A Force Against Inertia - Chapter 20
Title: A Force Against Inertia
Chapters: Prologue + 20 Chapters
Rating: R
Pairings: None, future installments will have pairings
Summary: Christmas comes and goes. The Love Cook makes his last stand.
A Force Against Intertia
Chapter 20
By Dixxy Mouri
For 0543 and 0544, the days were blending in together. It was hard to tell how much time had passed anymore, and in some ways they couldn’t bring themselves to care. They weren’t talking in the holding cell as much anymore, but they still held each other and slept in the middle of the floor together.
And then it was Christmas.
0543 had guessed it was around Christmas when she noticed one of the lab techs was humming a Christmas song. The idea that it was almost that time of year sent shivers up her spine. She had certainly had a lot of difficult Christmas seasons during her unfortunate tenure in Arlong’s crew, but she had a fair number of happy ones as well.
Her last Christmas with her mother and sister had been bittersweet. There was never a lot of money around during the holidays, but somehow her mother had managed to pull together enough money for a Christmas ham and a new doll - a NEW doll - for each of them. They’d had tangerine cocoa that evening and curled together under a blanket while their mother read them a story.
Her captain had made her last Christmas . . . interesting, to say the least. It was before the shipwright had joined (and therefore, while they were still on their first ship) when their captain realized what time of the year it was and started making preparations. He’d insisted on having a big Christmas. There were colored lights across all of her tangerine trees and a pile of gifts - mostly things they had all made themselves for each other - under them all. 0544 had hung mistletoe all over the ship, hoping to catch her or the archaeologist underneath. The swordsman slept most of the day with a belly full of brandy and eggnog. Although they weren’t close to a winter island, their sniper made fake snow to line the railings of the ship - he even made a snow man. The other woman on board was still mostly distant from the rest of the crew at that point but seemed to enjoy their celebration.
This Christmas was going to be torture.
Directly above their holding cell was where Tesla’s crew was having a Christmas party.
0544 and 0543 sat on the former’s bench, looking up at the ceiling as the sounds of casual chatter and Christmas music floated down through the ceiling. They had their normal dinner, which was served by a scientist wearing a suit with a festive tie, and nothing else. Not that they really expected anything.
“I bet they have eggnog up there,” 0544 said. He licked his lips. It had been a long time since either of them had a taste of anything other than the bland gruels and oatmeal and chicken puree they’d survived off of for the past ten, nearly eleven months. “I don’t think about that stuff unless it’s around Christmas . . . but I really like it.”
“If we ever get out of here I’ll buy you as much as you can drink,” said 0543, resting her head on his shoulder. 0544 rested his head on hers and took her hand, squeezing it.
Upstairs, there was a burst of laughter after someone told a joke or did something funny.
“You remember last Christmas?” 054 asked.
“How could I not?” 0543 said quietly. “It was wonderful. The first Christmas I’d had in years.”
0544 frowned. “Merry was a good little ship, wasn’t she?” 0543 nodded. “There’s something that was just so . . . home-y about her. Sunny is nice and all but we didn’t really spend a lot of time on that ship before . . .” 0544 trailed off. He didn’t want to think about it. “I miss the both of them. And the people on them.”
That was when it started to snow in the room. He held out his hand - there were puffs of snow, but they didn’t feel cold. Of course it was another hallucination, but it was much calmer and gentler than most of them. The room had quickly filled with at least a foot of the stuff, and their feet were dangling in it.
“Aside from Drum, I haven’t seen much snow in my life,” said 0544.
“Me neither. Drum was only my third snow.”
“It’s so destructive, but so pretty.”
“You’re hallucinating something snow related, aren’t you?”
0544 nodded. “Yeah. At least this one’s calm. It’s just . . . snowing.”
“Are you cold?”
“No, I’m not.” He laced his fingers through hers. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
The yuletide celebrations of the scientists soon passed, and it was clear that Christmas had come and gone and the new year was upon them if it’s hadn’t happened already. Not that it mattered - the routine the scientists had for them hardly changed, with someone feeding them and giving them at least their shots and pills every day, but some days there weren’t experiments anyways, so it was hard to tell if one of those pill and shot only days was Christmas or not.
