Mm. I was wondering about Moria v. Kaidou myself. One would have to assume Moria worked under his own power (i.e. no massive superzombies to aid him - and quite possibly no magic scissors, either)... but we've never been given any examples of what Moria can do with just his own power other than absorbing shadows he already has some level of control over. Can he control shadows he hasn't stolen? Can he steal them without cumbersome scissors? Can he create or destroy them? On and on it goes.
But we've seen hints at the power of a Yonkou (most recently Rayleigh, who as former second mate to the Pirate King one would assume is roughly at Yonkou-level power), and they can most likely put a Shichibukai to shame - especially one with obvious, tangible physical weaknesses like Moria. One would have to assume that for a Moria v. Yonkou match, Moria would have to have messed with Kaidou's shadow beforehand (or stolen the shadow of some of Kaidou's upper crewmates, maybe) to make the match even close.
Heck, we don't even know what happened between himself and Kaidou in the first place...
As for my own questions:
1) If (presumably) only Vegapunk knows how to discern the names and powers of Devil's Fruits, why are there named Devil's Fruits out in the wild?
This is a biggie. It's been largely established that Vegapunk is responsible for the technology that allows one to 'scan' a Devil's Fruit to see what power/demon it contains without actually eating it. It's also obvious, given the constant references to the 'book of Fruits' and the fact that Shanks knew Luffy's fruit, that this technology has been around for some time. However, given Vegapunk's employer, this also means that the WG should have a lock on the technology's use. So why do pirates know what fruits are, too?
If Vegapunk's discovery process doesn't actually necessitate having the fruit on your person to 'scan' it, it answers the question above but is a farily dubious technology. It also leaves open the question of why the 'book of Fruits' would be incomplete and has no logical answer, so I'm calling this one wrong.
There might also be a way outside of Vegapunk's technology to discern fruit names, but given that Oda himself has specifically suggested that Vegapunk's fruit tech was around at the time Luffy ate the (known) Gomu fruit, it would be somewhat silly to believe that another method would exist. So I'm calling this one wrong too.
However, assuming the Fruit scanner (or whatever it is) does necessitate the fruit's presence (by far the most likely case), that raises an even bigger question: Why are Devil's Fruits that have passed through WG hands out in the wild? Shouldn't the WG logically want to keep pirates from getting their hands on Fruits - as well as use them to bolster the power in their own ranks? Is Vegapunk's Fruit scanner available to people outside the WG? If so, how did that leave WG hands? Or, barring the scanner's public availability, might there be someone - or several people - inside the WG close to Vegapunk who is/are smuggling Fruits out? And who would even attempt such an act of treason from within the WG, much less get away with it?
2) Who published the book of Devil's Fruits?
One would presume given the circumstances and questions raised in the Mystery above this one that the WG would be the only logical source of knowledge for all known Fruits and powers. Why, then, would they allow that information to become public? Wouldn't someone think that it might encourage the dreamers of the world to become pirates to try and find one?
Side note - answer to Number of Devil's Fruits:
Each Fruit is given a name consisting of two Japanese phonetic characters. There are 46 characters in the Japanese phonetic (hiragana) alphabet. One (romanized as 'wo') functions as a grammar placement only and does not exist as part of any Japanese words, leaving 45 characters. Assuming a) no character repeats within Fruit titles and b) all two-character combinations exist as Japanese words or onomatopoeias, we are left with E(44+43+42+...+2+1) = the sum of integers n from 1 to 44 = n(n+1)/2 = 44(45)/2 = 45*22 = 990 fruits.
Obviously this does not take into account certain Zoan Fruits that may have several models. Since there is no known account of the possible types of Zoan Fruits, nor is there any known limit of models per Zoan (nor do all Zoan fruits necessarily have to have many distinct models - or at least there probably isn't a Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Neanderthal), this is a fairly unquantifiable number to estimate. However, assuming perhaps twenty common animals or animal classifiers (dog, cat, cow, snake, bird, ancient, etc.) and maybe ten to fifteen models per animal (should be obvious enough), we can make a rough guess at 20((10+15)/2) = 250 total Zoan models, or 250+(990-20) = 1220 total Devil's Fruits (most likely a low number due to the unquantifiable but probably low estimation of Zoan fruits).
