The tranquility of Percy’s island was broken right before he turned ten.
Crouching near the top of a towering Carapa tree, he watched as people passed underneath him carrying torches. The one in front was an old man from town on his island, dressed in the loose shorts and sleeveless shirt favored by local men. The eight guys following him were all wearing white coats and hats that matched. Percy squinted and tried to read any kind of identification on them but the distance was too great. He’d seen enough law enforcement groups in his long life to still have a decent idea of who these men were.
“You’re certain she’s out here?” asked one of the men wearing white.
“She must be!” said the local man, walking at the front of the line. “I’m telling you, she stayed with me for a whole week! I don’t know how she snuck out, but she was here yesterday, there’s no way she got off the island. She has to be hiding.”
The men following him didn’t say anything else, looking at the surrounding foliage while keeping a hand on the weapons they carried, both guns and swords.
Percy waited until they had passed, watching them thoughtfully. Eventually, he jumped out of his tree, landing in the branches of another one nearby. He leaped between trees, clearing the gaps between branches with the ease of a person running over flat ground, until the jungle got less thick and the ground started climbing steeply upward. He climbed the mountain that had his house at the top of it, running right up the side.
At the steepest section right at the top, Percy stopped. He grabbed the lip of the mountain’s flat top, hanging there with his legs dangling. It was late afternoon, just beginning to get a little bit dark. All over the island, he could see orange spots glinting between the foliage, marking more groups like the one he had observed. The fact that they were carrying torches implied they were planning to stay out late. It was hard to count how many groups there were. Percy estimated roughly six, which would mean around forty more of those men in white. He’d never seen anything like this before.
Percy launched himself into the air by heaving with his arm, flipping to land on top of the cliff.
He was curious about this change. Percy went to one of his favorite places to sit and plopped down, his legs dangling over the drop. He liked this spot because he could see all the way to the ocean from here. Tonight, that meant he could see three ships.
They were anchored off the coast of the island. There must have been more of those men in white; the majority hadn’t come onto the island. Percy tilted his head.
“I wonder who they’re here for.”
The man from the village had clearly said “she”. The torches were still moving, crisscrossing the island. None of them had come close to his home.
Percy laughed. “Of course they haven’t! Nobody normal is going to get up here, there isn’t even a path.” He turned his head, smiling. “So who are you?”
The door to his storehouse was ajar. He’d closed it when he left, yet it was partially open now.
Percy got to his feet. As he walked, he palmed Riptide and removed the cap. Like he said, no one normal would make it up here, so it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
The storehouse looked as innocuous as ever, a bunch of boards stood up next to each other with some fairly clumsy carpentry to keep it standing, and a thatch roof on top.
The door was open about two inches. Percy stopped slightly in front of it. Nothing burst out. After a moment, Percy capped riptide, freeing his hands.
He seized the handle and opened the door.
Inside was a kneeling girl around his age, the lower half of her face covered in the juice of fruits Percy had stockpiled. There were seeds around her lips. She had bright blue eyes, black hair, and bangs. Her white dress had leaves on it and stains from the fruits she had been wolfing down.
When she saw Percy, she crossed her arms in front of her with the back of her hands facing him. Her eyes were full of wariness.
“It’s good fruit, isn’t it?” Percy said.
She squinted at him. Her confusion didn’t last long and his cheerful question didn’t lessen her distrust.
“Leave,” she said.
“That’s not really an option. I live here,” Percy said.
The girl wasn’t amused or dissuaded.
“I’m dangerous,” she said. “I can hurt you. Get your parents and leave, if you know what’s good for you.”
“Oh, I don’t have those,” Percy said, just as cheerfully.
“You don’t have parents? You live all the way up here alone?”
Percy had disarmed some of her animosity with surprise. “Yep, that’s right!”
The girl recovered her composure, although she still looked quite ridiculous with orange fruit juice smeared on her face.
“I don’t believe you. There’s too much food up here. Someone your age couldn’t get up here by yourself, either.”
“You got up here,” Percy said.
“I’m special.” The girl told him this with a completely straight face.
“Me too!” Percy said. “Do you want more fruit?”
A conflicted look crossed her face. The next time she spoke, she was using a different tone.
“You should really leave,” she said. “Now that I’ve been here, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be safe.”
“I refuse,” Percy said. “I found something interesting here and I’m still investigating it. I’m not in the mood to move on yet.”
“Fair enough.” She talked like she was older than she actually was. “In that case, I’ll leave. But I still think you should leave too. I bring misfortune wherever I’ve been.”
Percy took note of the heavy tone of her voice.
“Do you bring misfortune? Or do the people who are chasing you?”
“There’s no difference,” she said. “It all ends the same.”
Percy didn’t agree. The difference was about whose fault it was. Percy crouched in the doorway. The girl reacted defensively at first, tensing as she prepared to defend herself.
“Why don’t you stay here for a while?” Percy suggested. “At least stay the night. It’s hard to go down the mountain in the dark.”
“People have told me to stay with them before,” she said. “That’s how I ended up here. I can’t trust you.”
“What’s your name?”
In spite of her words, she must’ve trusted a little bit, because she gave it:
“Nico Robin.”
“I’m Percy!” said Percy. “Nice to meet you!”
