AN: Hello everyone. No, I'm not dead. Sorry for my prolonged absence. Some of my chapters were deleted and work got a little hectic. As I said before, this chapter throws us back into the main timeline for the story and begins Karmen's missions during the two-year gap. Some exciting things are going to start happening and I hope you enjoy reading.
Merry Christmas! -KnightNGale020
The winery beneath them is close to sea level and surrounded by a wall with an iron gate marked with the number sixty-eight. The compound is dark and unassuming. Galaval and Valcour don't actually produce enough grapes to make full use of DavenGallow Co.'s satellite sites. With each partnership Ikaika makes, he seals the deal by placing either a small vineyard or winery on the person's island. With each new installment more guards, ships, and slaves are needed to run the facilities.
Karmen and Pierce have been observing the facility for two days. Her first test had been to make sure there wasn't anyone inside with observation haki strong enough to see her, then to map the grounds. While she'd walked between the barrels and vats she observed the staff and the conditions the slaves were in. If any of the guards or the people who checked the quality of the wine didn't seem like complete monsters she would take note of them and move on for now. There were some staff, as expected, who were utter trash whom Karmen wouldn't have minded punching in the face. In fact, one of the overseers had made to strike one of the slaves who had collapsed from exhaustion. She'd stabbed the attacker with a toxin that instantly made him feel like he'd worked for six days without sleep or rest. The man had collapsed, foaming at the mouth. The other guards drug him away, simply telling the slave to get back to work. The satisfaction of the act filled Karmen with righteous glee. She couldn't wait to destroy this place and give the slaves their freedom.
Now that the second night had set in, they sit faded on the hill above the facility preparing to implement phase two. As she observes the glowing windows Karmen can't help but wonder how many of these facilities were built by Ikaika's business partners who had hoped they'd be the one Gallowcomb would choose for her to marry. She remembers the man who runs this island, not his name, but the clammy coldness of his fingers. He'd been in his forties and ran a merchant company. She'd forgotten the name of that too. She finds that she'd like to forget all the faces and names of Ikaika's male business partners. She wants to destroy all his assets and rescue as many people as possible. Then she'd go back to Sabaody. The thought of Luffy's eager smile focuses her mind. There isn't much time when she thinks about it all. She has to work quickly and fulfill her missions completely. She'd go back to Sunny without any regrets.
"Describe it for me." Pierce's voice breaks her out of her thoughts.
Her eyes wash back over the facility. "Directly down the hill is a smooth stone wall that expands to the ocean to the left and the town to the right. The other side is a shipment port with ocean access. The complex is small, square cornered and flat-roofed, with a side building that contains seventy-five people. There are three lights in the windows of the main building. Two on the third floor and one in the basement. Inside the finished wine is treated and stored on the lowest level. A team of slaves makes adjustments to the barrels throughout the night with one overseer. On the floor above are the presses and above that are the offices, the break room, and the communications room. We'll need to start there." She looks over at him. "What are you getting?"
He does a partial transformation, ears and nose extending, pushing his new leather visor forward slightly. She frowns at it but waits for his response. "It smells like wine and blood," he says, turning his head away from the wind to take a deep breath. "I can hear an iron door and a whip." He shudders slightly and reverses his transformation.
Karmen holds his forearm. "Are you going to be ok?"
He takes another deep breath and nods. "How long until we take them down?" His voice is a tight growl and he continues to shake with rage.
"One more day," she promises. "We have to keep up personas." She pats his arm before standing. "Come on. Let's go haunt them and make them believe in curses."
"For us to do that all they need to do is watch you cook."
She snorts and holds her hand out to him. "Shut up and lend me a wing." He transforms as he takes her hand and she hooks his clawed thumbs over her shoulders. She leaps and his wings snap open, carrying them down on the unsuspecting compound.
They land lightly on the roof. Karmen steps over to an access door and tries the knob. Locked. "Want me to break it for you?" Pierce asks.
"What kind of ghost breaks locks?" she asks, shaking her head. "You forget I spent months on a ship with a cat burglar." She removes a bobby pin from her hair and gets on one knee as she inserts it into the lock. With a jiggle and a twist the door swings open. "She taught me how to do that in exchange for me teaching her how to slip a rope."
"Mistress, I'm not sure if I should be proud of your knowledge or worry about you traveling with unsavory characters."
"We're breaking into a DavenGallow compound full of people who beat slaves all day and you're worried about me learning how to pick a lock?" she asks.
"Point taken."
