The trip to the other side of Jaya was relatively quiet, Sunny snoozing on the warm deck for the first half of the voyage—except for one complication. That bird he'd saved from that animal trader somehow found him again.
He heard a heavy flap of wings, the sound penetrating his dream and he opened an eye just in time to get poked by a massive golden beak and a croaking caw in his face.
Sunny jumped up, adrenaline startling through his veins, ready to run for safety, but the bird was ruthless, flying after him, cooing and poking him with its beak.
"What's going on?" Usopp yelped, diving out of the way as Sunny-and-the-bird nearly ran straight through him.
"The bird says 'You saved me, my very own prince charming! I want to spend the rest of my days preening that fluffy coat of yours, you cutie!'" Chopper announced.
"Heh, looks like you got an admirer, campfire," Zoro smirked, before closing his eyes and going back to sleep.
"He can't be that desperate to get away," Nami sighed, watching the chaos unfold across the deck. "If he hasn't scared it off with his flames."
"I think he might have forgotten," Usopp said, sweat-dropping.
The bird chased Sunny around the deck bonking him on the head until he headed toward the galley. As he opened the door and charged in, Sanji's foot shot up past him at about captain-head height and yelled. "I said no food 'til lunch, Luf—" The bird shot flying into the air, disappearing from sight.
Sanji blinked, watching a feather drift to the floor, before looking at Sunny. "Was that a bird?"
It was a short trip to the other side of Jaya, where they found castle built on the very edge of the water.
Before anyone could get too excited or apprehensive about it, the Merry had sailed just far enough to the side of the crew to realize that it was no more than a facade and in fact, the back only had a small hut.
So Sunny already knew to temper his expectations on whatever they were going to see here. He hopped down off the ship and shook out his fur, orienting himself. He prepared himself for whoever lived here to be a lot like Usopp. And as much as he loved his friend, he was afraid if they started a bragging match this hut owner and Usopp might tear a hole in reality.
The rest of the crew climbed down after setting the mooring a couple minutes later. The hut owner still hadn't come out yet, if they were even inside.
"You could have at least pretended to help out, you know," Nami scolded as she walked up to Sunny, who was licking the pollen off a flower as bees buzzed furiously around his head, unable to get close due to his fire. Sunny stuck his power yellow covered tongue out the corner of his mouth with a teasing smile.
Nami stared for a moment, her nagging look evaporating to as she failed to hide amusement and something else Sunny couldn't parse. "You really are different. Not everything, just a little…And that stunt you pulled on Mock Town…" She crouched and shook her head, while Sunny merely tilted his, actions speaking the words he couldn't.
"Is it silly to say you're growing up too fast? We only met months ago." Nami looked thoughtful, and Sunny was suddenly swept away by memories. Not of his cyndaquil sleuth, but his new one. Of Nami stealing away with the Merry, him in tow. Him like a child, a pet, a stray, to be released. Not yet a sleuth. Neither of them strong enough to fight her demons. And here she was, stronger and braver, and transformed, just like him.
In a flash, her gaze returned from her thoughts, whatever she was reminded of. "You might be strong now, but don't make me worry like those three do, okay? Or I'll give you a knock on the head." At her last words, Nami grinned sunnily back at him, and the quilava quailed a bit..
"Okay, Nami, yes ma'am."
Sunny and Nami rejoined the group, who had found a man who had a chesto berry on his head. No one mentioned the chesto berry.
Sunny was not gonna give it a nibble.
Sunny was not gonna give it a nibble.
Sunny was not gonna give it a nibble just to see if it dropped there or if it was attached to his head and he was really just a chesto plant.
Or ate the chesto-chesto fruit making him a chesto man.
Was there even a fruit-fruit? He would love to take it. Chesto berries had an effect similar to coffee in pokemon. Oh how he missed his berries. Sanji could probably make the best dishes with them…
Sunny blinked, realizing the room had gone quiet.