He offered his hand for her to shake. She didn’t do that, so he had found the edge of how much she trusted him. Robin got up, dropping the pose that she’d kept her hands in while they were talking.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “Don’t bother telling the marines that you saw me. They won’t pay you my bounty unless you give them my head.”
She probably would have looked dignified if she had been given a chance to clean up her face. She walked past Percy… And stopped.
“Where… Where did the Marine ships go?”
The torches were still glowing from different spots on the island. But out at sea, where the ships had been, there was no sign of them. All three ships had been big and sturdy.
It was as if the sea suddenly ate them whole.
“Are marines those funny looking guys who dress in white?” Percy asked.
“You don’t know marines?” Robin asked.
“They must be, then.” Percy grinned at her, closing his eyes. “They went away!”
“What?” Robin said.
“Well, there are still a few of them around,” Percy mused. “But they aren’t going to make it up here. And if they do, they won’t like what they find.”
Riptide formed. Robin, who had been looking at Percy’s face, didn’t notice it taking shape until it was there. She gaped, finally showing an expression that matched her age. “Where’d that come from!?”
“I’m pretty strong,” Percy said. “And I don’t like grown ups who chase little girls around.”
Robin was staring at his sword. She came to a decision and made that X shape with her arms again.
Something fascinating happened. To Percy’s utmost shock, little arms sprouted all over his body. They grabbed his head and applied pressure, threatening to break his neck.
Well, they were way too weak to even get close to that. Even if he was a normal person, he thought the force from the hands felt kind of tame. It was clearly a warning.
“I can hurt you,” Robin said. “I’ve hurt people before. So if you’re thinking of betraying me, think again.”
Percy grabbed one of the hands that had appeared on him. Curiously, he noted that Robin flinched when the arm was touched, meaning that she could feel what these extra appendages felt.
Percy pulled it away from his head with ease and in a flash, was holding it in a handshake grip.
He shook the hand.
“There!” Percy said. “We have a deal!”
Robin stared at him, holding the back of one of her real arms, the ones that were on her body, as the sensation reached her. She coughed. After a few seconds, Percy realized that she was trying not to laugh.
“You’re ridiculous!” Robin said. “You pull a sword out of nowhere, then you see that I have a devil fruit, and the first thing you do is shake my hand? Don’t you have any sense of caution?”
Percy thought about it.
“Not really.” It was hard to have a sense of caution when you’d lived as a god, although he supposed he should be a bit more careful, now that he was in a mortal body and an unknown world. Still… “It takes a lot to hurt me.”
Robin squinted at him. She then remembered the messiness of her appearance and finally started looking chagrined about it now that the tension had passed.
“Do you have somewhere to clean up?”
LINE BREAK
While Robin washed herself using the spring that Percy had created, he stayed in his house. He didn’t have spare clothing for girls (even his own clothes were completely homemade and honestly pretty bad) so she would have to use her stained dress, but at least she could clean her body off. She had more to clean than just the messy meal she’d eaten while raiding his storeroom. She’d had scrapes and dirty patches on her body, as well as some leaves. It clearly hadn’t been an easy journey for her through the jungle.
When Percy saw Robin next, meeting her back where they first did, she looked a little bit more like a girl her age should. Her eyes were still too mature, a combination of a precocious mind with hardship that such a young girl shouldn’t have had to face. Percy had seen similar eyes on demigods.
“You did something,” Robin accused.
Percy wasn’t sure what she meant, giving her an honestly confused look.
“To those marine ships,” Robin clarified. “You sank them. It had to be you. One minute they were there, the next they were gone.”
The marines searching the island had noticed the disappearance of their ships. The torches that had been scattered throughout the jungle were now congregated on the beach closest to where the ships sank. “How would I have done that? I’m all the way over here,” Percy said. “The sea just doesn’t like people like that.”
“How would you know what the sea likes?” Robin asked, squinting at him. She was pretty talkative now that she’d started to relax, even if she’d only relaxed a tiny bit.
“Because I’m an expert,” Percy said matter of factly.
“You can’t be an expert. You're my age,” Robin said. “Experts have to be a little old. It takes time to learn things.”
Percy just smiled.
“Want to see something cool?” he asked.
He didn’t actually give Robin a chance to choose. He took her hand and jumped into the enormous hole inside the mountain, taking her along for the ride.
Predictably, she screamed.
“YOU CRAZY, CRAZY, CRAZY—”
But Percy put his arm around her shoulder and held her close to his body. Using his legs, he kicked back and forth across the gap, as he usually did when coming down here. Having a passenger today didn’t change anything.
When they got to the bottom, he let go of her. Robin immediately dropped onto her hands and knees.
“You’re insane,” Robin said. “You don’t make sense. Why did I almost just die? How are we alive?”
She lifted her head, seemingly to glare at Percy. Before she could, she noticed that there was light here. When she found the source, Robin’s eyes glazed over.
She got up and took a few steps toward the ancient door.
While the surface was covered in words, one short line at the top was written by far the biggest. Robin’s eyes were immediately drawn to it. Percy smiled, enjoying the wonder on her face.
He never would have predicted what happened next.
“We reside here, the ones who held on,” Robin said, standing in front of the door with her head tilted back, the light bathing her body.
Percy just stared at her.
“You can read it?”