Yaya! Chapter three! My dad got out of the hospital. :3 Sorry I was so busy. Thanks for reading and reviewing. Here it is.

Weirdo Base Strikes Back

Chapter 3. Lies, Untruths, and Misconceptions

The shadow moved silently around the side of the pillar, exactly opposite it's prey. Left, right, back around, farther, closer, dancing in and out, always just beyond sight.

All was dead silent, except for the quickened breathing of one on the verge of hysteria.

One deft slide to the right, and the twang of a bow. It was over. At that close of a range, the target was dead beore it hit the ground.

Usopp unwraped the bandana from his head, unblocking his eyes and lifting his self-induced blindness. Looking down at the unmoving body at his feet, he knelt and yanked the arrow out of it's skull, dropping it back in his quivver in one swift movement. He could clean it later; good arrows were hard to make.

Cocking his head to one side, he just barely caught the anguished scream of another victim. He could make out the triumphant silouette of a woman seventy yards away, holding a bo staff loosely.

A siren sounded, and a welcome sound it was. -ROUND TWENTY ENDED. WINNERS ARE TEAM S, NAMI AND USOPP-.

A few minuets later, the two of them were back in their borrowed estate. Nami was polishing her staff in her room, and Usopp was lying on his bed upstairs. His bandana and his bow and quivver were in a pile in the corner, along with his battle mindstate and his cool indiference.

He curled up in a ball, facing away from the unfamillier room, shutting out the horribly wrong world around him. None of this was right, and he was the only one who saw it. Not even Nami, and she was the most sensible of them all.

He so dearly hoped that all of this was a dream. If it wasn't...

This HAD to be dream. It just plain wasn't fair otherwise. Luffy was dead, Zoro and Sanji were off somewhere else entirely, he and Nami were killing innocent people for no reason exepct competition, no one remembered going to sea at all, or their adventures together, and Usopp... he didn't know what to do.

He tried to tell Nami, but it was just like back home when his village was going to be attacked and no one belived him because he lied so much. Only, this time around, there were no galiant pirates to help him when no one else could. This time around, it was those very same galliant pirates that would never belive him.

He felt his arms go numb where he held on too tight. He shook, his emotions grabbing hold of his body. He twitched and trembled, and no one was there to see him, so it was okay. He coughed into his arms, a dry cough that left his throat hurting. He coughed, again and again, and he felt hotter than usual. He shivered and pulled the blankets around him.

A soft knock on the door.

"Usopp? Usopp, is it alright if I talk to you?"

"Go ahead and come in, Nami. You can always talk to me." He didn't quiet feel like it, but talking sometimes cheered them both up. He rubbed his arms for warmth and tried to seem a little happier, so she wouldn't need to worry about him.

She quietly closed the door behind her and walked over to his bed, plopping down heavily on the edge, her head hanging. She seemed pretty down.

He uncurled himself and sat up against the wall. "You alright?"

"Usopp..." her voice wavered ever so slightly as she whispered his name.

He frowned and put on hand on her shoulder. "Hey, Nami, what's wrong?" He took care to sound unrushed.

"Usopp, I... Tell me a story?" she turned her head to look at him, eyes pleading, like she really needed it.

He hesitated. Nami just didn't act like this. She just... didn't. Not if there wasn't something terribly wrong.

"Please..." she breathed.

"...Yeah, okay."

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, searching for a tale.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a giant goldfish?" She shook her head.

That wasn't correct, he had told her that story hundreds of times, on the Going Merry.

"Well, that's okay," he continued, "Because the story I'm about to tell you has nothing to do with that."

She giggled slightly, some of her previous expresion fading.

"The story I'm about to tell you has kidnapping, poison, deciet, and mockery to the extremely anoying level, and someone who chokes it all with a pie, and the funny thing about it is, it all started with a rat.

"Now, this rat was was a clever little thing, and it had stowed away on a pirate ship. What the rat loved the most in the world was evil. All kinds of evil, kidnapping, poison, deciet, mockery, anything like that. The rat loved it so much, it only needed evil to survive, even when it had no food or water. So the rat stowed away on a pirate ship, knowing that around pirates, evil was always lurking.

"The first morning after departure, the rat went up on deck. The first person he sought out was the first mate. The first mate, being a powerful warrior, was bound to be heartless and cruel.

"And sure enough, no sooner than the rat had come on deck, the first mate started fighting with the cook. Thier fight lasted almost a half an hour, but when it ended, instead of feeling full of energy, the rat felt more hungry than it had before.

