Voyage Name: Homosexual Beauty
Location: Momoiro
Participant(s): Solo
Description:

Sofia will return to Momoiro in order to meet up again with her lover, Kahseh. However, in order to flirt with him more effectively, Sofia will look into the Okama arts of makeup and beauty so that she could perhaps give herself a bit more of an edge when it comes to impressing him. She'll arrive to a beauty salon who prizes themselves in having entirely health-based techniques for enhancing a person's appearance, and she'll try to learn from their techniques.

This is a Doctor Crafting Voyage.

Enemies: -
Goal: Learning

Registration: https://strawhats.rpg-board.net/t2781-homosexual-beauty

Sofia arrived at Momoiro Island after having made a trip to Jordsand, along several other trips before that. She had been travelling a lot lately, making several business transactions here and there so that she could continue funding her entrepreneurship endeavours around the world.

But, right now, she wanted to get some time to herself to relax and do what she wants to do. Which was to spend time with that dapper white-haired gentleman which she had met here on Momoiro. However, she was still really shy about the prospect of just going up and meeting with him - what would he think of her? Did he even like her to begin with?

She couldn’t tell, because she was always so nervous and unfocused around him, her mind becoming numb and stupid.

Regardless, she still wanted to meet up with him. However, she wanted to give herself a bit of an edge when it came to it. She was vastly familiar with make-up and fashion in order to enhance her womanly charms, but she wasn’t of the sort that was enthusiastic about the gaudy lengths that some women took for that. She wanted some a lot more subtle for herself, something that would be effective, but that wasn’t obvious.

And for that, she had done a bit of research into the beauty salons of Momoiro - one of the best places for this kind of arts, given how dedicated the island was to feminine things, or making people more feminine.

In this study, as she scoured magazines and newspapers, she found a certain salon called “Maribel’s Paradise”; which prized itself in purely “natural” ways to improve a womanly appearance, based on medical advances.

Given how she was a sort of medical trainee herself, she got interested in this. Two birds with one stone.

After a short trip to this beauty salon, she found it to be a flamboyant and large pink building, with a sort of Marie Jois style architecture to it. Maybe they were interested in attracting nobles for this kind of place? Or perhaps it was just that the architect was interested in that sort of style. Either way, Sofia made her way into it, finding that through its double-doors, there was a huge open hall with several balconies to the sides, each stacked on top of the other for each of the floors, and on each of the floors, a bustling amount of okamas, women (or what seemed to be them), and a handful of men. All of them seemed to be very busy, either going between the multiple rooms, talking over Den Den Mushis or each other, or writing down things on papers.

“May I help you?” an okama behind a front desk asked her with a chipper smile, breaking Sofia out of being stunned in impression, making her flinch for a moment as she changed her gaze over to her (or him?).

“Oh.” Sofia replied. “Well, I was just checking this place out a bit really. This is Maribel’s Paradise, yes?”

“Correct!” the maybe-woman replied, with a wink. “Have you come here for something in particular, or just looking around?”

“Just… looking around, really. Sort of. I’m actually quite curious about the procedures you’ve got here - I’m interested myself in medicine as well, you see.” Sofia admitted.

The okama clapped her hands together with joy. “Oh! That is fantastic to hear! I’m so happy that we’re starting to really get to more people - you’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, not really.” the noble chuckled.

“Well. We’ve got a few courses if you’re interested.” the other then said. “Here, please take a flier.”

Sofia nodded then took one, and started to read it. From reading it, she noticed that the courses were really pricey - even if she was a noble and much richer than most, she wasn’t too cool with having money leave her pockets for any reason.

“Oh.” Sofia then mentioned, looking up from the paper, and to the okama in front of her. “Quite interesting. Do you perhaps hold conferences or something perchance?”

She was hoping for something free.

“Aaaah. Not for a while, no.” the other replied. “Maribel herself is out so we’re just doing the normal stuff for now you see.”

“Alright. Well. Uh. Do you need any volunteers or something?” she then asked, hoping that she could perhaps get the knowledge that she wanted for free, but in a different way.

The okama narrowed her eyes and turned her eyes slightly away, while still looking at her. “That’s a bit of an odd request.” she replied with a nervous chuckle. “You’re looking for an internship or something?”

Sofia shook her head. Surprisingly (to her), unlike the Marines who seemed to always be so welcoming for her medical volunteering, these people weren’t the same. Maybe it was because with the Marines, her fame preceded her, so she didn’t have to explain too much or go through hoops in order to be able to do that sort of stuff with them; she thought.

“Fine. FINE. I’ll pay for a course.” the noble eventually conceded, changing the subject and cutting to the chase. She could sense that the course of trying to weasel her way in and get free stuff wasn’t going to work too well, and wasting too much time was nearly as bad as having to pay.

“Oh - great!” the other then chimed in, blinking for a moment, startled, to then start to pull out some papers from under the desk.

“Please fill in these papers right here, and we’ll get you set up as soon as possible! Let me know what you’re going to sign up for too, so that you can do the payment.”

“I pay right here?” Sofia asked, nearly wincing. ‘Payment’ was one of her least favorite words.

“Yeah.” the other confirmed.


