Chapter 8 - On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 1
Foreword: This and the next few chapters was originally scripted to be one singular chapter, with the most detailed draft so far, but it's being posted in chunks now as an experiment to see if readers are more engaged with the smaller chunks in case they're intimidated by the longer word counts of the previous ones. How long will this experiment last? We'll see after this i suppose.
DD - I haven't done chapters this short in almost ten years. It's weird and kind of uncomfortable after spending so long training myself up to consistently aiming for an average of 7K words, but please tell us if this sort of length is 'better' reading. We'll be keeping it up for the entire 4-part run of On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue regardless of immediate response, but if it'll stay after that will be decided after we get feedback on it.
It was 7 AM. The sun was shining, birds were chirping, a long-eared gopher squirrel - squopher if you were in a rush - was scratching at the window, and Marshalsea was lying in bed, scratching her cootch.
What? It was in the privacy of her own room. Wasn't like anyone was there to see her at it and, at her age, having an itch in an inconvenient spot was a more present issue than maintaining the imaginary idea of a pirate queen - not quite a capital letter, proper noun Pirate Queen, though she'd had Roger once or twice back in the day thoroughly enough to probably count - who was above that kind of mundane inconvenience.
Bullshit. Nobody was above mundane inconvenience. She'd caught Garp scratching his ass in broad daylight at the height of his 'Hero of the Marines' fame and she didn't imagine that the Golden Buddha was above that sort of shit either, even if he probably did have the sense to save it for his office.
Right now, the only thing that really seemed a priority - now that that itch was out of the way - was the matter of breakfast.
Popping the kinks out of her spine with a stretch, she made her way down to the living room of the apartment she shared with Zahlia, who - true to form - was already up and ready with a plate of fried eggs, toast, and beans ready for her.
"I always hope that today will be the day you put on pants before you come down for breakfast, but I guess that's too much to ask for, isn' it?" Zahlia sighed as she poured a glass of caffeinated orange juice for her grandmother.
"Not my fault my delicate bits need to breathe in that fresh morning air," Marshalsea said as she sat down and started in on her breakfast. "You hear about what happened to Meryl's little curiosity?"
"Raine? No, what happened?"
"Meryl managed to get her stuck in bed for a week; threw her back out doing something or other on Stonecutter - probably was trying to drag her up to the Dacey's old temple thing," she said, tearing another egg apart with her teeth. "Didn't get all the details from Shimon, but it sounds like a whole 'complications with pre-existing condition' song and dance kind of mess. Still, you expect that sort of thing from people my age, not yours."
Zahlia's smile crumbled quickly into concern, reminding that while Marshalsea wouldn't necessarily call Raine and her granddaughter 'friends' yet, there was enough of a connection to call them more than just mere acquaintances.
"Don't worry - he says she should be fine after that. At least good enough to give me that spar I want down the line."
"You shouldn't kick people around just for hanging around the people you like, especially if they were just injured," Zahlia said as she grabbed breakfast for herself, pouring coffee over puffed grain cereal.
"How the hell am I supposed to figure out if they're good for it then?" Marshalsea protested. "You don't know the quality of someone's steel until you get them under hammer and fire, that's what my mama always told me, and that piece of advice hasn't steered me wrong yet."
"I suppose I'll have to bow to your superior wisdom there, grandmother," Zahlia said, rolling her eyes.
They sat quietly for a few minutes with nothing but the sound of chewing and crunching to fill the air.
"Mr. Holliday's been asking about her," Zahlia said after drinking the last bit of coffee out of her cereal bowl. "He's been trying to poke at the regulars for any information they might have concerning any 'oddities' they might have noticed in the last few weeks."
Which meant that Marshalsea would probably have to poke at Holliday in turn to see if he'd picked up any good dirt she hadn't figured out on her own. Could be fun, in its own way, if he hadn't gotten a hold of any clues that were dead dog boring to anyone not raised with an archeological bone between their teeth. It was already bad enough whenever he brought out his bag of mystery geegaws.
