John slowly felt himself coming back from blackness. His eyes slowly opened. Revealing to him a bedroom. The room is circular in shape. Four windows across from each other on the walls. With furnishings spread across the room. Chairs, dressers, single wall shelves and more. John quickly felt up his body just to make sure that all his bits were still there. With that quick confirmation he looked around again.

This wasn’t the room that he had been tied up in. And he wondered how he had gotten here. Looking around the room in quick fashion. Trying to absorb all the information he could take in. But once it was clear he had seen everything there was to see. He leaned up against the wall. And let out a sigh.

“Why does all the worst stuff happen to me?” He tried again to log out of the game. But he couldn’t pull up the system menu on his VR headset. After that failed he tried to register any of the thought based commands that came with his Moculus VR system. The volume, brightness, and subtitle controls were nowhere to be found.

He felt a wave of unease wash over him. What did it mean that he had become stuck in this video game? Would he ever be able to get back home? He let out a sigh as she leaned up against the wall while on the bed.

Instead of focusing on what he had no control over. He decided that he would figure out what he was working with. If he was going to be stuck here for a prolonged period of time. He would become well acquainted with his body.

Name: Buggy

Species: Human

Age: 14

Hp: 60/60

Stamina: 70/70

Level: 3

Exp: 4,900 / 6,000

Power

Speed

Body

Will

Brains

Instinct

Personality

Luck

Effective

7

6

6

5

5

5

8

10

Total

7

6

6

5

5

5

8.4

9.9

Character Sheet

Skills

Abilities

Techniques

Just like before his character sheet was a series of opaque boxes with a gray border. His general status page at the top. Attribute points in the middle. And below both of them was the page function. He had reviewed this page already and so he wanted to move to the next page. He mentally clicked the skills tab.

Name

Total Level

Base Level

Modifier

Rank

Affinity

Short Blades

8

8

1

Dabbling

98%

Persuasion

3

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3

1

Dabbling

90%

This page was relatively straight forward. He didn’t have any additional modifiers to his skills. So it looked like his rank was just his rank. The only thing he needed to check were the skills themselves and the rank. He started with Short Blades.

He focused on the skill. And as the prompt was summoned he heard the sound of a blade leaving its sheath to fill his ear.

Short Blades is the art of using small bladed weapons to deal death to your foes. For each level of Short Blades you will get a +1% bonus to damage and attack speed.

He wondered why anyone would use knives and daggers in a world where giants would club you to death with giant maces. But the 8% increase to speed and damage would be fine for the time being.

John then moved to persuasion. This time the prompt came with the sound of a crowd talking.

Persuasion is the art of convincing people that you know better than them. For each level of persuasion you get +1% to your ability to convince people of your ideas.

Charisma skills in most games were either totally broken. Or completely useless. Hopefully this skill would fall somewhere in the middle…if not somewhere closer to the first option.

He wondered how hard it was to get skills. He didn’t imagine that flailing a knife around would qualify you for a level in Short Blades. But did it require you to use it to attack a living creature? Did it have to be a good attack? Or did he just have to scratch something?

The affinity section also puzzled him a bit. He had to assume that it was how good you were at a skill. But then why have skill ranks? Each of the skills did have a bonus they gave for each rank. But if that was the case what could affinity do? John just shook his head. He’d have to ask someone later.

With that he moved to the last tab that he could access. Abilities.

Moving his mental focus to that tab. The screen in his vision changed again. And four boxes took his focus.

The Power of Friendship

You have the ability to make people look past your faults. Creatures with a high enough instinct might be able to see past this. +20% reputation growth. +20% relationship points with individuals. +20% to Personality.

Luck of the Draw I

Your luck is unmatched. +10% to Luck

Chop Chop Fruit

You have eaten the Chop-Chop fruit. Making you a Separation Human. This fruit gives you the ability to separate your body parts and control them independently of your body. Your body parts may float off of the ground. Your feet must stay on the ground.

Ire of the Sea

By eating a devil fruit you have marked yourself the enemy of the sea. Being submerged in water will weaken you. Being ankle deep will drop your current stamina by 50%. Knee deep water will drop your stamina by 100%.

Holy balls! These abilities seemed great. Two of his abilities were just increasing his stats. The next was his devil fruit ability. He wasn’t sure how that devil fruit was meant to help him. In fact the final ability he only had because of his devil fruit. And it made him severely weaker. He couldn’t even take a bath!

Though it now made sense why his stats were distributed like they were. With how his abilities were set up. Every 5 points of personality would add an extra point into that stat. And the same would be true for every 10 points of luck. Still probably not how he would have distributed the points. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as he had assumed it was.

