It had taken Bill the better half a week to come to a reasonable understanding as to why he felt so strange, and in the end his conclusion was that as long as half of his soul was occupied by trapping Yoko’s, his spiritual sense would remain tilted out of order.
He started this discovery on the fourth day after he had awoken, when he walked on a scene of Pearson using the Hole-Hole Fruit to cheat at a game of cups.
For Bill who had long been sensitive to the invasive smell of Chaos, he had barely noticed it and would have thought Pearson to be clear on the other side of the ship when he was using the ability right in front of him.
While revelation was disheartening, he was not without hope.
Using his Lieutenant as a reluctant guinea pig, Bill discovered that his Haki was for some reason working a lot more like other peoples in this world. He couldn’t simply nullify the man’s ability with a thought, but he could suppress it with a touch.
More than that, Bill found that his Armament Haki had become ‘pushy’ when he softly touched Pearson’s shoulder and nearly buckled the unfortunate man. Apparently, by coating his hand with Haki he had unintentionally amplified the downwards motion of his arm.
After years of wondering, he had finally understood how Armament Haki strengthened people!
This made him consider why it had never worked this way before and it wasn’t long before an experiment dawned on him. Knowing what he had to do, he returned to the sea of souls and Willed his three headed spirit to swap places with his soul of interlocking wheels and eyes.
When he returned to Reality, the effect of this change was immediate, and Bill was surprised to see that he couldn’t visually manifest his Haki or suppress Devil Fruits at all.
But with that loss, he found that he had gained in other ways.
Immediately obvious to him was that he could at-will read the surface of his crew’s minds. Then after some trial and error, he found that he could even erase his presence from their notice – even if he was standing right beside them.
And these were just the abilities he discovered in a single afternoon!
On one hand, Bill thought to himself, it made some sense that his soul made up of interlocking wheels and eyes was geared towards Observation and his humanoid soul with three heads was geared towards Armament.
However, that led to a series of other questions that he had no answers to. For example, he wondered why his nullification ability – which he assumed would be considered Armament – would be weakened when his abilities for Observation were so restricted.
In the end, without any arcane knowledge of what would be the result of having a separated soul when everyone else he had ever encountered only had one, Bill decided to just slowly uncover what influence he could have on Reality.
While he was discovering these new aspects of his spirit, he hadn’t been negligent to the cause of all of this.
Bill found Yoko not long after he had woken up and the girl seemed meek and mild. Because he hadn’t complete locked her soul away she was more or less the same, however, she was definitely less spirited and that made him realize that he would have to allow her spirit to grow back over time.
After seeing her almost lose herself on that bloody field, he would never allow the characteristics of her ability to grow larger than she could handle. If that meant he would also be limited for a period of time, then so be it.
The effort it took to suppress Pearson’s devil fruit made it clear to Bill that unless something changed, he would simply never be able to nullify an awakened ability without having the strength of both of his souls together.
But thankfully, there wasn’t a loss in his physical body and instead of despairing of losing his most cherished ability – which was to nullify devil fruits – he decided that he would use his Haki as best as he could and rely on growing his physical might.
With this in mind, on the thirteenth day on Jail Island Bill decided to go have another talk with Warden Isaac. Due to the presence of the pirates this time he would rely on his Observation Haki to suss out any information that would help him.
Though this kind of mental probing made him feel uncomfortable, with the less than enthusiastic response he had gotten from Sentomaru about Vegapunks cloning program, or the fact that Bill had become aware of the Pacifista Project at all, he felt the need to develop his own way and to show the genius scientist that he was wrong.
Even if he couldn’t persuade them ethically, they would be forced to see the practicality of automated systems over cybernetic human clones.
Leaving the ship and going to Isaac’s lab, Bill prayed that he would find something he needed. Although he wasn’t to the point of taking up arms to stop it, the idea of using cloned slaves was outright evil.
With all the benefits he enjoyed in this world he felt obligated to do something about it.
It had been nearly two weeks since the last time Bill had seen Isaac, so it was of no surprise that he hadn’t been stopped and was allowed straight through to his laboratory.
Sitting behind three very large monitors, the Warden was eying lines of code.
In his previous life Bill had been an old coot by the time computers had become widespread, but he had seen enough examples of computer code to think that what the Warden was viewing was somehow similar to what he saw back on Earth.
