There is a man, one in the many worlds, that is capable of performing feats which supposed to be impossible. He is known as a Demon, as a Hunter, as one of the most famous and feared Pirates on the Seven Seas (and counting).*
He is Roronoa Zoro.
Now, there are three types of immortality. There is the kind that villains everywhere seek, the kind that leads them to kill as many as they deem necessary, so that they can live forever. There is the kind that is known in books, the immortality of literature: that of Odysseus, of Romeo and Juliet, of Aslan, of the Hobbit.
And then there is a simple refusal to die, no matter the circumstance. It is the kind that is powered by mere willpower and little else. It is not an immortality in that he lives forever, but that he doesn't die.
Roronoa Zoro is a man that is capable of the impossible, of surviving situations that he shouldn't, of causing things that shouldn't happen, and of getting lost in ways thought to be unknown.
He, as you should all now know, is soon going to be sent to worlds quite unlike his own, in situations designed to test this impossibility of his. Join us, as we watch and wonder.
.o.o.o.o.o.
World: Harry Potter
Location: Hogwarts
Time (in world): Somewhere in Harry Potter's Second Year
Time (One Piece): Soon after leaving Alabasta
Harry walked through the halls, friends by his sides, in a thoroughly irritated mood. He had, just since breakfast, been accused multiple times of causing the petrifications, and did not like it. Of course, the fact that said friends were squabbling like an old married couple may have added to his irritation somewhat.
"Harry, it's not that bad. It could be worse, you know."
"Hermione, how could it be worse? The whole school's convinced he's a raging psychopath. It doesn't get much worse than that."
"Honestly, Ron, would it kill you to-"
"Both of you shut up!" Harry held up a hand. "Can you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Don't tell me you're hearing voices again mate."
"Yeah, I am, and it's going this way!" Harry took off running, listening intently to the sound of the voice, which, for once, wasn't talking of killing. After a glancing at each other, Ron and Hermione hurried after.
Harry frowned, confused by what he was hearing. He was used to the voice hunting saying Kill, Kill over and over again. What he wasn't used to was hearing it beg for its life.
Or negotiate.
Or laugh.
As they hurried forward, he caught snatches of conversation in human tongue, though it seemed rather one-sided. And it seemed irritated, confused, and sleepy.
Not to mention confident. And somewhat crazy. It was a really weird combination.
"Whatever you are, just get out of my way, I have to get back to my ship." Ship? Harry thought. Like a spaceship? "I don't have time for you."
The voice replied, Sorry, no can do, I'm under orders to eat any humans I come across, unless they're Slytherins or pure-bloods. You seem to be a muggle.
"I don't understand you. I don't speak giant snake. Or sea king. Whatever you are."
Harry glanced at Ron and Hermione, only to see looks of utter confusion on their faces, mirroring his own, despite the fact that he knew they couldn't understand the second voice. Though, Hermione, he noticed, had a growing look of horror on her face, as if just realizing something.
"Do you want me to slice you in half?" The voice was getting louder, and they'd slowed down, scared of what they'd find. They inched forward, and Harry couldn't hear the non-voice give a reply. "Fine, then." There was a sound of scraping metal, and then a loud thump, "I suppose we'll do it this way." They inched forward, only to encounter a giant, slithery green hide. Hermione hid a gasp, and mouthed something in horror. Harry shot her a questioning look and she whispered, horrified.
"Basilisk. A giant snake, one look in its eyes will kill you. Oh, Harry, with Dumbledore gone, we have to go inform Professor McGonagall immediately. This is too dangerous for anyone else to handle, they're classed XXXXX by the Ministry. Ron, come with me. Harry, stay here, you can understand both sides of the conversation, and please do be careful." She shot him a beseeching look, and then ran off, Ron at her heels, a bewildered look on his face. Harry pulled out his invisibility cloak, and inched forward, to see what was going on. His mouth dropped at the proceedings.
"Kid, I know you're there. You're not exactly quiet. And I heard your friends run off to find someone too. Any idea what this thing is?"
"A Basilisk."
"Which is?"
"A giant snake, more or less. One look in its eyes is supposed to kill you."
"Really, now? Seems a bit like extreme killing intent and a Devil Fruit power to me. I've had worse."
"What?"
"Nothing, a kid like you wouldn't understand."
Harry would have protested, except for that he was more or less sure that he wouldn't understand any of it anyways. He fumbled around for something to say, pulling of the cloak in the process.
"Why is your hair green?" It seemed an innocent enough question.
"It's natural. Mock it at all and I slice you in half." Harry gulped.
"Um… Why three swords?" He, embarrassingly enough, had to make a conscious effort to keep his voice from squeaking.
"I practice Santoryu." A moment's pause. A disappointed sigh. "Three sword style. I hold one sword in each hand, and the third in my mouth."
"In your mouth?"
"Yes." The man's voice was low and gruff, but not too mean. Harry wondered if there was something else, something inconsequential, that he could talk about to keep the 'conversation' going. His eyes landed on the man's bare chest. Well, it can't be that off-limits as a topic…
"Where did you get those scars?"
He waved a hand over his torso. "Battles. Normally they'd be covered, but I was at a summer island recently, so our ship was still in the island's climate zone." No need for Harry to mention how little of that made sense to him.
Harry shifted where he stood, careful to keep his eyes on the man in front of him, and away from the deadly snake next to him, though he felt, pathetic though it was for the snake, that the man may be the more dangerous of the two. A question that he probably should have asked earlier occurred to him.
"Who are you?"
"A pirate." Well, that answers what he is, but…
"What?" Harry squeaked. A pirate? There haven't been pirates in hundreds of years! At least… there haven't been any ones that still use swords and stuff…
"Yes." Again with the one-word answers.
