196 Fishman Island
"Giant bioluminescent jellyfish, weird." Cherry said, feeling up one of the jellyfish's tentacles that had poked into the bubble. "I'd say that they're beautiful, if they weren't so deathly poisonous."
"Eh?!" Chopper backed away swiftly from a tentacle that he was about to touch.
A sea king came out of the darkness and chomped onto the jellyfish, before it itself got caught by Takako who took a big bite out of it in turn.
"You're so sweet, Takako~! You show that big mean sea king who it's stealing from~!" Cherry gushed over the adorable monstrosity's brutality.
The others looked at her strangely, with the exception of Robin, Cabernet, and Franky. Robin and Cabernet were just used to her antics with the kraken by now, and Franky was just a pervert who had a high bar for what he considered to be odd behavior.
The sea king thrashed about trying to escape only to go very still a few moments later.
"Wow, the poison really paralyzed a sea king of that size, and so quickly too?" Cherry pondered aloud, tasting the poisonous ooze left on her hand.
Caribou looked at her in silent horror and thought, 'What kind of monster are you?!'
Cherry turned her gaze to him. "What are you looking at, huh? You want to have a taste too or something?"
Caribou shook his head vigorously from side to side. "No no no no no! I was just admiring your, uh… courageousness…"
"Damn straight." Cherry responded, turning her attention away from him to his infinite relief.
*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*
They felt vibrations through the water coming from ahead as they entered into an underwater volcanic region.
"I hope that's Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji rather than some other unrelated sea monster fight…" Nami said.
"Maybe we're sailing straight into a volcanic eruption." Robin posited darkly.
"Shush you!" Usopp didn't want to jinx it.
They were surprised to find that the fight they were hearing wasn't the three buffoons fighting the yellow kraken, but actually the kraken fighting what looked like an enormous pudgy man.
The fight was over by the time they reached it, ending with the male kraken's victory. Nearby they saw a tiny bubble with three fools all stuffed into it swimming over to the ship.
"PUHAAAA! Fresh air, I thought I would die, bahahahaha!" Luffy laughed.
"It's good to have so much space to breathe in." Sanji said, lighting up a cigarette.
"Mm, I'm glad I won't have to die smelling your awful perfume." Zoro said.
"It's not perfume, it's cologne! COLOGNE!" Sanji was unusually bent out of shape about that one. Actually it was about the same as any other time he talked to Zoro, but he seemed to take it a lot more personally this time..
*sniff sniff*
Cabernet sniffed at Sanji which drew his attention away from zoro.
"Oh, do you like my cologne Cabernet-chan?" Sanji asked with a pleased look.
"Yeah. It kind of smells like Ivankov's, it's nice." Cabernet nodded with an innocent smile.
Sanji experienced a mixed bag of extreme emotions that few men ever had the displeasure of feeling.
"T-thank you…" Sanji muttered after a tremendous internal battle with himself.
"Ah, Sanji?! Why are you bleeding from your eyes?!" Chopper panicked.
"I can't believe you actually managed to tame that kraken just by beating it up…" Nami said, looking at the octopus' nervous smile.
Takako didn't look amused at all.
"That's pretty much how I met Takako, though. It's not that strange, is it?" Cherry said.
Another ship appeared then. It dwarfed the Sunny in size and had no bubble around its ruined form. Its sail bore the name "FLYING DUTCHMAN".
Someone started to sing a dreadful song in an equally dreadful singing voice, coming from the ghost ship. Strangely the voice carried through the water quite well.
"A fishman huh?" Cherry commented.
She didn't even need to scan with Life Sense to make that guess, though she still did for good measure. Only a fishman or mermaid's voice would carry so well underwater.
'A fishman with a devil fruit? How odd.' Cherry thought.
The fishman masquerading as some kind of ancient pirate who drowned his whole crew was caught off in his singing as a new rumbling passed over them. This one was much larger and wider in scale.
The red glow in the distance gave away the cause.
