The stress of their recent ordeal had left Kimiko exhausted. Stress levels were high after the battle at the Mesa and subsequent portals flinging everyone to every which corner of the map.
By the time her little party had managed to return to Frontier Town, Betel's network had finally been re-established, and immediately she'd scrambled to check on her missing friends; by some stroke of luck, it seemed that everyone was accounted for, for better or worse, which finally felt like a huge weight off her shoulders, leaving simple weariness to drag her down.
Her little party wasn't the only one to pick up hitchhikers on the road home, either, and though she was glad for the strength of numbers they would provide in future battles, she could only imagine what this would do to the threads of the plane... There was a significant part of her that feared she'd have to send Alex back home, and though she would be grateful for any time she got to spend with him, she wasn't sure she could handle saying goodbye again so soon.
For his part, Alex was highly intrigued by the mental connection they all shared... until Kimiko quietly reminded him that their conversation was not a mental one-on-one and the entire network could currently hear his thoughts, which would be better kept to himself, after which he promptly apologized and refused to think at all for the rest of the evening.
She had no energy left to show Alex around town, save for introducing him to Greasewood upon their arrival as they passed through on their way to her room. The small burden of having to somehow find him a job too if he was sticking around - because, frankly, she wasn't sure they could be sent home so easily despite her fear of losing him - tacked on to the end of her growing list of tomorrow's problems.
Upon entering her room, whatever willpower she had left was used refraining from simply flopping into bed and crashing right then and there. Sleep sounded lovely, but spending time with her lover while not drowning in drama, even for a short time, sounded even better. It was awkward, at first, given their less-than-human forms, but once her eyes closed, she swore she could recognize the arms wrapped around her, and for the first time in many, many months, everything felt perfectly right with the world.
The white light that filled the room startled Alex more than herself, and had she not been holding on to him in turn, her vines wrapped possessively around him, he would have reflexively pulled away. Even so, as it happened, internally she felt a sense of sadness as his arms slipped away, and it took a moment for it to dawn on her that he wasn't doing it by choice - she'd simply grown larger and harder to reach around with his smaller first-stage form. She could feel him staring as the glow faded, but perhaps thinking she was already asleep, he did not voice whatever thoughts he was having.
She didn't move when the evolution was complete, long since used to using her vines as her primary limbs. She didn't bother to even open her eyes to take in her new form; there would be plenty of time for that tomorrow. For tonight, she was already exactly where she needed to be.
Morning brought with it less shock and excitement than Kimiko expected, but she couldn't say she was upset by the circumstances of her second evolution. What did take some getting used to was the complete loss of limbs, vines aside. Her little leafy hands had gotten comically smaller, somehow even more useless than the arms on a tyrantrum. But even more awkward was the lack of legs entirely; she'd experienced brief bouts of slithering on the ground during battle as a servine, but having so much of her body in constant contact with the ground just felt dirty.
But this was who she was now, as Alex was quick to remind her, and she resigned herself to just having to deal with it. There were more pressing matters to attend to, now that she'd actually managed to have a restful sleep for a change... like getting Alex used to fighting for himself.
She told herself it wasn't obsession that kept her doing nothing but training and working for the next several days, and excuse though it may have been, she cared little. At least she wasn't sitting around feeling sorry for herself this time; she was actually putting in work. When not helping Alex work on his own moves (and feeling more like a trainer again than she had in months... which was an unusual sensation, to say the least), she and Alex sparred with each other (or, rather, she allowed him to throw attacks at her for target practice, while she got used to moving around without legs).
Maybe it was because Alex himself had always been the better trainer between the pair, but he caught on surprisingly quickly - even moreso than she had at the start, which in her mind, was saying something, and she was sure to point it out. It didn't take long at all after Kimiko's evolution for him to experience it firsthand.
And to her surprise, he handled it with only marginally more enthusiasm than she had in her weary daze. He was excited, of course, but brushed it off quickly with the notion that, while significant proof of progress, it was still only a step in the process and that he had a long way to go to reach her level.
Day and night, the pair was easy to find for quite some time. They had eventually taken a break long enough for Kimiko to show Alex around town, but otherwise it was a safe bet that if she wasn't at work at Sun Stone, then the two of them were probably just outside of town in their preferred clearing, easily identified by the otherwise out-of-place scattered leaves, black scorch marks in the dirt, and crackle of static in the air.