"So," Sanji lit up a cigarette in his mouth. "If we want to prove this sky island is real—that your ancestor wasn't lying-we need to take the knock up stream tomorrow morning. And if we want to navigate there, we need one of these rare South Birds, who always point south, since that's the only reliable compass available: a bird."
As if on cue, a bird sailed through the open door, diving at Sunny, who only just managed to dodge out of the way, and raced out the door, the bird hot on his heels.
"Huh," Nami said, as the crew watched their crew member unsuccessfully lose his tail.
"It's almost as if," Sanji started, watching as Sunny circled in large panicked loops in the clearing, the bird's head keeping one steady direction, even as it chased Sunny around, pecking air.
"Lieutenant-san has made a very useful friend," Robin mused with a smile.
"A SOUTH BIRD!" Mont Blanc Cricket yelled, pointing as his eyes almost popped out of their sockets. "SO RARE!"
Zoro, Usopp, and Luffy charged out of the building with nets. "CATCH IT SUNNY!"
Sunny just moved faster, his erratic loops beginning to wear the grass down as a tear fell from his wide eyes. "I can't do anything! It won't leave me alone!"
"Hang in there, Sunny! This is our best chance!"
Sunny wailed and ran through Zoro's legs, the latter receiving a face full of feathers but managing to catch it. Within a few minutes, they had secured the South Bird to the railing by a length of rope and Sunny was leery of getting anywhere near it for all the pokes he'd taken to his head.
That obstacle taken care of rather easily, the crew settled around the clearing. Zoro lifting weights a short distance away, and Sanji, Nami, and Usopp sitting at an outdoor table talking about what they'd learned. Sunny joined them, interested in the few times outside of fighting and traveling when Sanji wasn't cooking or serving them.
"Wait, you're not from the East Blue, Sanji?" Nami was asking.
"No, I was born in the North Blue, I was just raised in the East Blue by that old geezer. So I'm actually familiar with the tale of Noland the Liar. It's like a fairy tale there. I didn't even realize it was a true story." Sanji ran a finger over the weathered pages of the Noland the Liar book they'd borrowed from Cricket. The man depicted on the cover had the same chesto berry head. Sunny hopped up on the cook's lap and opened the book with a paw, flipping through pages of drawings and human script, trying to discern the reason.
Sunny didn't see anything but a gold city, a king, a voyage, and finally, the chesto berry man's execution. If this was really Chesto-man's ancestor (the resemblance was uncanny), it was a sad legacy to carry. Sunny shut the book with a dissatisfied huff.
"Oi, you're getting too big for my lap, you know," Sanji complained, drawing his cigarette from his mouth and exhaling smoke like the best of quilava. It made him think of home, a bit.
"Do you miss it? North Blue?" Sunny asked.
Sanji's eyes went from carefully watching Sunny to looking at the rest of the crew. If he understood him, he didn't show it.
"So," Sanji said, "we should plan for how we're going to get to the knock up stream."
They came in the night. Sunny felt a shiver run up and down his spine in anticipation when he saw who they were. Beside him, Zoro stood up and jumped off the ship, joining Luffy, as the Bellamy pirates made way to Cricket's hut. Despite his reservations, Sunny hopped down from between two posts of Merry's railing to join them.
Luffy lowered his hat to obscure his face, but the determined set of his mouth said it all to the Straw Hat crew. "Let me handle this."
In the end, it took a single punch from Luffy to knock Bellamy out. Zoro smirked, and turned around to hop back on the ship. The whole crew smiled and shook their heads, as Bellamy's crew was in chaos, trying to revive their leader, reeling in shock. Cricket's own jaw nearly hit the ground, but the Straw Hats weren't surprised.
The next day, the ship had been air-proofed for the journey by the Masira pirates and they set off to hit the knock-up stream.
Then cannonballs started raining down, sending Sanji, Zoro, and Luffy into the defensive positions as the ship lurched to the side, causing Sunny to dig his claws into the wood to keep from being slid around.
"We're being drawn in to the whirlpool! Steady!"