"Might need to step up my game, if just any young thing can just waltz in and distract my man like that," she said, chewing on a piece of toast. "Can't afford to lose a gun that good, no matter if it's the set he keeps on his belt or the one he keeps in his-"
"It is way too early in the day to be getting those kind of details, grandma," Zahlia said as she picked up the dirty dishes and carried them over to the sink.
"Not too early in the day for me to tell you exactly what else my morning stretching routine is good for-"
"MARSHALSEA!"
Marshalsea cackled as she returned to her room and went through her morning routine, stretching and getting dressed for the day, though her shoes would wait for later, before opening the window for a News Coo, who - prompt as ever - had shown up at precisely 10 AM.
"Ah, got a nice thick juicy issue this time, don't cha?" she asked as she slid the right number of coins into the Coo's money pouch. "Fly careful on your way out - there's some nasty birds that roost around here."
The Coo nodded before launching itself into the air, catching the wind at such an angle to quickly see it back to the sea, while Marshalsea walked back down to the living room to see what was supposed to be going on in the world.
The news was mundane, but plentiful, considering that Marshalsea sprung for the Global Edition of the World Economic every time.
A few new Supernovas lighting up the Grand Line - that Portgas D. Ace looked to be one of those ones that would either burn out spectacularly within a few years or go on to give the Marines an on-going case of hotfoot for the next three decades, even without the consideration of his Devil Fruit -, very carefully worded article about an upset in some forgettable kingdom that could have just as easily been talking about a worse-than-usual pirate raid or proper Revolutionary Army action, some speculation over what people were expecting to hear from the upcoming Reverie based on what was publicly known about the last one two years ago and who would likely be attending…
Bleh. Everything but the D. was the better part of boring and Marshalsea was pretty sure she didn't recognize this one's looks from anywhere… though, really, at her age and with how many of that bizarre lineage she'd encountered, there was no way of saying she hadn't run into one or two of those capital 'D' idiots from this 'Ace's family at some point and just forgot about it. Not everyone could be Roger, after all.
"Anything interesting?" Holliday asked, leaning down to plant a kiss on Marshalsea's cheek.
"Couple rookies at most," she replied, returning the kiss. "How's my baby?"
"Still waking up," he admitted, dropping into the seat next to her, the action dropping his hat down over his face… a slip that, when he didn't move to correct it after a minute, proved exactly how much sleep the cowboy had gotten in the first place.
"Pull another all-nighter snoopin' around?" Marshalsea asked. "Should save that kind of nonsense for younger folks."
"Hm. If I could trust any of my juniors to do the work without breaking something important, maybe," Holliday said, voice faintly muffled by his hat. "Still can't figure out why that Raine girl would throw in with Meryl."
Marshalsea laughed. "You don't get it - you don't throw in with Daceys, Daceys throw in with you, regardless of your feelings on the subject; they're too stubborn to take a hint you haven't driven in with a sledgehammer and by the time you get to that point, you've usually got yourself used to having them around."
She turned her head in the direction of Meryl's house, even though there was no window to show it.
"And for Meryl, it's probably because being around Raine doesn't have the baggage that her relationship with me and the others does - hell, I'm not good at talking about feelings and that sort of stuff, the hell would a kid who's still grieving the last family she had in this world want to be around me for? Just to get reminded that I'm an asshole who spent more time with Brenda then Meryl's been alive? I wouldn't wanna deal with that shit myself."
A moment of silence passed as the sound of Zahlia's workers coming in and setting up the Dead Admiral for another day of service rang out from down below.
"But enough about that mushy stuff," Marshalsea said, shifting to a much less serious tone. "You find anything out about what that Raine's like in a scrap?"
"You sure make an effort to keep a one-track mind, don't you?" Holliday said as he pulled a small object out of his bag.
The one time Marshalsea, had asked about it, Holliday called it an 'Obsidian Camera'; nowadays, Marshalsea mostly called it junk.
Well, not to Holliday's face. Archeologists took people insulting their artifacts extremely personally and this one was so much better to enjoy when he wasn't in a snit about something that petty.
That didn't mean she had to like the little thing though.
