aite whats shakin bacon

HEEEEY – I have returned to tactlessly shove this mess down your throats; another take on the "modern teenager falls into fictional world" trope! WHO'S EXCITED

/crickets

Anyway, I would like to preface this prologue with a few minor warnings:

- The prologue itself is an old & frivolous drabble, written in the middle of the night back in...March? I think?

- My writing ability tends to spiral into the category of 'oh god no' when I'm half-asleep.

- Despite the prologue's age, it's still unedited and has pretty much just been... lurking in my drafts since its accidental birth. I've tried editing it, buuuuut since I don't know how to synchronize free time and inspiration, every time I open the file I just kinda go "hnnnnnnnnnnnggggggNOPE" before closing it again. I TRIED, OKAY. I'VE BEEN HOLDING MY BRAIN AT GUNPOINT TRYING TO EDIT THIS THING, BUT TO NO AVAIL. LEAVE ME BE AND FORGIVE THE ERRORS THAT ARE BOUND TO OCCUR (jk feel free to notify me & I'll go back and fix it. One day. Probably.)

- On second thought, this thing isn't even a prologue. It's more like...a bundle of flashbacks told in weird chronological snippets.

- Which is why it has, like, no dialogue. And is written via an omniscient viewpoint. /sweats

- I tend to get REALLY INTO character development at the cost of plot and the problem with that method is that I go off on tangents and end up with a lot of shit that isn't going anywhere. REALISTIC AND CONSISTENT PLOT? NOT ON MY WATCH

- Honestly? The OC is just plain rude and has all the engaging qualities of a potato peeler.

- I haven't caught up with the manga yet (I have pathetically little time to do stuff lately huff huff), so if anything in this story goes against canon, you could either tell me or smack me in the face with a fine brick of your choice. Or both. Both works.

- Actually, this is a trainwreck and might even be borderline parodical at times. But hopefully it's still readable. A GIRL CAN HOPE RIGHT. Girl. Woman. Super old author who still refuses to accept her position as a functional member of society. /hisses and retreats into a pile of half-finished fics and empty dorito bags.

- ONE LAST THING! I'm still kind of new to this fandom and haven't read a single OP fanfic yet, so if you have any recs please holla me! (Sssssshould probably read some before posting my own, but when I join a fandom I don't even bother testing the waters – I just swan dive into the deep end and hope I don't die.)

OKAY THAT'S ALL.

Let's trudge through this hodgepodge and embark on this fanfic-journey together as hardcore tomodachis.

Leggo.

Tea with a Stranger

- PROLOGUE -

Let's Rewind.

Alright, she'd admit it. Eating a funky-looking fruit offered to her by a complete stranger in a cramped alleyway hadn't been the smartest of choices. But if this predicament was some sort of karmic retribution, the responsible deity was overdoing it.

Camille did not deserve to be thrown into a Japanese comic book.

Hell, in her defense, Camille wasn't even a bad person. She steered clear of all the major sins. She had never robbed anybody at knife-point, she didn't double-dip at parties, and she sometimes passed the potatoes during dinner.

Sure, she had certain faults. Her moral compass had been broken at the tender age of five, she was a certified wimp (understandable, when you have arms like twigs), and she hardly did anything of particular importance or productive value. But none of these things made her evil. She was just brought up to believe in self-preservation and the underappreciated value of boredom. Your average kind of girl.

In other words, this entire phenomenon was destined for failure from the very beginning. Camille wasn't built to survive wacky adventures. All she wanted was to remain comfortable middle class and go through life undetected. She had the social appeal of a decomposing goat, and couldn't coordinate a jumping-jack. Her three favorite hobbies at the time were sleeping, complaining, and not talking to anyone at social functions. Plans for the future? Becoming a full-fledged hermit. It was the only appropriate occupation.

Basically, Camille was already well on her way to becoming a lonely cat lady and probably had the life expectancy of a Tamagotchi. She didn't even mind. No, Camille Cousteau was fully content with her sedentary lifestyle and found everything to be completely perfect.

At least up until the moment she devoured an enchanted fruit, was removed from her home planet, transported to a floating island, accused of diabolism, and hunted down by an army of leprechauns due to accidental vandalism and destruction of religious property.

