The Quest for the Legends

I'm actually writing! Would you look at that?

So, um, yeah. It's not an overly remarkable chapter, but all progress is good, so.

I never knew the Ouen Safari's warden was Robin Riverstone's mom. Huh.

So. Status report.

I am doing NaNo, no matter how little it might look like it when I'm at less than a third of what I'm supposed to have done so far. As I've been saying, it's a rewrite of Scyther's Story, and hopefully at least a revision of The Fall of a Leader is to follow as well, what with Scyther's Story being only 30,000 words (in the original version, anyway).

I've finished Part I. It's less changed than I might perhaps have liked, as I didn't really have enough opportunity to plan this ahead properly, but improved regardless, and of course the writing isn't quite as cringeworthy. The main change is in emphasis, since originally the purpose of Part I was very nebulous and mostly consisted of "make Descith as cute as possible". Now, instead of devising some new story elements to introduce the fic in a less utterly fillerish manner or cutting ahead and sacrificing my precious word count, I decided to tell more or less the same story except with more focus on Razor's parents and introducing the way Scyther think, which should hopefully feel slightly less pointless than the original opening. This is helped by the fact that as of The Fall of a Leader, Razor's parents actually have some semblance of characterization and an actual history to explore. I don't know if this makes it way too cheesy and soap opera-ish, but whatever.

Preview. Because why not. It's not a greatly changed scene, but hey.

It was a while before his mother returned, holding a dead Pidgeotto in her mouth.

At first, she wasn’t alarmed by the green shape in the tree; she remembered seeing a Metapod in it and assumed, without giving it a closer look, that that was it. She wondered briefly where her Descith had gone off to, but didn’t dwell on it; after all, no one attacked a Scyther swarm, and odds were he had simply wandered off to explore as he so liked to.

It wasn’t until she had already started to dig through the Pidgeotto’s plumage to get to its tender flesh that she heard the soft moans coming from the tree.

“Sciiiith…”

She looked up, her eyes narrowing; her gaze scanned the area quickly as she tried to pinpoint where the sound was coming from.

“Sciiith…”

She turned sharply towards the tree and finally recognized her son there, hugging the tree trunk as if holding on for dear life. His eyes were wide and scared.

“You little troublemaker,” she muttered. Her wings carried her up to the top of the tree with ease, where she picked him up by sliding her scythes under his arms and carried him back onto the ground.

He was shaking, and she wondered how long he’d been up there – potentially hours. She nudged the Pidgeotto towards him carefully, and after a moment he stepped closer, sniffed it and began to eat. Soon ravenous hunger outweighed his shock, and he finished every edible scrap on the bird before sighing contentedly and wandering off to go to sleep somewhere in the shade. She noticed, with mild amusement, that he decidedly avoided the tree.

She looked at the tattered remains of her prey, still hungry after the lengthy hunt, and vaguely considered heading out again, but she was too tired. She sighed, looking after her son as he plopped down in the shadow of a rock and closed his eyes.

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?”

I'm actually cheating a little because I haven't finished this part yet; I'm only halfway done at the most. But eh; I have so much other stuff to do that I really don't know when any of this'll be finished, so I figured I might as well post an update in the same vein a the previous two to show something is going on.

So, part three. This part is home to one of the most noteworthy changes to Scyther society in the revision: Scyther no longer spend a full year as adolescents.

The thing is, Stalker was right when she told Shadowdart this was stupid. Why would any species of wild predators whose young spend three years unable to hunt and dependent on the older ones to feed them cheerfully add a fourth year on top of that? I mean, if it takes that long to teach them all that stuff (which is kind of silly in the first place), couldn't they at least just give the Code lessons while they're still Descith, with the bits they can't do then being taught in a hurry after they evolve? I was already facepalming at this by the time I wrote The Fall of a Leader, but because Scyther's Story had already established it and I didn't exactly have time to rewrite that then, I just handwaved it (um, the Leader needs to think up his lessons! And that takes ages for each one! Totally!) and hoped nobody noticed.

But now that I am rewriting it, I am addressing this. Descith still evolve in the spring, but now they have their First Prey in the early autumn. Why then, in particular? Well, because of another thing that was rather problematic with the old version, namely timing. We know Stormblade and Shadowdart meet Razor when Mark and company are walking through Ruxido, in early June, and at this point Shadowdart is not yet Leader. Furthermore, we know that Stormblade meets Nightmare at some point after the Ouen League that Mark participates in, since at that point she's just been released, and Shadowdart only dies after this. The League finals were on August 31st, but okay, Michael Willows was supposed to attempt to keep training for a bit; technically I can stretch that to sometime in the winter, though that seems unreasonably long.

