The Quest for the Legends

I know there will be no continue, but, why do you 'always' make an open end?

I wouldn't call the end of The Fall of a Leader particularly open, either, since both Stormblade and Shadowdart's storylines have been resolved; while we don't know what happens to the swarm, that's something that is to be found out in the future of The Quest for the Legends. The Quest for the Legends' end is very definitive and not open in the least, but of course it will be a while before we get there.

P.S. why, and how, did Stormblade bring nightmare, and HOW did he find her?

…didn't you read the chapter where he found her? o_O I think it's the second chapter in part VII.

Stormblade: It has been better, I suppose. They're all dueling to choose a new Leader now. Nightmare is still with the swarm, though she only really hangs out with me. I miss him a little, but I suppose I'm glad he escaped from what he had become.

Stormblade: What is there to tell that she doesn't already know? I already told her he followed her. Apparently she met him at that human tournament she told me about.

Nightmare: There is no pride in being a Scizor. I can tell that I repulse them; they still avert their eyes from my body, even though they've gotten used to my presence. I don't duel. I usually hunt with the one you call Stormblade and have been building up my own hunting skills anew, but it will never be like being a Scizor.

First after I'd evolved… I was horrified. I'd heard about Scizor, how Scyther would be caught by humans and evolved. I wanted to commit suicide to escape from it, but I couldn't do it without scythes. At first I just refused to fight for him, hoping the other Pokémon might kill me, but then the human sent me out to talk to me sometime, I explained about being a Scizor and he said he was sorry. That was when I began to accept it and regain some sense of purpose.

My trainer left Ouen for other regions for a while shortly after capturing me to compete in various leagues there, but then eventually returned to Ouen to make a second attempt at the Ouen League. We had a battle then which… well, didn't go too well, and after trying to go on for a while, he decided to give up training for good and release all of us. He asked where I'd want to be let go, but I said I didn't care. So he just let me go there.

As twiggylover pointed out, puredragon222's question was asked just a page or two ago.

Chaletwo to SilverLatios47: What do you mean? It has happened twice, although I think the time with the Manectric it was Alan who asked. That hardly sets a trend. I don't know what was up with Suicune, but the Manectric's body was just too damaged.

Resurrection is impossible more often than you'd think. Simple damage can be repaired by speeding up and helping the normal healing process along, but if you've got crushed bones or other irreversibly destroyed tissues, you can't repair it just like that, and recombining the soul with the body in that state would only lead to it dying painfully again.

Mark to hellfirehoundoom: Um, well, I'd still like a Vulpix. Do the Pokémon I actually have count? If so, I always wanted a Charizard as a kid. Growlithe too, really - I like a lot of Fire-types. Pidgeot too - I think they're beautiful and I like birds. And Taillow.

May to hellfirehoundoom: Well. I've got Skarmory and Tyranitar; that's two I really like. Flygon too, and Mutark though now that I've actually used her I'm a little disappointed. Outside of that, there's Garchomp, Salamence, Weavile, maybe Absol.

Ash to hellfirehoundoom: He's great. Been sort of bored since I stopped serious training, though; I try to take him on vacations so we can spend some time traveling together like the old days and fight a few battles.

Dragonite to hellfirehoundoom: Well, we were brought up in a sort of natural park with something of a population of Dratini, Dragonair and Dragonite. There were humans always sort of watching over us and checking on us regularly. When we were old enough they started to talk to us about whether we'd like to stay there or be released, and whether we'd like to be released near a human-populated area or not.

Tyranitar to hellfirehoundoom: …

Scyther to twiggylover: Annoyed, mostly. He decided to antagonize me for no good reason and then wouldn't leave me alone.

Stormblade to twiggylover: I have a new friend in Nightmare, but she's not quite the same. I miss Razor and Shadowdart sometimes, but mostly it's different. Really, things have changed many times - first when Razor left, then when I met Pearl, then when she died, then when Shadowdart died… This is just another change.

Nightmare to twiggylover: It was horrible. I had no idea how to use the pincers. I kept trying to use them the way I would use my scythes and failing miserably.

He was attacked a while ago, yes. It was some Sneasel, apparently.

Razor: Sort of bitter. It's not that good the first time. You need to acquire a taste for it.

Letaligon: He will not beat me.

Stormblade: I would choose Pearl over anyone.

Tyranitar: *eyes from a distance*

May: Well, they're Dark-types. Psychic powers don't affect them, period.

Mark: Well, as I told my Pokémon, I'd like to just go home, finish school, maybe go to art school and become an illustrator or something.

(Since the Effect is not technically in the ILCOE, Mark can't really answer in this thread, but in the IALCOTN, it is inside the city, though the borders are rather vague and it's hard to pinpoint the center exactly.)

Chaletwo: None of mine have refused. They were chosen to be the sorts of people who'd be up for it, after all. And I'm always sure to go and copy the body before any burial or cremation happens.

Sparky: What with the different worlds and different times and all, I doubt you'd know any of the ones I read. Though I'd love to share them if I could.

Stormblade: There are around twenty to forty individuals, generally.

Still not doing very well at actually catching up with NaNo, but it is getting written, slowly but surely.

