Robin opened her book. She inhaled the scent of old dry pages and fine compressed dust. Possibly her favorite, aside from the aroma of brewing coffee beans. The scholarly damsel sped through page after page, soaking masses of information, along with beams cast by the evening sun. She was sitting on-deck in a folding chair. Nothing unusual about this situation whatsoever. Nor was it that unusual that Zoro decided to sit down on the nearby steps either, or that he was passing time with a dumbbell in his grip while alternating arms now and then.

What was out of the ordinary, however, was the fact that he decided to question Robin about her book.

"You look real absorbed in that thing."

She unglued her eyes from the text, putting her slender digit on the word she stopped at for the ease of return to where she was. Robin smiled in her predictable and effeminate manner. Even after seeing it countless times he couldn't help but internally and extremely briefly note that it still made his breath change up momentarily.

He seemed to have nothing else to say to her. Prompting her to resume her venture into the material.

"Isn't there supposed to be some kind of information or imagery on the cover?" He asked her blankly.

She looked up at him.

"Yes. You're absolutely right."

Robin laid her book with its insides against the small table in front of her.

"The thing about this one is, it was printed several hundreds of years ago… You see. While it's sturdily and beautifully bound in leather, the fashion of the time was to simply write the title and author on this…"

She gently lifted her book off the table and flipped to the front of it, displaying it to the swordsman.

"The first page."

Zoro lifted a curious brow.

"Huh… Fancy that."

He put his dumbbell down next to him and massaged his sore biceps.

"I can't see from here what it says though. Care to indulge me?" His stoic tone of voice made it sound more like a command than a question.

"Of course. The book is called 'Fear: Mortality's Sense'."

"That's not gloomy or anything." He quipped.

"Fufufufu."

He leaned back on his palms enjoying the warm weather.

"I take it the book covers death as a topic."

Brook was coming down the stairs and the leaf colored man made sure to get out of the way as the skeleton avoided his training equipment.

"Well, it does. In doing so, however… There is a lot of talk about vivacity, and life. As you probably are aware, the two are completely inseparable. We would have no way to describe one without the existence of the other."

"I'm not sure about that. But I don't pretend to have all the answers either... Wait, you mean the book isn't depressing?"

Brook had walked off to talk to Usopp about fishing technique.

"Well, yes and no… There is the expected melancholy. The thing is, this isn't an emotional piece as much as a scientific and philosophical one. The author discusses the drive observed in biological creatures, a sort of force that powerfully drives all things living on earth to stay alive."

He nodded.

"To give you an idea of how universal this is, I could take the example of your weight training."

"Aeh?"

"It's true!" She chirped enthusiastically.

"Your weight training is a reflection of your instinctual drive to pursue a dream you believe at your core to be beneficial to your wellbeing, and consequently… Survival on a more all-encompassing scale.

Consider this: Everything we do positively for ourselves and for our health raises our chance of evading potential predators in nature and overwhelmingly often furthers our social life. It also raises our value as potential mates, which factors powerfully into survival instinct and our body's internal reward processing. "

He wasn't always sure of every term had used, but he got the gist of the speech.

"I see…"

He felt a soft breeze brush his face as it swept the ship.

"…You know, I could say the same about your reading."

"You surely could. That's what makes this line of academic thought so interesting. It's everywhere around us. Even in animals and plants. "

Zoro leaned back on the steps and folded his arms behind his head as a cushion.

"Plants?"

"Yes. There is evidence that countless species of flora have self-preserving behavior. Which prompts the observance of apparent correlation between self-preservation and being defined as a living thing. This theory is incredibly ahead of its time, and from an age when literacy was staggeringly low. It's originally hand-written."

Zoro would've normally fallen asleep a long time ago in his comfortable pose.

"What's the author's name?" He sounded annoyed that she hadn't already mentioned it.

"Ah, he's called Caluheim Marten. Although, women were barred from academia and often used masculine and androgynous monikers when they learned to read and write. So I may never know his true gender."

Zoro shifted a little on his arms, which were getting squished by his head.

"This Caluheim… Must've had a strange existence." He was a little drowsy by now, but still interested.

"What do you mean by that?" She asked.

"Well, imagine living life surrounded by people who are illiterate, and living your life in a sea of information they'll never have access to..."

He stretched his legs out in front of him.

"…Must've been a tad isolating."

Robin rested her head in her hand while responding.

"Yes." She seemed a little bit solemn, but returned to a neutral expression as she added:

"On the other hand, imagine how much information he had to share with others.

Maybe he became a great teacher… Perhaps even taught a few illiterate people to read and write?"

"Good point." He grinned.

"Guess attitude and will is a big part of it."

"It truly is."

"That doesn't change the fact that he was real different from everyone around him. Probably lived in a world of his own in a way." He had bent his knees back up and laid his arms against his lap. More than that, he was looking at her.

She felt a little flustered, looking back straight into his eyes confrontationally. Her lips curled a little as she looked off to the side calmly once more. Robin stroked the cover of her beloved text, enjoying the microscopic shifts scratches and stutters in its surface.

"We all live in a world of our own, in our own way." She said.

He eyed a line of seagulls which were making their way across the sky, as he digested her words.