Chapter Text
[...this person has now been labeled a villain after multiple attempts from police to stop their serial theft has failed, and many of the police workforce of Japan have come back injured from said attempts. Surely, the Heroes of today will have much better luck than the police force, considering the challenges they've faced to be here! Next up we have-]
Bzzt-
"Aw man, I was watching that bro? Why'd you turn it off?"
"Kiri, it's so late. Go to bed. You know if Iida finds us up this late he'll kill us, or worse–lecture us!"
"Alright, alright. I guess I'll read more about it in the morning." He says, standing up from the couch.
"You? Read?" They say, setting the TV remote on the coffee table with a gentle "Clunk."
"Hey! I read..."
"Comic books, maybe." They scoff. The light to the common room is flicked off, and the two head upstairs to bed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, nearly a week later. 8am.
"Game over, Straw Hat. My sidekicks and I have you cornered!" The hero stands triumphantly at the only exit to the busy streets where the theiving villain could easily escape. Despite this, the hero notices that he looks rather unbothered. Perhaps its the meat bun shoved in his mouth, or the fact that his arms are full of food, but he isn't acting cornered.
"He shrugs. Shrugs! Cornered in an alleyway, and this villain shrugs, just before knocking the hero completely unconscious with ONE punch!" The presentor begins to lose his calm a little–not the best look in front of the Hero Association council. "Ahem. My point is, we've thrown hero after hero at this villain, and nothing has worked. He's still out there. Still on the loose. Still wreaking havoc across Japan. Some of our strongest heroes didn't stand a chance against him. Perhaps we need less brawn to take him down... and more brain?"
The Heroes Association council look and nod amongst themselves before the president speaks up. "I believe you make a very good point. We've been going about this villain all wrong. We need someone more cunning... and I think we know just the Hero for this job."
The associates get up in near unison and start making their leaves to their offices. Once the president has returned to his own office, he picks up his desk phone and dials a number.
"Ring, ring! Ring, ring! Ring, ri–click." The phone picks up and with little wait, a rather mousy voice appears at the end of the line. "Hello! What can I help you with, Mr. President?"
"Hello, Principal Nezu. I'm calling you to ask for aid in taking down a tedious villain."
"Oh? Who is this villain?"
"That, we're unsure of his true identity. He's horribly sloppy, hasn't even attempted to conceal his identity once, and he's looked directly into security cameras nearly every incident of his... yet for some reason we're unable to pinpoint his civilian identity. All we know is he wears a straw hat."
"I know who you're talking about. I'll help, but under one circumstance."
"..."
"What?"
"If I successfully capture him, I get to decide his sentance." Nezu says so smugly that the president can feel it through the phone.
"...very well. Good luck."
"Click."
Nezu hops out of his spinny seat, giggling. He waddles over to his closet where he keeps his hero uniform, takes it out, and dusts it off before putting it on. "Let's get this kid under control." He mutters to himself, fixing his tie in the mirror breifly. Once he's happy with the placement of his tie, he leaves his office and the building and starts tracking down the villain.
"If the last couple of places he attacked were here..." Nezu mutters to himself. A map with all the previous places that the straw hatted boy had attacked was provided to him. Unfortunately for the boy, he was sloppy enough that there's a rather clear linear pattern of attack. It's clear the kid doesn't have any sort of plan in mind. The next closest area to the last sighting is a small bakery. He seems food driven, so it's likely he'll attack there.
Nezu hides in an alley nearby the bakery. It's likely that this boy wouldn't recognize him as a hero, or simply wouldn't care, but it's better to take more precautions then not. As if on queue, a street lamp casts a shadow across the walls of the alley. Looking for the source of the shadow, Nezu's eyes meet a particularly familiar straw hat. He steps out of the alley.
"You there! Boy with the hat!" He calls out. The boy whips around and takes a defensive stance once locking eyes on him. "Whoa, whoa. Calm down, now. I don't want a fight! I just want to talk to you. What do you say we have this conversation over dinner? There's a great restaurant open nearby."
The boy visibly relaxes, thinks for a moment, then shrugs. That was far too easy. Nezu thinks as he walks up to the unguarded boy. "Let's walk and talk. Just follow me."
"Alright." His hands slide in the pockets of some blue denim shorts that look like they've been stomped into dirt. The sandals he's wearing are worn, but well loved, and the red button up vest is open and seemingly missing buttons. What really catches Nezu's attention, though, is the large X- shaped scar in the middle of the boy's chest.
"What's your name, first of all. My name is Nezu."
"My name's Monkey D. Luffy! I'm the king of the pirates!" The kid–Monkey grins, widely.
