The sign-in the next morning gave him a language.
Not one language — all of them. Every dialect and tongue spoken across the entirety of the One Piece world, from the common trade language of the East Blue to the oldest written scripts found in ruins that predated the current world order, deposited into him the same way the others had arrived, clean and complete and immediately natural. He tested it quietly while the others slept, running through a few phrases in his mind in languages he had never studied, finding them sitting there with the comfortable familiarity of things long known.
*Appropriate,* Ciel said, when he noted it. *A traveler who cannot communicate is not traveling. He is merely moving.*
Ethan thought that was one of the better things Ciel had said.
He made breakfast as the harbor woke up around them — the fishermen going out, the early market vendors setting up, the particular sounds of a working port finding its morning rhythm. The smell of the food brought Luffy out of sleep with the mechanical reliability of a tide responding to the moon, sitting upright and then standing and then at the food in a sequence that had no visible gap between steps.
Zoro woke in his own time, which was shortly after Luffy and considerably more deliberately, and ate with the quiet attention he gave to fuel — practical, sufficient, complete.
"Shipwright will be done by midmorning," Ethan said.
Zoro nodded.
"After that we should talk about direction," Ethan continued. "We've been moving east without a specific destination. It's fine for now but it won't stay fine."
"Orange Town," Luffy said, through a mouthful of rice.
Ethan looked at him.
"I heard some people talking yesterday," Luffy said, swallowing. "At the market. There's a town being terrorized by a pirate. Buggy the Clown." He said the name with the particular relish he applied to things that sounded interesting. "He has a Devil Fruit. Chop-Chop something."
Ethan kept his expression neutral. "You want to go there."
"There's also a map there," Luffy said. "Part of one, anyway. People were saying Buggy took it."
"What kind of map?"
Luffy shrugged. "Important kind, I think. People seemed upset about it."
Ethan looked at the harbor mouth, where the morning light was on the water.
He knew, of course, what map. He knew what Orange Town was and what Buggy was doing there and what was going to happen when Luffy arrived. He knew Nami was there — knew her name, knew what she was carrying, knew the specific weight of what she was trying to do and how long she had been trying to do it.
He let none of this show.
"East it is," he said. "We'll leave when the boat is ready."
Luffy's grin arrived at its full width. "I knew you'd say yes."
"I haven't said yes. I said east."
"Same thing."
Ethan looked at Zoro.
Zoro was looking at his bowl with the expression of a man who had decided this conversation did not require his participation.
---
The shipwright had done good work.
The patch on the hull had been reinforced properly — not just covered but integrated, the new material matched to the existing hull in a way that made the repair structural rather than cosmetic. He had also, as promised, checked the mast step and found a small issue with the fitting that he had corrected without being asked, and had tightened the tiller hardware so it moved cleanly rather than with the slight resistance Ethan had been compensating for without mentioning.
Ethan paid him fairly and added something beyond the agreed price, which the shipwright accepted with a nod that communicated both the acknowledgment and the understanding that it had been earned rather than given.
"Grand Line," the shipwright said, as they were leaving.
Ethan turned.
"When you get there." The man was looking at the boat with the appraising eye of his profession. "She's good for the East Blue. She's not good for that. When the time comes — find someone who knows what they're doing and don't cut corners on the hull."
"We won't," Ethan said.
The shipwright looked at him for a moment. "You've sailed before. More than most people your age."
"Some," Ethan said.
"It shows." He paused. "The boy with the hat — he's got something about him."
"Yes," Ethan said. "He does."
The shipwright looked at Luffy, who was standing at the dock's edge throwing small stones into the water and watching the ripples with what appeared to be genuine scientific interest.
"Good luck," the shipwright said. Not the reflexive good luck of a farewell. The considered kind, offered to something specific.
"Thank you," Ethan said.
---
They left the harbor at midmorning with a clean hull and a replenished hold and the wind behind them, and the island fell away at their backs with the quiet efficiency of places being left, and the East Blue opened ahead of them in every shade of blue and green that the morning could produce.