It was a rectangle, about the size of an average sized human's wallet, made of a sturdy black glass on one side and some sort of metallic material on the back that faded from black around the edges - all rounded to make for smooth handling in the hands - to a deep blue in the center, where an odd medallion with a number and a name sat.
No-ki-ah.
Why such a thing without any clear use would be worthy of a name was beyond her, but hell, maybe it made sense to Holliday - after all, he'd been carrying the thing around for at least two years now, along with all the other Outsider kitsch he collected.
The 'Camera' didn't work obviously - Marshalsea couldn't even say if it actually was a camera, though she guessed that the presence of what looked like ridiculously small lenses made that a better guess than most. Holliday had also said it had 'lit up' when he'd first gotten it, which sounded a whole lot like a flashbulb, which didn't hurt the analogy.
Whatever the thing was, it didn't light up anymore - but still, Holliday would bring it out and look at it like it held half the answers to the universe packed somewhere in the half centimeter of space between its front and back.
"You can always go poking around Raine's boat - Pew towed it around to a protected dock for Meryl a while ago and I don't think either one of those kids are gonna be in any state to catch you snooping around any time soon."
"You mean the boat you think belongs to Raine," the cowboy countered.
"How the hell else was she supposed to get on the island? Fly? Last lady with wings I knew was Brenda and she couldn't use them like that," Marshalsea shot back. "You want better evidence? That sword in the corner there is it. Me or one of my crew would have noticed a cursed sword like that coming in through the front gates, sure as sunrise, and that blade fit too natural in that girl's hands for her to be anything but it's proper master - and not in a way that says she just earned that title either. Pew says it came off the boat, that's where Raine came from too."
Holliday looked thoughtful. "Might be worth checking out then. You don't mind me borrowing Pew for that?"
"Only if you promise me a hot date later, lover."
The cowboy leaned over to plant a kiss on her lips as he stood up again. "Of course, Seasea."
Holliday could have written a book on the art of spywork - and he had, actually. It was extremely informal and only passed around the Revolutionaries for obvious reasons, not to mention filled out with the contributions of others in the organization, but he'd done the bulk of it.
The section that he'd probably put the most effort into was a chapter named 'The Art Of I Was Never Here' - where he'd covered all the tricks to going unnoticed.
To sum it up in the plainest terms, it didn't have to do with what colors you wore - though some helped more than others - but how you moved.
Specifically, the art was in appearing unimportant. A person who stood too tall and walked too proud drew the eye because only kings and would-be conquerors did that, while one that hung low and looked around too much looked like a thief. A runner invoked crisis, a loiterer invoked suspicion - to balance all of those things and more was to invoke dismissal, to make people think, 'that man belongs here, now let's focus on something else'.
A servant in a noble's manor was infinitely more invisible than even a user of the Clear-Clear Fruit could ever hope to be.
There were, of course, exceptions to that rule. The likes of Pew, for example, were much harder to fool - likely because the blind fishman was far better attuned to senses Holliday was simply incapable of fooling and knew him well enough to pick him out of any crowd despite any efforts he could have made to avoid it.
It was a good reminder to never get too confident in his abilities - after all, CP9 had a taste for collecting predatory Zoans, and it wasn't just for the combat potential of claws and teeth.
"You finally get around to asking me about your little mystery girl?" Pew asked as Holliday walked up to where the fishman was sitting. "I'm almost insulted."
'Almost' was a very key word, especially with Pew, who could twist it into meaning anything from 'not at all' to 'you've forfeited your right to femurs'.
Holliday was fairly sure he was dealing with the first one.
"I didn't want to waste your time with questions others could answer," he said, making a point to stay right at the edge of Pew's reach. "Seeing that most of those are out of the way, now I can turn to the expert."
"An expert on what? Boats? Daceys? Mysterious strangers?" Pew's dolphin chatter of a laugh was always strange to listen to - infinitely more playful and energetic than the fishman ever came across as on his own. "I'm sure I can only lay claim to only one of those rightfully."
