OP C05 - Joining Dragon's cause

Dragon took the two toward a cave dwelling that was surprisingly pleasant a little further inland. Had he not been shown the entrance, Dave suspected that he would have needed some serious skills in observation haki to find the door.

Once inside, Marie was led away by someone who Dave thought looked a lot like Koala. The red newspaper boy cap with the golden goggles matched in any case. Dave himself followed Dragon, even without prompting, and was led into a room with a few candles, book cases, and very basic wooden furniture. Inside, he saw a blonde young man with a scar over his left eye that couldn't have been anybody but Sabo.

Dragon unhooked his cloak, placed it over his chair, and sat down on it, gesturing for Dave to do the same.

"Link Dave. What a hard name to find since you did not share it with Kuma," Dragon started the conversation by giving Dave a deep, calculating look.

"I... didn't? Why didn't he ask?"

"Kuma isn't good with strangers and small talk. We taught him a few phrases to start a conversation, but he struggles with it," Sabo chimed in with a cheerful smile.

"Is that why he keeps asking where people want to go for vacation?"

"Haha, that's right!"

Dragon cleared his throat, and Dave instantly shut up and sat straight in his chair.

He leaned forward a little and asked, "What do you want to know about me?"

"Your mother Link Avery, a skilled tailor, was killed in Sabaody Archipelago by the Rear, now Vice Admiral Onigumo, because of the orders of the Celestial Dragon Pluming thirteen years ago when you were nine. You've lived in Cottonspring Island's orphanage until six years ago when you were sixteen. Is that correct?"

Dave pondered because he had to dig deep about every detail and eventually shrugged, "My mom was shot because she wouldn't smile after getting abducted on the street to marry that guy and slapped him. I knew none of their names. The dates are correct."

"How did you know about Kuma being a part of us or even just Sabo?"

Sabo once more chimed in, "Yeah! You knew my connection to Luffy and Ace when not even the leader did! How?"

"I'm sorry, I cannot answer that. No, before you grimace. I literally can't. I just knew, same as how I know about Blackbeard's impending scheme to steal Whitebeard's fruit with his unique logia and how he plans to break into Impel Down to free his soon-to-be crew or the fact that Vice Admiral Vergo is a spy of Doflamingo and that he secretly works with Kaido to make artificial devil fruits while ruling Dressrosa through intidimation, subterfuge, abduction and a little girl who ate a fruit that literally changes reality. She can turn people into sentient toys, making every living being forget every memory of them. Don't ever trust Sugar when you're on Dressrosa just because she looks 10. She's actually my age and more formidable than you would expect."

Sabo was reacting to every sentence of Dave, but Dragon stayed unpeturbed.

The Revolutionary Army's leader eventually asked, "How can we trust that acting on this information isn't just furthering your own goals at the expense of our resources secretly?"

"You're a great judge of character, I imagine?" Dragon nodded. "I swear on my life that everything you do does further my own goals. And, I also swear that my goal will always be aligned with yours as long as yours don't change. I want to topple Cipher Pol after CP9 abducted and tortured me in Water 7, where I met your son. And while doing so, I want to free as many people sold into slavery as possible. If you help me do that, I imagine getting freed slaves sympathetic to your cause would be quite good, even if you would always have to fear spies once the WG notices what we're doing. And then, I can also do this."

Dave changed into his fox form, jumped on the table near Dragon, and touched his paw to the man's hand. With his haki, Dragon naturally knew that Dave didn't have any intention to harm him, so he even stretched out his hand. When he noticed his physical strength slowly increasing, as miniscule as it was for a man of his power, Dragon lifted his brows.

Still in his fox form, Dave said, "That's what CP9 was after. They didn't know I could do it, but tortured me on a whim. Worst case scenario, I could grow them Treasure Tree Adam trees anyway once they confirmed my fruit."

"It can only be a supplement. Growing stronger without one's own effort is a crutch," Dragon judged a few moments later.

"I agree. And I'd rather help a few become a little stronger than the masses become as strong as formidable cannon fodder. It comes at a cost but becomes training once it's used on someone sufficiently strong."

Dragon looked at him for a while before he nodded to Sabo, who took out a devil fruit from his coat.

"You said this was a mythical zoan? We couldn't find it in any of our vast sources of information. Not even this Sun Wukong, who you said... rebelled against heaven?"