Where it gets problematic is that Mark and company are supposed to cross paths with the swarm again in the fairly near future of TQftL, at which point Shadowdart is supposed to have been dead for at least some time. And right now, in the fic, it's early September, whereas Shadowdart, according to The Fall of a Leader as it stands, won't die until sometime in the middle of the winter. This is a problem because Mark and company are going to Ruxido very soon, to release Letaligon - wouldn't it be kind of silly to either stick around there for several months or leave and then randomly come back?

So what we want, now, is for parts five, six and seven of The Fall of a Leader to all take place sometime in the time period between early June (when Stormblade and Shadowdart meet Mark and company at the end of part four) and sometime in September (near-future second meeting). Part five already has Shadowdart defeating the Leader the day after the first meeting, at a quick skim (at most it's the day after that), so that's taken care of. Then the First Prey lessons start soon after that, and Stalker can't have had her First Prey when she dies, so the First Prey needs to be sometime late enough for it to make sense that the entirety of part six happened before that point. So early autumn it is.

This really doesn't change that much for the actual story, interestingly enough; it just means that Razor hasn't evolved by the time of Stormblade's First Prey and Shadowdart hasn't evolved by the time of Razor's, a couple of seasonal indicators change, and a few lines of dialogue in The Fall of a Leader get messed with.


Preview, as usual. Leader-POV! I really don't like how I originally wrote the Leader's lessons in Scyther's Story; there are just sentences all over the place that are ridiculous and it beats the reader over the head with "THE LEADER IS BAD, M'KAY?" and his personality kind of jumps all over the place and I never formed a coherent picture of how he viewed the Code like I did for Shadowdart in The Fall of a Leader. Most prominently, I never properly decided whether he actually had a coherent view of it to begin with or was just a bully using the Code as an excuse to oppress everyone (because HE'S BAD, M'KAY?).

So here's the first part of my attempt to fix that. The answer is: he does have a view of the Code, but it's quite different from Shadowdart's in the details and overlaps suspiciously with his need to keep everyone else down to retain his feeling of being in control. And, well, he's still pretty bad, but I hope the fact he's more coherently so makes him feel less mustache-twirlingly evil.

Out of all of the swarm’s many rituals and traditions, the Leader’s favorite – or at least the one he most enjoyed his own part in – was the traditional series of lectures that all young Scyther attended between their evolution in the spring and their First Prey in the early autumn. It was a delicate time for them: they were physically adults, with everything that came with it, and to boot it was the fertility season, but the swarm would not regard them as full adults with the right to mate and have proper duels until they had hunted and killed for the first time. And that would not happen until they had been formally instructed in the mores and traditions of Scyther society.

In practice, the lectures were his chance to verbally beat potential rebels into submission, to force them to stay within well-defined boundaries where they wouldn’t do anything unexpected. Unruly children could be transformed into obedient, rule-abiding swarm members during these few months of adolescence, and over the course of his long reign as Leader, he had gotten quite good at it.

“The Code,” he began his first lesson that year, with six wide-eyed adolescents looking up at him as he sat on the Leader’s rock, “is the ancient body of rules, morals and rituals passed down among the Scyther since the beginning of time. At the center of it lies the Moral Code, the five most fundamental laws of our society.

“Breaking the Code is a heinous offense; breaking the Moral Code is to forfeit your right to consider yourself a Scyther. The only way to redemption if you have broken it is to slit your own throat – what we call a suicide of guilt. It is the ultimate realization of the wrong you have done and the ultimate proof that you have overcome your fear of death – fear of death being the greatest sin the Moral Code describes. If, having broken the Moral Code, you fail to commit suicide of guilt,” – here he glared over the group for additional emphasis – “you are disgusting worms, unworthy of the Scyther name, and will be cast away from the swarm forever to die alone in shame.”

They looked at him in stunned silence, and he regarded their intimidated expressions with satisfaction. The more silent they were, the more scared, the better. The only way to conquer one fear was to replace it with other, greater fears, and the only way to effectively prohibit an act was to make them dread the consequences. Fear was the greatest teacher of all.

He only had a couple of months to make them fear him more than they feared death itself, and he would make them count.

