The Quest for the Legends

Ugh. Been letting this rot for way too long.

If I forget anybody's questions, by the way, it's not because I'm deliberately ignoring them or something; it's just a mistake because I didn't see it or accidentally skipped past the post when I was looking through for questions.

Mitch and Sparky: What makes rainbows?

Mitch: Light refracting from raindrops in the air.

Sparky: Anyone who wants to! 8D

May's Blaziken: Could you briefly summarize your oldest / first memories, please?

Blaziken: Being in the nest with my mother and siblings. It was warm and comfortable, but not very interesting.

Mark's Gyarados: How did you make/learn/get your Dragon Beam attack?

Gyarados: One day as I was trying to get to Suicune, I felt something charging inside me and released a beam. At first it was weak, but once I'd discovered it I started to train myself to do it better. It came to me naturally.

May's Stantler: Do you think you will miss your herd in the Safari Zone, traveling around with May to defeat legendaries? Or were you always solitary?

Stantler: I've been solitary since my calf grew up. I was in the Safari because I wanted a new trainer, so I was prepared for leaving that behind.

Mark's Sneasel: Since becoming stronger is important, do you think you will train at hours that one would think you would normally sleep?

Sneasel: I'll train whenever I can. I don't care what time it is. You lose your sense of time in the Pokéball.

Stantler: What are your first impressions of the group, May in particular?

Stantler: My first impressions were that she was acting a little strange, but I suppose I know why now. I don't think she's a bad person. She just needs some help.

Sneasel: If you come across a pokemon obviously much smarter and stronger than you, would you still fight it?

Sneasel: Why not? Fighting a stronger opponent makes you powerful.

May's Stantler: What was life like for you in the Safari Zone?

Stantler: It was all right. Sometimes I was lonely. Sometimes it reminded me too much of Ruxido. But I wanted a trainer and I got one.

Mark's Sneasel: Same.

Sneasel: There weren't a lot of strong opponents around. I spent most of it waiting for a powerful trainer to come around.

May: Have you ever broken a bone?

May: No.

Mark: Do you think that if you let a ditto transform into a person, and tried to break a bone, would you succeed?

Mark: Um, probably? I don't know a lot about Ditto but I think they're supposed to just copy the whole body.

(I remind you yet again that Ask the Characters is not a good place to just find out some factual information about the world of the story that you're curious about. If you don't want a particular character's take on something, it's better to ask in Ask the Author - especially since I answer those much quicker than questions in Ask the Characters. I can tell you that if you broke a bone in a transformed Ditto, the bone would be broken and the Ditto would feel exactly like a person who just had their bone broken. If it transformed back into its own shape, it would stop feeling like a bone has been broken specifically, but it would still be painful for a little while afterwards. Asking Mark, though, is just kind of counterproductive.)

I have a question to May:
Have you ever considered using some kind of strategy
Moves? EG: Skarmory can learn Stealth rock if you find the TM, Butterfree can learn Tailwind, and possibly Mutark can learn Sucker Punch.

May: What are you talking about? Butterfree uses Tailwind all the time, one of Mutark's main moves is Sucker Punch, and Skarmory was rocking a Stealth Rock/Whirlwind combo in my second preliminary match. Have you been paying attention?

(Note that entry hazards are considerably less useful in most of this fic's battles than in competitive battling as we know it. You never saw May's preliminaries, but using Stealth Rock in any of the matches you did see wouldn't have made much sense since they were switchless and in fanfic battles being sent out into Stealth Rock once is not going to take away even close to half of a Charizard's stamina. Good strategy in the games is not necessarily good strategy in a fanfic.)

Mark, how do you think Charmander (the Charmander you trained, not Alan's) has matured on the course on your journey-interrupted-by-Chaletwo? Specifically, what are the signs of his increased maturity, if there are any?

Mark: Well, when he was a Charmander he was kind of grudging and easily annoyed, and once he'd evolved that redoubled into this obsessive thing against Scyther. Once he became a Charizard he got a lot more sympathetic and laid-back.