Luffy took the bow. Zoro sat amidships and began what Ethan had come to think of as his weight training — lifting things that were aboard not as weights but being used as weights, the kind of improvised physical practice that spoke of someone who had trained in conditions where proper equipment was rarely available and had learned to work with what existed.
Ethan sailed and watched the water and thought.
He was thinking about Nami.
Knowing that she was ahead of them — knowing what she was carrying, the specific terrible weight of the arrangement she was living under — was one of the more complicated pieces of foreknowledge he had. The broad facts of her situation were not comfortable to carry quietly. He had known about them before he arrived and knowing had been one thing. Being days away from the actual person, in the actual world where it was actually happening, was another.
He thought about what he had said to Zoro on the pre-dawn water, two nights ago.
*The story belongs to them. My job is to make sure they get the chance to tell it.*
That was true. He believed it. But there was a version of holding back that was principle and a version that was negligence, and the line between them required attention.
He let it settle. He did not have an answer yet and was willing not to have one, because the situation was not yet in front of him and the situations you thought through in advance were always slightly wrong about the details that mattered most.
*You are thinking about the navigator,* Ciel said.
"Yes."
*Your concern is appropriate. However, the situation will resolve as it resolves. Your interference beyond what the moment requires will not serve anyone.*
"I know."
*Knowing and feeling are different things.*
"Also something you've said before."
*It bears repeating.*
Ethan looked at the horizon and adjusted their heading by a small degree, reading a shift in the current that the surface didn't show clearly but that the navigation knowledge felt as easily as temperature.
"Ciel," he said. "What do you think of this world?"
A pause. Longer than usual.
*I find it,* Ciel said, *considerably more textured than I expected. The power systems here are crude relative to what I am accustomed to processing. The people, however, are not crude. They are specific. Individual in a way that is — interesting.*
"Rimuru's world had specific people too."
*Yes. But I knew that world from the template. I knew its people as data. This world I am encountering in real time, through you, as it happens.* Another pause. *It is different. I find I prefer it.*
Ethan considered this. The idea of Ciel — ancient, divine, the living intelligence that had once governed the most powerful being in another universe's history — finding the East Blue interesting in real time was something he filed quietly and found unexpectedly warming.
"Good," he said.
*Additionally,* Ciel added, with a quality that might have been the closest she came to dry humor, *Luffy just fell asleep at the bow with his hat over his face. You may wish to ensure he doesn't roll into the water.*
Ethan looked forward. Luffy was indeed asleep, one arm hanging loosely over the rail, the hat moving gently with his breathing.
He adjusted a line to keep the sail's noise down and sailed them on through the quiet morning.
---
Orange Town appeared on the third day.
The approach told the story before they arrived — a smudge of smoke on the horizon that was not from cooking fires or industry but from the ongoing, careless destruction of a place being taken apart for entertainment. As they came closer the detail filled in: buildings with damage that was fresh, the harbor unusually quiet, the specific absence of normal activity that meant the population was either hiding or gone.
Luffy stood at the bow and looked at it with that focused, quiet expression.
"Buggy did all this," he said.
"Yes," Ethan said.
"For no reason."
"For his reason. Which amounts to the same thing."
Zoro stood beside Luffy and assessed the town with the practical eye of someone calculating relevant variables. "How many crew?"
Ethan looked at the town. He knew the answer. He gave a version of it that fit the cover of good observation. "Hard to say from here. Enough to hold a town this size. Dozens, probably."
"And Buggy himself," Luffy said. "Chop-Chop Devil Fruit. His body splits apart and each part moves independently."
Ethan glanced at him. "You did your research."
"The people at the market knew a lot about him." Luffy paused. "His weakness is the sea, like all Devil Fruit users. And if you can grab the main part and hold it, the rest of him can't function properly."
Ethan looked at him for a moment. This was exactly right — the specific tactical insight buried in what Luffy had said was entirely correct, and he had arrived at it from two conversations with market vendors in a port town.