"It is what I said it is. You'd have to trust me," Dave started before he explained the legend of Journey to the West to the two. Well, as much as he remembered about the Chinese classic anyway. Dave was sure he butchered quite a few details. At some point, he was sure he threw in the plot of the Dragon Ball Z Frieza saga in there, but the two men in his audience didn't seem to care.

As he explained the story, he used his powers to grow a staff with two ornamental ends from one of the splinters he had received from Franky before their journey to Thriller Bark to give his story a deeper impact. Son Goku had a similar staff in the early story anyway and was clearly designed after Sun Wukong, so mixing in some DB lore with the Chinese epic wouldn't hurt, Dave judged.

Honestly, it would be cool if his own powers worked to explosively enlarge the staff to make his own Ruyi Jingu Bang, but he still couldn't do it. He had an inkling it could be a branch skill of his timer bomb, but so far all his tries left him with a brittle mess instead of a pillar able to measure the depths of the ocean as the one in the story.

Enchanted with the story of the monkey king with a vast array of powers like transformation, eyes that recognize evil, super strength and speed, making sentient, loyal copies of himself from just his hairs and unnatural memory powers like remembering every monkey ever born on his mountain, Sabo and Dragon had very different reactions.

Sabo's eyes were shining like stars, while Dragon looked very skeptical. Great Sage Equal of Heaven... this all sounded too good to be true. But the story was rather intriguing, all things considered.

"So he became immortal on seven different occasions? Was that necessary somehow?" Dragon asked after Dave had finished his retelling of Sun Wukong's life.

"How would I know? I didn't write the story, I only heard about it."

Dragon sighed and breathed out a deep breath, "Alright. If it is truly the fruit you just mentioned, consider yourself a member of the Revolutionary Army with my full support. I say member, though. So you will still have to answer to me and the other leaders. If the fruit is something else, prepare to meet your end."

Undaunted by the threat, Dave accepted Dragon's likely exaggerated proclamation, and Sabo eagerly ate the devil fruit. His smile, of course, quickly vanished after getting his first and likely only taste of a devil fruit.

At first, nothing changed after Sabo repeatedly cursed the foul taste, yet eventually, he lifted his shirt, and a monkey's tail popped out from his back.

Dave looked at it with an open mouth, unsure how to explain the peculiar effect of the zoan he had Sabo eat. Dragon's frown was ever-present as he slowly turned to the green haired guest.

"Uh, if you adopt him now, nobody will link his new last name to you?"

Sabo started laughing, clearly not concerned with having grown a furry tail, and even Dragon smirked for a short moment after Dave's joke.

"Monkey D. Sabo, that has a nice ring to it!" Sabo said as he picked up the staff Dave made earlier and gave it a few whirls.

Unexpected to everyone, the ornate ends on both sides of the staff Dave had created suddenly turned golden and the Treasure Tree Adam wood in the middle turned a bright red. The size of it changed too, fluidly going from thicker to thinner again and from long to short and back to its original dimensions as Sabo turned it over in his hands in wonderment.

"Not sure what your actual weapon is if you have one outside the metal pipe Luffy told me about, but I guess you have your own Ruyi Jingu Bang..." Dave mumbled as he thought about Mythical Zoans were really something else.

Though, he still broke his own promise to himself and cursed Adam in his mind despite resolving to not curse the godly being anymore in this life. This power could have been his! Would have been his if only he could have inspected the devil fruits in the chest!

"Uh, well, I guess that settles the case of whether or not the fruit is real... though I want to remind you that the fruit's name to my knowledge is Ape-Ape fruit Model: Sun Wukong's descendant, not Model: Sun Wukong. So unless you fully train the fruit you'll likely have less powers than the ones I described and possibly even different powers," Dave interjected when Sabo slowly started getting the hang of how to control the size of his staff, settling on roughly the same size as his steel pipe.

"You said Sun Wukong put the staff into his ear when he wasn't using it?" Sabo asked, excited like a 7 year old that just got minecraft for christmas.

"Uh, well. I think that was just misinterpreted in folklore. He made the staff the size of a needle... Can you really put that inside your ear without hurting yourself? I should have said he put it behind his ear, like one would do with a cigarette," Dave said as he demonstrated with his index finger. "Okay, he was a monkey, not a human, so maybe I'm mistaken. You, however, should put it behind your ear without a doubt."