"So, instead of staying around the cook and the first mate, it went to the the ship's sniper. He was known for telling lies, and deciet was a type of evil.

"But when he found the sniper, instead of lying, he was patching up a hole on the ship, fixing it. So the rat waited, and after a while the siniper started talking to the navigator, who had been frustrated by the first mate and the cook. He was telling lies now, about a magical island in their path that wold drown out any noise you didn't like automaticaly.

"After listening to them for a few moments, the rat started to get frustrated. It was even hungrier now, and it didn't know why.

"So it decided to go see the captain. If no one on the pirate crew was evil enough, the captain had to be. It ran all the way to the figurehead where the captain was sitting and looked at him. He wasn't doing anything, so it moved to a spot where it could see his eyes.

"He took one look at the eyes of the pirate captain, and do know what it saw?"

Nami shook her head. She had been listening more intently than he had expected, hanging on to his every word.

"In the captain's eyes, there was wonder, innocence, curiousity, loyalty, trust, and, -this is the big one- truth. Absolute black and white truth. All that baked into one pie, it choked the rat, and it died of starvation."

"... Did the rat fall overbord?"

"You betcha! And no fish would eat it."

Nami smiled warmly and leaned back against the wall, next to Usopp. "It died of starvation because of the captain. And it didn't even see the straw hat! Imagine if it did!"

"Yeah," he laughed, "It would explode or something." He closed his eyes, chuckling lightly.

When he opened them again, Nami was smiling straight at him. But, it was a different kind of smile than before. A murderer's smirk of triumph, like at the match.

No. A theive's smirk. Then it finally registered what Nami had said about the straw hat.

"You...!"

Nami's grin widened at his astonished expresion.

"You remember! You remember the Going Merry! I don't belive it!" he shouted in glee, "You knew all this time, and here I was thinking that you- Wait."

"I only remembered after you told me the story about the rat. I had been remembering small bits of things, and that's why I asked you to tell me a story. I knew if you were going through the same thing I was, your story would reflect it. It's because you think of them off the top of your head."

"Wow. That's actually what I was going for." Usopp plopped down onto the bed, eyes closed and grinning. "So how'd you get around the maines, do you remember?"

"Not much. I remember you falling. I don't think I'll ever forget that." She shuddered. "I think the marines tried to force me to drink something, but everything is hazy. They might've tried to put the four of us in a state of amnesia. You weren't there of course, so you weren't effected."

"That makes sense. I wonder why, though? Those are kind of wacky marines, with their Weirdo Base. Why'd they put you guys in there in the first place?"

"Don't remember that either."

"I'm still trying to figure out what the heck they did to Luffy. Why didn't they just kill him outright? It makes me mad whenever I think about it."

"..He's not dead, you know."

He opened one eye to look at her searchingly. "What do you mean?"

"He's not dead. I know that's what everyone thinks, but it's not true."

"How so?"

"Alright." She sighed, then looked back at him seriously. "Did you ever notice when Zoro sleeps so much after battles, but never really before them?"

"Well, we all knew he sleeps alot, but no, I didn't notice that."

"Back when just the three of us- me, Luffy and him- were fighting Buggy the clown, Zoro got really hurt. He wasn't as strong as he is now, but he still carried Luffy in a cage while his side was litteraly pouring blood, you remember that story, right?"

"Yeah..." Usopp could tell this was leading somewhere. He opened his other eye.

"Well, after he did what he could, the mayor helped him out. The mayor told us that he had tried to get Zoro to a doctor, but Zoro had said that he only needed a little sleep. Later on, when he had been fighting for a long time, and won, he conked out on the street. He did it at Arlong Park, and almost everywhere else when he needed to recover. And after he had his naps, he always was completely fine.

"What I'm trying to get at is, the exact same thing goes for Luffy. The only difference is, instead of sleep, it's meat. Even when we were at Syrup village. After he defeated Kuro, he almost fell unconsious right where he stood. I asked him something about the battle, and he said 'A steak would be nice.' I know he's not dead, because the last thing I remember seeing him doing was eating trememdous amounts of meat right after we got back to the Going Merry from Weirdo Base."

'It wasn't that much...'

"Of course it w..." Nami trailed off, distracted. "Usopp, you didn't say that, did you." He slowly shook his head.

'Hi Nami, hi Usopp...!'

To Be Continued...

Yup. There you have it. Again, tell me what you think! (Wow, my muscle memory sure lets me type that fast!) Happy Holidays everyone!