Me: Oh, and before I forget - I do not own One Piece or any other copywrit materials that will be randomly included throughout the story. I do own my original characters, such as John Smith.

This is not a story you should read if you're looking for Straw Hats or many other canon characters. They will be included in a later arc but that's a while off yet.

There is swearing, dark elements, and bizarre-ness throughout the story. You have been warned. Chew on my limbs.

Introduction Arc

Chapter 1 – Hit the Ground Running (Part 1)

—Fifteen Years Later—

In a run-down town on the very edge of the Wasteland surrounding the high mountain of the spearhead-shaped Continent, a young boy watched the entrance carefully, hoping for outsiders to appear so he could apply his trade. In his case, trade meant scam the ever-loving crap out of unsuspecting travelers. He soon spotted a possible candidate approaching the town entrance.

The young man, eighteen or nineteen years old, walked purposely up the dusty path to the town. He was dressed in jeans, a simple, red t-shirt, and a trench coat. Glasses perched on the end of his nose, in front of sparkling eyes the color of coal. His black hair was a tussled mess perched on the top of his head. On his shirt, hidden by the trench coat, was an insignia shaped like an elaborate X. "This… should be the place… Carage, to the east of Jennsohn, bordered on one side by the Waste… obviously the largest building here…"

The small boy ran up to the teenager, grinning happily, and thrust his tray of trinkets out at him. "Buy somethin' mistah! I got all sorts of little charms and such like! Five dollars for one, nine for two, and thirteen for three. That's cutting my own neck, that is!" he added brightly. The stranger crouched and brought himself to eye-level with the child, looked him in the eye, and picked up a charm in the shape of a wolf's head, studying it.

"Well, kid, these are wonderful little trinkets, but I believe I may just prevent you cutting your own neck and continue on my merry way!" he said with a grin, and made to put the charm down and pat the child on the head. The teen then noticed a malicious smile plastered on his face and promptly tried to drop the charm. It didn't. More specifically, it was like someone had glued his fingers to it.

With a smug look, the child added, "Of course… the spell removal is fifty dollars more! Ha ha ha!" His laughter slowly petered out as the suddenly dangerous teen reached slowly and deliberately into the folds of his trench coat… and pulled out a business card which he held in the con's face. The boy's complexion promptly became equal to that of milk and stammered, "T-two dollars f-f-f-for the cah-ch-charm and thr-three-ee for th-the spell re-removalalalal."

Grinning again, the teen straightened up and quickly forked out five dollars, laughing when the charm unglued itself from his fingers and fell onto his waiting shoe. "Thanks, ya little midget! This'll make a grand souvenir!" Laughing again, he walked onwards, dropping the charm safely into his pocket while accidentally dropping the card onto the dusty road. It read:

Assassin X

Assassins for Hire – Oddjobs

John Smith

Scrawled along the edge were the words, "Goddamned ninja."

The little con hadn't quite learned his lesson yet. As soon as the goddamned ninja had turned the corner, he promptly marched up to the next stranger to the town, a slightly out-of-breath young woman. She was dressed in jeans, a t-shirt with an image of a dragon running up the left side, and a white cape of sorts and was carrying a long staff with what seemed to be the dinkiest double-headed axe on the end. Her hair was a silver color, with a spike jutting out and down right above her nose.

She was muttering angrily about goddamned ninjas.

The boy didn't lose face and cheerfully stepped up to her, thrusting out his tray. But, before he even started his con game, the woman shot an angry glare at him, stopping him cold. "Honey, I am a bloody enchantress!*" she snapped at him. "If you don't think I can spot magic like that from miles off, you must be one unfortunate little fool." And with that she stomped off down the street in the same direction as John Smith. Though completely unrelated to the story, the little conman walked back to his home in a bemused daze and convinced his father that the straight path was all the rage these days. Less likely to result in death, too.

By the time the girl had caught up with John, he was lounging against the wall of a large fortress-like building. Seeing her, he waved cheerfully before saying, "You're really out of shape! You should work harder at thaAAAAagh!" He was sprawled along the ground now, after being hit over the head by the dinky axe. The girl pointedly stepped on him as she walked off around the side of the compound.

She was chalking a large circle on the wall when John stumbled around the corner. "Sara… What'd you hit me for? Did I say something wrong? Did I? I'm sorry. Could you stop glaring at me like that?" Sara turned from him and back to her circle, chalking in another line.

Stepping back, she suddenly looked around with a confused expression on her face. "Say, wasn't Mr. MuscleforBrains supposed to meet us here?" she asked, looking at her partner, who shrugged and made several mockeries of a muscle-builder.

"Okay, Sonny Jim!" she started, brushing chalk off her clothes. "Up, over, and try not to get lost… again. 'kay?" She chuckled, reminiscing about something. With a dry, sarcastic laugh, John jumped ten feet up the wall and stuck there with his specially designed gloves and shoes. He crawled carefully up to the ramparts, waited as a guard walked past, and then slipped over and disappeared.

Sara Wilson leaned against the wall beside her and settled in to wait. John, on the other side of the wall, was clinging to the ceiling of a long tunnel that ran along the length of the structure. It had been designed so that any unwanted visitors** would be caught in a deadly crossfire without the attackers being placed in any danger. It was useless, however, for defending against people hanging from its ceiling.

A pair of guards walked past under him. When they were a safe distance away, he dropped from the ceiling and landed silently on the floor. Keeping low, he dashed after them, leaping back up the wall right before another pair of guards turned the corner going in the opposite direction of the first two.

