I Sell Gacha Jars in One Piece

Franky's chest swelled with emotions. The looks on their faces, his stoic senior apprentice and his great bear of a teacher, both struck dumb and wide-eyed. It felt good. Even if he hadn't drawn the blueprint himself, he'd been the one to roll it out of a Jar, and that counted for something.

"I didn't draw it," he admitted, because Franky was many things but not a liar. "I got it from a Jar merchant. Here's what happened..."

He laid out the encounter with Amon in rough strokes, the ship, the Jars, the items that had come tumbling out of them. By the time he finished, Tom was staring at him with the expression of a man who had heard many strange things in his life and was now encountering something that outpaced all of them.

"Let me be sure I understand," Tom said slowly. "You're telling me that a merchant sold you a jar, and inside the jar was a fully realized rail schematic for a sea locomotive."

"And that the ship itself defies normal spatial logic," Iceberg added, eyebrow arched. "The interior doesn't match the exterior dimensions."

"I know how it sounds," Franky said.

"It sounds completely impossible," Iceberg said.

"I know. That's why I brought proof."

Franky reached into his coat and pulled out the Energy Core. He held it up for a moment, let them look at it, then closed his eyes and focused. The familiar chime sounded. His body dissolved into light, and the Optimus Prime mech erupted into existence in the middle of the shipyard, five or six meters of gleaming steel frame filling the space between workbenches and timber stacks like something from another world entirely.

"Believe me now?" Franky's voice rolled out from the cockpit speakers, deep and reverberant.

Iceberg swallowed. He was fourteen years old and had seen quite a lot working in this shipyard, but nothing had prepared him for a giant mech materializing three feet away from his face.

Tom stared up at it in open amazement, one hand absently rubbing his belly. Then he started to laugh.

"Extraordinary," he said. "Franky, do you remember where this merchant's ship is anchored? Take me to him."

"You want to go in person?"

"Of course I want to go in person! A man who can produce something like this from a jar, and a ship built the way you're describing... I've been building vessels for decades. If I didn't go see it with my own eyes, I'd never forgive myself."

The rail schematic could wait. Tom had looked it over carefully enough to know it was workable, and a project of that scale wasn't something you rushed into anyway. Now that the design existed, the pressure had eased. What pulled at him now was pure curiosity, like what had driven him his whole career.

"I remember exactly where it was," Franky said, dropping back to his normal form. "Come on, I'll take you."

"I'm coming too."

Grandma Kokoro had been listening from the doorway through the whole exchange. The moment Franky had started talking about Jars that produced impossible things, she'd made up her mind. She shuffled forward before anyone could object, and Yokozuna hopped along behind her without being asked, because wherever Kokoro went, the frog followed.

So the five of them set out, Franky, Tom, Iceberg, Kokoro, and one large philosophical frog, heading out across the water toward where the ship was last anchored.

...

As it happened, Amon was already on his way to them.

After Franky had left with the blueprint tucked safely inside his coat, Amon had turned the ship toward Water Seven. He only needed two more Jars sold to unlock the exclusive Jar reward, and he was quietly eager to get there. If Franky's return hadn't already stirred up enough word-of-mouth, he had other approaches ready. And beyond business, he genuinely wanted to see the city. A metropolis built on the water, woven through with canals, a place you didn't pass up.

There was also the matter of the government. Robin was on his ship now, and that made her situation his situation. If CP9's people had already arrived in Water Seven, Amon had no objection to being ahead of that problem rather than behind it.

"Master, is it really true?" Lily was perched at the bow, staring forward with wide eyes. "A whole city built on the ocean?"

"Every word of it." Amon reached over and ruffled her hair. "Don't believe me? Ask Robin. She's read everything."

Robin was standing nearby, her book held loosely in one hand. She glanced over and smiled. "He's right, Lily. Water Seven is exactly as he described. The canals run through the streets like roads. People travel by boat the way others walk."

Lily's expression cycled through astonishment and then pure, uncomplicated delight. "You can row a boat down the street? That sounds incredible! Can we do that? Master, can we?"

"We'll do whatever you want," Amon said.

It was genuinely charming to watch. Lily had been growing steadily more human in the time she'd spent with them, picking up curiosity and enthusiasm and the particular joy of looking forward to something. She was practically bouncing on her heels by the time the distant shape of Water Seven began to appear on the horizon.

They were still approaching when Franky's fleet came into view from the opposite direction.

"That's the ship you were talking about?" Iceberg said flatly, studying the ship from across the water. "It looks ordinary."

"You have to get close," Franky said. "Trust me."

"You said that about the mech too, and then a giant robot appeared in the middle of the shipyard, so I'm reserving judgment."

Tom said nothing. He stood at the prow of Franky's lead vessel with his arms folded across his considerable chest, eyes fixed on the approaching ship. From the outside, it was unremarkable, a well-kept vessel, nothing more. But instinct, one built from decades of reading hulls and waterlines and the particular way a ship sat in the sea, was telling him something different.

There was something different about it. He suspected he'd only understand it once he was aboard.

"Faster, Franky," he said quietly. "Let's go meet this merchant."