It didn’t matter. It was time for the test that forcefully activated their Devil Fruits. 0544 could hear 0543’s roaring somewhere nearby. She was probably stuck in either her mostly tiger or half and half form while the scientists observed her desperately try to reclaim her humanity again. He frowned, and was somehow thankful he didn’t have a Zoan in these circumstances. It was hard enough to feel human being one of Tesla’s lab rats - to have a power that really DID make you not human was unsettling.
0544 sat naked in the testing room, uninterested in the floating foam balls around him. He had pulled his knees to his chest and was resting his forehead on his arms as they lay cross and draped over the bony appendages. He couldn’t bear to look in the stupid mirror anymore. It hurt too much to look at what he’d become.
He’d always been fairly thin. It had taken him a long time to build up the muscle definition he did have, and even then he was still the one the old man had crawl into those hard to reach places because he was the only one without a gut or a pair of shoulders that would get stuck in those spots. It didn’t bother him - plenty of girls liked his body and he had the notches on his old bed post to prove it.
Back when he was a pirate, his crew - especially the swordsman - would sometimes accuse him of being a “desperate virgin” with the way he flirted and swooned over women - especially 0543, the princess, and the archaeologist (and the angel, and the secretary-slash-spy, and the dozens of other women he’d encountered during their travels together). Truth be told, the last time he’d been any kind of virgin had been when he was seventeen.
He used to be good at seducing women. True, it didn’t always end in his room or her boat, but it had happened enough that he was pretty sure he was decent in bed (at the very least he was positive the last three or four hadn’t faked it) and pleasing women was easy for him. Having a well put together appearance and a trim, fit body had helped to attract his previous partners.
But Tesla had robbed him of that body, of that identity. His hair was dry and mostly split ends, and his skin was rough and fragile. Most of the muscle he had was gone, eaten by his body to offset the lack of proper nutrition they had been getting from the scientists. His skin was paler than it used to be - at least he thought it was - from the lack of vitamins and minerals and he lacked the energy he used to have. He was tired most of the time and lacked even the motivation to try fighting back anymore. He just quietly followed Tesla or Curie or whomever to wherever it was they were taking him.
This test didn’t hurt physically, but being forced to look at himself was tearing him apart.
And today, he wasn’t alone.
The Love Cook was standing by the mirror, smoking a cigarette with a pretty girl on each arm. 0544 didn’t recognize them, but they were generic pretty girls with firm butts and bouncy chests who didn’t look like they had much going on between their ears. The hallucination looked at him with a cruel smirk and blew a smoke ring towards him. 0544 moved away from the smoke and the girls giggled cruelly.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” said the Love Cook. “We should get you laid or something.”
0544 turned away. “I’m not interested.”
As he raised his head up, the Love Cook was standing before him, leaning forward with his hands in his pockets. “Why? Isn’t that your favorite thing to do? Isn’t screwing pretty ladies something you’re really good at? And isn’t that the REAL reason you joined that dopey little pirate crew of yours? To land the hot read head with the cold shoulder?”
He clenched his eyes shut. “I joined them to find that ocean.”
“And fuck your way around the Grand Line as well. You kinda suck at that.”
“And how is that important now!?” 0544 snapped, gritting his teeth at the Love Cook. “Shut up. You’re not real. Leave me alone. Unless you want to do something useful I DON’T like having you around!” He ducked his head down and hid under his arms. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut UP! I don’t want to deal with you right now!”
“What about us?”
0544 opened his eyes and, suddenly, was in a fancy hotel room. He was sitting on a giant bed, fully clothed in one of the suits he used to love wearing, his body back in peak condition his stomach feeling full. Sitting all around him were several beautiful women, all of whom he’d seen before. His eyes widened.
The first woman had an impossible tiny waist and wide, sexy hips. She was smoking through a cigarette holder and had piles of wonderful, curly blue hair and sharp, gorgeous eyes. She blew a smoke ring into his face. “Don’t you remember me?” she asked. 0544 stared - he vaguely remembered seeing her during the crew’s trip to the desert kingdom and he remembered thinking she was hot, but beyond that they hadn’t interacted very much at all. She reached forward and grabbed his tie. “Our organization would have been a lot more fun if you’d been there with me.”
“No . . . you were-“
“What about me?” The girl crawling towards him was wearing an impossibly color outfit with feathers and shapes and a fox-like mask over her eyes. Perched under her mask was a sharp but strangely cute nose. She cupped the side of his face and cooed at him. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if the boss brought you onto our crew - I would have made sure you weren’t lonely.”
“But . . . what about . . .”