“When I started out, do you know what the hardest aspect of making my robots was?” asked Isaac without looking up.
Scanning the surface level of the Wardens mind, Bill saw several ready-made responses and decided to choose the one he thought Isaac most likely wanted to hear.
“Depth perception, probably.” He knowingly answered wrong.
“That’s exactly what I had thought!” Isaac answered excitedly and turning off the stream of information to look at Bill he continued to say: “But who knew that was so easy?! The actual difficulty was just getting the machines to simply balance and not fall over all the time!”
Sifting through the responses that the Warden was already thinking up, Bill responded: “Huh, that makes sense, but I’d have figured if not depth perception, then object recognition would be the hardest hurdle.”
Nodding to this, Isaac claimed that object recognition was definitely a challenge, but that challenge was more busy work than revolutionary design.
Essentially, as the man explained, there just needed to be a ton of object data and enough nodes in the code for the system to accurately identify objects that the camera viewed. In addition to that, they used radar to track the movements of objects and that made it possible for the system to effectively navigate without constant human input.
Continuing to read the Warden’s mind, Bill knew what he was thinking and replied: “And this is what I could gain if I bought your research?”
Once the topic of pay was brought up, Isaac sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. Reading multiple responses in the mans mind Bill could see he was on one hand worried about the situation with Yoko but also firm that he didn’t want to sell his research for a discount.
Unfortunately for the Warden, as he answered Bill by going into detail about the types of problems they solved, Bill could see the flaws they still had.
If coding ‘balance’ had been the first impossible level, then security concerns were the next.
Trading questions about the research, Bill made sure to steer clear of the topics that Isaac hadn’t directly spoke about but was smooth enough to get so close that the Warden inevitably thought about them.
The robots operating system contained object parameters that labelled everything from common trees to pirate enemies. One legitimately revolutionary thing about Isaac’s research was that he had designed his robots to be able to act outside of any wider network.
Though their possible actions would be more limited outside of a network, they were still effective enough to be used without a reasonable assumption of friendly fire.
However, that great feature was also a source of constant stress, as Bill was alarmed to learn – from reading Isaac’s mind – that some of his robots had been stolen and reprogrammed by Cipher Pol.
The more the two spoke, he was able to weave some specifics about generalities and became more and more alarmed by what Isaac was thinking.
The security question was such as issue because Isaac apparently wasn’t satisfied with his current autonomous robots, he was designing systems capable of contending with the Admirals!
Although this had only been a fleeting idea in the Wardens mind, Bill asked: “So I understand that the robots are powered by stabilized di-hydrogen, but I know that fuel very well. I can produce non-stable crystals myself, but that seems like there’s a real cap in terms of overall power. Unless of course you want to spend their fuel up very quickly.”
Uncrossing his legs, Isaac waved the concern away and said: “Only the thrusters are powered by the crystals. The rest of the system is powered by rechargeable batteries.”
After that, he went on to explain that there were indeed limits to overall power but that was why he designed them to fire solid munitions and not lasers.
Then, as he went on to say that his current models had a constant operation time of four hours, Bill heard a word that hadn’t come up before.
‘Dyna Stones?’ he thought.
Deciding to just go for broke, since he still had Yoko’s situation as a bargaining tool, Bill asked: “What if you used Dyna Stones instead of the di-hydrogen crystals as a fuel?”
Hearing this, Isaac sat silent for some time, but Bill saw dozens of thoughts cross his mind. His thoughts were mostly about how Bill knew about Dyna Stones, and if Vegapunk had sent him here as a spy, or if Bill was secretly a part of Cypher Pol, or even if he knew about his ‘plan’.
Taking the initiative to speak first, Bill raised his hand and said: “I’m not here as a spy for working for the secret police. Dyna Stones is a secret, but my father is an influential Vice Admiral and after reporting to him he told me that this was the island where they were being produced.”
Lying through his teeth, Bill was surprised himself how quickly he was reacting to the thoughts that came through Isaac’s head. But it was too late to stop now, with Isaac’s robot technology his Department would be virtually given wings. The applications for them were eminence and far exceeded their already ample combat potential.
Shifting his weight. Isaac leaned forward and rested on his left elbow before saying: “Dyna Stones are property on the Marines, and they’re too volatile to be used as anything other than explosive weapons.”
