The flick of a lighter was the last sound Alex heard in his previous life.
An invisible gas leak, a cigarette lit out of habit, and then the world was consumed by a roar of fire and debris. The explosion didn't just claim his life, but the lives of many others in the building. Yet, darkness was not the end. When consciousness returned, there was no judgment, no pearly gates—only a gasp of fresh air and a blinding light.
Alex blinked, feeling strange, lighter. When he looked at his hands, he didn't see his own, but small, soft, unfamiliar ones. He was ten years old again. But the most radical change wasn't his age, nor the exotic purple hair falling over his forehead; it was on his back. An unusual weight—a pair of white, feathered wings—stretched out behind him.
He had been reborn in Skypiea, the legendary Sky Island. A second chance to redeem himself for past sins... or so he thought before the screaming started.
"YOU'RE NOT MY MOM! GET AWAY, YOU OLD HAG!"
Alex's voice, now high-pitched and childish, echoed through a kitchen built on solid clouds.
"Who are you calling a hag, you stupid brat?" bellowed the woman in front of him.
She wasn't a villain, nor a monster, but a mother on the verge of a migraine. The woman, possessing strong features and the same small wings on her back, held Alex by the cheek, stretching his skin with a mix of maternal frustration and contained fury.
"Eat your fruit right now!" she yelled, shaking him slightly. "You haven't had a decent bite in days!"
"Leave me alone! I don't know you!" Alex kicked and screamed, the panic of reincarnation mixing with the indignity of being treated like a toddler. "Let me go!"
The kitchen was a domestic battlefield. Sunlight filtered through the windows, illuminating a scene that would seem comical to any stranger, but for Alex, it was a nightmare.
"All you do is eat junk!" The mother didn't yield an inch. "You need to eat fruits and vegetables! I don't spend a fortune on quality food just so you can fill your stomach with trash!"
In her free hand, the woman wielded the cause of the conflict: a strange, threatening fruit. It was yellow, pear-shaped, but that's where the similarities ended. Its skin was covered in spikes that seemed to warn of danger and decorated with hypnotic swirl patterns. From its top sprouted a green stem curved in the shape of a lightning bolt.
Alex looked at the fruit with genuine horror.
"I am never eating that thing! What the hell is it? It looks poisonous!" Alex struggled, trying to push the woman's hand away.
"The vendor told me it's a unique fruit!" the mother insisted, with the conviction of someone who has been scammed but refuses to admit it. "She swore it has essential vitamins and only blooms once every ten years! It cost me a fortune, so you are going to eat it!"
The reality was much crueler: the market vendor, a stingy and cunning old lady, had found that mutant pear in her harvest. Thinking it was damaged or diseased, she decided to invent a story about its rarity to sell it at triple the price to the first gullible mother who walked by. And it had worked.
"I don't care what it cost! Let me go!"
The woman's patience evaporated.
"Enough!"
WHAM!
With a technique a professional boxer would envy, the mother connected a left hook straight to Alex's liver.
The air escaped the boy's lungs in an agonized wheeze. The pain was instant and paralyzing. Alex opened his mouth out of pure reflex, gasping for oxygen, and that was his fatal mistake.
The woman seized the opportunity with terrifying speed. She shoved the entire fruit into Alex's open mouth and, before he could react, clamped both hands over his lips, sealing off any escape route.
The flavor hit Alex like a chemical slap. It didn't taste like a pear. It tasted like rotten earth, rusted metal, and something indescribably rancid. He tried to spit it out, his watery eyes pleading for mercy, but his mother's hand was like a steel vise.
"Swallow!" she ordered.
GULP!
The sound was definitive. The fruit, spikes and all, scraped down his throat, leaving a trail of disgust. Alex fell to his knees, coughing and gasping, the residual taste burning his tongue.
"WITCH! THAT TASTED LIKE SH*T!" Alex roared, recovering his breath only to insult her, furious at the humiliation and the taste.
The woman's eyes seemed to burst into flames.
"How dare you speak to your mother like that?" Her voice dropped an octave, becoming dangerously calm. "It seems you need to learn a lesson or two about respect."
She cocked her right arm back, concentrating all her maternal strength into a corrective strike destined for the crown of Alex's head. The smack was going to be legendary.
"Take this!"
The fist descended like a hammer. But then, the impossible happened.
The instant the mother's skin should have impacted the child's skull, there was no sound of impact. There was no pain.
Alex's head came undone.
Where there should have been purple hair and bone, the woman's fist passed through a mass of crackling pure electricity. Alex's body elementalized, breaking down into thousands of tiny yellow bolts that sizzled with a deafening static hum.
The mother's fist passed right through, cutting empty air.
The woman froze. Her eyes bulged, nearly popping out of their sockets in an expression of absolute disbelief. In front of her, the particles of electricity coalesced, reforming her son's head. He looked back at her, just as confused, with small yellow sparks still dancing on his shoulders.
The silence in the kitchen was broken only by the soft hum of static electricity.
...Twelve years later.
