138 Complications

Cherry and the other ladies boarded the Sunny whilst Cabernet lugged Bartholomew Kuma over her shoulder and brought him along.

"I really hope he hasn't sent out a distress beacon or something to inform the world government of our presence here…" Robin commented whilst looking at Kuma, which made the others, with the exception of Cherry, quite nervous at the thought.

"I've disabled his cybernetic bits temporarily, so that won't be an issue. Besides, unless an admiral shows up I should be able to handle whatever may come our way." Cherry brushed off the concerns.

They went into the dining room and settled down whilst Cherry went to the kitchen to grab some food and drinks.

"Speaking of that, since when were you strong enough to beat the Hero of the Marines, Monkey D. Garp? He might be old now, but from what I've heard he certainly hasn't weakened that much." Serene asked.

Perona was shocked at hearing that fact. She hadn't seen the broadcast of the war at Marineford and the newspapers naturally wouldn't mention such a thing even if it would spread word of mouth.

"Bah! The old man is too soft. He went easy on me just because I'm friends with his grandson." Cherry said, whilst rooting around in the pantry for snacks.

"THAT was going easy on you?! You looked like someone put you into a blender when you came out of that fight!" Serene exclaimed, shivering when she imagined how much it must have hurt.

"Well, he couldn't be too casual about it, could he? He had the admirals and Fleet Admiral Sengoku breathing down his neck at the time. Maybe he'd get away with not fighting Luffy seriously, him being his beloved grandson and all, but he'd get into a bit of trouble if he showed weakness against me." Cherry said, bringing an armful of sodas from Franky's stash and some snack foods that would go bad if they weren't eaten soon.

"I see." Serene said, popping open a soda.

"What's been going on with you, then?" Cherry asked.

"Fighting punks mostly. Shakky has been teaching me some more direct martial arts. Turns out she used to be an empress of the Kuja, can you believe that?" Serene said, then her expression became somewhat depressed. "But…"

"What's wrong?" Robin asked gently.

"... miss him…" Serene muttered inaudibly.

"What was that?" Cherry raised her voice, bringing a hand to her ear in mock deafness.

"I miss Brook, damn it! I only got to spend a little time with him until we were separated! I want to see his fluffy afro and his bleached white bones!" Serene shouted. It seemed like she'd been holding that in for a while now.

She had been spending an awful lot of time with Brook ever since he joined the crew. It hadn't really seemed like a romantic interest so much as a slight obsession, but who could really say.

"Hm, maybe we should check up on Brook. Knowing him, he has probably become a sideshow attraction in a traveling circus or something." Robin commented. No one could disagree with that assessment.

After finishing their snacks, Cherry decided to go assess the damage in Kuma's head. It wouldn't be a quick fix no matter what, since brains were pretty complicated organs, but it didn't hurt to get an idea of what she was dealing with ahead of time.

It was for this purpose that Cherry left her sword with Kuma. She had ordered the sword to essentially "memorize" the electrical patterns in his brain so she could use it as a reference. Fixing the "meat" was the easy part, restoring everything else not so much.

Cherry approached Kuma who was sitting quite still on the deck of the ship, though certainly not by choice. He'd be squirming up a storm right now if he still had muscles instead of replacing them with machine parts.

Cherry focused and touched Kuma's forehead and sent her senses into his brain to understand what happened to him.

She was surprised to find that his brain was mostly intact, with the exception of a few cybernetic implants that shouldn't have had this sort of impact on his mental state.

Cherry furrowed her brow in thought, then she decided to look into his mindscape.

What she saw, or rather what she didn't see, was quite shocking to put it lightly.

'This is incredible in a terrifying sort of way. To think that Vegapunk could directly remove memories from the mindscape without damaging the brain at all. I have to keep cultivation out of that man's hands no matter what, who knows what heights his genius would bring him to.' Cherry thought to herself.

Kuma's mindscape wasn't completely barren as she searched around. There was a scattering of fragmented memories as well as the memories that Kuma has created since whatever Vegapunk did to him.

It was also the first chance Cherry got to see what the genius scientist looked like. A strange old man with an empty head and a ridiculously long tongue.

Cherry exited Kua's mindscape, or what's left of it anyways, and heaved a great sigh.

This wasn't what she had been planning for, not at all. If she wanted to restore Kuma now, she'd either need to find his extracted memories (if they even still existed), or try to reform the memories from Kuma's soul.

However, Kuma wasn't a cultivator whose souls were naturally made more robust through years of cultivation and Cherry did not possess the capabilities at her current level to directly imprint his soul's memory onto his mindscape. Even if she did, she certainly couldn't do so without enormous risk on his part unless she had an even higher cultivation.

Simply put, meddling with souls was dangerous and she wasn't going to do it.

"I'll have to find that Vegapunk fellow and hope he has the means and the desire to store his memories…" Cherry thought aloud.

"So you aren't able to do anything for him?" Robin asked curiously, with some pity towards the large man.

"No, this isn't as simple as I thought. Vegapunk isn't a man to be underestimated it seems. The question is should I go right now, or should I make a breakthrough first? I'll need to find a devil fruit or two if I want to do that, though." Cherry said.

"Devil fruit?" Robin asked. She knew that Cherry had Cabernet and her sword as devil fruit objects, but not how they related to her cultivation.

Cherry took a minute or two to briefly explain to Robin about how she used devil fruit to push her cultivation realm to perfection with the energy burst from its transformation process.

"Can I get one of those 'blood bound' weapons too?" Robin asked.

Although she didn't normally use weapons, she thought she might be able to produce a blood bound weapon from her bloomed limbs which would greatly increase her arsenal.

"Sure, figure out what you want and I'll walk you through the ritual after I make or obtain it for you." Cherry said, receiving a peck on the cheek from Robin.

"On the topic of Vegapunk, don't you want to meet him yourself? I'm sure there are plenty of things you'd like to talk about with him, considering the way you are with Chopper." Robin observed.

"Yes, I would like to. However, I'm not so sure I'd be well received, him being a World Government scientist and all. That's assuming I can breach whatever defenses lie between me and him too." Cherry said.

Robin raised an eyebrow at her.

"Okay, okay. I'm pretty confident on breaking into just about anywhere, but that won't do me any good if he gets mad about me breaking his stuff. Or if the World government catches wind of it." Cherry sighed.

"I will just think about it overnight. There's no real rush here, Kuma isn't going to die or anything. At least not as far as I can tell…" Cherry said, tilting her head whilst gazing at Kuma.