What he said was only half the truth, the actual fact was that Isaac had already made a robot design to utilize the power of Dyna Stones, but he was worried about security.
‘If I’m not careful Cipher Pol will steal it and then my plans are finished!’ Isaac thought.
Truthfully at this moment Bill didn’t care at all about the Wardens plans.
Whether it was his Department expanding operations into the East Blue, Vegapunk’s clone slaves, Yoko’s need for guidance, or discovering new aspects about his souls, his plate was already overflowing.
Shrugging his shoulders, Bill stood slightly sideways and said coolly: “Listen Warden, I’m not here to ask about why you had a large pirate base operating just a few hours from here. I don’t care about your plans or any of that.”
Saying this, he didn’t need to able to read minds to see the alarms flashing in Isaac’s head.
Continuing on, he said: “I think you’re a genius in robotics, but I also think your limiting just how effective this technology can be. Since I see you not using this technology to its potential, I want it.
You said you’d sell it to me for a Billion Beli, but frankly I don’t have that kind of money. On hand I could only trade you something worth about a quarter of that amount, and I would be willing to, but I would need your research on robotics and the stabilized di- hydrogen.”
Then, using one final push he said: “With that, I’d be sailing away in just a couple of days. Whatever you have planned…” Bill shrugged again and finished “I’m sure that’s none of my business.”
Running through Isaac’s mind was pictures of his mother and Jail Island, which Bill only learned now was once called ‘Jewel Island’.
Perhaps if he had asked in another way Isaac would have given his plan more thought and Bill would have been forced to act once he discovered that the Warden planned to destroy Mary Geoise.
But that didn’t happen, and after several long minutes, Isaac stood up – nearly tall enough to look Bill in the eye – and said deeply: “And what exactly do you have worth 250m Beli?”
Smiling in his mind, Bill knew that he got what he came for.
UberNuber If you enjoy the fanfic hit the heart icon and consider leaving a rating!
This chapter didn't spell it out, but revealed a pretty major part of the fanfic. Hopefully it makes as much sense to the reader as it does me!
It had taken Bill the better half a week to come to a reasonable understanding as to why he felt so strange, and in the end his conclusion was that as long as half of his soul was occupied by trapping Yoko’s, his spiritual sense would remain tilted out of order.
He started this discovery on the fourth day after he had awoken, when he walked on a scene of Pearson using the Hole-Hole Fruit to cheat at a game of cups.
For Bill who had long been sensitive to the invasive smell of Chaos, he had barely noticed it and would have thought Pearson to be clear on the other side of the ship when he was using the ability right in front of him.
While revelation was disheartening, he was not without hope.
Using his Lieutenant as a reluctant guinea pig, Bill discovered that his Haki was for some reason working a lot more like other peoples in this world. He couldn’t simply nullify the man’s ability with a thought, but he could suppress it with a touch.
More than that, Bill found that his Armament Haki had become ‘pushy’ when he softly touched Pearson’s shoulder and nearly buckled the unfortunate man. Apparently, by coating his hand with Haki he had unintentionally amplified the downwards motion of his arm.
After years of wondering, he had finally understood how Armament Haki strengthened people!
This made him consider why it had never worked this way before and it wasn’t long before an experiment dawned on him. Knowing what he had to do, he returned to the sea of souls and Willed his three headed spirit to swap places with his soul of interlocking wheels and eyes.
When he returned to Reality, the effect of this change was immediate, and Bill was surprised to see that he couldn’t visually manifest his Haki or suppress Devil Fruits at all.
But with that loss, he found that he had gained in other ways.
Immediately obvious to him was that he could at-will read the surface of his crew’s minds. Then after some trial and error, he found that he could even erase his presence from their notice – even if he was standing right beside them.
And these were just the abilities he discovered in a single afternoon!
On one hand, Bill thought to himself, it made some sense that his soul made up of interlocking wheels and eyes was geared towards Observation and his humanoid soul with three heads was geared towards Armament.
However, that led to a series of other questions that he had no answers to. For example, he wondered why his nullification ability – which he assumed would be considered Armament – would be weakened when his abilities for Observation were so restricted.