Dragon nodded, and they began talking about devil fruit powers, zoan's specifically to give Sabo - and Dave coincidentally - a better understanding of his new powers. It turned out that Sabo did not have another form he could change into and 'only' gained a monkey's tail so far. Thinking about Sun Wukong and in relation Luffy's different 'gears' instead of forms, Dave once more reminded the two of the fact that Sun Wukong was born from stone and therefore wasn't technically made from flesh. Well, he was... but it was hard to put into words for someone who only watched a shitty real-life adaptation of the story instead of actually reading it. Maybe that would still lead Sabo to create different gears on his own to match Luffy.

Eventually, Koala led Marie into the room with drinks and food, and Marie introduced herself to Sabo and Dragon while Koala started immediately playing with Sabo's tail.

"Sorry, I pulled you into something like this without explaining it fully. I... didn't realise we would come here directly," Dave whispered to Marie, who sat next to him.

Marie's grief was still very much apparent to everyone who knew what to look for, but she still favored Dave with a warm smile as she answered in a whisper of her own, "Koala-chan has been very nice to me. Everyone I met so far has been good people."

"Well then, Dave, Marie," Dragon said to gather the attention of the other four other people in the room. "I understand you have medical expertise having worked as a nurse, Marie, but what can you do, fox?"

"A variety of things. I can do the thing I showed you earlier. I... am not a doctor and know painfully little about remedies, but I am well versed in triage when in a battlefield, trauma surgery, and first aid. I know a little about engineering, biology, and marketing and accounting, though only enough to keep a small operation afloat - as well as a little banking. I can grow food in proportions that would blow your mind. My mother made me an excellent tailor, though I prefer making women's clothes or big things, like sails," Dave slowly explained by doing his best to recount most skills he gained a satisfactory expertise in over his lives.

He continued, "If you get me to Cottonspring Island near Sabaody, I could resume my work of growing more Treasure Tree Adam trees for the revolutionary's ships. I can't play an instrument and have a terrible singing voice, but I know of a few songs I'm certain you have never heard of."

"I'm sorry, everyone. But is that cute little fox talking?"

Everyone looked at Koala with a weird expression for a moment before Sabo pointed a finger at her and started laughing at her airheaded-ness. Even Marie laughed a short 'fufu', reminding Dave very much Robin's signature laugh.

"That's quite a lot of things you claim to be able to do," Dragon solemnly said to get things back on track. "Have you had thoughts about how you want to integrate into the revolutionaries?"

Dave pondered for a moment and answered with a serious expression, "I'll trust your judgement if you want to place me elsewhere, but I'd like to pose as a wandering doctor going from the blues all the way to the grandline eventually. I want to be seen going from island to island to perform surgeries for free for the poor and secretly helping them grow food. Of course I'd want to combine that by using the crew on my ship to hunt down slave merchants, though the primary objectives would be to recruit - which I hope could be done through someone other than me, to gather information on kingdoms your merchants have less access to and finally to personally grow stronger until I'm strong enough to kill every Cipher Pol agent I would ever come across."

He let that sit for a while before he continued, "To that end, I ask to be taught medicine by someone in the army to close the gaps in my education and trained to better utilize my haki. I know several aspects of observation haki and have unlocked conqueror haki. Silvers Rayleigh punched me in the guts a few hours ago to show me armament haki, so I guess I'll train that when I have the time."

"Hmm, we do have friendly relations with Sakura Kingdom after the Strawhat crew rid them of their incompetent king. Have you heard of Kureha?" Dragon asked as he pondered the question to which Dave simply nodded.

"Of course you have. Especially with Ivankov still in Impel Down, us revolutionaries could always use additional doctors in the fold, so I will endorse you. Getting taught by Kureha will still rely on your own performance, however. If you didn't exaggerate your capabilities, my word should get you in."

Dave changed into his human form to reply, but immediately Koala chimed in once more, "What!? You were a zoan user all along?? But I thought you were just a cute fox dreaming to become a doctor with his antler scalpel!"

"Uh, sorry to burst your bubble, little Koala," Dave apologized with a wry smile when he saw that Koala almost looked offended.

"Hey, we're, like, totally the same age! Who are you calling little?"

