OPSR: Chapter 19

“Hello. My name is Sanji. It’s nice to meet the king of this island, but… Did you know someone is trying to assassinate you by pushing a large crate onto you?” Chopper ran behind the king, hiding with most of her body hanging out the wrong way, like she does in the anime. I got a better look at her as I got closer, and she was definitely cute.

I’d seen an anthropomorphized deer. There was a mink on the island, and there was a significant difference in their appearances, though. For one, this female Chopper didn’t have antlers, but hair twintails shaped upward through her hat, sort of resembling horns. She was also wearing clothing, not just a pair of shorts like the original Chopper wore, but a frilly lacey flower pattern dress that only added to her cuteness, brown hair poking out from underneath her hat, two more ponytails tying most of her hair together, and a familiar blue nose.

I think she was older than I originally assumed, maybe ten or eleven; her cutesy appearance made me judge her as younger than I thought. It was also because of comparison. Standing next to a man at death's door, so old his skin sagged, practically hunched over at a ninety-degree angle, anyone would look young next to them.

“I wish he’d succeed, then he’d at least be good at something. That’s my idiot son; he’s been trying to kill me ever since I told him he wouldn’t become king after me, but rather the island's royal guard, Dalton. I’m almost a hundred years old, a stiff wind could take me down, but my inept son disappoints me again.” I almost feel bad for Wapol until he opens his mouth to complain.

“I should be king! Not some stupid mayor with no blood relation to you!” The old man only sighed again. “Truly a disappointment. My first son is pure evil, the second is completely inept. How terrible is my luck?” So that’s what happened, because the king lived longer, he realized his son wouldn’t make a good king, so he replaced him. This island, famous for its doctors, wouldn’t go through the idiotic period where Wapol imprisoned all the doctors and had them work for him.

“Who’s your friend behind you?” The king smiles as he pushes her forward, the pride in his face making it look like she was more his daughter than the idiot still struggling to push the crate above us. “This is Antonette. She likes to go by Toni Chopper, though, and she is the future of our doctors.” She began to dance back in forth in excited embarrassment as she spoke. “Shut up! I don’t want to be praised like that, dummy!” 

“Well, anyway… I’m here to see if I can purchase some medical books. One of my acquaintances wants to be a doctor once she grows up.” I had no plans on letting Kaya remain the useless version she was in the show. After curing her, she had the energy to begin learning, and now that her mother is living, she wouldn’t go through that depression that made her symptoms even worse.

The doctor crewmember, in my opinion, is the most important member of the crew. Above even the captain or navigator, they were complete game changers. If the world didn’t have such hearty people, able to recover from having their bones broken, or even replace missing teeth by drinking milk, their role would be even more important, but poison on a ship, or some other disease or illness, would wipe out a crew entirely without a good enough doctor.

If Roger had a doctor on his ship before he knew something was wrong with him… Shit, is that why Ace was older in this universe? Did he get diagnosed earlier, and have Ace while still heading to find Raftel? I wasn’t sure, but it made sense. It would give him time to see his son before he died if he knocked Rouge up a few years before becoming the Pirate King.

The king had one of his guards lead me to their books. There wasn’t a single ‘get gud at doctoring’ book, but with how much money I had, I could buy all the ones that most doctors needed to be considered good doctors. Now I’d have something to read in my downtime when I have to park my plane for bad weather. Before I left, I gave Chopper the gift I had prepared beforehand.

“Here you go. I bet you can’t get this very often on this frozen island.” She let out a delighted squeal as she started licking the cotton candy I brought her. “Don’t think I like you just for bringing me this, you bastard.” Flying again, I finally came across the terrible weather the Grand Line was known for. A storm almost flipped my plane before I could land it, and waves big enough to coat the ship completely struck over and over again. 

My plane was close to being wiped out, only kicking the waves before they struck the ship, and the short time of the choppy water, most likely because I entered the desert region of Arabasta, I made it out alive. It was the first sign of just how dangerous travelling the world was. I took a break here now as I recovered and waited for my log pose to fill. I had several eternal log poses, but not one for Jaya, or more specifically, Mock Town. 

Crocodile was here already, but he was still making his name as the island's hero; people were still wary of him. It would still be years before he put his plan into play, and the Straw Hats blew through Arabasta; we didn’t really get a good look at it besides the town they arrived at. Even then, they didn’t even spend a single day seeing the sights before they made their way into the desert.

Besides seeing the sights and enjoying a few days of rest now that I had to wait for my solar battery to finish recharging, I tried to find out what Arabasta was famous for. Did it have anything similar to water meat from Water 7? It did, but how the fuck was their island's specialty ice cream? Most of the restaurants, and even some of the shops, offered different sorts of ice cream. There was also a signature flavor.

Sea salt ice cream on top of another dessert called the knafeh. They served this in many styles. When the ice cream was sweet, they went a little more savory with the dessert below. Some were filled with cheese or sour cream, but most of the time, it was sweetened with syrup, while the ice cream was salty yet sweet. Absolutely delicious, and it gave me ideas on menu items I could add to the Baratie.

We had a freezer on the ship, but for small businesses here, they still managed to have a supply of ice cream, even if their building was small. Learning the refrigeration methods a desert kingdom used to keep most of its food cold was something I did before I left. It made sense, but wasn’t something I ever really thought about. What would happen if you took ice from an awakened area elsewhere? Would it remain ice, even in a desert area like this? Not really, but it would if you enclosed it and kept it in a cold place, which would make the place cold as well, perpetuating the ice practically indefinitely.

The ice they used wasn’t even from Aokiji, but rather from a completely different frozen island made by a different awakened ice user. The ice could last for decades before they’d need to replace it, and in the long run, having the ice shipped would cut down significantly on refrigeration costs for the entire region. The only reason I didn’t know about it is that we had a large deep freeze for a large restaurant; if we were a smaller restaurant, it would make more sense to go with this ice… Still, it was worth thinking about it for designing my future ship's cold storage.