Sanji scrubbed blood out of the ship's deck.

Nobody knew anything about it and it was gross, not to mention the sight had caused a pretty lady client to pass out.

Then a mangy piece of flesh had floated to dance on the waves and Zeff had promptly given a free day for all the waiters and waitresses. He just wondered if any of them would return, they'd already repelled at least six of them with the cooks' shitty attitude and there'd been a rumour about something haunting the ship. It made bad business.

He'd never told anyone about the wierd mermaid, but he suspected that Zeff knew about it. The bastard somehow always knew everything going on in the ship and immediate area, all the way down to how many eggs there were in the seagull's nest at the peak of the tallest mast. Truthfully, it was kind of creepy.

The apprentice listened how the cooks dived under the Baratie to see what was going on and Patty came up with a report of several dead sharks, holding a piece of a grey tailfin. Having been fearless pirates in their past, none of the cooks cowered in fear that something had just casually slaughtered a few man-sized beasts.

"No, it'd be useless to move the ship," Zeff had said when someone asked if they should do it. "Whatever it was either passed by or it lives here, which would mean we need to move the ship too far away for customers to find us again."

The blood had soaked right into the planks and he doubted he'd ever get them clean without taking the deck itself apart. It did look gruesome and the other cooks had first tried to keep him from seeing the scene, but in Zeff's opinion it built character. Besides, the old man had assured them that it wasn't from a person and Sanji could grudgingly agree. It smelled like fish. It just raised new questions.

He enjoyed the unexpected free day, since they were usually open six days of the week. In fact he enjoyed it all the way until Zeff dragged his tired ass out of bed for a talk in the dining hall. A lantern sat between them on the table and moonlight cast sharp shadows across the walls. Neither spoke in the first few seconds while the master chef was gathering up his thoughts.

"How long has it been around?"

"Wh-what?"

"Tell me, eggplant."

There was a sense of seriousness in his voice that didn't leave room to argue. He had half the mind to lie, deny he'd seen anything out of ordinary, deny he knew what the old man was talking about.

And then he crumbled under the scrutiny, his voice but a mumble. "Two weeks after we opened."

That night, Zeff told him all he knew about the she-serpents.