Disclaimer: One Piece is the property of Eiichiro Oda. Many of the characters in this story are property of me. Do not use this story or its characters without my permission. Thank you.
Aboard the Buster Pirate's flagship, currently in-between logged islands and traveling briskly across the unpredictable waters of the Grand Line, the crew was on deck making a commotion over their newest little snag.
"GOOD LORD, WHY!?" Marco shouted.
"This just plain suck..." Zan said, dragging from his cigarette against the ship's railing.
"Of all the crazy crap we could run into," Rez said angrily, drawing his broadsword-cannon, "we had to run into this!"
"A-HA-HAWSOME!!" Bard shouted, the only pirate admiring the lethal Gigante Piranha of the Calm Belt's treacherous area. The massive fish-demon that swam beside the ship and roared didn't look hungry, but it wasn't going away. "Are there more of these things?" Bard asked.
"Who cares!?" his crewmen shouted. "Steer away from it!" Bard pouted and turned back to the fish, watching the sun reflect off its many human-sized scales. This was his first encounter with such a legendary thing, something he never thought existed, and he wanted to take it all in. "Hey Rez, are we still on course?" Bard shouted behind him. Rez was to busy loading his huge gun while Zan watched lazily.
"How should I know?" he screamed. He took a glance at the pose on his wrist to humor his imbecile captain but ended up doing a double take. "Everyone ignore the fish!" Rez shouted. The crew looked at him like he was crazy. "We need to pull a 180! We're going backwards!!" The crew decided to scramble, above and below deck, getting the Dampening sails ready to make a sharp turn. Bard, their captain, was busy getting his footing on the deck.
"What're you doing?" Zan asked as he scrambled to help.
"Saying goodbye, I guess" Bard said. "Soru Jump!" Bard disappeared with a loud blast on the wooden deck and the fish started to tilt a little. If one could look closely, they would see him next to the fishes eye. "Well, see ya" Bard said cheerfully to the monster piranha. "I hope you have a nice journey!" Bard jumped back, tilting the fish so much it was almost on its side, floundering its fins helplessly as they left the water. He landed with a thud back on the deck and yanked the sails up with one arm.
"What was that!?" Zan shouted in honest astonishment. The ship suddenly around, the winds picking up the Dampening sails, the ship heading straight once again. Bard hopped up to the forward deck where Rez was furiously holding down the wheel to turn the ship fully around, keeping a steady eye on his pose's needle as it turned.
"Rez!" Bard shouted over the loud splashing water. Rez glanced over his shoulder and nodded to affirm his attention to Bard. "I'm blaming you for getting us off course, so from now on you're our completely fleetless navigator, understand?" Rez let go of the wheel, sending the ship on a soft opposing direction shift so he could swing a mighty high kick into Bard's face. Bard stumbled back and Rez hopped back to retain his balance.
"Screw you, amateur!" Rez shouted. "I was an outlaw before you learned how to swim!"
"I doubt that" Bard fired back "cause I learned how to swim before I could even walk right!" Rez and Bard took a pause in their argument to snarl hatefully at each other. Bard smiled while he did, making his animal growl much more playful than Rez's. Soon, Rez huffed the incident off and pouted back to his wheel, steering the ship a few more degrees into the straightaway.
"Hey!" Rez shouted down to the deck, "Lower the Damp sails, we're good!" The pirates followed his orders and started working at getting the sails down. Then along came Bard, who did it by himself in no time whatsoever so he could go back and argue with Rez some more.
"Food call!" Marco shouted through the ship's built in PA system of amplification tubes. Every pirate on the expansive galleon rushed down into the mess hall beside the bunk room. A lavish, royal setting worthy of Fleet Admirals awaited them, with golden yards of rope for decoration and a fine dark-oak table that stretched to infinity. Bard sat at the far end nearest to the kitchen, while Rez sat opposite him. Zan sat right in the middle, sandwiched between the two parties of loyalty on the ship.
"We cooked all of today's catch" Marco narrated as he and his fellow cooks carried in the huge trays of meat, one after another with no end in sight. Bard was happy, droolingly happy, but Rez was glaring. He was so busy working up a nice, hot glare that he didn't notice the delicious food in front of him and his pirate loyals stole it from under his nose.
"Hey!" he shouted, snapping back to the present, "that's my chunk!"
"Like hell it is!" the thieving pirate snapped back. While Rez wrestled his stolen food away, another pirate swiped more meat from his plate. The table end became a comedy for the rest of the crew who watched on at close. Zan shifted occasionally between the mediocre slapstick with Rez and the debacle of human consumption that Bard was performing, eating whole fish bone and all without a minor gag.
"This is delicious!" Bard shouted happily, his cheeks brimming full with foodstuff. His loyals, the strongest and otherwise biggest pirates, were cheering him on as he stole from their respective caches of fish meat. Zan was entertained, as emotionless as he decided to show it, but he was a subsistence eater. He had well over eighty-percent of his fish left and more than half a cup of grog when he was unable to eat anymore.
"I don't think that girl is coming down here to eat" Zan said. He picked up his platter of food and emptied his cup to make room for water, then departed the long way for the deck.
"Hey!" he heard one pirate shout as he left, "who's steering?"
Up on the fore deck, Maxwell was snoring monstrously as his feet carefully nudged the wheel a few degrees in one direction. The pose was straight, dead ahead for only a few more days to whatever island they would get to. Zan passed him by and admired the evening sky, orange with a hint of light purple from the coming blue night. It was nice. He walked over to the captain's room and knocked on the door with his free hand.
"Who is it?" Araly asked from her hammock. Zan opened the door and entered unannounced.