In the end, without any arcane knowledge of what would be the result of having a separated soul when everyone else he had ever encountered only had one, Bill decided to just slowly uncover what influence he could have on Reality.
While he was discovering these new aspects of his spirit, he hadn’t been negligent to the cause of all of this.
Bill found Yoko not long after he had woken up and the girl seemed meek and mild. Because he hadn’t complete locked her soul away she was more or less the same, however, she was definitely less spirited and that made him realize that he would have to allow her spirit to grow back over time.
After seeing her almost lose herself on that bloody field, he would never allow the characteristics of her ability to grow larger than she could handle. If that meant he would also be limited for a period of time, then so be it.
The effort it took to suppress Pearson’s devil fruit made it clear to Bill that unless something changed, he would simply never be able to nullify an awakened ability without having the strength of both of his souls together.
But thankfully, there wasn’t a loss in his physical body and instead of despairing of losing his most cherished ability – which was to nullify devil fruits – he decided that he would use his Haki as best as he could and rely on growing his physical might.
With this in mind, on the thirteenth day on Jail Island Bill decided to go have another talk with Warden Isaac. Due to the presence of the pirates this time he would rely on his Observation Haki to suss out any information that would help him.
Though this kind of mental probing made him feel uncomfortable, with the less than enthusiastic response he had gotten from Sentomaru about Vegapunks cloning program, or the fact that Bill had become aware of the Pacifista Project at all, he felt the need to develop his own way and to show the genius scientist that he was wrong.
Even if he couldn’t persuade them ethically, they would be forced to see the practicality of automated systems over cybernetic human clones.
Leaving the ship and going to Isaac’s lab, Bill prayed that he would find something he needed. Although he wasn’t to the point of taking up arms to stop it, the idea of using cloned slaves was outright evil.
With all the benefits he enjoyed in this world he felt obligated to do something about it.
It had been nearly two weeks since the last time Bill had seen Isaac, so it was of no surprise that he hadn’t been stopped and was allowed straight through to his laboratory.
Sitting behind three very large monitors, the Warden was eying lines of code.
In his previous life Bill had been an old coot by the time computers had become widespread, but he had seen enough examples of computer code to think that what the Warden was viewing was somehow similar to what he saw back on Earth.
“When I started out, do you know what the hardest aspect of making my robots was?” asked Isaac without looking up.
Scanning the surface level of the Wardens mind, Bill saw several ready-made responses and decided to choose the one he thought Isaac most likely wanted to hear.
“Depth perception, probably.” He knowingly answered wrong.
“That’s exactly what I had thought!” Isaac answered excitedly and turning off the stream of information to look at Bill he continued to say: “But who knew that was so easy?! The actual difficulty was just getting the machines to simply balance and not fall over all the time!”
Sifting through the responses that the Warden was already thinking up, Bill responded: “Huh, that makes sense, but I’d have figured if not depth perception, then object recognition would be the hardest hurdle.”
Nodding to this, Isaac claimed that object recognition was definitely a challenge, but that challenge was more busy work than revolutionary design.
Essentially, as the man explained, there just needed to be a ton of object data and enough nodes in the code for the system to accurately identify objects that the camera viewed. In addition to that, they used radar to track the movements of objects and that made it possible for the system to effectively navigate without constant human input.
Continuing to read the Warden’s mind, Bill knew what he was thinking and replied: “And this is what I could gain if I bought your research?”
Once the topic of pay was brought up, Isaac sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. Reading multiple responses in the mans mind Bill could see he was on one hand worried about the situation with Yoko but also firm that he didn’t want to sell his research for a discount.
Unfortunately for the Warden, as he answered Bill by going into detail about the types of problems they solved, Bill could see the flaws they still had.
If coding ‘balance’ had been the first impossible level, then security concerns were the next.
Trading questions about the research, Bill made sure to steer clear of the topics that Isaac hadn’t directly spoke about but was smooth enough to get so close that the Warden inevitably thought about them.
The robots operating system contained object parameters that labelled everything from common trees to pirate enemies. One legitimately revolutionary thing about Isaac’s research was that he had designed his robots to be able to act outside of any wider network.
Though their possible actions would be more limited outside of a network, they were still effective enough to be used without a reasonable assumption of friendly fire.
