If, four weeks ago, you'd have told me that I'd be climbing a mountain in a ship with a goat figurehead as part of a pirate crew captained by a rubbery girl wearing a straw hat, I'd have told you that you were insane. But there I was, the wind whipping my leather jacket back, the sea spraying in my face, getting colder and colder with each passing second.
Let me just say that in the One Piece anime, it seemed like they'd reached the top of Reverse Mountain in just a few minutes. Was that how it was in real life? No. In actuality, it took the better part of two hours to reach the top.
And that was to reach the top .
"I can't believe we actually made it," I muttered. "We almost crashed against the water gate." The storm had soaked my leather jacket and best ninja T-shirt. My jeans were so heavy it felt like they were falling down, even if they weren't. I took one look at Lucy, my captain, and was glad her favorite color was red. The only things she had on was a straw hat, a red vest with a low-V cut, and short jean shorts, as well as sandals. If she'd been wearing a white top, I would've been able to see through to her breasts, because she didn't like bras. And her chest was, possibly, even bigger than Nami's. She had a thin scar under one eye.
And yes, she was the girl version of Monkey D. Luffy, the original captain of the Straw Hat Pirates in the plot of the anime and manga.
You may be wondering what I'm doing climbing up a mountain with the Straw Hats and a female Luffy. Well, it's a long story, but to sum it up in a few words, I met a god named Aes who turned out to be my father and sent me to an alternate universe of One Piece in order to save the multiverse. Since then, I'd followed the crew's adventures through the Baratie sea restaurant, Conomi Island and Arlong Park, Loguetown, and a brief visit to the Calm Belt, where I'd nearly become fish food for a frog.
And I was starting to feel weird around Lucy.
So basically, my life was screwed over.
Nami, our ginger haired navigator who had steered us through countless storms and rough seas, had taken off her pink rain coat and was letting it flutter behind her in the rough wind. "Now we'll just ride the current straight to the peak!" she said, her voice sweet and girly. She felt like the kleptomaniac older sister I'd never had. She had a huge chest, and it was tough to say which was larger, Nami's or Lucy's. Not that it really mattered. Anyway, right now Nami was wearing a sky blue diamond-patterned shirt with a navy heart above her chest, as well as short shorts that barely covered anything and sneakers. A blue tattoo of a pinwheel and a tangerine, her favorite food, stood out on her left shoulder.
"Sweet!" Lucy giggled. She was prone to giggling a lot. She jumped onto her special captain's seat, saying, "I want the best spot when we get into the Grand Line!" Her long, raven-black hair fluttered wildly in the wind.
It was hard to hear everyone over the roar of the wind and the current.
Sanji and Usopp, our cook and sniper respectively, had linked each other in a one armed hug and were doing a victory dance. Sanji was wearing his usual expensive, pristine black suit and blue undershirt. His eye brow was so swirly it made me dizzy to look at it, and his blonde hair hid his left eye from view. I made a mental note to ask him why he had hid his eye in the first place. But then again, when I was wearing an eye patch, I couldn't really be one to talk.
Usopp was in brown overalls and a tan, diamond-patterned bandana. He had green, heavy shoes and a tan bag that held his various Sure-Kill Stars. He had the world's longest nose and had joined the crew just before I'd fallen into this world. He told many lies.
Zoro was standing at the front of the deck, and I was unable to see his face from this position. He wore a plain white shirt, dark green pants, a green haramaki, and had green hair. The swordsman's signature three swords hung at his side. One had a white case; Wado Ichimonji. The other two had black and maroon cases, and I didn't know or remember their names yet. Zoro was the unofficial first mate of the Straw Hats. Lucy put an incredible amount of trust into him, and it made me a little... jealous?
"Say, Yuril, back in Loguetown, you were freaking out," Nami said suddenly, face-faulting. "We never really had a chance to ask you about that. Why do you hate clowns?"
I shivered at the thought of clowns, then sighed and sat down on the upper deck Indian style. "You want to know the terribly sad story of how I came to fear clowns?" I sighed.
The rest of the crew looked at each other, then said in unison, "Hai."
"Yosh." I said. There was the sound of a drum and pink sakura petals started flowing around me. "It happened a long time ago, when I was six. I had been celebrating my birthday at my grandmother's house when my uncle, who worked as a clown, showed up and tossed one of my presents out the window. Unfortunately, there happened to be a pool outside the window, and the present, a comic book, was destroyed. It was the last thing I'd ever get from my grandmother because she died a few days later."
There was a long pause. The sakura petals vanished.
Then Usopp, Nami, and Zoro shouted, "THAT'S IT!? YOU'RE AFRAID OF CLOWNS BECAUSE YOUR UNCLE RUINED YOUR COMIC BOOK!?"