May's Stantler: Did it make you sad seeing that your former Trainer inexplicably hung himself? (I was wondering if you mourned for a while, or was simply stunned, shocked or flabbergasted, or if you shrugged your shoulders and left with only a little regret. I am sorry if I seem callous asking this, but the minds of Pokémon may be different from that of humans'.)

Stantler: It shook me when it happened, but perhaps most of all that it had never occurred to me there was anything wrong. He seemed cheerful and ordinary, the whole time I was with him, and then…

We weren't especially close. It saddened me that he died, like it would sadden me that anyone I knew had died, but more than that it was the unexpectedness that got to me. I felt like perhaps I could have helped him if I'd known. That, I think, is what hit me the hardest.

Mark: I just realized we have the same favorite Pokemon! *High fives*

Mark: Huh, really? Cool. Lugia and Articuno are pretty awesome, aren't they?

To any character: Would you rather catch a Wobbuffet or an Absol?

May: I like Absol, but Wobbuffet is a well-known powerhouse and I've already got a Dark-type, so I guess I'd rather have a Wobbuffet.

mark n' may's pokemon: if you could be anywhere at this exact moment outside of your pokeballs, where would you be (note:including letalligon)

You can't ask ridiculous numbers of characters a question like that. Pick three or four at the most.

(Oh, one more thing: Butterfree, did you watched the DP series? In other words, can I assk a question about characters from that season?)

Uh, I've seen the D/P movies? I don't really know why you'd want to ask questions about random anime characters who don't appear in the fic, though.

Sparky + Mitch: why cant yanmega use fly when it can pick people up and possibly eat their heads off?

Sparky: I'd wager it would just have a hard time carrying a human over long distances. You can't overwork the poor thing.

Mitch: I don't think it can pick people up at all, to be honest.

mewtark: have you ever tried blood sausage or blood pudding or shepards pie?

Mutark: *blinks in puzzlement*

Mark: what is meat made of, miltanks, tauroses, piloswines?

Mark: Huh? I just eat animal meat.

No. Animals were imported from the animal world to the Pokémon world, but are only kept in captivity, for meat and the like, since they couldn't survive in direct competition with Pokémon. Generally people in the Pokémon world aren't worrying about animals in their daily lives.

ok then, what happens if a hacker enters your PC and opens chaletwos ball?

Mark: Uh? You can't open balls on the PC.

what I mean mark is that, a hacker withdraws chaketwos ball then opens it

Mark: I'm pretty sure the PC system is supposed to be very secure. I mean, I've never heard of anybody hacking into it.

I just realized that you said that Shadowdart was a darker green than other scyther in Fall of a Leader, or maybe Scyther's story, and when I looked at serebii to see if/where I could get a scyther in black, I noticed shiny scyther are dark green, so is Shadowdart a shiny scyther?

No - shinies also have orange/red joints, which Shadowdart doesn't. It's just that there are slight individual color variations, and Shadowdart happens to be on the darker side of the scale (Stormblade, meanwhile, is lighter than average). It's a very small difference and you'd probably not really notice it if you aren't a Scyther - shinies are much more significantly different.

There's also a weird thing I put into Scyther's Story for some silly reason about how females are darker than males, but I'm planning to remove that detail when I revise Scyther's Story and The Fall of a Leader because it was really extraneous and kind of stupid.

I may have found another goof…

In the Chapter called Clearwater City it says

"Finally, to register Charmander to his ID number, he held the Pokéball up to the scanner and pressed A."

Yet in the first encounter Mark has with Rick's younger brother, Officer Jenny says that the computer says that Charmander, now a charmeleon, is registered to Rick's brother. How is that possible?

I have no idea how I managed to do that, considering this scene was new in the HMMRCIG and the whole Charmander-is-registered-to-Taylor thing has been a plot point since the original. Either I somehow forgot about it or Mark was merely assuming Charmander would be registered to his ID number now when in fact he wasn't. Just imagine it was the latter.

When human characters speak Pokemonish, what sound are they actually making? It would seem awkward to vary it depending on the Pokemon their speaking to, because of the difficulty of learning different intonations etc. for every species, and the problem of addressing a number of Pokemon of different species. So what sound exactly do they make?

