Broken Proximity Zone

Somewhere In The Distance

A/N: If you know nothing about Star Trek, don't worry. I will hold your hand, we will get through this together ;)

XxxX

You've got a lot of nerve to try and bring me down
Baby, you haven't heard, that's not the way we run this town!
Cause when the times are tough, we turn them round!
We've got a lot to lose, the stakes are staggering
But we don't chose to lose the place that only brought us down
Though when the times are tough, we'll turn them round!

-"Somewhere in the Distance" The Hoosiers

XxxX

The USS Thousand Sunny was gliding elegantly through the empty vacuum of space. The USS in the title meaning United Space Ship, and signaling its belonging to the United Federation of Planets, this may not have been an entirely accurate description of the situation. The ship was a part of the Federation, but it was privately owned and followed it's own, less traditional methods. They responded to federation emergencies and sent back data, but other than that they were a solo operation. It was more that the Federation tolerated them and accepted them as more of a help than a hindrance.

Captain Monkey D. Luffy sat in the captains chair, leaning back as stars zoomed past them. Luffy had gone jumping through hoops to get to were he was now. The young captain was originally bajoran, born on the planet Bajor, and had grown up in the chaos of the Cardassian occupation of his home planet.

The bajoran people were a very religious bunch, worshipping the prophets, who where later discovered to be non-corporeal aliens living in a wormhole near their planet, as gods. The bajoran people pierced their left ear in two places with a chain connecting them as a sort of religious sigil. Luffy had no such piercings, or faith in such prophets. The only thing connecting him to his people were the small ridges running down his nose in the place between his eyes. Other than, that he could have been mistaken for human.

Like most bajoran children, he had been forced to do his part to fight off those pale, lizard like cardassian tyrants. Spoon heads, they called them, after the spoon shaped divot in the center of their forehead. Luffy had been wounded in one of the encounters when he was about six and was taken in by one of the most infamous of the cardassian generals of the war. The cardassian people were known for being devious and cruel and this man was the most devious and most cruel.

Luffy had never talked about what had transpired in his time with the man who called himself Dragon, not even when he had showed up on Bajor out of the blue. By then the war was over and the Federation was overseeing the new bajoran provisional government and the cardassians were back in their own territory.

The boy was interrogated by the bajoran high council, but he gave away no information on the man or much at all about the cardassian people. All he said was that his time had made him as strong as he was now, an answer that failed to satisfy the council. However, when they could hold him for no longer, he was dismissed from the council to go as he pleased. That was when he had set off across the galaxy chasing his dreams. Luffy was somewhat of an enigma; despite the cruelty and hardship he had most certainly suffered, his personality was generally childlike. Maybe it was a defense mechanism of some sort, it was impossible to tell.

Luffy was determined to explore the galaxy in his own starship and for that he needed the best crew he could find. Unfortunately, at that time he had no crew and he had only a medium sized runabout ship named the Going Merry.

His first stop along his epic journey had been to a cardassian planet on the edge of the bajoran-cardassian border, too far into the neutral zone to belong to either side. Upon landing, he was looking for a place to find something to eat when he had happened upon a man tied to a post in the middle of a courtyard.