The sounds of creaking wood and water dripping filled the air as Riley sat hunched over, trying not to vomit. Her world was spinning, but she refused to acknowledge her choices as a mistake, her pride wouldn't allow it.

Riley had decidedly opted for not getting food the past two weeks and instead chose to drink her new favorite beverage in excess. Any normal person would have died from alcohol poisoning, but she had the metabolism of a dragon- for better or worse.

It was very quickly proving to be for the latter quality, as she had found herself in the hull of some pirate's ship. The nameless pirate crew would have never been able to subdue her but gullible as she was in this state she had been promised more alcohol, instead being tied and bound as prisoner. Being incredibly inebriated, she was in no mood to move around or fight so she gladly kept her spot on the moist floor of the ship and sat quietly with a sour, dizzy look on her face.

The crew above had left her alone in their food storage for hours, seemingly not having a regular facility for prisoners. She would be rolling over to help herself and eat what she felt like once she found her footing.


(a week ago)


Riley burst out of the door of the bar after the owner had booted her for not having sufficient funds to pay for her booze. She was too drunk to stay grumpy about it but also too drunk to pay attention to where she was going.

The town was bustling with activity, much of it being due to rowdy pirates. Riley tended to look for towns popular to pirates because they almost always knew where the best booze was to be found. This particular one was closer to the grand line, but not beyond it. There were nervous regular folk mixed in however, which was not of the norm for pirate pit-stops. She did not think much of this though, she had one goal and that was to get drunk and have fun!

In her stupor she crashes into someone walking adjacent to the building, and in a sudden surge of sobriety she ducks under a flash of gold metal swinging directly at her face. Wide-eyed and alert, she stares at the person who had retaliated against her accidental rudeness. Standing before her was a tall black-haired woman, her scarred face snarled and angry.

Without rising from her ducked position, she carefully steps backward and eyes the woman. "S-sorry friend," she said as she stumbled a bit.

"Worthless," the angry woman growled, threateningly aiming the giant golden hook attached to her arm at Riley. "Move or I'll kill you."

In her drunken state, she was less inclined to suppress her attitude. She smirked at the woman and said, "Don't threaten me with a good time!"

The angered woman lunged at her then, and Riley sloppily falls on the ground to roll out of the way of the hook's swipe. She balanced herself on all fours with her eyes on the woman's back. The attacker turns on her heel and a tendril of some sort shot out from the woman's arm in Riley's direction, and with a startled yelp she ungracefully leaps backwards to get out of its way.

As she dodged the attack, she stared at the unnatural extension of the woman's body and realized it was made of coarse sand. She didn't have a lot of time to admire the strangeness of this person as her senses screamed at her that another attack was coming from her right, another claw made of sand trying to lash at her. She leaps off the ground and uses the wall of the bar to bounce off of and jump closer to the woman, who was growing increasingly angry that she couldn't hit Riley with her many attacks of sand.

Riley bounced up and down in an active battle stance, grinning at the woman. "That's really cool," she panted, "You control sand! Did you know sand heated up makes glass?" She dodges another attack. "You and I could make a wonderful team," her suggestive tone gave way for implications beyond her words as she winked at the woman.

The woman growled indignantly and scoffed, "Don't come onto me, you drunken pathetic homeless-"

"Oh look out!" Riley interrupted the slew of adjectives as she rushed forward and shoved the woman out of the way of a stampede of people running away from something.

Amidst their battle, they failed to realize that all of the pirates had begun to vacate the area and regular villagers had hidden away to safety. Not long after the chaos had started, they saw several armed navy soldiers coming from an alleyway. The villagers must have mustered up the courage to drop a hint to the navy that there were pirates in their village. That's fair, I guess. Riley thought with a shrug.

"Shit," the woman cursed, turning on her heel to run away.

"Oh shfugk," Riley cursed in agreement and followed behind her.

The woman snarled, launching a spear of sand behind to stab at Riley who had easily dodged out of its way. "Fuck off, trash!"

"But I want to hear more of these nice things you keep calling me!" Riley protested as she panted and kept chasing after the woman.

As the angry woman glanced behind Riley and saw the navy in pursuit, she snarled and gave up on getting Riley off her heels and ran out of the town into the woods. Riley laughed to herself with a hiccup and followed her into the safety of the forest.


(present)


Riley groans and spits out the foul taste from her mouth. She hadn't managed to keep anything down, so she inched back to her original spot and pretended nothing had happened even though the evidence was clearly behind her.

The pirates hadn't bothered checking on her once for several hours and half a day had gone by in a gruelling pace. The lowering sun's light shone through the open stairway leading to the deck of the ship. She occasionally saw people walking by doing their daily duties to keep the ship sailing smoothly.