Huh? Human characters never speak Pokémon speech. Pokémon understand human, so there's no need for humans to speak it, only to understand it. If you've gotten the impression anywhere in the fic that a human is speaking Pokémon speech, that's not the case.

There have been a lot of queries regarding the fact Mew is referred to by both 'he' and 'she' in chapter 61 - most of them noticing one instance and assuming it's some kind of a typo.

It is not a typo: Mewtwo consistently uses 'she', while Chaletwo and Mark's narration consistently use 'he'. (And May, you may also notice, uses 'it' - which means in this chapter the same character is referred to by all three standard English third-person singular personal pronouns, something I quite enjoy.) This is because in the world of this fic, all legendaries who are genderless in the games are biologically sexless single-individual species that don't have a gender as we know it. Some of them - like Chaletwo - prefer to be referred to by one particular pronoun anyway; others don't, and much like with Pokémon nicknames, the pronoun used in any given instance is up to the speaker. Mew is one such legendary.

This is not a new thing; I've been consciously writing it that way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG if not longer, and outside the fic I've been explaining this to readers for about that amount of time. The first time I found occasion to actually bring it up in-story, however, was the first time the opposite of the usual pronoun was actually used for a legendary: chapter 51, where Entei used 'she' for Mew. I threw in a paragraph of Mark remembering that Mew has no grammatical gender preference - kind of out of nowhere, but it was at least intended to introduce the concept to readers so they wouldn't be confused. And it seemed to work: I can't recall anyone expressing confusion over it then, so I actually was kind of surprised by how many people were completely puzzled when the same thing happened in chapter 61.

Now, I said I'd been consciously writing it this way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG. If this were a newer concept, it would probably be a bit more refined and informed by modern ideas about gender - but the fact it is old means that pronoun use has been an active part of the characterization for ages. So now that I've found an excuse to ramble about that, I will! :D

If you were to reread chapters nine and ten or Mew's random appearance in chapter 13 (but please don't), for instance, you'd notice Mark's narration awkwardly avoids using any pronouns for Mew as far as possible but goes with "it" where a pronoun is absolutely necessary. However, Chaletwo has always referred to Mew as 'him' - in fact, Chaletwo uses 'he' for every legendary that doesn't expressly prefer the feminine. It just seemed like what he'd do: he wants things to be simple and easy and doesn't like to think about them too much, so he made a rule - using the same pronoun he prefers for himself - and just sticks with that. And Mark, since chapter 25, has simply gone along with Chaletwo's pronouns for everyone, including Mew. (When he started not going along with everything Chaletwo said and did, it didn't occur to him to change his pronoun use in protest, but on reflection that would have been rather amusing.)

May, meanwhile, uses 'it' for all such legendaries, because as far as she's concerned that's just the correct pronoun for something genderless. Its potentially 'dehumanizing' properties don't bother her because she's not the most tone-sensitive person in the world. (Who would've thought?) I don't think anybody has ever commented on May's use of 'it' for legendaries Mark and Chaletwo are calling 'him', which just goes to show that people are perfectly capable of seeing the same character referred to by two different pronouns as long as they don't happen to be 'he' and 'she'.

Entei was an interesting case - it felt like he would refer to Mew as 'her', but as I wrote him I started to realize that as part of his general condescension he has shades of a kind of pseudo-sexism - he uses 'she' for smaller, less imposing legendaries. Although Suicune for instance also has no preference, my mental simulation of Entei found it absurd to call him 'her', because Suicune is his equal. He goes through all the motions of respecting Mew, but doesn't think anything of just going and making a plan to stop the thing that Mew doesn't want to be stopped - where Chaletwo keeps justifying his decision to disobey Mew with the greater good and Mew just being tired and not wanting to live anymore, Entei has no real impulse to care about Mew's opinion in the first place. In some way, calling Mew 'her' is because he doesn't think much of her and uses it as a kind of way to designate her as a different class from himself that he can be elitist towards.

Mewtwo, on the other hand, began to use 'she' for Mew to differentiate himself from her as part of his journey towards realizing that he was his own person with a right to exist independently of Mew. (Side note: I really liked writing Mewtwo and how he's dealt with his issues in the twenty-seven years since he was created.)

