Snippet #2733774

Blueno woke up in pain. As he heavily blinked his eyes open he winced at the bright morning sun slipping between his window shades, as well as at the strange stinging ache located about an inch behind his forehead. Strange... but oddly familiar. Grunting, the heavy-set man swung his legs out of bed and pushed himself to his feet, wandering to the basin to splash cold water on his face and rub the sleep from his eyes. Peering at his reflection in the full-length mirror beside him for a moment or two, he slowly lifted his hands to his head and almost thoughtlessly began styling his hair into the two large horns that were his visual flair. His mind was focused on the odd dreams he had experienced the night before, which were already slipping beyond his conscious attempts to grasp them... but as they did, he remembered the last time he had felt such an odd pain in his head, and recalled such alien dreams. When his powers wanted to teach him something.

Calm and collected by nature, Blueno was not given to boasting or overstating his abilities, but nonetheless he was of the opinion that most of his former colleagues underestimated the power that he'd gained from the devil fruit. The power to make doors... not just in walls, and floors, and people, but in the stuff of reality itself. The last time he had woken up like this, a few minutes of fumbling had taught him how to open doors in the very air, walking into a sort of shadow dimension which he could use to shelter from enemies, survey the world invisibly and even cross wide distances in the material plane. This time, he felt something new... he knew that his powers... his devil fruit, or the devil inside it, if any such thing still existed... wanted him to make a door in something else. But what? He stared at his reflection in the mirror a little longer. Unthinkingly, he reached out a hand to touch the cold surface of the glass. He blinked. Oh... maybe?

A gentle pressure. The tell-tale feeling of reality shifting obediently under his skillful hands. The mirror split lengthways, half of it swinging back, door-like, exposing the portal he had created. This time, not a physical door to the space behind, or an air door to his shadow dimension... where did this door lead? He could see nothing but darkness beyond it. Pausing only for a moment, Blueno thought back to the words he remembered Iceburg saying whenever something was to be gained by risk... "a ship in harbour is safe. But that's not what ships are for." He stepped through. The mirror swung shut behind him.

---

The mirror swung open. Blueno stumbled through, gasping, tripping over a thick layer of silk carpet and sprawling over it as behind him the wide, ceiling-high, gold-inlaid three-piece mirror resettled and became an inanimate piece of furniture once more. For a moment he just shuddered and breathed, before raising his face and casting a wild-eyed look around the room he had entered. No threats. No monsters. No strangers. And most importantly... air that he could breathe.

The former CP9 member looked far different to how he had when he departed his bedroom... ten minutes ago? An hour? Thirty seconds? Even he wasn't sure. Now he was soaked to the bone, the hems of his pyjama breeches torn, one of his hairdo's noble horns only a stump... looking as though it had been cut through with a blade of unerring sharpness. Bloodied, bruised and shivering... but only for a moment longer. Then he inhaled deeply, and pushed himself carefully to his feet. Steadied himself. Remembered his Rokushiki training, and for the briefest moment meditated. Satisfied that he was centered once more, he refocused on the room.

Not his room, obviously. Too large, too opulent, too brightly-lit both by the warm daylight flooding in from outside and by the ornate chandelier hanging above the center of the space. And though half of it appeared to be the dressing room of some privileged young aristocrat, or perhaps a famous actress, the other had the trappings of a comfortable but businesslike office. One end of the room featured a broad sliding window leading out onto a balcony adorned with a large mounted parasol and two luxurious-looking deck chairs. Blueno stepped quietly towards it, sliding one door open while cautiously avoiding displaying himself to anyone who might be watching from outside. Slowly he cast his eyes over the surrounding landscape. He appeared to be on the balcony of the top floor of a multi-storey rectangular building, at least five floors up, its facade looking down on... a wide courtyard built around a huge and ornate fountain, decorated with a white stone statue of a tall woman... other buildings that faced onto the same courtyard, none of them as tall as this one, all marked somewhere with the symbol of a stylised windmill... people hurrying to and fro, most of them dressed in formal clothes, some speaking rapidly to one another or carrying briefcases or stacks of paper... two figures, both flanked by a mass of lackeys, meeting before the fountain. They shook hands firmly, exchanged businesslike greetings. One held a hand out sideways, had something placed in it by one of the owner's various assistants. Proferred it cordially to the man he was meeting, who took it with a thoughtful nod. A banana. A banana?

Frowning slightly, Blueno lifted his eyes. Beyond the walls surrounding this compound of buildings constructed around the tower in which he stood and the courtyard below were fields stretching as far as the eye can see. Not just fields, but orchards, vineyards, plantations... he could see people in brightly-coloured clothes making their way slowly through the fields, filling huge wicker baskets with the fruits that they plucked from each plant. Closer he could see huge wagons toting great payloads of fruit, overseers inspecting the crops and the efforts of the labourers, cranes raising large metal crates marked with the same windmill symbol onto... a railway? Just where was he this time?