Stop.

Rewind.

Let's try that again.

You see, it all began when Camille made a rather grand entrance into the fictional pirate world.

…But for the sake of convenience, let's start a little bit earlier.

More specifically, let's start in Colmar, France.

La Pâtisserie de Cousteau was situated at the end of the town's main street, nestled snugly between the local bookstore and a modest restaurant. Pungent odors and sweet aromas wafted through the air and tugged at all noses nearby. The sun was setting and the evening rush was in full swing as customers from all walks of life crowded the pastry shop counter.

It was Tuesday, and the Cousteau family was terrified.

Correction: It was Tuesday, and they were out of apples.

No apples meant to apple tart. No apple tart meant disappointed customers. Disappointed customers was downright outrageous and most definitely unacceptable.

But it was Tuesday.

A Cousteau did not go grocery shopping on a Tuesday. Grocery shopping during weekdays was sacrilege. The only fruits you could hope to find on a Tuesday were leftovers from the weekend, sure to be musty and moldy and, heaven forbid, flavorless.

But to the family's collective dismay, the importance of satisfied customers outranked a pastry chef's pride by far. Thus the head of the household, Denis Cousteau, swallowed his honor in a heroic display of bravery and sent his only daughter out to fetch the finest apples she could find.

Camille was not a happy camper.

She rolled out of bed to express her chagrin in long groans at different octaves, before eventually accepting her fate with a heavy huff (a very dignified response considering her level of consciousness). Her father gave her a solemn nod, like she had just announced her intention to become a martyr. Camille snorted, rolled her eyes heavenwards, and grabbed an umbrella to ward off the spring rain outside.

With one last grunt, she slouched her way out the door, unintentionally embarking on a grocery trip that would take her far beyond the threshold of her family's pastry shop.

Despite Camille's best efforts, Acceptable Apples to Consume were a species now extinct. She sauntered home empty-handed, wrestling with her umbrella in the wind like a schizophrenic Mary Poppins. Hissing at no one in particular, she decided to take a shortcut, and ducked into one of the cramped alleys for some shelter.

Her annoyance levels were zeroed out the moment she passed by a fruit stand. The stand was guarded by a somewhat lanky man of middle age, with a rapidly retreating hairline, and an impressive beard to make up for it.

He beckoned her over with a wave.

In hindsight, she probably should have seen it coming. She had already tempted fate that evening by going grocery shopping on a Tuesday, and when a shady stranger gestures for you to get closer, well – he most likely plans to harvest your organs. But while Camille was a suspicious creature by nature, the man sold apples, and her family's honor was at stake. So she scowled, squared her shoulders and made a bee-line for the fruit stand.

The second the man realized he had seized a customer, he launched into a detailed story about his homegrown apple tree. Camille ignored him in favor of staring at some kind of mutated plum next to the apples, marveling at its colossal size and fascinating swirl pattern. When he finally caught her staring at the bizarre fruit, he nudged it towards her and offered her a taste.

This was the point where someone should have grabbed her by the arm and said, 'Camille, it's time to go.'

No one did this.

And because Camille was a curious soul when it came to new gastronomical delights, she shrugged and accepted the man's amiable offer.

Wrong thing to do.

Camille brought the hefty fruit to her lips, sank her teeth into the juicy pulp–

– and froze.

It tasted like panic, disappointment, and the absolute conviction that your entire life is crumbling around your shoulders and that this is how you die.

Camille, petrified, stared at the fruit vendor in an impressive mixture of shock, terror and complete betrayal – her mouth still stuck in mid-chew. The juice of the fruit spread like fire across her tongue, slaughtering every single gustatory cell in its way, and her mind was brimming with unconditional regret.

But she couldn't spit it out.

If there was one thing her parent had taught her, it was to never shame another man for his own comestible creation. That included fermented fish, animal heads of various sizes, and fruity annihilation. Regardless of your disgust, you did not, under any circumstance, spit out a man's homegrown fruit in front of his own face.

So there she was; gagging and sweating bullets in the middle of an abandoned alleyway as her body convulsed in sheer protest. One of her eyes twitched sporadically and she willed herself to not barf because she had not been raised in a goddamn barn.