The crew wasn't particularly anything special, they were all nameless wannabes who had gotten "lucky" in a bar and took the opportunity to "graciously pay for her debts" that she owed the bar. In their minds this meant they owned her now, and had put up a friendly facade with false promises of booze.

She couldn't help but grumpily repeat this thought to herself but she wasn't too worried. The pirates didn't seem to realize she had devil fruit powers, as the ropes were plain and the cuffs made of regular metal. She would wait out her horrible migraine and sickness in this peace and time of reflection she was given.

A sudden, loud crash and disruptive rocking of the ship broke her out of her groggy thoughts and she squinted toward the opening of the stairwell to see what had happened.

There were splintered pieces of wood being thrown through the air and everyone was shouting and running frantically around, gathering swords and guns in hand. She flinched as the wall behind her burst open and a cannonball blew past her, embedding itself further into the ship and wreaking havoc as it crashed.

The sudden spray of the sea sent chills through her skin as she grumbled and struggled to stand with her arms still bound together by rope and chain. She groggily snarled and made a stumbled approach to the stairs, trying not to fall over between her head swimming and the ship rocking against the waves and attacks from the surprise visitors.


(a week ago)


"This is a tree," the angry woman spat through her teeth, very clearly unimpressed.

"Yes," Riley declared with a grin and dove behind a bush and into a large hole in the trunk. "Very spacious."

Her new friend grumbled distastefully and followed Riley much to her own dismay. This was all very much beneath her, following a ragged-clothed girl into a tree. However she wanted to keep out of the navy's sights so she continued through the brush and into the tree trunk.

As Riley stated, it was indeed very spacious. It was actually surprisingly so, because Riley had disappeared from view. The woman looked around with a scowl on her face. The inside of the tree seemed to make way for a tunnel burrowed underneath that led to a cavern.

"It's a good tree!" Riley's call echoed somewhere deep within the cave.

The woman reluctantly followed after it. She found Riley sitting on a mossy rock near an underground source of water. The area was dimly lit with a blue hue which gave it an eerie but not unpleasant mood.

"How'd you find this place," the woman began as she produced a cigar from her coat and put it between her teeth.

Riley grinned at her. "I smelled out the wa-"

"Oh, I don't care," the woman said and lit the cigar with a fancily decorated lighter.

Riley scowled and pouted.

"Fucking navy will be sniffing around for a while," she said to herself. After taking a puff of the cigar, she opened her eyes and side-eyed Riley. "You could dodge all of my attacks. How?"

Riley squinted, pursing her lips and looking over the woman as if trying to decide if she was actually allowed to finish her answer to this question. It seemed more genuine than the last question, so she finally said "By using mantra."

The woman raised an eyebrow, but didn't seem interested in hearing Riley speak further. "You might be useful," she mumbled to herself.

"Lucky day!" Riley waved her hands in the air in pretend excitement. She rolled out of the way of a pillar of sand launched in her direction that had obvious intent to harm.

"Be quiet," the woman barked. "I have a job for you."

Riley found a new spot to sit in that hadn't been covered in sand. "Sounds fun! I'm not doing anything else!" She smiled eagerly, gripping the stone she sat on and kicked her dangling feet in the air.

"Of course you're not," somehow the response came out as an insult and made Riley pout again.

The woman sat on a stone across from Riley and crossed her leg over the other and carefully folded her arms. How she managed that with a giant hook for one arm was impressive.

"I'm waiting for someone," she began. "This place may as well be base of operations. I need you to find them and lead them here."

Riley cocked her head. "How do I know what they look like?"

"They will stick out like a sore thumb," she spat. "That's all the description you need."

Riley's brow furrowed and she tried to imagine what this character looked like to be that noticeable in public.

"You will also recruit others for me, others less useless than you preferably."

"Aw jeez that's like the whole planet," Riley squinted at the woman defiantly.

"I'm aware," she took a puff of the cigar.

Riley's self deprecating jokes weren't even reading that way but rather as facts to this infuriating person. It was flooring her. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the stone below her and her eyes twitched as she tried to keep in her frustration.

"You will call me only by Zero." The angry woman finally had a name to her.

"I am Ri-"

"You," Zero interrupted. "Will only be Miss Leap Day. Understand?"

"I already have a name," Riley protested.

"And I don't want it attached to my company."

The rock under Riley crunched under pressure but did not break. "Okay, you're lucky I'm bored and curious about all this."

Riley leapt out of the way of another stream of deadly sand that ended up exploding her sitting-stone. She landed daintily on another boulder off to her side; she was running out of sitting places.

"You're lucky I don't kill you now," Zero venomously retorted.

"Oh yes I am," Riley put her chin in her hands with her arms propped on her knees.

"You'll begin looking at sundown. They may not even arrive for a few days, but you need to look for them diligently." Zero ordered with another puff of smoke leaving her lips.

Riley grunted in acknowledgement. She lazily dodged another unwarranted swipe of the angry woman's sand powers and ended up laying on the ground on her side, chin still resting in her hands.


