No-one can remember how it started - maybe no-one really knew how it happened. One minute, there were nine people at the edge of a chasm, handmade gliders stretching end to end for an indeterminable length. The next, a howling, whirling twister was behind them, spinning out of the leaden, early morning sky above. The winds raked at them and at Luffy in particular - he was being driven and dragged and pulled over the cliff, where the gales whistled like old-style express trains booming through the valley.
"Luffy!" Zoro screamed, his wings almost strangling him, his hands wrapped around the hilts of two of his nanoblades as he used them to claw frantically at the ground. Desperately, despite the blackness of oxygen deprivation, the gang's lieutenant tried to inch closer to his vanishing captain. Rozo found it damned suspicious that the tornado was so intent on pushing against the rest of them, but pulling on their leader.
"Hang on, ya tumbleweed!"
And then the Duck was there, clawed feet ruthlessly savaging the closest wing, even though his own arms were bleeding as his hands scrabbled for purchase in the cracks on the desert floor. The cook's own glider had ripped at his shoulders horribly, the straps burning and splitting the flesh and feathers underneath - Orzo found himself sickened at the smell of cooking bird for the first time ever.
The hair on the tribal's heads suddenly stood up like the needles on a cactus; three seconds later, he ducked, temporarily blinded by the bright flash so close to him. Another bolt of lightning tore at the other wing.
"This storm is a straight-up freak-bitch twister!" Nami howled, her staff aimed at her lieutenant. Her snarled fur locked her into the contraption, but she was still able to duck and dive through calm pockets of the wind as she took aim again.
"I can't tell ya where'll go next! 'Bout as natural as a mutie! Get Mean Green free! He's the best hope for gettin' Luffy up! Robin, how's he holdin'?"
Robin's branches creaked wildly in the wind, her arms and feet strained by the rapid growth she had forced them to endure just so she could remain standing with Chopper's help - the young doctor's muscles rippled and strained as his radioactive form began to eat at his underlying physiology. Luffy's hands stretched to clasp onto her own woody appendages, but splinters from the uneven, unnatural extensions had already begun to stab through his palms. The blood was making everything slick.
"Make it fast! He's slipping!"
Franky grabbed B. Bones by the feet as the ghoul started floating past him. Together, acting as an overpowered light-blade, they hacked at the remaining hang glider behind the lieutenant, the rudder falling away as the laser sword disintegrated the supports.
There was another wretchedly hard squall and suddenly, Luffy was smiling at them.
"Too much trouble, y'all," he chirped, still audible over the hellish screaming of air around them. "I'll see ya when y'all get there!"
He let go Robin's hands.
[~~~]
"NO!"
They yelled as one voice, but to no avail - their cries were drowned by the mass of air pounding on them - all of them, except for Sogeking.
"Sogeking Scurry!"
The rest of the gang barely felt the disturbance of the air as the shadow sped past them, running flat out into the wall of air. There was a momentary pause - a brief second where all sound died and the winds calmed to nothing more than a gasp - and then the return of sound hit them like a physical blow to their eardrums.
"Reject!"
The boom that followed left Zoro and his brothers' ears bleeding for weeks and his sense of direction far worse than ever before - they were the only ones who were not able to cover their heads as the sonic wave washed over the whole lot of them. Despite the pain rendered by the sound, they were able to keep all three pairs of eyes open, which allowed them to see the impossible.
Sogeking - wearing that bloody stupid mask again - was now flying towards the chasm, one arm dangling oddly away from his body. Shards of some rock or shell or hardened, radioactive soil scattered behind the sniper and priest like the dust trail behind their mother truck as it zoomed down the highway on autopilot. Zoro's eyes almost fell out of his head when the Long-Nose angled himself over and into the heart of the tornado, which had now followed Luffy into the ravine.
While Zoro was the only one who could see, all of the others could hear the cry that echoed off the valley's walls.
"Usopp's Super Strong Spider Web - Trapdoor Version!"
The question of who exactly Usopp had been would remain with them for a long time - but not now. Now the gang would be too busy watching and listening and feeling a miracle and sacrifice as they occurred at the same time.
"Impact!"
