A/N: Happy New Year, all!

Purpose of this chapter? Flesh out CP4 a bit more. But I promise we'll get back to our more favoriter characters soon.

Fair warning: there may be a west-side story snapping Utahraptor in this chapter. Yeah, you read that right.

Ch. 7 – Other Forces at Work

Robertus found Gloriadne in a part of the main city that had been damaged during the fight with Regent and the Navy. Though not far from the palace, it had not been repaired, and for the time being remained abandoned.

She lay unmoving in a pool of her own blood.

"Gloriadne!" he cried, falling to his knees beside her. Taking her in his arms, he turned her blank, pale face toward him. "Amorcita! Wake up!"

No response.

"Come on!" he begged, shaking her lifeless body with tears welling up in his eyes. "I got the boys to safety. Tell me what it is we need to warn the queen, then we can get out of here!"

"Oh, so glad to hear you didn't go straight to Queen Helena, like it's your job," a voice said from behind him. "I had a feeling you wouldn't."

Robertus turned, eyes flashing dangerously toward his wife's tormentor.

"Who are you people?" he demanded. "Why are you doing this?"

"And why would I tell you?" Bags asked, swaggering toward him. He twirled his umbrella with surprising dexterity, like a performer's cane, and then stuck it into the ground, leaning on it to survey his handywork. Bubbles floated from his pipe in carefree puffs as he spoke. "I know that you can disappear into the shadows now, sir. I would be a fool to feed you information, like it's my job, even if I am planning to kill you like I did your wife."

Robertus bowed his head, his entire body shaking in rage as he lay Gloriadne to rest on the ground. Face hidden from Bags' view by a white fedora, he searched his powers.

When he lifted his head, his eyes had turned a predatory gold down to the sclera, pupils slitted.

"You're going to regret doing that," he growled, his teeth sharp.

Scales sprouted all over his body in red swirling patterns like those shaved into his head. His Edwardian gloves tore as his hands lengthened into claws, and his feet grew talons, bursting his dress shoes. The snarling mouth widened in a long, snapping set of jaws as a scant crown of feathers sprouted from his head and along his lengthening back.

Moments later, Bags stared up, only mildly impressed, at an enormous black and red Utah raptor in a white fedora. His feathers flared awkwardly beneath the hat, and stuck out like arm cuffs out of his suitcoat around his taloned hands.

"Hmm," Bags said. "An Ancient Zoan Power. But where would you have come across that?" Realization crossed his face, and he burst into a round of jolly laughter, mustache twitching.

"No…" he gasped, wiping a tear from his beady eyes.

"What's so funny?" Robertus growled.

"Nothing," Bags snorted. "I had been wondering how you could mourn your wife after finding out she'd been lying to you about who she was your entire marriage. But it turns out you had a secret of your own, eh?"

Robertus narrowed his reptilian gaze.

"I know the person who has that devil fruit, like it's my job," Bags insisted. "She's a Revolutionary. To come in contact with her, you'd have to be one too."

"So what?" Robertus snarled.

"So, I just thought it was amusing. A Revolutionary married to an agent of Cipher Pol, and neither knew what the other was."

Robertus glanced down at his wife. "I was going to tell her," he insisted vulnerably, voice cracking even in his draconic form. "If it ever came to that."

"I'm sure she intended to do the same, if it makes you feel any better," Bags grinned. "Unfortunately, we never gave her the chance now, did we?"

"But you did just tell me what you are," Robertus growled, a smirk tweaking his reptilian face. "Now I can get a message out to our contact. They will come to Ilium's aid, trust me."

"Oh, I'm sure they would," Bags replied. "If your message got through. They've been trying to get a foothold in Ilium for years, like it's their job. However, despite their obvious dislike for the World Government, Queen Helena and her predecessors have avoided giving us more reason to cause Ilium grief by openly accepting them here. Yet, you say the Revolutionaries would come to Ilium's aid?"

"We can't allow Ilium to fall," Robertus insisted. "The sea prism alone would make the World Government too powerful, not to mention the god powers. So whether Queen Helena likes it or not," he snapped his taloned fingers, "Ilium is Revolutionary turf."

He bore down on Bags, snapping his dinosaur fingers up and down menacingly as he approached. Unmoved, unimpressed, the squat man gazed placidly up at the raptor four times his size. Even when the dancer gone dinosaur made a flying leap straight at him, he did nothing but sidestep him, swinging his umbrella up to his shoulder.

"All those powers at your disposal, and you choose this one, like it's your job," Bags commented. "But then, I guess a Logia like the Ink Ink fruit would wear you out too quickly. Accessing past powers takes a lot of energy, I understand, particularly the more powerful ones. That was Gloriadne's mistake. She didn't count on how quickly the Glimmer Glimmer fruit would wear her out."

"Shut up," Robertus snarled. "After what you've done, I'm going to rend you with my bare claws."

Gloriadne groaned from the ground, and the two men turned to her sharply. Relief washed through her husband

"Still some breath left, I see," Bags observed. "We can't have that, can we?"

