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.


Marching haughtily through the stormy streets of Lougetown, Aleister Altair and his crew passed by many houses with shutters drawn and Marines mobilizing past them.

"What do you know of the fire?" a Marine asked, stopping the troupe.

"Hmm?" Aleister said. "There's a fire? Goodness, where?"

"Nevermind" the Marine said as he rushed on. Aleister hid his grin in his big, bushy beard and turned back away.

"To the dock, men!" he declared. "We're ready. Let's leave this pathetic sea for good and head to the Grand Line! The greatest show for us to perform is still somewhere out there, on the world's greatest ocean!!!"

"Whooooo!!!" cheered his crew. Everything had gone perfectly, aside from one unknown detail. The curious stalker, a girl draped in a dark and dreary raincoat with fair white skin and hair, following the band of men and women all the way from the scene of the incident currently stirring up a huge panic in town. She held herself to keep warm, and to calm her nerves. She'd just seen someone die, and now she was blindly wandering right after the murderers themselves. Nobody running in the street bothered to stop her. She was just a girl going away from the fire to them, not that there weren't other people on the street as well. Vega just wandered all the way to the dock and was awoken by a sudden flash of lightning that was blocked by some unknown, dark shadow cast across her body. She looked up and saw the grinning mouth of a large-bodied man with a jutted lower jaw and big, thick teeth sticking up from it. Vega took a step back and turned, as if to walk away, but found herself surrounded by yet more detestable-looking men in coats.

"Well well!" the great-sized man said. He stepped forward, shaking the ground, and stunning Vega in a fearful stall. "Look at this, my friends! We've got quite the beauty wandering around in the middle of a storm!"

"It's dangerous out here, you know" another man said, leaning in and scaring her. "You know, you should always travel with a man you trust, little girl! Or else some big monster might come up out of the sea and swallow you whole!" Another man, this one with the same hippo-like face as the huge man blocking Vega's path, leaned in close and laughed dumbly at her.

"Yeah!" he said. "Hey, you wanna hold my hands, miss?" The group laughed coarsely at her. Their leering, perverted presence made Vega speechless with fear. Suddenly her coat was grabbed from behind and she was pulled back into some ugly man's arms.

"Come on! Get it off!" one of the men shouted.

"Hey now!" the huge hippo-man shouted. "Treat her a little more delicately. It's my job to break her in before we sell her off as a slave!" The group chuckled lewdly. Vega wasn't so dim that she didn't know what was going on. She kicked and struggled herself free and started to run away, but was caught by her flowing, wet hair by the thick hand of the huge, hippo-man. She screamed and struggle further, hitting his fingers as he pulled her slowly forward, then he held her up to his eyes level by her hair. She held onto his fingers and kicked her feet that had left the ground, face-to-face with the ugliest man she'd ever seen. He stretched his grin across his big, thick cheeks and wiggled his ears at her.

"AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!" Vega cried.

"Go ahead and shout, then!" said the hippo-man. "All the Marines are searching for the pirate scum that started that fire earlier. They don't care what some petty thugs like us do. That's why we're still around! We masquerade as nothing but common thieves, but really, we're part of a slave cartel! We kidnap cute girls like you and sell them to the highest bidders from all the oceans!"

"Um, boss?" one of the men began. "Why are you telling her this, exactly?"

"I ain't talking to her!" the hippo-man growled. "I'm saying it for your benefit!"

"But we all already know what we do" another man said. "What you're doing is just redundant." From behind that man something moved. In a strike of lightning the flash of pure white and black glared out, then vanished back into the shadows, just as the man who spoke up turned around to inspect it.

"You shut up!" the hippo-man bellowed. He turned back to Vega with the most perverse of smiles and brought up his other hand to stroke her chin. "I've never seen a girl this cute before! It's almost like some kind unnatural occurrence. How'd you get your hair so white? You look so young, but you must actually be really old, right? Even so, you'll do very well on our cartel!"

"Pardon me" a man said from behind. "Mind sparing me a hand?" The hippo-man turned around, swinging his arm to sucker-strike whoever stood behind him, and his hand vanished into thin air. "Ah! I'm sorry, looks like it's you who needs a spare hand! AHAHAHA!!!" Vega was dropped as the man stared at his stump of an arm and screamed.