I've also written some backstory material from Mew's point of view that alternates between using 'he' and 'she' in the narration between scenes. If you found it confusing in chapter 61, just wait until you read that.

Why did you decide to make Gyarados (Gyaradoses?) waterbound in the fic when in the Pokémon Special manga, for example, Gyarados are shown to be able to move about on land? (The example I'm referring to can be found here: http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/4/42/Gyara_Hydro_Pump.png)

Well, because I hadn't read the Pokémon Special manga, for one. (And I don't really consider it canon, so I've never made any great effort to familiarize myself with it beyond the two or three first chapters that I got as a gift a couple of years ago; it happens to be the best-known of the billion-and-one Pokémon mangas out there, but for it as with the other Pokémon mangas I've read parts of, I felt dictinctly like I was reading well-financed fanfiction. Which isn't to disparage it, mind; I love fanfiction. It just felt like some guy's interpretation of the Pokémon world, not like what I should be basing my interpretation on.)

But either way TQftL takes place in the anime-verse, rather necessarily what with having anime characters in it, and as far as I've seen in the anime, Water-type Pokémon without terrestrial limbs are always waterbound there. Maybe at some point in the ten years since I started the fic this has been falsified without my knowledge, but it would be rather odd to suddenly switch now.

Butterfree: In what día you inspire yo name the region Ouen? Was it a good idea after something or just stupid 14-years old changing the Hoenn region's name?

Well done picking up on that. I made up the name when the Hoenn region had yet to get a name in English and was still known as Houen; I deliberately made it as a counterpart to it. I felt like since Kanto and Johto are kinda-sorta similar it made sense to make my region's name similar to Houen? Don't ask, I was twelve.

In first place, I will ask about TQFL, but I will also ask something regarding Morphic (I think there's not a proper forum for it, and even if it has ended, you haven't said there wouldn't be a sequel) with this mentioned, I will ask:
-Does Morphic and TQFL happen in the same universe?
In case they do:
-Are the Pokemorphs related to Pokemon from the fic? (i. e. Mia related to Stormblade)
-Would there be a possibility to include TQFL in Morphic 2?
In case it did, would there be a possibility to revive Will and Mia?
You probably hadn't thought about it, but maybe you could make that fusion taking this idea, I really know you want to continue Morphic, you just need an idea. (I don't consider the Mewtwo and Mew morphs a secuel since it was just created for a replacement to the April's fools)
Hope you take this in count, or at least make Dave and Mia have more discussions.

No, they decidedly do not take place in the same universe. TQftL happens in, roughly, the same universe as the Pokémon anime (I've taken some liberties with legendaries, since the anime has drifted towards a pretty different idea of them in the time since I started this fic). Morphic takes place in an alternate universe that is intended to closely resemble the real modern world, except that there are Pokémon instead of animals. They are practically night and day.

Perhaps most crucially, as hinted in the April Fools' Day sequel chapter, legendary Pokémon in the Morphic universe are cryptids: there exist people who believe in them or swear they've seen them, they're common fodder for fiction, and there are even occasional cults that worship them, but there is no credible evidence that they exist, and they're generally regarded as simple myths. Technically they could exist, but I don't ever plan to canonically establish the existence of any legendary in the Morphic universe, because that would change the sort of universe it is into one further from the real world, and I very deliberately want it to feel as close to the real world as possible. Obviously this is quite incompatible with the QftL universe.

I did write a very silly non-canon crossover ficlet in which Dave has been transported into the QftL universe for unspecified reasons, which might amuse you, but yeah, a canonical fusion of the two would be quite impossible.

Happily, though, I already know what the sequel to Morphic will be about. If I didn't, I wouldn't be planning a sequel; looking for excuses to continue stories just for the sake of continuing them is the bane of good storytelling. I still need to develop my ideas better and plot it out properly, but I don't need someone to come up with a concept for me.

And Dave and Mia definitely will have more discussions.

Do all wild Pokémon have a naming system like the Scyther one?

Pokémon in general all use the same basic naming system in this fic's universe, yes. The concept was created to address the otherwise odd fact that Pokémon are fine with being referred to by the name of their species and having their trainer make up a name for them.