I'm thinking about renaming Scyther's Story to 'Razor'. After all, Scyther's Story is just a pretty terrible name, it makes no sense if you haven't read the main fic (I can just picture some puzzled reader going "Shouldn't it be A Scyther's Story?"), and I'm bad enough at titles that I can't really think of anything other than my beloved "name of character" cop-out. Besides, the story is just "Razor's life", so it seems reasonably appropriate as a title.

I've rewritten Part II now and started Part III. I'm… reasonably satisfied with what I've done with Part II, story-wise; the main aching problem with the old one was that they were just being all chipper and making friends for no reason like in some horrible happy high school adventure, so instead, I now went and tried to portray a little better just how desperate and weird it is for Stormblade to start trying to talk to some year-old Descith about clouds (and hint at just how many of his peers he's alienated with it by now).

Likewise, their first encounter with Shadowdart isn't quite as forced and out of nowhere. I'm scrapping the whole females-are-darker-in-color thing; Scyther already has a gender difference that makes perfect sense and that was just a silly added complication and I have no idea what I was smoking when I put it in. Besides that everybody teasing Shadowdart because he looks like a girl is just horribly grade-school-esque and headdesk-worthy and doesn't fit in with the Scyther's otherwise quite sexism-free society. Scyther now officially don't give a damn about gender except when it comes to who they want to do the deed with.

So, uh. Another preview-scene. It references a new bit, where Stormblade briefly exchanges words with Razor at Shadowdart's acceptance ritual. Razor also makes a big deal of "sky Pokémon"; that's because the explanation of the clouds now includes a bit about how the sky is something analogous to the ground, with its own Pokémon that live in the sky (as opposed to ground Pokémon that can fly; according to the logic of the mythology, gravity is the force that pulls you to the plane where you belong, and hypothetically, a cloud "flying" towards the ground would "fall" upwards). Thus the assumption that "sky Pokémon" are a special class of Pokémon that can operate by different rules than "ground Pokémon".

“Why do you think it really rains?” said a sudden voice, and he whirled around to see a two-year-old Descith approaching him from the other side of the tree. It took him a moment to recognize him as the same one who had talked to him at the acceptance ritual the previous night.

“What?” he asked, a little annoyed that this weirdo was talking to him uninvited again.

“I mean, I know they talk about the clouds’ blood and stuff…” The older Descith stared up into the air. “But that seems weird to me.”

The younger looked uncomprehendingly at him. “Why?”

“Because,” the other said, pausing a moment, “because Pokémon have faces, and the clouds and the sun and the moon and the stars don’t. And they move so slowly, and they’re so weirdly shaped. And if the moon were really a Pokémon, he would know the sun is going to rise in the east and ambush her there.”

The younger Descith considered it. “They’re sky Pokémon,” he finally said. “That’s just what sky Pokémon are like.”

“But…” The older sat down near him, thinking. “But how do we know what the sky Pokémon are like? We can’t fly that high.”

The younger shrugged. “It’s what all the Scyther say, so it has to be true.”

“But how do they know?”

He shifted in irritation. “Why are you thinking about this? It doesn’t matter. You’re two. You shouldn’t be wasting your time thinking about stuff that doesn’t matter.”

The other was silent for a while. He looked out over the swarm, at the duels going on and some lucky Scyther sharing a Ponyta with two Descith. “I saw a flock of Pidgey fly through a cloud once,” he said at last. “It didn’t react or attack them. It was like it wasn’t even solid.”

“It’s a sky Pokémon,” the younger Descith repeated, annoyed. “Why do you care?”

The older one sighed, like he had had this conversation dozens of times before, and looked back over the swarm. As the younger was hoping he would give up and go away, he suddenly turned back towards him and said, “Hey, want a duel?”

The Scyther don't have any inherent prejudices against left scythes as opposed to right scythes. But Shadowdart's left scythe in particular was the one the Leader had been repeatedly cutting into, leaving it jagged, unsharpened and otherwise not a 'proper' scythe (which was how Shadowdart won the duel - the Leader had his right scythe pinned in place but forgot to worry about the left in an offensive context). When Stormblade speculates on if the fact Shadowdart chose to kill himself with his mutilated scythe meant anything, he's more thinking maybe it was a sign that Shadowdart realized how much like the old Leader he had become and therefore deliberately subjected himself to the same unusual fate.

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.

Maybe if you make him shiny they could think he is cool cause he is shiny, and then they find out he is not… and the events unfold.

When would they "find out he is not"? The first especially "uncool" thing that Shadowdart does is during his First Prey, and being that that's the same day Razor leaves, it would change the whole central point of their relationship pretty massively if that were the first time Razor didn't think he was cool.

Besides that it would be kind of against the point for them to feel he is cool at any point. Stormblade identified with him because he was different and defensive and troubled, and Razor always thought Shadowdart was kind of beneath him, only going along with his initiation into the group because of his existing friendship with Stormblade. Not that I'd expect they'd find a shiny to be cool to begin with - those who look markedly different from the norm tend to be ostracized for it, not admired.

But really, ultimately, Shadowdart isn't shiny simply because there is no need for him to be. I could write the story with a shiny Shadowdart, but why make him more special than his story calls for?