Beyond all their hopes, a large, wire-mesh sack - much like a spider's egg-sac - rose up into the air in a graceful arc, falling with unerring precision back on top of the ridge where they had all been standing before the storm began. The bag bounced and jumped as Luffy's roars and screeches strained through the fabric, intense rage painting every syllable.
But it was too late - only Sogeking's echoing wail remained.
"You can't ever die - not here, not there, not anywhere, Luffy~!"
Luffy emerged from the sack, panting and wheezing as his anger choked him. As he started to crawl-fall-creep-scrabble-run to look over the edge, the other Vault-suits joined him, tearing limbs from paralysis and wresting senses from oblivion.
All they saw were broken wings tumbling over and over and over in the heart of the whirlwind.
"Stay alive~!"
[~~~]
They all peered over the ledge, wide-eyed, even as the sun began to sink in the distance. Luffy stretched his hands as far as possible, feeling along the walls of the cliff as Franky and Zoro sat on his legs to stop him from falling over again. Robin strained to use her roots to their fullest, nodules feeling deep into the earth and along the rocky walls as Nami and Sanji raced to provide her with as much water and nutrients as she could take without stretching the rations too thinly. Brook and Chopper went back down the slope, trying through sonar and scent to find any other possible trail down to the bottom that did not involve a two week-long trek on the highway behind their long-gone mother truck.
All efforts for rescue ceased when Luffy's hand came up with the shattered mask - blood fully flecking the inside goggles in a macabre spray.
Without a word, Luffy shook his lieutenant and engineer off of him and pushed himself upright. Swaying slightly - it was the first time anyone'd seen Luffy go without food for more than two hours, far less eight - the gang's captain trudged back to the remains of their fire from the night before.
He sat there, alone.
Eventually, he took some of the gritty, barren soil at his feet into his hand and let it trickle into the mask.
He rubbed the sand slowly - fiercely - into the blood stains, until all of the grains were tinged red.
He poured the sand out and began again.
For the rest of the night, the Vault-suits sat around that fire and watched Luffy polish out every scrap of blood, dirt and matter out of the cracked and crumpled mask. Finally, with the orange-tinted moon hovering in the night sky like the diseased eye of a fly, their captain spoke.
"I'm goin' after Sogekin' - tonight, not later. How many gliders we got?"
Franky didn't even have to think hard - he knew the answer, having spent the remainder of the day tearing each of them down and rebuilding as many as possible with the parts he could salvage.
"Luff-bro, we got four at your say-so," the android replied with a quick salute. Luffy nodded and turned his head up to count the stars.
"This is a rescue, but it's as dangerous as going in a mutie outhouse with matches. Who's coming with me?"
The leader of the Vault-suits sniffled loudly when every hand, hoof, paw, feather, tine, bone and bark stretches upwards. He managed not to cry, but just barely.
[~~~]
In the end, Zoro made the decision of who would go down the escarpment with Luffy. He ruled out the two women due to exhaustion - Nami was still sparking with static electricity and Robin's face was lined with stress cracks. Franky would need to stay to fix or create the remaining gliders and track the truck, leaving Brook to act as lookout and backup.
Chopper needed to come as their doc - if there was even the remotest chance that Sogeking was alive, the reindeer would be needed to work on the sniper as quickly as possible. Sanji and Zoro were going because there was no telling what had caused the storm - if something happened to Luffy and strength was needed, those two would definitely have it to spare.
No-one bothered to mention how to get anyone back up the escarpment - if Luffy and the others didn't send a radio or smoke signal or some other message within two evenings, the rest of the Vault-suits would follow the trail of the truck - the remaining rations would be just enough for them to get through, provided that their last maps had been correct.
They didn't stop to think about the fact that one of them already might not need rations ever again.
As the rescue team geared up at the edge, Nami loped to a pile of degraded boulders and skittered up to the top of the stack. She sat with her tongue out, her whole body stretching to feel for any more freak storms. Franky attached one of his ear units to Luffy with a thick strand of cyan blue hair-rope before strapping him in to the reconstructed glider.
The wind immediately began to pick up as soon as the belt was fully tightened. The men looked over at Nami, who could only shake her head and whine futilely as her hair remained flat, not even remotely ruffled.