(present)


Riley let out a shocked cry as she was suddenly knocked backward after having climbed all the way up the steps. The person responsible for smacking into her was out cold and they both tumbled down to the bottom of the stairs. Riley lay there with the unconscious person on top of her, her head pounding too much to get up right away. She heard more footsteps as someone else ran downstairs and ransacked the storage area before cursing and leaving almost as quickly as they came.

Using her shoulders, she shoved the pirate off of her and struggled to get up again. She still hadn't freed herself from her bondage, so everything was made infinitely more difficult. Through blurred vision she saw that the man had been wounded mortally, and they would bleed out there. She grunted a lazy half-hearted word of mourning for one of her captors and slid back up the stairs, smearing against the wall for support.

When she reached the top of the stairs again she could see that the chaos continued. The large crew who abducted her were getting their asses handed to them left right and center. The attackers were few but they were definitely strange looking to say the least.

She plopped on the ground so she wouldn't have another falling-back-down-the-stairs accident and watched through half-lidded eyes. Her stomach still felt queasy and her head still spun like it was caught in a windstorm.

One of the attackers was a young man with short black hair, he seemed to have a growth on the side of his face. She couldn't make it out from her position so she slowly rose to her feet without paying any mind to her surroundings. This was of course a mistake, for when she squinted and took a step toward the man fighting she was caught off-guard by another attacker who roundhouse kicked her in the arm and sent her flying to the ground.

Riley squawked in surprise and landed hard, biting her tongue on impact. "WHYYyy would you DO thaaat," she loudly whined, her tongue sticking out of her mouth in pain.

The man who had kicked her was very tall and he wore a blue suit with bunny ears. He was screeching a battle cry as he posed dramatically, his hands aimed at Riley in a kung-fu type manner. "Stay on the ground! G!"

"Blruugh," Riley let her head fall back and she laid there with her head pounding in protest to all the abuse.

"Lao G," someone behind him called. "They're all down, right?"

Instead of answering like a normal person, he enthusiastically posed and nodded at his accomplice with a loud "Yooo!"

"Did you find anything Diamante," the other man with the growth on his face seemed unphased by the weirdness of his friend. He walked up to the two of them while carrying an unmoving bleeding man before dropping him to the ground none-too-kindly like a useless sack.

"There was nothing in their treasure room," the tall man with the black flower-patterned hat began. He was called Diamante.

A high pitched, grating voice spoke up. "Nothing in the larder either!"

Riley groaned loudly, the piercing voice terrorizing her migraine.

The men all looked in her direction as she writhed on the ground. The chaos had died down so she was the only other noise besides the sound of burning wood and the ship creaking as it took on water.

"Who's she," Diamante asked.

"I'm guessing a prisoner," Lao G declared. This was the man with the rabbit-eared outfit.

"You!" Diamante shouted at Riley. "Where are all the supplies and treasure?"

Riley sat up and looked at the lot of them. The four of them were very...colorful. "Mmyeh. Priz'nr." Her tongue still hurt so she childishly spoke badly on purpose. "They gah noth'n. Jusme."

Riley soothed her tongue and licked her lips as she stood to regain some sort of dignity. The men took a stance ready to strike, as if her swaying uneven movements beared a threat.

"They had no food? At all?" Diamante asked incredulously.

"They had food," Riley drawled. "I ate it all."

All of them stared at her in disbelief.

"And then I threw it up."

Diamante seemed to grow disproportionately angry and went to lunge at her but was held back by the large, imposing man with the shrill voice. "Just take her for now, before the ship sinks with us on it."

This ridiculous man's voice was like a chalkboard being raked with 300 uneven fingernails. It made Riley cringe inwardly in her... delicate state.

The man with the weirdly-specifically shaped growth on his face calmly walked toward Riley while the others squabbled and before she could protest she was hoisted over his shoulder. They all leapt across the gap between the ships and onto their own, non-sinking vessel. When they were all safely aboard, her new abductor let her fall on deck with a thud.

She growled and rolled over on her back to glare up the rude man. She realized the growth on his face wasn't a growth at all, but an entire uneaten sandwich stuck to his cheek.

"Did you have to do that?" Riley hissed at him.

He didn't spare her a look. Instead he ignored her and looked directly ahead.

Someone came out of the cabin behind her. "What did you find?"

"Nothing of value," sandwich-face stated.

Riley scoffed, "Everyone's so nice to me." She was thinking of Zero's lovely compliments as she muttered under her breath.

"What are you doing here?"

Riley perked up, carefully rolling to her stomach to look at the new person. She squinted her eyes and saw the familiar man towering in front of her. He was wearing a large, pink feathered coat this time.

"It's you!" Riley greeted, genuinely surprised. She drunkenly grinned at the man and said, "Heso."