"Alright..." What the hell is the king of pirates supposed to be? And that name sounds foreign. "Where are you from, Monkey-san?"
"Luffy, and I'm from the woods on the mountain!"
That's... not helpful. "Yes, but where?"
"Oh! Goa kingdom."
What? That's not...
"Where is the Goa Kingdom, Luffy?" Nezu asks, trying to pry more information out of Luffy.
"The East Blue." Duh.
"I think, perhaps, I may be a bit confused. There's no such place called the East Blue on Earth. Not in our language anyway. Why don't I pull up a map of the world and you can point to it, or the Goa Kingdom."
"That's silly. There's no such thing as a map of the entire world yet." He says, bluntly, confusedly. His walking pauses and Nezu looks back to see his brows furrowed and a frown upon his face.
"Yes... Luffy where do you think you are right now?"
He shrugs. "I dunno." He starts walking again, and so does Nezu, realizing he must lead.
"Well, how did you get here?"
"Dunno. Just woke up in the area."
"Where were you just before waking up?"
"A ship in the sea."
"..." Nezu's eyes widen. "We're nowhere near the sea." He pauses, studying the kids looks, his mannerisms, the fact that he has a noticable accent but speaks Japanese perfectly. "You are last on a ship in the middle of the ocean when you went to sleep, but you woke up here in the mainland of an island country. You didn't get carried here in your sleep, for certain. You don't know seemingly anything about current technology, and don't think I haven't noticed you staring at my phone like it's some sort if magic item. You're from places that don't exist, you've never seen a map of the world, you certainly didn't come here on purpose... and on top of all that you're freakishly strong and a theif. Who are you?"
"I'm not freakishly strong, y'all are just weak. And my crew wouldn't have dumped me someplace, so I dunno why I'm here. We were over a day away from any island, too."
"So then, you're from a completely different world and you've been teleported here is the only explanation!" Nezu says, sarcastic and exasperated.
"I mean..."
"Nope. That was a joke and I don't want to think of it as a possibility right now." Nezu's rubbing his forehead with his paw. "...Do you have any money on you?"
"Uh, yeah. I have a couple belli in my pocket but nowhere I went would take it."
"May I see it? I want to search something." He holds out his paw. Luffy shrugs and reaches into his left pocket to pull out a couple of brass coins. He drops them into the paw of the hero, who has that device out again. He called it a phome, or something.
Luffy watches as the fuzzy short man taps the phome a couple of times, before squeezing his eyes shut. He hands the coins back to Luffy, and slides his device back in his pocket.
"Your currency, belli, is not a currency from this planet. Meaning, you're almost certainly from a different world. May I ask what your quirk is?"
"Oh yeah, I dunno what that is."
Why didn't I start with that?! Nezu internally asks himself. "Okay, yeah. You're definitely not from here." He deadpans.
"What's a quirk?"
"One moment, we're at the restaurant. Let's get a table, some drinks, and appetizers, and then we can keep talking. I have a lot of questions I want to ask you, Luffy." He opens the door and gestures for him to walk inside.
Luffy is sipping on a ramune, melon flavored, when Nezu begins his interview once again.
"A quirk is an ability that people in this world are born with. These abilities could range from having long fingers to being able to produce fire. Roughly eighty-five percent of the population has them. I'm assuming you don't have them?"
"I don't have an ability that I was born with, but I have an ability!" He says, stuffing a slice of meat in his mouth.
"Oh? What's your ability called?"
"Mimph- urk-" He swallows. "Mine is called a devil fruit! I wasn't born with it but I found it when I was six or seven. Eating it made my body stretchy."
"Interesting... that doesn't seem like it enhances your strength, though, so how have you been fighting professional heroes and defeating them easily without signs of using this devil fruit ability? No footage we have of any fights show your body was stretching in any abnormal ways?"
"Ohh, yeah. That's cause using my devil fruit would just make the fights wayyy too easy and not fun. Not that they weren't easy without it..." He rolls his eyes. "Instead I fight with haki."
"And, what is haki?"
"Eh, I don't wanna explain it all. Just think of it like a martial arts."
"Alright. I think that's all my questions for you for now, or, I suppose I have one more. From what I'm understanding, you're stealing an awful lot of food. This is because you have no money to buy food and no record of existence to get a job... yes. However, you did beat up and hurt a lot of people. You deserve to be able to eat when you wish, though. I have a place where you could stay for free where you could get food anytime you wanted for free-"
"I'll stay there!"
"Alright, but there's certain rules you'll have to follow if you want to stay there."
"I can do that if it means I get food. What's the place called?"
"U.A."