The Quest for the Legends

Haha, yeah, sometimes I'd see people expecting this fic to end super-tragically and it always kind of amused me because, yeah, I tend to be a pretty depressing writer (look at Morphic). But this story was always meant to have a pretty nice, satisfying ending, and I never felt the urge to change that fundamentally. Mark and May and Alan were always going to make it out. I only ever considered killing like two of the Pokémon. (Flygon narrowly escaped the axe here, and there was a time I was considering killing Weavile, mostly to have it established that you can't detect a Dark-type ghost. But nah, Floatzel and Weavile deserved to ride off into the sunset together.)

I'm curious though how May's life plays out after she talks to the police, though. Do you have anything thought for that / are you willing to elaborate? This specific resolution is something I've been waiting for for a while so I'm a little disappointed we don't learn more about the outcome. I recognize it's useless as far as her character arc and ending go but I'm still curious to see how the bureaucracy takes it, I guess.

That's something I really wanted to just leave open. What matters is May's decision to confess and confront what happened; establishing a canonical version of exactly how that turns out would distract from it by inviting concerns about exactly how fair/just/realistic that outcome was, and every reader would probably have a different idea of exactly what that balance should be, and I'm just not particularly interested in trying to definitively draw that line myself. As far as I'm concerned, you should imagine whatever feels right to you there.

I can tell you she definitely loses her license (but will have a chance to reapply later, and will probably get it), and that she is a juvenile and the legal system is not unreasonable. Like, she's not looking at anything horrific and life-destroying. She will be okay. She probably takes up drawing and diversifies her life a bit and eventually returns to Pokémon training as a healthier, more balanced person.