In the end, Camille simply decided to commit the biggest mistake of her entire life.

She swallowed the fruit.

The man smiled.

And with a rather anticlimactic 'plop!', Camille's body transformed into pure nuclear energy and blew a hole straight through spacetime.

Simply put, Gardenia was a sky island.

More accurately put, it was an archipelago; a handful of floating islands, all filled with an abundance of nature and connected by wooden handcrafted bridges. Some of the trees were heavy with leaves and stretched up, fighting a long, unbearably slow battle for sunlight. Others were smaller and bore fruit in cycles which had little to do with the permanent spring weather. Narrow rivers slithered across the bigger islands as the sole water supply, and how they stayed perpetually filled was a mystery unsolved by time.

Although Gardenia was a rather secluded place in Paradise, The Golden Age of Piracy had created a steady stream of rowdy pirates. It affected all kinds of islands in the Grand Line – this sky island included. While few pirates managed to find a way up, and even fewer bothered to stay once they realized Gardenia had no treasure to offer besides some outstandingly glamorous plants, the peculiar air currents around the island had an annoying tendency to waft wanted posters into trees and littering the small footpaths.

Now, before we continue any further, it may be interesting to note a few things about the inhabitants of this particular sky island.

First of all, your average Gardenian rarely grew taller than twenty inches. They were tiny jack of all trades, lived off the land, and hardcore vegetarians. Sympathy for carnivores was a feeling the population had bred out decades ago.

Furthermore, Gardenians practiced animism, dendrolatry, and spent a majority of their free-time worshiping shrubbery. They had an amiable give-and-take relationship with nature, and they loved it.

And finally, a Gardenian was genetically predisposed to insanity and obsession. Every single person above the age of four was, by regular standards, certifiably mentally unsound.

Moving on.

Today was a day of joy. The Gardenians were all out of their timbered huts and had gathered together in the town square for their monthly ceremony to celebrate their bountiful harvest and pledge their loyalty to the local greenery. They busied themselves with an activity that vaguely resembled singing (using decibels only heard in whalesong) and conveying their emotions through interpretive dance. The cacophony drowned out the sounds of birdsong and wind tugging at drying leaves. Everything was going quite well.

Alas, it was not meant to last.

Just when the feast was in full swing, an interesting diversion occurred.

More to the point, Camille Cousteau, with her normal panache for excellent timing, fell from the sky, screeching like the shades of hell were at her feet, and careened with wild abandon straight into their makeshift altar.

The force of impact sent flower decorations and one unfortunate grandmother hurtling through the air as the Gardenian altar ruptured and turned into a broken, angled slab of lumber.

Everything was completely still.

The Gardenians fixedly avoided each other's gaze in favor of staring at the inelegant tangle of limbs almost completely flattened into the street, surrounded by shrine remains. Eventually, the village elder braved to step closer. The Gardenians began chattering in low, suspicious tones as the elder touched one of the protruding limbs with his cherished staff.

The humanoid lump let out a strangled wheeze.

When Camille finally regained feeling in her face and could sense a root forcing its way into her spinal cord, she peeled her cheek off of the ground with a feeble cough. She barely had time to register that there was a freaking forest up ahead, before something cold poked her leg. With tremendous effort, she turned around.

A knee-high pensioner was prodding her with a tiny stick. He smelled faintly like thawing minced beef, wore nothing but a leaf between his legs, and was flanked by a whole troop of garden gnomes in a similar state of undress.

She stared.

They stared back.

Silence reigned.

Camille broke it when she nailed the elder in the face with her left shoe and fled screaming into the woods.

She spent her first month in Gardenia chewing leaves, curled into fetal position, and convinced she had contracted some rare, probably fatal jungle disease from the funky plum-fruit.

Meanwhile, the Gardenians were mesmerized by the idea that she was the ready vessel of a vengeful god. They figured she had come to claim what was hers, and saw her as something that should be hunted down, beheaded, torched, and buried in a salt quarry.

For the most part, Camille thought she handled the situation just fine. She only suffered a few minor heart attacks, cried thrice, and had no more than five existential crises. Or six. Okay, maybe nine. But considering her situation, it wasn't all that surprising.

