Another full chapter available at you know where (patre0n.com/moctopus)
****************************************************************************************************
"Violence is the perfect way to build relationships?" Nami repeated, bewildered. "What are you talking about?"
"Nami, don't tell me you've forgotten all my teachings?" Luffy looked genuinely upset. "Before becoming someone's friend, you must first become their enemy!"
"…I repeat my question: what in the world are you talking about?"
"It can't be…" The young man's eyes flew wide, and he staggered away from her on buckling legs as though she had struck him unexpectedly. "Could it be… could it be that I never told you about this?" Despair entered his voice. "The most fundamental of fundamentals, and I forgot to explain it to you?! How could this happen?! How could I make such a mistake?!" In a burst of dramatics—or idiocy—Luffy fell to his knees. "I already told Traffy about it!" His index finger pointed at the Heart Pirates standing nearby.
"So what is this supposedly perfect method for building relationships?" Nami asked, rolling her eyes.
"Since you're so eager to know, allow me to enlighten you!" Luffy instantly returned to his feet and placed his arm around her shoulders again. "Think about it yourself… and all of you listen too and draw your own conclusions," he added to the rest of the family. "The essence of my theory is that a person's true nature can best be understood only when you are in open conflict with them. In other words, to understand someone properly, you first need to become their enemy!"
"…What kind of nonsense is that?" Johnny and Nami blurted out simultaneously.
Judging by the expressions on Usopp, Sanji, Yosaku, and Tashigi, they were thinking along roughly the same lines. Only Zoro acquired a frighteningly thoughtful look.
"Why call it nonsense immediately?" Luffy was not offended in the slightest. "Look at Zoro. He clearly agrees with me!"
Everyone immediately turned toward the swordsman in question.
"Zoro-aniki, please don't tell me you believed him!" Johnny pleaded when he saw the thoughtful expression on Zoro's face.
Zoro was one of the two principal 'pillars' supporting the 'balance of the world,' so his 'collapse' could end in a genuine 'apocalypse'—that is, in Luffy's madness finally defeating the last remnants of common sense.
"…The longer I think about it, the more reasonable it seems," the green-haired young man finally deigned to answer after a full minute of consideration.
"Reasonable?!" Almost no one managed to remain silent this time.
"Think about our family, our friends, and most importantly, how our relationships began and developed. Orc's story fits this theory perfectly, and so does most of the leadership of that organization you all know."
It was one thing when Luffy spouted nonsense and quite another when Zoro began agreeing with it. Consequently, everyone present immediately began considering their words, including Crocus, the whale, and the Heart Pirates. Only the members of Luffy's family, however, could fully evaluate the theory. And as Zoro had said, the longer they thought, the more reasonable it appeared.
"You know, there really is something to it," Johnny said, surprising even himself.
"You're right." Yosaku nodded. "That's horrifying."
"And it immediately explains many aspects of his behavior," Sanji agreed.
"Then it truly is a terrible theory." Usopp went pale as he recalled the details of his own introduction to his new family.
Nami, however, was interested in something entirely different.
"Just admit it—you invented this nonsense very recently, didn't you?" she pressed the evasive young man. "I refuse to believe you simply forgot to tell us about it before!"
"Perhaps when I said I had forgotten to tell you, I exaggerated a little," Luffy finally retreated.
"In other words?"
"Nami, Nami, Nami, a child must grow up before you explain the 'birds and the bees.' Otherwise they either won't understand what nonsense you're talking about or they'll be emotionally scarred for life."
"You know, apparently I still haven't grown up enough, because right now I feel as if I've just received an emotional scar for life," the girl sighed heavily.
"I strongly doubt it," Luffy waved carelessly, "because you've been living by the same principle yourself for ages!"
"What?!" Nami exclaimed indignantly. "I have never done anything like that!"
"How cold!" The young man's eyes widened in shock. "Such heartlessness! And they call you 'Merciful'? Poor, poor Koby." Luffy shook his head sadly. "After everything you did to him!"
Remembering the details of her meeting with Koby, Nami involuntarily blushed, but she could not remain silent either.
"I barely did anything to him! Besides, the entire situation was originally just a misunderstanding! Almost all the blame lies with you, Zoro, Johnny, and Yosaku."
"For some reason, I'm sure Koby would disagree… Poor boy. He'll probably fear all women for the rest of his life." Luffy again looked mournful, as though he truly pitied Koby.
"He'll be perfectly fine!" After those words, the blush on Nami's cheeks became even more obvious. "We got along very well afterward!"
"Of course you got along!" the young man nodded confidently. "The kid was scared shitless of you—of course he got along with you!"
In truth, Nami was unquestionably in the right, but Luffy could lend meaning to practically any nonsense he invented. In this particular case, when the girl herself felt guilty, his words sounded especially convincing.
"And by the way, here's the latest and clearest example!" Having morally and verbally 'crushed' Nami, Luffy hurried back to his theory. "Every one of us wondered why the whale allows old Crocus to dig around inside its body and what kind of relationship connects them. We could have guessed forever, but even if we received direct answers, each of us would still wonder how truthful those answers were. But now? One strike, one threat, and we know with absolute certainty that the whale deeply values the old man's life and that the old man values the whale's. One tiny drop of violence, and the entire truth immediately crawled out on its own."