Zoro was looking at Luffy with a similar expression.
"What," Luffy said, noticing them both.
"Nothing," Ethan said. "Good thinking."
Luffy looked faintly suspicious of the compliment, then accepted it and looked back at the town.
They brought the boat into the quieter southern end of the harbor, away from the main dock where the damage was most visible, and tied off at a small private jetty that had been abandoned. The town was not entirely empty — sounds came from the deeper streets, voices, the occasional crash of something Buggy's crew had decided needed destroying — but the waterfront was clear.
They stepped off the boat and stood on the dock and looked at the town.
"We split up," Ethan said.
Luffy looked at him. "Why?"
"Because if we're together we're easier to track and easier to deal with. Separate, we cover more ground, we find the people who need finding faster, and Buggy's crew can't concentrate on one location." He paused. "Also you attract a lot of attention when you move through places."
Luffy considered this. "That's fair," he said, without offense.
"I'll go east through the town. Zoro, west. Luffy —"
"Straight through the middle," Luffy said.
Ethan looked at him.
"I'll find Buggy," Luffy said simply. "That's the point."
The logic was impeccable in its way. Ethan thought about the map, and Nami, and the specific sequence of things he knew was coming, and made his peace with the fact that Luffy going straight through the middle of Orange Town was not a problem to be solved but a fact to be navigated around.
"Fine," he said. "Straight through the middle. But —" He waited until Luffy was looking at him directly. "If you find someone who needs help before you find Buggy, the person comes first."
Luffy looked at him like this was such an obvious thing that he was slightly puzzled by its being said.
"Obviously," Luffy said.
Ethan nodded. "Go."
Luffy went — straight up the main street with his hands behind his head and his hat pushed back, the most conspicuous possible approach, which was either strategically unsound or strategically perfect depending on how you thought about it.
Zoro watched him go. "He'll find trouble in thirty seconds."
"Twenty," Ethan said.
They looked at each other.
"East," Ethan said.
Zoro turned west and walked, swords at his side, unhurried.
Ethan turned east.
---
The eastern quarter of Orange Town had fared better than the rest — the destruction here was older, the first wave of damage rather than the ongoing kind, and some of the buildings were intact. People had sheltered here, he could see — the signs of temporary habitation in structures that were not homes, the specific disorder of people who had moved quickly and taken only what they could carry.
He moved through it quietly, listening.
The language ability the sign-in had given him turned out to be more useful here than he had anticipated. Not because the people spoke differently — the East Blue's common tongue was universal enough — but because the quality of what he heard was richer. The precise words people chose when they were frightened, the specific idioms of distress, the things said between the words that only came through clearly when language was fully understood rather than adequately processed.
He found them in a storage building near the eastern harbor wall.
A group of twelve townspeople — mostly older, a few families with children, the ones who had been too slow or too encumbered or too unwilling to leave their homes entirely and had found the nearest shelter that felt defensible. They had barricaded the door with furniture, which was psychologically useful and physically limited, and were sitting in the dim interior with the patient endurance of people who had been waiting for something to change and were not sure what form the change would take.
The woman who came to the barricade when he knocked was in her sixties, with the upright bearing of someone who had decided not to be diminished by the situation and was succeeding through will alone.
"I'm not with Buggy," Ethan said, through the door. "My name is Ethan. I'm a traveler. I'm here with people who are dealing with the problem. I want to know if anyone here is hurt and if there's anything immediately needed."
A silence.
Then the sound of furniture being moved.
The woman looked at him with the same rapid assessment he had encountered before — the specific East Blue talent for reading strangers quickly, developed in a sea where strangers were frequently either helpful or dangerous and the difference mattered.
"Two people with injuries," she said. "Not critical. We have water. We're short on food."
"I'll get food to you before we leave," Ethan said. "The injuries — can I see them?"
She stood aside.