The first day was, without a doubt, the most confusing. After screaming and running through an entire forest in a fit of panic and sheer confusion, she eventually reached a clearing. There she tripped over her own legs with the grace of a thousand swans, went sprawling with a choked shriek, and almost tumbled off the edge of the island.

She poked her head out and over the edge, squinting down into the wild blue yonder.

The island was floating.

...She decided to retreat and tackle that particular abomination later.

In terms of practicality, a panic attack was one of the worst things she could provide herself with. So she took a deep breath and flopped onto her back to assess her current situation.

The island was floating, inhabited by tiny half-naked humans, and had zero phone reception.

Right.

Surely a perfectly logical explanation could account for this.

Half an hour later, she concluded that her sanity had been forever banished, exiled in a land of no return. Her empty stomach screamed dissonant melodies of pain, agony and longing, and she besought the heavens in frustration.

At long last, Camille sat upright, dragging her palms across her face with a groan. Hallucination or no, it was clear that everyone here was exceptionally insane. She could stay out here, all alone in the middle of nowhere, or she could play along before they straight-up murdered her as a result of cultural miscommunication.

Honestly, the choice wasn't even that hard.

When Camille finally managed to guess her way back into the village, the elder and his council (staffed by four old women and six guinea pigs) were holding a conference to deal with the situation that had cropped up. She gave them a once-over, belatedly realized that the council had the combined IQ of a raisin, and began praying to any merciful god listening, begging them to end this fever dream before the garden gnomes decided on her corporal punishment.

Was she going to be exiled and forced to live on a mountaintop, fending for herself and living off flambéed raccoons?

Would she get pushed over the island's edge, thrown from thirty thousand feet – or whatever cruising altitude was?

Would they demand reparations in the form of her head on a pike?

Or burn her at the stake as a sacrifice to their garden gods?

Good lord, the possibilities were endless.

Had the world been a fair place, she could have apologized humbly and rebuilt the altar for its contingent of diligent worshipers with only a minor political kerfuffle. But the world was anything but fair, and Camille was being charged for a murder most foul and labeled as the harbinger of Satan.

Once the elder finally turned to her and explained (in some sort of archaic English that gave her a headache) how she had impinged on their honor and violated the sacred truce between them and mother nature, Camille was just about ready to grovel to any likely deity for some kind of hallucinatory cure. That was, until he told her that the punishment was to steer clear of any religious establishment in the future.

Relief washed over her. A few days later, the relief increased tenfold as they gave her a house to boot.

Camille liked to think they gave it to her out of pity.

In reality, they gave her the house for an entirely different reason. You see, on her second day, when her stomach felt like it had denied all hope and begun to eat itself, she had tried to find something edible on her own. And frankly, seeing a chipmunked motherfucker doublefisting unripe nuts and semi-poisonous plants into her mouth in the middle of the street before turning a violent shade of green and throwing it all up minutes later – well, it kind of terrified the children. It had to stop.

So. They gave her a house.

...It might also have been because Camille lifted the village elder by his shoulder and discreetly threatened to strangle him with his own entrails if he didn't help her the fuck out.

But anyway.

The house was a small structure, placed on an equally tiny island that gave her a rather nice overview of the town below. Inside, it was cold and dank after years of neglect. The air was stagnant and stank of rot and mildew, and cobwebs of all sizes stretched like gossamer lace among the ceiling rafters. It kind of looked like the bastard offspring of a tree house and a public restroom. While it was big by Gardenian standards, her face still smashed right into one of the low-hanging beams when she entered. Besides a small bedroom, an enclosed section with a wooden bathtub, and a cramped main room with a petite table and chair, it didn't encompass much. But seeing as she was probably high on plum-juice (or the butt of a really tasteless joke), she didn't care to complain.

According to the elder, the house had been built as a gift to a coven of gargantuan witches (or as we like to call them, a group of average humans), and its poor state came from being under the care of neglectful occultists.

Camille stared at the house and vaguely wondered if she should perhaps consider an exorcism.

Then again, she had no intention of staying on the same island as the Gardenians and their very worrisome culture, and figured she might as well shimmy her way into the bedroom to sleep off all the freaky drugs in her system.

