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We braved the storm as we drew closer to the Grand Line, the waves growing more violent with every gust of wind. Luffy, Nami, and I stood on the deck, and despite the fierce weather, Luffy stubbornly remained perched on the ship's figurehead, just like always.
"Luffy, get down from there!" I shouted over the wind. "If you fall in, there's no way we'll be able to find you!"
He just laughed, yelling something about me trying to steal his favorite spot. Before I could argue, Nami's voice cut through the chaos. "You two, get inside now! We have to talk about something!" she ordered, heading toward the kitchen.
Luffy and I followed her in, taking our usual seats around the table. Nami unrolled a large map, pointing to a single spot on the page. "The entrance to the Grand Line," she began, "is a mountain."
Everyone gasped in shock.
"A ship can't climb a mountain!" Usopp exclaimed. "Even if there was a river going up, it's impossible!"
Sanji, ever the loyal knight, stepped in to defend her. "If that's what the map says, we should trust it. Nami's never wrong."
Zoro wasn't convinced. "She stole that map from Buggy. Who knows if it's even reliable? Why don't we just sail right into the Grand Line from the side?"
"No, we can't!" Nami and Luffy shouted in unison. "We have to use the cool entrance!"
Suddenly, the ship's rocking stopped, and the air grew still. I glanced out the window and noticed the storm had vanished. "Hey, it's nice out now," I said. "The storm's gone."
We all headed outside to find the calm sea, but a moment later, Nami screamed. "Oh, no! This is the Calm Belt! Grab the oars and start rowing, everyone!"
"But it's so nice here, can't we just relax for a bit?" Rose whined, looking at the tranquil water.
Nami explained that the Grand Line was surrounded by two regions called the Calm Belts, where the winds never blew. As if on cue, the ship shuddered violently, and a dozen enormous Sea Kings surfaced around us. We were all freaked out, but Rose was completely terrified. She collapsed to the deck, trembling.
"Make the big things go away," she whispered to herself.
Rose's —her fear of giant things, especially creatures—had completely taken over. While she cowered by the mast, the rest of us scrambled to grab the oars.
"When that thing dives back down, row like your lives depend on it!" I shouted.
The giant whale whose nose we were perched on began to take in a deep breath. With a massive sneeze, it sent us flying high into the air.
"Usopp's falling!" someone yelled.
Luffy stretched his arm out and snagged Usopp just before he became food for a frog-like Sea King. But our brief rescue was short-lived. We were blown all the way back into the storm.
"That's why we have to use the other entrance," Nami explained again, adding that the mountain's peculiar sea currents made it possible to traverse.
"So, it's a magic mountain?" Luffy and Rose asked, their eyes wide.
We sailed for a few more minutes until we were close enough to see the Red Line, a colossal continent-sized mountain covered in so many clouds that its peak was invisible. Its base was just as obscured, swallowed by massive waves crashing against its side.
"There it is! Our ticket to the Grand Line!" I cheered. "A waterway up a mountain!"
"Turn the rudder to starboard!" Nami instructed Sanji and Usopp.
SNAP!
The rudder broke in half. We were now sailing straight for the mountain wall with no way to turn. Just as disaster seemed certain, Luffy threw me his straw hat and leaped overboard. "Gum-Gum Balloon!" he yelled, stretching himself into a massive sphere to bounce the ship away from the wall. He fell back toward the water, but Zoro grabbed his hand and pulled him back onto the deck.
"We did it!" we all cheered as the ship was carried up the mountain's waterway. We reached the top and began our rapid descent down the other side.
"I can see it!" Luffy yelled. "The Grand Line!"
"This is it," I said, a smile spreading across my face. "The greatest sea in the world."
"There's a mountain ahead!" Sanji shouted from the crow's nest.
As we got closer, we realized it wasn't a mountain at all. It was a massive whale with a head covered in scars.
"Zoro, save me!" Rose screamed, cowering behind him.
"What do we do? Do we fight it?" Zoro asked, hand on his sword.
"The thing's so big we can probably just sail around it and avoid a fight!" I yelled back.
"No, we can't! We're going too fast, and the rudder's stuck!" Sanji shot back.
BOOM!
Luffy fired the cannon, and the ship slowed down just enough to ram into the whale.
"What were you thinking?" I yelled at him. The figurehead snapped off, but the impact sent the ship reeling.
"You broke my seat!" Luffy screamed, enraged.
"Now's our chance! Let's go!" I grabbed an oar and started rowing.
The whale roared, but Luffy, still fuming, had other ideas. "You destroyed my seat!" he yelled, punching the whale right in the eye.
"Why the hell would you do that?!" I screamed. "Now it's seen us!"
"Come at me!" Luffy taunted.
Rose and Zoro kicked him from behind. "Shut up!" they both yelled.
The whale opened its massive mouth and began to suck in water, pulling our ship inside. Luffy fell off the boat and into the water before I could grab him. The current swept us deeper and deeper until we were finally pushed out into what looked like the whale's stomach.
"Where's Luffy?" I wondered aloud.
As the water settled, we looked around in disbelief. An island! There was a whole island inside the whale!
"Is this some kind of dream?" Usopp asked.
"This must be heaven!" Rose added. "There's even a house for us to stay in. We can spend forever together, Zoro!"
Suddenly, a giant squid burst from the water and charged toward us. Rose fell to the ground in terror, and Nami and Usopp screamed. Three harpoons shot through the air, piercing the squid and killing it instantly.
"Someone's here," Zoro said, getting into a fighting stance with Sanji.
"Maybe we should open fire?" Usopp whimpered, his voice trembling.
"Wait, someone's coming out," I said, pointing toward the house. An old man with a head of flower-like hair stepped out and stared us down. We stood frozen, staring back at him in silence.
