A/N: Hello readers, I really hope you enjoy this fic!
(BTW I haven't abandoned 'This Could Be a Catastrophe' and I have the next chapter half written, but I've lost all inspiration for it at the moment.)
EDIT: Rewritten & Revised 3 | 5 | 19
I had been in the world of One Piece for about a year and a half now.
A necklace that I had been wearing, something that I had purchased from an op shop because I thought that it looked pretty, had started to glow a furious red. It caused me to blackout, keeling over forwards and waking up to find myself aching all over, on an island in the middle of nowhere familiar. Ships would circle the island every now and then over the next few hours before a ship flying a very familiar flag picked me up after seeing the fire I had made with the lighter I carried around in my back pocket.
I knew that it would come in handy somehow.
(The necklace had stopped glowing, the colour had dulled and had become almost milky, as though the life had been sucked out of it entirely. As though it had fulfilled its purpose.)
The ship docked at an incredibly familiar site, that of Loguetown.
It wasn't meant to be real, none of this was.
I had to make my excuses and quietly thanked the marines for their rescue and made my silent panicky escape towards the Gold Roger bar. I had no money that was of any use in this world, but maybe they could use a bartender? Or at least I could pay off any drinks that I may or may not ingest in my panic as to find out what the freaking hell was going on.
I had to be hallucinating somehow.
But I wasn't.
The smell of booze got stronger and stronger as I got closer to the bar, drunk and unconscious pirates of all sorts littering the street and even partially blocking the way. Narrowly avoiding a dagger being thrown in my general direction, thankfully it wasn't aimed at my face or I'd be dead, I ducked into the bar in which a full-on bar fight was in progress.
The poor girl behind the bar looked to be in tears as the chaos continued, right up until smoke began to fill the room.
That could only be one person and I hoped that Smoker didn't latch onto me as a problem.
"You lot can't go five minutes without causing problems, can you?"
His voice was, unfortunately, familiar, and I really hoped that it was a dream but what happened next definitely cemented this as one of the pirates who had escaped being restrained by the logia wielding marine charged toward the barmaid, cutlass raised to strike.
They only missed because I had stupidly thrown the bag that I had been carrying over my arm in the way, the handle pulling it downwards by gravity with a thud and embedding the cutlass into the wood.
The pirate let out a scream of rage and frustration, as another marine snuck up behind him and knocked him out.
Smoker turned to me and smirked.
"You're new."
I didn't trust myself to speak, so I nodded in response. What the hell had I just done?
"Welcome to Loguetown, do try and stay out of trouble while you find your footing."
A group of marines rushed into the room, rounding up the pirates to take back to some prepared cells.
This happened often enough that cells were always ready apparently.
As the marines left, the poor girl behind the bar burst into tears, collapsing onto the bar in front of her. I looked at her more closely, she couldn't have been any older than fourteen, and all that had happened directly in front of her. She had almost died.
I walked over to her, mindful of the mess that had been created by the bar fight and put a hand in front of her so as to not cause her any more distress.
"Did you need any help?"
She jumped, not realising that I was still in the general vicinity.
"If I can do anything to help?" I prompted further, as she tried desperately to wipe away tears.
"If you would? It would mean a lot!"
She sounded a heck of a lot younger than fourteen, and I couldn't help but blurt out.
"How old are you, kid?"
She glared up at me through cloudy eyes, "I'm fourteen! I'm old enough to work here!"
"I wasn't saying that you weren't," I really couldn't afford to offend her at this point in time, especially if I was to be able to gain some sort of employment or even friend. "I was just wondering what a young women like yourself is doing working here by yourself."
This made her burst into tears again, "There was someone else!"
She was wailing at this point.
"He just started that bar fight!"
That didn't sound good.
"He's been working here to gather information on the marines! A wanted murderer! Not even a pirate!"
The girl had picked up speed in her rant, "I would welcome a pirate! But a serial killer! Who killed for the sake of killing! That pirate crew had been hunting him down because he'd killed their sister!"
She ranted a little longer, before losing steam, her tears drying up.
"Did you want someone else around to help out? I haven't got anything else on at the moment."
Or ever again really.
And this is how I secured work at the bar. Apparently, they kept loosing staff members to the criminal underworld, as that had been who had started that particular fight.
The girl, whose name was Burgundy Bailey, slept in a house she shared with her grandfather who owned the bar next door and offered me a place to stay when she realised that I had nowhere else to go.
I only had my backpack with me, and the bag of groceries that I had thrown at the cutlass when I arrived. My backpack was full of art supplies, my laptop and charger and a camera. I had no way of currently charging any of these things, except for the small solar charger for my phone and now it would never leave my body, the only thing that I could safely keep on me from a home lost. I had been walking home from the shops, after a long day at classes.
Classes that were now kind of useless to me, but groceries that I could at least use to cook a good meal or three before those supplies ran out. Bailey and her grandfather at least appreciated the lasagne I cooked for them in thanks for allowing me to stay with them, as well as for the job.
Bailey showed me to a small guest room, with a plush looking bed and a window that faced the executioner's block. Morbid, but I thanked her nonetheless, putting my stuff down onto the bed, pulling out my journal that I took everywhere with me, a photo of my parents and I falling out of it. It had been put into my journal as I had spilt oil paint on it a few weeks earlier, so it couldn't go back into the photo album that it had originally belonged to.