When she woke up the next day, the fever dream still hadn't subsided. Camille scowled at the ceiling for several minutes, went outside to force some harmless fruit down her throat and drink water from a nearby river, before wobbling straight back to bed. The hallucination would have to end eventually, so she might as well speed things up by sleeping through most of it.

By the fifth day her phone was dead and gone, and she was fairly certain she wasn't getting all the nutrients she needed. While the Gardenians lapsed into their old routine, Camille tried to cope by sleeping an obscene amount and going on a redecorating frenzy. Had she been back home, she would have given the house a makeover and filled it with lots of elephant and bird related decor, and at least one framed photo of Dick Van Dyke. Alas, she had to make do with a wooden tea pot hidden in one of the main room's dusty cabinets. Which was better than nothing, she supposed.

The second week rolled around and Camille was getting pretty tired of residing in her own subconscious, and even more tired of the moldy smell in her temporary house. With little else to do, she decided to give it some semblance of order. Old, moth-eaten cotton garments were tucked away in a chest, so she dug them out and began to scrub the walls with a vengeance.

She would have given up halfway through if she had anywhere else to go, or anything else to do.

The rest of the month was spent frantically trying to orient herself. She studied her predicament for days, looking at advantages and disadvantages of every course of action and their possible outcomes. Meanwhile, the Gardenian children stayed far away from her house. Mostly because their parents convinced them a scary lady had claimed the house as her territory and that those who dared to enter her domain would be imprisoned in her closet. Nearly all the adults were under the impression that she would challenge trespassers to savage barbaric duels, and didn't really get any closer to her than the children. All things considered, Camille's bubble of seclusion had been rebuilt. Her only fear was to wake up and find a wooden fork planted deep in her forehead while a Gardenian high-tailed it out of her window, howling as they fled into the night.

Sometimes she would wander the streets and bewail her fate loudly, and at length, to the sky. Other days, she stayed in bed and lamented the lack of plumbing, or watched dust motes dance in the air when that got too stressful. Once, she even fashioned some sort of toothbrush from wooden fibers. All the while, her mind and body readjusted to being a persona non grata on the same nutritional plan as a group of vegetarian garden gnomes.

(She did try to eat a rabbit once, but the village elder bounced out from a nearby bush, whacked her over the head with his staff and called her a loathsome worm of fetid soils before she even got her hands on it.)

But the majority of her time was spent glaring at the bedroom ceiling as she wondered why everything felt so frighteningly real.

The second month arrived. Camille still wasn't sure what kind of sick fever dream she was loping through, but she was starting to get real tired of binging on nuts, berries and semi-clean river water.

She craved a sandwich with the crusts cut off, and decided that enough was enough.

Desperate for something that wasn't fruit, she hunted down a plant that somewhat resembled wheat. Crushing the dried seeds confirmed that, yes, they did contain flour. A minuscule amount per plant, but she had time to spare.

She couldn't exactly make a five-star dinner from water and flour alone, but it would have to do. No eggs, no butter, no yeast, no salt – the options were limited, but her father had taught her all kinds of obsolete recipes, and Camille would be damned if she wasn't going to make something edible.

She figured any kind of progress would be good for her state of mind.

Creating a fire with flint stones was not as easy as MacGyver made it seem, and blisters covered her fingers by the time it ignited. The wooden contraption she found probably wasn't hygienic either, and could have been used as a frisbee for all she knew. But it was thin and flat and did the job.

Hours later an aroma of warm, slow-frying pancakes filled the air.

The pancakes weren't particularly fluffy, and were in dire need of some salt, but after a whole month of only fruit and vegetables, it tasted like flavorless bliss. Camille shoved the burned first-tries into a bucket, left it outside her house for any nearby animal to eat, and went scavenging for more wheat seeds.

By the time she returned, the bucket was licked clean and void of even a microscopic crumb. Instead, it was filled with herbs. Edible herbs.

Apparently, the Gardenians had a penchant for pancakes.

