Over the course of half a year, Sasha had quickly become one of the most frequent civilian visitors to the Aquarium of the Pacific in quite some time.
Though most people with a year-long pass tended to actually visit the park's many exhibits, as opposed to almost always beeline for one specific part of the complex.
One of its less popular ones at that.
It wasn't that Sasha never went to any of the other parts of the park, she did sometimes, especially if she came early.
It could be nice to visit the other parts of the park, to watch the sharks, the seals, and the other animals.
But the simple fact was that there was only one thing that brought Sasha here, time after time.
Today though, Her Beau was talking to a group of school kids as the last part of her shift, and showing them the various amphibians here.
That meant she'd have to wait all the way until the shift was done and the kids had left before talking to her.
And so, Sasha took an independent look around the section of frogs, olms, Salamanders, and… Toads.
There was a reason she rarely visited this part of the park, except when coming to pick up Anne.
She usually got melancholic when going around this place.
It was something she and Marcy had in common. Unlike Anne, who was able to draw not only strength from these creatures, but enthusiasm, all Sasha felt was melancholy as she watched these, smaller, unnatural versions of…
God that was a weird way to think of them. But it was how she now saw it.
To her, it was now the Toads and frogs of Amphibia who were the usual versions of their respective races, while it was these Earth-based ones, so infinitely lesser in size, intelligence, and worth that were the abnormalities.
She had similar issues with birds after coming back, but since the only giant birds on Earth were currently in a government lab, probably being cloned, or whatever the hell U.S.A's scientists were doing with them, she'd eventually gone back in her head to think of regular-sized birds as the "normal" sized ones.
Not so with Amphibians.
For her, the only regular ones were the ones like Braddock, Percy, the Wartwood Gang, Beatrix… Grime...
Her eyes went over the room, and its exhibits, noting the artwork she knew Anne had designed herself to make it seem energetic and interesting.
Finally, her eyes went to the exhibit that she'd put off the longest, the Toads exhibit with-
She froze. Then looked again to make sure she hadn't misseen. Then she burst out laughing. Not hysterically so, but if Anne and the kids hadn't been in another room of the overall section it would probably have disrupted the tour.
As it was, she was only glared at by a couple of other, unaffiliated adults.
She didn't care. She had a big grin on her face, one that remained when Anne finally came over, her shift at its end.
Anne immediately noticed what Sasha was looking at, and in turn, gave her own grin.
"I see you're fond of Grimothy, Sash."
Plastered below, on the side of the Toad exhibit, was another one of Anne's cute artworks.
This one featured an adorable looking toad, with a comically serious expression, a scar across one eye, and his other one a bright, pure green.
It was absolutely adorable… And for Sasha, absolutely hilarious.
"He would murder you if he knew you represented him like this."
The tone made it clear Sasha found it all absolutely hysterical.
"Yeah, probably. I think he once threatened to eat Sprig alive if he called him Grimothy again. At least that's what Sprig said."
She hesitated.
"You… Really do like it then?"
"Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, I actually tried to get him on board with a stylized picture of himself to get the Tower Toads more accustomed to him."
Anne chuckled.
"I'm guessing he wasn't on board with the awesomeness of a stylish selfie?"
"Nope. In the end, I just ended up using my own face. Actually, we made a crap ton of merch with that design."
"You're kidding."
She flashed her a full-toothed, cocky grin.
"Nope. I was REALLY popular in the tower, everyone wanted a piece of me, and we plastered my face on pretty much everything."
Anne smiled at her, but Sasha could tell she wasn't sure if she was joking or not. However, rather than question her account of events, she decided to pounce.
"Well… It is a pretty amazing face. I can see why they'd want it… but… I'm not sharing you..."
As she spoke, her grin was a playful one, the kind she used when she was in control, and both she and Sasha knew it.
Her hand went up to Sasha's cheek.
"With anyone~ "
Then, still stroking Sasha's cheek, she leaned in, their lips meeting in a kiss that Sasha instantly melted into.
Anne was more than capable of kissing Sasha in a way that made it feel like lightning was going through her spine, that incredible passion flowing through both of them… But truth be told, Sasha had always preferred the other kind of kisses.
This kind. The more subdued, but no less affectionate kind, where she could take her time and savor the feeling of just how wonderful it was to be truly loved and love someone in return.
