I have a couple of monstrously busy days ahead and I'm not sure if I'll be able to post Wednesday or tomorrow, so I've decided to update now that I have some free time between classes.

I'm really happy to see the good reception the first chapter had, I was worried when I published it :)

I forgot to say something very important in the first chapter's AN. I'm an idiot. Well, here we go: I have decided I don't want any character that knows about the One Piece world, but as the series is well known it would be strange if none of the fifty people knew it, so they come from a sad alternate universe of our world where One Piece doesn't exist.

Chapter 2: Add bad luck to the mix

Thatch regretted opening his mouth almost immediately. Now everybody was staring at him as if it was his fault that all of them had been too distracted by the strange people-spitting hole that had appeared to realize someone had to get the other captain out of the water or he would die.

Well, saying everybody stared at him was a bit of an exaggeration: the crew stared at him, the newcomers seemed too confused to understand anything that was going on, though Thatch doubted they would understand much of it either way, as just by looking at them he got the feeling none of them had never experienced any of the strange situations characteristic of the Grand Line.

"Oh, come on, we still have the fruit, right? We only have to find it."

And, just like that, almost half of the pirates standing on the sand dashed off to the ships, as if they were in a race to see who found the reappeared devil fruit first. Some of them, instead of heading for the Moby Dick, went to the smaller ships they had with them, just in case the fruit had appeared there. Thatch noticed that most people disappeared from the deck as well.

Shrugging, he sat down on a vacated rock.

"Someone's bound to find it."

"What about them?" Vista asked, signaling with a gesture of his head at the still huddled strangers who apparently came from a whole different world.

"I think the nurses should talk to them," Izo suggested, and everybody in hearing range turned to stare at him, confused as to why he said that.

No one protested Izo snorted and looked at them as if they were idiots. He did that sometimes, and usually it meant they were missing some delicate point.

"Have you looked at them? They're terrified. I'm surprised no one has fainted. Talking to a group of women will be far easier for them than talking to any of us." And with that he gestured around, showing with his hands that he meant the whole group of pirates.

Thatch had to admit Izo had a point. Most of them were, at the very least, intimidating, and would do no good to those people's nerves. He almost chuckled at the thought of huge, serious-looking Jozu trying to get that group to relax.

Everybody agreed with Izo, and Thatch took it upon himself to go tell the head nurse about the plan.

They needed the group to calm down, as they would probably stay here for several hours still before everything was ready to send them home. Thatch could only imagine the fight that would break over the fruit if whoever found it didn't want to eat it.

This afternoon promised to be long.

Sarah had been the Moby Dick's head nurse for several years now, and she was proud of her ability to deal with many different types of patients. There were the tough men refusing to admit a wound hurt, the extremely tough men they had to hunt down just to treat their wounds, the ones who tried to appeal to a nurse's sympathy to get laid, the ones who tried to prolong their stay at the infirmary to avoid chores… But never, in all her years as a pirate nurse, had she dealt with scared patients. And now she had fifty of them, all looking lost, disconcerted, and frail, in serious need of reassurance that they weren't about to be killed nor had they gone mad.

She didn't want to promise them they would go back home, as she didn't share Thatch's optimism in their ability to recreate that strange event, so instead she instructed her girls to tell them they would do as much as they could to help.

The crew had a total of fifteen nurses, and she had separated them to go to the people who looked worse first.

Right now Sarah was with a short brown haired girl, maybe five foot tall, who was trying to convince her this was all just a strange dream, that she had fallen asleep during the boring class and would wake up to find the teacher glaring at her. Sarah was trying to convince her that this was no dream and, at the same time, trying not to trigger the same reaction than the previous girl had. That girl had been in shock, not really registering what was happening around her, and once Sarah managed to snap her out of it she had started yelling at Sarah, as if it was her fault she was here, and began crying while she yelled, finally quieting down and snapping at Sarah to leave her alone when Sarah tried to comfort her.

That girl now was sitting on the sand, curled in a ball and sobbing quietly.

It had been a while, maybe an hour, since the search for the devil fruit started, and for now they had only received reports of where it wasn't.

Marco sat on one of the rocks to the side of the group, far enough so he wouldn't disturb them but at a distance where he could observe them.

