—Broadcast—
The garden was not a garden anyone had designed to be incomplete.
Roses that bloomed in late summer shared trellises with spring tulips. Flowers that grew on rocky highland soil pressed against flowers that belonged in humid lowlands. White lilies stood alongside daisies alongside varieties that had no name in any catalogue Nami had ever consulted, and all of them were in full bloom simultaneously, in the middle of whatever season this place was.
The garden should not have worked. It worked beautifully.
Someone very rich, Nami thought, or very powerful. Probably both.
She passed through the garden without meeting anyone. No servants, no guards, no groundskeepers attending to the impossible flowers. The path led her through the garden and into an open atrium, and there the scale changed again.
The atrium was built around a fountain — a large one, its water catching the light in slow arcs that scattered across the courtyard stones and the surrounding walls. The walls were carved. The pillars were carved. The windows were tall and arched, the wrought-iron details on the railings extending to shapes that required patience and a steady hand. The lawn between the fountain and the building walls was trimmed to a consistency that implied either obsession or a very good tool.
Nami walked slowly through the center of it, doing two things at once: admiring the architecture with one part of her attention, and quietly calculating the value of everything she was looking at with another. This was not a quality she could turn off, and she had made her peace with it.
A voice said: "Miss Nami?"
She turned.
The maid standing near the entrance had the head of a wolf — grey-furred, amber-eyed, composed. She wore a formal maid's uniform with the kind of perfect fit that cost money to achieve, and she held herself with the stillness of someone who had learned that most situations did not require movement.
"Do you know my name?" Nami asked. "Where is this place? Who brought me here?"
The wolf maid did not answer any of these questions. She was not paid to answer questions. She was paid to collect guests and deliver them to the correct location, and additional interaction increased the probability of doing something wrong.
"This way, please," she said, and made a precise gesture toward the castle's entrance. "You've been expected."
Nami considered her options. Running into an unknown manor without a guide was unlikely to be safer than following the guide. If this turned out to be a mistake, she would deal with it as a mistake when she arrived at it.
She followed.
The wolf maid walked quickly. Nami kept pace at a jog, which left her no attention for the corridor walls, though she registered them at the edges of her vision: oil paintings filling the available space between doorways, specimen cases arranged in clusters, stone figures positioned at intervals. She had the persistent feeling of being observed, which was the kind of feeling that, in her experience, was almost always accurate.
From the shadows between the paintings, from the mounted figures and the carved stone faces, something was watching. The watching had a quality to it — not hostile, but interested. The kind of interested that categorized.
Fragments of conversation reached her from sources she could not identify:
"Human. How long has it been?"
"Is she today's new acquisition?"
"Don't speculate about guests brought by the wolf maid. Unless you want to end up as tiles."
The last voice carried the casual authority of someone whose warnings were taken seriously because they had been accurate before.
Nami kept her eyes forward and her pace steady and catalogued everything she was seeing without looking at any of it directly for too long. The artworks and specimens lining the walls were not quite static. A painted face blinked. An animal specimen's head turned a few degrees. A stone figure's eye tracked her movement without the rest of it moving. None of this happened when she was looking at it — only at the edge of her vision, which was considerably worse than if they had simply done it openly.
The corridor ended at a gate.
Gate was not quite adequate. It was a door at the scale of a wall, metal, its surface worked with patterns that were finer up close than they had appeared from a distance. The wolf maid walked to it without hesitation and placed both hands flat against its surface.
The gate weighed what it looked like it weighed — more than Nami could have shifted with a year's preparation. The wolf maid pushed it open to a width sufficient to pass through, took a breath at the effort without otherwise acknowledging it, and stepped back.
"The master is inside," she said. "He has been waiting for you."
Nami went through.
The interior of the castle was lit by a chandelier that occupied most of the ceiling space and all of the visual attention. Gold and jade, worked together, the light from it warm and directional enough to illuminate the room without washing it flat. Expensive carpets. Art on every surface. More art than was strictly necessary, filling every space between architectural features with something that had been chosen carefully and installed with intent.
Nami's thief instincts were doing a kind of silent inventory that she would not be acting on but could not prevent. The wealth in this room exceeded anything she had seen outside of Celestial Dragon territory. Possibly including Celestial Dragon territory.
Then she heard the voice.
"Nami."
It came from the stairs at the far end of the room, and she recognized it immediately — the particular warmth in it, the way it said her name, as though her name contained something the speaker was genuinely glad to find.
She had heard that voice recently. She had heard it when it was coming from a small body lying unconscious in Robin's arms.
The figure descending the stairs was not small.
He stood over five meters. His antlers spread wide from his head, dense and heavy, the rack of a creature that had grown undisturbed for years — they carried a weight that should have been inconvenient but apparently was not. His fur was the same coloring she knew, and it caught the chandelier light with the quality of something well-kept. He came down the stairs upright, unhurried, and looked at her with eyes she had last seen closed.
The excitement in those eyes was real. It was the kind of excitement that does not know how to perform itself because it has never needed to.
"I'm so glad to see you," Chopper said. "How are everyone doing? How is Luffy? Is Robin okay? Did Usopp —"
He stopped himself. He had, apparently, been saving up questions.
Nami stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at him and did not say anything for a moment.
Chopper — a Chopper that was five meters tall with a crown of antlers, standing in a castle that existed inside whatever space the Black Goat Cub had carried her to, calling her name the way he had always called her name — was waiting for her answer with the particular attentive patience of someone who has had a great deal of time to practice patience and is still not very good at it.
"Everyone is fine," she said. Her voice was steadier than she expected it to be. "They're worried about you. I was worried about you."
Chopper's expression did something complicated.
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. I've been —" He glanced around the room, at the enormous impractical beautiful castle that was apparently his. "—here."