"And your name?" Harry thought he could hear harried footsteps in the distance. He hoped it was McGonagall.
"Shouldn't you give your own name first?"
Harry blinked. "Um… my name is Harry Potter."
The man frowned. "I'm not familiar with how things work here, so please tell me: when you give your name, do you say your family name or personal name first?"
Harry thought for a few seconds, trying to figure out the question. "Personal name, I suppose."
"Ah." The man nodded, somewhat to himself. "Where I come from, you would introduce yourself as Potter Harry." Harry blinked. The footsteps were almost there.
"So your name?"
The man smiled. "Ro-"
"Mr. Potter!" Professor McGonagall came striding down the corridor. "What is the meaning of this?"
"Well, Professor," Harry juggled the words, trying to find something to say. He saw the man smirking out of the corner of his eye. "It seems there's a Basilisk."
"I can see that!"
"I wouldn't suggest bothering it right now, because I'm pretty sure that this is the first staring contest it's had in ages that didn't end the second it started."
"What." McGonagall's voice was flat. Hermione's eyes were bugging out, and Ron's jaw seemed ready to hit the ground.
"They've been competing since before we got here. The man's a pirate, was recently in an extremely warm climate, uses three swords at the same time, but he hasn't told me his name yet."
The three watching were dumbfounded. "But – you can't have a staring contest with a Basilisk!" Hermione cried out, "Its stare KILLS YOU!" She seemed near hysterics. "It's impossible!"
"Apparently not." Harry said, oddly at ease with the situation, having been dealing with it for a while already. He may have been in shock.
"But, who is he, and how did he get inside the castle?"
A hiss came from behind Harry, and he whirled back around to face the man and the snake again. The second voice, the Basilisk's voice, said 'Enough, swordsman. I accept my defeat.'
"My name is Roronoa Zoro." The man stood up and smirked. "And I apparently just accomplished the impossible."
"What did you do?" Ron finally pulled up enough courage to speak.
"The snake blinked. I won the staring contest." The Basilisk began to slither off, leaving behind the two dumbfounded students, one confused professor, one somewhat jaded Boy-Who-Lived, and one yawning pirate.
"But, to repeat Professor McGonagall's question, how did you get here?"
"Don't know."
"It's obvious, isn't it?" There came a voice from behind them. They whirled around to look at the orange-haired woman walking towards them. A very attractive woman. "He got lost again."
"I did not! Besides, how did you get here?"
"I followed you through the glowing door." Harry could tell that the two were about to reach a tennis match conversation, and prepared to give his neck a workout turning from one side to the other.
"What glowing door?"
"The same one you went through trying to find the bathroom. Which, by the way, is on the other side of the ship. Can't be too surprised though, we are on the Grand Line. Glowing doorways are the least of our problems."
"What's the most?" Harry asked, curious about these people, and happy that he'd managed to stop the argument before he had to wring his neck from side-to-side trying to follow it. Alas, his question only caused him further trouble in that regard.
They frowned. "Sea kings."
"Dinosaurs."
"Marines. "
"Shichibukai."
"Other pirates."
"Devil Fruits."
"Bounty hunters."
"The weather itself." They shrugged. "Plenty of stuff."
"Oh. You mentioned Sea Kings earlier. What are they?" Hermione threw in.
The orange haired woman answered. "Large sea monsters, eel-like in shape, though many have extremely odd defining characteristics. I'd say they're rather like extremely weird, aquatic versions of that snake thing just now. Only bigger."
"Bigger than a Basilisk?" Hermione asked in horror.
The woman smiled. "Easily. Especially the calm belt ones."
"Yeah, the one we accidently ended up on when we were in the calm belt was several hundred times the size of the ship. And that was just the head." He grinned at their faces.
"Zoro, stop being an idiot." They turned to the woman, hoping for a somewhat more sane sounding answer. "The eye alone was at least a dozen times the size of the ship." Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley, for the first, and possibly only time in their lives, due to their proximity to manga characters (whose knowledge of the English language shall remain a mystery), did anime fall.
Literally. They actually face-faulted. Though McGonagall did manage to make do with just a sweatdrop.
"Well, we should get going. Usopp spotted some Marines on the horizon; they probably followed us out from Alabasta after the fiasco we made leaving and if they're strong, then we're going to be wanting you there with us, marimo."
Zoro frowned. "Don't call me that."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Come on, we don't need you getting lost again, and without me, you know you will be."
"Ch…" He scoffed, and began to head off in a seemingly random direction.
"You still owe me money, Zoro-kun. You wouldn't want me to raise your debt some more, now would you?" A smirk was present on her face, which only widened when the swordsman froze.
"Sea-witch." He muttered.
"Call me what you want, I don't mind. Sanji-kun might, though." She grabbed his elbow and steered him off.
"Yeah, well I don't feel like dealing with idiots today. Dartboard-brow's going to have to wait."
"Marines." She pointed out.
"Fine, I don't want to have to deal with more idiots than is strictly necessary. That ero-cook still isn't getting a rise out of me."
"Whatever, come on."
"Yes, Nami." He spat her name, and their voices faded out as they disappeared from view.
The students looked at one another, and then at Professor McGonagall.
"Just pretend it was all a dream?" Hermione said hopefully.
"Unfortunately, no," Said McGonagall, "We now know what the monster is, so we need to inform the Headmaster."
Hermione groaned and put her head in her hands.
* East Blue, North Blue, South Blue, West Blue, Grand Line, White Sea, White-White Sea (the last two don't really count yet in this drabble, since they just left Alabasta, but it will in the rest, and that was the introduction part to the story, not in the actual chapter itself, so please bear with me).