The mermaid didn't know what to do. She was afraid, but she believed what Zoro was telling her. She knew that it was dangerous to trust people out on the open water, most of all pirates, but she'd gotten to know Nami and Robin and Chopper, and none of them seemed the sort who would hang out with a bunch of evil, no-good villains.
Besides, she was a mermaid. If push came to shove, she'd just have to run and dive overboard. She turned the blades around, and offered the hilts to Zoro, who accepted them gingerly. For the next week and a half Zoro sparred with her, the swords kept in their scabbards. Robin had suggested that it might jog her memory, practicing something which was familiar to her.
The crew named her Tenshi, due to her resemblance to an Angel fish. They decided that they would call her by that name until she remembered her real name. She liked it well enough. She still didn't talk, but nobody really minded. Twenty-three days after they'd found her, the crew reached the next island. It had a small town bustling with shops, which everyone was eager to explore.
Zoro offered to escort her to the sword shop; he needed a new whetting stone anyway. The old one had worn down until it had crumbled embarrassingly in his hand. Nami and Robin volunteered to accompany them, so they wouldn't get lost. It didn't hurt that the bookstore was just opposite the weapons and armour shop. Robin left them just outside the store, and dove into the table of books on sale outside the book shop.
Nami stuck with them. Her ulterior motive was to get Zoro to borrow lots of money from her, which she could charge a fortune on in compound interest, as usual. She was willing to pay for Tenshi's weapons as a gift, because they'd become friends, and the mermaid deserved a break, but Zoro was still fair game, and her favourite victim.
Zoro and Tenshi walked into the well-stocked weapons and armour store. Zoro gravitated towards the swords and whetting stones, which happened to have adjacent display stands. Tenshi trailed after him at first, but then another display caught her eye. It was the Scythes. A variety of styles and sizes were available, almost all in twin-sets.
Most of them were the small one-handed type, Kamas, and most of those had a chain connecting their handles, but there were also a few of the full-length kind, with handles the height of a short person. They all felt familiar to her, but at the same time they all felt wrong. Each of them had something missing, some detail which her eyes found jarring and off. She just couldn't put her finger on it.
She picked up a pair of small Kama, with short handles connected by a chain, and executed a few basic manoeuvres, but the weight was wrong, they were too light, and the blades felt too short. But all of the long-bladed scythes were single blades, with long handles, and none of them had chains. In the end she bought two big scythes with identical blades, and the pair of Kama she'd handled, as well as her own small whetting stone.
It came to a tidy sum, eight hundred thousand beli in all, but Nami didn't mind. She could recover that much in treasure in under a week when the going was good, she had at least ten times that amount in savings squirreled away in her cabin, and the best part of it was that she'd be making at least half of that amount in interest alone from Zoro by the time he could afford to pay her back completely.
She quietly hummed a merry tune as she handed the store's proprietor the money, while Zoro stared at her in a superbly unimpressed manner. After their shopping, everyone rendezvoused back at the ship for lunch. Chopper was relieved to see them all return, he hated being on watch, even with a sunbathing Franky keeping him company. Tenshi borrowed Ussop's tools, and went below deck with her new weapons.