Poison Fish

The next few days were filled with multitudes of challenges one after the other without end. The crew ended up having to take shifts getting some sleep, or at least attempting to do so with all the tossing around the ship did. Cherry was the only one to stay up the entire time and helped keep people energized whilst manning the ship.

They were thankfully not without food, though it was practically impossible to cook anything more complicated than roasted fish or sea king meat that Takako fished up. The sea creatures could sense the tumultuous seas, though, and fled far away or very deep to avoid it, forcing Takako to go far afield to catch anything.

"It's so ugly~! E~hahaha!" Carrot laughed at one of Takako's catches, a seahorse the size of a land horse with a big, human-like nose with seaweed poking out of the nostrils.

*snort*

The seahorse sucked the seaweed up its nose as it lay on the deck. Its seeming lack of a mouth likely meant that the nose was, in actuality, the mouth or mouths.

"""Hahahahaha~!""" Luffy, Carrot, and Chopper lost it.

A dreadful heat wave washed over the ship as the morning sun rose in the sky. So intense it was that the sea itself became scalding hot and even started to boil. Takako would not be harmed by this with her tough skin, but it was terribly uncomfortable so she took refuge in Cherry's vital energy sea.

Nami's Clima-Tact went a long way at keeping them cool, both directly and launching cool balls into the water to prevent the ship from acting like an oven.

The minks and Chopper were still quite hot even with these measures, though, hiding in whatever shade they could find and hugging frozen barrels of water desperately.

"Nami, I'm hungryyy~" Luffy whined whilst holding a fishing pole.

"Then catch something. You ate the lion's share of that seahorse this morning, why are you even still hungry?" Nami fanned herself.

"But we skipped lunch! And what about snacks?!" Luffy's head lolled around aimlessly.

"We don't have the luxury for snacks anymore after you used up our supplies, Luffy." Brook gently chided.

"How are you sweating?" Cherry asked Brook in an abrupt change of topic.

"It's hot?" Brook tilted his head in confusion.

"..." Cherry blinked at him and sniffed the air. "Is that… milk?"

"I can't help it, okay!" Brook cried.

"Ohhh~!" Luffy's fishing rod gave a sharp tug and he leapt to action at reeling it in.

With one hard yank, Luffy pulled an elephant sized fish out of the water and onto the deck. Its skin was a toxic purple and green, and Cherry immediately noticed that the grass where it landed start to die. That wasn't an easy thing to do to a plant that had absorbed celestial energy.

Chopper very reasonably took note of the coloring of the fish and decided to go look it up in Sanji's sea life encyclopedia. "Don't touch it yet, let me go look it up!"

The moment Chopper was out of sight, Luffy was already leaping onto the fish. "Food!"

Luffy was grabbed out of the air by the waist and Cherry suplexed his head into the deck with a resounding THUNK.

Luffy was unharmed of course, but that didn't stop him from comically bulging out his eyes as if it actually hurt.

"Chopper said wait. If you respect him and his skills as our ship's doctor, then you'll do as he says." Cherry advised calmly, like she hadn't used a move on him that would have shattered a lesser man's neck.

Luffy, to his credit, actually listened to that advice. He was often thoughtlessly reckless to an unreasonable degree, but he most certainly respected his crew. "Mm, you're right."

Cherry released him and stood up, brushing her hands off on her robes. Then she walked over to the fish under everyone's gazes, swiped a finger across its skin, and stuck it in her mouth.

"Didn't you just tell him to wait?!" Pedro understandably pointed out.

"Oh my, that's a real doozy right there. Good thing Chopper warned us." Cherry nodded, ignoring Pedro's critical words and accusingly eyes. "I think this stuff would actually drop a giant."

Before anyone could say anything to that, Chopper slammed the kitchen door open and shouted, "Don't touch it! The skin is EXTREMELY poisonous!"

"Okay, I'm starting to feel it a bit. I think I made a bit of an understatement, this stuff can probably kill a giant in less than a minute." Cherry said. "I may have made a little oopsie."

"A 'little oopsie'?!" Pekoms shouted. "Isn't THAT 'a bit of an understatement'?!"

"I thought you were immune to poison, Cherry?" Nami asked worriedly. She hadn't been concerned until now.

"Normal poison, yes, but this stuff is actually eating away at my v-... life force." Cherry explained. "It's no big deal though, I can handle it."

Strange purple-ish markings started to appear on her skin, seeming to directly contradict her own words.

"I-I'll go get my antidotes!" Chopper rushed off, though he wasn't certain he had the supplies on hand to deal with this particularly nasty poison. Cherry felt a bit bad seeing him all flustered over her.

Truthfully, this was genuinely dangerous, but only a tad so. If the exposure had been greater, then she'd be in a tight spot, but with the amount she was dealing with, she only needed to outmaneuver the toxin in her system; an easy enough task to accomplish given she was the only one between herself and the poison to have the ability to make conscious decisions.

"Seems that we're getting close." Jinbe spoke up.

Everyone looked up as he was doing and saw what looked like flurries of snow coming down from the sky.

"That's right, we've entered Mama's territory now. The cotton candy snow is a dead giveaway." Pekoms concurred.

"Cotton candy snow?" Nami asked incredulously, reaching out to taste some. "It really is? Are the clouds made of sugar?"

Chopper burst out onto the deck once more with a doctor's bag in hand. He rushed over towards Cherry, before getting distracted by the tell-tale scent of his favorite sweet. "Cotton candy?!"

Their den den mushi started to chime, which Pekoms said was the true mark that they were inside Big Mom's territory proper now. He insisted on them wearing some manner of disguise from henceforth.

"What disguise? You don't think Big Mom knows what our ship looks like?" Cherry said, looking worse than she did before but otherwise acting like she was fine.

"It's not a certainty, but it's very unlikely that anyone who matters in Mama's crew knows what an upstart's ship looks like. They'll only know your faces and your jolly roger at best." Pekoms said, then added, "No offense."

"There's a ship coming, Pekoms!" Pedro called down from the crow's nest.

Pekoms gazed out over the water. "Probably a biscuit ship. Hurry up and pull down your flag! And hide or disguise yourselves!"

"What? We're not taking down our flag!" Luffy refused stubbornly.

"They'll recognise you immediately!" Pekoms argued.

"I don't care! A jolly roger represents the pride of its crew!" Luffy was adamant and crossed his arms.

*This is Germa! We have identified your vessel as belonging to the Straw Hat crew!* The almost mechanical voice played over loudspeakers.