Before long, Camille was a part of the Gardenian barter system. In exchange for delectable concoction, the village folk gave her eggs, butter, milk and sugar. While one part of Camille wanted them to get away from her personal den, the arrangement cemented a truce between her and the village, and gave her more ingredients to work with. So she began kneading dough for daily batches of bread and paid them no mind.

Besides, the scent of baking loaves permeating the air was rather nostalgic.

Month number three came and went, and by the end of it Camille had done little besides cleaning up her overgrown garden and making a preposterous amount of lemon balm tea.

She still spent some time sitting in her kitchen and quietly seething about her situation like some misanthropic evil grandma, and occasionally went outside to plant her fists on her hips and glower up at the bright sky for no reason. But there wasn't much time left to be angry at her fate when she had noon loaves to bake.

When the Gardenians came for their daily, uniquely scrumptious treat, they come in hordes, in legions; they didn't visit her kitchen, they laid siege to it. She was still isolated from the society at large, and referred to by the children only as 'the crone', but once you get a reputation as a devil spawn, there's really no shedding it. So she exchanged food for utensils and ignored their absurd conversations. Something about increased pirate activity in Paradise, and the Marines being a blight upon the earth. She didn't really care to ask.

Towards the end of the month, Camille looked out over her unkempt garden and realized it could have been impressive, if only she had spent more time tending to it. She could get some more ingredients out of it, even.

With that in mind, she began to slaughter all the grass, weed, and other things in her garden that were unwanted. Some of the plants she ripped away weren't even weeds. The Gardenians would have told her, but nobody wanted to go against Camille, simply because Camille was Camille, and Camilles were not beings that one should meddle with.

Once her garden looked acceptable, Camille went to bed, rolled herself into a burrito format and tried to accept the fact that maybe, just maybe, she was a tiny bit crazy.

Throughout the fourth month, her daily routine consisted of baking, gardening, and settling with an almost spiteful efficiency.

Having a surprisingly green thumb made things a little less boring, and finding edible plants gradually became easier. In the middle of the month, she even stumbled across (quite literally) a dozy hedgehog, sleeping the day away in her garden.

She felt an instant kinship.

The hedgehog let out a sleepy squeak and broke her trance. Camille crouched to coo at it, pausing slightly when her fingers were half an inch away from his snout.

In this new plane of existence, where floating island and tiny gardeners were the norm – maybe touching a hedgehog was a bad idea.

Maybe the hedgehog could actually disassemble himself and form around her body as a suit of highly advanced weaponry that allowed her to fight aliens and demigods and jaded Russians.

Or maybe he was an average hedgehog.

Either way, he was pretty cute, so Camille shrugged and decided to bring him inside to see if he preferred sleeping on her kitchen table.

She named him Thistle.

During the fifth month, Camille became sure of one thing.

Thistle was her best friend.

...Okay, fine, so that might have been a bit of an overstatement. But at that moment, the term "best friend" could be loosely defined as anyone who didn't want to send her to the pits of hell at first sight.

And if a hedgehog fit that bill, then a hedgehog her best friend would be.

With little else to do in her spare time besides cultivating her garden and making new batches of bread, Camille welcomed the hedgehog's company with open arms. Thistle communicated through a combination of grunts, snuffles and squeals, and while they didn't understand each other at all, Camille adored him.

In fact, she had even brought him with her on a walk down to the island's town, when her life decided to turn ten times worse than it already was.

Thistle was huddled inside of her hoodie, held up by the tightened drawstring with his snout poking out, while Camille strolled past a pack of laughing children, a man in the middle of being overly-affectionate with his tree, and an elderly lady who was busy stabbing at paper pages on the ground, muttering something about littering and wasteful uses of shrubbery.

Curious, Camille stooped down to pick up a page and give it a quick look.

She frowned.

The sheet of paper, which looked more like a wanted poster from your typical Western movie than anything else, featured the picture of a boy. The straw hat on his head seemed to be on the verge of falling off, and he smiled like a child, all teeth and dimples and zero reservedness of any kind – which, when she thought about it, looked oddly familiar.

Something distant niggled at the back of her mind.

As the hamster wheel of her brain slowly tried to crank out the only possible explanation, she stole a glance down at the boy's name an–

Realization dawned.

