I. Nico Robin
She reappeared in her room.
The same stone room at the heart of the Baroque Works fortress — the thick walls, the oil lamp on the table, the candleholder she had lit before deciphering the letter still burning at the same height, as though time had not moved. The dust on the floor was exactly the same. The air was exactly the same.
She looked at her hands.
The disc was there.
Red. Perfectly circular. Cold against her palm in a way that was not unpleasant — the coldness of an ancient stone, not the coldness of metal. She turned it slowly, examined it under the light of the lamp. One face. The other. Both identical, without mark, without engraving, without any indication of a right way or a wrong way up.
It was looking at her.
She knew it — not in a frightening way, not in a threatening way. Just that quiet, ancient presence she had already felt in the amphitheater, that awareness of being watched by something that had existed long before her and that was simply waiting for her to be ready.
She closed her fingers around it.
— Soon, she said quietly.
Not to it — to herself. A promise, not a conversation.
She went to the mirror leaning against the back wall of her room. An ordinary-sized mirror — roughly chest height, not wide enough for her to pass through entirely. She looked at herself in it, the disc in her hand, and something in the reflective surface shifted slightly — an imperceptible vibration, as though the glass had recognized the object she was holding.
She brought the disc close to the mirror.
The surface rippled.
Not much — a shiver, like the surface of still water grazed by a fingertip. Then it settled. Behind her own reflection, for a fraction of a second, Robin glimpsed something — a color, red and ochre, a texture of rock, a different light.
She withdrew the disc.
The mirror became normal again.
Robin stood still for a moment, eyes fixed on her own reflection, and thought with the systematic method she applied to all problems that deserved to be solved properly.
She had seen what was on the other side. She knew the passage worked. She knew the disc was the key. What she didn't yet know — the time that would pass over there compared to here, the survival conditions, how one came back, whether the mirror had to stay on this side or whether she could take it with her.
She set the disc on the table.
And began to plan.
The market of Nanohana was busy even in the middle of the morning.
Robin moved through it with that way she had of not drawing attention — not invisibility, not forced discretion, just a natural way of occupying space that made people see her without noticing her. She wore a light dress suited to the desert heat and a canvas bag on her shoulder, and she looked like anyone doing their shopping.
She was looking for a mirror.
Not just any mirror — large enough to walk through without having to stoop, solid enough to be carried, ordinary enough not to attract attention in an alley. She visited three furniture merchants before finding what she wanted : a rectangular mirror in a painted wooden frame, slightly chipped, the kind of thing sold cheaply because there was too much stock of it.
She paid without haggling.
The merchant, surprised, said nothing.
She carried it to an alley behind the market — narrow, little used, between a warehouse and a stone wall. Set it against the wall. Checked that no one was watching.
She took out the red disc.
She brought the disc close to the mirror and the surface rippled immediately — more openly than the first time, as though the larger mirror offered a more stable doorway. The color on the other side was visible now, sharp and clear : red, ochre, grey. A light that was not the Alabastan sun — colder, more diffuse, like an overcast sky but without clouds.
She put her hand through.
Her hand crossed the mirror's surface and there was a sensation — no pain, no discomfort, but a clear difference. The air on the other side was drier. Colder. And when she withdrew her hand and looked at it, there was a fine red dust on her skin.
Pulverized rock. Very fine, very light. The kind of dust that formed when stone eroded over millennia under the effect of wind.
Millennia.
She looked at the mirror in the alley, the other world visible in it like an open window, and made her decision.
She returned to her room.
Prepared her equipment methodically — the field satchel she brought to archaeological sites, with her notebooks, her pencils, her documentation materials. Water. Food for several hours. A compact oil lamp. A knife.
And one last thing.
She took the small mechanical clock from her nightstand — a simple, precise object she wound every morning. She set it on the table next to the candleholder, clearly visible.
She noted the exact time on the first page of a blank notebook.
Then she took the mirror she had brought back from the market — leaning against the wall opposite her bed — and she stepped through.
The world on the other side was silent.
Not the relative silence of a desert or a calm night — a deeper, more complete silence, the silence of a place where nothing had lived for a very long time and where even the wind seemed to hesitate to enter. The ground beneath her feet was red, powdery rock, covered in places by that fine ochre dust she had already felt on her hand. The sky above was a uniform white-grey, no visible sun, with a diffuse brightness that came from everywhere at once and cast no shadows.
Behind her, the mirror rested against a fragment of collapsed wall.