“You know I wouldn’t have killed you.” The sultry voice of the blonde bomb shell in the black fishnets was behind him. He turned his head and watched her adjust her glasses, then blew a bubble from her palm onto the tip of his nose. He shrank back as she smirked. “After all, I wasn’t done playing with you.”
“You would have killed-”
The women vanished as suddenly they appeared, and suddenly 0544 found himself alone and facing Curie. She stood at the foot of the bed, her hair trailing down her back and her lab coat hanging loosely around her shoulders. Beneath the lab coat was nothing but a lacy bra and a lacy pair of panties. She snapped her glasses off and threw them to side before leaning over onto the bed. “Admit it. I’m gorgeous.”
0544 backed himself against the headboard and Curie advanced on him. “Get away from me!”
She caught up to him, and suddenly he was back in the room, but the women were gone. It was just him and the Love Cook now. 0544 was backed up against the wall, shuddering and shaking as he looked at the dark reflection of his former self. “What’s the matter? Can’t get it up?” The hallucination swaggered over to the captive and bent down. “If you’d had the chance, you would have fucked every single one of them.”
0544 shook his head. “No, no I wouldn’t have!”
“Let’s take a look at some of the ladies you would have GLADLY fucked.” The Love Cook snapped his fingers and Sanji could hear music behind him. He his head to see a runway in the middle of the room connecting to two black voids covered by red curtains on either end. The Love Cook was sitting in a throne on the other side, a microphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
There was a flash of light and the woman from Baroque Works came waltzing out from one of the voids, her hips swinging widely back and forth as she took each step. “Now let’s take a look at the lovely Miss Doublefinger! She’s hot like the desert kingdom she tried to destroy, wears a size 6, and almost killed your best friend in the entire world. She’s Horrible Woman #1 you would have gladly taken to bed!” Miss Doublefinger twirled around and blew 0544 a kiss before proceeding to the other end of the catwalk.
“What is this!?” 0544 demanded.
The Love Cook ignored him and pointed to the opposite side of the walk again. “Let’s give a warm welcome to the overly flamboyant, overly selfish, and overly endowed athletic beauty!” Porche walked out, marching proudly across the stage. “She doesn’t care about anything but her boss and her crew, even if growing that crew means tearing apart the bonds of friendship! Had you and the idiot not worked together, she would have taken off with the little doctor and maybe even your dear, sweet cellmate if she’d been given the chance! It’s Horrible Woman #2 you would have bungled in the jungle, Porche!”
0544 tried to cover his eyes. “No more! No more!’
“Oh but there IS more!” the Love Cook said gleely. “Here comes the femme fatale herself, Califa! She’s sneaky and deceitful when it comes to her job as a spy but goes all out when it comes to roughing up her opponents! She tried to keep you from rescuing your archaeologist, tried to kill you, and nearly got away with harming your favorite navigator.” He paused as Califa stopped halfway on the catwalk. “But at least you had tea with her - after all, there’s always time to stop for a beautiful woman, even if she wants you and all your friends dead! Let’s hear it for Horrible Woman #3 you would have had rock your world!”
“GET AWAY! STOP IT!”
The Love Cook leapt into the air and landed in front of 0544. “And last but not least let’s meet Horrible Woman #4! She’s smart, she’s cold, she’s got an IQ higher than the bra sizes of all the other women combined! She’s taken your ability to swim, your freedom, your dignity, your virility, your name, and she’s not even done yet! Ladies and gentlemen please welcome CURIE!”
0544 started to scream, only to have a very real hand slap him and a very real spiked high heel kick him squarely in the chest. He skidded across the floor into the corner, scrapping skin along the way and snapping him out of the hallucination. The Love Cook, the stage, the music, the nonsense, they were gone.
But Curie was standing above him, rage in her eyes.
Bleeding and bruised, 0544 looked up at her like a terrified dog.
“Knock it off! Your screaming and shouting are ruining our observations!” She smacked him across the face, and he stayed still for fear of what else she might do. She grabbed him by the hair and dragged him to his feet. He howled, and Curie pulled his face to meet hers. “You’re going to keep quiet or I’ll make sure you regret it! Do we understand each other!?”
0544 nodded, tears streaming down his face as Curie threw him onto the ground. He laid there, praying that the beating was over. There was silence in the room, and all he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat and Curie’s frustrated breathing. He closed his eyes and curled into a ball, shaking in fear and pain.
