Frequently Asked Questions

This section applies to the ILCOE.

I have received surprisingly many questions about this story. Here they are answered once and for all. If you have not read the ILCOE in its entirety, spoilers abound just by reading the questions!

How can Mark communicate with his Pokémon?

It is right there in chapter one - Pokémon speech is taught at school in this fic. It's set twenty-seven years after the anime (or, more precisely, the beginning of the fic, excluding the prologue, is twenty-seven years after the beginning of the anime).

Why can Mark only understand Pokémon speech sometimes?

There are several reasons it's not always translated. In Eevee's case, he was essentially speaking baby talk at the very beginning. Otherwise, however, not everything the Pokémon say needs to be translated. Sometimes the basic meaning is obvious from the context; sometimes it's just a roar that has no special meaning; and sometimes they're just not saying anything that really matters. Compare with the spin-offs Scyther's Story and The Fall of a Leader, where in accordance with the fact it's a Pokémon POV, all Pokémon speech is translated, including for example the random words they say in battle, which are for the most part irrelevant and unimportant.

Why don't you mark translated Pokémon speech specially, like by using « and » instead of normal quotation marks or something?

Why should I? I mean, it makes sense when nobody actually understands the Pokémon speech, as in most fics that do that sort of thing, just as a way to remind the reader that whatever the Pokémon is saying is unknown to the humans around; for example, I agree that it's a good idea to put telepathic speech in italics. But since in this fic, the humans and Pokémon all mutually understand one another, there is no such purpose to it and all it does is distract the reader by using quotation marks they're not used to. There is no need for you to keep reminding yourself that they're not actually speaking English - it never actually matters.

Why do you use levels and stats in this fic?

Pokémon are not actually made of a set of numbers, if that's what you're worried about; the stats are simply a feature similar to an IQ, an approximation of certain features of the Pokémon calculated by the Pokédex from the data collected when a Pokémon is scanned. They're not absolute or completely accurate.

Isn't it kind of lame for there to just "happen" to be a Pokéball on the ground when Mark needed it in chapter three?

It was actually Charmander's original Pokéball, which was still lying there. I'd still agree it was cheap to make him come across it if he'd actually used it, but as it is, its presence doesn't actually benefit Mark in any way; it's there merely as a reference to Charmander's story and to illustrate a point about the Agreement.

Are you going to continue the IALCOTN?

I'm going to have to decide when I want to sit down and do a rewrite whether it'll pick up from what I'd written of the IALCOTN or start from scratch again. At the moment, I unfortunately have no idea when that might be.

Why don't you change the name of the fic?

I think this title is bad, but I have a hard time changing things. This is what everybody knows it as, including me - it would feel like a pretty drastic change if I changed the name. I also have no idea what the heck else I could call it. :/ It's just about so darn many things.

Why did you name May May when there is one in the anime?

My May came first, and I have no plans of changing it just because some pesky dubbers stole my name. :P (No, I don't think they actually stole it, but she did come first; this fic was started in the summer of 2002, when Ruby and Sapphire weren't even out in Japan. I couldn't exactly do anything about it when Nintendo of America decided to name Haruka the same thing I'd named my character, and changing her name would just feel odd.)

How do you pronounce "Chalenor" and "Chaletwo"?

See the Pronunciation Guide.

How do you pronounce "Mewtwo²"? It's not in the pronunciation guide.

You can pronounce that however you want, to be honest; that's why it's not in the guide. In my head it's "Mewtwo'two", with a tiny pause between the "two"s, but "Mewtwo squared" and just "Mewtwotwo" both make sense and you can choose to say it that way; I don't quite consider anything "correct" here. In fact, the originally intended pronunciation was "Mew-to-the-power-of-two", but that sounds awkward and is way cumbersome as a name, so that's officially uncanonical now, but if you prefer that, that's also an option.

Are Leta, Letal and Letaligon cats or dogs?

For God's sake, why must every four-legged mammal with claws be a cat or dog? @_@ When I created Letaligon, neither cats or dogs so much as crossed my mind. In fact, Letaligon was based on - wait for it - a horse. Yes, a horse. I narrowed the neck, changed the head shape and tail and gave it paws and claws instead of hooves, but originally the only real-world animal I was thinking of was a horse, hence the long legs and neck. Of course this doesn't make Letaligon a horse; it's just an abstract mammalian Pokémon, much the same way I think of Pokémon like Eevee and Absol. I don't understand why everybody must automatically assume they're cats or dogs, much less that it must be strictly either one or the other.

Who is Ash's wife?

She is nobody you know; Ash met her as an adult. I spent a while for the first few years of writing this fic intending to make this a big reveal in the story's epilogue, as a silly jab at shipping; eventually I realized this was unnecessary and petty (and later the epilogue itself was scrapped).

How did Mewtwo²'s Psychic affect Tyranitar?

Because Mewtwo²'s psychic powers are so great that it can even throw Dark-types around with a bit of extra effort. This isn't the game, where there's a neat little multiplier of zero. If Mewtwo² were in a game, it would have an ability that would work somewhat like Scrappy for letting Psychic moves affect Dark-types, except probably turning them "not very effective" or giving an even lower multiplier than that, since it does affect them less than other types.