Hi guys! This is my first fanfic for One Piece, so please feel free to critique it in any way!

Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece in any way, shape, or form! All rights go to the wonderful Oda.

Note: My character will not become a Strawhat member. Also, any other OCs in the first two chapters will most likely never make a reappearance. The excessive amount of OCs in the beginning is strictly for giving Nao a backstory.

Life has a way of being all too ironic.

At times it ranges from average to almost humorously sad. Sometimes your best friend becomes your worst enemy. Sometimes the one section you decide not to study ends up being the one section that's tested. Sometimes the unsinkable boat sinks.

And other times, when life decides to show an irony that's plain and outright cruel, the girl who dies of a shameful alcohol poisoning incident gets reborn into a world where alcoholics essentially run, well, everything.

Of course, if asked about dying, she'd usually play ignorant. If she was in a good mood, she'd drop some sort of mystical line about death being something that a mere human could never dream of properly articulating. If she was caught in a bad mood, the poor, unfortunate soul who asked such an intrusive question would be fortunate to leave with all their limbs intact. Her reaction was justifiable though, if only to the other explorers of the sea. Death via alcohol—the staple drink of a pirate—would be something not even she—a person who would soon be notorious for grand-scale mistakes—could live down.

Strangely enough, regardless of her only meaning to deter her interrogators with that ridiculously vague reply, she'd end up being right, in a way, about death being indescribable. She'd try though (by god she would try), if the person asking was someone dear to her. She'd fumble for the right words to use to describe the hopelessness she had felt after death, grasping at straws to explain that lifetime she spent in what she'd refer to as Oblivion.

Oblivion was a place without light or darkness. It was simply nothingness; it was a void that contained nothing but her consciousness—her soul.

She didn't know exactly how long she had stayed there—couldn't even differentiate between a few months or a few years in that hell—but she knew it was long enough to drive her to the brink of insanity. She couldn't quite explain the bleakness of it all either; how she had to constantly remind herself of her former life, (Who was she, again?) despite not knowing whether or not that knowledge would ever be put to use. She could remember a few things, like the loneliness and anger (and maybe even the self-pity) that engulfed her very being, but she could never bring herself to admit that part to those who asked, even those closest to her. Her understanding of death really ended there. She could barely make a comment on whether or not there was an afterlife. (Would even the cruelest of gods place a soul under that sort of torture and call it an afterlife?)

There was, however, one thing she could say with certainty; death was not instantaneous. In her case, dying might've even taken longer than living.

There wasn't really much to tell about her first time around. She had lived a measly twenty five years on earth, barely finishing her studies in medicine before she went out like an idiot and accidentally killed herself. It happened at a party, that much she could remember. (Was it the alcohol that made her forget, or was it those years spent in Oblivion?) She had downed shot after shot, foolishly overestimating her alcohol tolerance and eventually losing count of how many drinks she had had, and when she finally lost consciousness, those around her had laughed, calling her a lightweight before leaving her to 'sober up' in an empty bedroom.

She never woke up after that—not as herself, at least.

Now that was definitely a story to tell—her life after death, that is.

It's common knowledge that the body decomposes after death, but it's not the only thing that deteriorates. The mind does, too. She theorized that it was some type of defense mechanism for the universe; something that allowed a person to pass onto the next life with a clean slate. After all, the universe(s) couldn't afford to have a bunch of bitter people running around, swearing that they'll get revenge on a world that didn't let them live long enough or well enough in a past life.

So she understood it.

But understanding it didn't equate to her obeying its purpose. She'd really rather die (again) than let her time spent fighting her inevitable erasure go to waste.

In fact, her ability to retain any sort of awareness, despite spending years upon years, (Or was it only a few seconds?) in Oblivion probably stemmed from the fact that she thought her death was fucking stupid.

Yep, faked acceptance and enlightened insight on her death aside, she was still bitter as fuck.

And what better way to express that bitterness than destroying the predetermined fate of the new world she was born into? What better way to make use of that eternity-and-a-half that she spent forcing herself to recall her memories of her former life than to use those memories to fuck shit up.

And thus came the existence of Nao, a bitter girl born to shake up a bitter world.

And the intro is done! Please leave a review, it's much appreciated.