Chapter Text
Odalys Fenn had been one of the two Marines assigned to gently escort the folio woman away from the platform after the evidence argument, and she had assumed, handing the woman off at the plaza's edge with a polite nod, that her involvement in this particular saga was complete. She was, professionally, wrong about this, in the same specific way everyone at Marineford kept turning out to be wrong about which strange thing was actually over.
Forty minutes later, the woman was back, marching past Odalys with a fresh, if slightly more disheveled, folio and a look of grim, renewed determination, and Odalys understood, with the specific dread of a soldier recognizing a pattern, that she was about to be personally involved in whatever came next, purely by virtue of standing closest to the platform when it happened.
"OBJECTION!" the woman screamed, resuming her position at almost the exact spot she'd occupied during the previous incident, close enough that Odalys could see, with real professional alarm, that several of the folio's pages now had visible tea stains, as though the woman had spent her forty-minute exile furiously revising strategy over a hasty cup of something hot.
Sengoku, who Odalys suspected had genuinely begun flinching at the word by this point in the afternoon, did not even ask what the objection was this time. He simply closed his eyes, briefly, and said, "What is it."
"LACK OF BITCHES," the woman announced, with total, unwavering conviction.
The plaza went, for one long, horrified second, entirely silent.
Odalys watched the reaction ripple outward in real time, a Marine sergeant nearby actually dropping his spear, several officers exchanging looks of pure, disbelieving alarm, and, from the Warlord platform, an eruption of laughter from Doflamingo so violent that he had to grip the railing to stay upright.
"I'M SORRY," Sengoku said, in a voice that had gone very quiet, very dangerous, "COULD YOU REPEAT THAT."
"LACK OF BITCHES," the woman repeated, entirely undeterred, apparently mistaking the plaza's stunned silence for rapt attention rather than genuine, collective horror. "IT'S A LEGAL DEFICIENCY. I'VE BEEN RESEARCHING."
"THAT IS NOT A LEGAL TERM," Sengoku said. "THAT HAS NEVER BEEN A LEGAL TERM. I NEED YOU TO EXPLAIN, RIGHT NOW, WHAT YOU MEAN BY THAT, BECAUSE I AM STRUGGLING TO IMAGINE A VERSION OF THIS SENTENCE THAT ISN'T—"
"FEMALE DOGS," the woman said, holding up both hands as if to physically stop the direction everyone's minds had clearly gone. "I MEAN FEMALE DOGS. THAT'S THE ACTUAL WORD FOR IT. A BITCH IS A FEMALE DOG. IT'S A TECHNICAL TERM. I LOOKED IT UP SPECIFICALLY SO I COULD USE IT CORRECTLY, AND EVERYONE IS CLEARLY MISUNDERSTANDING ME ON PURPOSE."
Odalys, standing close enough to hear Sengoku's long, slow exhale, thought it sounded very much like a man recalculating, mid-breath, exactly how much of his remaining patience this particular afternoon was going to cost him.
"Explain," Sengoku said, finally, with the flat, resigned tone of a man who had decided the fastest way through this was directly through it, "what female dogs have to do with this execution."
"IDENTITY VERIFICATION," the woman said, brightening immediately, flipping to a fresh, tea-stained page with visible enthusiasm now that the conversation had, apparently, arrived exactly where she'd wanted it. "THERE HAVE BEEN, BY MY COUNT, AT LEAST THREE SEPARATE IDENTITY DISPUTES INVOLVING THIS PRISONER TODAY. THREE. AND NOT ONE OF THEM WAS RESOLVED USING PROPER SCENT-TRACKING METHODOLOGY, WHICH REQUIRES, AND THIS IS WELL DOCUMENTED IN ANY SERIOUS TRACKING MANUAL, A TRAINED FEMALE HOUND, PREFERABLY A BLOODHOUND, BECAUSE FEMALES HAVE A DEMONSTRABLY MORE RELIABLE SCENT DISCRIMINATION RATE THAN MALES IN CONTROLLED STUDIES. I HAVE THE CITATION SOMEWHERE."
There was a long pause.