"I d-don't think I can do 'steady' anything!" Usopp yelped, his legs knocking together.
But the ship kept sinking and sinking, down and down, until the massive raft that had been attacking them wasn't visible past the streaming walls of water around them. Chopper went into strong point and Zoro picked up Sunny, putting him under his arm as the deck began to shake.
Then they were propelled upward with such force, Sunny was surprised they weren't pinned to the deck. He expected the spout to start beneath them, pushing them upward riding on top, but that's not what happened at all. Instead, the stream appeared off-center, the world spun around, he heard Zoro yelp a quick, 'shit!' as Nami yelled for help with the sails, as they felt the world reorient themselves sideways and Sunny realized he was no longer under Zoro's arm, but he also wasn't moving. He felt the wind racing across his fur, he felt the 90 degree angle they were moving at, and when he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but down.
His eyes nearly popped out of his head as he saw the blue ocean moving further and further away, as if they were moving back up Reverse Mountain, but worse. He saw the stream, impossibly big, spread out beneath them like an old tree as they moved up it. And Sunny was tied in place, tied to the mast, staring down the fall of a lifetime.
No one was calm, but the ones who could move rushed around carrying out Nami's instructions.
"We're falling out of the water. We need the sails!" Nami snapped, to an astonished rest of the crew. "DO IT NOW!"
Usopp tugged on the rope but the sails didn't unfurl. "T-they're stuck in the rigging!" Usopp wailed. And Sunny stared up above his head, spotting the exact snag that had caught them. He slipped out of the ropes, though he really wished he could stay, and hopped onto the top of the now horizontal mast, running across it like he would a fallen log. Within moments, he had pulled the snagged bit of rope from a splintered length of mast that had caught it, sending the sails free.
Immediately, they caught fierce air, ballooning full. The change of speed sent all thirty pounds of Sunny flying, and for one, terrifying, beautiful moment, he was alone in the sky, a trunk of a water spout, an entire blue world below him, droplets of water painting the impinging clouds with stars, and a lone, sailing caravel taking a forbidden, foolish voyage.
Sunny angled his trajectory like a shinx, landing on the ballooned sail with all four paws before bouncing off and landing on the wall of galley with just enough grace to keep his life.
They burst through clouds, a few smatterings of them at first, then they plunged through a thicker layer that took them a minute to push through. And when they came to the other side of them, a white, cloudy world surrounded them.
Sunny's eyes widened in shock as the Merry seemed to sail on the top of a cloud river with cloud mountains on top of them. Everything so startlingly white and fluffy and…unreal. This hadn't been like what he'd imagined clouds felt like at all.
The crew gasped for breath, even the unflappable Robin, as the Merry began to lazily float downstream.
"W-where are we?" Usopp gulped, staring out at the clouds. "And why does that look so swimable?" Sunny couldn't tear himself away from looking at them, and it seemed the rest of the crew was the same.
"When the sun sets, do you think these clouds will turn all those pretty colors too?" Sunny asked. He imagined a world of orange and pink and yellow gradient. All those beautiful sun rises aboard the Merry. And the stars, they ought to be so close to those, too.
Sanji huffed a laugh, staring out at the cloudy expanse.
"What is it, Cook-san?"
Sanji gave Robin a smile. "Sunny wants to know if this cloud sea turns the colors of the sunset, my dear Robin."
Robin smiled slightly as well. His words deadened in the air before she spoke, wistfully. "That's a pretty thought. I would like that."
"WATCH OUT!"
The three of them whipped around to see something in the sky pelting toward them at full speed. As it got closer, it appeared to be a man with long hair and strange weapons, skating on air.
Sunny didn't get a second look at him before he sent Sanji into the galley wall. Knocked Zoro and Luffy down as well.
All three of them got up as Sunny sprinted forward, igniting the flames on his back protectively.
"It's hard to move for some reason," Zoro panted, struggling after just a few sword swings. Sure enough, all three of the crew's strongest were flagging only a few exchanges into the battle. Sunny rolled out of the way of a diving attack that then ran headlong into Luffy, knocking him back.