The first mirror he had emerged from after leaving his bedroom had been thick with dust, a relic in the treasure room of some ancient stone-walled castle... where he had scarcely had time to get his bearings before a horde of skeletal warriors had lurched out of the darkness, swinging ancient rusted swords at him with startling speed and precision. Throwing himself back through the mirror, he'd emerged again from a horizontal floor of polished obsidian, surrounded by 20-foot statues of strange and somehow terrifying figures, at the foot of a huge pyramid beneath a sky of deep, unpleasant red. He had chosen not to linger there too long, passing back through the mirror... and into hell. His body tightly squeezing through what might have been a child's vanity mirror into a small, modest bedroom, he quickly realised that whatever was in the air here, he couldn't breathe it. Unprepared, he had had only had a few moments before he would have been struggling to remain conscious, and so had hastened quickly to the window. Outside... sunset, a painfully familiar city, but with no sign of human life... or any life at all, except for the colossal childlike figure sitting hunched, its face buried in its arms, motionless in the center of a square maybe half a mile away, far too large even to be a giant. Blinking, continuing to hold his breath, Blueno had watched that huge being for only a scant few seconds before in a moment of unbridled terror it had raised its head, turned its face towards the window he was watching from, fixed diamond-pupiled eyes on him and opened its mouth wide in a silent scream. Blueno didn't even remember throwing himself through the mirror again. But he remembered the next place... the last place he had visited. Driving rain, rumbling distant thunder, the mirror that he stepped from simply a sheet of polished silver at the entrance to what might once have been a temple. He had looked up from the vista of an endless desert of grey ash and seen three moons in the sky. One of them had looked like it was covered in starfish. And then he had heard the chanting.

Blueno shook his head, tried briefly to distract himself from the bizarre and harrowing experience he'd put himself through, stepping through that first mirror in his bedroom. It might not be over yet, relatively pleasant and mundane as this place might seem. He quietly stepped to the desk now, cast his eye over the stray papers that littered it here and there. He couldn't understand the writing at all, didn't even recognise the alphabet, but... letterheads, signatures, stamps, what might have been dates... he was fairly sure that he was looking at contracts, or sales agreements. Checking further, he found some scattered coins, an orange-scented candle, and a framed picture of an attractive but rough-looking woman with an amused, confident smile.

"Who the heck are you?! Security!"

The shout startled Blueno from his musings, and he whirled to find a woman standing in the doorway opposite the balcony, dressed in a pristine silk shirt and knee-length black dress, orange hair bound back in a businesslike ponytail, holding a transponder snail with the button depressed... and a look of bewilderment and anger on her face. Blueno recognised her instantly. "You... you're one of the Straw Hat Pirates," he stated aloud, brain still whirring as he tried to keep a grip on his situation. The woman's face twisted in further confusion and outrage.

"Pirate? Some half-naked bum stumbles into my office, noses around in my stuff and then accuses me of being a pirate? What the hell is going on here?" She raged, striding towards the desk. Hearing hurried and heavy footsteps in the hallway outside, Blueno slowly began stepping backwards, heading to the mirror again. Her eyes still trained on him, the young woman spoke once more into the snail. "Jino, are you hearing me? There's a man in my office and he looks like he just crawled up a sewer pipe. Does this sound like something that should be happening to the CEO of the largest produce concern in Big Blue? A CEO who spends 1,060,000,000 a year on security? Someone's getting fired for this, Jino, and unless you can give me an excellent reason for what is going on right now then my forecast says that it's you. Hey, get away from there!" The woman pointed a shaking, orange-nailed finger at Blueno as he reached his hand out towards the huge hinged mirror again, and as if on cue half a dozen black-suited men with sunglasses and efficient-looking pistols dived, leapt and rolled into the room through the open doorway, levelling their weapons precisely at Blueno. The large man slowly exhaled through his nose. Back to harbour, please, he thought to himself. And again he stepped through the mirror, the sound of a bemused and irritated shriek and three or four flintlocks firing behind him as he tumbled through the void a final time...

...and found himself lying on the floor of his bedroom, spread-eagled. Blinking his eyes, he looked upwards at the mirror, detecting a sort of faint smugness in the way it stood there perfectly still with no signs of life whatsoever. As the gentle warmth of relief filled him, he inhaled deeply, closing his eyes as he lifted himself to his feet. And after a few moment consideration returned to bed. He wasn't sure where exactly he had been exploring that morning. But he felt quietly confident that it wasn't somewhere that he ever needed to go again.

---

And somewhere else, distant not in space or time but another dimension that most don't think about, in an opulent office belonging to the prosperous Mikan Corporation, the woman who has elevated that business from a small decaying shop at the edge of a piece of dour farmland to a multinational fruit monopoly stamps her foot in anger at the beloved mirror that she now has to replace because it's riddled with bullets and might contain a damp homeless man. Outside her window, beneath the beaming sun, workers sweat and struggle to meet their daily quotas, but most of them wear a half-hidden smile in the knowledge that they are earning a fair wage, and that if it weren't for the protection of their influential boss the slavemasters that they escaped on Gold Line might still be chasing them down. Beyond that land of sweetness and bitterness, a vast ocean wraps itself around the midriff of a planet, lapping at the shores of numberless islands and beating at the rocky edges of the two ring-shaped continents that divide it from its smaller sister-seas. Big Blue, Royal Blue and Dark Blue. Green Line and Gold Line. As we pass over that first grand ocean we approach the violently dangerous Green Line, but before reaching it we pause to view the nation of Plunder, a large urban island just over the horizon from the Line, and therefore the last stop of many adventurers who dream of passing into Dark Blue and seeking its unknown treasures and wonders. Further back we see the Navy outpost on the island of Standish, where the Pirate King Barbadorada was taken after he surrendered himself to Government forces having explored the furthest reaches of Blacksky, the zenith of Dark Blue and the "End of the World". Where he was executed two days later, and where in his dying moments he signalled the beginning of the Great Pirate War by claiming that what he had found in that remote land was nothing less than the "Keys to the World".

We can see a great deal, in this vast ocean and the darker, stranger ocean that lies beyond it. In this day and age countless stories are woven every hour. Stories of people struggling to get by, people chasing their dreams, people dedicating themselves to justice, people seeking wealth and fortune, people realising that freedom could be nothing more than a ship, a calm sea and a stiff breeze. Anywhere we look, we could see a new story unfold. And perhaps that story might even go far beyond the warm, wide sea where it began.

Perhaps it might even travel as far as the end of the world.