Luffy pushed Franky back and let the wind shove him along, Zoro, Sanji and Chopper quickly forming up on his flanks and behind him. The rubber rad-boy was grinning his lunatic leer - the one that was licking Arlong's blood off his teeth and spitting fiery hell at Moria. The evil sheen was over his eyes again and his fighting mania quickly infested the rest of the rescue squad.
"Oh baby, you want me so bad?" the captain simpered to the crazed sky, shaking his hips in a way that spoke to his not-so-innocent innocence.
"You want me love you long time? Well, you can have me - if you can handle the price!" Luffy screamed as the tornado descended once more. "Come on guys! Sogeking's waiting!"
The four men laughed loudly, whooping like coyotes as they took running leaps off of the cliff.
[~~~]
He imagined that he opened his eyes - had to be his imagination, of course, because it was still as dark as the crack of his ass. Anyway, he imagined that he opened his eyes and wanted to cry as the blackness still loomed heavily over him, his body only a faint memory.
"Hey kiddo, long time no see."
He turned around as quickly as he could, somehow unsurprised at the lack of legs underneath him. He stretched his eyes wide as a patch of the darkness began to shuffle its way over to him There was a brief gleam that scattered steely motes throughout the completely mired landscape, but it ended swiftly. The shadow slithered closer, leaning into the sniper's face, peering intently.
"Wow, it's really been a while. You're best feature hasn't changed at all though, or else I wouldn't be able to confirm it."
He may have been legless, but he still had his hands. He flipped off the ambulatory shadow.
"Y'mean I still don't get away from nose jokes in Purgatory?"
Death stepped as close to the new ghost as he dared - secretive mirth filled the entity's eyes and the stark, embalmed laugh lines around his mouth began to dance.
"Well instead of trading insults, you can always follow me, get acquainted with your new digs, visit a couple pubs and then tell me a few stories from Above, hrm? Whaddya say?"
He shrugged and left the now unfamiliar, almost totally spent body behind, along with a small shot made of a rare silver dollar and salt and...a memory.
'Keep him busy until the others come...You can do it, Captain!'
"Lead on to the nearest undead and spirit-loving establishment, good sir Death."
[~~~]
Luffy and the others found that the tornado had a band of calmer, warmer air inside its funnel. With some minor adjustments, the four Vault-suits found themselves gliding effortlessly down to the canyon floor in a tight spiral just out of sight of the narrow, rocky walls that wanted to render the wings to kindling.
As they floated down, they tried their best to pick up signs of Sogeking's own precipitous descent. Every so often they saw scraps of cloth that may or may not have been from the pious sniper, but nothing conclusive came up until about half way down, where Luffy's seeking digits had found the mask.
They steadfastly ignored that torn, bleeding patch of scalp, with its sparse, matted locks.
Soon after-wards, they realized that the wind was slowing, making it harder and harder to stay aloft. Very swiftly it became a situation where luck would just have to be on their side - they couldn't stay in the air any longer and would plummet through the remaining darkness at any second. While rough, they managed to stick the landing without breaking any bones on the jagged, rocky floor of the crevasse. Without a word, they stripped off the gliding gear, and Luffy made an attempt to contact Franky.
"Tinman, this is Dorothy, come in Tinman. Over."
"Copy Dorothy, this is Tinman, we read you. Over."
"Eh ya! Capitan! We got somet'ing here!"
Sanji's bellow caused feedback on Franky's line - everyone above closed in on the android as they tried to follow the pounding of the rescue team's half-boots.
"'S cave," Zoro and his brothers grunted. "It go pretty far back too."
"Don' look good dat - we got sludge right dere," Sanji grumbled.
Chopper whined loudly, his hooves clicking nervously on the rocks.
"I smell a predator - big, big!" he moaned loudly. "But I also smell Sogeking - he's bleeding real bad. More than a night in there an' he'll go septic - he'll die and go ghoul or not die and mutate if we can't get him out real soon-"
"By tomorrow evening, Sogeking will be back with us," Luffy intoned - everyone heard the long-anticipated cracking of knuckles and the popping of large joints. "We're goin' in, my bitches.
[~~~]