Hope for the Best, Brace for the Worst

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Also, Marina's mother/Eury hauled @resolutepath's little three-year-old Ainsley around during the God Valley Incident and protected him all those years ago. I don't know how long they were together, but I'm assuming they were separated when Kuma (baby!) used his powers to scatter the survivors of God Valley.

I'd like Marina and Ainsley to encounter someday with Ainsley seeing a picture of Marina's parents. Then, something somehow slots into place? Marina realizes 'this horrible thing happened to my distant, cold mother when she was younger than me. I never knew her at all.' Then, she's able to understand why her name is upsetting, why Eury never forgave her for joining the Navy, etc.

Reveal I had while on hiatus:

The reason the Marines took so long to make it to Marina's occupied home island has been revealed. Thank you, brain! All those years ago, Eury, her mother, and one uncle were able to escape and go for help. Unfortunately, her uncle, whose fish-man heritage allowed him to swim away with Eury in the first place, was badly wounded fending off a (small) sea king and died not long after.

The worst of tornado season is over, and I'm not living in a state of repressed panic anymore. Yay! I should be back on Marina (and Shar) soon.

I'm also hunting for Carrd templates to better present and rearrange the mass of information I'm working on for all my blogs. Not knowing how to present how my OCs fit into One Piece, timelines, connections, etc. made it easy to fall into the executive dysfunction trap. I'm going to have to go slowly with it all so I don't get overwhelmed, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

SHIP HEADCANON IDEAS - @resolutepath - ACCEPTING

Before Marina turned on the Observation haki, it was "this is a distressed father with a very sick child, and also he's one of those criminal types because I know Criminal Types when I see them. I hope I don't have to disarm a ten-foot-tall man today and then lie about how I did it while his little boy watches." Also, she was thinking he looked kind of like a sad sheepdog.

(Above: Image of a Sad Sheepdog.)

Rosinante: Was tired of doctors and hospitals, and this wasn't even one of the good hospitals he was checking out, so he didn't expect much. Especially since this is a "rougher" area of the Arbor and the doctor wandered in looking like she lost a fight with the end of a broken bottle. So, not super impressed at first, then grudgingly surprised and grateful to her just to experience a moment of kindness in a medical system he'd become completely disillusioned with by that point. She probably lost a bit of that good opinion when she locked the hospital down, but he got over it. After all, she didn't call in the Marines, and the Amber Lead Disease propaganda was nasty.

3 to 5 FACTS - @melpcmene - ACCEPTING

A lot of Marina's patients aren't equipped to pay. Her clinic is funded Various Ways, some of them dubious, but the TL;DR is: they pay what they can, and sometimes that's in services or trade. Because of this, she's overwhelmed with little thank you gifts like coffee cups. A lot of them say things like "The Doctor is IN... Need of a Drink!" or "World's Best Doc" in designs she doesn't really like, but it's the thought that counts. She probably has a secret closet of coffee mugs somewhere.

Marina's family lived on an island without a lot of shops. If the stores in town don't have what you need, you fix what you have, you travel to get it, you wait for a visiting ship, or you go without. This extends to her cooking. If she can manage--she's a busy doctor!--every scrap is put to use. Cheese rinds, fish bones, and vegetable scraps are used to flavor broths. Potato peels are used to flavor dough or get fried in a skillet, etc.

She has some sort of deal going on with @resolutepath's Melpo where she provides medical care for Caponier, in exchange for certain medicines for the clinic, etc.

Marina did not go to medical school. I've written a short meta about the medical system in One Piece here. She apprenticed with another doctor directly, the way Chopper initially learned. She's not an expert in her field; she does her best with the resources she has and tries to help those being underserviced in Sabaody. She's more of a family practitioner than an emergency room doctor. She'll clean out your wounds, provide medicine, deliver your baby if you won't go to a hospital, etc. She's a doctor for people who don't want to go through the larger medical system in Sabaody, which has doctors who choose not to treat enslaved people because they only make half pay, who have very strong racist biases, etc. She took over from the doctor who taught her.

SHIP HEADCANON IDEAS - @resolutepath - ACCEPTING

I feel like there are two routes to go with this! "Canon Death AU" and "Survival AU"! Canon Timeline/Corazon Dies in the Snow ;-; The last gift Marina gave the man she knew as Corazon (and also one to little Law!) was a bracelet of braided red cord meant to give protection. It falls into more modern Jewish folk tradition than anything you'd find in the Tanakh, though there are mentions made of red string, etc. etc. The TL;DR: she made him a red cord bracelet with knots tied in it meant to protect him. It's supposed to be worn until it falls off naturally. In the Survival AU, he's still wearing it and comes back to her clinic, so--?!? The last gift Corazon gave Doc Laroche was actually just a boxed lunch he bought while picking up his own. While visiting Law, he overheard one of the religious sisters/nuns who volunteer at the clinic talk about the doctor missing meals (or worse, giving hers away), so he picked up a spare lunch for her while he was out. Just in case.

Rosinante Lives! AU

I don't know of a specific gift that Marina's given him, but she tries to do things like sewing rips in his coat that he doesn't realize he gets. She's never sure about when he's going to Impel Down, but when she can, she tries to have a lunch ready for him. (I think part of the time he's worried she's going to make herself collapse doing too much, so he'd smile if she sent him off with a glob of burned rice and cold eggs, but Marina needing to be forced to take a break is another situation.) She does this for two reasons: she wants him to know that when he's in that horrible place talking to his horrible brother, there are people out in the world who love him. Also, knowing people love him fortifies him for Doffy's psychological warfare shenanigans.

@melpcmene

"He's right. Eating fish at least twice a week can lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, and decrease the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Omega-3s are also good for..."

Well. Clearly no one asked her, but that doesn't stop her from offering up that compulsive announcement of, "I'm a doctor."

And a paella enjoyer, a lover of trout almondine, a fan of a hot bowl of chowder at the end of a long day, and... all of those things are beside the point, but true.