She took out her notebook.
And began to walk.
The city appeared after half an hour of walking.
First as shapes on the horizon — too tall for ordinary ruins, too vertical for natural formations. Then as outlines that began to make sense — towers, facades, structures that had resisted time better than the rest, perhaps because they had been built with denser materials, or using techniques that erosion had not yet found a way to attack completely.
Robin stopped at the threshold of what must have been a main avenue.
The city was large.
Not a hamlet — a real city, with multi-story buildings of which some still reached ten, fifteen meters in height despite the centuries of abandonment. The facades were cracked, the walls fissured, the red stone streaked with darker veins. The windows were large gaping openings. The doors — where they still existed — were empty frames.
Everything was empty.
Robin entered the city.
The first building she explored seriously was a large structure at the corner of the main avenue — three floors, a more elaborate facade than the others, suggesting a public or commercial function. She pushed what remained of the door and entered.
And stopped immediately.
Belongings.
Not ruins — belongings. Scattered across the entrance floor with the particular disorder of things dropped while running rather than set down. A container — not glass, not metal, a material she didn't recognize — tipped on its side, its contents long since evaporated but the trace of those contents still visible in the dust around it. Objects that might have been tools, utensils, personal effects — their shape unrecognizable but their presence undeniable. And in the dust of the floor, footprints.
Dozens of footprints.
All going in the same direction — toward the exit.
Robin crouched. Examined the prints. The distribution was not that of people walking — it was that of people running. Deep prints at the front, light at the back, the pattern of hurried strides. Prints that overlapped, crossed each other, as though many people had tried to pass through the same door at the same time.
She straightened slowly.
Continued to explore the building.
On the first floor, she found a room that must have been a bedroom — an intimate space, smaller, with niches in the walls that might have contained personal objects. On the floor, a rectangular shape in the dust — the imprint of an object that had been placed there for a very long time and then removed, or fallen. Clothing, perhaps — an organic material that would have long since decomposed, leaving only this absence in the dust.
But what drew her gaze was the window.
The shutters — a rigid material, not wood, something denser — had been closed from the inside. Barred. A cross-beam still in place, now too fragile to hold if touched but still there, bearing witness to someone who had tried to protect themselves from something coming from outside.
The latch was fractured.
From the outside.
Something had forced this window. Not with the blunt force of a battering ram — with something more precise, more concentrated, as though a hand had gripped the shutter and forced it open by bending the metal.
A very large hand.
Robin noted everything in her notebook without comment. The facts, the observations, the approximate dimensions. She reserved conclusions for later — when she had more data.
She found the church at the center of the city.
She knew it was one before even entering — something in the way it stood apart from the surrounding buildings, taller, more massive, with a facade that had been worked differently from the others. Ornaments still visible despite the centuries — shapes carved in the red stone that framed the main entrance with a symmetry too deliberate to be merely decorative.
Symbols.
She examined them carefully before entering. Geometric shapes — divided circles, lines crossing at precise angles, repeating patterns that looked like they belonged to a coherent symbolic vocabulary. She copied them all, one by one, with the patience of a woman who knew that religious symbols were never read in isolation.
Then she entered.
The interior was destroyed.
Not by time — not with the patient, progressive quality of decay. Destroyed violently, brutally, with clear intent. The rows of what must have been benches or seats were overturned, fractured, scattered. The central floor was sunken in places — impacts, as though something very heavy had struck repeatedly. The interior walls bore marks that were not erosion — deep gouges in the stone, at several meters' height, with the characteristic shape of fingers that grip and tear.
Four fingers.
Robin stopped before one of these marks. Looked at it. Extended her hand to measure — the furrows in the stone were approximately eighty centimeters deep over a length of one and a half meters. She calculated mentally the force needed to leave such marks in stone of this density.
Considerable.
She continued to explore the interior.
At the back of the church, where the most sacred space of the structure probably was — a raised platform, a central space — she found documents.
Not scattered as in the previous building. Organized. Set with care on what must have been a piece of furniture or an altar, now collapsed, the documents slipped into the debris as though someone had placed them there in the haste of departure — not abandoned, preserved. With the intention that they be found.
The same resistant, rigid material as the others. The same characters incised on the surface.
But here, between the lines of text, symbols.