Dave, who was almost three heads taller than the young orange haired girl, squatted down so their eyes were on the same level and asked with a mocking grin, "Did I prove my point yet?"

Seeing them getting along put a smile on Dragon's face that vanished with Dave's next words.

"By the way, I asked Kuma to bring me to Marineford on the day of Ace's execution. With the knowledge I have, I want to demoralize the marines and do everything I can to help Whitebeard and Ace survive the war. If I don't, Blackbeard will break out a formidable crew from Impel Down during the chaos and use his devil fruit powers to steal the Quake-Quake fruit from Whitebeard's corpse becoming the sole winner of the Summit War. He'd become close to unstoppable, and I don't want to see a man as black-hearted as Blackbeard become one of the Four Emperors if I can't delay it."

"What do you have against Blackbeard?"

Dave looked to Sabo and was about to answer but remained silent for a while to think of the answer. What did he have against Blackbeard? The guy did nothing yet that would warrant 'Link Dave's' animosity. He simply disliked him because he was a major antagonist in one of his favorite series. Obviously, he couldn't let that be his answer.

"I have a feeling that left unchecked his ambition will cloak this world in his darkness. Countless ordinary people will suffer to satiate his greed."

Dragon interjected with narrowed eyes, "And the rest you can't say."

Dave nodded solemnly.

"Uhm," Marie raised her hand as she bashfully looked at everyone. "I'd like to help with Dave's plan and become a nurse on his traveling clinic."

"That takes care of one position," Dragon said, allowing the topic to be changed in Dave's favor. "You'll still need quite a few more people to man a ship... Speaking of ship; Lindbergh and his team are currently near Water 7. If you tell us where you hid those trees you were growing, I can have him retrieve one to get this hospital ship built by the time you're ready. Meanwhile, I'll ask Betty if she has a senior information officer without an active task or bounty in her division that is interested in filling the role of helmsman or navigator for you. With how you're talking about that side mission, you'll need some assassins as well."

"Uhm, about that. I have four more devil fruits and would like to train a few people to be my right hands in this mission."

Everyone looked to Dave, most wondering how someone who was recently abducted by CP9 had so many devil fruits just falling into his lap, but Dragon decided not to pry. He likely wouldn't get a solid answer anyway, he mused.

"Oooh, cool! Can you tell us what they are?" Sabo chimed in with an excited expression.

Dave sheepishly scratched his head, "Uh, three logia for clouds, wine and coins and something that was sold to me as a special paramecia: Rust-Rust fruit."

"Three!? How does someone just have three logia lying around!" Koala shouted with a horrified expression - though Dave was unsure why she had the horror etched on her face.

"Well, would you believe me when I say I found them in the same spot as Sabo's mythical zoan?" Dave asked with an embarrassed expression.

If he didn't know the moral character of Dragon and his chief of staff, he might not have given this information out freely, but not only did he have close to nothing to lose even if Dragon took the fruits from him, he himself had already eaten his share. With what he brought to the table, Dave was pretty sure Dragon would think twice about crossing him. One way or another, these logia would already aid in the revolutionary's cause.

"Ugh, you're making me rethink my life-choice of not eating a fruit," Koala dejectedly said in jest to lighten the mood.

"Yeah, I would be too scared, too. Not many humans can learn Fishman Karate - imagine if you can't use it anymore because you get weakened by your own move with the devil fruit weakness," Sabo taunted his longtime friend.

After a little more banter, Koala brought the sheltered Marie away once more to tell her more about the world and the forces within it while Sabo went outside to show off his new powers to his friends.

Dragon and Dave discussed his plans for the incoming war some more so that Dragon could be sure it would actually benefit his cause. They only finished when the sun was about to rise, and Dave was excused to his quarters.

Over the next few days, Dave got a crash course in haki by getting his ass handed to him by Sabo, as well as a tattered book titled Hasshoken. The Revolutionary Army had long ago got a hold of the manual, but either they received a faulty guide or missed a critical piece of information to make the martial art work.

Everyone who trained with this manual could barely display the powers it promised, so it was left alone in storage while the fighters of the revolutionaries instead simply focused on different martial arts.

Browsing the manual, Dave had an idea what was missing. Vibrations gained through rapid, repeated muscle contraction. Through his spotty medical knowledge and experience over his six lives, he had an idea on how to approach this by flexing his muscles hardly in an instant. He couldn't control it, but doing it like that, his muscles did 'vibrate'.