"Say something already!" Sanji screamed.
"We have a cannon, and we're not afraid to use it!" Usopp added, trying to sound tough.
The old man just stared at us. "Don't even think about it. Someone might end up dead."
"And who might that be?" Zoro asked with a cocky grin.
"Me."
"Oh, come on!" Zoro yelled, stomping his foot.
"Relax," I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, old man, would you mind telling us who you are and where we are?"
"It's polite to introduce yourself first," he replied.
"Okay, I'm…"
"My name is Crocus. I'm a seventy-one-year-old lighthouse keeper," he said, cutting me off.
"I swear, nobody will care if I kill this guy right now!" I yelled, my frustration at its breaking point.
"It should be obvious where you are. You were swallowed by the whale," Crocus said nonchalantly.
"Are we going to die in here?" Rose and Usopp cried.
"The exit's right over there," Crocus pointed to a giant door in the wall of the whale's stomach.
"There's a door?!" we all shouted.
The water suddenly began to shake, and we saw that our ship was now sitting on an iron-bottomed island.
"So he's started bashing his head again?" the old man muttered to himself.
"Now that I remember, the whale's head was covered in scars," Nami said quietly.
"But what does it all mean?" Usopp asked, still confused.
"It means he's suffering," Nami replied. "He's trying to kill himself from the inside."
"Who cares? We need to get out of here before this ship falls apart!" Rose yelled.
"Both of us and Luffy are in danger," I commanded. "We have to leave! He didn't make it inside, but I saw him get swallowed in the mouth!"
Usopp pointed out that the old man had jumped into the water, but we had more important things to worry about. Zoro and Sanji grabbed the oars, and we started rowing for the door. Just then, a door at the top of the whale opened up, and three people fell out, one of them being Luffy.
"You guys are all right! Mind helping me out?!" Luffy screamed as he plunged into the water. We pulled him out, and he dragged the two others with him. The two people—a man and a woman—looked terrified of us.
"I won't let you lay a finger on Laboon!" Crocus yelled, appearing on a platform.
The two new guests picked up their guns and fired at the whale. Crocus jumped in front of the attack, taking the blast himself to protect the whale. The two villains began to gloat about killing the whale for food, but Luffy walked up behind them and knocked them out cold. "Don't know what's going on, but you two should be quiet," he said.
After everything calmed down, we docked on the old man's ship. He explained that the two people Luffy had knocked out were bounty hunters trying to kill the whale for food. He told us that Laboon was an island whale that had come here with a pirate crew who promised to return for him after completing their journey across the Grand Line. But they never came back for the poor thing.
"It's been fifty years, and Laboon still waits," Crocus said sadly. We later went outside, where he told us the rest of the story: the pirates who left Laboon here had abandoned the Grand Line altogether.
Rose's Point of View
Crocus led us out of the whale through a series of tunnels he had made himself to treat Laboon. He admitted to once being a ship's doctor, but when Steve and Luffy asked if he would join our crew, he quickly denied it, saying he was too old. The old man opened the gate to let us back out to sea.
"What should we do with these two?" I asked Steve, pointing to the knocked-out bounty hunters.
"Just throw them overboard," he shrugged.
I did as he said and dropped them into the water. Luffy was playing with something he found on the ground, and the rest of us were listening to Crocus tell us more about the whale while Nami plotted our course.
Suddenly, Luffy returned to the ship and grabbed the mast, snapping it off at the base. He ran up the whale's head, getting to the top, and then shoved the mast into the animal's flesh.
"What are you doing?!" I yelled as the whale slammed its head into Luffy, driving him into the ground.
Luffy stood up, completely unharmed, and punched the whale in the eye. Just as the whale was about to attack again, Luffy put his hand up, signaling it to stop. "It's a tie," he said to the massive creature. "Since we don't know who won, when I get back from my trip around the Grand Line, I'll come back and fight you again!"
The whale roared in agreement. Luffy took out some paint and drew his mark on the whale's head to symbolize their pact. "But you'll have to stop slamming your head into that rock, okay? The paint will get rubbed off."
Stupid… always acting out.
Steve's Point of View
The others went their separate ways while Nami plotted our course. I sat on the ship with Luffy, waiting to start sailing.
"The compass is broken!" Nami screamed.
"It's not broken; it just won't work here," Crocus explained. He went on about how the magnetic fields and minerals in the Grand Line made traditional compasses useless. He told us we would need a device called a Log Pose.
"Does it look like this?" Luffy asked, holding up a watch-like device.
"That's it," Crocus confirmed.
He explained that there were multiple paths to the end of the Grand Line, and the Log Pose chose which one to follow based on magnetism. Luffy said he didn't care which path we took; if it was boring, we could just start over.
Nami took the Log Pose and began to calibrate it, but Sanji and Luffy suddenly got into a fight about food. Sanji kicked Luffy, sending him flying across the rocks past Nami. The force of the wind from Luffy's flight shattered the fragile Log Pose. Nami, furious, kicked both Luffy and Sanji into the water.
I dove in after Luffy to make sure he didn't drown. "I'm coming!" I shouted, pulling him out of the water with Sanji's help. When we got back to the cape, Nami had somehow gotten a new Log Pose.
The two people Rose had thrown overboard also pulled themselves onto the cape. Sanji helped the woman out of the water, leaving me, Luffy, and the man to fend for ourselves.
"We need a ride," the woman pleaded. "Please do us a favor." She bowed low to us.
"Whatever, I don't care," I said.
"Sure, you can come!" Luffy said, inviting them onto the ship.
We all climbed aboard the Merry, our two new guests with us. Crocus waved us off and said his goodbyes, and even the whale let out one last roar.
We were finally on our way to our first stop on the Grand Line: Whiskey Peak.