Once a week, Wolf went into town to sell his inventions and vegetables, then bought what he needed with the money he’d made. I never went with him. Staying at the house suited me fine. I didn’t need to get to know any of the townsfolk. Or so I thought.
While Wolf was away from the house, I read any medical books I could find on his shelves. And when I got bored of that, I went out for a walk. By a month after he took me in, I had started to get used to having a normal life again. But I still didn’t have a goal, and there were times when I wondered if that was a bad sign.
I was considering this topic on one of my walks, when I happened by the edge of the forest and saw a huge polar bear with two human kids.
“Stop it! Stop that!” the bear was saying.
Yes, the polar bear was talking.
“What the hell?” I said out loud. A talking polar bear? Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like a friendly situation. The two boys were kicking the unresisting bear on the behind, over and over.
“Heh heh! Can you believe what a wimp this bear is?” said a brown-haired boy wearing a casquette cap. He punched the bear on the head.
“Yah! Yah! Go back to the forest!” jeered the other boy, who wore a hat that read “penguin,” as he smacked the bear in the ribs.
Why are these guys ganging up on that bear?
“Tch!” I clicked my tongue, disgusted by the scene before me. The boys heard the sound and turned to look at me.
“What do you want? Clear off! You got a problem or something?” the casquette-cap boy snapped. It was the kind of thing a stereotypical bully might say.
“Nope. I don’t care about you or that bear. Do whatever you want,” I replied.
“Quit actin’ so high and mighty. I don’t like your attitude. But if you give me any valuables you’re carrying, I’ll let you go!” threatened the penguin-hat boy.
No matter where you went in the world, there were always bullies like this around somewhere.
“Quit actin’ like you’re so cool!” the boys yelled, rushing at me with a knife and a bat.
Good grief!
Quietly, I murmured “Room.” Immediately, a large domed circle appeared around me, enclosing the three of us.
“W-what’s this?”
“A-are we trapped in here?!”
It worked. I’d been practicing my powers on the sly, when Wolf wasn’t around, and had gotten better at wielding the Op-Op Fruit’s abilities. Whatever was inside the circle was within my grasp, and I could move it at will. I picked up two rocks near my feet and chucked them high into the air.
“Chambres,” I said, switching the boys’ positions with the rocks’. The boy in the casquette cap and the boy in the penguin hat wound up high above the ground, then plummeted to earth. They were knocked out cold.
“Hmph!” I muttered. I’d had a feeling that my powers could be used for battle as well as for medical procedures, but this experiment had worked out even better than I had hoped. Of course, I’d feel bad if it turned out they had died, so I took a moment to look closely at the two knocked-out kids. They were only unconscious, and would probably wake up in a few minutes.
I’d solved that problem, and old man Wolf would be coming back soon. I turned to head home, but no sooner had I started to walk than the polar bear grabbed my shirt and held me back.
“W-wait!” the bear said.
“What do you want?” I asked, slightly annoyed.
“Um, thanks for saving me. I was just so scared that I couldn’t even fight back.”
“Whatever. I only knocked them out because they tried to attack me instead. I didn’t do it for you.”
“Even still! Even still, what you did really made me feel better.”
The polar bear kept its grip on me and broke down into sobs. What an irritating bear. I waited for a moment, but the bear still wouldn’t let go, so I agreed to follow it to a nearby cave to talk.
“Listen,” I said. “Why didn’t you just fight back? You’re a polar bear! You should be strong enough to handle those kids.”
“They talked to me.”
“So?” I asked.
“I thought that maybe we could be friends,” said the bear.
“Huh? They were punching and kicking you, and you wanted to be friends?” I couldn’t understand it.
“Yeah,” replied the bear, as though it were perfectly normal. “I thought that if I just stayed still and didn’t fight back, we might end up being friends.”
Friends. It was a word I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. I didn’t have any friends anymore. They’d all gone up in flames. The thought made me remember my family and everyone at the church when they were alive. Yeah, my life wasn’t so bad back then.
What was this polar bear doing out here by himself, anyway? Maybe he’s all alone in the world, like I was not that long ago. The thought made me just the tiniest bit interested in this bear’s situation.
“So, do you live around here?” I asked.
“No, I just got to this island yesterday. I don’t know anyone here, and I have nowhere to live,” the bear responded.
“Where did you live before?”
“Uh, do you know what the New World is?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. After all, I was part of a pirate crew. You tended to pick up information about the sea and its many destinations. The New World was what people called the latter half of the Grand Line, a stretch of sea that ran all the way around the world. It was a place that any pirate hoping to find the One Piece would have to contend with.