Eventually, the kiss did end though, and the two young women left the aquarium together, though reminiscing on the world of frogs, toads and other amphibians weren't quite over yet.
I
"Oh yeah, it was a brutal training regiment. I'd start with teaching everyone Tai-chi each morning to get them all stretched and ready for the meat grinder."
When it came to Amphibia, Anne had come to notice a pattern with both Marcy and Anne.
Neither of them liked to talk about it and generally avoided speaking about it if at all possible.
Then, something would get them in the mood, and they would just talk, and talk about that world that was now lost to them.
They all had their own ways to deal with she supposed.
Then I'd run them ragged, having them follow me for a jog for 4 hours, before we moved on from that to frog jumps! Man… And back then I didn't even question how it was that I always lasted the longest. By the end, when everyone was completely winded from the training, I was still fresh and ready for more."
As Anne listened to Sasha talking about running the toads ragged, there was… Something in the back of her head stirred. Hadn't she seen that once? A whole horde of toads running across a field?
That vague memory though was immediately washed away by the image Sasha was describing.
"Really? You frog jumping?"
"Yeah. It's actually the best method toads have for training their legs and arms, and I had to lead by example and all that."
It took her a few seconds after she was done until she realized what Anne had actually been talking about.
"Ohhh… Right… Yeah, it did look preeetty silly."
The image Anne had in her head of Sasha frog jumping across a field, followed by a horde of tired, out-of-breath toads did indeed, look very silly.
Sasha quickly changed the topic.
"But man, can you believe we didn't notice any of the gems' powers at the time?"
"Well… To be fair Sash, me, and Marcy didn't really go out there and really push ourselves to the limit like you did."
"You still broke an arm."
Sasha pointed out.
"That healed in two days."
True enough.
"Alright, you've got me there."
Anne, Marcy, and Sasha had all gone through Amphibia while carrying the power of the 3 gems inside of them, which Anne had made great use of at various times after fully unlocking them, and Sasha and Marcy had both embraced their parts of it during the final battle.
All 3 girls had assumed that was the end of it. Well, at least until they got back home, and started really going into detail about said stories to, amongst others, Anne's parents.
At that point, her parents had noticed some… Things about their stories in Amphibia.
Like the fact that Anne and Marcy had both broken bones(Anne her arm, and Marcy her leg) during their times in Amphibia, that had healed completely and cleanly in less than a week, as opposed to the two months such injuries would usually take.
Or that none of them had really gotten truly sick during their time in Amphibia, despite all the unclean water meaning they should have had constant health problems from said water.
Or the fact that Sasha was strong enough that she could kick through stone.
That last one was what had clinched it for all 3 girls that the gems' effect upon them had been way more thorough than they had initially assumed.
Once she'd realized that this was a thing, Anne had originally assumed that this kinda stuff would have gone away with the gems.
But it hadn't. And if that was the case, Sasha and Marcy would have lost this aspect after their respective temples anyway, which they had not.
On the contrary, Sasha had reached her absolute physical peak only after her separation from the powers.
One part of this aspect that had disturbed all of them once they realized it, was that one of the reasons they hadn't noticed it, was that in the moment, all of it had seemed completely natural to them.
Andrias had sent Sasha slamming into a wall so hard, that the stone around her had cracked. Why shouldn't she just walk it off with no issues, that was natural right?
Marcy had fallen down hundreds of flights of stairs, and only broken a leg, and gotten some bruises? That's to be expected.
As for Anne, she could distinctly remember a time when she'd had to carry all the plantars on her back and run through a field of steam vents at a speed that any pro-athlete runner would envy. Back then, it had seemed so… Natural.
There were many more of those instances. Moments of a surge of power, endurance, and agility that Anne frankly hadn't even noticed as odd.
Like her brain had been rewired to think of it as normal.
But the absolute cake was the kind of injuries Sasha and Marcy had recovered from.
In Sasha's case, during Sasha's big duel with Darcy, the mechanical abomination had inflicted two massive injuries on her that by all accounts should have drastically crippled her ability to move.
It had almost completely severed one of her Achilles' tendons with a thrown laser knife, which by all accounts should have meant many surgeries, and years and years of physical therapy.