"UWAAAHH!!! MY HAND! It doesn't feel like it's been cut off, but where'd it go!?"

"Boss!" one of the other crude bandits called. His next sound was a death grunt, the sound a man makes when he realizes he's been stabbed in the back. The man next to him repeated it and fell down. Suddenly all the scenery around them, the cobblestone road on which they stood and the boxes nearby, all was cast away as cleverly placed colored clothes to hide the lurkers underneath them. The Top Hat Pirates sprang out and silently killed all of the bandits in one fell, instant action.

"You son of a bitch!" yelled the hippo-man. "Where do you get off!? Are you trying to be clever or something!? Being a pirate in this town is a death-sentance!!!" Aleister's grin did not drop. Instead, he brought the voided space of his hands up and slowly pressed forward, swallowing the hippo-man's thick arm into his portal space. The man stood in terrible, frightened awe and simply watched as he was slowly devoured by Aleister's magic hands. Aleister suddenly clapped his hands together and the man vanished between them. He rubbed them together, clapped twice and grinned.

"Ala-Bala-Carda-KALAAA!!!!" He parted his hands, and the man was gone, vanished into the space he held in either palm. Vega saw it all, the silent deaths of all the evil bandits by the sinister, white-masked men in formal black suits and the apparent death-by-obliteration of that ugly, heavy man. "You heart can lead...to all sorts of amazing places!" Aleister said, catching Vega's attention. She looked up and saw nothing coming at her, but she could feel the tension and pressure. She could feel the fear of being swallowed, and the next thing she knew she was floating freely in that colorful void where nothing existed. That man just swallowed was already so much farther away and unconscious. Vega watched him fall into an infinite pit of nothingness, never to be seen again, over what seemed like a lifetime of floating and praying that she would get to live. So she prayed, and hoped to see the light again.....


In her praying, Vega lost consciousness and awoke some time later with her arms and legs bound together. She was held captive now in the corner of the women's dressing quarter, which was currently empty. Her mouth wasn't bound, but it was dry and it hurt. She struggled her way up to her feet and hopped across the wood floor to a mirror mounted on the wall. On first glance she seemed fine. Her skin was white, as was her hair, and her eyes were red. She remained fully clothed in the white nightdress she had left home in and there was no visible trace of any wounds on her. She turned her head just to make sure, but found no marks or cuts or brands at all. She hopped back over to a bed and wormed her way into it, covering herself by clutching the blanket with her toes and lifting it up over her chest by bending her knees up. After a bit of struggle and moving, she was resting comfortably.

"So this is being captive?" Vega said. "They must not be doing it right. From all the terrible stories I've heard, I should have been abused or bound up a little tighter, or at the very least held in a small space that's locked from the outside...." Vega opened her eyes at realizing her conditions and got out of bed. She walked over to the door and checked to see if it was actually locked from the outside, but it wasn't. She opened it and peaked out into the hallway interior of a ship in motion. She shut the door, found a lock near the latch and quickly bolted it shut, just then realizing that she was no longer bound up at all! She looked at her rope-marked wrists in surprise and lifted each leg up to inspect them separately.

How did that happen!? She wondered, resolving to stay as quiet as she could. She went back to the bed and found the ropes undone under the covers. She inspected them and found that they weren't even tied, they were just single bits of rope that had been coiled around and tightened to seem like many rings of rope at once. Vega picked the ropes up and dropped them at the side of her bed. She crawled back in and tried to rest, not letting herself get too overwhelmed at the sudden shift in her circumstances.

What should I do if I'm found out? I've seen what they can do. For all I know, someone could already be in this room, hiding, waiting to tie me up the second I go back to sleep.... Vega was suddenly wide awake and stood up from her bed. She looked around with a start and made her way into the corner of the room, holding her back strong against it and testing it by knocking around at a hip-high level, quite hard. She looked at the beds, rowed up against the wall across from the door. There were enough mirrors on the wall for each bed to have its own and several chests at the far end of the room with keys in them. The wall she was against also had a few trunks, but there was a space big enough for her to stand in between the chests and the wall.

