-Jaya-Late Afternoon-
-Montblanc Cricket's Residence-
-Time for Log Pose to Set: 1.5 Days-
The bell had landed about half a mile off. Presented with a tremendous golden bell falling from the sky for no discernable reason, the Straw-Hats were united in their desire to have wildly differing opinions on the matter.
Nami, briefly entertaining the idea that she had summoned the bell from empty air just by expressing her skepticism on the subject, also entertained ideas of summoning other such objects. She was vaguely aware that it was traditional to wish for half-naked men to fall from the sky, but… in the end she decided that an unclaimed bell of solid gold was just about as good a gift as it got. Her eyes were replaced by two pulsating Beli symbols, something that caused Naruto and Sasuke no end of concern, and then she dashed off towards the crater. The rest of the crew was unmoved by Nami's ocular antics. In the last month Robin had had to fish pink floating hearts out of her tea twice after Sanji had emitted them while serving her breakfast. Such was life on the Grand Line.
Robin followed their navigator shortly thereafter. The chance for a revolutionary discovery was palpable.
Sanji, seeing that both of the ladies had gone, decided to follow them.
Luffy paused just long enough to try and wake up Cricket, then forgot what he had been doing and dashed off in search of adventure.
Naruto and Sasuke felt compelled to check out the disturbance, but were interrupted by Usopp. If one giant golden bell could fall from the sky, the sniper reasoned, then two could as well, and no sane person wanted to be anywhere near that place. In fact, he screeched this at them while huddled in a ball inside the stone house. This seemed like good enough logic for the two young ninja, and Chopper as well, so they stayed back.
Zoro, sensing that they wouldn't be going anywhere else for a while, fell back asleep.
Chopper stood by the unconscious Montblanc Cricket. The man seemed to have just fainted from shock, but he was currently sleeping off extreme chronic exhaustion. Cricket seemed to have been pushing his body to the absolute limit, day after day, repeatedly diving and resurfacing. The ship's doctor decided to pass the time by grabbing his medical equipment and creating a medication regimen and diet for the man to follow in the near future.
He hoped it would work. Cricket had the look of a man who didn't listen to doctors. Doctorine had always been good at clobbering patients until they took their medicine, but that was all still a bit hard for him to manage. He had just finished preparations when his ears pricked up from a very odd sound. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible.
"What's that noise?" he asked.
Naruto stuck his head out from inside Cricket's house, swallowing a bite of stolen jerky. "I don't hear anything," he said.
Sometimes Chopper forgot that humans couldn't smell or hear nearly as well as he could. The noise was getting closer now. "Someone shouting? It sounds like it's coming from up above?" He looked up into the sky, straining his eyes to see.
"Yeah, now that you mention it… It does sound like someone shouting. But, I can't see anything."
"Something else IS falling! Up there!" shouted Usopp, pointing from the window of the house. Something- no, someone was falling from the sky some distance away. They didn't sound very happy with their current lot in life.
"Shit-Shit-Shit-Shit-ShitShitShitShitShitSHIT! FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-"
The unidentified figure impacted at roughly the same spot the bell had, striking the ground at a little under 120 miles per hour. The landing was fairly quiet from this distance.
Everyone at Cricket's house stood in shock.
"What's wrong with this place?!" yelled Naruto, distinctly worried by recent events. "First it's raining bells, and now people?!"
"D-do you think I should go over there?" asked Chopper, confusion filling his voice.
"A fall like that? He's dead, no doubt about it," stated Zoro, yawning.
"I gotta go help him! There might be something I can do!"
"Suit yourself," he said, then rolled back over.
Leaving his friends behind, Chopper transformed, assuming a four-legged form much more like the one he had grown up in. The wind blew through his thick fur as he went, and he was surprised to suddenly find himself distracted by the simple act of running. No matter how much time he spent in his compact and comfortable two-legged form, it was nice to get back to four hooves hitting the ground. He just didn't have the room to move around on the Merry.
Maybe he could convince Naruto to teach him how to run on the water like they did? Naruto seemed nice. Sasuke did, too, he guessed, but he was also a little scary.