The same ones as on the facade — the divided circles, the crossed lines — but more elaborate, denser, integrated into the text in a way that suggested they were not simple decorations but meaningful elements in their own right. And among them, two shapes that recurred more often than the others. Two opposing shapes — one open, radiating, with lines extending from the center outward like rays. The other closed, folded in on itself, with lines converging toward an obscured center.
She looked at them for a long time.
Two states. Two conditions. Something that was open and something that was closed. Something radiant and something obscured.
Pure. Impure.
The words did not come to her yet in that form — she didn't yet have the tools to read what these documents said. But something in the visual logic of these two opposing shapes, in the way they visually structured the religious texts she could not yet read, gave her an impression. An archaeological intuition — the same one she had had dozens of times on very different sites, that way of sensing the grammar of a culture before understanding its language.
This civilization had believed in something.
Something strong enough to build structures like this one. Something important enough to be inscribed in stone, preserved in time-resistant documents, traced on the walls of ordinary buildings.
And something had happened.
She copied everything — the texts, the symbols, the two opposing shapes in all their contexts, the arrangement of the documents on the altar debris. She worked in order, methodically, without hurrying despite the place and despite the silence that grew heavier as time passed.
Then she went back out.
She noticed the symbols on the walls on her way back toward the main avenue.
Not on every building — on some of them, those that might have had a particular function, or those whose inhabitants had judged it necessary to mark the facades before leaving. The two opposing shapes — open and closed, radiant and obscured — tagged at eye level on the exterior stone. Sometimes alone. Sometimes accompanied by a few characters she could not read.
She stopped before one of these wall inscriptions.
The closed shape — the one she intuitively associated with darkness, with what folded in on itself — was drawn larger, deeper than the other. As though someone had wanted to emphasize it. To insist. To warn.
She copied it carefully.
Then continued.
That was when she saw them.
She was about to head back in the direction of her camp when her gaze fell on the floor of the avenue.
Footprints.
She stopped.
Crouched.
The prints were in the fine dust of the floor — clear, sharp, unambiguous. A hand. Four fingers, not five — the absence of a thumb created a shape immediately recognizable as a hand and different from a human hand at the same instant. The wide palm, the long and powerful fingers, the edges of the prints deep enough to indicate considerable weight.
She measured by eye.
Four meters. Perhaps a little more.
She thought of the marks in the church. The shutters forced from the outside. The impacts in the stone floor.
The same thing. The same size. The same force.
She extended her hand toward the nearest print and grazed the sand inside.
It was still soft.
Not completely fresh — but soft, with that particular texture of sand that has not yet had time to settle and harden under the effect of dry air. She knew enough field work to understand what that meant.
Whatever had left these tracks had passed through recently.
Very recently.
She had seen dinosaur footprints on archaeological sites — fossilized, imprinted in ancient rock, witnesses to an era long since past that one could observe without danger because what they represented had been dead for a very long time. This was not that. This was not a paleontological curiosity. This was a fresh track, in a place that was supposed to have been empty for centuries, heading in a very precise direction.
The direction of her camp.
Robin straightened slowly. Looked around her — the avenue, the empty facades, the gaping window openings above. Nothing visible. Nothing moving. The same total silence she had known since her arrival.
But something had changed in that silence.
Not a sound, not a smell, not a visible change. Just something in the quality of the air around her — the way the silence now pressed differently than it had an hour before. Like the difference between an empty place and a place that was pretending to be empty.
Her sixth sense — developed over years of fleeing, years of living with a bounty on her head and enemies in every port — began to work.
The thing was looking for something.
And the footprints were heading toward her camp.
She made eyes bloom.
Just enough. Two extra pairs of eyes, placed fifty meters ahead of her in the direction of her camp, at a height sufficient for a clear angle of view.
She saw her camp.
The mirror, leaning against the fragment of wall. Her satchel, placed beside it.
And around them, in the dust of the floor, footprints.
Everywhere.
A circle of tracks surrounding her campsite — not the disordered tracks of an animal prowling, not the random marks of a creature passing through. A deliberate circle, as though something had gone all the way around her belongings, examined them closely, and left.
There was nothing there now.
But it had come.
It had found her camp.
It knew someone was here.
Robin recalled her eyes. Stayed still for one second — the time for a quick, cold, practical calculation. She had the copied documents. She had the symbols, the religious texts, the observations on the city. She had the data on the time ratio between the two worlds.
And there was something in this world four meters tall that had just circled her belongings.
She set off.