The nurses still hadn't been able to talk to all of them, spending a long time with each person and not obtaining very good results in most of the cases. The reaction Marco had seen the most, once a person seemed to finally understand what was going on, were tears. They burst out crying and the nurse with them hugged them, if the person allowed it, and comforted them until they were calmer, most of the times still sobbing, and then let them go to a quiet spot, probably to sort their thoughts out a little. It didn't seem to matter the age or gender of the person, Marco could count with the fingers of one hand the people who hadn't cried after talking to one of the nurses and he still had fingers left.

Most of the people were sitting on the floor again now, some still crying and some having sobered up a bit, most of them back in small groups of who probably were their friends; a boy and a girl that had to be a couple were hugging each other and muttering soft words; there was a girl still openly crying that the nurse with her had left with another girl who now hugged her, crying softly as well.

Marco had noticed, too, that the nurses were discreetly moving the people they talked to away from the ones still left, no doubt to keep a head count, and his eyes moved to that group. They were the ones who had been calmer, or perhaps it would be better to say less distressed, but they still looked bad.

A tall, skinny girl with platinum blonde hair sat on a boulder, a lost and somewhat defeated look in her eyes, that looked decidedly dull; a lanky boy with cropped dark hair dressed in loose clothes shivered noticeably and bit the inside of one of his cheeks, no doubt trying to hold back tears if the moisture in his eyes was anything to go by; there was a red-haired girl dressed in black clothes and wearing tall and black wedge-heeled boots that looked decidedly uncomfortable —Marco remembered she had spoken before— and tried to look indifferent to the world around her, but the insecurity reflecting in her eyes gave her away; and the last one was a brown-haired girl of average height, at least for what seemed to be the norm in that group where almost all of the girls were at least a head shorter than Marco, wearing a green dress and standing to the side staring at no particular place, probably lost in thought.

Marco was pulled from his contemplation when he saw Namur, who had been searching the Moby Dick with other members of the crew, approach.

Namur looked very serious, and Marco knew he wouldn't like the news.

"There's no devil fruit anywhere where we had fruits stored. It's not in our ships."

Marco resisted the urge to sigh and instead looked to the ocean, more exactly to the scattered wood floating on it that had been their opponents' ship.

"You think it appeared there?"

"Maybe. I'll take a look just in case, but perhaps we're lucky and some of them," Namur pointed to the group, "has fruit."

Deciding it was most definitely worth a shot, Marco stood up and headed for the group, looking for a nurse that wasn't busy with someone.

He caught Patty before she could reach the group of still unattended people and stopped her by the arm.

"Could you ask them if anybody has fruit amongst their stuff?"

She blinked, then understood they hadn't had any luck and nodded, heading back to the bigger group of people.

Marco really hoped someone had a disgustingly tasting devil fruit in their bag.

Evelyne Rockbell had always considered herself a rather rational and calm person, especially for someone of her age and generation. Still, that hadn't been enough to prevent her being completely dumbfounded when this ordeal had started.

She hadn't truly realized she was sitting in the middle of a beach until everybody around her, most of whom apparently had snapped out of it before she did, started yelling at each other, and then the tall blond guy with the weird hairstyle had yelled at them to shut up and took control of the situation much like a teacher would of a class of kindergarteners.

Though, looking around, she realized the guy wasn't as tall as she had originally thought. Oh, he had at least a head on her, no doubt about that, but this place was full of people whose height surpassed by much what was considered humanly possible, and it was seeing these people what made her discard the absurd idea of having been kidnapped by a bunch of lunatics or something like that.

Not that her other ideas weren't absurd. Or what apparently was the truth, for that matter.

She hadn't believed to be dreaming, as several people around her affirmed because, somehow, this didn't feel like a dream. She couldn't exactly explain the strange feeling she always got while dreaming, like having a thin fog wrapped around her awareness but not quite that, all she could explain was that she didn't have that feeling now.

Still, she hadn't started to truly react to her surroundings until the group who had gone with the blond man came back, dumbstruck, and the blonde girl, Evelyne believed her name to be Christy or something like that, said that they were in another world.

Another. World.

Chaos broke at that statement.

Then a group of what looked like a porn movie version of nurses came and started to try and calm them. That no guy made any perverted comment proved how shocked they all were.

The pirates, as all that people had introduced themselves, seemed to be doing something, but she couldn't even imagine what it was and her mind was in no condition to pay attention to their comings and goings in an attempt to figure it out, so she didn't bother trying.