Yet, getting Hasshoken to work was a bit on the backburner for now and would stay there for a while. Haki training and constantly using his devil fruit to its limit was using up his time anyway.

Marie had asked to be taught how to fight, and Koala was doing her best to show her how to train first. Dave jumpstarted her training by growing her physical strength every day since he felt responsible for the nurse on his future ship.

A week on the island, Dave had a better grasp over his observation haki and could use the first stage of armament, even if only for a short moment. What he needed most for his pressing plans was to figure out how to use Moonwalk in his fox form, and it took him a full three days of focus to get it done.

For Hasshoken, he only had plans laid out on how to train it without any progress. Dragon, who observed Dave's training, had still called him an absolute monster for his improvement speed in haki. And rightfully so. Dave chalked it up to having easier because of his 'old soul'. Eventually, even he would hit a bottleneck in his talent and only then would Dave decide if he truly had a monstrous talent.

"Kuma is here to get you," Dragon solemnly said to Dave as he knocked on the new revolutionary's open door.

Dave, who dyed his hair orange-brown for this occasion and prepared an intricate wooden mask, stood up with shaking hands. He didn't plan on fighting anybody, but he planned on talking to the whole world. And most importantly, to Whitebeard. And he planned on changing the old man's mind, it would be a tall order.

Changing into his fox form and storing only the mask, Dave left everything else behind. Should he fail and die in his attempt at changing history, Dave told Dragon to use the devil fruits for his cause.

After a quick slap from the Tyrant, Dave landed in a completely empty Marineford. True to the information provided in canon, all civilians were temporarily moved out of the marine's HQ as a safety measure.

Together with his blending into nature passive and his very basic grasp over the technique to cancel one's presence in the eyes of observation haki, Dave made his way to his very first mission. It was still four hours until the execution, so Dave had two or three hours to spare to plant a bug.

Dragon was reluctant to give him the small den-den mushi that he was going to plant in a hidden spot inside the headquarters. It wouldn't do to lose a promising soldier like Dave for such a simple matter. Yet, this was a unique opportunity with the marine's upper echelon all gathered near the execution platform.

With the small bag hiding the communicator snail close to his chest, Dave stealthily made his way inside the headquarters minutes after landing. All the cannon fodder marines that still patrolled the area were talking about how the marines were about to crush the Whitebeard pirates and create a new era.

It got so repetitive that Dave stopped rolling his eyes a few hallways later and only thought about how much brainwashing was necessary to make this happen. The fifth group in, it was starting to be suspicious how they all said the same exact thing.

He walked mostly in the shadows or on wooden beams near the roof, and even twenty minutes in, he didn't find anyone powerful or remarkable. A few faces seemed familiar, but none of them had names Dave remembered until he saw Koby hurriedly running from somewhere with a full stack of rifles in his arms.

Sadly, this was not the time to follow the iconic pink-haired young marine who would probably be the protagonist if Oda would have decided to tell the story from the perspective of a marine, so Dave simply stayed completely still until Koby was gone. He didn't need Koby to randomly find him because of the kid's protagonist aura.

Instead, Dave made his way to where Koby came from. Most high-level rooms would probably get swept for surveillance devices regularly based on the strong observation haki of the senior officers alone, but the armory was the perfect place in Dave's mind to hide a den-den mushi.

Sure, they wouldn't hear as much high-level intelligence in there, but in the longterm, that would be acceptable. Dragon kept the destination of the bug open-ended. Likely, he wanted Dave to show his own judgment.

The armory held the chance of marines talking about weapon deliveries and deployments as well as happenings in different bases on the grandline. As far as targets go, Dave judged he chose rather well.

With the spy den-den mushi in place on a very dusty beam in the warehouse sized armory, Dave was done with his first mission and ran toward the port.

He sat quietly on a tall tower, all alone, watching the warlods slowly line up and the marines getting ready on the walls. He was completely unbothered, trying to meditate to calm down his nerves, until the gates were opened to let Whitebeards fleet inside. It was about to start. Moments later, bubbles slowly raised to the top in the middle of Marineford's port.

And right as the Moby Dick emerged, Dave changed to his human form with his mask on and jumped down. Right on top of Whitebeard's ship before anyone could say anything or threaten anyone.