God's Throne was, to Alex's dismay, incredibly uncomfortable.
It was made of solid gold, cold and hard—a monument to vanity rather than ergonomics. Alex, now twenty-two with an athletic build forged by combat and the electricity running through his veins, lay sprawled across the sacred seat in a posture no respectable monarch would ever adopt.
His eyelids felt heavy. The boredom felt denser than the clouds the sanctuary floated upon.
"What a drag... there's nothing to do," he lamented in his thoughts, letting out a sigh charged with static. Tiny yellow voltaic arcs danced between his fingers, the only sign of life in his motionless body.
However, in front of him, the reality of his divinity manifested in its cruelest form: a mountain of bureaucracy.
The precious wood desk creaked under the weight of unstable piles of scrolls. Tax reports, neighbor complaints, maintenance requests for the White Berets, and, most ridiculous of all, reports on road infrastructure.
"Why the hell do I have to worry about potholes in the clouds?" he muttered to the void, picking a paper at random and reading it with disdain. "Request to fill the hole on Milky Road 4..."
Am I a God or a public works contractor?
When he imagined becoming "God," he thought of adoration, offerings, and absolute power. He never imagined divinity came with so much administrative work.
His mind, seeking escape from the tedium, wandered to the past. To how he had come to sit in this golden chair.
It had happened six years ago. Alex, in the midst of adolescence and with the power of the Goro Goro no Mi mastered to an instinctive level, had decided that the old God was the only punching bag worthy in the sky. He didn't do it for justice, nor to liberate the people. He did it out of pure selfishness: he wanted to fight. He wanted to test his limits.
He remembered how he shot toward God's Shrine, transformed into a living lightning bolt that split the sky in two. But the fight... the fight was disappointing.
The old God (an elder named Gan Fall) could barely keep up. Alex was looking for an epic challenge to test his "Ultimate Techniques"—those attacks with bombastic names he had come up with during sleepless nights. But he found no resistance. The old man fell quickly, and with his defeat, the title of "God" passed to Alex like someone handing over an unlit torch.
But what truly cemented his status wasn't that private duel, but what happened shortly after: the 400-Year War.
Skypieans and Shandians. Angels and Warriors. Two peoples trapped in an endless cycle of hatred over a piece of land.
Alex remembered the day he stumbled upon the battlefield. The jungle of Upper Yard was burning. Screams, Dial explosions, and the clash of swords filled the air. To anyone else, it would have been a tragedy. To Alex, it was an invitation.
"Hey! I want to join the party too!" he had shouted from the sky, his voice amplified by thunder.
And he descended.
He didn't take a side. He didn't defend the angels nor protect the natives. He simply started fighting everyone. It was indiscriminate chaos. Skypieans, Shandians, captains, warriors... everyone fell before the storm. In less than an hour, the only man standing in the middle of the smoking jungle was him.
The centuries-old war ended not with a treaty, but with a massive technical knockout.
When the dust settled, the Skypieans celebrated. They believed that, since Alex was one of their own, he would expel the "savage" Shandians forever.
"Kick them out, God Alex!" they had cheered. "The Vearth is ours!"
But Alex, sitting atop the ruins of an ancient city of gold, yawned and shook his head.
"Nobody leaves," he sentenced, his voice crackling with menace. "But nobody keeps everything either."
He forbade the expulsion of the Shandians, recognizing their ancestral right to the land. But he also forbade exclusive privatization by them. With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, he forced both peoples to sign peace.
"Either get along, or I electrocute everyone until you learn to share." That was his diplomacy.
At first, the tension was palpable. The leaders of both sides looked at him with hatred, but the fear of his lightning was greater. However, as the years passed, something curious happened. That forced peace, born of fear of the "Tyrant God," began to transform.
Hatred turned into rivalry. War transformed into sport.
Now, instead of killing each other, they organized the Annual Games. A colossal event where Skypieans and Shandians competed to see who was stronger, faster, and smarter. There were no real prizes, only pride, but that was enough.
Alex looked out his palace window. Below, in the vast whiteness, he saw flying ships from both tribes crossing peacefully. They traded Dials for food, technology for culture. Shandians walked the streets of Angel Island, and Skypieans explored the jungles of Upper Yard without fear of being impaled by a spear.
They had realized their ancient hatred was stupid. The alliance was real. A perfect symbiosis born from the fists of a bored teenager.
An ironic smile curved Alex's lips.
The old God had spent decades trying to negotiate peace without success. Alex had achieved it in one afternoon, by accident, and only because he wanted to test how hard he could hit.
"Life's irony..." Alex sighed, turning his attention back to the pile of papers. "Well, I guess peace has a price. And that price is signing building permits."
With a grunt of resignation, he picked up a pen, charged it with a touch of static so the ink would flow faster, and began to work. Being God was much more boring than the legends said.
"Lord God."
The firm voice of his personal assistant, a Skypiean woman with rigid posture and a severe expression, broke the sanctuary's silence. She entered without waiting for permission, holding a report with the urgency of someone bringing news of war.