Fast — not running, not panicking, but with that particular pace of a professional who has assessed the situation and decided the urgency was real without being unmanageable. Her steps were silent on the dusty ground. Her eyes continued scanning the facades, the alleyways, the openings above her.
The camp was five minutes away.
She was there in three.
She took the mirror. Positioned it. Took out the red disc.
The surface rippled.
She stepped through.
Her room.
The lamp. The candleholder. The dust exactly the same.
She set the mirror against the wall. Placed the red disc on the shelf beside her bed — not on the table, not in her satchel. On the shelf, clearly visible, within reach. The place for an object one respects and keeps close.
She went to the table. Looked at the clock.
Twenty minutes.
One hour over there. Twenty minutes here.
She noted the figure in her notebook. Precisely, without comment.
Then she sat down, opened the notebook to the first page of copied texts, and looked at the unknown characters covering the sheets. Between the lines, the two opposing symbols — the open and the closed, the radiant and the obscured — recurred like punctuation, like a breath in a text whose words she did not yet understand but whose rhythm she was beginning to feel.
Somewhere in that world of red stone, something four meters tall had circled her belongings. That same thing had left deep marks in the stone of a church destroyed at the center of a city that thousands of people had fled, abandoning everything.
People who had preserved religious documents in the rubble of their place of worship.
People who had tagged warnings on the walls of their buildings before leaving.
People who had barricaded their windows from the inside.
Robin took out her finest pencil.
And began to work.
II. Elias Voss
The last light disappeared.
The amphitheater recovered its silence — two hundred empty seats in the shadow, the stage under the spotlights, the motionless red curtains. Elias remained for a moment at the center of the stage and listened to that silence with the same attention a musician gives the last note of a concert dissolving into the air.
Then he buttoned his jacket, adjusted his pocket square, and waited.
[ SYSTEM — SESSION EVALUATION ]
Analysis in progress.
Host performance : exceptional.Buyer satisfaction : maximum across five lots.Emotional intensity generated : exceptional.Session incidents : none.
Grade assigned :
S.
Elias read the notification floating before him.
S.
He looked at it for a second — not with surprise, not with displayed pride. With the quiet satisfaction of a craftsman who examines his finished work and finds the result matches exactly the intention.
Good.
[ SYSTEM — REWARDS UNLOCKED ]
Points accumulated this session : 25,800 MC&D points.Transfer to host account : confirmed.
Unlock — Host Shop : access granted.
Tickets obtained :— KETER Ticket × 1— EUCLIDE Ticket × 4
Unlock — SCP Syntonization System : access granted.
Unlock — Multiverse Travel : destination selected.World : ONE PIECE.Precise location : not communicated.Maximum duration : 72 hours.MC&D protection : active.Cover provided by the organization on site.Departure : at the host's discretion.
Note : public mention of Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd is not only authorized during this trip — it is encouraged. The objective is to attract the attention of this world's elites toward the organization. Make noise.
Elias went through all the notifications one by one.
He stopped on the last line.
Make noise.
He read it again. Slowly. Then a third time, with the same care he put into rereading anything that surprised him — not because he hadn't understood, but because things that surprised him deserved to be checked twice.
He smiled.
Not the facade smile — the other one, the real one, the one that came from somewhere beneath the sternum and asked no one's permission.
In his previous life, he had spent thirty-eight years disappearing into the corners of rooms. Being invisible, inaudible, absent from every conversation that mattered. He had learned never to draw attention to himself, never to take up space, to exist only as a function in service of other people who had the right to occupy space.
And now, an organization that operated in the shadows of the multiverse was explicitly asking him to do the opposite.
He went to sit on the edge of the stage and opened the shop interface.
The catalogue appeared — elegant, plain, black text on cream.
Guest services :
Spa — Private hammam, facial and body treatments, therapeutic massage. Available between lots or before the session on request. Price : 800 points.
Wine cellar — Tasting of great vintages from various universes and eras. Sommelier service included. Price : 600 points.
Gastronomic restaurant — Menu adapted to each guest's preferences. Cuisine from several worlds. Price : 1,200 points.
Rest suite — Luxury suite for guests wishing to stay between sessions. Decor and comfort tailored to preference. Price : 1,500 points per suite.
Private casino — Games of chance and strategy in a closed setting. Chip system independent of MC&D points. Price : 2,000 points.
Library — Collection of rare works from various universes. Limited access, on-site consultation only. Price : 900 points.
Exhibition gallery — Display of objects not put up for auction, for contemplative purposes only. Price : 700 points.