"I know someone is in here!" Vega shouted, giving up on her stealth. She suddenly became focused on one specific bed, the one two beds over from the one she had rested on. "You're under a bed! The fourth from this side of the room! Fourth from the left!" Vega waited a moment before calming her breath again, and waited for a response. She was positive, unequivocally, that there was someone in the room, and all her better instincts told her that that was where they were.

Am I just paranoid? She wondered. I must be. These people, whoever they are, if they wanted to kill me they would have. Still.....what happened that I came here in the first place? All I remember was....that terrible void I was swallowed into. That horrible space. So empty and wide. And what about that ugly, fat man? Is he dead? Suddenly, something tapped on the floor some distance away. Vega saw a hand crawling out from under the exact bed she had called for. The arm pulled along and a man with slicked-back hair and a white mask with black pants and a white shirt stepped up onto the floor from under the bed.

"Nice one" he said. "Seems you saw straight through my trick. You even managed to untie yourself from the subconscious knot I tied. It's impossible to undo by yourself if your consciously trying, that's what makes it so hard. The more you struggle against it, the more impossible it is." Vega had just recovered her senses when he finished talking. Seeing a man come from under a bed she randomly deduced him to be under was more of a shock to her than she thought it would have been.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"Within the ship of the Top Hat Traveling Magician Troupe" the man said "currently sailing on the grandest of seas, the Grand Line!" Vega lost it. She fell forward on her knees and then forward yet again, but caught herself with her arms before hitting the floor. It had just suddenly hit her that she was now in the 'pirate's graveyard', the place she'd always heard about and dreaded. Not only that, but she was alone on the ocean and forced into the crew of cold-blooded killers who masqueraded as traveling entertainers, and for how long she didn't know. It's possible that the day she met them and saw their show there were already people being killed far behind the scenes.

The tension and broken nerves overwhelmed Vega for a moment and she succumbed to a certain nervous sickness, vomiting right there, and then she began to weep.

"No!" she said. "No! I don't want this! I....take me back! I don't want this to happen to me!!"

"Hmm" the man said with an honest shrug of his arms. "Nothing to do about that. Once you're on the Grand Line, you pretty much have to stay until you either get to the New World or....die. We're setting our sights as far as possible in that regard. What about you?" Vega held her hands to her eyes and openly let her tears stream down her face while holding her lips together and forcing her eyes to shut tight. "Where will you go now that you're here?" The man left after that. Vega stood up and staggered over to the bed. She fell down into it and began crying, finally weak and alone enough to let herself be overwhelmed by her emotions. She held the pillow tight against her face and screamed out loud.

Up above the room, the mighty captain stood overlooking his ship, and from a nearby trap door the man that had been sent to watch over the hostage came up and gave a gallant bow. "Sir" he began, "it seems she's awake. You were right in being on guard about her, of course."

"Hahaha!" Aleister laughed. "She's a bright star of a child, isn't she? She'll make an excellent addition to my crew. The only child who bothered to see through my act...I'll make good use of her!"

"Captain!" another suited man called, this one descending on a rope counter-weighed with a sandbag from the crow's nest. "Enemy ship spotted nearby! What are your orders?"

"Raise the flag!" Aleister said. "For now, I do not feel like entertaining. No, now I seek entertainment for myself and my crew! Men! We fight, as true pirates!! Let my hands push through the waves and clear us a path to our wildest dreams!!!" His crew cheered loudly for him, and the noise of their warcrying reached down to the lower deck. Vega laid with her body curled up and her hands on her ears, refusing to hear it at all. She imagined that she was still at home in her bed, and that anytime her mother would come wake her up, and she would see herself in this mother. A beautiful woman with fair skin and white hair and red eyes, just like her, who loved her and protected her.....

But she also knew, the bright young woman she was, that those days of dreaming were now gone. She bit her lip until it hurt and a thin line of blood leaked out over her chin, all the time wishing away and denying the truth of reality only to have it forced back on her. She was lost now, past the point of return but not without her fleeting hopes of peace....Surely that would never change for her.....


The moment the battle began, Vega was knocked off her bed by a violent rocking of the ship. Cannon-fire was exchanged. No attempts to trick or stupify the enemy had been made. It was an all-out attack, the first encounter of the Top Hat Pirates on the Grand Line, tied in combat with an obscure group of ragtag bandits on a small Marine boat. A bunch of nobodies who had somehow found their way through the currents and into the most treacherous sea ever, against the man with magic hands. Vega curled up on the floor, still adamant of remaining away from any distress, but the sounds of fighting and war came closer and closer.