“Pathetic.” She dropped her knees and sighed, using her ability to heals the scrapes and cuts he’d gotten from her. 0544 just laid there quietly, still crying, and hoping that she would just go away soon. He felt her spit on his back and slam the door shut. Through tear filled eyes, he watched as the balls floated in the air again, and he curled himself into a ball, his thin frame wracked with sobs as he caught a glimpse of a gruesome sight in the corner.
The Love Cook was lying in a pool of blood, a demented grin on his face.
He was dead.
Later that evening, after 0543 and 0544 had been returned to the holding cell and fed their dinner, Tesla called Curie into his quarters for a meeting. He was getting frustrated with the lack of results in their experiments and wanted to speak with her to figure out if there was something they were overlooking.
“Captain, there must be something we’ve done correctly,” said Curie. They were pouring over the files they had on 0543 and 0544 for what must have been the tenth time that evening. Blood tests, heart rates, lists of medication they were on, notes on their weight (both had lost a lot of weight - 0543 had dipped below 100 pounds), and every other test that had thought to run on the pair. “After all, they’re alive.”
“At what cost? The modifications haven’t shown up. Relatively speaking they’re just normal Devil Fruit users,” said Tesla. Curie quieted, waiting for her captain to respond. “We’ve spent years and millions of berries researching and researching . . . all we’ve done is waste valuable Devil Fruits on this experiment.”
“Well sir, the modifications are still there - there must be SOMETHING there,” said Curie.
Tesla closed his eyes and pressed his fingers together. “Possible, but we’re quickly running out of options,” he said. He stayed quiet for several moments, thinking it over as he drummed his fingers together. “There could be something we just aren’t seeing. Curie, my dear, there is one examination we haven’t tried yet.”
Curie swallowed. “You don’t mean that one?”
Tesla nodded. “Yes. That one.”
Author’s Notes
Some actual explanatory notes this time!
On the Love Cook’s introduction to Porche, please note that I’m using MANGA canon, not anime canon. If you’re anime only, Foxy never wins Robin in the manga. The Straw Hats loose Chopper in the first round, get him back in the second round, and then they take Foxy’s flag in the third round. Therefore, we don’t know who Foxy would have selected after Chopper - it could have very well been Nami.
-Dixxy
Chapters: Prologue + 20 Chapters
Rating: R
Pairings: None, future installments will have pairings
Summary: Christmas comes and goes. The Love Cook makes his last stand.
A Force Against Intertia
Chapter 20
By Dixxy Mouri
For 0543 and 0544, the days were blending in together. It was hard to tell how much time had passed anymore, and in some ways they couldn’t bring themselves to care. They weren’t talking in the holding cell as much anymore, but they still held each other and slept in the middle of the floor together.
And then it was Christmas.
0543 had guessed it was around Christmas when she noticed one of the lab techs was humming a Christmas song. The idea that it was almost that time of year sent shivers up her spine. She had certainly had a lot of difficult Christmas seasons during her unfortunate tenure in Arlong’s crew, but she had a fair number of happy ones as well.
Her last Christmas with her mother and sister had been bittersweet. There was never a lot of money around during the holidays, but somehow her mother had managed to pull together enough money for a Christmas ham and a new doll - a NEW doll - for each of them. They’d had tangerine cocoa that evening and curled together under a blanket while their mother read them a story.
Her captain had made her last Christmas . . . interesting, to say the least. It was before the shipwright had joined (and therefore, while they were still on their first ship) when their captain realized what time of the year it was and started making preparations. He’d insisted on having a big Christmas. There were colored lights across all of her tangerine trees and a pile of gifts - mostly things they had all made themselves for each other - under them all. 0544 had hung mistletoe all over the ship, hoping to catch her or the archaeologist underneath. The swordsman slept most of the day with a belly full of brandy and eggnog. Although they weren’t close to a winter island, their sniper made fake snow to line the railings of the ship - he even made a snow man. The other woman on board was still mostly distant from the rest of the crew at that point but seemed to enjoy their celebration.
This Christmas was going to be torture.
Directly above their holding cell was where Tesla’s crew was having a Christmas party.
0544 and 0543 sat on the former’s bench, looking up at the ceiling as the sounds of casual chatter and Christmas music floated down through the ceiling. They had their normal dinner, which was served by a scientist wearing a suit with a festive tie, and nothing else. Not that they really expected anything.