Camille's inarticulate scream carried to the heavens.

Month number six came around, and Camille was panicking.

This was not good.

This was not good at all.

She spent her days in the kitchen, nursing a cup of lemon balm tea and trying to make sense of everything. Which was a lot harder than it sounds. Because somehow, for some reason, she had managed to devour an interdimensional portal key, detoured into a fictional pirate world, and now she was stuck inside a story written by a middle-aged Japanese artist.

Camille had read enough fanfictions to know where this was going.

In fact, she could already picture it. Before she would be able to blink, the Straw Hat Pirates would probably come crashing in through her window, armed with nerves of steel, tequila blood and hair that defied common sense. They would consider her a valuable asset to the crew for no reason at all, and cart her off, forcing her to engage in a dangerous cross-country journey and questionable sea voyages that she had no desire to be involved in. The fact that she wrote a new will and testament every time she got the sniffles would be ignored. Even if she told them she hailed from a different planet where cutting your sandwich diagonally is considered daring, and that she would rather not embark on yet another death-defying adventure, they wouldn't care to listen. Then they would most likely proceed to assimilate her into the crew by making friendship bracelets and doing trust falls or braiding each other's hair.

She would have to spend her the rest of her life on the run from shady governmental organizations, fighting totalitarian dictatorships and superpowered murderers, before meeting her true baking nemesis who could probably atomize her with, like, a sneeze.

Camille slammed her forehead into the kitchen table with a loud groan and briefly entertained the thought of walking into a meat grinder.

As the seventh month came to an end, Camille was significantly more calm.

The chances of meeting the Straw Hats were slim to none, and if it ever did happened, she would do anything in her power to stay the hell away.

There were very few things that motivated Camille Cousteau, but self-preservation was first on the short list.

Keeping her bum parked in Gardenia was the lesser of two evils. She could have a comfortable (comparatively speaking) life, and plot the village elder's demise in peace. Besides, she met none of the basic pirate requirements, was an involuntary vegetarian, and only had, like, two survival shows from Discovery Channel under her belt.

There was no way she would put herself in the line of fire. Her life was going to be pirate-free, marine-free, and fishmen-free, even if it killed her. All she had to do was stay away from sea rovers, brooding storylines and dramatic monologues.

It couldn't be that hard.

The eight month passed without any interesting events, save for Camille's eighteenth birthday. Which wasn't even that interesting, seeing as she slept through most of it.

After several months of cultural immersion and no escape in sight, she had been lulled back into a sense of security. With unfathomable willpower akin to legend, Camille settled in to repress the memory of a certain pirate crew until it was nothing more than white noise in the back of her head.

Besides, her life could have been worse.

She could have ended up decorating the asphalt in a metropolis instead of crashing into a tiny altar.

Or woken up missing a kidney in a foreign country with no passport.

Or maybe having to cut through dense jungle with a machete and nothing but the clothes on her back.

Come to think of it, Camille supposed there were a lot of places worse than where she had ended up. That didn't mean she enjoyed being the only sane person atop an eerie floating island, but she got to live in a nice house with adequate food and access to medicine.

Thistle nestled himself into her severe bedhead with a contented squeak as Camille took a sip of her tea.

Maybe Gardenia wasn't that bad, after all.

Once the ninth month rolled around, Camille convinced herself to stop caring.

Yes, she had been through more emotional ups and downs than she could shake a stick at. But she was alive and relatively unhurt. Hell, by now she could point out animal paths and edible greens and tubers already from her unglazed window. Her days were simple and repetitive, just the way she liked them. Wake up, eat, water the flowers, bake something, take a bath, wash her clothes if needed, go back to sleep.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Even her lost dream of becoming a cat lady seemed to be back in reach. She'd have to swap the cats for some overgrown caterpillars and a hedgehog, but she'd make do. Thistle had already wormed his way into her heart, just like the Gardenian slang had wormed its way into her vocabulary. Besides, the place was stupidly charming. Giant bugs aside.

In fact, life was surprisingly normal.

Until the day Fire-Fist Ace knocked on her door and ruined absolutely everything.

The actual chapters will follow ur average fanfic-style, have main charas, and dialogueeee ;w; /ollies out