One Piece: Dream of Immortality

"What do you mean 'A what?'," Usopp shouts. "We flew up to Skypeia on a knock up stream!"

"Oh, is that how you guys got up there?" Cherry hummed. "I was a little curious at the time, but I guess I forgot to ask."

"Ah, right…" Usopp scratched the back of his neck. "You left us all behind to fly up with Cabernet. Luffy was seething, heh."

"Shut the hell up and get to work!" Nami looked about ready to zap him.

"I guess we're going on another little adventure into the sky, then," Cherry said.

"Not if I can help it!" Nami denied. "Quit slacking!"

"We're right in the middle of the thing, though?" Cherry tilts her head, glancing off the side of the ship.

Nami rushed to the railing and paled at what she saw. What she had dismissed as the horizon during all the hullabaloo was actually just the drop off of a massive swell in the ocean.

"Why is it so big…?" Nami squeaked in barely suppressed terror. "The other one wasn't like this!"

"It's a New World, after all," Robin said, lying in a lounge chair as she judged Reiju's taste in literature.

The pun earns many groans.

"This is weird…" Nami said, still looking out at the giant bubble of sea. "Is it not actually a knock up stream? The surface tension should have broken by now…"

"It's kind of weird that Jinbe isn't back with Luffy yet," Sanji pointed out.

Once he said it, they all felt it too. Jinbe was one hell of a swimmer, and Nami couldn't have kicked Luffy that far.

Nami's brow had furrowed something fierce, now. Something wasn't adding up here. Weatheria occasionally found new weather phenomena to study, but not that often. Surely she couldn't have stumbled upon such a thing by accident…

"Cabernet. Would you be a sweet heart and fly out to the edge of the swell for me? Come back and tell me what you see, in as much detail as you can," Nami asked.

Cabernet nodded and did as she was told. With here speed, it was hardly even a minute by the time she'd come back.

"Well?" Nami questioned, daring not to hope for something a little less disastrous than a knock up stream.

"We're on a bubble!" Cabernet told her.

"Yes, I can see that. What about the sea around us? Is it foamy or swirling or anything? Don't spare any details," Nami tried to get more out of her.

"No, we're on a bubble!" Cabernet repeated. "The sea is way below us!"

Nami blinks. The rest of the crew blinks.

"We're…" Nami faltered. "You mean, we're on a big sphere of water just… floating up into the sky?"

Nami silently pleaded with her to say no.

"Yes!" Cabernet smiled, happy she was properly understood.

Nami couldn't bring herself to ask the most logical follow up question.

"How far below us is the sea?" Reiju asked instead.

"Uh…" Cabernet had to think about it, and that was also an answer in its own right. "Really, really far?"

"That's why Jinbe hasn't come back," Pudding stated the obvious, looking a little pale herself. "Because he can't swim through the air."

"Reel in Franky!" Nami commanded suddenly, making Usopp, Chopper, and Carrot flinch at the ferocity of her tone. "We need him on the Sunny to fix whatever breaks when we fall!"

There was a mad scramble to do just that. Anyone could imagine the damage falling from such a great height can cause to a ship. Going Merry had taken a nasty bump and she hadn't even fallen the whole way down from Skypeia. The Thousand Sunny was made with better material and by a better shipwright, but she wasn't indestructible.

Or at least, not yet, if Cherry had anything to say about it.

…

"Phew!" Franky used one of the mini hands in his big hands to wipe his brow. "I thought I was a goner there for a few minutes!"

"Some weather we're having, no?" Brook asked.

"You're telling me! All those weird balls all over the place, I thought I was in a men's locker room!" Franky guffawed and Brook joined him.

"Stop playing!" Nami bashed them both upside their heads. "Franky, do you think the Sunny can take a fall from this height?"

"She'd survive, but only barely," Franky rubbed his chin, again with the mini hand. If we were going to try that, I'd recommend trying to hit the other balls on the way down."

"How cruel of you," Brook said, and the two of them started snickering like school boys again.

The clouds that were once above them were now roughly level with their bubble. They weren't the lowest hanging types of clouds, either. It wasn't very reassuring.

"Hmmm…" Cherry hummed.

"What?" Nami dead panned at her, sensing that she had something to say.

"Jinbe and Luffy are in one of the other bubbles," Cherry said.

"Why can't anything-!" Nami screamed.

WATER

They were underwater.

Nami grasped at her throat. Everyone had been caught off guard, but she had just been pushing all the air out of her lungs with a wide open mouth. Needless to say, it wasn't pleasant for her.

Reiju was quick to react, however, even more so than Cherry. Although the method she chose to help Nami was a little risque, locking lips and breathing air into the navigator's lungs.

Cherry instead went for the diving suits. They kept them in a little closet accessible from the outer deck just in case. Franky originally put it in with the trip to Fishman Island in mind.

Of the others, those without devil fruits helped those with them, as they were at the greatest risk of drowning.

Once everybody had an air supply and were no longer at risk of imminent death, it was just a matter of waiting to see what Franky was up to. It soon became apparent, as a familiar, soapy bubble expanded from where he fiddled at the base of the main mast. Another precaution he built in for the trip to Fishman Island, presumably.

"What the hell happened?!" Usopp demanded to know, his body trembling a bit from the experience.

Nobody could answer that question for certain, but Nami ventured a guess. "Maybe we were pulled into the sea bubble out of nowhere?"

From her tone, they could all tell she was skeptical even as she voiced the guess. She had a pretty keen instinct for these things, so her not being sure meant it was pretty implausible.

"Perhaps our sea bubble collided with a body of water above us," Robin offered.

"No, that's ridiculous," Nami dismissed. A second later, "But it does make a lot of sense…"

"Well, which is it?" Chopper asked, shaking his entire body in a vain attempt to dry off.

"We couldn't see a body of water above us, but… a giant mirage concealing a body of water in the sky isn't the most absurd thing I've seen," Nami ventured.

"It's so dark, like we're deep underwater," Pudding coughed, then smacked her lips. "It tastes different than the sea salt from the New World, too."

"What, are you suggesting we've been teleported to the deep ocean somewhere?" Usopp queried.

"Don't be rude, long nose," Sanji chastised.

"I don't know!" Pudding threw her hands into the air. "I'm just making observations!"

"I don't think we've moved through spacetime," Cherry said. "I like Nami's theory better. Invisible sky ocean." She nodded.

"Whatever it is, we should get to the surface fast!" Franky warned. "The emergency coating wasn't meant to hold for long! It's hastily applied, shoddy work! It doesn't compare to a proper coating!"

"Let's think about what happened later, when we aren't in mortal peril," Nami agreed, as did the others.