"...That's actually true," said a voice from somewhere in the crowd, and Odalys turned to find, with a jolt of genuine recognition, Kennel Master Rufio Damsgaard, the same weathered dog handler who'd spent the earlier puppy incident sitting cross-legged on the cobblestones, scratching a Corgi mix's ears in the middle of a war, pushing forward with the specific, engaged urgency of a professional finally hearing his own field of expertise taken seriously. "I mean, the specific citation's probably nonsense, but the underlying claim isn't wrong. Female hounds do generally test better for sustained scent discrimination. It's not universal, but it's a real, documented tendency."
"THANK YOU," the woman said, with real, vindicated feeling. "SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS."
"I DID NOT SAY THAT TO VALIDATE YOUR OBJECTION," Rufio said quickly, apparently horrified at how this was being received. "I SAID IT BECAUSE IT'S TRUE. THOSE ARE SEPARATE THINGS."
Sengoku, watching this entire exchange unfold with the specific, hollow-eyed patience of a man who had genuinely started to lose track of how many separate crises had originated from this exact spot on the platform that day, held up a hand. "Even granting, hypothetically, that a scent-verification hound would have been useful earlier, which I am not conceding, I am simply moving past it to end this faster, we do not currently have such a hound available, and the identity questions raised earlier have already been separately, if chaotically, resolved."
"THEN WE SHOULD GET ONE NOW," the woman said. "FOR THE RECORD. RETROACTIVELY. TO CONFIRM THE EARLIER FINDINGS WERE ACCURATE."
"That is not how retroactive confirmation works."
"IT COULD BE, IF WE TRIED."
Rufio, Odalys noted with real professional interest, had by this point become genuinely, unhelpfully invested in the specifics of the argument, apparently unable to resist the pull of a debate that had accidentally wandered directly into his own area of expertise. "For what it's worth," he said, to Sengoku, "we do actually have a decent tracking hound back at the northern kennel post. Ferra. She's a good dog. Very reliable nose. I could have her here in maybe fifteen minutes if you actually want this settled properly."
"I DO NOT WANT THIS SETTLED AT ALL," Sengoku said. "I WANT IT TO STOP HAPPENING."
"FIFTEEN MINUTES ISN'T LONG," the woman said, and Odalys, watching her face, understood in that moment, with the specific, belated clarity of someone finally seeing the whole shape of something, that the entire scent-tracking tangent, however sincerely argued, however genuinely rooted in one accurate piece of dog-breeding trivia, existed for exactly one purpose, and it wasn't scientific rigor.
"IT IS TODAY," Sengoku said, with real, weary finality. "GUARDS. REMOVE HER. AGAIN. AND SOMEBODY TELL THE KENNEL MASTER TO RETURN TO HIS ACTUAL POST."
Rufio, escorted back toward the northern kennels by an increasingly exasperated junior officer, could be heard protesting the entire way that he'd only been trying to be helpful, that the science was sound even if the delivery had been catastrophically unfortunate, and that somebody really ought to write an official memo about proper terminology before the next major military operation, because this was, in his professional opinion, an entirely avoidable misunderstanding.
Odalys, tasked once again with escorting the folio woman away, found herself, against her own better judgment, walking a little slower than strictly necessary, giving the woman a few extra seconds before the crowd swallowed the whole strange incident behind them.
"For what it's worth," Odalys said quietly, "the dog thing wasn't a bad point. Buried under a genuinely terrible way of saying it, but not a bad point."
"I know," the woman said, sounding, for the first time all afternoon, tired in a way that had nothing to do with performance. "I really did look it up. I just also really wanted to see everyone's faces when I said it wrong on purpose first."
"That was intentional?"
"Everything today has been intentional," the woman said. "Badly intentional, but intentional."
Odalys learned, filing her own brief supplementary report that evening, that the fifteen minutes Rufio had spent being escorted back to his post, combined with the several additional minutes his own kennel unit had lost while their commanding officer processed the incident, had left the northern kennel checkpoint unstaffed at the exact moment two of Whitebeard commander Vista's advance scouts, probing for the same weak points the day's chaos had been quietly creating all afternoon, slipped past it unchallenged and reached a supply position nearly a hundred yards closer to the plaza's center than any previous breach that day.
She included the detail without editorializing, because by that point in the afternoon, editorializing on the pattern felt redundant. She did include, at the very end, a note about Ferra the tracking hound, on the theory that somebody, eventually, might actually want a reliable dog on hand, whatever the reason turned out to be.