Noblesse Privilege 13 (Patreon)

Commisioned.

Noblesse Privilege
Chapter 13

-VB-

As much as this was supposed to be a “date” between Vivi and I, it turned into a more informal sit and greet not just between us but with the crew of the ship.

Yeah, my ship and its crew served me, a World Noble, and that already placed their value above most other lives, but it was one thing to serve and another to directly sit and talk with a royalty.

I did that, yes, but I was also weird as hell.

Vivi was … normal. She was a normal royalty with all of the bearing and charisma that normal royalty exuded from their training and breeding, and it showed.

My crew was instantly enamored with her.

“This is good!” Vivi said with a smile as she chewed on teriyaki chicken.

The cook grinned happily at the praise. “Thank you, Your Grace! It is thanks to our captain and lord that we can afford such good ingredients and food!” he guffawed.

Vivi spared me a glance from across the table, and I felt my heart stuttering at her smile. This wasn’t going to go away, was it?

“By the way,” she asked me. “Why do you wear sunglasses inside?”

“Ah,” I uttered and fidgetted. “I … am a little bit sensitive to sunlight.”

“Oh,” she frowned. “Surely, it can’t be that bad?”

“Lord World Noble rolls around screaming and shrieking like a banshee when he looks at the sun for even half a second,” the traitorous cook reported to Vivi without a hint of remorse. “If only for the sake of the crew’s ears, he needs to keep it on.”

I gawked at him.

Bruh! I’m your paymaster! My glare told him as much.

The cook shrugged before glancing at Vivi.

Fair enough. Keep the boss’s important wife/girlfriend/potential girlfriend/friend happy and then the boss.

Our lunch date continued on in this manner, and I found myself wondering why she wanted to be here and allowed the crew to approach her so easily.

… Could it be that she was trying to figure out what kind of a person I was?

But that had me confused.

Didn’t everyone know about me already? I mean, sure, I wasn’t super famous like Donquixote, but I was pretty famous for my own exploits(read: exploits of the network of alliances created by me, maintained by me, and commanded by me)!

She daintily dabbed her lips with the napkin and smiled.

“The food is very exotic.”

I blinked before, once again, realizing that it must have been exotic for her because of where she was on the Grand Line.

The “Paradise” part of the Grand Line had its fair share of exotic foods, but at the end of the day, its islands and resources were all marked down, mostly well explored, and colonized. Islands that weren’t colonized were still regularly harvested by strong farmers, hunters, and fishers. Grand Line’s exotic goods, as such, was a result of ready resource of available manpower and resource management, which also made their exotic foods hard to find elsewhere in the four oceans.

On the other hand, the New World part of the Grand Line was anything but static. There was no way of keeping absolute track of islands and resource spots. Unless you were specifically from that island with an Eternal Pose, reliably selling resources of the island was impossible.

People have tried without the Eternal Poses and they have failed. Considering that some of the New World islands famous for their food lay just within Calm Belts, there’s a good chance those well-trained and brave(stupid) captains and their crews who wanted to save some money by not buying the super expensive Eternal Pose were dead.

Despite these difficulties, I had access to them because I had determined their rarity as a source of income to be sold not to the market but to my fellow World Nobles.

World Nobles who were quite rich, though not as rich as me, may look down on my dealings outside of Mary Geoise, but they sure as hell forked over money without care - which always drove their more budget savvy servants insane - when I told them about the “latest exotic fruit/fish/stuff from the New World that would be super hard for anyone else to find, but I can provide them for you because I have the means!”

In a way, I wasn’t just creating an alliance of island kingdoms, killing pirates, and freeing slaves; I created a base demand of World Nobles looking for exotic foodstuff and a political powerbase that could be bribed into doing what I wanted.

Holy shit, I hadn’t considered it like that.

(Maybe because when I first began selling the normal foodstuff people ate in the New World to World Nobles, there was a war going on that I needed to fund and was on the losing side, so I just didn’t give it much thought? Probably why I completely forgot about it.)

Wait, was that why pirates kept attacking my alliance?

Holy shit.

I didn’t even know I was luring pirates towards me and then got rid of them when they bothered like the pesky and noisy flies that they were.

…

Ugh, now I just feel embarrass-

“What are you thinking about?”

I jolted in place.

Oh.

Right.

I was on a date and then drifted off to my train of thoughts. Shit, am I rude as fuck! She probably already thinks that I’m rude, too!

Why brain? Why me?! Why do you do this to me?!

“Just … I realized that some of the work I have been doing has had unintended consequences,” I smiled weakly as I gestured to the food. “Like what we just ate.”

She blinked. “And exactly did we eat?”

I told her and where the food came from.

Her jaw dropped.

“Y-You mean you serve your crew dishes worth entire houses here in Alabasta…?”

I blinked.

I quickly did a calculation.

Huh.

Real estate here must be cheap as fuck.

I blinked again.

Real estate here was cheap as hell.

Alabasta would soon be an ally if the direction my stay so far had gone. I might have to talk with King Cobra about it, but I might be able to set up my alliance’s traditional military and trade outpost in Alabasta for cheap.

My eyes widened.

Hell, I might be able to make Alabasta an important trade hub by leveraging its positi-.

Brain. Stop. Lunch date with Vivi now. No trade thoughts.

“Say…” Vivi hummed as she looked out of the dining hall window (this was the grand galleon of a World Noble; windows for a mere dining hall were a thing because I had money to burn). “Is it for the people of my kingdom to enjoy this, too?”

I blinked (I’m doing that a lot) and then smiled in realization.

I met someone like me, apparently.

“I don’t see why not,” I hummed. “It’ll also make any kind of scheme like Crocodile’s really hard to take off.”

She smiled.

God, she was beautiful.

“I’d like that.”