The following days, Sofia went to their courses, learning about the basics of their philosophy - that health was the basis of all beauty. And, to Sofia in retrospect, it made sense. After all, attraction was a natural thing that exists to find a good mate, even animals have it for their own good. Makeup and the sort is after all often used to conceal blemishes, scars, premature aging and such, which are all signs of poor health or past harm to it. It all clicked in her head.

Although, she was a bit distraught at the idea that love and attraction was all so mechanical - she had to consider the notion that there was more to it, such as personality compatibility. Possibly horoscope too, although with each month that passes by with her studying more and more science and medicine, the less she’s believing in that sort of superstition, regardless of how hailed it is in the magazines that she likes to buy. They’ve been going on about blood types as well, and how they affect how a person is like, which seems a bit more scientific and convincing than astrology - and it’s been starting to get to her as well.

At one of the latter courses, Sofia learned about how skin was fed nutrients from the blood vessels that were underneath it. In general, her lessons weren’t particularly exciting - it’s mostly just sitting and listening to a lecturer give the class and then going to ask questions at the end of it if you have any, although for this particular one, she was quite interested, because of how it related to Busoshoku Haki. Haki in itself wasn’t something that she could easily explain with medical science, but maybe if she could understand skin itself better, she could comprehend how that black ambition managed to creep across her and reinforce her body. She knew how to perform the Busoshoku haki trick of course, but what she didn’t know was the explanation for it on a medical level. What made her skin turn back - pigmentation? Or was it just “magic” like how her Devil Fruit worked. She was quite curious, but by the end of the lesson, she didn’t end up with any answers for it, and got a load of information about health-related beauty instead.

So, at the end of the class, she got up and went to the lecturer - luckily nobody else seemed to have been as interested as her in this, so she was the only to go up to them.

“Yes, Sofia?” the teacher asked, as she started to stuff her books into her backpack.

“I was wondering about something.” she started off. “Are you familiar with Haki?”

“Yes, indeed. What about it?” she replied.

“Well.” Sofia started off. “I was wondering if you knew how Armament haki interacts with skin. Is it like, pigmentation? Or what is it, really? What does it do to skin?”

“Ah.” the other then replied with a giggle. “It’s quite mysterious - it’s like, supernatural. It’s hard to really figure out what’s going on there, you know. But, as far as I’m aware, it’s a coating of solid emotion - now, don’t look at me like that. I know that in a word of germs, diagnosis and science there isn’t much room for something as ambiguous and fantastical as “solid emotion” - but that’s the best explanation I’ve got. It’s quite outside the realm of conventional medicine. Luckily, it’s not too much of a concern for beauty interests, heh.”

“I see.” the noble then replied, disappointed. Nonetheless, the lessons had been very useful for her to understand better other things though, she was just disappointed that this point of curiosity really didn’t have a good explanation, even from a real lecturer like the person she had in front of herself.

Once Sofia finished her courses, she started to think about ways to try to experiment with the new knowledge that she and acquired, to see if she could figure out something of her own - and while she was in her room in the inn, staring at the wall, she got an idea.

She could produce a miniature clone of herself within herself via the powers of her Castle Castle (why her fruit was capable of doing something as un-castly as that, she didn’t know). And, since she could produce more of them once the first one was dismissed, she now essentially had a free test subject she could do experiments on, and even better, it’s a test subject which is identical to herself. So, any knowledge that she would gain from testing on the miniature would directly translate to herself, quite seamlessly.

And so, she spent a few days with her belly entirely open with a large set of double-doors and a drawbridge in her middle to facilitate that, and with her hands and some small doctor’s tools, she started to experiment with different skin grafting techniques and surgeries on her internal miniature clone, reaching a better understanding of how skin worked.

It was fairly common for the miniature clone to die and bleed out due to how difficult it was for her larger self to do work on her smaller self - because of how small it was, simply. So instead, she started to opt for directly controlling her miniature with her own consciousness and do surgery on “herself”, as the miniature, which ended up being more effective. While it’s always hard to do self-surgery, at least she wasn’t encumbered by the fact that the subject was comparatively normal-sized.

She also did a few experiments in how Busoshoku Haki worked with skin - in one particular experiment, she wanted to see what would happen with the skin enhanced with Busoshoku if it was separated from the rest of her after the coating has been applied. She soon discovered that the Haki didn’t entirely disappear once the skin was grafted off her her body, and that it lingered, but that this lingering didn’t last for too long, which lead her to believe that it was truly reliant on a person’s consciousness itself - it wasn’t some property of the organic tissue of skin itself that was being invoked. Regardless, it was an interesting finding for herself - at least it was a greater medical insight into how it worked than just shrugging it off as that it’s just plain magic and not look deeper into it.

After performing more fairly questionable and gruesome self-experiments on how to self-graft skin and do reconstructive plastic surgery along with it onto her miniature "test dummy" body of a sort, she wrote it all down into her notebook so that she could record her findings and discoveries. It was quite likely that all that she was learning on her own here had already been figured out by someone else, on the theoretical level, but actually performing it herself gave her essential practice so that she could do it for real herself properly in the future, and writing it down helped her commit the knowledge to her memory.

[EXIT]