Seven days have passed since Squid Girl departed from the Lemon Beach House on a much needed vacation from her inkvasion efforts. She was a small girl whose age was unknown to her future human subordinates. Squid Girl was garbed in a white dress with a hat and a pair of boots of matching color. She had blue squid tentacles for hair, which possessed powers superior to that which [most] humans could comprehend.
On her seventh day away from her surface home, she found an island where she was currently standing ashore under the deep blue sky, right next to a beached ship that had a large carved sheep head at the bough.
"A human vessel?" Squid Girl wondered aloud, peering around the sandy shore for signs of life. A sea breeze blew upwind, carrying the smell of salt as the water flowed and ebbed around Squid Girl's ankles. Finding no one, Squid Girl pressed forth, leaving the beach and ocean behind and entering the greenery that lay ahead.
Seeing this place reminded Squid Girl of the time when a group of human ghosts led her through the greenery to the sea. This greenery, though, was a little bit different. The colors here were so much more vibrant than back home. The air was so muggy and hot that Squid Girl wanted to turn right around and go back into the water. The problem was she forgot the way she came. She stopped walking. Large bugs buzzed around her, trying to get a bite of fresh Squid Girl. One particular bug, a mosquito the size of Squid Girl's hand, landed on her forehead and sank its needle-like biting apparatus into her. She attempted to squash the mosquito against her face with one of her tentacles, but the bug flew off and she missed, instead slapping herself silly.
Now with the vertical imprint of a squid tentacle up her face, Squid Girl picked a random direction and walked that way. Five minutes later, something straight ahead of her moved. She moved into hiding, behind a shrub at the base of a tree. That something moved again; it was mossy, green, and alive.
"What the squid is that?"
A twig snapped and the green mossy thing fell still. It must have heard Squid Girl's whispering. The green thing sank below the bushes, and a metallic clanking could be heard from just over yonder. A few seconds later, the moss rose into view and moved away. Squid Girl waited until it was gone before she stood back up and unintentionally rammed the top-end of her hat straight up the backside of a long-nosed man in brown overalls.
"Yeowch!" he cried out, dropping all the coconuts he was collecting to the ground with four massive thuds, and skittering back up to the top of the tree. "What the heck?! Zorooooooo, help!"
Squid Girl looked up at the hilarious sight of the panicked man. He was afraid of her! Nice. He was wearing a brown bandana over his curly black mane. He wore a white cloth sash and had a leather satchel strapped over his shoulder and hanging against his hip on the opposite side.
Squid Girl cupped her hands around her mouth. "Hey! Is that your vessel there on the beach?!"
Hearing Squid Girl's voice, the man in the treetop looked back down and saw that the thing that poked him was nothing more than a harmless girl in a white dress. He slid down and dismounted the tree, presenting himself before Squid Girl.
"That's right, lady. The name's Captain Usopp, and that ship's all mine."
Squid Girl grinned at him. She was supposed to be on vacation from her inkvasion, but there was no reason to let this chance go.
"Well, I'm Squid Girl, and I'm going to conquer the human world – starting with you!" All ten of her tentacles rose to life and writhed in the air, ready to capture this Usopp fellow. Seeing this, Usopp took a step back.
"What the…?" He reached into his satchel and pulled a slingshot and small black sphere. Slipping the sphere into the strap of the slingshot, he drew it back and took aim at Squid Girl, as he tried to mask his cowardly trembling with a threat. "You don't make any sudden moves now, you hear?! I'll open fire!"
"Go ahead, human," Squid Girl dared, "I'm going to take you prisoner~"
Squinting his eyes closed, Usopp let the drawn slingshot strap go, snapping forth the black sphere. The shot whistled through the air, traveling at such high speed that Squid Girl had no chance to block or evade it. The sphere made contact with her face and burst into a swatch of red hot sauce, splashing Squid Girl across her eyes, nose, mouth, and a few of her tentacles. Every orifice caught fire. Screaming in agony, Squid Girl swung all ten of her tentacles everywhere she could, trying to strike Usopp dead as she staggered around, blinded by the cruel but useful tactic employed by that human coward. She heard his footfalls fading as he fled the scene. Squid Girl stepped on one of the coconuts, which rolled out from underneath her and sent her to the ground.