Sasha, despite the insane pain from the injury, had not only managed to fight on in spite of it, but internally, the muscles had eventually healed perfectly.
And then there was her back… The damage from the scythe had been 2-3 Inches from inflicting what on any normal person would have been permanent, irreversible damage on her spine.
Even as it was, the damage should have left her with chronic back pain, and massive problems bending over for the rest of her life.
Instead, she'd pushed through, and it had healed fine internally, just like her leg.
And then there was Marcy… Anne did not want to imagine what sort of horrible tortures they must have done to her, to replace her red blood with a green liquid that no one had been able to identify.
But whatever it was, Marcy had survived it and was now just as functional as any other, healthy young woman. Other than having a green liquid in her veins instead of blood anyway.
Either way, none of them had any answers to the details of how this had worked.
Was it some trace of the power still residing in them even after the main power was gone? Had being vessels for the gems changed them on the basic level?
The truth was they didn't know. They didn't know how it worked, the limitations, or anything about them really. And it wouldn't be until she was 91, that she would get the chance to ask the only one who could have explained it, about anything.
As she reminisced about this weird aspect of her life, she thought back to all those times she had a massive burst of strength when she needed it.
Holding back the giant red killer Mantis, running across the steam field during the trek to the spring at the top of the mountain, running from the giant rooster…
"The chicken!" Anne suddenly exclaimed, taking Sasha completely by surprise and making her jump in her seat.
"What? A chicken? Where?"
Anne almost laughed.
"No, no, not here. Back in Amphibia, there was this chicken, and… Well, It was during the first couple of months, and I was sooo tired of eating bug meat and vegetables, so when I heard there was this chicken hanging around nearby with eggs, I thought to myself, why don't me and Sprigg go over there and get ourselves some eggs to make delicious omelets out of?"
Sasha glanced over at her, frowning.
"Chickens in Amphibia grow 10 meters tall. Their roosters almost twice that."
"Yeah… I wasn't really all that familiar with how birds in Amphibia were all huge, evil monsters back then."
"Okay, but… I… Really don't see how this is related to what we were just talking about."
"Well, here's the thing, when me and Sprig inevitably had to run for our lives from the monster, we ran through this giant, open field… And there, on the other side of it? There was this giant horde of Toads running in a jog."
She grinned sheepishly.
"It was such an odd sight, even for Amphibia, but I'd completely forgotten about it until you mentioned training Toads with Jogging!"
Sasha's expression was one of shock.
"Wait… I REMEMBER that! Yeah, we were running, and on the other side of the field, there WAS a giant chicken running through it. Like, I don't recall seeing it chasing someone, but yeah, I remember that! Holy crap, if I'd just looked left, I'd have seen you!"
"Man, imagine that. We could have met WAY earlier. Man, can you imagine how different it could have been?"
Sasha didn't immediately reply. In fact, her expression turned sour.
"What's wrong?"
"You almost died… You almost died, and… I was right there… And I didn't even see you. I didn't even know you were there."
Oh, right. When you looked at it from that angle… Yeah, she understood Sasha's expression. It was one of regret.
"Eh, it's fine Sash. I "almost died" about twice a week back then."
"It really isn't Anne. You could have… I wouldn't have..."
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to be calm, obviously still conscious of the fact that she was driving.
"Well… You are right about the fact that things would have been different. For one… Well, Hop Pop didn't really become a symbol for the rebellion against Grime until after he ran for Mayor. That was the big turning point. Before that, he was just another frog not paying his taxes. And there were plenty of those."
"Um… He did pay his taxes. I know. I was there."
"Okay, so bad wording. The fact is that he was Seen by the rest of the valley as not paying his taxes. No one actually cared if he did or not. The important thing was that he stood up to the tax collectors, and that's what people cared about."
"So, political nonsense you mean."
"Yeah pretty much. My point is that if we'd met then, this would have been before Hop Pop became this big symbol of resistance when he stood up to Toadstool. Which in turn means Grime wouldn't have had any reason to kill him. Which means… Well… We wouldn't have had that big fight on top of Toad tower at the very least."
"Huh… Yeah, that… Makes sense."
The two of them drove the rest of the trip home in silence, each thinking in their own way, about how things could have gone so, so differently, had Sasha just turned her head left on a morning in Amphibia so long ago.