They slip inside and move into the first door on the left, the break room. There is a large table in the center where the guards take their meals, a small kitchen, and a large icebox. A young man stands at the counter chopping vegetables for stew. Karmen points him. "Oh, I love this guy," she says. "He's pretty tame. He's kind of their self-taught chef. He just comes in to fix the food and tries to make sure the slaves get enough to eat."
"How do you know he's self-taught?" Pierce asks. He keeps his voice low even though he knows Karmen is masking their presence.
"He mentioned it the other day," she says with a shrug. She steals forward and pricks the man with her quill. "Flexomn." She gets close so she can whisper in his ear as his eyes glaze over. "You want to make some extra food tonight. Tomorrow you will come into work as usual but you will leave before sunset. No matter what anyone says or does, you will be home by the time it gets dark. You deserve a vacation. A long, relaxing vacation and a job that doesn't weigh so heavily on your heart."
"Ok," he responds simply. "I won't come to work. I don't like this place anyway. I just wanted to know they were taken care of, at least a little bit."
This warms her heart. "I promise I will." She steps over to a blank area of wall and grins. "Pierce, would you like to do the honors?"
She feels his snout pull back into a toothy grin. "You have no idea." He extends his wings forward and begins writing, gouging the plaster with his razor-sharp claws, but the letters he's carving are off.
"Dearie, that's braille."
His wings stop. "Sorry."
"Don't be. You've made some great progress," she says, nodding with satisfaction. "We just need them to be able to read it too."
"I'll start over."
"Thank you."
He carves over his letters until there is a very legible "Get Out" there in large, morbid letters.
"I love it," she says. "Let's go do the rest."
They move through the building systematically, top to bottom. They don't carve their message in every room, but they leave deep gouges in the walls where they do. They dodge night guards with rifles and she tells him about which ones have been particularly nasty over the past few days. Luckily almost everyone is asleep. The guards have grown lax from lack of incident and they use it to their full advantage. Karmen sets algidity grenades at strategic locations around the compound. In the basement, they carve a different message. "Leave or suffer the Gallowcomb Curse."
She stands there admiring it for a long time. "You're stupidly happy, aren't you?" he asks.
"Maybe," she says, drawing the word out playfully. "We'll give them a day to choose if they're smart enough to evacuate and then we'll leave it to Kudra."
"You still haven't explained why you brought her along."
"Let's just say we'll need to know who our devil fruit users are before everything goes down."
Pierce groans, finally catching on. "Don't you think that's a little extreme?" he asks.
She glances over her shoulder as she begins climbing the stairs again. "I blew up a building getting you out. This is mild for me."
She returns to the kitchen and collects the extra food, passing most of it back to Pierce. She observes the kitchen boy for a few moments longer after they'd finished. It was possible that he would be hunted down and interrogated after tomorrow night. She only hopes they can provide enough of a distraction to keep him and any others from prolonged discomfort. She'd had Pierce write out the warnings to paint a target on her own back. They'd have to make sure it was too irksome to be ignored while remaining just under the radar. It would be a hard dance to balance, but this is what she'd been training for.
They leave the building through a side door on the first floor, making sure the night guards are all dosing at their posts, and fly back to the hill. "Sleep," Pierce says, climbing down. "I'll keep an ear out for trouble and we can switch off at sunrise."
"Sounds good," she says, giving a yawn. They sit back to back and she lays her head on his shoulder. He does the same and wraps her in wings to keep her warm. "Wake me when they start screaming."
When Pierce shakes Karmen awake, the sun is a gray line on the Eastern horizon. "They're starting to wake up," he says. "We should move in, just in case."
She rubs her eyes sleepily and nods. "Once we get inside, you go ahead and sleep. I'll need you rested tonight."
He climbs onto her back and takes off, carrying them back to the roof as Karmen covers them both in a cloak of haki. They land lightly on the roof and find the door still unlocked. The slaves here must be very well behaved for the guards to have grown so complacent. Over the next few months, she knows, it will never be this easy again. She observes the guards below as they dress, wash, and prepare to eat. On the ground floor, the slaves wait patiently for someone to bring them their breakfast and their single guard rubs his eye sleepily, ready for someone else to take over. Karmen goes inside, ready for the show to begin.
She reaches the breakroom moments before the new guard. "What the hell is this?" he asks, pointing to the gouged letters in the wall.
The young cook shrugs. "I thought it was some practical joke," he says. "It was here when I came in this morning."
The guard turns to one of his coworkers who is on his way to bed. "Darren, did you do this?"
"Aw, come on, Shane, you guys can't go blaming everything on me," Darren says. "Whoever did it got the whole place. It was carved into the wall over the stairs too."
"And you didn't think to report it?"