Grinning at the thought of leaping over ocean waves, and then growing nervous at the thought of suddenly falling into the ocean, Chopper arrived at the edge of the crater quickly. He scurried down the deeply-pitted dirt walls with well-placed hooves. As he did so, he got his first good look at what had landed. Most of what he had thought was the bell was actually more like a structure, or an altar of some type. An immense, tiered platform nestled the gantry that supported the bell itself. The altar had cracked on impact, coming apart into three major pieces. The gantry had shattered into tiny fragments, the golden supports wrenched off of the platform. Miraculously, impossibly, the bell itself was still intact. Cracked, but intact.
All-in-all, it was hard to tell whether the bell or the ground had had the worst of the encounter.
Robin was standing in front of the bell, examining a dark stone tablet that was different from the rest of the structure, a reverent expression on her face. Chopper normally had some trouble interpreting human faces, but she was clearly awestruck by what she was seeing. She hadn't even stopped to examine the man who had fallen from the sky.
The others, Nami, Sanji, and Luffy, were clustered around a still-settling cloud of dust at the impact-site. Nami looked distinctly uncomfortable. Chopper arrived in time to hear her speak.
"But where did he come from?!" she asked, "The same place as this bell? There's nothing but clouds up there!"
"You think he fell from the clouds?" asked Sanji, in disbelief.
"How should I know? Where else could he have fallen from? Bells, and - ugh- half-naked men shouldn't just fall from the skies."
Chopper interrupted their conversation as soon as he was near. "I came right away! Is- Is he in there?"
"Whoa, don't look at me-" said Nami, "I'm not going to go check."
Sanji shook his head, then blew a cloud of cigarette smoke. "A sight like that, women and children shouldn't try and see it."
"W-well, I may be child. But I'm also a doctor," said Chopper, a nervous energy in his eyes, "-and even if he's dead we need to know what happened to him."
"Oh no," moaned Nami, "You mean something or someone might be taking people up into the sky and throwing them off of clouds?"
"W-WHAT?!" shrieked Chopper, "That's terrifying! W-What if it comes down here?!"
"So, what I don't understand-" started Luffy, interrupting their dialogue as he stared into the rapidly settling dust-cloud, "-is, if he's supposed to be dead, then why is he still moving?"
There was silence. Then, as the dust began to clear a pained voice uttered, "Fuck this up and down, both ways. Next time our Supreme fucking leader wants to toss someone off a damn cloud he can choose someone else. I'm not doing that again."
From the shifting clouds of dust, a figure emerged. A man, half-naked from the waist up, the tatters of torn, burnt, and blood-stained clothing falling away from his body. He had grayish hair that was wild and unruly from the long fall, but his face and body looked like a young adult.
"It's a ghost?!" cried Chopper.
"A ghost?" asked Sanji, "I kinda doubt that..."
The dust cleared entirely before their eyes, and something else became apparent.
"S-sir, y-your arms! D-do you need help?" asked Chopper, pointing.
Sure enough, the man's right arm was broken and hilariously dislocated. The left was missing entirely, torn off at the shoulder joint.
"What the hell's going on with you?" asked Sanji.
"Aw, shut the hell up! I'm trying to look for something," the man growled.
As the man walked, scanning the ground, something unusual was happening. Before their eyes the breaks in his arm began to correct themselves, straightening without complaint, the only sign of distress being a disgusting, wet noise as bone, muscle, and tendon moved beneath the skin. After a moment, only his dislocation and missing limb remained.
"Hey, Chopper," asked Luffy, face blank, "how's he doing that?"
"What? I don't know what's going on!"
"You're the doctor."
"Yeah, but I've never seen anything like that!" As Chopper spoke, the man fell to the ground, performing a vicious elbow-drop to the earth beneath his feet. With a sickening noise, the arm righted itself in its socket.
"Fuck, that hurt!" the man said, cheerfully. As he stood, he grabbed a thick metal cable from the ground that had been trailing from his waist. Coiling it around him as he pulled, he soon retrieved the object it was attached to: a wicked-looking red scythe with three blades set at the end, each one larger than the one before it.