Along with that. His “Power of Friendship” ability seemed to allow him a better chance of deceiving others. If he remembered correctly, reputation grew as you did great acts. Like getting bounties, or defeating strong people. Reputation in the game was separated into local and world reputation. Local reputation would affect his standings with specific factions or groups. And world reputation was how the world collectively felt about him. It wasn’t an all knowing system. If he did something in the middle of nowhere. Unless word got spread to the wider area. Then it would only change his local reputation.

Relationship points were the standings you had with individual people. Most times it would be better to gain local reputation by increasing your reputation with the individuals of the faction. Not to mention doing that got you all kinds of quests most of the time.

Something that was a bit odd was his “Luck of the Draw” ability. It was the only one of his abilities that had a number next to it.That must be the abilities rank. Which means his ability might grow in the future. But he didn’t know what could cause something like that to happen.

But as it stood the ability wasn’t anything special. The additional points would be helpful. But luck wouldn’t be as good of a skill to invest in. He’d get more out of the additional points he’d get in personality.

Then there was the devil fruit. He wasn’t a One Piece fanatic like some of his friends were. But honestly Buggy’s devil fruit always felt like a joke. The ability to separate your body parts and make them float seemed like it would be good only for punching over long distances.

Looking over his abilities one last time. Each of them had a different color. John wondered what those colors meant. And as he wondered what they meant. The tables changed

All in all. He wasn’t feeling overly confident with what he had been given. John wasn’t even really sure what was happening to him. Had he been trapped in his game? If so, why couldn’t he feel his headset like normal? Why couldn’t he pull up any of his menus? He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

And just as that pit in his stomach hit the bottom, The door in the room opened to reveal Shanks. “Oh man. What are you doing here?”

“That’s rather rude of you.” The red haired boy set a stool from downstairs next to the bed John was laying in. And took a seat. Shanks folded his arm and closed his eyes before he started talking. “Buggy. Crocus told me you might come out of that cold a little loopy. But I would never have expected this.” He opened his eyes and stared directly into John’s soul. “Is something wrong?”

John blinked. He honestly couldn’t come up with anything to say…other than the truth. “My name is John Smith. I’m a 25 year old accountant. I am not Buggy. My dream is to one day have enough money to retire and live in a big house and never have to live a day in my life. I can’t get my VR headset to turn off. And I'm starting to think I've lost my mind. If any of that registers as “wrong”. Then I would love the confirmation.”

There wasn’t any reason to believe that he would believe any of that. Or that the red head would understand anything of what he just said.

After a few moments of silence Shanks stood up and walked over to John. Taking the hat off of his head and inspecting the blue hair on his head. “Get out of there! I was just messing with you. You jerk!” John yelled at the overly curious teen. And swung his fists around a few times to get shanks back into his seat.

Shanks deflected the blows with his hand and sat back on his stool. “Damn. You had me worried there for a second, Red Nose!”

At the sound of those words John’s heart beat a single time in rage. His eyebrows furrowed. His mouth turned upside down into a frown. And the vein on his forehead popped out above his right eyebrow. His punches may not have been enough. But Buggy’s face of pure rage certainly got Shanks to back down.

“Ok! Ok. You don’t have a red nose.” Shanks put up his hands to try and placate his sensitive friend. “Seriously though, Buggy. I don’t want to worry the crew over nothing when they get back. Are you sure that you’re fine?”

John thought about that for a good long second. This would be a great time to get some information about the things he had seen on the character sheet. He just had to be cool. “Uh…well. It’s probably nothing. But…my memory is a bit fuzzy. Do you think you could go over some stuff with me? Just to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything important.”

Hearing Buggy’s question Shanks raised an eyebrow. “Come on, Buggy. I’m not that dumb.” Shanks brought one of his feet up on the stool he was sitting on. “You just don’t want to admit to Rayleigh that you forgot all the lessons he gave us. Dahahahaha!” Shanks began to tear up a bit as he laughed. “If you wanna learn so bad. Why don’t you ask him?”

The laughter of the red haired boy infuriated John like nothing else ever could. “You don’t need to rub it in you jerk.” John rested his elbow on his knee. And his head on his fist. “Where is the crew anyway?”

That made Shanks stop laughing. And stare at John. “Woah. You really did hit your head.”

“It was the illness you jerk!” John’s face turned back to anger in a flash.

“Hey!” Shanks put his hands up again to keep the peace. “No worries alright? It’s just…I can’t believe you forgot that the captain and them…went to the final island.”

John froze at that. “You…you mean…the island with the On-” His speech was interrupted by a loud bell sounding outside the house.

“Oh! It’s the dock’s pirate alarm. It must be the crew!” Shanks jumped to his feet and ran over to the door of the circular room. “Come on, Buggy! They’ll all wanna see that you’re alright!”

Watching Shanks run down the stairs. John was frozen on the seat. What exactly had he become a part of? He had a feeling he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.