—Broadcast—
The campfire memory faded from the Sky Screen, and the scene shifted.
A string of small text appeared in the lower frame:
Holy Roman Empire Calendar — Year 1940
Two familiar figures reappeared among a cluster of tourists standing in the open air of what looked like a public square. One was lean, quick-eyed, wearing an easy smile that belonged to someone accustomed to moving through crowds. The other was nearly three meters tall, wearing civilian clothes that had clearly been sized for the shorter man and adjusted under protest, with a false beard applied to his lower face that convinced nobody who looked closely.
Borsalino stood with the patience of a man who had decided, some time ago, that patience was the only tool currently available to him.
The tour guide at the front of the group was a young woman with an unhurried voice and the practiced cadence of someone who had given this particular speech many times and still believed in it. Around her, on pedestals and in carved relief along the square's walls, were images of a figure rendered in gold and bronze — tall, wild-haired, arms outstretched, arcing lightning between his fingers.
"Enel is worthy of every word in the title," she was saying. "He was the first human to leave this planet under his own power. The first to reach the Moon. The first to venture beyond our star system into open space. The pioneering spirit he embodied — the willingness to go farther than anyone believed was possible — has guided every generation of explorers after him, and will continue to do so as long as we still have universe left to find."
Sky Screen Character Note: Pioneer God — Enel
Borsalino listened. He had become accustomed to this kind of thing over the weeks in this era — the Sky Screen's revelations playing out in real historical fact, centuries compressed into tour itineraries. He had stopped being shocked. He was now in the phase that followed shock, which was a kind of profound, slightly nauseating re-calibration.
The guide's account of Sky Island was thorough and warmly told. Enel's early years, his awakening to the Goro Goro no Mi (Rumble-Rumble Fruit), his rise to power over his homeland. The destruction of Birka — the guide mentioned it briefly, in passing, and moved on. The conquest of Skypiea and the enslavement of its people was not mentioned at all. The battle with the Straw Hat Pirates was described as a clash of ideals between two forces each pursuing their own vision of freedom, which Borsalino thought was one way to characterize being punched off a golden belfry by a rubber-bodied teenage pirate.
History was, as Barry had observed, a negotiation.
The campfire conversation received considerable attention. The guide described it with genuine feeling — three people on an uninhabited island, a bonfire, and an archaeologist who had spent her life accumulating exactly the kind of knowledge that could redirect a person's entire trajectory. The narration named Robin as the turning point. Without that conversation, the guide said, there would have been no second voyage to the Moon, no Discovery launch, no pioneer.
"Many of you may not know the name Monkey D. Luffy or his crew personally — those records are from a very different era — but Nico Robin is another matter. Her life story appears in history textbooks at every level of study. The chapters on her have been known to make examinations considerably more interesting."
A small laugh from the group. Barry glanced at Borsalino.
Borsalino's expression had done something careful and internal. He was looking at the monument to Enel and not quite seeing it.
Nico Robin. The Child of the Devil. The woman with the eighty-million-berry bounty that the World Government had been trying to collect since she was eight years old. He had been a Marine Admiral during those years. He had done things in service of that institution that he did not particularly want listed in a history textbook.
Whether they were or not was a different question. He was not sure which answer would be worse.
"Don't trouble yourself," Barry said, quietly enough that only Borsalino could hear him. "Some records get cleaned up. Some get buried. Time takes care of a lot of it." A beat. "Or rather — the people writing the records take care of it. Time just provides the distance."
"That is not reassuring," Borsalino said.
"It wasn't meant to be reassuring. I was just noting what happens."
The guide had moved on to the aftermath of the campfire. The formal historical record:
Enel had been a Marine Admiral. Borsalino's head turned at this. The guide explained briefly — Admiral Kennen, the Fur Tribe Admiral who had wielded the Goro Goro no Mi, died in the Battle of Dawn. In the structure of that event, Enel had been bound to Kennen in some capacity not fully explained to the tour group; when Kennen fell, the link dissolved and Enel was freed. He presented himself to the then-Fleet Admiral afterward, and under the advisement of the scientist Caesar Clown, received initial funding from Fleet Admiral Artoria Pendragon to construct the first vessel capable of leaving the planet's atmosphere.
The ship was called the Discovery.
Its engine was simple: Enel, sleeping, generating electricity. The Goro Goro no Mi in a dormant state produced more than enough power to drive the vessel, and Enel's ability to restart his own heart with electrical current meant he could survive the journey's physiological demands for longer than any other human could have managed. He was, in practical terms, the only person capable of flying that particular ship.
Caesar Clown supervised the construction. It took one year.
Under the eyes of Caesar Clown and Nico Robin, the Discovery launched from a Marine base and broke through the atmosphere. Through the Marine's telescopes, it diminished to a point of reflected light at the edge of the sky, and then disappeared.
The guide described the silence that followed. The months of signal delay stretching longer as the ship traveled farther. The transmissions becoming sparse, then infrequent, then absent. Six months after launch, contact was lost entirely.
"Many people assumed he had died," she said. "The topic was spoken about less and less. Some questioned whether the voyage had ever really happened. His name began to fade from regular conversation." She paused. "And then, ten years later, the Discovery came back."
Enel returned with documentation. Observations, measurements, photographs taken at distances no human eye had previously reached. The universe as it actually was — not as anyone had calculated or imagined, but as a single person had seen it, moving through it alone. He had not found a planet suitable for settlement. He had not left the Milky Way. The Discovery's speed was, against the scale it was operating in, genuinely insufficient.
But he came back.
For the second voyage, he did not go to the Marine.
At Robin's suggestion, he approached Queen Otohime of the Mermaid Kingdom directly. The Mermaid royal family — in order to give their people a path beyond the sea floor, a contingency against whatever the future held for Fish-Man Island — donated the majority of the national treasury to the construction of a second-generation vessel. Caesar Clown supervised again, this time with additional contributions from Vegapunk's cloning line. The resulting ship was faster. Navigation speed doubled. The possible range of the second voyage expanded accordingly.
"He was not immortal," the guide said, and her voice softened slightly. "He called himself a god, and perhaps there was something in that — but the years marked him the same way they mark everyone. By the time the second voyage launched, his body had begun to show the ordinary signs of age. It was mathematically probable — the scientists knew this, and so did he — that he would die in space before returning."
The group was quiet.
The monument stood against the sky. Enel in gold, arms wide, lightning perpetually arrested in the moment of release.
Borsalino looked at it for a long time.
It was strange, he thought, to stand in the future and look at a monument to someone from your own era. Stranger still to realize that the people in your era who would be remembered had already been decided — by something older than any of them, set in motion long before they chose anything.
He had shared an era with Nico Robin and Enel.
He had not done anything worth a monument.
He kept this thought to himself.