Instead, Evelyne looked around herself, and a completely stupid and uncalled for thought came to her mind: after reading all those fanfiction where a girl from the real world fell into Middle Earth, she should consider herself fortunate for the circumstances. Looking at these people's attires, and the fact that many of them carried guns even if the guns themselves worried her, she guessed this world was a far cry more advanced than Tolkien's creation. With a bit of luck, there might even be toilets or an equivalent of them.

The nurse that spoke to her seemed relieved when Evelyne didn't yell at her as many of her classmates had done. The woman asked her if she was hurt —apparently there were some bruises and sprained wrists and ankles— disconcerted her by asking if she had carried any fruit on herself or her things, suggested she sat down and, being as Evelyne was the last person she had to talk to, told her now they would go in small groups to retrieve their things.

At that, Evelyne looked around and paid closer attention to the desks and chairs piled nearby, as she had been too stunned before to really pay them any mind. There were bags and some loose objects with them as well, mostly notebooks, pens, and the odd laptop or phone. All of a sudden, she felt the need to find her bag and everything she had carried that day, hoping her phone would work and allow her to ask for help. That hope disappeared as soon as it came: there was most likely no signal, and even if there was, she very much doubted it worked inter-dimensionally or whatever it was that separated her from home. Still, she felt the need to at least try.

Once all the nurses were finished, one of them, who seemed to be in charge of the group, announced the news to the class, and the women had to practically stop a riot when all of Evelyne's classmates tried to get to their things at once. They calmed soon enough when some of the pirates came. No one seemed to want to mess with the at least twelve foot giant and his friends, all of them obviously in shape and almost all taller than the tallest of students, Evelyne noticed.

She was in the third group to go to the pile of objects, and found quite easily her black backpack, that luckily had been closed at class. The notebook where she had been doodling was a little harder to find, and there was no trace of the pen she had been using. She guessed it wasn't easy to find a pen amongst all that sand, not that she believed anyone had even known it existed.

Right now Evelyne was kneeling on the sand, her bag open before her while she meticulously took out and catalogued its contents, just as everybody around her was doing, most of them grouped with friends to compare what they had.

As she had thought, her phone had no signal, and no internet access either, she noted, and she placed it inside her bag again.

Her possessions, she noticed sadly, were practically useless. She had her ipod, her notebook full of doodles, a couple of pens she always had loose in one of the smaller pockets, her wallet full of useless cards and some also useless money, an empty pack of gum she wondered why she hadn't thrown away, a pack of tissues, and a couple of pads she always carried just in case. For not having, she didn't even have the small bottle of water she usually carried around, having left it in the dorm that morning because she was too lazy to refill it.

Looking around, she noticed most of her classmates carried books with them, half the class had laptops that were now as useless as phones and, generally, almost everybody had more things than she did.

There were several people desperately trying to make their phones work, and others who looked as resigned as Evelyne herself felt.

She saw a girl burst into tears as her phone failed to make a call again; a guy who broke his when he threw it against a rock in frustration and then started cursing when he realized what he had done; another guy, for some reason, had pulled off the phone's cover and was fiddling with what was inside, perhaps hoping to make it work.

"There's no trace of the fruit," Marco announced to Pops and the other commanders when it started to get dark.

Silence passed between them.

"What now?" Vista asked.

"We keep searching tomorrow," Pops said, and looked at the group of people still sorting through their things, "but for now they need somewhere to sleep, and food."

"I think we'll have enough free beds between all the ships."

The Whitebeard Pirates right now possessed five ships, the Moby Dick and four slightly smaller ships similar to it, all of them currently anchored near the beach. Each of the smaller ships gave residence to three divisions, and four stayed in the Moby Dick with Pops. All of them had some free rooms, ready to accept any new additions to their crew.

"I'll go see how many beds we have in each ship, I think it'd be best if we didn't separate them in too many groups," Izo said, looking at the group that now seemed generally calmer than before, and walked away.

To be continued

Final notes:

- About breast sizes: I suppose I don't need to point out the obvious differences between OP women's breasts and real world women'. I did an estimate, seeing as Nami's and Robin's are big even for OP standards, and decided the average size, while in real life is around a B cup, would be an E cup in OP.

- I know there are many physical descriptions in here, I don't really like using them, but they are the best way, and almost the only one believable, for a character to describe others when he doesn't know anything about them.

Not much more for now, in the next chapter the plot will start moving.

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