Capítulo 168: Murder Mystery
"I suppose a good place to start would be talking to the local law enforcement?" Robin suggested quite reasonably.
"What? We're PIRATES! With BOUNTIES! And you want to talk to the guys who are paid to arrest us?!" Perona refuted animatedly.
"I'm sure it'll all work out." Cherry said, before marching off to grab another villager to interrogate- no, to ask for directions.
She approached a teenager with the great misfortune to be both covered in warts and a lot of painful looking acne. Judging by the scowl on his face, he wasn't very happy about it.
"Excuse-" Cherry started politely.
"Fuck off!" The teenager cursed and made a rude hand gesture in her general direction.
Cherry exerted the smallest amount of pressure with her conqueror's haki and nearly made the young lad piss himself in fear.
"If you answer my question, I'll clear all that nasty shit off of your face with a special technique. How does that sound?" Cherry took a different, less polite approach this time.
The teenager nodded his head furiously. He didn't believe that she could actually do it for a second, not even the village doctor could do anything for him. However, he wasn't about to upset the terrifying demon lady any more than he had already done.
"Where's the local law enforcer?" Cherry asked calmly.
The teenager's arm jerked up and pointed towards the center of the village. "Big sign says "Constable", can't miss it!"
"Good boy. Now hold still, this will only hurt for a moment." Cherry spoke ominously.
"What-" The teenager tried to turn to run away, but he was only a regular person so he was far too late.
Cherry poked him on the tip of his nose, which happened to be one of the few relatively clear areas of skin on his face.
The teenager didn't feel any different and seeing Cherry walk away with her companions, he figured she was just messing with him. He ran in the opposite direction that she went and hoped not to run into her again.
He only managed to get a few meters away before he started to feel an odd pressure building in many places under his skin all over his body.
Suddenly all the acne and warts he had all burst outwards along with a rather painful sensation.
Before he could even scream the pain had vanished. He felt his face with his hands in terror only to find that the wounds he expected to find weren't present. Rather his skin felt soft and smooth.
He found a bird bath to look at his reflection. Aside from a bit of blood from the unsettling experience, he found that his skin was completely clear of the less than charming pimples and warts.
Shedding tears of happiness, he silently sent a prayer of gratitude to the angel who had visited him in his time of need. Surging with self confidence, he decided to ask out the girl he was crushing on before the day was over.
Cherry was oblivious to the religion with a single follower that she accidentally created whilst Robin and Perona were wishing they had had such a technique when they were dealing with acne in their teenage years.
They arrived in the village center quickly and sure enough, the local constabulary was plain to see.
They stepped inside the stone building and took in the scene.
One decent sized, steel barred jail cell took up half the building's floor space with its door flung ajar. A snoring unkempt man was sleeping comfortably on the rather uncomfortable looking bench within the cell.
Behind a desk to their left, they saw another man wearing a sort of uniform. His hair was cut very short and stubble decorated his face. He appeared to be trying to fill out a single sheet of paperwork whilst sipping on a beer at the same time. The paper had a number of stains to suggest he had spilled on it a few times.
"Are you the constable?" Cherry asked.
"Hm? Oh!" He swiftly set down his bottle and stuffed the sheet of paper into a drawer haphazardly. "Yes, I'm Constable Ricky! Not often we get visitors in the Fungwood, toxic spores and all that."
He glanced at the bottle. "I'm not drinking alcohol on the job, promise! That's, er, mushroom… water…"
"Right." Cherry said. She glanced at a bulletin board she hadn't had a good look at and noticed it was covered in bounty posters.
Constable Ricky followed her gaze and they both landed on a particular poster that held the likeness of Cherry as well as her name.
Their eyes returned to each other and made contact.
"Um, strange coincidence, huh? The world's such a big place, I'm sure every big bounty has a few people who look just like 'em!" Constable Ricky said, sweating a bit from nervousness.
"Sure is. Seems I've even got the same full name as well. Crazy, isn't it?" Cherry spoke with a smile.
"Right. So what can I do for ya?" Constable Ricky said, trying to change the subject.
"We want to solve the mystery! Catch the Killer! Punch his teeth down his throat!" Cabernet excitedly exclaimed, pumping his fists in the air.
"Ah, y-you heard about the deaths, I see…" Constable Ricky tugged at his collar. "Well, I guess you can help out if you want, but I won't be much help to ya. I'm mostly here to break up drunken brawls, not hunt for killers. I've deputized Deponte to do the investigatin' for the recent cases of unexpected death. You can find his house here."
Constable Ricky pointed to a point on the map behind him.
"I don't really got the smarts for investigations, ya see? DePonte is one of them cyan-tests." Constable Ricky said somewhat embarrassedly.
"What was that about the toxins? How come they don't make the people here sick?" Perona asked. Cherry's technique helped to clear out the toxins from her system, but they still affect her before they are filtered out.
"We actually didn't know about them until after DePonte came here. Said we must have built up "Aunty Bodies" against the spores over the generations of living here. The mayor's wife gave him a slap for that, but after explainin' what he meant we kinda sorta understood." Constable Ricky explained.
Perona was disappointed that there wasn't some secret cure, but then realized that this Deponte fellow probably had something to use for himself that she could use.
Deciding to go visit this DePonte, they bid farewell to the constable who promptly returned to his drinking of "mushroom water".
DePonte lived on the outskirts of town, which is apparently by choice rather than because he isn't welcome. Though whether he WAS welcome depended on who you asked. Most folk thought him odd, but harmless and wouldn't actively associate with him.
His home wasn't anything out of the ordinary for the village, except for his mushroom garden that was much larger than average from what they've seen.
*Knock knock*
The door immediately swung open and a middle aged man with pale, sickly skin, black hair with a thin handlebar mustache and goatee, and blood shot eyes.
"I've made a breakthrough in the case, Constable!" The man, presumably DePonte, shouted excitedly. "Oh, you're not him. Who are you?"
"We're helping out the Constable with the case as well." Robin said.
"In that case, come on in! Constable Ricky was never interested in my updates anyways!" DePonte motioned them inside his home.
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