-Real World-
Perona had not chosen to join the Beasts Pirates.
She had chosen not to leave Moria, which amounted to the same thing in the end, but the distinction mattered to her in the way that distinctions between facts and their implications always matter to someone who has strong feelings about their own autonomy. The difference between I followed my captain and I joined Kaido's zoo was a small one functionally and a large one emotionally, and Perona managed it by maintaining the emotional version as the official version while operating within the functional one.
Onigashima was not a Gothic castle. It was a fortress built around the aesthetic priorities of a man whose idea of interior design involved the structural requirements of housing a large number of powerful, physically active people who would occasionally destroy things. The architecture was massive and practical and entirely indifferent to atmosphere. There was no darkness here in the cultivated sense — only the literal darkness when the lights went out, which was a completely different category of darkness and did not serve any of the same functions.
Perona wanted Moria to build her a castle. A real one, with the appropriate proportions and the right quality of shadow and windows that faced north so that the morning sun could not reach her and she could sleep until noon without the world making demands on her. She had mentioned this to him twice. He had said yes, eventually both times, which she understood to mean not in the near term.
In the meantime, Black Maria had given her tasks.
The spider woman was not unkind about it — no one had been unkind, which was a different kind of disorienting than cruelty would have been — but the instructions were clear: develop Observation Haki and Armament Haki to a functional standard, work on the Horo Horo no Mi (Hollow-Hollow Fruit) toward large-scale ghost control, and accept that the Beasts Pirates were now her context whether she had chosen them or not.
The reasoning was sound. In open combat, once an opponent identified Perona's true body and closed the distance, her options reduced to zero. She was small — under 160 centimeters, which in a crew of men built like geological features made her functionally invisible in a crowd — and her makeup and style and the way she carried herself made strangers consistently misjudge her age downward. None of this was a problem in the long run if the Haki and the technique caught up. Black Maria believed they would. Perona was working on believing that too.
Today, Moria had been collected by Kaido's kanabō for the morning session, which left the morning free. She put on the appropriate footwear for Onigashima's terrain and went to find Tama.
"Tama! I'm here — do you have anything good to eat today—"
Something hit her face.
It was round and black and had wings and had apparently not been expecting a person to appear in the doorway at precisely that angle of trajectory. The collision was mutual. The creature bounced off Perona's face, lost orientation, dropped its flight pattern entirely, and fell into her arms with the undignified reliability of something that had been moving too fast to correct.
Perona stood in the doorway and looked down at what she was holding.
It was roughly spherical as a main body — black, dense-looking, with two small clawed legs beneath it and wings extending from somewhere near its head. There was a face on it, and the face had sutures, which in Perona's experience of faces was not standard but was not unfamiliar. There was a skull-shaped marking on its forehead. It had a bat-adjacent silhouette but was not a bat in the way that bats were bats — it had a structural ity that bats didn't have, an intentionality to the arrangement of its features.
Perona had spent years surrounded by undead and hollow things and the aesthetic range of what the dark family of creatures could look like. This one had the right inputs.
Before she could ask anything, Tama appeared from inside the room, stick in hand, expression indicating that this was not the first time today.
"Perona, put it down quickly." Tama's voice had the focused displeasure of someone who had already been through several rounds with this problem. "It's a bad one. Doesn't eat food, drinks blood instead, lies constantly to try to get let out, and then won't go back when it's time. Very bad. Should be hit."
The creature in Perona's arms went very still in the way that small things go still when two larger entities are discussing them.
"What does it go by?" Perona kept it at eye level, examining the skull marking, the suture lines, the way the wings articulated from the head rather than the shoulders.
Tama lowered the stick slightly. She appeared to be actually searching her memory. "When it was trying to trick me, it said its name was... Impmon. Yes. That."
Impmon.
Perona tested the sound of it. The name had a shape that matched the creature — small and dark and slightly adversarial — and the creature had features that landed in the overlap between her two primary aesthetic preferences: it was the wrong kind of cute, which was the right kind of cute, and it clearly belonged to the dark category of things in a way that had nothing to do with looking dangerous.
She rubbed the top of its round head with two fingers.
"I've never raised a vampire before," she said, mostly to herself.
No one had ever called Impmon cute before in his life. This was a fact that he was currently processing alongside the physical reality of being held, which he had also not experienced in any positive context previously. His existence up to this point had been organized around a very simple principle: everything stronger than him would eat him if given the opportunity, and most things were stronger than him. He had survived by being faster and more dishonest than anything that wanted to eat him, and by keeping his range of relationships limited to none.
The female human's hands were warm and she was looking at him like he was something she intended to keep, which his survival instincts categorized as a threat even as his other instincts, less well-developed due to underuse, were categorizing it as something else.
"Let go," he said, producing his most threatening voice. "Woman. Let go. You can say nice things about me all you want. I am not fooled. Let go or I bite."
Perona smiled. It was the particular smile of someone who has already decided and is simply waiting for the other party to arrive at the same conclusion.
"Try it," she said pleasantly.
Impmon showed his fangs — two of them, the blood-drinking kind — and bit down on her forearm with the small, pressure of something that was testing whether its threat was being taken seriously.
Tama lifted the stick.
"Don't," Perona said, without looking away from Impmon.
She let him drink. A small amount — enough to register, not enough to satisfy, just enough that the transaction had occurred and what it meant could be established. His eyes, which had been focused on the tactical problem of whether the human was going to hurt him, gradually shifted toward a different set of calculations.
"There," she said, when he stopped. "You've drunk my blood. That means you're mine now."
He pulled his fangs out of her arm and stared at her.
"I'm not going to let you go." Her voice was friendly in a way that made the skin on the back of his neck register warnings. "If you try to run, I'll put you in a cage. Very comfortable cage. Small, though. And every day I'll let you out for exactly one hour, and then I'll put you back, and I'll whip you a little before I do because it will be good for you."
Impmon had evaded predators with centuries of accumulated evolutionary motivation behind them. He had lied his way past creatures that could have swallowed him in one motion. His sixth sense had saved his life so many times that he had stopped counting, and it was speaking to him now with a clarity that left no room for misinterpretation.
This human was not joking.
He did not run. He sat in her arms and considered his situation with the practical attention of something that has survived by being honest about which fights it cannot win.
Tama watched this from the doorway, stick still in hand, and decided she would save the hitting for later if it was still needed. She had the expression of someone watching a problem become someone else's problem, which had its own category of satisfaction.
"He's going to cause trouble," she said.
"Good," Perona said, still watching Impmon. "I need something to do."
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