“I bet they have eggnog up there,” 0544 said. He licked his lips. It had been a long time since either of them had a taste of anything other than the bland gruels and oatmeal and chicken puree they’d survived off of for the past ten, nearly eleven months. “I don’t think about that stuff unless it’s around Christmas . . . but I really like it.”
“If we ever get out of here I’ll buy you as much as you can drink,” said 0543, resting her head on his shoulder. 0544 rested his head on hers and took her hand, squeezing it.
Upstairs, there was a burst of laughter after someone told a joke or did something funny.
“You remember last Christmas?” 054 asked.
“How could I not?” 0543 said quietly. “It was wonderful. The first Christmas I’d had in years.”
0544 frowned. “Merry was a good little ship, wasn’t she?” 0543 nodded. “There’s something that was just so . . . home-y about her. Sunny is nice and all but we didn’t really spend a lot of time on that ship before . . .” 0544 trailed off. He didn’t want to think about it. “I miss the both of them. And the people on them.”
That was when it started to snow in the room. He held out his hand - there were puffs of snow, but they didn’t feel cold. Of course it was another hallucination, but it was much calmer and gentler than most of them. The room had quickly filled with at least a foot of the stuff, and their feet were dangling in it.
“Aside from Drum, I haven’t seen much snow in my life,” said 0544.
“Me neither. Drum was only my third snow.”
“It’s so destructive, but so pretty.”
“You’re hallucinating something snow related, aren’t you?”
0544 nodded. “Yeah. At least this one’s calm. It’s just . . . snowing.”
“Are you cold?”
“No, I’m not.” He laced his fingers through hers. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
The yuletide celebrations of the scientists soon passed, and it was clear that Christmas had come and gone and the new year was upon them if it’s hadn’t happened already. Not that it mattered - the routine the scientists had for them hardly changed, with someone feeding them and giving them at least their shots and pills every day, but some days there weren’t experiments anyways, so it was hard to tell if one of those pill and shot only days was Christmas or not.
It didn’t matter. It was time for the test that forcefully activated their Devil Fruits. 0544 could hear 0543’s roaring somewhere nearby. She was probably stuck in either her mostly tiger or half and half form while the scientists observed her desperately try to reclaim her humanity again. He frowned, and was somehow thankful he didn’t have a Zoan in these circumstances. It was hard enough to feel human being one of Tesla’s lab rats - to have a power that really DID make you not human was unsettling.
0544 sat naked in the testing room, uninterested in the floating foam balls around him. He had pulled his knees to his chest and was resting his forehead on his arms as they lay cross and draped over the bony appendages. He couldn’t bear to look in the stupid mirror anymore. It hurt too much to look at what he’d become.
He’d always been fairly thin. It had taken him a long time to build up the muscle definition he did have, and even then he was still the one the old man had crawl into those hard to reach places because he was the only one without a gut or a pair of shoulders that would get stuck in those spots. It didn’t bother him - plenty of girls liked his body and he had the notches on his old bed post to prove it.
Back when he was a pirate, his crew - especially the swordsman - would sometimes accuse him of being a “desperate virgin” with the way he flirted and swooned over women - especially 0543, the princess, and the archaeologist (and the angel, and the secretary-slash-spy, and the dozens of other women he’d encountered during their travels together). Truth be told, the last time he’d been any kind of virgin had been when he was seventeen.
He used to be good at seducing women. True, it didn’t always end in his room or her boat, but it had happened enough that he was pretty sure he was decent in bed (at the very least he was positive the last three or four hadn’t faked it) and pleasing women was easy for him. Having a well put together appearance and a trim, fit body had helped to attract his previous partners.
But Tesla had robbed him of that body, of that identity. His hair was dry and mostly split ends, and his skin was rough and fragile. Most of the muscle he had was gone, eaten by his body to offset the lack of proper nutrition they had been getting from the scientists. His skin was paler than it used to be - at least he thought it was - from the lack of vitamins and minerals and he lacked the energy he used to have. He was tired most of the time and lacked even the motivation to try fighting back anymore. He just quietly followed Tesla or Curie or whomever to wherever it was they were taking him.
This test didn’t hurt physically, but being forced to look at himself was tearing him apart.
And today, he wasn’t alone.