In the end, every member of the family found common sense in Luffy's words—was that not the very definition of 'the end'?—after which they calmly went to introduce themselves properly to the Heart Pirates, the whale, and Crocus. Because of their less-than-good reputation among pirates—or simply terrible reputation, to be honest—the initial acquaintance proceeded awkwardly. Yet only a complete corpse, without any qualifications, could resist Nami's charms and Sanji's cooking, so things quickly improved. Moreover, Nami liked Trafalgar Law himself—'He frowns so adorably!'—and his first mate, Bepo—'What a cute little bear!'—which eliminated the Heart Pirates' last, already tiny chance of remaining mere casual acquaintances. Of course, the main reason Nami liked 'Law-chan' was that he could almost completely ignore her appearance, remained calm, rational, and intelligent, and generally seemed so normal against the background of her own family that talking with him was like a breath of fresh air. And naturally, one could not forget the grand feast. Any feast was a wonderful opportunity to make new friends. To make enemies too, for that matter.
"What is this?" Nami asked, turning a small glass sphere with a strap over in her hands. The unusual device looked as though someone had crossed a wristwatch with a compass, because a single needle, strongly resembling a compass needle, swayed slightly beneath the glass. "Some kind of compass? But I can't see the cardinal directions."
They were seated at a large, long improvised table assembled from whatever materials had been available, which by now was literally bending beneath the weight of Sanji's numerous culinary masterpieces.
"…Did you really set out for the Grand Line without learning anything about it?" Law asked after a short pause, still wearing the same gloomy expression—even though Nami was sitting directly beside him.
"Luffy didn't want to spoil the surprise, so all of us tried to avoid almost any information about the Grand Line," the girl replied carelessly.
Everyone listening to their conversation immediately fell silent. Even if that approach did not shock them, it certainly surprised them greatly. And for good reason. People literally killed for information about the Grand Line. Any additional knowledge might save a crew's life, so information about the Grand Line was valued more highly than gold. Whenever the logbook of a crew that had visited the Grand Line surfaced, a full-scale bloodbath often erupted over it, while such journals could sell at auction for tens of millions. If the logbook had belonged to a famous crew, the price might rise to several hundred million berries. Pirate crews extremely rarely possessed such sums, so everything once again came down to murder and robbery.
"So what is this thing?" Nami reminded him of her question.
"…A Log Pose."
"A Log Pose? What is it for?"
"Ordinary compasses don't work on the Grand Line, so everyone uses Log Poses," Law explained.
"Ordinary compasses don't work?" Nami asked in surprise. "Seriously?"
"Have you not noticed yet?"
Leaving the question unanswered, the girl immediately ran back to the ship and soon returned with an ordinary compass in her hand. Its needle jerked endlessly in different directions, as though it had panicked and could no longer remember where north was.
"It really doesn't work!" Genuine delight appeared on Nami's face, instantly making her look even more beautiful. The young men in Law's crew, unaccustomed to her presence, briefly lost contact with reality. "Apparently something is wrong with the magnetic fields on the Grand Line?" Nami asked Law, who sat beside her.
"Correct." The young man nodded. Unlike his men, the captain of the Heart Pirates endured the girl's presence with admirable composure. "Every island on the Grand Line has its own magnetic field, which makes an ordinary compass useless. That is why the Log Pose was created. It attunes itself to the magnetic field of one particular island and then points the way toward the next one."
"What prevents people from navigating by fixed coordinates, the sun, and the stars?" the thoroughly puzzled girl asked. "Of course, it would be easy to lose course in bad weather, but at least you could travel anywhere instead of only sailing from island to island."
For the first time since their meeting, a smile appeared on Law's face after he heard Nami's words. It was not a pleasant smile, however; it was closer to a smirk.
"Navigate the Grand Line by coordinates, the sun, and the stars? Only suicidal people, brainless idiots, or complete lunatics are capable of that."
"Is it really that bad?"
"Explaining it now would be pointless, but you'll understand once you continue your journey. The Grand Line is not a place where ordinary logic applies. There is a good saying about it: 'The only logic that works on the Grand Line is the complete absence of logic.'"
Trafalgar himself did not know exactly what he hoped to accomplish by saying such things to the girl beside him, but the result was predictably unpredictable.
"Luffy, you won't believe what Law-chan just told me!" Nami exclaimed in a voice filled with delight.
Luffy, who had spent the entire time practically hanging from Bepo, instantly appeared beside his beautiful navigator. She immediately hurried to recount every detail of her conversation with Law. In addition to Luffy, Nami's enthusiasm attracted most of the rest of the family—Zoro had poured a good ten liters of wine into himself and was sleeping soundly, while Sanji continued cooking without pause. Contrary to every warning previously voiced by the Surgeon of Death, the girl immediately obtained Luffy's permission to try navigating the Grand Line without any Log Pose whatsoever. Law's left eye began twitching visibly. He had literally just listed the categories of people who might risk traveling through the Grand Line without a Log Pose, and he had absolutely no desire to form a close friendship with such individuals. Worse still, as their acquaintance deepened, Trafalgar began seriously suspecting that the crew known as the Pirate Slayers, who stubbornly called themselves the Straw Hat family, could fit into every category he had named. That opinion only strengthened when they managed to break the only Log Pose still intact. That morning, the Heart Pirates had possessed five: one large stationary unit installed directly aboard the submarine and four small spares. After Luffy's entertainment, only one remained whole. And when Law watched the last surviving one shatter into pieces… the young man's feelings became impossible to describe. At least, they could not be described using language fit for polite company.
"Oops!" Luffy apologized.
Johnny's words only made the situation worse.
"Oh, come on, so what if it broke?" he 'reassured' Trafalgar after noticing how drastically the young man's expression had changed. "You're not stupid. You must have brought spares. So don't forget to give one to us too—we don't have any at all! Ha-ha!"