Vince winced as he leaned heavily on the cane he'd been walking with. All of the damage, healing, corrections, and re-healing had taken their toll on his legs. Two weeks of physical therapy with a Night Nurse had been plenty for him. Luckily, he found out Comfort was also qualified to administer the treatments he'd been enduring and Aiden's Pinielf was much more of an agreeable individual.
Reshmi helped him to sit down in the chair he had been aiming for. It still amazed him even after all the time that passed and debriefings he'd sat through. He'd been sure she was dying back on the ship but instead she evolved into a breed Vince had never even heard of. Now she was a Dryder, apparently the evolution of the Widow that had been discovered only a few years ago. They'd become something of a media sensation for a week until Ava nearly set a reporter pokegirl on fire. Most journalists backed off after that.
It was strange now that Reshmi perhaps could look the most human as she had since being transformed into a pokegirl. According to the few researchers that had seen her, she strayed dramatically from what was considered the norm for the breed, though they admitted there with only a handful of cases so far there really wasn't enough data to truly classify what the standards for the breed were. How Reshmi broke the mold exactly was in her metamorphic abilities. Like when she was an Arachnae, she could shift between a bipedal and tauric form. But she could also change many other aspects, like the number of arms she had, whether her eyes appeared compound or binocular, and if her skin was dark and chitinous or smooth and flesh-toned.
She'd been diagnosed with PTSD along with dissociative amnesia, but other than that was perfectly healthy. She did feel a lot of guilt about Vince's injuries, but Vince had told her, thinking it was in private, that he would prefer any physical injury over losing her again. Then his entire harem, and some of Aiden's, had burst into the room to gush over how romantic he was. Now he thought he'd rather bare any injury than put up with a second more of their sappy behavior whenever any of them saw him and his Dryder together.
Vince was enrolling back into the Jade Islands school system, even though he wasn't ending his career as a tamer after all. He had realized he needed a plan for when he was going to retire though. He'd been rewarded with a small bounty for “capturing” and “taming” a “feral” Dryder. It was still way less than what the tamer who had reported the ship got. His injuries complicated his duties as a tamer; he was pretty much stuck on the bottom and things had to stay very tame until he was back at one hundred percent. Constance and Ione both rose to the challenge of satisfying the bigger kinks while he was out of commission, with Ione even, apparently, learning to produce a very convincing reproduction of his equipment with the Grass Cock technique.
Constance, same as ever, was doing a stellar job as his alpha, perhaps even better now that she finally had Reshmi officially appointed as her beta to assist in her duties. She also was becoming inexplicably amorous towards Reshmi, and frequently complaining about discomfort in her legs. After a week of these things happening Ayn finally let slip that she had detected the starts of a delta bond between the Tick Tock and her tamer. Constance practically radiated happiness from the minute onward.
Ava had already set out to master all of her new combat abilities bestowed on her by the addition of her Charred template, and all in all the Blazicunt was adjusting well to it. Save for one thing, which Nanna had offered to try to alleviate. The Tats-turned-Starlady was currently collaborating with a Tatfir to find a way to restore some color to Vince's first pokegirl's blackened body.
Yin Zhi still resolved to remain with Vince, and had become endeared to Hanako. The Samurai had even fashioned a wooden training sword for the pokekit, and the young Flowergirl was now convinced she'd grow up to be an accomplished swords'girl.
Verse was the only pokegirl who seemed discontent in the aftermath of everything. The battle against the pirates had appealed to whatever base instincts the OfficerJenny breed had to uphold the law, and she was itching to return to duty. Unfortunately for her, she was privately owned and Vince no longer had any interest in playing bounty hunter, at least not for a long time.
For the most part though, they were all happy just to be together and alive. All together save for one. Every night since Vince had gotten home from the hospital they would sit in the room where Hana lie, still lost within her own mind. They would just sit and talk, to each other and to the Flowergirl, hoping one night she'd hear them and awaken from a long, long sleep. Ava and Hanako would read stories, and the pokekit was halfway through reading one of her favorites.
“Hanako changed the words...” A sleepy voice stated. The book fell to the floor, pages crumpling under each other as everyone stared at the bed. Slowly, eyes fluttered open and turned to focus on all the faces in the room. Hana brought up a hand to rub her eyes and then sat up just a little.
“MAMA!” Hanako vaulted across the distance between Vince's lap and the bed where her mother laid. “Mama! Mama!” The pokekit repeated the word over and over as she cried against Hana's breasts.
Hana gently petted her daughter's hair. “It's okay, Hanako. Mama's here.” After a minute the Flowergirl looked up to see everyone else. “Master...” She scrunched up her face as she thought hard on something. “Is it Wednesday?”
Vince blinked and then burst out laughing. Back before he had lost her and Tuuli on Wadjet, Wednesday was the plant type's night with him on the taming schedule. And every night, without fail, things always wound up involving more than just the two of them. Hana gave him a lascivious smile as he replied, “You know, it just might be.”
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The End