Something pounded at the door. Vega hid under a bed and accidentally tripped the latch for a trap door to fall. She held on to the floor, refusing to drop into an unknown depth that was suddenly under her, and saw from past the bedsheets two men struggling after the door was opened. One of the men, in black pants, threw the other to the floor, but he was pulled down as well and stabbed through the chest with a dagger. His mask fell off and he was tossed away as the man who killed him stole his saber and ran back out to rejoin the battle. Vega could see, by his hair and his build from that angle, that he was the man she had met minutes earlier. Now he was laying and drawing his final breaths as blood leaked out from his chest.

She came out of hiding and came to his side, finding him roguishly handsome. "Ahhh" he groaned, "there you are. I wanted to see if you were still safe. It's a war out there..."

"You're dying" Vega said. She looked up and down his body, then shrank away and held her hands up to her mouth. "I'm scared.....I'm so scared!"

"That's normal" the man said. "It's a good thing to feel fear. It means you still have....some common sense...." The man's eyes became empty and lifeless. He was dead. Now Vega, an otherwise sheltered and intelligent girl, had witnessed the second death so close to her, but this time she felt not a distant revilement but a deep, hollow fear. She knew this man, though not well, and in the end he tried to comfort her just before he died. Vega began to cry again, silently at first, but soon her voice cooed with mournful, soft sobs and she could not hold back her tears.

Up top, the Top Hat Pirates were just coming to terms with the battle they were already losing. The other ship was too well armed and the pirates on it were too barbarous to allow any quarter for the new captain to make use of. Aleister's men suffered in defeat, but Aleister himself did well. He took his huge hands to the pirates that invaded his ship, those that came straight at him, and swallowed them up in his deep void. Then, winding his arm back, he tossed them out and off the ship, right into the water or into the cannons of their own ship. At one toss a pirate was thrown into the porthole where a cannon was loaded and ready to fire. His body knocked the cannon away and it rolled back, lowering down and blasting a ball through the floor.

"Ahahaha!" Aleister triumphantly laughed. "That will teach you, hopefully, not to try and conquer me!"

"Sir!" a frantic Top Hat fighter called. "We're getting beaten! They've already boarded the ship and tore through the galley! I saw a group of them heading down to the women's quarters!"

"Damn" Aleister cursed. "I can't fit in there. I'm far too large of a man! Send in a small team to take care of the stragglers. I'm about prepared to finish off this silly fight and destroy their ship!" Aleister clapped his hands together and drew out a long, sharp saber as they parted, one fitting his massive stature as a man, that he held in his invisible hand so the handle was visible past the warped form wrapped around it. He charged with a leap, bounding clear over the boarding planks, and rocked the ship when he landed on it. "Is there any man worth facing here!?"

"I am!" growled a man. His back, chest, arms and abs were huge and perfectly carved in muscular form. He held over his immense shoulders a steel bar which he took in the palm of both hands and began to bend against his mighty, thick neck. He strained all he could and bent the solid steel into a U shape, which he then wound back and prepared to throw. "I challenge you!" he shouted.

"Very well!!!" Aleister replied. The man threw his weapon and Aleister caught it, letting it slide into both of his hands and following its form to a clap. And it was gone. The heavy man that threw it stumbled on his legs and fell to his knees in utter confusion, an opportunity that Aleister took charge of by taking up his sword and coming forth with a malicious intent in his eyes....

Vega, meanwhile, was confronted with yet another dilemma. She had found, hidden in the man's shirt, a dagger. She unsheathed it and held it for a moment, the ship still jarred and shaken by the constant motions of fighting. Men continued to charge, and others went after them, all swinging swords or holding guns. The Top Hat magicians drew pistols from their sleeves and surprised the charging enemies with them. Others took of their hats and threw burning powder at the invading pirates that ignited into an explosion that consumed everything the powder touched the moment the heat of a bullet hit.

The enemies overwhelmed the Top Hats in sheer number and force, however. Bodies were strewn all over the deck, most of the bleeding and many of them in fine suits. Vega stepped out into this chaos with her mind utterly blank and a dagger in her hand.

