Note: For anyone who doesn't know, they extended the deadline for voting on the SpaceBattles short story contest to December 1st. So, if anybody's already on there and feels like voting for IlPogitano's Legitimate Methods of Problem-Solving, it's at: https/forums./threads/official-25th-anniversary-short-story-contest-public-voting-now-open.1178400/
:)
X️XX ️ ️
The oden shop-boat is little, with not many chairs and with the owner's laundry strung up on a line built up into the establishment's roof. Said owner, an old man with a bandana and a reasonably impressive beard, watches the Merry and its jolly roger suspiciously as Nami brings the ship to anchor, then with growing I've-seen-it-all-but-that's-still-pretty-weird incredulity as Luffy uses his rubber powers to lever himself, his crewmates, and their tagalong from over the side of the Merry and down onto the oden boat. There seems to be one more person already present, a vertically challenged customer sitting and eating at the right-most chair with their back to the world, but Luffy can't make much out about them from behind the noren.
Then, the old man spots Tobio, at which point he sighs and gets back behind the counter.
"What did you do this time?" he asks, annoyed but unsurprised.
The other customer perks up. Now on the oden boat's deck, Luffy sees that it's some kid, a boy, with a fantastically floppy hat. "Tobio's back?" he asks, craning around. He blinks at the Strawhats, before brightening completely. "Wow! Real pirates!"
"I'm a real pirate!" Tobio protests. "And I didn't even do anything!"
"No, see, that's the issue," the other boy explains. "We haven't done anything yet. We won't be real pirates until we do something worth telling stories about, everything until then is just practice."
"I'm not joining your crew!"
"Here we go again…" Tobio's grandpa mutters.
Luffy laughs, and Zoro, Nami, and Usopp all give him varying intensities of stink-eye, probably because Tobio's refrain is one they've all on some level aimed at him before to no avail. Treva, though, stares intently at the boy with the eared hat.
"Yuta's only involved in thirty percent of the futures in which Eldoraggo is encountered, but if he's here, that means we're gonna have to deal with the possessed guy on top of all the other stuff," she says, still staring at Yuta—apparently—with disconcertingly blank, disconcertingly yellow eyes. None of it means anything to Luffy. "I guess we're doing the plots of that game and the first movie together."
Yuta blinks at Treva, then points at her and looks to Tobio, pleased. "You told her about me?"
"Why would I tell anyone about you?!" Tobio demands. "You're the most annoying person I know!"
"I don't know if I'd call him annoying, but he's statistically unlikely," Treva corrects, not sounding overly invested. She meanders over to the chairs, and tries to climb on top of the left-most one. It's a losing battle. "Are your…" she wheezes to Yuta. "Are your friends nearby?"
Yuta beams. "You told her about Ryuji and Reika too?"
"No!"
Yuta continues to ignore Tobio. To Treva, he says, "Nah. They had to run errands for their parents."
"Okay," Treva manages. Finally, Nami takes pity on her and walks over to help her fully onto the chair, with only a fleeting, dubious glance shot Yuta's way. Luffy and Zoro both take that as their cue to also find seats, and Usopp follows their lead.
"Hey, Treva," Usopp prompts, once they've all settled in and begun eating. Yuta is evidently done, but he sticks around to watch the Merry's jolly roger sway in the wind with huge eyes and a huge smile, and Tobio has with some grumbling and mumbling accepted an apron from his grandpa and stationed himself behind the counter with the old man. "What's a movie? And, uh. You said something about a game?"
"Oh." Treva tears her eyes away from her plate, which she's yet to touch, to blink at Usopp. "Well. Sometimes people from another world will show up here, like the person I'm hoping to have the comms rig ready for, and a lot of them believe that our world is actually a story that some guy is telling." Treva makes a sort of what-can-ya-do gesture with her hands. "They're all delusional, of course, but their system for categorizing sequenced events is useful."
"Oh," says Usopp, who visibly regrets having asked. He eats a piece of konjac, and then, when Treva resumes her unblinking vigil of her own food, he swallows and changes the subject. "Aren't you going to eat too, Treva?"
Usopp, now, probably expects Treva to either overcome whatever her hangups are, or come out with another non-sequitur. It's what Luffy expects, at least, based on what she's usually like.
Neither of them, Luffy can only guess, had expected Treva's face to scrunch up like a sockpuppet and her eyes to gloss over with tears.
"Treva?!" Usopp squawks, at the same time as Nami yelps, "What now?!"
"Oden," Treva burbles. She wipes furiously at her eyes, beginning to cry in earnest now but obviously wanting to not be doing that. Giving up on the venture, she instead strikes a silly pose, one arm stretched out and the other kind of half-folded behind her, still weeping and sockpuppet-ish. "Oden wouldn't be oden if it wasn't boiled!"
Silence.
Baffled silence.
Silence, and then—
"Well," says the old man dryly, his arms crossed over the countertop. "You're not wrong."
"No!" Treva agrees, choked up, and gets back to wiping at her eyes. "I'm not wrong at all!"
"I liked your dumb pose," Yuta tells her, sincerely, nodding to Treva. Treva glares at him through the tears.