Moving faster than Robertus ever would have expected out of one so fat, Bags went to finish her off. With heightened reptilian senses, the raptor managed to stop him with a shuffle-hop, lord-of-the-dance pose. Kneeling over his wife, his extended arm barely caught Bags' hand in time.

Robertus had never seen an attack using a single finger like that before. He didn't have time to ponder on it, though. Bags was already on the attack. After that moment, the dance master never gained back any sort of advantage. The Head of Cipher Pol 4 proved too much for him to handle.

Bags nonchalantly poked at Robertus' lifeless body with his umbrella, flipping him face up to be sure he'd stopped breathing. In the process he knocked him into his equally lifeless wife. Side by side, the two lay, covered not in finger bullet wounds – their powers had actually prevented him from landing that attack effectively – but in odd lacerations, like the kinds caused by shrapnel.

They hadn't foresee Bags' special attack style, but that was nothing new. People generally underestimated him for his girth, unless they had the observation haki to know better.

"It really is a shame," he told his victims. "If I'm completely honest, I'd rather avoid senseless killing, though I'm pretty good at it, like it's my job. You really left me no choice, though Gloriadne. – I suppose your children are too small to be of threat to us, but," he focused on her husband, "You must have entrusted them to someone, Robertus the Revolutionary. I'll have to look into it, like it's my job, to be sure whoever it is isn't out to warn the queen."

He puffed a few bubbles from his pipe, eyeing them a moment longer. Satisfied when neither twitched or drew breath, he walked away, swinging his umbrella like he hadn't a care in the world.

For all he had researched the Alpha Alpha and Omega Omega fruits before, though, he failed to take into account one of its crucial properties.

Oh, he knew that the Alpha Alpha Fruit could imitate the power of any devil fruit its user came in contact with; that the Omega Omega fruit could imitate whatever its user subconsciously perceived as the opposite of the devil fruit she touched. It was what made them the Alpha and Omega of all devil fruits. When they had freshly stolen a power, they could use it with all the strengths and weakness of its original user, but only one at a time, which meant touching each other would negate the power, leaving them vulnerable and human.

However, upon further training, they found they could access past powers they had experienced, though at great cost of energy.

If Bags had thought about this energy cost, he might have thought twice about tossing Robertus into his wife. At such proximity, the Alpha and Omega fruit negated any energy draining powers that had been put to use, returning to both users just enough vigor to again draw breath.

He didn't see, didn't stay nearby long enough to suspect, that they still lived. –That, though covered in wounds, the pair managed to drag themselves away from the abandoned part of the city to a more frequented side street, where they again collapsed, senseless, but in the path of help.

Bags had always had an odd feeling around Nysa. Not that he could put a finger on why. Maybe it was because she had this really freaky smile, if one ever caught her smiling. And she always wore sunglasses, even indoors or at night.

She had been assigned to Ilium a little before himself, and when he'd looked her up he could find no record of her; not of her joining Cipher Pol, not of her training, nothing, so he wasn't entirely sure what she was capable of. She always acted in the loop though. She also knew the six arts, and the other agents seemed to acknowledge her, so he never questioned it beyond confirming with his fellow higher ups that she was, indeed, one of their own.

Ultimately, he didn't doubt her efficiency. She had a way of bringing order to Chaos, and her hammer hammer power was invaluable.

Bags addressed her the afternoon before the party, just to be sure they had everything in place:

"I have confirmed we have six agents at our disposal tonight, like it's my job," he informed her. "Calypso, Orpheus, Diddy, you and myself, and then of course…"

She patted a fur bag she wore over her usual kilt: a sporran.

"He is ready," she said in her usual, clipped manner. Bags wasn't sure if she ever spoke in sentences longer than three words. Well, maybe the rare four.

"He knows his orders?" Bags went on.

Nysa nodded.

"Gloriadne?" she asked.

"I'm afraid I had to terminate her, like it's my job," he said with a sigh. "She and her husband. Her young children escaped me. They are with Robertus' sister, Cinnabar, and her son, Ajax. They skipped town, but I don't think they are enough of a threat for me to pursue them outside Ilium's ports."

Nysa nodded again. Then she pulled something from her sporran. A clipboard. Though the pouch was far too small to have contained it, it came out with ease. A moment later, she reached in and pulled out a pen without having to rummage at all. It practically appeared in her hand.

"The package?" she asked, tapping the pen against a list on the clipboard.

"Calypso is getting the package now, like it's his job," Bags replied, and she checked something off. "And you are certain, absolutely certain this will work?"

Nysa raised a brow at him behind her sunglasses. "Having doubts?" she asked.

"I'm just not sure how someone can be certain of the will of the gods around here," Bags admitted. "They seem capricious. But if you are absolutely certain of your intel that they have had enough of Helena and Cygnus, then this is the opportunity we've been waiting for, like it's our job."

"I am," she responded. "This will work."

Why didn't he question it?

Maybe because he didn't care to spend more time than necessary with her. That freaky smile… She never showed it around the royal family, but she was doing it now. It seemed to crawl up her face higher than humanly possible.

"Don't worry, Sweetums," she assured him. "Chaos will reign tonight."