I cried myself to sleep that night.
And all the nights for the next two months, as I realised that this was going to have to be my home now.
I would never see my family again, and that was a cold hard fact.
The fictional world of One Piece was even harsher, more full of life than the manga and anime showed.
I had been trying to keep an eye out for Monkey D. Luffy and his merry band of nakama, but I had appeared in this world far before he had set out it seemed. But not too far behind, as I had the pleasure of serving his elder brother and his drunken crew many times before they too left for the New World and before he had become the Second Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates.
Somehow we had become friends, too, and he had offered me a place on his ship at one point.
Declining, I had told him that I was waiting for someone else and then I would meet him out on the high seas.
I needed to be a Straw-Hat. Something is telling me that that is the reason why Im here in this world. And truthfully I couldn't just sit back and watch from the sidelines whilst those terrifyingly incredible adventures were going on. There was a way I could become a Straw Hat and that could be to offer to write the adventure?
That could be something that Luffy would be interested in, especially if it stopped Nami from having the extra chore. It was a guess, but she was the only other person on board that ship that I could see (besides Robin, who wouldn't join until much later) to have the patience to write their stories.
I could swim, and in my time in the One Piece world, I could now fight.
The lack of pollution in this world actually helped out with my training, that and the criminals that continued to fight in the bar, and it was so nice to see the stars without light pollution, even if the constellations were not the same as back home.
Perhaps the Straw Hats would want a dedicated swimmer to back up all the devil fruit users on the ship?
The marines apparently needed decent swimmers, as they were almost universally incapable of actually being able to swim.
The first time I had seen their incompetence was when a group of apparently experienced marines were standing at the port, looking towards a flailing child and a screaming mother. Not a single one of them were going out to help.
I didn't even think for a second, diving into the ocean, avoiding the incredibly large fish with very sharp teeth that seemed intent on making me into their next meal.
The child at this point was unconscious and sinking under the waves. I dragged them ashore and began to perform CPR as the child's mother screamed at the marines for not doing anything.
The marines had absolutely no idea what CPR was when I later explained it to them. I honestly have no idea how they couldn't know what it was.
We're surrounded by water and the children of Loguetown for the most part, and these marines did not know how to swim apparently or perform CPR. After the incident, and the child's survival and a teary mother who almost squeezed the life out of me, I had somehow become the one person to go to for swimming lessons, partially due to my friendly and supposedly approachable nature. Parents would come to me on my breaks at the bar, curiously peaking into the building carrying small children at their hips, offering payment even when I told them that it should be a basic skill that everyone should know.
I think that was just the Australian talking.
Most parents told me there were only three ways for the children to learn how to swim. One was that a family member would teach them, but that was gradually becoming lesser and lesser. The second was to join the marines. Not even just asking for basic survival skills, no. You had to join up if you wished to learn how to swim and the majority of the parents and older siblings that I had spoken to did not wish to force their younger relatives into a career choice that they did not choose themselves.
Becoming a pirate, or even knowing a pirate was the third and final option. (And with the marine presence in town this wasn't always a viable option.)
Even so, the marines that I had met that day that couldn't swim left an uncomfortable mark on my psyche.
It seemed that the majority of the good marines were either those who had eaten devil fruits, not marines yet or named Monkey D. Garp, thus not actually stationed at Loguetown.
It had to be the time; the latest bounties had been released a the start of the week and a familiar face had shown up.
I gave my notice at the bar, and to the parents of the children that I had taught to swim. They all knew that I had been waiting for someone, and were disappointed but not shocked. I don't think that they knew, however, that I was going to attempt to join a pirate crew.
I'd been scouting along the port for a few days now, ever since the bounty poster of a certain Straw Hatted teenager had been issued.
I didn't want to miss them, as this would be my only chance (unless I somehow begged passage on the Cannibal's ship in two years time, but I could not and would not do this. Not if I could stop the whole Marineford debacle. This reminded me, he was such a fanboy of anything Straw Hat, would this include me in the future?) to get away from here.
And then I saw it. The Going Merry pulling into port. She looked just as I remembered, maybe even more magnificent.
I did the only thing that made any sense to me at the time and ran full sprint towards it.
"Monkey D. Luffy!"
The straw-hatted teenager turned around and faced me. It was odd, considering that I had been waiting for this for almost two years and now it was here I wasn't feeling any nerves at all.
"What do you want?"
His voice was exactly as I had remembered, although with a slight twinge of an accent that I couldn't quite recognise. (Maybe a local dialect?)
"I would like to humbly request to join your crew and serve as your chronicler, Future Pirate King!"
I could tell that I had shocked the crew standing behind their captain. This was the first time that anyone had actually asked to join the crew.
A/N: I'm going to try my best to write a long fic with this one. I'm far more used to writing one shots and really, incredibly short chapters. Whilst this is only the introduction/prologue, I'm going to try and write at least four chapters before university goes back at the end of July; if I can get those written, I'll upload them two-three weeks apart. (I can't guarantee this, but fingers crossed!)
Cross-posted on AO3.