The Love Cook was standing by the mirror, smoking a cigarette with a pretty girl on each arm. 0544 didn’t recognize them, but they were generic pretty girls with firm butts and bouncy chests who didn’t look like they had much going on between their ears. The hallucination looked at him with a cruel smirk and blew a smoke ring towards him. 0544 moved away from the smoke and the girls giggled cruelly.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” said the Love Cook. “We should get you laid or something.”
0544 turned away. “I’m not interested.”
As he raised his head up, the Love Cook was standing before him, leaning forward with his hands in his pockets. “Why? Isn’t that your favorite thing to do? Isn’t screwing pretty ladies something you’re really good at? And isn’t that the REAL reason you joined that dopey little pirate crew of yours? To land the hot read head with the cold shoulder?”
He clenched his eyes shut. “I joined them to find that ocean.”
“And fuck your way around the Grand Line as well. You kinda suck at that.”
“And how is that important now!?” 0544 snapped, gritting his teeth at the Love Cook. “Shut up. You’re not real. Leave me alone. Unless you want to do something useful I DON’T like having you around!” He ducked his head down and hid under his arms. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut UP! I don’t want to deal with you right now!”
“What about us?”
0544 opened his eyes and, suddenly, was in a fancy hotel room. He was sitting on a giant bed, fully clothed in one of the suits he used to love wearing, his body back in peak condition his stomach feeling full. Sitting all around him were several beautiful women, all of whom he’d seen before. His eyes widened.
The first woman had an impossible tiny waist and wide, sexy hips. She was smoking through a cigarette holder and had piles of wonderful, curly blue hair and sharp, gorgeous eyes. She blew a smoke ring into his face. “Don’t you remember me?” she asked. 0544 stared - he vaguely remembered seeing her during the crew’s trip to the desert kingdom and he remembered thinking she was hot, but beyond that they hadn’t interacted very much at all. She reached forward and grabbed his tie. “Our organization would have been a lot more fun if you’d been there with me.”
“No . . . you were-“
“What about me?” The girl crawling towards him was wearing an impossibly color outfit with feathers and shapes and a fox-like mask over her eyes. Perched under her mask was a sharp but strangely cute nose. She cupped the side of his face and cooed at him. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if the boss brought you onto our crew - I would have made sure you weren’t lonely.”
“But . . . what about . . .”
“You know I wouldn’t have killed you.” The sultry voice of the blonde bomb shell in the black fishnets was behind him. He turned his head and watched her adjust her glasses, then blew a bubble from her palm onto the tip of his nose. He shrank back as she smirked. “After all, I wasn’t done playing with you.”
“You would have killed-”
The women vanished as suddenly they appeared, and suddenly 0544 found himself alone and facing Curie. She stood at the foot of the bed, her hair trailing down her back and her lab coat hanging loosely around her shoulders. Beneath the lab coat was nothing but a lacy bra and a lacy pair of panties. She snapped her glasses off and threw them to side before leaning over onto the bed. “Admit it. I’m gorgeous.”
0544 backed himself against the headboard and Curie advanced on him. “Get away from me!”
She caught up to him, and suddenly he was back in the room, but the women were gone. It was just him and the Love Cook now. 0544 was backed up against the wall, shuddering and shaking as he looked at the dark reflection of his former self. “What’s the matter? Can’t get it up?” The hallucination swaggered over to the captive and bent down. “If you’d had the chance, you would have fucked every single one of them.”
0544 shook his head. “No, no I wouldn’t have!”
“Let’s take a look at some of the ladies you would have GLADLY fucked.” The Love Cook snapped his fingers and Sanji could hear music behind him. He his head to see a runway in the middle of the room connecting to two black voids covered by red curtains on either end. The Love Cook was sitting in a throne on the other side, a microphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
There was a flash of light and the woman from Baroque Works came waltzing out from one of the voids, her hips swinging widely back and forth as she took each step. “Now let’s take a look at the lovely Miss Doublefinger! She’s hot like the desert kingdom she tried to destroy, wears a size 6, and almost killed your best friend in the entire world. She’s Horrible Woman #1 you would have gladly taken to bed!” Miss Doublefinger twirled around and blew 0544 a kiss before proceeding to the other end of the catwalk.
“What is this!?” 0544 demanded.
The Love Cook ignored him and pointed to the opposite side of the walk again. “Let’s give a warm welcome to the overly flamboyant, overly selfish, and overly endowed athletic beauty!” Porche walked out, marching proudly across the stage. “She doesn’t care about anything but her boss and her crew, even if growing that crew means tearing apart the bonds of friendship! Had you and the idiot not worked together, she would have taken off with the little doctor and maybe even your dear, sweet cellmate if she’d been given the chance! It’s Horrible Woman #2 you would have bungled in the jungle, Porche!”