He spent twenty minutes in the storage building. The injuries were as described — one man with a cut on his arm from falling glass, one older woman with a sprained ankle from evacuating too quickly. He dressed the first with supplies from the pack he was carrying and assessed the second and determined it was not fractured and provided what comfort that information offered.
The children watched him from the back of the room with the enormous eyes of people who have had a frightening experience and are processing it through the specific lens of childhood, which was different from adult processing in ways Ethan found required careful attention. He spoke to them directly and simply and did not talk around them or over them, and one small girl, somewhere around six, eventually came forward and asked him if the scary men were going to go away.
"Yes," he said, with the specific certainty of someone who actually knew.
She looked at him for a moment, doing her own version of the rapid East Blue assessment, and appeared to find it satisfactory.
From somewhere in the middle of the town came a series of sounds that were recognizably the consequence of Luffy finding the situation he had gone looking for — crashes, a distant shout, then silence, then more crashes.
The woman at the barricade looked toward the sounds. "Your people?"
"One of them," Ethan said.
She listened to the next crash. "He sounds enthusiastic."
"He is," Ethan said. "Consistently."
He left them with food from the pack and the promise of resolution, and stepped back into the street, and listened to the town around him with the observation Haki running at the lowest functional setting — enough to map the immediate situation without being more than the sharpest human instincts could plausibly explain.
Luffy was in the center of town. Moving, engaged, functional — the specific quality of his presence in the Haki's range was unmistakable, enormous and bright in a way that made everyone else register differently by comparison.
Zoro was coming in from the west, also engaged, also functional.
And there was someone else — moving fast through the streets parallel to Ethan's position, heading south toward the harbor, carrying something. A person traveling with the specific urgent efficiency of someone who had acquired what they came for and was trying to leave before the situation changed.
Ethan turned south and moved to intercept.
He came around the corner of a warehouse at the harbor's edge and stopped.
The person who had been moving fast stopped too.
She was about his age — maybe a year younger, with orange hair and eyes that were currently doing the rapid threat assessment that everyone in the East Blue seemed to do as a reflex, except hers was notably faster and more comprehensive than most. She had a map case under her arm, held with the specific grip of someone transporting something that mattered enormously, and a staff in her other hand that she had raised before she fully stopped moving.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"You're not with Buggy," she said. It was not a question — it was a conclusion arrived at quickly from available evidence.
"No," Ethan said.
Her eyes moved over him with that quick, thorough intelligence. "You're with the idiot in the straw hat."
Ethan considered several responses.
"He prefers captain," he said.
Something moved in her expression — not quite amusement, not yet, but the raw material of it.
"He's causing absolute chaos in the center of town," she said.
"That does sound like him."
She looked at him for a moment longer. The map case under her arm. The staff still raised. The specific, complicated calculation of a person who had been operating alone for a long time in a situation that required constant assessment of who could be trusted and had developed very good instincts about it and was currently applying them at full power.
"The map is mine," she said.
"I know," Ethan said.
Her eyes sharpened. "How do you know that?"
Ethan met her gaze steadily. "Because you came here for it specifically. And because the way you're holding it is the way people hold things that belong to them, not things they've stolen."
She was quiet for a moment.
The sounds from the center of town had shifted — less crashing, more the particular quality of a situation being resolved, the last stages of a fight finding its conclusion.
"Your captain," she said carefully. "What's his goal?"
"King of the Pirates," Ethan said.
She stared at him.
"He means it," Ethan added.
She stared at him for another moment.
Then, slowly, the staff came down.
She did not smile — not yet, not fully — but something in her posture shifted from the braced quality of someone ready to run into something that was at least considering the possibility of stillness.
"I have my own goals," she said. "They don't involve piracy."
"That's fine," Ethan said. "He'll ask you anyway. You should know that in advance so it's less annoying."
Something definitively close to amusement moved through her expression this time, brief and quickly controlled.
"Nami," she said.
"Ethan," he said.
She looked at him for one more long moment with those sharp, intelligent eyes.
"You're an unusual crew," she said.
"Getting more so," Ethan agreed, "all the time."