"Hey, let's get the fucking pleasantries out of the way first. I'm Hidan. Anyone seen an arm around here? And don't say anything smart-ass like, 'where's the last place you saw it?' I had it with me on the way down, alright?"
Several of the assembled onlookers shared wary glances.
"Did you fall from the clouds?" asked Nami, just to be sure, "You were screaming like a madman. Why were you up there in the first place?
"I know, right?! I had no goddamn business being up there. And, yeah, no need to rub it in. It's my first time falling from that sorta height."
"Well, yeah, I'd hope so," she said, "but that doesn't really answer the question..."
"N-Nami, you're not supposed to talk with ghosts!" called Chopper, who was now quaking in place and hiding behind a nearby rock, all thought of lending medical aid banished.
"Watch your mouth you goddamn heathen. I'm pretty sure ghosts are an abomination unto the Lord Jashin."
"Pretty sure?" asked Sanji, eyes narrowed.
"Yeah, he doesn't exactly make himself very fucking clear, alright? Also, has anyone seen a huge-ass bell around here?"
Without a word, Luffy pointed behind the man. The bell loomed behind him, twisted and broken. Hidan followed his finger and turned to regard the immense structure. "Huh. Well at least the kooky shitlord has good aim, I'll give him that. It's all busted up and shit, but hell if I'm gonna take the blame for that."
"'Kooky shitlord' meaning the guy that threw you down here?" asked Sanji, "Your so-called 'Supreme Leader'? Is that the guy you were calling 'Lord Jashin'?"
Hidan whirled on him, eyes burning. "Like I said, watch your mouths, heathens. You don't get to say that name. And no, he's not the guy, but you wouldn't know who I'm talking about anyway. Real asshole, our so-called leader."
Sanji scoffed, puffing up slightly as another man tried to challenge him. "Well I don't really give a damn about whoever it is you're talking about, but despite my better judgement I am damn curious about where you came from."
"What, the sky?" asked Hidan. "You wanna know why I was up in the fucking sky? Tell you what. Help me find my arm, and then we'll talk."
This seemed a reasonable thing to do, but out of all of them only Hidan seemed to have his heart in it. A few minutes later, Chopper wandered past Luffy. "Luffy? Are you okay? You've been pretty quiet…"
Luffy glanced at the young doctor, then looked over his shoulder at Hidan, who was tossing aside small rocks in his search. "I don't like him. He's dangerous."
"Eh?! You think he might attack us?"
"Dunno. Don't think he's planning on anything right now. It just doesn't feel right. But…" Luffy trailed off, uncomfortably.
"But…?"
They searched in silence for another few seconds, Chopper no longer sniffing the air for signs of the wayward arm. Eventually, Chopper looked back at Luffy, who was grinding his teeth together, fists clenched and eyes wide.
"I wanna know what's up there!" he said.
Chopper swallowed, nervously. He trusted their captain more than he trusted himself, but all of a sudden he wasn't feeling good about the wisdom of their choices.
Despite her best effort, it wasn't long before Nami found the arm. She hadn't actually had any interest in hunting for this object, but had discovered the errant limb by tripping over it while gathering spare gold fragments into a pile. "Eurgh! Arm!" she shouted.
"Ah, sweet! I'll be right over."
Nami watched as the smiling, wild-haired man approached her. Something about him gave her the creeps, and she wasted no time in scrambling away from the arm nestled between the fallen rocks. Ignoring her antics, Hidan grabbed his limb and gave it a frustrated glare. When just shoving the disconnected arm onto its stump proved unproductive, he became lost in thought. Soon, he started thwacking his own limb against his shoulder like a baseball batter might do with a bat. His limbless shoulder made an odd motion, then stopped, and he looked puzzled for a moment. Then, Hidan used his lost limb to scratch his nose. After another distracted moment, he reached down and used it to adjust his crotchal region.
When he finally snapped out of his thoughts, the nearby crew, Nami in particular, were all giving him odd looks.