My fate Vega thought it's been stolen from me now. Whatever I do, I know I'll end up dying. I can feel it...see it. Death is everywhere now. I feel like I know true terror now....but I'm not amused yet. Vega saw a man, a man wearing clothes not suited for the crew that had taken her, with two pistols wielded and a sword in his mouth. He threw the pistols, took the sword into his hand and stabbed two men at either side of him before they got a chance to try and attack. He then pulled out another long saber and looked around, growling with a red bandana on his head. Maybe I feel indifferent to this disaster because....it has nothing to do with me. That man began to back away. He saw too many men to fight alone coming at him, and his crew was far off on his boat fighting the man with the magic hands.

If I want to feel anything here Vega thought then I must make myself an active member of this world! I know who I am. My life was pointless before. My parents weren't my real parents, and the life we lived wasn't the one I was born for. There was something better for me and I missed it. My real mother....whoever she was, she didn't give me up because she didn't care. I can feel it. She wanted me to know....what my fate is.

When Vega opened her eyes, and her mind quieted, she could hear the painful groaning of a man and the drops of blood, all in the silence of the ocean. She looked up and saw the dagger in her hand sunken into the man's back. His swords dropped, he stepped forward two half-staggering steps and fell to his knees.

"My fate" Vega said "is mine." She kicked the man down and let him die as he hit the ground. His eyes were empty when she saw them and his mouth agape, but there was nothing about him that she felt attached to. Instead she looked at the dagger in her hand very carefully. On it was engraved a word that the blood had obscured. She wiped it away on the front of her dress and saw that it read 'LIFE'.

I will live it here Vega thought. It is my life now.....I was born to live my life....

"Bravo!" a Top Hat shouted. Vega was snapped to attention by the applause and cheering of the rest of the crew. The men all lined up, their battle finally won, clapping for the young Vega's first ever act of murder. She felt torn initially over whether it was really something to be celebrated, but she sheathed the dagger and tucked it into the strap of her shoulder, giving a polite and courteous curtsy with a timid smile. One man parted the crowd, a great-sized man he was, moving his arms as if clapping but producing no sound.

"Well done!" Aleister said, his beard messed and a scar on his face still bleeding from the fighting he'd just finished. "Splendid, splendid! Bravisimo! Wonderful show!" He stopped and crouched down, picking up the body with his invisible hand and tossing it to the side. "You're a natural for finding your way around, aren't you?"

"If I refused to live my life" Vega said "my mother would surely look down on me and weep."

"Well said!" Aleister said. "You know, you haven't been too far from my mind since we met during our last performance. No one has ever had the insight, let alone the tenacity, to see through my illusions as I perform them."

"You must pull a lot of stupid crowds" Vega said. The crew thought that was it for her, knowing full well the consequences of insulting the maestro himself, but their fears were unrequitted. Aleister laughed.

"Ahahaha! Tenacity is too tame a word for you, my dear. You have sheer, willful GUTS!!!" Aleister stood up, still brightly smiling, and crossed his arms, the fabric and the substance slowly disappearing as his hands swept across his body. "I'd like to offer you this: Join my crew as my Prima Donna Assistant!"

"I seem to have no choice" Vega said "unless you would otherwise let me take that boat you've conquered back to the East Blue myself..." Vega looked over at the other side of the boat and noticed that nothing was there. The boat was gone, the whole damn thing. "......I will" Vega said. Aleister extended his arms out as they suddenly appeared from thin air out of his portal hands.

"Wonderfully splendid!" he exclaimed. "Then, to celebrate our first victory, we must find an island and fest until we cannot move! Everyone to your stations! Ensign, get us a post! Doctors, nurses, deliver the bodies back to the brink and treat the wounded! Give the dead their rights and cast them off honorably."

"The dead...." Vega said softly. She held her hand to the dagger at her chest and remember his face. The dead....they have no life to live. For his sake, and for the sake of everyone who might die, I shall live my life on my own. With these men or without, I have to live...

And so the resolve was set. Vega's pact to the heavens was made. Her career of villainy as the Prima Donna Assistant to the magical Aleister Altair continued up until the fateful day from which she reminisced, the day they met the "most powerful pirates on the sea"....