"Catering" he joked. She closed the book she was reading and scowled at him, despite the fact that he was bringing her food. "I still don't know why you're so angry at me" he debated calmly. "I haven't done anything to you that I'm aware of." Araly huffed and picked at the food he handed her. Zan waited for a moment for some kind of reply, even an angry one, but seeing none too soon he sighed and started phasing through the wood.
"I don't agree with you" she said before Zan left completely. He stopped and phased back up.
"Eh?" he said.
"There are other ways to settle disputes" she started self-righteously, "even wars. Killing people isn't always an option. In fact, it never should be." Zan was moved by her, just a little, because he had often thought that as well...when he didn't know any better.
"You should tell that to Dragon" he joked. "I'll bet you can change his mind if you try." As Zan laughed softly to himself, Araly glared out of the corner of her eye.
"Well, whatever you do on this ship" she started in a very serious way "stay away from Bard." Zan froze for a second. "Bard may be strong, but he's very impressionable. If he's around a killer like you for too long, he'll become a killer too, and then what will I tell his mother?" She angrily chewed her food while Zan peered at her out of the corner of his eye in disbelief.
"I can't believe this" he said, holding a hand to his head. Araly looked at hi, with one eye open. "That old man was really right..."
"Who?" Araly prodded. "About what?"
"Dragon" he said nostalgically, "about me." Araly's eyes poured over with terror for a moment. "He always told me that to be a truly great man, I have to have a greater wind at my back. You know who Dragon idolizes the most as the wind that guides him?" Zan asked. Araly shook her head, not from not knowing the answer but from not wanting to know anything about such a heinous man. "...his wife..." Araly started to choke. It was too much for her, comparing the Revolutionary to a normal person. Zan rushed over and phased his fingers steadily into her throat, pulling out the offending chunk of bone and tossing it out before descending through the floor stealthily.
"No no NO!" Araly shouted in her solace. "I don't want to be on the same ship as him! I;ll get an enormous bounty for sure!!" She started kicking in her hammock and nearly fell out, but her common sense kicked back in and she caught herself. "...right" she started. "Right! Bard's the Captain here, so I just have to tell him to kick Zan off the ship!" She was smiling at first, but then her smile got wiped away. "Oh, but Bard was so excited to get a new member like that" she said sadly. "I can't tell him to do that..." A black cloud of confusion was gathering in her mind.
"Woah" Zan said, peeking into the dinning hall upside down from the woodwork. "I missed on great party." Indeed, the signs of a pirate party were present. More than half the crew was unconscious, the furniture was broken, and Bard and Rez were standing across the room from each other ready to fight. Rez had his huge sword out and Bard just stood with a smile and crossed arms. Zan dropped down and landed elegantly into a still-intact seat. "Begin!" he shouted. Neither man made a motion to charge, but instead Rez stowed his weapon and equipped a crooked smile of his own.
"I've got an idea!" he announced. Bard, Zan, and the still awake pirates listened in. "We'll have a contest to decide who the Captain of the Buster Pirates will be!" Zan leaned in, intrigued, while Bard tilted his head curiously. "Not only that, but the Captain will get to name the ship! After this, no one else can try to be captain again. Hell, even I'll settle for it!"
"No way" Bard declared. "We already had a contest, remember? I won" Rez snapped into a snarl at the mention of that cheap trick."
"Yeah!" one of Bard's drunken faithfuls shouted. "Bard's the Captain! Max said so!"
"MAX IS TOO LAZY TO MAKE DECISIONS!!" Rez shouted with a flaming aura of hate. He panted with his arms tensely flexed for a while before his thoughts regathered. Before he could regain his ground, Bard stepped in.
"Well, fine Rez" he said with a cock-sure grin. "What can we do to convince you that I'm the Captain here?" Rez smiled deviously.
"Now that's more--"
"Hold" Zan interrupted, standing up with a cigarette out of nowhere in his mouth. "This contest should be open to everyone, so I'll participate as well" he announced. Rez clenched his teeth and growled in anger, while Bard just shrugged.
"Sure, that's fine" he said.
"Alright!" Rez shouted again. "Tomorrow morning, we'll settle this! And I'll guarantee you, I'll win!" The three menacing men stared each other down in a triangular jolt of competitive glares. Zan glared at Rez who hatefully glared at Bard who was grinning at Zan. The remaining pirates had already crawled out and were retreating to the bunk room.
"Those guys are scary" one said.
"Just think" another mused, "at one point, they all could have been our enemies instead!"
"Shhh!" one of the husky pirates shushed, pulling his arms in close with fear. "You'll give us nightmares with that kind of talk!" The pirates nodded in agreement while they heard the stomping of feet in the next room of their superiors going off in their own directions to bed. Rez slept on the deck, Zan slept in the crow's nest and Bard of course went to his bedroom.
"Night Araly!" he cheerfully said as he hopped into his lavish bed. Araly listened to him stir restlessly from her hammock on the other side of the room and found it hard to relax on a ship filled with killers and marauding maniacs aplenty.
"Bard" she called. "I'm scared." Bard sat up and chuckled in his goofy, happy way that made Araly more curious than angry.
"Why?" he asked. "Everyone here's nice, even Rez in his own kinda cruel way. Plus, they all know how sick you get, so they won't bother you." Araly could feel herself drifting off already. "You've got nothing to worry about. We'll just circle the world and drop you off back at home, safe and sound, then you'll never have to worry about me again, okay?" She was already asleep. Bard smiled through the darkness, glad his last little quip had gone unheard. He knew how much pleasure Araly took out of watching Bard get hurt and how little she like the trouble he got into. Hopefully, one would outweigh the other somewhere on this majestic place, the Grand Line.
...wait... Bard thought. ...is that right? Regardless, he slept like a log.