"A pirate group has just anchored at Angel Island," she announced, adjusting her glasses.
Alex, who until that moment seemed melted into the gold of his throne from boredom, sat up so fast the air crackled around him. A predatory smile instantly replaced his grimace of weariness. His eyes, previously dull, flashed with yellow electricity.
"Seriously?" he asked, practically salivating at the prospect. "Are they causing trouble? Are they burning something? Tell me they are challenging authority?"
The assistant sighed, accustomed to the bellicose nature of her deity.
"No, sir. According to Sky Police reports... they seem to be sightseeing. But they haven't paid the entrance fee, although they are buying souvenirs."
Alex's smile crumbled. He slumped back onto the throne with a dull thud, like a kid whose recess had been canceled.
"Sightseeing? What kind of pirates are they?" he grunted, disappointed. "What a waste. I wanted a legitimate excuse to go down there and break a few bones. But if they aren't breaking the rules, I can't just electrocute them for fun. That would be... bad administration."
He made a listless gesture with his hand, turning his attention back to the mountain of paper on his desk.
"Just keep an eye on them. If they litter or steal candy, let me know." His hand began signing documents at breakneck speed, turning his pen into a blur. "Now, leave me alone. I have to finish this before I go crazy."
The woman gave a formal bow and withdrew, leaving "God" with his bureaucracy.
Hours later, when the sun began to descend, Alex decided he had had enough paperwork for one day. He needed to hit something.
His body dematerialized in a burst of light and, in less than a blink, reappeared at the top of the Giant Jack, the massive beanstalk piercing the clouds. There, hidden from most, rested the legendary Golden Belfry of Shandora. And at its base, embedded in the solid gold, was a massive dark blue cubic stone, covered in ancient inscriptions Alex had never managed to decipher.
It was a Poneglyph. A piece of invaluable history. And for Alex, the perfect punching bag.
He took off his sleeveless brown jacket and hung it carelessly on a gold ledge. He stretched his neck, cracking his vertebrae, and positioned himself in front of the indestructible block. He adopted an Out-Boxer stance, light on the balls of his feet, maintaining distance.
"Let's see if I can crack you today," he murmured.
BOOM!
His fist, charged with millions of volts, impacted against the stone. The sound was deafening, like thunder confined in a bottle. But the stone didn't even flinch.
Alex smiled. He loved that block. He could melt gold, vaporize iron, and pulverize cloud rock, but that thing... that thing was the only object in all of Skypiea that could withstand his strength without breaking.
For three hours, the top of the giant beanstalk lit up with rhythmic flashes. Alex punched, dodged imaginary attacks, and punched again. Sweat ran down his back, mixing with the static. It was the only time of day he felt alive, far from divine titles and mundane responsibilities.
Returning to the fortress, exhausted but satisfied, Alex headed to his private sanctuary: the royal bath.
The room was full of steam. He began to undress, letting his sweaty clothes fall to the floor, and slowly submerged himself in the massive gold tub filled with hot water.
"Ahhh..." A moan of relief escaped his lips.
The instant the water covered his body up to his chest, he felt his strength drain away. His muscles, tense and charged with infinite energy, became heavy and lethargic. As a Devil Fruit user, standing water was his kryptonite. The shower was fine, running water, but submerging was different. It was a voluntary weakness.
He did it every six months. It was the only way to force his hyperactive body to truly relax, shutting down his internal "engine." He closed his eyes, enjoying the momentary vulnerability, letting the heat penetrate his tired bones.
The following days passed in a predictable routine: office, complaints, training with the stone, sleep. The tourist pirates hadn't caused the chaos he expected, and he had almost forgotten about them.
Until one afternoon, his daily visit to the Golden Belfry was interrupted.
Alex had just arrived. He was sitting with one leg dangling and the other bent, right on top of the Poneglyph, resting before starting his routine. That was when he heard footsteps.
Looking down, he saw a woman. She wore a white cowboy hat, a yellow shirt exposing her midriff, and tight pants. She wasn't looking at the gold, nor the bell, nor the clouds. Her blue eyes were fixed on the writings of the stone Alex was sitting on, reading them with academic intensity.
Alex smiled. She was rare. People usually looked at the gold first.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and observed her from his elevated position.
"Like what you see?" Alex asked, his tone drawling and flirtatious, enjoying the surprise on the intruder's face.
The woman, Nico Robin, looked up slowly. She didn't seem scared, just curious. Her eyes met his, evaluating the man who dared to sit on lost history.
But before she could answer, a shout shattered the quiet atmosphere.
"HEEEEY! YOU! HELLO!"
A cheerful, thunderous voice resonated from the clearing's entrance. Alex turned his head and saw a skinny young man with a straw hat, waving both arms as if they were old friends.
"I'M LUFFY!" shouted the boy, with a grin stretching from ear to ear. "ARE YOU THE GUY WHO MAKES THE THUNDER?!"
Alex blinked. The calm of his routine had just been shattered to pieces. And for the first time in twelve years, he had a hunch that his boredom was about to be extinguished forever.