Which raises another interesting question.
3) How long have Devil's Fruits actually existed/been available?
Let's be honest - a lot of people in the One Piece world have these things. We have 24 known Paramecia (and 7-9 unknown), 13 known Zoan (and 1 unknown), and 7 known Logia - that's 52-54 Fruits by only the first half of the Grand Line. Extrapolate that to the second half, account for another few we may witness before crossing over, and you have maybe 110 Fruits being seen in just this generation of the OP world - which spans maybe thirty years, and would not account for Fruit users that we simply will not witness due to the fact that we have six other paths along the Grand Line that we cannot see all of. Moreover, we have no reason to assume that Fruit consumption at any other generation in time has been any lower.
Let's try accounting for unseen Fruit users in the current OP world by tripling the number we've seen thus far. (Paths do eventually converge - seven goes to one for ~3.5 paths overall, and we've seen some from other paths in the form of the Supernovae, so we can take that down to roughly 3x the amount we'll get to see). This gives us ~330 fruits consumed in one generation of 30 years.
If there's really ~1220 Fruits in existence, and assuming that a given power truly is lost to the rest of the world forever upon consumption, that would put the duration of their existence at roughly 3.7 generations of 30 years apiece, or about 111 years. Even that lifespan assumes that they actually came into existence ~111 years ago and that what we see of them now are the last of the Devil's Fruits - as this is most likely not the case, that lifespan decreases even further, probably to somewhere between 80-50 years old.
In the best-case scenario, a distorted bell-curve could be used to log the progression of Fruit availability. If the current 30-year generational span is taken to be the height of the curve, that still only gives Fruits an existence on the lower end of the hundreds of years mark - likely several hundred years after the WG came into existence.
In any case, Fruits likely could not have existed for all eternity. So how long has it been? If there's a set date, where did they actually originate from?
There's one possible answer to this entire set of questions, which is to throw out the assumption that Fruit powers are totally lost upon consumption. It may very well be the case that when a Fruit user dies, the power is released from their body and returns to it's 'source' - i.e. wherever it is that they come from. This assumption is only supported by statements from characters who themselves don't know much about Fruits, and could very well be false. So:
4) Is gaining a Devil's Fruit power reversible in any way?
As for character mysteries...
5) Seeing as she'd never been to the Grand Line, how did Nico Robin come across her fruit?
This was never explained or hinted at. I want to know.
6) Does Sengoku have a Logia power? Akainu? What is it/are they?
The two Admirals we've actually encountered do. They're more or less the WG's most powerful in-house force... and Sengoku was an Admiral once. There's no real reason to believe that either he or Akainu don't have Logia's of their own. We certainly haven't seen any Paramecia so staggeringly invulnerable...
7) When Ace is released (get real, Oda's not killing him off), will he rejoin the Whitebeard pirates or join the Strawhats?
To some extent that depends on who frees him, I suppose. If Luffy frees him before Whitebeard gets the chance to, I imagine Ace will be pretty torn about who to continue on with...
8) Why would Hancock agree to be a Shichibukai when the WG continues to allow the free reign of her former captors, the Tenryuubito?
I mean, come on, isn't that a pretty massive conflict of interest on her part? Or, faced with WG ships suddenly able to cross the Calm Belt, did she join in the interest of potentially keeping her people out of the Tenryuubito's hands? (She's shown no interest in keeping her people protected from war, so slavery would be the next best idea, but there's still some logical and plot gaps there...).
9) Vegapunk can whip up Devil's Fruit identifiers and cyborgs. He can't invent boat motors?
Seriously? You have cyborgs and your ships still use sails. For that matter, they're still made out of wood. I know the WG is a massive organization and likely a thick bureaucracy is involved. I know that in said bureaucracies, basic needs often go unfulfilled and wacky defense spending projects get way more money than they should. Still... get your priorities straight.
10) Will Franky get upgrades from Vegapunk's technology if (when) the Strawhats meet him?
Oda's already hinted that, at some point, the Strawhats will likely meet up with the mad doc. Franky stands to benefit most from that, doesn't he?
More as I think of them.
- Diosjenin -
