Brook’s Bounty at 33,000,000 Berries

This poster is roughly fifty years old, and the man on it died shortly after it was printed.

Thirty-three million, issued while Brook was sailing with the Rumbar Pirates — alive, in flesh and music, long before the New World had heard of a walking skeleton. The portrait shows a man with a complete face. It is the only official photograph of Brook taken before his death, and it is still in circulation.

What followed was never entered into the file. The whole crew was poisoned in the Florian Triangle, Brook included. The Devil Fruit he had eaten returned his soul, but it took a year to find its way back to a body that had become bare bone. He then drifted fifty years through a windless sea, alone, on a ship full of his dead friends.

Throughout all of it, the notice stayed in circulation: nobody ever reported the subject's death — and the subject, technically, never stayed dead long enough for anyone to notice.

It is the only bounty here older than the people around it. Not one of his crewmates had been born when it was printed: Jinbe, the oldest of them after him, is forty-six, and the poster is roughly fifty.

The amount needs a word of context, because it reads badly without one. Brook joined the Rumbar Pirates fifty-two years ago, on their way into the Grand Line, and took the crew over himself once Yorki was gone. It was not a fighting crew: mostly musicians, whose stated programme was to sail around the world playing. Thirty-three million is what the World Government put on an armed violinist — once the leader of a royal combat convoy in the kingdom of Esperia, then a swordsman and musician. What the figure could not anticipate is that the man on it would still be sailing half a century later.