"The volcanoes are going to erupt! We have to get out of here!" Nami shouted.
"Surume! Get us out of here!" Luffy ordered.
"You gave it a squid's name…?" Usopp paused in his panicked screaming to say.
Surume picked up the Sunny as Takako gave him a gesture with two tentacles that meant "I'm watching you."
*BOOOOOOOOOOOM*
"It's so hot!" Chopper suffered the most from this event.
Nami led the way with the log pose, until they reached a dark trench.
"Go down!" Nami shouted.
Their resident cowards screamed in doubt whilst Luffy shouted at Surume to dive inside the horrible trench filled with a darkness deeper than death itself.
Enormous rocks larger than the Thousand Sunny began to rain down upon them as they dived. Takako managed to divert some of them from crashing into the ship, then Usopp stepped in with his odd plants to grow a massive seaweed structure out of the cliff face to catch the rocks.
Finally they reached the bottom of the trench and the sea opened up with space and light. Above them there was a massive coral reef inside a double layered bubble, nestled amongst the massive roots of the mangrove trees whose tops were on the surface ten kilometers above them.
A final boulder fell down from above, luckily it wasn't going to hit anything. At least until Takako nudged it to the size so that it slammed into Surume's head. Takako grinned with sadistic satisfaction.
"Fishman island! It's huge, amazing!" Luffy shouted in child-like wonder.
Cherry joined in with Sanji and Brook chanting "Mermaids! Mermaids!", which Robin could only shake her head at knowing she was just messing around.
Sanji kept scrunching his face in discomfort, clearly indicating that he would be spewing his entire blood supply out of his nose if not for Cherry's little modification. Though Cherry was wondering if it could actually hold up under the strain Sanji was putting on it.
"Kraken! What the hell are you doing submitting to those humans?! Huh?!" A voice shouted, sounding like a juvenile delinquent.
Surume flinched at the voice, turning to its source. A zoo's worth of sea kings swam over to greet them.
"Oh, you found a female? Is it mating season already?" The voice, a conger fishman, wondered.
He turned his attention back to the pirate ship in front of him. "I see that you're the Straw Hat pirates. You defeated Arlong, but you also saved Hachi and struck a celestial dragon. So I'll give you a choice, swear allegiance to the New Fishman Pirates or die!"
"What did you say?" Luffy said, sounding a bit miffed at the ultimatum.
"Franky, get ready to use a Coup de Burst! There's no way Luffy will even pretend to submit, we need to get out of here! We're at a disadvantage in the open water against fishmen and that many sea kings!" Nami quickly and quietly told Franky.
"Mm, even if Surume sides with us, which seems unlikely under the circumstances, it's unlikely that he and Takako can both fight and protect the ship." Cherry reasoned. Though she looked disappointed that she couldn't just go all out.
"Right, we've already got the fuel rigged up and ready to go!" FRanky said, rushing over to the helm.
Cherry poked her hand out of the bubble for Takako to slurp back inside.
"What the fuck?!" The Conger Fishman shouted in disgust and confusion at the sight.
"Forget it, BAKAAAA!" Luffy shouted at them, as his official answer to their absurd proposal.
The conger fishman started ranting about how they were now "enemies of all fishman kind" whilst Luffy made funny faces at him in response, making full use of his stretchy powers.
Before the fishmen could make a move, the Sunny jerked forward with its Coup de Burst. About half of the air was sucked out of the bubble, but that was fine since the destination was close at hand.
The ship pierced through the outer bubble of Fishman Island, stripping the bubble coating off of their ship. Their momentum continued and they pushed through the inner bubble as well.
Unfortunately, the other side of this bubble wasn't air like the last, but water. Seeing the helpless devil fruit users on their crew, Cherry rolled her eyes and got to work rescuing them from an otherwise watery grave.
'They couldn't have just aimed at the obvious official entrance? I'm sure this won't bite us in the ass later…' Cherry thought to herself in annoyance.