"Oh, shit," Hidan said, "I hate to be so fucking lewd, but what the hell else am I gonna do with it?" he asked, in his version of an apology.
Chopper had returned from his search and now moved hesitantly forward. Dangerous or not, there were some things he had to do. "Umm… Sir, are you going to be fine healing yourself, or…" He was lost for words for a moment, his training under Doctorine not having hinted at the procedure for such things, "…can I assist you in re-attaching it?"
For the first time, Hidan seemed to actually notice him. "What the fuck? A talking Tanuki?"
"I'M NOT A TANUKI! I'M A REINDEER! GET IT RIGHT, ASSHOLE!"
"Whoa, whoa whoa! The hell are you getting all angry for? Sheesh, I don't give a shit, whatever. Not the weirdest thing I've seen anyway." Hidan seemed to consider this for a moment. "You're a doctor or whatever? Cause- like- I can reattach this myself, but I've gotta hold it in place for, like, an HOUR or something. It'd be a big help."
After Chopper wound down slightly, he retrieved his bag and got to work. Chopper instructed his patient to sit down on one of the largest smooth fragments of gold.
"Sit down?" snorted Hidan, "I'm not gonna fucking faint on you or anything. Can't I just stand?"
With a frown, Chopper hopped up onto the makeshift golden stool. With the added height, he barely made it up to the taller man's chest. Hidan took one look at the tiny, scowling reindeer-boy and shook his head before sitting down as requested.
Chopper went to work stitching the arm back onto its intended location, and as he worked Hidan talked.
"Yeah, so we were out at sea, right? And I'm starting to feel like my God's telling me to do something, right? But we're just getting the hang of things, then all of a sudden we get blasted into the sky by a giant fucking whirlpool cannon." As he spoke, he added several entirely unhelpful one-handed gestures that made it look like he was carefully planting a sapling.
Chopper muttered an irritated, "Please stop moving."
"Whirlpool cannon?" asked Luffy, eyes wide, "That sounds so cool!"
"Yeah, sure, kid. So we land in these fluffy clouds, right?"
"Eh? It really was clouds!"
"Shut the fuck up, alright? Yeah, clouds. Or something, I dunno, whatever. Anyway, some dudes came by-"
"EH?! There are people up there?!"
"Shut the fuck up! Yeah, of course there were people, asshat. Some dudes came by and tried to pull some shit or something, so we kicked their asses. Then we went up some swirly cloud thing and some old bag tried to mess with us, so we kicked her ass too. There was a whole city up there and they got all uptight about something, then a giant cloud crab took our ship off to some island-"
Sanji stopped smoking for just long enough to interrupt, "Bullshit."
"What the fuck is wrong with you people?" asked Hidan. "Can't just listen to a goddamn story for one fucking second? Anyway, so then we kicked the crab's ass and then went off to where it was trying to take us, just 'cause. Big-ass island with big-ass ruins and bigger-ass trees."
"Ruins?" interrupted Robin from behind him, having returned from her examination of the Poneglyph, "Please, did those ruins look similar to the architecture of this bell? The same writing, or inscriptions?"
Hidan gazed over his good shoulder, giving her a quick look up and down that made Sanji bristle. The injured man sighed and cast another glance at the bell, then turned back around. "Yeah, sure. No gold, but sure, close enough."
"Robin?" asked Nami, "What are you thinking?" However, she got no response. When it became clear no-one was going to keep talking, Hidan continued.
"Bunch of assholes on that island. There were some sheep guys, and some natives who thought they were real badasses, and some priest dickheads who must have been high on something big-time, I don't even know. And trust me, I tried asking 'em what they were taking, but they played dumb. And I do mean that. Dumb. Like, unbelievably, ball-shatteringly dumb."
"Okay…" began Nami. "They were all teaming up to kick you off the island? Were they all on the same side?"
"Who the hell's telling this story, lady? And I don't have any fucking idea, alright? We killed the shit out of most of them the instant we saw them, what do you want from me?"
Nami paled and backed away quickly.
