I Sell Gacha Jars in One Piece

"Mr. Amon, I truly can't thank you enough for that schematic," Tom said, resting a hand on Franky's head as he turned to face Amon properly. He looked a little sheepish after losing himself so completely the moment he stepped aboard. "We owe you a great deal."

"Don't mention it." Amon smiled and waved it off with an ease that looked entirely genuine. "That blueprint didn't come from me anyway. It came out of one of my Jars. So there's really nothing to thank me for."

He said it lightly, almost dismissively, as if the point were hardly worth making. But the words landed exactly where he intended them to. Every head in the room turned toward the rack of Jars along the wall.

From the outside, they were perfectly ordinary, the same round shape and plain surface as any jar you might find in a market stall. It was nearly impossible to reconcile them with what Franky had described pulling out of one.

"That design really came from one of those?" Kokoro asked, studying them with sharp little eyes.

"It really did," Franky said. "Grandma Kokoro, you should try one. Best hundred thousand Berries I ever spent."

That was all the push she needed. Kokoro had come with exactly this intention, and Franky's endorsement landed at just the right moment. She straightened up and looked at Amon directly.

"How much for one?"

"She already knows," Franky murmured to Iceberg.

"Ten thousand Berries," Amon said pleasantly. Then he caught himself. "A hundred thousand. One hundred thousand Berries each."

Kokoro didn't hesitate. She was already reaching into her coat. A hundred thousand Berries was not a trivial sum, but it wasn't beyond her, and after what she'd heard, curiosity had fully taken the wheel. She counted the coins out and handed them over, then turned her attention to the rack with the focused energy of someone who takes selection seriously.

Yokozuna watched from beside her, blinking slowly, following her eyes from jar to jar.

After a careful study, Kokoro reached for a pale blue-green one, the color of shallow water in good light. She liked the color. It felt auspicious.

"A blue one," Amon said. "Good choice. Just smash it open and whatever's inside is yours."

Kokoro gave him a look that suggested she did not need instructions for breaking things, raised her hand, and cracked the Jar smartly against the shelf's edge. It split cleanly, and a small white pill dropped out into her palm.

She stared at it.

"There's just this small thing in there," she said, mostly to herself.

She held the pill up and turned it in the light. It was smooth, unmarked, completely featureless. After examining it from several angles, she looked up at Amon.

"I don't suppose you can tell me what this is?"

"You have to ask him," Franky said immediately. "He's the only one who can read them."

"Franky's right," Amon said. "Let me take a look."

Kokoro passed him the pill. Amon held it in his fingers and opened the system interface, letting the scan run.

*Body-Sculpting Pill: A high-technology pharmaceutical from the future. After consumption, allows the user to freely adjust their physical proportions at will. Even the most portly figure can be reshaped into a slender silhouette.*

Amon read it twice. Then he looked up at Kokoro, taking in her broad and generously rounded frame, and felt a particular kind of appreciation for the Jar's impeccable timing.

Kokoro had been a mermaid once, in the full sense of the word. The kind of mermaid that made poets reach for their pens. Somewhere between the years and the drink, that figure had become a memory she'd mostly made peace with. Mostly.

"Grandma Kokoro," Amon said, keeping his voice pleasant and even, "you have excellent luck today."

Her eyes sharpened immediately. "What does it do?"

Tom and Iceberg both looked over. Franky leaned in slightly.

Amon let the pause sit for just a moment, long enough for everyone's attention to sharpen, then smiled and said, "It's called a Body-Sculpting Pill. After you take it, you can adjust your figure however you like, whenever you like. Want to be slimmer? Done. Want to change your shape entirely? Also done. Your body becomes completely yours to decide."

The silence that followed lasted about half a second.

Then Kokoro made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a shriek and grabbed Amon's wrist with both hands, the white pill clutched carefully between her fingers like something sacred.

"You're serious?" she asked.

"Completely serious."

For a woman who had watched her youthful silhouette drift away year by year, replaced by the consequences of good food and better wine and the general indignity of time, the idea that a single pill could hand all of it back to her was not a small thing. It was an enormous thing. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that makes a person's hands tremble slightly while they hold a very small white tablet and try to remember how to breathe normally.

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