*clears throat*

All,

It is not even slightly a regret to inform you that I am closing up shop here.

However, as I don't want to leave those of you who enjoy and/or just found this story hanging, I'm posting this explanation and leaving it up for a few days since I know a some of you are anons who might not get the notification on me posting this.

Long story short, I have been dealing with an exceptionally toxic work environment for over a year and a half now where damn near everything that can go wrong thus far has done so to a catastrophic degree and is expected to continue to do so.

It's not even as simple as 'Oh your company's terrible, you should quit'. My company is great and I really like my job, but we're so completely hamstrung on this project that it doesn't even feel like the same company. Dozens of good people have already quit, but I'm trying to stick it out because I know this is not normal and I just have to survive until another project starts up that I can escape to. Needless to say, this is not easy. It's difficult as hell, and to be perfectly honest, I've been teetering back and forth over the edge of depression like a tightrope for months as opportunities to leave this absolute shit hole just seem to fall through one after the other. Hell, I'm self-aware enough to understand that I flat out have been depressed for a couple of weeks now.

Calm down, I'm nowhere near suicidal. No, me knowing that many of you would suspect that is not indicative of me actually being that and trying to deny it. That's me knowing how the shit I write reads. I'm still powering right on along like the little engine that could, would and will, and even if I run out of everything else, I'll keep going out of pure undiluted spite until either they run me off or I get to escape. I'll be damned if I'm gonna let this miserable shithole be what does me in. Never gonna happen. I'll quit long before I ever consider suicide.

The reason this little bit of background is important is because the nice comments I receive on my stories are one of the very few things I've always sincerely looked forward to. They always brighten my day tremendously and help inspire me to write more. Even new chapters as good as what we got with Egghead don't make me as happy as people liking my stories. This being the case, negative comments always hurt just that much more because I get that little spark of hope when I see the notification and then immediately after I open it, it's just an immediate sucker punch of getting shit on. It's like getting a surprise box of donuts and then opening it and finding out they're covered in shit.

I've received dozens of extremely unpleasant 'guest' reviews on this story, as well as several from named users including one who apparently made an account just to tell me how much I suck. While I can and have deleted every damn one of them I could, they still hurt and upset me quite a bit every time I get one. The ones I can't get rid of piss me off fresh every time I see them. There've been so many now that it has gotten to the point where my knee jerk reaction to a notification of a new review on this story is immediate dread because I've gotten more nasty comments than nice ones.

As you can imagine, having this vital little drip of positivity be poisoned like that is doing nothing good at all for my mental health.

This is not the first story this has happened on either. I had several Naruto fics at one point which after being popular for a few chapters garnered quite a bit of hate, and several of them nothing but hate after I finished them. My specialty is writing characters who are absolute psychological tire fires. Apparently this is very unpopular and leads people to assume that I myself am a psychological tire fire if all the flattering things I was called over those fics are anything to go by.

It's happened on my Fairy Tail fic too, people calling my writing absolute garbage, poorly paced, stupid, and ironically enough one or two even telling me to go back to writing One Piece because they think I suck at writing Fairy Tail. I haven't gotten nearly as many negative or positive on that one, I think the Fairy Tail fandom just has an overall lower traffic volume.

Since I'm sure some of you are wondering, the most common criticisms of this story are that I don't understand the characters or story at all, that my portrayal of Bones and Reiju is stupid, especially the bit where Bones declares war on Luffy, and basically that I'm just an utterly terrible writer whose plot doesn't make sense.

Yes, Bones losing his temper over Luffy nearly killing him is unusual at a glance given his patience with the other characters. Luffy came much closer to killing him than all the rest of them put together. On top of this, Bones had literally just run several hundred miles in what was actually a dead panic to help them, and he was utterly exhausted mentally and physically, as evidenced by him literally passing out as soon as he was sure everything was going to be okay. NOBODY would take having their help spat on immediately after that well, and Bones is far from a saint or even a particularly forgiving sort to begin with. Patient yes, forgiving no.

Yes, Reiju has been tripping out a lot, overthinking a bunch, and jumping at shadows. There is a reason for this that will be explained in the next chapter, which will not be posted on FFN.

Yes, I will be continuing this story when I manage to find it in me to write some more. No, it will not be on FFN.

I'm posting this note for those of you who actually like and enjoy this story. I have already been cross posting this on Archive of Our Own for quite some time, and I have not received a single hateful comment over there. I can upload pictures there, link stories and appropriate music, and actually reply directly to your comments when you post them. From now on I will be posting exclusively on AO3 and I welcome you all to come and enjoy the rest of the story over there.

Frankly, I've been considering this move for quite some time, but today I've just simply had enough.

I apologize if it's inconvenient for any of you, but I do believe that it's time for me to put my foot down and be done with it.

This note will be deleted from FFN along with all my others the evening of Sunday September 29th.

To my loyal readers, thank you all so much for your support.

I hope to see you on AO3.

Ghost out.