With the ballet shoes laced on, Bon Clay danced again. His toes barely grazed the floor and his whole body seemed to float upward, spinning and turning with a lightness that hadn't been there before. Amon didn't know enough about ballet to break down the technique, but even he could tell the difference. There was something almost dreamlike about the way Bon Clay's feet met the ground now, a softness and precision that the earlier performance had lacked.
The system delivered, as always.
Bon Clay could feel it too. The shoes sat perfectly on his feet, weightless in motion, as though they had been made for him specifically and no one else.
"These are extraordinary!"
He came to a stop, breathing hard and glowing with excitement. In all his years of dancing, he had never worn anything that felt like this.
"Ha, not surprised. Oh, right, the second item. Here, it's the ballet tutorial."
Amon handed it over without much commentary. He had no real frame of reference for it himself, so letting Bon Clay judge it seemed the most sensible approach.
"A ballet tutorial..." Bon Clay took it, but the enthusiasm that had been so vivid a moment ago dimmed noticeably. He was grateful, of course, but a tutorial was a tutorial. He had spent years mastering every style of ballet the world had to offer. He was well past the point where a basic instructional guide could teach him anything. Still, refusing to look at it would have been rude, so he opened it.
"Let me just take a glance..."
He flipped to the first page. The title caught him slightly off-guard. Swan Lake. He had never heard of it. Some kind of original composition? Nothing immediately jumped out at him as remarkable. He frowned faintly, wondering what Amon had been so expectant about.
Then he kept reading.
The skepticism faded. Then he stopped being aware of anything around him at all. His expressions moved through stages, puzzlement, then focus, then a spreading, helpless wonder, until his face was alight with reverence.
"Well? Did it live up to your expectations?"
Amon watched with amusement. He didn't know the first thing about ballet, but the transformation on Bon Clay's face told him everything he needed to know. A world-famous classical work from his previous life was proving to be as overwhelming here as it had ever been back there.
Bon Clay pulled his eyes away from the tutorial with visible effort, as though detaching from it required something physical.
"I apologise, Mr. Amon. The content just... I lost myself completely. I couldn't help it."
He pressed the tutorial to his chest. "I've never seen anything like this. Swan Lake. What kind of genius could have created something like this? I don't even have words for it."
The dismissiveness he had walked in with was completely gone.
"Understandable. Not bad at all, right? I did tell you everything in these Jars is worth something."
Bon Clay nodded rapidly. "Not bad? It's breathtaking. The choreography is extraordinary. And I think there's a complete Okama Kenpo system woven into it, layered inside the movement. I can sense it, but my current level isn't deep enough to draw it out yet." He clutched the tutorial tighter. "I'm going to go somewhere quiet and study this properly. Mr. Amon, I don't know how to thank you. You kept my secret, and now you've given me something like this, and shoes that fit as though they were made for my feet..."
His voice cracked. Tears spilled over without warning, and he didn't bother wiping them away.
This was the first time since setting out to sea that he had met someone like this.
"Ha, the luck was all yours. As for the rest, it was nothing, really." Amon waved it off. "Oh, and here. I finished writing the letter while you were absorbed in the tutorial. When you get to Shimotsuki Village in the East Blue, give this to a man named Koushirou. He'll see to it that you reach the Kamabakka Kingdom."
He handed over the letter along with a shard from the broken Jar. He was confident Koushirou would know what to do with it and would get word to Ivankov.
"I truly don't know what I've done to deserve this," Bon Clay said quietly. "Other than my mother, you are the kindest person I have ever met in this world, Mr. Amon."
The words came out simply, without performance, and that was what made them land.
"Ha! Meeting like this was its own kind of fate. Now go."
Amon meant it genuinely. Bon Clay wore his heart on the outside, loyal and earnest in a way that was hard not to respect. Helping him cost almost nothing, and a letter of introduction written in under a minute had earned him the wholehearted gratitude of someone worth knowing. By any measure, a worthwhile exchange.
"Then I'll take my leave. Mr. Amon, until we meet again."
With that, Bon Clay turned and walked away, clutching his tutorial and wearing his new shoes, heading toward a dream that had finally started to feel within reach. The Kamabakka Kingdom had always been the one place he imagined he could belong without apology. As for Baroque Works, he had joined under difficult circumstances and left nothing behind worth mourning.
Amon watched him go, then turned and led Lily the rest of the way into Rainbase.
...
As an oasis in the heart of the Sandora Desert, Rainbase was considerably larger and more vibrant than Alabasta's royal city. The rain that gave the place its name kept everything lush and alive, and the settlement had grown accordingly, sprawling and loud and full of the particular energy that came from money changing hands.
Rain Dinners, the casino Crocodile had built at the centre of it all, lived up to its reputation immediately. The moment Amon stepped inside, the noise enveloped him. The clatter of dice, the sharp slap of cards, the groans of people losing and the laughter of people who weren't. As the largest gambling establishment on the Island, the floor was enormous, packed with every kind of game imaginable, and Lily turned in a slow circle with wide, overwhelmed eyes.
"Come on. Let's play a few hands."
Walking into a place like this and leaving without gambling felt like a waste of the occasion. Amon bought a stack of chips for both of them and began to wander the floor at an easy pace.
"Big! Big again!"
"This old man is unbelievable. That's more than ten wins in a row! How is he doing that?"
A particular table up ahead drew Amon's attention, though it was less the table itself and more the man sitting at it that caught his eye. A middle-aged fellow, apparently blind by his appearance, who had been quietly winning hand after hand without any sign of slowing down.