"Wasn't it one of you?" Darren seems surprised. "Then who…?"
At this point, five other guards had gathered and stare past the pair to look at the clawed message. Shane's eyes narrow. "Search the whole place. Bring me any intruders and make sure all the slaves are accounted for. I want to know where every letter of this writing is."
They disperse with serious faces and Karmen moves with them. Humor turns to fear and they all but forget about the slaves once that fear turns to nervous anger.
Get out. Get out. Get out.
They'd carved it into wood, metal, plaster, pottery, stone, anything that was easily visible or often used. They'd even carved it into the back of a toilet. He'd gouged the letters deep enough that they dripped water and Karmen had added red ink to the tank, making the seeping fluid appear to be blood. Pierce had been especially proud of that one. The fresh shift doesn't seem satisfied when the guard on the first floor tells them that the slaves had remained locked in all night, but when they find the door still sealed and everyone inside still chained with explosive collars on their necks, they relock the door and move on. Karmen grins from her position near the stairs when they find the one in the basement:
Leave Now, or Suffer the Gallowcomb Curse.
"What does it mean, the Gallowcomb curse?" Shane asks.
"Didn't they have a daughter that died a few months ago?" One of the other guards asks. "Maybe someone cursed the family and that's why she died."
"Don't you guys read the newspapers?" Darren growls. "She was killed by an assassin faction the night before her wedding."
A wicked cackle sounds and the basement begins to fill with a mist that seems to freeze the very air. The guards whip around point their rifles in all directions. They can't find anything to shoot.
"Leave by sundown or suffer the curse."
"Darren? What's going on?" Shane asks as they search behind all the barrels and still find no one. All the guards are shivering violently, not entirely from the cold. Ice crystals creep up from floor level and form on their boots and the wine barrels.
Their leader shakes his head. "Someone's trying to mess with us," he says. "We should just report this and get back to work. Keep your eyes open. Shoot anyone you don't recognize. Keep the slaves locked up. No one goes anywhere alone, not even to the bathroom."
They pair off and return upstairs, continuing to chat among themselves as they go.
"If we're keeping all the slaves locked up, then aren't we going to lose money?"
"It's better than a possible riot. If the slaves are somehow involved we have to root it out. We may have guns but there's a lot of them."
"Do you really think it's a curse that killed the girl?"
"Buddy, I don't know nothing. I do my job, I get paid, I go home."
"Why were assassins after her in the first place?"
"Have you ever even met a Gallowcomb or Davenwell?" one of the other guards asks. "They're the kind of people who make a lot of enemies."
"What was with that voice in the basement? And that weird fog?"
"I didn't see or hear anything. You, Aether?"
"Not a thing, and you can't change my mind."
"Think it was a ghost?"
"I'm telling you, there wasn't anything in that basement. It's best if you remember that."
A spectral laugh echoes around the hall.
"Did we not hear that either?"
"Just keep moving."
Darren and Shane quicken their steps and make it to the communications room on the third floor. Darren picks up the receiver and dials his superior's office. It rings only once before the line connects, but no one speaks on the other line. There are only a few pops of static. "This is Blon Darren at outpost number sixty-eight. Something weird's happening down here. Does anyone copy?"
A crackle disrupts the static in the line. "I took his arms to the underworld. There was so much blood on his hands that they could not remain in the world of the living. If you're still here by sundown, I'll take you too."
"Why sundown?"
"I follow the blood trails to see how many hands he shook. How much blood is on your hands? I wonder… Who's smart enough to live?"
A cold chill runs down the guard's backs. Darren tries to keep a brave face but sweat breaks out on his forehead. "Who is this?"
"They planned on killing me. I killed myself first. The assassin just gave me the opportunity."
"Give me a name!"
"I was once known as Gallowcomb Jenevive Willow Karmen," the voice whispers. "I'll take them to the underworld, down into the cold nothingness, along with all who stand under their name." With this, the line goes dead.
Everyone is frozen for a few seconds. Darren tries to make another connection, but nothing goes through. Upon closer inspection, he would have noticed the snail had a small scratch under the lip of its shell, letting it sleep for the rest of the day and cutting any further communication.
"You seem to be enjoying yourself," Pierce says with a yawn from her shoulder as she detaches her snail from the communications relay and crosses a few wires to ensure no one will be able to reactivate it without a loud explosion.
"Are you kidding?" she asks, flashing him a grin she knows he can't see. "I've wanted to mess with guys like this since I was four. This is like fulfilling a childhood wish."
He chuckles and settles into a tighter ball. "I have to admit. It's pretty satisfying. It almost makes me want to stay awake and keep listening. Almost."