When the pairs of guards had continued onwards, he dropped to the floor again and stepped through a door into the main part of the house. This hallway, unlike the stone tunnel he just left, had plush carpeting, paintings all along the walls, various expensive urns and vases lining the floor, and the walls themselves were painted a horrible green-yellow color. It was the sort of hallway you didn't want to be in for extended periods of time. John quickly left through the first door he found, yelped, and rushed back out, muttering about yellow.

A sharp voice cut through his yellow-condemning rant.*** "Get a move on you utterly moronic lunatic! Let's get this done so we can get lunch and head back to the Guild!" Sara snapped at him through the com-piece.

"Aye, I shall continue on my way through halls of hideous paint and pointlessly fussy carpets! Onwards!" he replied, dashing off to find a different door, one that would lead somewhere less brain polluting. Outside, Sara gritted her teeth and let out a small sound of annoyance.

After dozens of hideously colored hallways, he finally stopped to ask for directions from his partner. "Sara… I think there's something wrong here… it's like some sort of bad parody of a fun house in here! There's strange, distorted mirrors in here…" John struck a pose in front of one of the mirrors and yelped when it became disturbing.

Sighing, Sara leafed through the papers she was holding, finally pulling one out. "You're probably one floor below the main building. Get up as soon as possible!" she said with a sigh.

John immediately obliged her by leaping up to the ceiling and cutting a hole through it… straight into the guard break room. Sara flinched when the sirens went off and sounds of an over-the-top battle reverberated through her head from the com piece.

Her partner had engaged in fierce battle with the guards and, by fierce, we mean a completely one-sided massacre in the ninja's favor. Wielding two modified katanas in either hand, he flipped and dodged his way through the mass of burly man-flesh, slashing at legs and arms, resulting in roars of rage quickly de-evolving into screams of pain and horror as the hidden blades slammed home into soft, yielding flesh. Occasionally something exploded.

Quickly dashing out into the hall, he dashed up the large staircase to his right, screaming at his partner. "Which way! ? Right or left! ? RIGHT OR LEFT! ?"

"Go straight!"

"Straight! ? That's a wall!"

"There's no wall on this map!"

"Well, I see a wall right in front of me and it looks pretty damned solid! I'm not gonna try to run through—igh!" He charged into the wall. He came out the other side without any problems. "Ah! A trick wall to prevent people from getting into this room! Containing the mark! And fifteen extremely dangerous looking people!" He stopped in his tracks and waved cheerfully at the bodyguards across the room.

He yelped as ten of the fifteen swung at various points on his body, specifically chosen for their incredible difficulty of avoiding. The other five ushered the baron of the town out through another door as two of their fellows were flung into pillars, another two lost consciousness thinking about how much wheelchairs cost, and three more made strange gurgling noises as shuriken took up residence half way through their necks. The other four were extremely wary now.

John paused and did a quick headcount. "Wait, there's one more of you guys then there should be," he noted, cocking his head as he considered why that would be. The conclusion was one he wasn't fond of and he stood up from his crouch with a sigh, folding away his swords.

The four guards quickly glanced at each other, extremely quickly in the case of one, seeing as the extra muscled, black-suited, masked guard put his head through the wall. The extra's shirt exploded off him as his upper-body's mass suddenly jumped from burly to disturbingly huge in the space of half a second. The man ripped his mask off and accidentally slammed his arm into John, throwing him into another guard and the both continued on into a wall.

John got back up.

The guard he hit didn't.

"You bastard! Jacob, we said to meet on the outside of the giant fortress thing whatsit! Not suddenly popping up in a situation that I might kill you!" John yelled at the older man as he cheerfully strangled the last of the guards.

Jacob was a relatively**** large man, with a massive jacket that usually covers his chest. Its arms had been ripped off so that the entire shirt didn't explode each time he increased his arm mass. He also had an extremely rich laugh, the sort you would find coming out of the mouths of jolly fat men climbing down your chimney in the middle of the night without getting in trouble. He had short and spiky hair which was the gray of age.

Companionably hitting John's back (throwing him forward five feet), he barked, "HAH HAH HAH HAHmmm!… yeah, I got here a whole lot earlier and decided to do things my own way! As in, sneak in and wait for the perfect time to ambush people, preferably you. These idiots would be the next best thing!"

"I hate you. Now, come on! Baron Shawanna is getting away! And it's all! your! fault!" The teen dashed off towards the hallway the baron escaped through and ran headlong into an invisible wall. It was like the illusion of a wall that marked the room's entrance, except almost entirely different.

Gritting his teeth against the harsh laughter behind him, his hand dove into another pocket and came back holding a metal orb with a button on the top. It was a red button. Nothing good ever happens when you press a red button. This button, for instance, caused things to explode.

The burly adult had disappeared. A few seconds later, the ninja landed on top of Jacob's cowering figure. A few seconds later, the wall disappeared, both behind a cloud of dust and smoke and from being blown to pieces. Dashing out from behind the pillar, laughing maniacally, John dashed through the cloud of smoke and down the hallway after the escaping baron. Jacob peered cautiously around his refuge and jumped when something by his feet beeped.*****

* - (There are multiple classes of magic users, such as enchanters and enchantresses, wizards and witches, warlocks, magicians, sorcerers, sourcerers, and fairies (little bastards that they are).

** - (Unwanted visitors, such as peasants, politicians, lawyers, and mimes).

*** - (The rant followed a basic theme of, it's yellow, kill it. Among the yellow entities mentioned were talking sponges, pointlessly large birds, and yellow rooms with bizarre dots of not-color all over the place).

**** - (In regards to elephants).

***** - (The bombs John used gave people a chance to notice them before they went off, the cruel bastard that he is. This bomb looked just like the one which contrived to make a wall not a wall. A flag with the word "BANG!" on it popped out instead, accompanied by jaunty music).

Oh, yeah. The footnotes. They diminish as you get further along, as my writing style got... less stupid.