However, that great feature was also a source of constant stress, as Bill was alarmed to learn – from reading Isaac’s mind – that some of his robots had been stolen and reprogrammed by Cipher Pol.
The more the two spoke, he was able to weave some specifics about generalities and became more and more alarmed by what Isaac was thinking.
The security question was such as issue because Isaac apparently wasn’t satisfied with his current autonomous robots, he was designing systems capable of contending with the Admirals!
Although this had only been a fleeting idea in the Wardens mind, Bill asked: “So I understand that the robots are powered by stabilized di-hydrogen, but I know that fuel very well. I can produce non-stable crystals myself, but that seems like there’s a real cap in terms of overall power. Unless of course you want to spend their fuel up very quickly.”
Uncrossing his legs, Isaac waved the concern away and said: “Only the thrusters are powered by the crystals. The rest of the system is powered by rechargeable batteries.”
After that, he went on to explain that there were indeed limits to overall power but that was why he designed them to fire solid munitions and not lasers.
Then, as he went on to say that his current models had a constant operation time of four hours, Bill heard a word that hadn’t come up before.
‘Dyna Stones?’ he thought.
Deciding to just go for broke, since he still had Yoko’s situation as a bargaining tool, Bill asked: “What if you used Dyna Stones instead of the di-hydrogen crystals as a fuel?”
Hearing this, Isaac sat silent for some time, but Bill saw dozens of thoughts cross his mind. His thoughts were mostly about how Bill knew about Dyna Stones, and if Vegapunk had sent him here as a spy, or if Bill was secretly a part of Cypher Pol, or even if he knew about his ‘plan’.
Taking the initiative to speak first, Bill raised his hand and said: “I’m not here as a spy for working for the secret police. Dyna Stones is a secret, but my father is an influential Vice Admiral and after reporting to him he told me that this was the island where they were being produced.”
Lying through his teeth, Bill was surprised himself how quickly he was reacting to the thoughts that came through Isaac’s head. But it was too late to stop now, with Isaac’s robot technology his Department would be virtually given wings. The applications for them were eminence and far exceeded their already ample combat potential.
Shifting his weight. Isaac leaned forward and rested on his left elbow before saying: “Dyna Stones are property on the Marines, and they’re too volatile to be used as anything other than explosive weapons.”
What he said was only half the truth, the actual fact was that Isaac had already made a robot design to utilize the power of Dyna Stones, but he was worried about security.
‘If I’m not careful Cipher Pol will steal it and then my plans are finished!’ Isaac thought.
Truthfully at this moment Bill didn’t care at all about the Wardens plans.
Whether it was his Department expanding operations into the East Blue, Vegapunk’s clone slaves, Yoko’s need for guidance, or discovering new aspects about his souls, his plate was already overflowing.
Shrugging his shoulders, Bill stood slightly sideways and said coolly: “Listen Warden, I’m not here to ask about why you had a large pirate base operating just a few hours from here. I don’t care about your plans or any of that.”
Saying this, he didn’t need to able to read minds to see the alarms flashing in Isaac’s head.
Continuing on, he said: “I think you’re a genius in robotics, but I also think your limiting just how effective this technology can be. Since I see you not using this technology to its potential, I want it.
You said you’d sell it to me for a Billion Beli, but frankly I don’t have that kind of money. On hand I could only trade you something worth about a quarter of that amount, and I would be willing to, but I would need your research on robotics and the stabilized di- hydrogen.”
Then, using one final push he said: “With that, I’d be sailing away in just a couple of days. Whatever you have planned…” Bill shrugged again and finished “I’m sure that’s none of my business.”
Running through Isaac’s mind was pictures of his mother and Jail Island, which Bill only learned now was once called ‘Jewel Island’.
Perhaps if he had asked in another way Isaac would have given his plan more thought and Bill would have been forced to act once he discovered that the Warden planned to destroy Mary Geoise.
But that didn’t happen, and after several long minutes, Isaac stood up – nearly tall enough to look Bill in the eye – and said deeply: “And what exactly do you have worth 250m Beli?”
Smiling in his mind, Bill knew that he got what he came for.
UberNuber If you enjoy the fanfic hit the heart icon and consider leaving a rating!
This chapter didn't spell it out, but revealed a pretty major part of the fanfic. Hopefully it makes as much sense to the reader as it does me!