"Pew…"
"Fine, fine. We can check out that boat without problem; Meryl's more than likely still clinging close to the house while that Storm- wait, no, Storm was the last one - Raine-girl's down. But there's still a chance she might catch us at it and you well know the kind of hell we're likely to get if that happens."
"I don't, actually. Never had much interaction with the girl for hanging around Seasea as much as I do."
That was probably some intersection of Holliday's job taking him away from Ravenspurn for regular durations and the Dacey girl not exactly giving the impression of someone willing to just reach out to any stranger on a whim - how much either aspect factored in was something that likely required he know her better before making the calculations.
Pew let out a hiss of breath through his nose and chuckled. "Seasea. You're the only person I've ever heard call her that - none of her other boyfriends, hell, none of the ones that made it to husband either. Can't think they ever treated her anything like you did either."
The fishman must have had his Haki tuned to tracking people's emotional reactions because there was no other way for the blind pirate to have caught Holliday's frown.
"I ain't saying that as a slight on them. Most of them loved her in their own ways and with a full heart - but you, little spy, you treat one of the most dangerous women to ever live as someone who deserves a delicate touch instead of being treated as an object of worship or just another one of the boys; it stands out. You treat all your ladies like that or is that just for her?"
The question stung at a history Holliday made every effort to keep buried.
"I just make an effort," he replied, not really caring about how his voice had tightened. "Now where did you say that boat was?"
Author's Notes
Monica* So surprisingly, of all the things that COULD have caused issue while writing this chapter, was my offhand remark of trying to make a weird One Piece creature in an offhand comment. I wrote "Squopher" and it lead to a few hours of argument between me and DD for a bit and that's probably the weirdest experience I've had writing for this.
DD* I got too focused on trying to figure out what the 'squopher' was, got pissed after I reached the conclusion that it was a squid gopher or seagull squid (which was a visual I still hate to think about), and then got ADHD-locked into pounding my head against the issue until the argument was resolved.
Also, our first canon event mention! Helps a bit establish the timeline in relation to the main canon, doesn't it? Also seasoned with a bit of irony, for kicks.
DD* The choice of making Holliday's 'Obsidian Camera' a Nokia (specifically, a Nokia 8.3) was kind of a joke on both our parts - it was Monica's decision to give him a smart phone he didn't know that much about in the first place (he managed to unlock it after a lot of trying and then it immediately ran out of power), we agreed that it was absolutely going to bea better and more expensive model than Raine's hundred-dollar-junker, and then I opted to make it funnier by making sure that said-smartphone also had a name that people would not only immediately recognize but also be able to believably (at least, thru the power of memes) stand up to One Piece's BS.
I actually spent a lot of time researching recent/really good smartphones to find the perfect intersection of 'expensive', 'brand recognition', 'durability', and 'ability to be charged with common USB', along with fitting the text description first given to me by Monica.
Plus it allows Raine to have a mild meltdown later over the fact that the cowboy just handed her a fuckin Nokia after describing it like a magic mcguffin.
Writing this chapter has also been an exercise in making Mr. Holliday as a character work - he's ended up changing a fair bit from notes because I (Monica) was constantly having trouble trying to fit him in until I offered up the idea of making him romantically involved with Marshalsea, and it spiraled from there.
DD* I was also pretty open to it cause a fair bit of Holliday's character/backstory was not only full of gaps, he was also falling into a couple bland stereotypes that Monica's ideas really helped counteract… or at least, fill out so they didn't really count as stereotypes anymore. I also couldn't deny the fact that the sentence 'because she [Marshalsea] fucks like a champion' was the first thing that crossed my mind when Monica asked why I was so chill with her adding that romance angle.
Yes, he has his true name and a bit of his more sensitive backstory already on the art on DD's blog but shhhh it'll come up soon enough in prose.
DD - I haven't done chapters this short in almost ten years. It's weird and kind of uncomfortable after spending so long training myself up to consistently aiming for an average of 7K words, but please tell us if this sort of length is 'better' reading. We'll be keeping it up for the entire 4-part run of On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue regardless of immediate response, but if it'll stay after that will be decided after we get feedback on it.