Elias went through the list twice.
He thought of his five clients. He thought of Tivan who looked at his collection without feeling anything — an exhibition gallery would give him something to study between lots. He thought of Loki and the way his gaze had drifted to the ceiling throughout the session as though trying to understand the invisible structure of the place — a library of rare works from several worlds would strike exactly the right nerve. He thought of Doflamingo — the casino, without doubt, with that way he had of turning any situation into a playing field. He thought of Lucius and the image of that man in a white marble hammam with a glass of fine wine — the image was so coherent it was almost comical.
He thought of Robin.
The library. The gallery. Both.
He made a mental note of his purchasing priorities for the accumulated points and moved to the next section.
SCP Syntonization System :
Principle : by sacrificing a SAFE, EUCLIDE or KETER class ticket in the system, combined with a guide object, an SCP of the corresponding class and category will be generated for the following session.
The guide object defines the thematic domain of the SCP obtained.Examples :— A medicine + EUCLIDE ticket → SCP of medical or biological type, Euclide class.— A coin + SAFE ticket → SCP of economic or monetary type, Safe class.— A weapon + KETER ticket → SCP of offensive type, Keter class.
Note : results carry an interpretation margin inherent to the system. Precise guide objects refine results.
Available tickets : KETER × 1 — EUCLIDE × 4
Elias read this section more slowly.
One Keter ticket. Four Euclide tickets.
He thought of his clients. Of what he had observed during the session — what they had bought, what they looked at, what made their bids climb beyond what reason recommended. He thought of the next session, the lots he would want to present, the profiles he wanted to attract.
Tivan — something living, ancient, unique. Something that looked back. Loki — something that played with perception, secrecy, hidden power. Doflamingo — something offensive, manipulable, applicable on a large scale. Lucius — something tied to survival, to control, to personal power. Robin — something that opened doors to erased history.
And the future clients — those he had not yet met, those his trip to One Piece might attract. He didn't yet know their names or their desires. But he would learn. That was precisely why he was going.
He closed the list mentally and stood up.
The System gave him the rest of the information in a single final notification.
[ SYSTEM — TRAVEL INFORMATION ]
Destination : One Piece world — precise location generated randomly at the moment of departure.
Cover provided :— Official representative identity of Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd.— Sufficient funds to cover all expenses on site.— Premium accommodation provided upon arrival.— Travel documents adapted to the codes of the destination world.
Primary objective : attract the attention of this world's elites toward the organization. Method left to the host's discretion.
Secondary objective : constitute discreet and competent auxiliary staff for future sessions.
MC&D protection active throughout the stay.In case of extreme danger : immediate extraction guaranteed.
Are you ready to depart ?
[ YES ] — [ NO ]
Elias read the notification to the end.
He stopped on one line in particular.
Method left to the host's discretion.
He thought about that. The host's discretion. After an entire life of never having any discretion over anything, of executing other people's instructions according to their methods and their schedules, he was now being entrusted with a mission in an entire world with the sole constraint of do it your way.
He didn't need to prepare anything. The organization handled it — the accommodation, the funds, the cover, the documents. He would arrive somewhere in the world of One Piece with the necessary resources and seventy-two hours ahead of him.
He knew this world. He knew it in its smallest details — its geographies, its hierarchies, its codes, its characters. He knew how people spoke there, how they negotiated, what had value and what didn't. He knew how to recognize an ambitious gaze in a busy port, a capable figure in an ordinary group, someone looking for something without yet knowing what.
He had read it hundreds of times.
It was time to live it.
He looked at the question floating before him.
Are you ready to depart ?
He thought of the library of his previous life. Of the hours spent reading stories that were not his, traveling by proxy through worlds he would never touch, knowing by heart adventures lived by others while he folded clothes in a corridor.
— One last thing, he said aloud.
He buttoned his jacket. Slipped his pocket square into his breast pocket. Checked his tie knot with the flat of his hand without a mirror — out of habit, out of rigor, because certain reflexes survived death and reincarnation and everything else.
Then he pressed YES.
The light was white and sharp and total.
And Elias Voss, auctioneer of the impossible, official representative of Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd, disappeared from his hotel cut off from the rest of the world to land somewhere in the world of One Piece with seventy-two hours, unlimited funds, a perfect cover, and the explicit instruction to get noticed by the right people.
He had spent thirty-eight years learning to disappear into rooms.
He was curious to see what it looked like in the other direction.
End of Chapter 8