Aftermath

Shanks was overseeing the Whitebeard pirates boarding his ships when there was a whoosh and a splash and a tall mermaid with very curly orange hair dropped onto the deck beside him holding a piece of paper.

"Shanks, meet Tempest," came the voice of Spitfire –Gol D. Spitfire as he now knew her to be– from above where she was perched on the head of a Sea King large enough to swallow the Red Force whole. "Tempest, meet Red-Hair Shanks. I've got to go make sure everyone on Fishman who wants to leave now we've gone public can do so, so I'll catch up again past the Red Line." Her mount sank into the water with barely a ripple.

"So what brings you here?" Shanks asked his guest. Tempest proffered the sheet of paper and the pirate noticed she had one of Lisska's messenger fish curled around her shoulder. He accepted the paper, noting that the message had been scrawled in blood.

Need raw material.

"What does she mean when she says she needs raw material?" Shanks asked a little suspiciously.

"It means her current patient has lost so much of their body mass that they can't replace it without external help," Tempest said quietly, "but they aren't in any condition to eat and so gain it that way. Fox-chan knows I'm always willing to assist in these cases so she sent me a note. Can you direct me to her?"

"Assist?"

"Transfusions, transplants or grafts," Tempest elaborated, still pleasantly calm. "Directions?"

"Well she should be in my room but I haven't checked recently," Shanks said, escorting the fourteen-foot beauty with striped fins to the door of his private cabin and opening the door. As it opened Tempest wrinkled her nose and the pirate had to stifle a sneeze: it stank like a slaughterhouse in there. Following his guest who hurried inside, Shanks closed the door and stared around at the mess.

Half the floor was covered in blood and thicker, darker things, there was an unrecognisable dead body with a sunken, hollow-looking torso lying in the middle of the mess and Fox was hunched over it, wearing only a bloody vest on her upper half and her arms were gore-stained to the shoulders, one buried inside the chest cavity to the elbow. Her face had bloody smudges here and there from where she'd wiped her skin, her hair was fighting its way out of her braids and her legs was so drenched in what looked –and smelled– like liquefied internal organs those clothes were probably a lost cause. More worrying was the steady glow from every inch of her skin and her patient's and the look of absolute focus on her face.

"Fox-chan?" Tempest said lightly, not seeming all that surprised at the horror.

"Hm?" Fox hummed inquiringly. "Temp?"

"In the flesh, Fox-chan," the mermaid said, removing her boots, tearing away the ragged remains of her trousers and piling them in a corner with her green coat. "What do you need?"

"A pound of flesh, at least four ounces of bone, half your liver, a square foot of skin and a willingness to adopt another stray," Fox rattled out, one arm still buried in her victim's chest. Shanks sidled around to get a better look at the face; he suspected he knew who this was but he wanted to make sure. Marco had mentioned Ace' body had been stolen by the Phantom Fox…

Tempest pulled her shirt off over her head and produced a knife. "Cut away, Fox-chan."

"Shanks, lend me a hand?" Fox said, the blood sliding off one arm like water from an oiled surface. "Doesn't have to be your hand, but I need some help and my preferred choice is several hundred miles away babysitting Ace' soul for me."

Shanks blinked and decided he didn't want to know. "Any preferences?"

"Marco would be nice, but he's probably busy," Fox –because this really wasn't Lisska– mused, her other arm sliding out of Ace' stomach with a sucking pop, blood and gore streaming off her fingers. "Izo would be good if he can stand the mess but I'll settle for anyone with a level head who'll obey orders no matter how insane. It's not my fault how my Devil Fruit works." She accepted the scalpel-like blade from the tall mermaid, placed her other hand flat against the woman's waist, cut in and casually snapped out a floating rib, hands glowing steadily. "Tempest and I will need calcium and iron-rich food; rare Sea King joints, bone and all, I should think."

"Even for your lovely assistant?" Shanks asked, surprised and slightly nauseated. Lisska never ate Sea King but she did occasionally eat other meat. Mermaids however were notorious for not eating any kind of meat or fish. For them to ask for Sea King meat was very unusual.

"I make an exception to my preferences in certain circumstances," Tempest said quietly, not looking down at the impromptu surgery going on below her ample chest.

"That doesn't look very sanitary," Shanks joked as Fox made a small horizontal cut and stuck her fingers inside the mermaid's abdominal cavity.

"Control over life, Shanks," the gore-spattered woman said absently. "Everything spilt is totally dead and sterile; not infectious at all. It just looks and smells dreadful."

"I'll take your word for it," the redhead said brightly, headed back towards the door, "and I'll see about finding you food and a helper. Izo you said?"

"Mm hm," Fox agreed, juggling a nub of unidentifiable tissue in the hand holding the scalpel and smoothing over the cut she'd just made with the hand holding the bloody rib. "Temp knows the drill."

"You've done this before?" Shanks had to ask.

"There's a reason I offered you your arm back that time," Fox said, bending over Ace' body and sticking glowing hands back into his abdominal cavity, "and it wasn't the joke you took it for; that offer's still open for later by the way. This is the biggest, most complicated thing I've ever done but it is doable, provided Hothead here doesn't panic when he wakes up."

Shanks left. He was firmly of the opinion that there were things sensible men did not need to know and how Lisska intended to put Ace back together using her friend as spare parts was definitely one of them.

Tempest knelt quietly on the stained, sticky cabin floor and watched Fox work. What her friend's daughter could do never ceased to amaze her: Ace would have been considered a lost cause by any real doctor but Fox was putting him back together with ingenuity, precision and sheer bullheadedness. He would probably look rather different by the time the Devil Fruit User was finished, as she would have to adjust all the rest of his tissues sufficiently for him not to reject the transplants, but he would be alive and fully whole. Hopefully he wouldn't mind acquiring another blood family.

The fourteen-foot mermaid had first agreed to assist Fox-chan in an operation of this kind when the younger woman had been asked to help a child with a blood condition. Fox' solution had been to adjust the child's entire body, replacing the part that was causing the problem with one that worked. However as the condition had been inherited from a parent, the parents couldn't help.

Tempest had offered because she didn't want the child to die and quietly longed for children of her own, children she couldn't have due to an unfortunate combination of inherited anatomical problems. Fox was reluctant to mess with the reproductive system on principle and had told her that her body didn't recognise the problem, making it practically impossible for the healer to use her Devil Fruit Ability to fix it. After the success of the procedure the child had gone through Tempest had offered her flesh and blood for any further operations that required extra help and had in this way acquired three more 'children' to call her own. Portgas D. Ace required far more assistance than she'd ever had to give in one sitting before, but a week of good meals and a little help from Fox would replace what was missing as through it had never been lost.

The mermaid didn't care that it was illegal for merfolk to give blood to humans; Fox didn't perform blood transfusions if she could help it and there were no laws against things thought impossible, like rebuilding a person's spine from donated bone or replacing a liver. By the time Fox was finished Ace would be Tempest's blood relative and truly a child of their newly-late father, Whitebeard. She didn't think Ace would mind, though hopefully his body would not change too much as a result of the donation. Most of the merfolk she'd adopted this way had grown considerably taller after the procedure with a few slight changes in hair or eye colour. Ace however was pure human, so the adjustments might be more pronounced.

She smiled at the thought of Ace looking a bit more like the father he had claimed as Fox turned around again and cut into the mermaid's abdomen once more, glowing hands numbing all sensation and sealing the wound after she had taken what she wanted. Tempest had faith in the younger woman's abilities and was looking forward to meeting this brother that Fox spoke so fondly of.

We get to see how Fox is going about putting Ace back together and the limits on her Ability.