assist us with this tournament to your utmost capacity as a skilled combatant, and in return, we honor our pledge to donate money to Marine Headquarters – they mentioned repairs to an 'Enies Lobby' and an 'Impel Down' – and to give a generous review of your performance to the same."

"So… you're just telling me you're going to give me a recommendation?" This isn't getting any less fishy…

"Well, as long as you don't give us trouble to the extent of breaching the contract… yes. That's what we're evaluating on – your ability to do the job we give you." Ofdensen gestured with the pen, which Smoker idly noticed he was using left-handed, to an article lower down that he had just been getting to. "This article here stipulates that we're going to provide decent quality food and shelter to your crew as pertaining to-"

"I can read."

"Uh, sorry."

Smoker grunted and got back to the contract. Okay, so it was fairly complicated, and there were a few words he hadn't learned at the officer's academy. He got the gist of it, and nothing in there seemed especially suspicious. Ofdensen himself was suspicious as hell, but that couldn't be helped. "Alright, it seems fine," he finally admitted.

"Excellent. Sign at the bottom." The executive flipped the pen around easily in his hand before handing it to Smoker, like a warlord flipping a sword to present it to his new charge hilt-first. Smoker took the pen, buried his doubts one last time, and signed.

"Can I go now?"

---

"And that was weeks ago." Smoker sat in his outpost with Tashigi, whom he was sharing a beer with. This particular outpost was a low concrete structure built into the western slope of the mountain, towards its upper reaches where the trees were mostly coniferous. Smoker hadn't modified it since he first parked his ATV in its garage, except by slowly clearing out the minibar and imbuing it with a permanent smell of tobacco. "It's been fucking dull, except for when they had me out on that grab-a-contestant mission and when they had me check out that monster. At first I patrolled around a lot, but now that it's the rainy season, I only do it when the cabin fever gets to me. No sign of Nero or that thing, either."

"It's killed a couple of the contestants," Tashigi responded. "I saw the footage on some fancy monitoring equipment they have in the base." She shuddered. "It's breeding… and those black-hooded soldiers working at the base treat it like it's cute. They've started calling it Ginger, because they figure it must be a girl, since it… spawns."

"How many babies so far?"

"Two… but it makes them by laying eggs down people's THROAT."

Smoker's eyes narrowed, and he looked toward the window. Nothing but rain pouring down behind bulletproof glass. "Fuck…have any of the other Enforcers seen action?"

"Shadow beat some creature only a little more human than Ginger, but he only thought he had killed it. That guy in the mask – Kakashi – he had more luck fighting some mad clown. That's one death I'm glad to see, personally."

"Buggy?"

"No, I'd never heard of this guy before, but he was a lot scarier than Buggy, even without a Devil's Fruit power. And Mystique – she's a shapeshifting woman, she seems competent but untrustworthy – got taken down by some egg-shaped guy who kind of snapped. I'm pretty sure she's alive and stalking him, though."

Smoker nodded, mulling all this over. "Any sign of Straw Hat on the island?" he asked hopefully.

"Sir… I'm going to level with you here." Tashigi took another drink of her beer. "Not one of these contestants is even technically a pirate. They've only let me see the records of the contestants who died, and most of them are criminals, but there's no pirates, and certainly no Straw Hat."

"That's alright. I knew that was a long shot when I signed. Have you been keeping an eye on the BORED members?"

"Yeah. Sakyo definitely can't be trusted – he reminds me of Sir Crocodile, if maybe a little less threatening. In fact, all three of them are schemer types. The thing is, Ofdensen seems like he just wants to keep things running smoothly. Sakyo's clearly only in it for himself, and Solidus acts like he has some faraway goal that's above it all."

"Thanks. It's not too rough hanging around the headquarters?" Questions like this were the most direct indication Tashigi ever got that Smoker cared about her well-being.

"It's not so bad. The others are there, most of the Enforcers are gone, and the BORED members are pretty careful not to reveal that they don't think much of me. Solidus said I can kick the ass of any employee who harasses me, and I've only had to a couple of times. I'm more worried about you stuck here with no human contact." And she was. Aside from the dangerous contestants and questionable Enforcers, Tashigi had heard stories about the Logia-empowered… how, when living as hermits, some had simply dissipated into their element and gone to a different plane of consciousness… and Smoker had told her firsthand that Logia users who lived in solitude often seemed to lose their humanity.

"I'm fine. I just feel cooped up with this rain…" he looked outside. "It seems to finally be letting up a little."

"Yeah." Her gaze traveled from her empty glass, to Smoker's, to the six-pack they had cleared out together, and back down into what she could see of the table through the bottom of her glass. "I should get back to the base."

"I'll walk you," Smoker said, shifting a cigar across his mouth with only his lips and tongue. "I think I'll go patrol after this if it doesn't start pouring."

---

Colonel Jade Curtiss, according to Ofdensen, was a multitalented individual.

In addition to being a powerful mage, surprisingly physically strong, and a necromancer (although BORED had seen no actual raising of the dead to back up this last claim), Jade was surprisingly good with communications technology, and competent at coordinating a team of people. Most importantly, he wasn't a sociopath, which seemed to place him in the minority on BORED's payroll. It certainly placed him in his current seat, in a dark room in front of a series of computer screens. While the other Enforcers had set out to outposts, Jade had been kept at HQ to coordinate them as a communications expert. Hardly the best use of his talents, but he couldn't argue with anything that kept him here in one of the cushiest seats on the island, instead of out killing people in the rain.

His fingers danced across a keyboard, and multiple clips of a specific contestant danced across the array of monitors. Anwar, Desert Swordsman had managed to pick his battles since arriving – and he had picked not having any battles at all, it seemed. Well, that wasn't very good television, according to the instruction booklet Ofdensen had left him. If people wanted to just watch men surviving in the wild, there were a number of shows they could watch already – one of which apparently starred a Bear. Fascinating.

Sighing, Jade picked up the microphone, and tapped in another quick sequence of keys. A mile or so to the south, Travis Touchdown's cell phone began to ring. "Talk to me," Travis said, and Jade heard it through a surround-sound system that seemed an unnecessary expense.

"It's Jade."

"I know – nobody else can reach me while the fucking shield's up, not even that one contestant who also brought a cell phone."

"That's actually related to why I called – we need you to go out there and hunt down a man who's been avoiding fights. He's a swordsman, so he seemed right up your alley."

"This is kind of embarrassing, but… could you call somebody else? My swords don't work in the rain."

Jade faked a reassuring smile, forgetting that the video feed was only on his end. It wasn't actually very reassuring anyway. "Sure, Travis, no problem. Smoker's closer anyway."

"Thanks. I'm out." Jade watched as Travis hung up and got back to watching his… well, he decided to change the channel and give Travis some private time.

"When the time comes to gather up the bodies, he'll just have to do that instead," Jade said cheerfully as he contacted Smoker.

End Intermission

Why are they gathering the corpses? Well, wouldn't you? Even if you aren't mailing the bodies home to their beloveds, Nathan and Alex are both infected by superviruses and Bowser has been known to return from the dead under various sets of circumstances. Sounds like you might want to keep an eye on those corpses.

Next: Smoker fights Anwar, Desert Swordsman. Except they're not in a desert. That'll be up in a little less than a week.