"It's not dumb!" she snaps.
"It was pretty dumb," Luffy muses, with food in his mouth. Treva's attention swivels to him, betrayed, but Luffy goes on after swallowing, before Nami can hit him. "Anyway, what was that about a possessed guy?"
Treva startles. "Right! There's a possessed guy." She reaches for her duffle bag, before realizing she left it on the Merry. Treva settles for kicking her legs back and forth under the counter. "He's not so bad, himself, but the ghost possessing him is evil and greedy. If Yuta's here right now, that almost definitely means we're already in a future where the ghost's become obsessed with finding and hoarding Woonan's gold after hearing rumors about it."
The old man pauses at Woonan's name, but doesn't speak up. He only raises an eyebrow at Tobio in question, so Tobio, who really can't be expected to explain Treva, shrugs.
"A greedy, gold-obsessed ghost, huh?" repeats Zoro, side-eyeing Nami over his plate. She glares back at him. Potentially after weighing his options and concluding that without intervention, a fight may break out on the little boat, the old man sighs.
"What would you know about Woonan, anyway, kid?" he asks Treva, vaguely defeated.
"That's right!" Tobio levers himself up over the counter—maybe there's a stool in the back?—to level his finger at Treva's nose in challenge. "You said once we got to where Grandpa was, you'd tell me where Woonan is!"
"Treva is our crew's fortune teller," Usopp informs the old man and Yuta, and Tobio again for good measure, his hands already placatingly up in front of him, just to have all their bases preemptively covered.
"Woah!" Yuta marvels, obligingly, but Tobio and his grandpa ignore Usopp.
"I'm not the fortune teller," Treva disagrees, her cheeks puffed up in abject petulance, but she lets it go with a huff. To Tobio's grandpa, she says, "But I do know lots about Woonan. He left some stuff behind for you on the island he used as his base, approximately two hundred nautical miles from here."
Tobio and his grandpa's eyes both, respectively, go huge.
"Why would someone as cool as Woonan have anything for my grandpa?! All Grandpa's ever done is make oden!" Tobio protests.
The old man heaves another sigh. "Fortune teller or not, you seem to have the right of it." He hesitates, looking at Tobio, but goes on. "Woonan and I were childhood friends."
Tobio's jaw hits the floor.
As it turns out, according to the old man, he and Woonan were close when they were young, only to have had a falling out when Woonan wouldn't give up on his intentions to travel the East Blue as a pirate who steals from the rich and corrupt. Because the old man is a homebody, Luffy takes it, or something. And then, following their fight, the pair nearly tumbled off a cliff, and Woonan left their island under the impression that Tobio's grandpa had died before things could be cleared up.
"There are a lot of things I wish I'd done or said differently," the old man admits. "Woonan's dream wasn't worth any less than mine, even if I wished he would stay."
As he talks, Tobio and Usopp both watch with rapt attention. In contrast, Treva becomes briefly preoccupied with passing Nami a nautical chart that she must have copied from the future; it really is an impressive forgery, right down to Nami's handwriting.
"New map," Treva says, sounding somehow dutiful about it, as she hands the chart to Nami. Nami accepts it, likely at least a little grateful for the distraction, considering the complicated frown she'd developed as the old man's tale has gone on.
Zoro, a man after Luffy's own heart, is most interested in his lunch.
Finally, the old man huffs and reaches for a great, big pot from under the counter. He hauls it up top with a thud.
"So," he says. "If he's left something for me on that island, I might as well leave him some of my oden. If it goes bad before he can get to it…" For the first time since they'd docked, the old man smiles, but it doesn't strike Luffy as an exactly happy smile. Nostalgic, maybe. "I'll just have to make him some more."
It occurs to Luffy that Treva hasn't blurted out where Woonan himself is yet, which would be an unprecedented show of restraint on her part. It would be, unless…
Well. Luffy will find out when he finds out, as with anything.
X️XX ️ ️
After lunch and after the old man—Ganzo, as it turns out—is done making his special pot of friendship oden, the Strawhats, Ganzo himself, and the two boys secure the little boat-shop to the Going Merry, and the whole lot of them set off in the direction of Woonan's island. Yuta refuses to go home, so he tags along on the oden boat with Tobio and Ganzo.
Nami, thinking ahead, asks Treva to point out where on the island Eldoraggo and his crew will dock, and so brings the Merry to a stop in an out-of-the-way stretch of beach kept well out of sight by a covering of rock formations on either side. She puts Luffy, Zoro, and Usopp to work securing the Merry for anchor, Nami herself keeping Treva from getting underfoot, as Ganzo, Tobio, and Yuta see to the boat-shop. Once all that is over and done with, Ganzo, Tobio, and Yuta all disembark from their vessel.
"Well?" Ganzo calls up to the Strawhats, all still out on the Merry's deck.
"You should go ahead!" Treva yells down, latched onto and head sticking out between the Merry's railing pickets. "We gotta deal with Eldoraggo's guys first!"
"You heard the girl," Ganzo mutters to the two boys. Armed with his pot of oden, he starts making for farther inland.