Lucy and Sanji burst into tears and hugged me. I blushed from the close contact with my female captain.
"That was so sad!" they cried. "What a terrible misfortune! Sorry!"
I sniffed and looked down. "T-thanks."
The other three Straw Hats sweatdropped. Zoro had a look that clearly said he thought I was the stupidest person who ever lived. I couldn't tell whether Usopp wanted to laugh at me or do a facedesk. Nami just had a blank look.
Suddenly I face-faulted. "Eh? Where did the sakura petals come from?"
"SO SLOW!" Nami roared.
A few hours later, when I had started getting hungry again, the slope we were climbing up abruptly steepened and it got noticeably colder. Our breath was visible and my skin was crawling with the chill. We had finally passed out of the storm and could see the top of Reverse Mountain: A giant explosion of water that was spraying everywhere. Sunlight reflected off of it and into our eyes. We started slowing a little.
"Look, the mountain peak!" called Lucy. "We made it to the top! We're getting there, man! We're getting there!"
"Please don't start that up again, Luce," I complained, shielding my eyes. "And what the hell's up with this stupid light?"
Nami laughed, now happy again. "We're so high up that the ocean's freezing into ice crystals and reflecting the sunlight back at us!"
"It's beautiful..." our captain muttered.
We hit the plume of water and we were thrown into the air crazily. I yelled, my stomach feeling like it had dropped all the way back down to the East Blue. Lucy laughed and giggled, and we crashed back down into one of the other currents... luckily, the one going down into the Grand Line. We landed with enough impact to rattle my bones, but it was a great feeling nonetheless.
"We made it!" I gasped. "I was sure we were gonna smash to pieces on the mountainside, but we made it!"
An unbelievable joy coursed through my veins. No, not even joy: It was a feeling of ecstasy. I broke out into a Lucy-sized smile and laughed until my throat was sore. As we descended down Reverse Mountain, I was so euphoric I almost joined Usopp and Sanji in their victory dance. Below us, a wide expanse of ocean was spread out before our eyes. It was like an eternal blanket that wrapped around the entire world.
The One Piece is out there at the end of that sea, I thought. So are countless adventures. And maybe the path for me to keep my promise to Cracked-Up Chuck, and become the world's best martial artist.
"I can see it!" Lucy told us excitedly. "The greatest ocean in the world! It's the Grand Line!"
It was a pretty epic moment.
As our ship shook and rode the current, we sailed into a cloud. A cloud . It was white and puffy and cold against my skin, but I'd never felt more awesome. I was on a ship in the clouds. How many other kids got this chance? I'll tell ya! None!
"This is the best!" Sanji shouted from somewhere behind me. I couldn't see much because the cloud was even thicker than mist. Usopp laughed in pure joy.
I grinned and zipped up my leather jacket to keep me warm. "This is awesome! It's like a roller coaster at 10,000 feet!"
"What's a roller coaster?" Nami said, raising her voice to make it carry over the wind.
"Not important!"
"Oh!"
Suddenly something moaned loudly. In the chaos of the white fluff whipping past, I had no idea where it was coming from, but it sounded like this: WOOAAAOOO . Somehow my mind was able to translate this to, Oi, bastard mountain! Give me back my friends! My neck tingled. Something huge was up ahead, even bigger than some of those sea kings we'd encountered in the Calm Belt.
"Did you hear something just now?" Zoro asked loudly.
I narrowed my eyes and squinted through the clouds. "Yeah! Whatever it is wants its friends back! It said something like the mountain took them!"
"You could understand that?"
"What are you two talking about?" Nami yelled.
"Yuril and I heard a strange noise!" he called back.
She was close enough that I could see her shrug and return to looking down the mountainside, still grinning widely. "Must've been the wind! There's a lot of strange rock formations here that could have caused it."
"How come I was able to understand it, then?" I asked. "I don't think that wind has friends, Nami!"
The moan came again. Please, I beg you! Let them through so I can see them one more time! As I squinted downriver, a dark shape was becoming visible through the thinning white cotton-candy-like cloud.
"Let who through?" I bellowed.
"What's that?" Usopp said in surprise. "Could you really understand that sound just now, Yuril?"
"Nami-san, I see a mountain up ahead!" Sanji reported.
"A mountain?" she repeated, turning to look at us in shock. "There can't be!"
"But I see it right there!"
"Who cares?" giggle Lucy. "Let's just GOOOO!"
"After the Twin Capes, which we're sailing towards now, there should be nothing but ocean!"
A memory of the original Straw Hats' trip across the Red Line hit me like a sledgehammer and I paled. "That's not a mountain! That's an enormous whale! That must be why I can understand the moans; I'm able to talk to creatures of the sea!"
