vewu

There was a village down the slope. You could see the smoke curling up from it, thatched roofs, the whole medieval starter-pack aesthetic, and every single instinct you had built up from a lifetime of these exact stories told you to march down there and be the mysterious knowledgeable stranger. The one who knew things. The one who could win the war, cure the plague, invent soap, whatever the plot demanded.

Except you did not know a single thing about this place. Not the name of it. Not who ran it. Not whether the smoke down there meant a cozy hearth fire or a raiding party currently setting the cozy hearth fires. You knew chicken shit about this world, and being isekaied had not fixed that, had not downloaded a helpful encyclopedia into your skull, had not made you special in any measurable way. It had just relocated your ignorance to a more inconvenient address.

So you did the thing. You walked down there anyway, because standing on a hill starving to death seemed like a worse plan. You opened your mouth to say something wise and stranger-from-afar-ish to the first person you saw, a woman hauling a bucket, and what came out instead was a question about where you were.

She looked at you the way you look at a man who has clearly been kicked in the head by a horse.

"You don't know where you are," she repeated, flat.

"Correct," you said, with all the dignity of someone who had just admitted, in a strange new land, holding no skill and no map and no clue, that the great gift of a second life had arrived with absolutely nothing in the box. "That is the situation. Yes."

The bucket handle creaked. Somewhere behind her a chicken screamed for reasons of its own. And you stood there in your weird ass clothes, looking, you are fairly sure, stupid as shit.

"Foosha," the woman said skeptically. "Hopefully you remember it when you're not drunk."

You weren't, and wouldn't, but seeing how she wasn't a mythical start screen, or even nice, you continued on into the mysterious Foosha Village. And recalled nothing specific despite there being something familiar about it.

It rattled around in your skull looking for a hook to catch on and found only smooth walls, because whatever library of useful knowledge the universe was supposed to have installed had apparently been left in a box on some cosmic loading dock, unopened, gathering dust next to your cheat skill and your status screen and every other thing you had been promised by two decades of reading stories exactly like this one.

Foosha.

Nothing came.

The village itself was almost aggressively pleasant, which somehow made it worse. There was a windmill turning lazy circles against that bruise-colored sky. There were little houses with round windows and flower boxes, the kind of place that looked like it had been designed to be missed after something terrible happened to it. Chickens, your only familiar friends, pecked at the dirt road. A woman was hanging laundry on a line. Somewhere a dog barked twice and then apparently lost interest in the whole endeavor.

You walked down the middle of the road because there was no traffic to walk anywhere else, and you kept waiting to feel like the protagonist. In the stories, the hero always knew. They arrived and the world arranged itself meaningfully around them, quests lighting up like they had little markers floating overhead, important people turning to look. Here, nobody turned. The laundry woman gave you exactly one glance, clocked you as not-a-threat and not-interesting, and went back to her wet sheets. A child ran past you chasing a hoop and did not so much as break stride.

You were, you were beginning to understand, a nobody in a town you could not place, in a world that had handed you no map, and the only person who had spoken to you so far clearly thought you had been recently kicked by livestock.

There was a building up ahead with a sign creaking over the door. A bar, maybe, or an inn, the kind of establishment where a stranger in a story always went to overhear the crucial rumor that kicked the plot into gear. You steered toward it, mostly because your feet needed a destination and mostly because if this world was going to insist on giving you nothing, the least it could do was give it to you sitting down.

You may have wandered forever looking for a fucking hint, but it was at that moment a small child burst from the doors of the establishment, and consequently, straight into you.

And he hit you not with the weight of a child but like a goddamn cannonball.

The air left you in one flat wheeze. There was a stagger, an undignified backward hop, a moment where your arms windmilled like you were trying to fly and had suddenly forgotten the mechanism, and then your ass met the dirt road with a thud that rearranged something in your lower spine. The chickens scattered. Somewhere the dog resumed barking, invested again now that there was drama worth its attention.

The kid did not fall but bounced off you like you were the soft thing in the equation, which you apparently were, and landed on his feet with the easy balance of someone whose bones were clearly made of a lighter material than yours. He was small. That was the part your brain kept snagging on as you sat there in the road with your dignity scattered among the poultry. He was small, gap-toothed, grinning, with a thatch of black hair. But he had flattened you like a pro wrestler.

"Sorry!" he said, not sounding remotely sorry, already looking past you to whatever had been chasing him or whatever he had been chasing. Then his eyes came back and settled on you properly, and something lit up in them, bright and unbothered and a little unnerving in its total lack of concern for the person he had just flattened.

"Whoa. Are you new? I've never seen you before." He leaned in, hands on his knees, inspecting you the way you might inspect an interesting bug. "You're sitting in the road."

"I'm aware," you said flatly.

"Why are you sitting in the road?"

"You," you said, "put me here."

He considered this. He seemed to find it fair. "Oh. Yeah." The grin came back, wider, and he stuck out a hand to haul you up, and God help you, there was that snag in your brain again, that maddening flicker of a hook finally finding purchase on something, a straw hat and a laugh and a name you almost had, almost, right there at the edge of knowing.

It slipped away before you could catch it.

You took the hand. He pulled you up like you weighed nothing at all.

"Thanks, kid." At least your near second death came with manners, you supposed, stretching your arm out to see if the shoulder still worked. It did, more or less. It filed a formal complaint, but it worked.

"Luffy," said the kid.

Your neck nearly broke turning back to him. You blinked, mouth a bit ajar.

"What?"

"That's my name." He said it patiently, the way you explain a simple thing to someone who has been kicked in the head by a horse, which, you were beginning to notice, was becoming a recurring assumption about you in this village. "Monkey D. Luffy. You said thanks kid but I'm not kid, I'm Luffy." He tilted his head. "What's yours?"

You told him. The name came out of your mouth and sounded wrong in the air here, too many syllables from a world that did not exist anymore. He repeated it back with the vowels slightly mangled and immediately seemed to decide it was acceptable.

But you were not really listening, because your brain had finally, finally caught the hook it had been fumbling for since the woman said Foosha.

It all landed at once. The pieces came down in a heap and assembled themselves into a picture you did not want to be looking at, because if that picture was correct, then you knew exactly what this world was, and holy fuck, no way.

You knew chicken shit about most things. You had established that. No map, no skill, no encyclopedia.

But you knew this. Oh, you knew of him.

"You okay?" Luffy asked, because you had gone very still and very sweaty and were staring at him like the sky had opened up behind his head. "You look kinda weird."

"Luffy," you said carefully, testing it, hoping to be wrong. "Do you, uh. Do you want to be a pirate when you grow up?"

His whole face split open. It was the most certain expression you had ever seen on a human being, more certain than most people managed about anything in their entire lives, and he threw both arms up over his head like the answer was too big to keep contained in his small ordnance body.

"I'm gonna be King of the Pirates! How’d you know?!”

Oh, you thought, sitting back down in the road entirely of your own accord this time. Oh, no.