Tobio falls into step with him, but frowns. "How'd you know where to go?"
Ganzo snorts. "Burying treasure in the highest place has always been Woonan's way of doing things. On this island, there's only one place he would settle for." He notices Yuta hanging back, still standing in place, watching the Strawhats' jolly roger. Ganzo raises his eyebrow over his shoulder at him. "Yuta?"
Yuta startles, then grins. "I'm gonna fight too!"
Ganzo snorts again and rolls his eyes, but turns back around and keeps going. Tobio takes just a bit longer, glaring back at Yuta before he too decides to let it go, already knowing what Yuta is like.
Yuta, for his part, left behind, waves his arms and shouts to get the attention of the pirates, who have already moved on to a conversation amongst themselves that Yuta can't hear. "Hey! Down here!"
"What is it?!" Luffy shouts back.
"I'm going with you guys!" Yuta returns.
Yuta thinks he catches Usopp squawk, "He is?!" but that suddenly becomes fantastically unimportant in the face of Luffy's arms rocketing unnaturally far down to grab Yuta by the shoulders and lift him, weightlessly, on board. His breath hitches in his throat in wonder, the world momentarily a blur of sky-and-ocean blue and wooden-ship brown, before he's deposited summarily onto the Merry's deck.
Five sets of eyes stare him down. Yuta, who loves attention, straightens his back and rises to the occasion.
"I want to set sail as a pirate too someday, so let me fight with you!" he opens with, punctuating this by unstrapping his wooden, slapped-together sword from his belt to hold up high and proud in the air. "I'm a lot tougher than I look!"
"It's true," corroborates Treva, her gaze wide and yellow and fixed. "He's freakishly strong."
"I am!" Yuta agrees, feeling encouraged.
Nami and Usopp exchange a skeptical look. Luffy, though, says, "Okay!"
Nami's head snaps to glare at him. "What do you mean, okay? Luffy, he's a kid!"
"He's probably older than Treva," Luffy reasons.
Treva bridles. "No, he's not! I'm older. I'm older by a month!"
The Strawhats all stare at Treva, then at Yuta, then at Treva again, clearly struggling with the concept somewhat.
"Huh," says Luffy.
"My point still stands," Nami tells him.
"But it's fine, isn't it? We'll all be there, and Treva says he's strong," Luffy reasons.
"He is," certifies Treva.
"I am," seconds Yuta.
Nami pinches the bridge of her nose. "Treva, check his survival rate for me, would you?"
"Okay!" Treva says, hand up in the air as if talking to a teacher. She retrieves a rickety book from her duffle bag, braces against it on the floor, and leaks red gunk onto it.
"Cool," Yuta says, reminded of a mosquito he'd seen splattered on a window pane. He goes unacknowledged.
When Treva's done, she gives Nami a thumbs up. "He survives in an overwhelming majority of timelines where he helps out! Actually, his numbers are better than Usopp's."
Usopp chokes. Nami grimaces.
"Yeah, okay," she concedes. "So long as none of our… numbers … are questionable."
"They're not," Treva tells her, nodding.
Luffy beams at Nami, obnoxious in victory. Nami, as a matter of principle, whacks him over the head, and Luffy's head goes springing up and down like a bobblehead's. He doesn't look especially inconvenienced by it, but maybe a bit dizzy.
"Anyway," Nami says. She crosses her arms. "We should figure out how we want to do this. Treva, we have two sets of enemies to keep in mind, yes?"
"Right." Treva nods again. "Eldoraggo's crew, and the possessed guy."
Nami leads the discussion from there, prompting Treva for checks of their statistical success at each turning point in the conversation. A plan takes shape, which would have Usopp, Zoro, Yuta, and Treva distract Eldoraggo's pack of pirates while Nami and Luffy sneak onto the enemy ship, where Luffy will fight the evil ghost should they run into it and Nami will rob Eldoraggo blind.
Luffy, throughout, looks pretty bored and unattentive, and Zoro fully lays down on the deck to sleep, but Yuta has enough fun with this new experience for everyone.
"And we'll be able to avoid the ghost, Treva?" Nami asks, gesturing for Treva to check one more time. Treva, bracing against her book, does so.
When Treva finishes, she says, "It's not gonna be a problem." Treva waves her fist in the air, smug. "Dumb ghost!"
Nami nods slowly, like she doesn't entirely think she can trust Treva's judgment, independent of the veracity of her predictions. Still, she does nod. With that, all that's left is to prepare, split up, and get to work. Everyone gets up and goes off in different directions, to go and grab whatever it is they'll need to do their part.
Yuta, whose part is minimal and who simply has to wait for everyone else to get back, is the only one who notices Treva run off into the kitchen. When she returns, he sees her wordlessly stuff a whole lemon into one of her coat's cavernous pockets.
He's sure that it's a surprise tool that will help them later.
X️XX ️ ️
Note: I've been bouncing around a Golden Kamuy one-shot that threw off my schedule, so while I get it out of my system, heads up that the next chapter might be up in three weeks instead of the usual two.