"A WHALE!?" everyone roared. "HOW CAN THAT BE A WHALE!?"
"This is the Grand Line we're talking about!" I replied. "Besides storms that are nearly impossible to navigate and predict, there are islands submerged 10,000 feet deep in water, as well as monsters like goldfish the size of islands here!"
"Really?" said Usopp with interest.
Finally, the Going Merry broke through the clouds and we all were able to see it for ourselves. It was enormous, maybe half as big as Reverse Mountain, and it was navy blue with scars across its head. The monster also had a mouth full of teeth the size of houses. I had a feeling that if it wasn't so huge, it might've been kind of cute, but the sheer size of it made me wanna throw up. And the stupid thing was directly in our path! If we weren't able to change course (and unfortunately, I just remembered that Usopp and Sanji had broken our steering rudder while trying to get on the right current up the mountain), then we'd smash into the whale and be reduced to little more than timbers and splinters.
"OH MY GODS WE'RE GONNA DIE!" I cried.
"We are!?" Usopp screeched. "Don't say those things when you're the psychic unless you mean them, plea-he-he-hease!" He made an indescribable moan of terror. "W-W-What do we do?!"
"Fight it?" Lucy offered, still sitting on the goat figurehead.
"IDIOT!" Nami admonished her. "We can't fight something that huge! It'll just eat us and then everything will be over!"
"T-T-T-The current's taking us right to it!" cried the sniper. "What are we going to dooooo?"
Zoro and Sanji were just staring at the whale in a kind of awed horror. Like with the sea kings, I would have found their expressions funny if I wasn't feeling the exact same thing myself.
"Wait a minute," said the cook, biting his lip. "We've gotten this close, but it still just looks like a huge wall. So where's its eyes? "
"WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT THAT NOW!?" I shouted, tic-pulsing and crying anime tears. "THE RUDDER'S BROKEN! AT THIS SPEED, WE'RE GONNA CRASH INTO IT AND DIE WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES!"
But Nami gasped. "You're right! It might not have noticed us!"
"LIKE I SAID, IT DOESN'T MATTER! IT'S STILL IN OUR WAY! WE'LL STILL CRASH AND DIE, EVEN IF IT DOESN'T EAT US! WE NEED TO SLOW DOWN OR SOMETHING!"
"Yuril's right," agreed Zoro, gritting his teeth. Suddenly he hit his palm in realization and pointed to the left. "Oi, look! There's an opening right over there!"
"WELL, THAT'D BE JUST GREAT IF WE ACTUALLY HAD A HELM, NOW, WOULDN'T IT! "
"We have to do something, dammit!" cursed the swordsman, as everybody started scrambling about, looking for a way to get us to go left. "Yuril! Can you command the sea to take us through the opening?"
"Maybe!" I shot back. "But I don't know if I actually can! It was hard enough to control it at the base of the mountain, let alone when it's this freakin' fast! Haven't you noticed that it's at least double the speed it was coming up?"
Lucy pounded her fist, somehow keeping her balance while standing on the figurehead. "Ah! Got it! Everyone, I just got a good idea!"
"I'M GONNA HAUNT YOU IN THE AFTERLIFE IF I DIE AND YOU SURVIVE!" I informed her, crying anime tears again. In the short three weeks I'd been with these insane people, I'd learned that whenever Monkey D. Lucy got a good idea, it was likely to result in a near-death experience.
"Lucy?" said Nami in confusion. "What are you doing?"
The rubber girl jumped off the figurehead and onto the upper deck of the Merry, running over to the storage room. A second later she came out with a cannonball and loaded it into the cannon that we hadn't used since the Baratie. Meanwhile, the other guys were in the kitchen, trying desperately to force the broken rudder to move, but it wasn't budging.
The whale was only about eight hundred meters away, the distance closing fast.
BOOM .
An almighty explosion shook our poor ship, and for a second I wondered if we'd crashed against the oversized whale; But when I didn't break all the bones in my body, I opened my eyes to see black smoke billowing up from the cannon and I put two and two together. Lucy had fired the cannon at the whale.
Nami had fallen into the railing and backed away, retching in shock.
"Hey, wait a minute..." I realized. "What's this feeling like I'm flying...?" I twisted around and saw nothing but water below me. My eyes widened in horror and I cursed Newton's Law of Inertia. Because objects at motion tend to stay in motion, when the opposite force from the cannon firing caused our ship to slow down, it also caused me to keep going and fly off the Merry.
"Yuril!" Nami shouted, her voice laced with horror and her eyes wide.
SPLASH!
It was too late. I had already fallen into the current, a rapid deadlier than any before it.