章 417: Tough Choices
"It'll be better to stimulate the subject's stamina in addition to triggering the Sulong state," Cherry said, looking over the chalkboard that Chopper and her had been drawing up the plans for the new pill.
"It'll be weaker if we do that, though," Chopper countered.
"That's true, but we have to consider the health risks of Sulong. It'll also be harder to end the effect voluntarily, making accidental death more likely," Cherry explained.
"That's true," Chopper nodded in understanding. "I was too focused on perfectly replicating the transformation."
Chopper erased part of the formula for the pill and wrote over the spot with a different ingredient.
"If you add some ancient dandelion root here, it'll increase its efficacy by about 3%?" Cherry pointed out. She was entirely sure since medicines weren't her specialty.
"It'll also give them purple polka dots on their fur…" Chopper said.
"I don't see the problem," Cherry snickered.
"W-we can't do that to our friends!" Chopper argued, though he was having trouble stifling his own giggles.
"It's fine. We'll just throw in some jungle cedar bark at the end," Cherry nodded seriously.
"Pffft-!" Chopper was hammering his work desk with his little hoof as he struggled to contain himself. "T-that… That will turn them completely GREEN!"
"Better than polka dots. It'll even work as camouflage," Cherry smirked.
Chopper lost it.
"What's so funny?" Carrot walked inside, blissfully ignorant.
"Chopper wanted me to turn your fur green. You know, for camouflage," Cherry explained.
"EH?! I don't want to be green!" Carrot cried out in horror.
Chopper wasn't able to defend himself, because her shocked reaction set him off again.
"Well, he seems to think that having multi-colored fur is worse than being green," Cherry said, glancing at Chopper with sadistic glee in her eyes.
The white rabbit girl grasped her shoulder length blonde locks, having misunderstood the statement. "You don't like my hair, Cho-bro?"
"Noooo!" Chopper managed to get a hold of himself. "I love your hair!"
Chopper quickly overexplained the process of creating the Sulong Ball from the initial idea to its current state of development over the last few hours. Carrot has smoke pouring from her ears by the end of it.
Carrot shook her head briskly to shake off the info-dump she just received. "So you're making moon medicine?"
Chopper and Cherry shared a look, then nodded at her.
"That's amazing!" Carrot clapped her hands with a bright smile. "You two are so smart! My people have never thought of such a thing before!"
Chopper started to wiggle-dance and curse again.
"But if you feed a mink a medicine that turns their fur a silly color, then you should expect to be gutted soon after!" Carrot said with the same chipper tone, though there was a threatening undercurrent to it that even gave Cherry shivers down her spine.
Chopper became so still, and mid-dance at that, that Cherry might have suspected he had literally frozen solid if she didn't know better.
"Ahem," Cherry cleared her throat, dispelling some of the tension of the air. "I might have forgotten how proud minks are of their fur for a moment. Sorry about that."
Chopper nodded so fast that he created a small breeze.
"I hope your work goes well! If we had had your moon medicine back when Jack attacked us, then we would have driven them away easily!" Carrot was back to her usual self. "Oh, right! We're going to make landfall shortly, that's what Jinbe said!"
"Oh? What kind of island is it?" Cherry asked. If it was something interesting, perhaps she would take a look.
"I don't know what it's called, but it has a bunch of big bottles and cups on it!" Carrot spread her arms high and stood on her tippy toes, as if to indicate the size of said bottles and cups.
"Oh?" Cherry rubbed her chin. "I hope that means what I think it means?"
It did indeed mean what she thought it meant. The big bottles and cups in question were suspiciously shaped like alcoholic beverages.
"Hey Nami, how do you feel about doing some more conventional pirate stuff?" Cherry gave the younger woman a toothy smile.
Nami caught on immediately. "Really, Cherry? I doubt they have anything particularly expensive…"
Cherry scoffed. "They probably got better stuff than the average island, at least. We need souvenirs too, and what better souvenir than a nice barrel of booze?"
"Yohohoho! She has a point!" Brook concurred.
"We need to stock up on supplies anyway, Nami-swan," Sanji said. "We don't know exactly how long it'll take to get to Wano, and you know how Luffy is…"
"Ugh, fine," Nami relented. "However, don't bring back any of the cheap stuff, Cherry!"
Cherry rubbed her hands together in anticipation. Some good old fashioned thievery was just what she needed to cool down from a hard fight; even more so after TWO hard fights.
Pudding, on the other hand, had an unreadable expression on her face as she stood near perfectly still, watching the island she knew to be Liqueur Island draw closer by the second.
The early morning light of the sun slowly illuminated her features, a gentle breeze pushing her bangs aside and revealing her third eye for all the world to see.
Not one person on the ship reacted negatively to her eye, in fact most didn't react at all. It just didn't register as strange to them, Pudding realized, and she supposed that made sense with so many strange people in their crew. Was an extra eye more unusual than a walking, talking skeleton or a reindeer with the human fruit who is also a doctor?
"It's hard to leave your family, even if you don't get along that well with them, isn't it?" Reiju leaned against the railings next to Pudding, looking out towards the island. "Scary, even?"
That was an extreme understatement. Aside from some friendly, but otherwise shallow relationships with a few of her siblings, she had no love for this family that had no love for her. Her own mother only cared for her as much as her potential future use of her father's racial abilities, whilst at the same time constantly disparaging her for the eye that made that possibility possible.
More than that, she was terrified of Big Mom. She envied her older sister Lola for her bravery to leave the safety of the crew and risk enraging their mother to seek out true love.
"Mama isn't some loser from a weak sea like Judge," Pudding said with a lot more venom than she intended. She was still getting accustomed to dropping her masks. "There's nowhere in the world I could hide from her. Lola only broke off an engagement with the giant king, and Mama wants her dead. Mama wouldn't kill me. She'd put me in a cage and weld the door shut, to make sure I could never run again."
Reiju looked at Pudding from the corner of her eyes, a certain softness contained within them. "Cherry beat her, you know. Twice as I understand it."
"She isn't dead, though. It wouldn't be the first time Mama lost a fight, and she wasn't afraid to challenge the ones who beat her before again," Pudding said.
"It sounds like you're trying to convince yourself rather than convince me," Reiju said. "Big Mom is old and all of us are young. We will grow stronger, and she will grow weaker. My father- Judge did a detailed analysis of all of Big Mom's activities over the years, and he surmised that she has already started to decline. That's why he had the guts to go for the alliance; he believed she was trying to increase her military power because her personal power was fading. Although it didn't quite go as he planned, it's likely still an accurate assessment."
It wasn't easy to argue with that. Pudding saw the state that her mother was in when she went chasing after the wedding cake on Bege's ship.
She had a lot to think about, and very little time to do it.
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