Also how you pronounce Leah?

Lee-ah.

The regions in the Pokémon games are often compared to ones in the real world - in the sense that Kalos resembles France, Unova looks like New York City, and so forth. Does Ouen have a similar real-world counterpart?

No; I wasn't aware that the Pokémon regions had real-world counterparts when I started the fic. I honestly think it hurts the fic a bit; it's kind of glaring for a fan-region to deviate from a pattern followed by every single canon region.

Where in the Pokémon world is Ouen? Does it border any canon regions the way Kanto and Johto do?

I've never placed it exactly, but it doesn't neighbor any canon region.

In the Quest Blog you mention pages a lot, but what are they? I don't see any pages while I'm reading chapters.

I write the story in a Microsoft Word document, which has pages. When I talk about how many pages a chapter is, I'm just talking about how long it is in a way that's a bit less cumbersome to talk about than word count. Generally I write something like 400-500 words per page, depending on how chunky the paragraphs are.

What are the rules regarding teleportation in the fic? Chaletwo was able to warp to the site of Leah's unexpected battle in chapter 51, so it seems like he doesn't have the same up-to-date memory-based restrictions as Felix or Xatu.

Chaletwo was blindly teleporting to the source of the psychic signal he'd felt, which is also a thing you can do. He couldn't have done the same without Felix's signal as a guide, and in turn, Felix could have done the same thing if Chaletwo had sent a similar signal. The other ways to teleport are 1) to a memorized location the teleporter has been to previously, or 2) short-distance teleportation, to a location within line of sight and inside a radius of perhaps 10-20 meters from the teleporter's current location (depending on the Pokémon's power level), which is what Felix did rapidly in quick succession to get them down to face the unicorns.

Thanks for the responses! Glad you enjoyed the chapters.

(Also, maybe there's an obvious answer to this that I'm missing, but why was there repeated switching back and forth between he and she for Mew in Chapter 76? Or is that something that'll be gone over in the next chapter?)

In the fic's universe, most legendaries are asexual beings and don't quite have gender as we understand it. Some prefer a particular set of pronouns anyway; others just don't care at all. Mew is one of the latter. From Mew's point of view, pronouns are interchangeable, hence alternating between scenes. (Other characters vary in what they call Mew - Chaletwo uses he, and Mark took it up after him, while Entei and Mewtwo use she. They're both valid.)

Well, it turns out the reason for the lack of Pokémon in northwest Ouen was that Chalenor's skull was buried there - the Effect was supposed to be his power drainage affecting even non-legendary Pokémon when they were close enough. When you made me realize the ILCOE didn't have the power drainage effect there, I thought that screwed me over. But then I actually came up with something I like even better explaining why things are the way they are in the ILCOE: mortal Pokémon adapted and evolved to resist the Destroyer's power drainage ability, while the immortal legendaries by their very nature were unable to do the same. By now, mortal Pokémon still feel uneasy if they're in Chalenor's presence for a significant length of time, and that's why Pokémon stay away from this part of the region - they just don't like the place, though they couldn't quite tell you why - but it doesn't actually drain their power.

I like that even better because it adds a great additional layer to Arceus's attempt to punish the legendaries for their arrogance. He knew the mortals would evolve to resist it, and that was the point: the exact qualities that made the legendaries consider the mortals beneath them, their awesome power and their immortality, are exactly what makes them continue to be vulnerable while the mortals adapt.

It still more or less works with the IALCOTN Effect, though; it'd just mean the mortals evolved to resist it up to a point, but when they're that close the pull is still too strong.

That's absolutely a subject worth thinking about. In the world of the fic, while Pokémon are generally to be treated as people with rights and agency, there is a pretty strong separation between the worlds of humans and Pokémon, established by the Agreement. This includes the thing about how wild Pokémon don't get prosecuted in the human legal system, and I'm inclined to think for the most part it's not expected that human systems for mental health, etc. treat Pokémon - I'm sure it happens, when particular Pokémon want to and particular therapists are willing to take them on, but in general Pokémon want to handle their own affairs. There are fanfics where Pokémon are fully integrated members of human society, but this one does not function that way; Pokémon have rights, and they're people, but humans have limited jurisdiction when it comes to Pokémon (and vice versa), and human society isn't expected to provide for them in the same way it's expected to provide for its own people. And humans are not allowed to interfere with Pokémon societies's rights to set and enforce their own laws and standards and worldviews for their own members. In the Scyther's view, being suicidal when you've broken the Code is right and appropriate; if humans systematically funneled suicidal Scyther into a human mental health system where they're taught to reject the Code and keep living, they'd be breaking the Agreement. (However, there's no provision that an individual Scyther can't seek out help from a human mental health system, or an individual human can't decide to try to help their Scyther with their depression.)

So there probably wouldn't be official mental health resources for Pokémon exactly. Trainers are probably cautioned to watch out for any signs that their Pokémon aren't quite stable and release them if they're not confident they can function and behave appropriately within human society. I don't expect most trainers would ever quite have to deal with this sort of thing, though; Mark, as the main character of a story, happens to end up with multiple Pokémon with major issues that come out in dramatic ways over the course of the story, but most Pokémon probably don't suffer from mental illness to a point that'd come up seriously with their trainer.

It would absolutely make sense for more characters, like gym leaders (as I brought up with Marge and how Scyther and Charmeleon have this fight in Mark's battle with her), to be watching out for this sort of thing and ready to help trainers dealing with Pokémon that have problems bigger than they could be expected to deal with. It'd be neat to talk more about this worldbuilding, too! Like, have Mark think about exactly what they do teach trainers about dealing with this sort of thing, discussion of the Agreement and its implications in general, etc.

I think you mentioned in a previous chapter commentary that Chaletwo jumping forward in time to only be visible a few minutes every year isn't going to work, considering it is established (in this chapter) that he would be leaving the time he's "anchored" to, and as the War approaches he should get pulled back to the right time. If we follow on the idea that Chaletwo consistently jumps forward in time to appear for a few minutes, the way I would envision this happening is that as he gets further and further in the future toward the War, he gets his power drained ("prematurely" because he's only "existed" for 5000 minutes or whatever, I would think), and then eventually bounces back to 5000 minutes after his creation. This is how I see it as working - feel free to correct me if you have a different version! But if I assume this is accurate then my question is, so is Chaletwo just incredibly weak for the remainder of his existence until he "catches up" with the War later on? I know this is all moot because that's not going to be how Chaletwo operates in the next revision but it is something I thought of recently that I was curious about.

If Chaletwo did this, then his power would be drained as if he never time-traveled at all, through the anchor. He'd still be at the power level he would be at after 5000 minutes in his own time. He wouldn't bounce back until he's lived the full nearly 1000 years.

1) without Mewtwo-guy changing your idea for what happens to Mewtwo and affecting everything else, do you have any idea of where the story might have gone after that?

This either happened after or probably had no influence on the Mitch-is-Chalenor reveal, so that would probably still have happened. I'm also pretty sure I'd been planning the ending with Mewtwo^2 being out long prior to this. So, as things were headed at that stage, we'd probably have had an ending where they just fight and take down Mewtwo^2 (well, I might still have ended up with Mark helping him resist, don't think that'd have been related), and Mitch joins them and turns out to be possessed by the ghost of Chalenor. But that'd just kind of be it. The Destroyer would be random giant pterodactyl or something. Nothing of note would have happened before the last War, and Mew's words would have been truthful.

2) you mentioned the mechanics of how Pokeballs and soul gems work regarding the War, but when it came to how it would work now that Chalenor's dead you said what you thought Mew would think, but not what you would think would happen. Any ideas on that front?

I said that maybe it would have, and that's what I'm inclined towards - Arceus's design actually being flawed is part of the point here, and if there was a real possibility of everyone escaping the War under these circumstances, I think that has a nice punch to it, both because of that and because of Mew's fierce motivated denial of the possibility. But, you know, if for some reason I later came up with something better, I'd do that.

Basically all legendaries being aroace is actually canon! In this universe they're one-of-a-kind and don't reproduce. Color Dragons are the one lone exception. (And the ones alive now are all siblings, so…)