"Lucien Vosgrave."
Lucien looked at him.
The clerk didn't meet his eyes. He held a folded note with the particular careful neutrality of someone delivering a message they had been told not to comment on.
"You've been asked to attend a meeting. This evening." He held the note out. "Attendance is not optional."
Lucien took it. The clerk walked away without waiting for a response.
He unfolded the note. A time. No address. No description of where or what. Just the time and a single line beneath it.
A car will collect you at the east gate.
Lucien looked at the note for a moment. Then he folded it, put it in his coat alongside the notebook, and pushed off the wall.
He had two hours. Enough time to eat something.
He walked out of the colosseum into the afternoon and didn't hurry. Whoever had been watching him for nine days already knew how he moved. There was no point performing urgency for an audience he couldn't see.
The car was already waiting at the east gate when he arrived. Long, dark, the Germa engineering visible in the way it sat on the road, too low and too quiet for something that size. A soldier stood beside it without looking at him directly. The door was open.
Lucien got in.
The soldier got in after him and closed the door without a word. The car moved immediately, smooth and without noise, pulling into the city's traffic and then out of it, heading away from the colosseum district and the manufacturing quarters and every part of Germa he had mapped over the past week.
They drove for fifteen minutes. He watched the city change through the window. The streets widened. The buildings became larger and further apart, set back behind perimeter fencing that carried the particular look of infrastructure that was serious about itself. Not military. Something else. Something that required more space than the city's ordinary districts allowed.
The car stopped at a gate that opened without anyone visibly operating it. They passed through into a compound that was cleaner than anything he had seen in Germa so far, which was notable given that Germa was already the cleanest place he had ever been. Wide paths between large structures, all of them low and broad and windowless except at the upper levels, connected by enclosed walkways at height.
A research facility. The real one. Not the unmarked warehouse near the docks.
The car stopped. The soldier opened the door.
Lucien got out and looked at the compound around him for a moment before following the soldier inside.
The interior was exactly what the exterior had promised. Corridors that were wider than they needed to be, lit evenly from above, lined with closed doors that had no handles visible from the outside. Equipment moved on tracks built into the ceiling. Staff moved between stations with the particular focus of people who had stopped noticing anything that wasn't their immediate work.
They were shown through three sets of secured doors and into a room at the far end of the facility that was large enough to feel intentional about its size. A long table. Documents spread across it, charts and diagrams and columns of notation he couldn't read from the doorway but recognised the shape of. Scientific. Systematic.
Two men were already seated.
The smaller one he didn't recognise. Older, pen already in hand, the kind of focused stillness that came from decades of caring about things other people didn't notice.
The larger one he recognised without having seen his face before. The build. The particular quality of stillness. The way he occupied space without appearing to try.
The large man looked at him across the table.
"Sit down," he said. His voice was even and unhurried. The voice of someone who had not needed to raise it in a very long time. "We have things to discuss."
Lucien looked at the chair across the table. Then at the documents spread between them. Then at the compound visible through the upper windows, the enclosed walkways, the structures set back behind serious fencing.
He sat down.
"You've been watching me since the warehouse," he said. It wasn't a question.
The large man looked at him for a moment.
"We have things to discuss," he said again. "That isn't one of them."
"You're Vinsmoke Judge," Lucien said. "The MAD scientist."
Judge looked at him across the table with the particular expression of someone who had long since stopped being interested in how other people introduced him.
"Yes," he said. "And you are a sixteen year old boy from North Blue with no crew, no flag, and no Devil Fruit who just spent nine days winning fights in my colosseum." He let that sit for a moment. "So. Shall we discuss what's actually worth discussing?"
"What do you want?" Lucien said. "I don't have anything worth your time."
Judge said nothing. It was the smaller man who looked up for the first time, pen still in hand, eyes carrying the particular detachment of someone who had reduced everything in the world to data points a long time ago.
"That might be true from your perspective," he said. "Though your perspective is somewhat limited." He set the pen down. "From ours it looks considerably different. You are an unmodified sixteen year old with no Devil Fruit and no formal institutional training who survived Daniel and then spent nine days solving problems we designed specifically to be unsolvable by someone at your level." He folded his hands. "We want to study that. Properly. A few years, controlled conditions, full documentation." His eyes moved briefly to Judge and back. "You would be compensated. And released, when we have what we need."
The room was quiet.
Lucien looked at the smaller man. Then at Judge. Then at the document still facing him on the table, his own nine days reduced to columns and annotation.
A few years. Controlled conditions. Full documentation.
He had a very clear understanding of what Germa's controlled conditions looked like. He had spent a week watching them. He had fought one of their products in a warehouse ten days ago and left it breathing on the floor as a courtesy.
Death, he thought, would at least be straightforward.
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Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones.