The Quest for the Legends

Chapter 52: The League Finals is up. Enjoy.

Thanks go to opaltiger for beta-reading it. As I've been saying, chapter 53 is likely to be quick, so expect it soon.

Finally! Took a little while to get it done completely, but here we go.

Chapter 53: Away

Enjoy.

So. As you probably guessed, the "Chapter 53" posted yesterday was an April Fools' joke. If you hadn't guessed, this means you no longer have to worry if I've lost my mind. If you had, I hope it amused you half as much as it amused me.

Specifically, everything after "He wished he could help her, somehow" was a joke. What came before it was a sneak peek at the real chapter 53, designed to lull you into thinking you were just reading a normal chapter. So when will you get to see this real chapter 53? In fact, I finished it several days ago - for the first time in this fic's life, I have actually been withholding a finished chapter. (Yes! I really did finish a chapter, and a humorous knock-off of it, within the space of less than a couple of weeks!) So now that it's no longer April Fools' Day on the server, I can now put up the real thing; see the link at the bottom of this post.

For those of you who missed all the fun, the fake chapter 53 can still be read, this time as an extra to chapter 53. If you haven't read the fake one yet, I sort of recommend you read the real chapter first, but it's your choice.

Chapter 53 Extra: April Fools

With this, I also decided that it would be a shame if people could never comment on it again, so I decided to add the ability to comment on extras to the minipage, as well as moving all the comments on the fake chapter over to that comment page.

I'll be posting a bit of a 'making-of' for the fake chapter tomorrow, because I just like to ramble like that. Hope you enjoyed the joke. Thanks to everybody who played along; you all made my day (especially Negrek, who had me giggling for at least five minutes straight). Special thanks also go to opaltiger and elyvorg, who were in on the joke and also beta-read both the real and fake chapters.

Those of you who just posted to tell everybody it's a joke, pssh! Have you no sense of fun? :P

So, well, without further ado, I present to you chapter 53, for real this time. Nine pages. I'm afraid it's… a bit less amusing than its counterpart.

The Real Chapter 53: Away

Chapter 54: Reunion

It's the shortest chapter in a while, at only six pages, but there is stuff happening in it.

Some ramblings, because I'm in a rambly mood; not exactly spoilery:

I love Chaletwo's self-deprecatingness. To be honest I never really took special note of it before, what with my characters being written on instinct more than with any conscious awareness of their individual traits, but then today I was on the bus reading over the chapter and I suddenly realized, oh, God, Chaletwo hates himself. Well, not quite hates himself, but he's so delightfully bitter about his own mistakes and failures and uselessness and how little he knows. It's so fun being able to constantly discover new things about the characters I made up. Which sounds completely paradoxical, but yeah.

This chapter contains the strongest language in this entire fic. Scyther's Story had a couple of F-words, but the worst the main fic has used until now is 'damn'. This has been in the planning for stupidly long; one of the reasons I included silly detailed ratings with the early HMMRCIG chapters when I posted them on forums for the longest time was so that I could suddenly warn for more profanity than usual in this chapter. It's not even all that remarkable when it's used, but hopefully the sudden precision F-strike adds a little impact.

I was also reading through the chapter plan and am starting to think I should really make a bit more out of a couple of plot points than currently planned. Hmm.

So here it is, that Spirit spin-off one-shot. Nothing spectacular; it's just a brief account of baby Spirit's testing, plus a little bit of seven-year-old May and her father.

I've also finished tagging all my relevant posts in the Quest for the Legends forum as well as some of the Quest Blog forum. I'm thinking about organizing the tags somehow, maybe splitting them into character tags, other fic-related tags and unrelated tags or something like that, to make the searching easier to do.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but I randomly decided that in addition to how far into the next chapter I am, I'm going to have a quote from what I've written so far in my signature. With this, I also decided that it's about time I allowed blog browsers to see that stuff without finding my posts at the forums, so my signature is now displayed on Quest Blog posts.

EDIT: On second thought, I put the signature on the main blog page at the top instead. Seemed kind of redundant to have the same signature showing below every post on the page.

Here we go.

Chapter 55: Unprepared

Thanks go to elyvorg for a very helpful beta-read.

So I did break that longest-wait-for-a-chapter-ever record. Ouch.

Chapter 56: The Ouen Safari

Even worse, unlike the other two longest waits (chapters 34 and 37), this chapter is neither long (seven pages and a bit) nor especially remarkable, so I can't really say it's especially worth the wait. Sorry. I'll… attempt to write the next chapter faster, and chapter 58 at least should hopefully be pretty quick.

Thanks to opal and elyvorg for beta-reading.

Chapter 57: Three Conversations

Yeah. It really is just three conversations, so if you don't enjoy the characters babbling on, you probably won't be too thrilled by this chapter. Also, I'm not in a good enough writing mood right now and had a really hard time wording a lot of things in there, which rather detracts from it in my opinion. But I do like some of it.

Chapter 58: Sins of the Mother

I'm in the process of adding to Letaligon's character ramble as a result. Hope you enjoy it.

Also don't miss the previous Quest Blog entry about the Best Thing Ever.

Chapter 59: December

Yeah. Sorry it took so long.

Chapter sixty, I might as well tell you now, is entirely about Scyther, hence why I've been saying it'll be quick. The downside of that is, of course, that if you don't care about Scyther you probably won't give a damn about that chapter, but at least chapter 61 has plot happening.

Chapter 60: The Swarm

Sorry it took longer than I thought. I figured it would be in the six-seven pages range, but it turned out to be thirteen, and then I kept redoing bits that didn't seem right.

As I said, it's about Scyther. I'm not sure how well this chapter works for people who haven't read the spin-offs; nothing about it should be confusing without it, but some lines probably won't really have any meaning to you. I don't know how much that hurts one's ability to enjoy the chapter on the whole.

Thanks enormously to opaltiger for beta-reading.


Then it's chapter 61. I don't know how long it'll take. It is a plot chapter, though, which is nice. Will it intrigue you if I tell you the working title is 'Mewtwo'?

EDIT: I added to Nightmare's character ramble.

Chapter 61: Mewtwo

There is plot! Gasp.

Fun fact: If you read Morphic or follow my Twitter or whatever, you may know of the time I made a typo and wrote "He was fucking scientist" instead of "He was a fucking scientist". Well, apparently there is just something with me and forgetting articles before phrases in the form [expletive] [noun], because I'd read this chapter many times over before opal (who betaed the chapter) found out I'd managed to write "It doesn't mean he's goddamn Destroyer", instead of "It doesn't mean he's the goddamn Destroyer".

Another fun fact: this chapter has way too many italics tags.

Chapter 62: Diplomacy

If you haven't been following the blog, I'm attempting to finish the fic for NaNoWriMo, so hopefully there will be lots of updating after November is over. See the other recent blog posts for details.

Thanks to elyvorg and opaltiger for betaing the chapter.

Chapter 63: Recovery is up. I know I meant to not post anything until I'd finished the whole thing, but it's been a while and I doubt I'm going to make any drastic edits to this chapter from here, so eh, why not.

I'm getting nicely into the editing gear now (after the distraction of opal encouraging me to write Community fic), so I expect to make more progress over the next days/weeks.

I'm also updating the plot recap page, since that's been out of date since chapter 62 went up.

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposted because the minipage wigged out on me and as far as I can tell the e-mail notifications didn't actually get sent.]

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposting because of technical issues.]

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposting because of technical issues.]

[EDIT: The Plot Recap page has been updated.]