"Where the hell was I? So we started talking to a giant snake, and-"
"Whoa, whoa, hold up," said Sanji, "Snake?"
"Aw, shit. Alright. So we were going along and then we ran into this snake that was, like, ten miles long or some shit-"
Sanji and Nami just shook their heads, not even bothering to interrupt.
"-then right when it was starting to get angry it got flash-fried by a lightning bolt that came outta fucking nowhere!"
"A lightning bolt killed the giant snake?!" cried Luffy, jaw hanging open.
"Fuck yeah it did!" grinned Hidan. "Then some crazy-eared dude zapped into being right in front of us, saying he was a fucking god or some shit. And, man, good thing he did, cause things were getting boring. I was like, 'Finally, we've got a badass heretic to smite!', am I right?"
Luffy nodded in full agreement, clearly engrossed by the story. By Hidan's side, Chopper was putting in some of the final stitches.
"So, we started fighting him, you know, really getting into it. And he kept throwing lightning bolts and shit, right? It was great! I got really crispy a few times, but then things got weird. Creepy weird. We were just getting started with a kickass battle and he started freaking the fuck out about something and screaming at us to just die. Like he'd never had a spanking as a kid or something, I dunno. I was embarrassed for him. I mean, I've never seen anyone throw around lightning like he did, that's for fucking sure, but after we started getting the hang of him he just flipped his shit and left. Just ZZZAAP and he was gone. Fucking 'poof!'" Hidan made a 'vanishing' sort of gesture with both hands, then looked down at the newly attached arm. "Hey, thanks, whatever the hell you are. You do good work. It'll feel like new in a bit."
"You're welcome, I suppose…" replied Chopper, hopping down from his perch.
"So, wait-" asked Sanji, brow furrowed, "That's not the whole story, right?"
"No, but I'm just about fed up with telling it. Long story short, after he left we found that bell thing and our so-called Leader, Tobi, got real excited all of a sudden. But then Mister Thunder-Wimp showed up again riding a huge… I dunno what you'd call it. It was like a ship, but in the air. Like an air-ship? Whatever. He shot a big lightning bolt at us and it blew up one of the big vines supporting the bell so it just fucking fell out of the sky. That's when Tobi told me to stick with the bell and make sure it didn't go anywhere, whatever that means, then he grabbed me and hurled me off the fucking cloud!"
"And then you fell down to the ground," said Sanji. "Great. So, what was his plan? How does he expect you to get back up there?"
"Oh, who even fucking knows. I don't care. I can't ever tell what the hell he's thinking. I'm here with the bell and that's all I'm sticking my neck out for. He'll send me a ride before long though, I bet you anything."
A moment later, there was the sound of a large explosion off in the distance. The Straw-Hats looked around, confused.
"That sounded like it was back at the ship," said Nami, worry entering her tone.
"Yeah, I'll bet it was," suggested Hidan, grinning. He lifted his scythe with one hand. "Perfect timing on the story, too. Anyway, thanks for the help passing the time, but I guess that means my ride's here, so it's time for all of you to get wrecked."
There was no transition in the man's tone or manner of speech. Hidan was off the ground in an instant. Sanji barely had any time to jump back, reacting solely to the word and the wild look in the man's eyes, then the wicked scythe spun forward. It caught Sanji across the side, slashing shallowly into his chest. Blood slid down the blade, and Hidan smiled.
"Hey, nice dodge, man! That normally just kills people!"
Chopper and Nami were stunned. Robin was tense, but seemed unsurprised. Sanji pulled back, nursing the wound, and Luffy growled as he stepped forward. "That was a dirty trick, you asshole! If you wanted a fight, I would have given you one any time."
Hidan shrugged, slowing unwinding the thick wire from around his waist. With a lazy smirk, he let go of the three-bladed scythe, spinning it above his head at the end of the cable, each rotation bringing the blade's arc wider and wider. "Whatever, don't blame me for your expectations, shitheads. You knew I was after this thing. I gotta take you all to pieces before my so-called teammate gets finished with your friends. So… let's have some fun."