The First Patient! Anecdote of the Rumble Ball

Dawn finds Nami awake on deck, where she sights an island and calls the rest up. After a comic squabble between Zoro and Sanji, Luffy clambers topside, spots land, and whoops with delight. Once the crew goes ashore, straws are drawn to settle who watches the Going Merry, and the lot falls to Chopper while the others head off to harvest fruit or chart the place. Thinking himself unobserved, the reindeer plays at being captain, only to realize Robin has been reading beneath him the entire time, which sends him bolting in fear of the woman he still remembers as a Baroque Works agent.

Inside the ship Chopper settles in to make another batch of Rumble Balls and remembers crafting the very first. In that memory he carelessly knocked a few of Dr. Kureha's medicines together, swallowed the lump without thinking, and watched his arms balloon into sudden muscle. Returning to the present, he panics once more at Robin's nearness, yet she merely tickles him using her Devil Fruit, calls him funny and cute, and hands him a barrel to refill after he broke the last one.

The two walk to a lake together, and along the way Robin confirms she has been on her own since the age of eight, scraping by in the service of one pirate band after another. Asked about the person he had mentioned, Chopper paints Kureha as a doctor who is also rather like a pirate, then drifts into a second flashback. As her apprentice he was suddenly forced to treat her when she collapsed, warned that her death would follow any failure on his part. He put her to bed, ran tests, and learned that no remedy works unless the patient places complete trust in the one treating them. Her single word of praise across six years, that he had done well for someone like him, stood as proof she had entrusted her life to him. Hearing all this, Robin quietly says she envies him for having someone she could write a letter to.

This filler entry opens the Post-Arabasta Arc and is the first to feature Robin's eyecatcher. It begins a stretch of character-driven episodes, leading off with Chopper's past, and debuts Papanapple Island as a location.