0544 tried to cover his eyes. “No more! No more!’
“Oh but there IS more!” the Love Cook said gleely. “Here comes the femme fatale herself, Califa! She’s sneaky and deceitful when it comes to her job as a spy but goes all out when it comes to roughing up her opponents! She tried to keep you from rescuing your archaeologist, tried to kill you, and nearly got away with harming your favorite navigator.” He paused as Califa stopped halfway on the catwalk. “But at least you had tea with her - after all, there’s always time to stop for a beautiful woman, even if she wants you and all your friends dead! Let’s hear it for Horrible Woman #3 you would have had rock your world!”
“GET AWAY! STOP IT!”
The Love Cook leapt into the air and landed in front of 0544. “And last but not least let’s meet Horrible Woman #4! She’s smart, she’s cold, she’s got an IQ higher than the bra sizes of all the other women combined! She’s taken your ability to swim, your freedom, your dignity, your virility, your name, and she’s not even done yet! Ladies and gentlemen please welcome CURIE!”
0544 started to scream, only to have a very real hand slap him and a very real spiked high heel kick him squarely in the chest. He skidded across the floor into the corner, scrapping skin along the way and snapping him out of the hallucination. The Love Cook, the stage, the music, the nonsense, they were gone.
But Curie was standing above him, rage in her eyes.
Bleeding and bruised, 0544 looked up at her like a terrified dog.
“Knock it off! Your screaming and shouting are ruining our observations!” She smacked him across the face, and he stayed still for fear of what else she might do. She grabbed him by the hair and dragged him to his feet. He howled, and Curie pulled his face to meet hers. “You’re going to keep quiet or I’ll make sure you regret it! Do we understand each other!?”
0544 nodded, tears streaming down his face as Curie threw him onto the ground. He laid there, praying that the beating was over. There was silence in the room, and all he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat and Curie’s frustrated breathing. He closed his eyes and curled into a ball, shaking in fear and pain.
“Pathetic.” She dropped her knees and sighed, using her ability to heals the scrapes and cuts he’d gotten from her. 0544 just laid there quietly, still crying, and hoping that she would just go away soon. He felt her spit on his back and slam the door shut. Through tear filled eyes, he watched as the balls floated in the air again, and he curled himself into a ball, his thin frame wracked with sobs as he caught a glimpse of a gruesome sight in the corner.
The Love Cook was lying in a pool of blood, a demented grin on his face.
He was dead.
Later that evening, after 0543 and 0544 had been returned to the holding cell and fed their dinner, Tesla called Curie into his quarters for a meeting. He was getting frustrated with the lack of results in their experiments and wanted to speak with her to figure out if there was something they were overlooking.
“Captain, there must be something we’ve done correctly,” said Curie. They were pouring over the files they had on 0543 and 0544 for what must have been the tenth time that evening. Blood tests, heart rates, lists of medication they were on, notes on their weight (both had lost a lot of weight - 0543 had dipped below 100 pounds), and every other test that had thought to run on the pair. “After all, they’re alive.”
“At what cost? The modifications haven’t shown up. Relatively speaking they’re just normal Devil Fruit users,” said Tesla. Curie quieted, waiting for her captain to respond. “We’ve spent years and millions of berries researching and researching . . . all we’ve done is waste valuable Devil Fruits on this experiment.”
“Well sir, the modifications are still there - there must be SOMETHING there,” said Curie.
Tesla closed his eyes and pressed his fingers together. “Possible, but we’re quickly running out of options,” he said. He stayed quiet for several moments, thinking it over as he drummed his fingers together. “There could be something we just aren’t seeing. Curie, my dear, there is one examination we haven’t tried yet.”
Curie swallowed. “You don’t mean that one?”
Tesla nodded. “Yes. That one.”
Author’s Notes
Some actual explanatory notes this time!
On the Love Cook’s introduction to Porche, please note that I’m using MANGA canon, not anime canon. If you’re anime only, Foxy never wins Robin in the manga. The Straw Hats loose Chopper in the first round, get him back in the second round, and then they take Foxy’s flag in the third round. Therefore, we don’t know who Foxy would have selected after Chopper - it could have very well been Nami.
-Dixxy