There she wailed in pain. She'd been so easily defeated by a human, and now on top of being lost, she couldn't see. So she crawled on her arms and knees wherever she could, in whatever direction she had to have been facing. Still blinded, eyes still in the agony from the fiery red hot sauce, Squid Girl bumped head first into so many trees that she lost count. She listened for the ocean. Around the time that she wised up enough to use her tentacles to feel the area around her so that she wouldn't collide into anymore trees, the most curious irony came into play.
It wasn't until Squid Girl was defeated, down, and blind that she found her way at last back to the shore from which she started her exploration. Into the sunlight Squid Girl crawled, sand squishing beneath her body. She used her tentacles to aid her four humanoid limbs to help her crawl more quickly toward the water, where she could hopefully wash away the hot sauce from her face. She barely saw the shadow of the beached seafaring vessel, but she now heard voices coming from it as she crawled by. Among those voices, one of them blurted,
"That's her! That's the monster I was trying to tell you about! The one that tried to kill me! Do you believe me now?!"
"Gum-Gum…!" the voice of a powerful sounding boy echoed. "Grappler!"
A cloud of sand burst nearby and sprayed Squid Girl in the side of the face, some of it affecting her already burning eyes, which didn't help matters. Someone landed on the ground beside her. That someone, she could barely see, was wearing a red shirt and a hat made of straw. He smelled liked…
"Shrimp!" gasped Squid Girl. She turned ninety degrees and crawled toward the hat-wearing boy with shameless gusto. Poking and prodding around the sand with her tentacles, she eventually wrapped them around the boy's waist and lifted him into the air, searching beneath where he was squatting a second before. All the while, the boy didn't seem to mind Squid Girl manhandling him. He let out a merry laugh, and following that merry laugh he said,
"Coooool!"
Squid Girl dropped the boy down in front of her. "Who the ink are you, human?"
"I'm Luffy! What's your name?"
"S… ow-ow-ow… Squid Girl…"
"Squid?" He seized one of Squid Girl's tentacles and bit down on it. Squid Girl yelped and slapped Luffy upside the head with one of her other tentacles. He let her go. Breathing heavily, Squid Girl crawled pathetically away from Luffy as quickly as her arms and legs could carry her. She went head first straight into the flow of the tide, which over the next few minutes washed away the hot sauce that had blinded her.
Rejuvenated, Squid Girl stood up and faced the whole crew of humans who'd assembled next to Luffy in curiosity. There was a red-haired girl in a white shirt with blue stripes and short brown cutoffs; that mossy thing, which turned out to be the green hair of a muscular man in a ragged shirt and pants, wearing three swords on his hip; Usopp, the spineless human who shot Squid Girl in the face with hot sauce; Luffy, who looked like the most spirited member of that weird group; and another woman with dark hair, who wore a white blouse and denim jeans.
"Is she like Chopper?" the red-haired girl asked the rest of the group.
"No idea," answered the moss-haired swordsman, who shifted his strong jaw in appraisal of Squid Girl. "But I think Usopp's more of a coward than I thought, if that's what scared him."
"Shut up!" Usopp cried. "You didn't see her do what I saw! That hair of hers is no hair! Those are tentacles!"
"Well," the dark-haired woman said coolly, "we know she's not eaten a Devil Fruit. We saw her swimming around out there not long ago."
Luffy just smiled and stared.
Squid Girl stared back.
The staring contest continued. Until –
"Let's introduce her to Sanji, I'm hungry," Luffy said. That was when the red-haired girl clocked him in the back of the head with her fist. He took the shot like it didn't matter; his smile never vanished.
As she started to lose her nerve before this uncanny group of people, Squid Girl said to herself, "Oh boy. I think I'm in a squiddle bit of trouble."