Two days passed.
Lucien was not permitted outside the facility. The Germa Kingdom existed beyond the laboratory's sealed corridors as something he could infer from maps and window angles but not reach. He noted the exits anyway. Habit.
What he could reach was information, and Germa, for all its engineered precision, turned out to be careless with it in the way institutions always were. Guards talked between posts. Technicians debriefed in corridors. The lead scientist spoke to his assistants as though the room were empty, which told Lucien something about how he regarded the people around him.
By the end of the first day, Lucien had a partial outline. By the end of the second, it had enough shape to be useful.
Judge had not always been this. He had come out of the Grand Line, recruited into something significant, a small and apparently exclusive collection of scientific minds that had operated at a level most researchers never approached. Something had ended it.
The World Government's name came up in fragments, never directly, always in the careful way people referenced things they had decided not to think about too carefully.
Whatever had happened, Judge had walked away from it with enough knowledge and enough intent to return to Germa, remove whoever had been running it, and install himself instead, with World Government protection as the seal on the arrangement.
The gaps were obvious. Lucien knew better than to fill them by asking.
During these two days, he also had frequent interactions with Reiju.
Their interactions had grown in the way things grew when two people occupied the same controlled space with nothing else particularly worth paying attention to. She sought him out with the same quiet deliberateness she applied to everything, and Lucien, who had spent the better part of two days being studied, found that he didn't mind being observed by someone who at least did it honestly.
Through her, and through what he continued to watch behind the glass, the shape of Judge's project became clearer. She was not incidental to the laboratory. If anything, she seemed to be the point of it. Whatever Judge was building toward, he had decided the most reliable raw material was one he could engineer himself from the beginning.
Whether she was the only one, Lucien didn't know. He hadn't seen others. That didn't mean they weren't there.
Reiju's strength at three years old was not a gift or an accident.
It was a proof of concept.
"Lucien, come. Let's go meet my mother. She was curious about you when I told her about you yesterday. She should be in the garden."
"There's a garden in this place?"
"Of course there is."
She dismissed the escorting guard with a word and led Lucien through the corridors without waiting to see if he followed. He did. They walked in silence until the light changed, the flat artificial white of the facility giving way to something warmer, and then a door opened and there was sky.
Lucien squinted. It had been a while.
"Oh, Reiju. Is this the new friend you were talking about?"
The voice was smooth and unhurried. He turned to find Reiju already folded into a hug, her face pressed against the woman's side. She was tall, blonde, with the same sharp features as Reiju softened into something warmer. The resemblance was immediate enough that the introduction was almost unnecessary.
She straightened and Lucien saw that she was heavily pregnant.
"Mom, this is Lucien. He is another kid here getting tested. Lucien, this is my mom, Vinsmoke Sora." introduced Reiju as she clung to Sora.
Sora looked at him with the kind of attention that didn't feel like an assessment. Just interested. Genuine and unhurried, the sort that had no agenda behind it, which in this place felt almost disorienting.
"It's nice to meet you, Lucien." She gestured toward the garden bench beside her. "Sit. Reiju tells me you've been here a few days already. How are you finding it?"
"Quiet," he said. "And very white."
Sora smiled at that. "What brings someone your age into a laboratory like this? You don't look unwell."
"I'm not. Apparently I'm strong enough to be interesting." He left it at that.
She absorbed this without pushing further, which he appreciated. Her expression didn't change much but something in it did, a small shift, the kind that came with connecting one thing to another.
"I keep hoping Judge will tire of it eventually," she said, more to herself than to him. Her hand rested on her stomach. "He hasn't let Reiju have a day that wasn't accounted for since she could walk. I don't know why I expect it to be different this time."
She glanced down, then back up. The smile returned, quieter than the first one.
"Though I suppose hoping costs nothing."
Lucien didn't answer that. There wasn't much to say to it that wouldn't come out wrong.
Reiju had been quiet through most of it, sitting close to Sora with her hands folded in her lap, following the conversation without participating in it. Not bored. Just present in the particular way she was present, taking things in and giving nothing back unless she decided to.
Sora watched her for a moment, then looked at Lucien.
"She talked about you, you know. That evening after you first spoke in the corridor." She said it simply, without weight behind it, the way you stated a fact you thought someone should have. "I don't think she has done that before. Talked about someone."
Lucien looked at Reiju. Reiju was looking at the garden.
"She's observant," he said. "Hard not to notice."
"Yes," Sora said. "She is."
She left the rest of it unsaid. She didn't need to say it. Lucien already had the shape of it, a child who catalogued everything and had never before found anything worth reporting back.
He stood when the light shifted, the garden going cooler as the angle changed. Sora didn't press him to stay. She simply looked up at him with the same unhurried attention she had given him from the start.
"Come back if they let you," she said.
"I'll see what I can do."
Reiju walked him back to the corridor entrance without being asked. At the door she stopped and didn't say anything. Neither did he. After a moment he went inside and the door closed behind him.
He didn't take out his notebook that evening.
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Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones.