The Quest for the Legends

Chaletwo to zeKieranator: No way. Mew is the Creator, and if he were the Destroyer he'd hardly have told us the War was starting again, much less the Beasts, would he?

Chaletwo to Ramenlord: Deoxys is affected. We don't know why. There could theoretically be more legendaries existing without our knowledge whether they're affected by the Destroyer or not, but we have to hope that someone would have noticed them by now.

Mew to Rose: Then he would gain the power of the Creator again.

Please no bothering the characters about the fourth wall. It'll just confuse them.

May's Dad: How did your Meganium die?

May's dad: It… it was an accident. We were in a battle against this Typhlosion, and we were desperate to win, and… it's painful to remember.

Mark: What sparked your interest for legendary Pokémon? Also, how have your opinions on legendaries changed during your journey?

Mark: I dunno. I've just always found them pretty fascinating.

Sandslash: Have you ever had interest in taking part in a Pokéathlon or any other kind of event?

Sandslash: Maybe. I've never tried it before.

Gyarados: Do you prefer to be in your Pokéball or out of it, in the water.

Gyarados: I'd rather be out of it, but being in the ball isn't bad. It's just… stasis, where you feel fine but you can't do anything.

Gyarados (Again): Why did you eat those kids? They could have saved you!
Mew: Who was the last Destroyer?

Gyarados: I ate them because I was hungry and they were too temptingly close.

Mew: Who was the last Destroyer?

Mew: …I do not know. The Destroyer has always been a mystery.

May: Do you, in any way, blame yourself for Taylor's… (Passing? Moving on? Trip to Kindly Old Man Simmons's Farm? Sentence to the Great Metaphorical Illegal Cloning Facility in the sky?)death?

May: …

Alan: Do you, in any way, blame May for Taylor's Untimely passing to Kindly Old Man Simmons's Great Metaphorical Illegal Cloning Facility in the Sky?

Alan: Well, right now I don't even really know what happened.

Chaletwo: What was the Dragon who survived supposed to do then?

Chaletwo: I didn't think it that far at the time. As I keep saying, young and stupid.

Mitch and Sparky:Have you ever had the misfortune of a HUMAN dying in front of you and you couldn't do a thing about it?

Mitch: All too often. Poisons claim many lives even after the victims are taken to me.

Sparky: I was there when my mother died. It always sits with you; it's a very surreal experience.

Mitch and Sparky (again): If you were told that your town would be starved by earthquakes and pestilence assuming you don't give up your Gym and Pokémon to some random ten year old who was completely unqualified for the job, would you do it?

Mitch: Depends on who was telling me that and why.

Sparky: I think I'd assume they were playing a practical joke until proven otherwise.

Ms. Grodski: Were you glad when Mark left on his Pokémon Journey?

Mrs. Grodski: I'm glad to be rid of him, but I can't say I'm glad his parents let him on the journey. When will he learn if they just give in to him?

Molzapart: What evidence do you have to prove that you're not the Destroyer, hmm?

Molzapart: Evidence? Why would I be trying to stop the War if I were the Destroyer? That theory is nonsense from the ground up.

Chaletwo: Same as above.

Chaletwo: What? That's ridiculous. I'm trying to stop the War. I'm not the one that needs to present evidence here. When you produce baseless conjecture like that, the burden of proof is on you.

Mew: Same as above.

Mew. …I suppose there is no such evidence. But I am not the Destroyer.

Nurse Joy: When you see an injured / dead Pokemon, does it make you feel worse than seeing an injured / dead human?

Nurse Joy of Stormy Town: Well, I suppose there is a sense of responsibility when there's a Pokémon, since keeping them healthy is my job, but injured or dead humans are no laughing matter either.

Sparky: What's the weirdest thing anyone's ever ordered at your restaurant. Besides, of course, a Scyther ordering a bowl of beer.

Sparky: Usually people just order things off the menu, so I can't say there has been anything particularly weird, can I?


Phew.

The Talking Cheese, for future reference, yes, that was way too many questions, but I answered them anyway because I felt like it. Please don't ask so many questions again, and don't just ask a boatload of questions because you're bored; I have better things to do with my time than sitting here answering questions if you don't actually care about the answer.

Mew: The Destroyer drains all of the power of all the legendaries before the War begins. The power they have to fight with is distributed evenly between them.

Mew: Then how could you have possibly won? Wouldn't the legendaries with higher defense and attack stats have the upper hand?

What part of "evenly distributed" is not getting through? o_O In game terms, every legendary during the War would have double the average of all of the legendaries' Attack, double the average of all the legendaries' Defense, and so on. If anything, Mew has an inherent advantage, because Mew can learn an unusually great number of moves, and those are not affected by the redistribution of the power.

Boy, I really need to catch up with these questions.

Mark: What Pokemon do you plan on catching once you arrive at the Ouen Safari?

May: Same.

Mark: I don't really know. Something good against the remaining legendaries, I suppose.

May: I… don't know.

Mark: If you could be any Pokemon, what Pokemon would you be?

May: Same.

Alan: Same.

Mark: If I had to choose? Uh, I don't know. I think I like being human. Maybe a bird Pokémon. I like them.

May: …a Psychic-type, I guess. Telepathy and teleportation would be useful.

Alan: Some Flying-type. I'd love to be able to fly on my own wings.

Mewtwo(squared): So, what's been going on with you since Taylor died? Has Rick taken you back? Does he use you? Were you released, instead? Also, similarly, how do you feel about Taylor's death?

Mewtwo^2: …

(If you just want to know, Rick has taken him back and he was not released, but he is not being used either because by now he's way too high-leveled for a first Gym of the region. And Mewtwo^2 is a bit too mind-controlled to have much in the way of opinions on Taylor's death.)

Charlie: How do you feel about the evolution/devolution?

Alan: How do you feel about Charlie's evolution/devolution?

Charlie: I'm pretty neutral about it. It can be convenient, but I don't really like to flaunt it.

Alan: It doesn't really matter to me what his physical form is, so long as he is himself.

chaletwo: how do you exactly know that you're in a fan-fic and if you know, how come mew doesn't?

Because his eyes see through the fourth wall. Look, these sorts of questions are just annoying. He nominally knows he's in a fic for convenience so that some character will be able to make fourth-wall-breaking comments in this thread. That does not mean it's some interesting canonical property of his you ought to be scrutinizing.

Mark: what would you have preffered eevee to evolve into if he didnt evolve into jolteon?

Mark: I don't know. Whatever he wanted, really.

mew: if you used future sight to see what would happen when the war would start, what do you see?

This question is nonsensical; Future Sight does not work that way.

mewtark: ~ gives bowl of milk and bowl of blood ~ what do you prefer?

Mutark: *sniffs at the milk, then eagerly goes for the blood*

may: what do you hope to replace tyranitar with?

May: I don't know, okay? Stop asking me that.

Tyranitar: ~Gives may doll~ how do you feel? ~gets female tyranitar and uses attract~ hmm?

Tyranitar: *growls suspiciously*

mark (again): do you plan on visiting the other regions just as a travvaler?

Mark: Sure, sometime when this is all over.

Rob: Have you found a pokemon to replace Scyther?

Rob: That's none of your business.

Leah: I know a guy you can call for help with Mew.

Leah: Really, who?

(No, you can't actually tell her. See the rule in the first post of the thread about not giving the characters important information they don't know in-story.)

Mark: Just a thought, but if you never formally released Mew, won't that make it impossible for anyone else to capture it? Since it's already 'marked' by a Pokéball.

Again, no giving characters important information they don't actually know in the story (or, in this case, make them think about information they haven't actually thought about). This is intentional.

Ignore the nature bit in chapter five. It makes no sense and is just another one of those goofs.

@the ditto(the one Mark battled)
how does transforming work and did it hurt as much as it would for the "real" thing when you were charizard and your tail flame got wet? oh and if you transformed into eevee would another eevees attract "make" you "love" it?

Aaron's Ditto: You just… transform. It's easy. The body transforms completely, so what's painful to them will be equally painful to me while transformed. It doesn't affect the mind, though.

@chaletwo then…how does it feel to know your not real?lol(well hey he SAID it himself;he knows)

See this answer.

Chaletwo: Why don't you just not wait for the War of the Legends to begin, kill all the other Legendaries with your eyes, and then become the new Creator? (apart from plot reasons!)

Chaletwo: …are you serious? Is everybody this convinced I'm a giant jerkass who doesn't really care about stopping this thing?

And it wouldn't even work, besides. Remember how Mew is a true immortal and can't be killed except during the War? Remember how we don't know who the Destroyer is but he's probably also a true immortal? Remember how the War will happen if even one legendary is out there when it happens?

Chaletwo: What is your relationship, if any, with other Legendary pokemon?

Chaletwo: I'm vaguely acquainted with most of them. Mew I know well, Molzapart I'm friends with, most of the others I've talked to from time to time but don't know that well.

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.

Charizard and Gyarados: Would you like to be able to mega evolve?

Charizard: It could be nice, I suppose. I don't think that's likely to happen, though. Doesn't it need some special stones only found in another region?

Gyarados: No. I'm fine as I am.

Rick: Can any of your clone pokemon mega evolve?

Rick: …

Mew:Did you create Arceus?

Mew: No. Arceus was the Original One. He created Dialga and Palkia, and with them space and time. They live outside of the universe and do not take part in the War.

Chaletwo: Is it possible that Yveltal is the destroyer? It is the death pokemon after all and its signature move drains energy.

Chaletwo: That would have been a theory, but Yveltal has already been caught without problems and yet our power continues to be drained. It's most likely someone we don't know of.

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.)

I don't think I asked this before (if I did then sorry) but just outta curiosity why did Mew choose Rick anyway?

Originally I'm pretty sure it was meant to be because Mew legitimately judged Rick to be the lesser of two evils. This seems pretty iffy what with the literal brainwashing, but for whatever reason I didn't think it that far at the time.

However, in later years I've been more inclined to say Mew probably didn't actually know much of anything about the two of them, and it was a total coincidence whose ball she ended up in. The Mew Hunter just imagines it was a specific choice of Rick over him because he sees everything Mew does as important and meaningful and driven by the grand motivations that he's projected onto her, as seen in the diary. This is very in line with the themes of the fic.

…Although then I have also recently toyed with the idea Mew deliberately chose brainwashing because in that moment it actually seemed like a comfortable escape from her constant guilt and doubts and self-loathing. But Mew's dialogue in chapter nine can't really be interpreted to jive with this at all, so that can't really be canon to this version. I may consider it for the next revision; it would theoretically keep the bit where the Mew Hunter assumes it was some kind of judgement of his character when really Mew just wanted to numb the pain. Assuming I keep the basic gist of that, that is.

(I need to finish that extra about what if Mew had gone with the Mew Hunter instead.)