"Hey, what are you guys doing?" Sunny yelled, voice carrying across the deck for once. "Pull yourselves together!"
The man grinned at Sunny. "Oh, so you're the fighter of the group, are you?"
"No!" Sunny snapped back, shifting to the tips of his toes. The air around him heated with an outpouring of his fire. It was a trick he'd been considering since Nami had showed him her new mirage tempo—and created two flickering images of himself on either side of him. As long as he moved quickly enough between the mirages, intermittently, they were as convincing as hers.
The man dove toward the ship again, this time, aiming at him. Through the corner of his eyes, Sunny could see his friends still struggling. Had they been hit with something? Something was wrong, but he didn't know what—
The man's weapon crashed where one of the Sunny's doubles were as Sunny took a moment of inspired recklessness and jumped onto the man's back. The man seemed as surprised as himself.
Well…only one thing to do. Sunny grabbed hold of the man's long, tied back hair, and yanked as hard as he possibly could. The man's yelped in shock as the tug changed his trajectory, sending him straight into Merry's railing. The wood cracked under the pressure, but Sunny didn't have the luxury of guilt. His fire struggled to stay lit, for some reason, so it burned quiet and small over his head and back, but his ferocity stayed.
The three fighters were back on their feet, but Sunny wasn't done as he closed the distance between him and the man again, at full speed, moving across the deck faster than the man was able to move, as he took a hit from Sunny's skull straight into the stomach, coughing up saliva, and crashing off the ship.
A moment later, he regained his footing on the air and backed up into the sky. Luffy's hands stretched up to the mast to rocket himself toward him but the man aimed his rocket launcher toward the crew.
Sunny tried to prepare himself for the oncoming smoke, fire, and destruction, but it never came. Instead, another man appeared, on a polka-dot pink pegasi creature, and fought off the offending man.
He landed, and gave them a whistle to call him for free assistance once and left, again leaving the ship sailing on their own.
"That was strange," Sanji said, tapping his foot on the ground. "It was hard to fight. Like every movement was hundred times harder."
"Yup! It didn't stop Sunny though!" Luffy grinned down at Sunny, who shook out his fur in embarrassment for the praise. He still wasn't sure what had happened, but he was glad it had worked out in the end.
Robin lifted up a hand, as if testing the air. She held it there for a few moments, the crew drawing their attention to her, quietly waiting to see what their newest crew member would say or do. "I'm sure Navigator-san has figured this out too, but high in the sky, the oxygen supply is much more limited-"
"—But that doesn't explain why Sunny is the only one not to be affected by the oxygen level dropping," Nami thought out loud. "He was fighting alongside the rest of them but was unaffected, could that be because—"
"—smaller animals have a faster heart rate, which moves blood and oxygen faster through their body?" Usopp mused.
"My fire burns up most of it before it gets to me. I'm used to fighting without much air. But the rest of you—" Sunny considered.
"Our red blood cells aren't up for the challenge due to changing altitude so quickly, we aren't intaking enough oxygen in our lungs! We should be careful—" Chopper added in.
"-Of altitude sickness. We'll all need to stay hydrated to stay healthy," Sanji stated, rushing off to the galley.
"-So that means food! Shishisishsi!"
"My," Robin rested her cheek on her hand, staring at the rest of them. "You all are certainly all on wavelength. What an interesting crew I joined, fufufufu."
Hey guys! Thanks for reading-little fun thing, chapter 39 is already up on ao3! Just look up this fic and my username might show up as rwd (RavenWingDark).
I'm not sure when/if I'll keep posting here. Stats have been broken for months and there's a lot of negative reviews here that make me uninterested in keeping writing this. But I know there's tons of you sending great and kind comments, you guys really keep me going. So come over and join me over there if you like, for the new chap. I just ask if you do, you don't send concrit (I'm too old to deal with that shit for my hobby) or negative messages (ao3 has a blocking function).
Ok thanks so much, hope you enjoyed the chap!