Most importantly, there is a new emphasis on fear here that was only very vaguely present before. The Leader is someone who would very much think of fear as a tool, because he has never had anything to fear: he's unusually strong from birth, gets into a position of power at a young age and has retained it with relative ease ever since. He's familiar with a distant sort of fear - fear of the idea of losing his position, which he has employed various means to secure himself against - but not really as that crippling, immediate thing. He then views fear as a quick method of manipulation, an easy shortcut to keeping others in line - and, more importantly, genuinely believes it's simply the best way to teach them. So now, instead of appealing to reputation - something rather arbitrary that the Scyther are never subsequently shown to really care about - he just appeals to the adolescents' fear of isolation and rejection to make them obey the Code.

This also fits better with the effects his lessons turn out to have on Shadowdart, because of course piling on a fear of failure is just going to make a previously nervous, insecure individual like him have a breakdown when what he's attempting proves unexpectedly difficult. And the Leader would never properly get that because real, immediate fear and insecurity are so alien to him. Until Shadowdart starts challenging him, of course.

Chapter 56 is actually almost done; I'm just having a hard time getting it to end. It's a rather lousy six pages, and you deserve a whole lot more after all this time, but.

Really sorry for the wait. I could start excusing myself with Morphic/ReGenesis/White/university/work, but really, I've had plenty of time where I've just been lazing around rather than writing. The truth is just that now I'm getting into chapters that I actually haven't been planning in detail for years on end, and the lack of pent-up excitement is bad for my motivation. Sorry. I'll still try not to make this the pace of the next chapters.

How do you write your chapters? Do you write them in bursts, or do you take your time and write it over a long period (By over a long period I mean slowly but constantly updating the chapter until completion.)

It varies, but even on my biggest writing sprees I very, very rarely write the whole chapter in one go; I don't recall it happening ever, actually. Usually I write a few sentences or paragraphs sometime when I feel like it, then write a few more next time I feel like it and so on, though because that's kind of ridiculously slow, most of the writing ends up being done on those relatively rare occasions where I happen to go on a writing spree and actually do pages at a time.

So you know chapter 57? The thing I haven't been talking about or making any real headway with for a couple of months?

Basically, I've been having something of a confidence crisis recently, realizing suddenly that this chapter is going to be awful and the whole chapter plan sucks and I can't write and so on. And it didn't help that I was stuck on a really stupid part of the chapter, one of those places where I need a transition from thing A to thing B and it just can't seem to work out in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous. So I haven't been getting a lot of writing done.

Well, the other day I realized it was almost June, and since the fic's ninth anniversary is on the nineteenth of June, I should probably hurry up with the chapter to try to get it out on TQftL's birthday. At first this resulted in about two new sentences of the chapter, which I promptly deleted after deciding they were awkward. Then earlier I got past that annoying little part and started writing again, and then all of a sudden the characters swooped in to the rescue by suddenly making the chapter interesting! I love it when that happens. (Oh, Chaletwo, in my Morphic-extra-writing spree I'd almost forgotten how much I utterly love you and all the new things I keep discovering about you.)

It's still a sort of a talky in-between chapter, but at least I like it a lot more now and don't feel like I'm a horrible writer making a chapter out of uninteresting chatter anymore, so I expect this time I will actually be able to find the motivation to finish it. If everything goes according to plan, you only have two weeks to wait now. Look forward to it.

Oh, and somebody a while ago suggested I should make some sort of a plot recap thing, so I've been drafting up a page that would go on the minipage somewhere containing a basic summary of both the main plot and the current status of that and the ongoing subplots, so as to make it easier for readers to refresh their memories on what's going on after a long wait between chapters. This would be updated every time there is a chapter update to feature information as of the chapter before the latest one, so as to allow you to read/skim it before you read the new chapter. Sound good?

Chapter 58 is coming along at a surprisingly decent speed. It's going to be quite short and I'm already on the third page. I've been looking forward to it for a while, which probably explains how it's so much faster than the past few chapters, but I'm still rather pleased with myself after thinking my ability to write faster than a snail had permanently left TQftL for silly Morphic extras.

This chapter is all about Letaligon, and I hope fans of her subplot will appreciate it. This and chapter sixty are, in the current chapter plan, the last purely character-focused chapters in the fic, and I'm hoping to make the most of them because I like character-focused chapters.

I heard it's almost done but the author's too busy playing Heroes VI and writing this random one-shot that refuses to come out right to finish it.

Quick means quick for some value of quick. Chapter 53 was quick as in less than a couple of weeks. I'm not going to tell you chapter sixty is going to be that quick (that depends on my writing mood and how much time I have) but it definitely could be.

Thought I'd write a bit of an update. I'm on the seventh page of chapter sixty, as my signature says, and the going's pretty fast when I'm actually working on it. I don't know when I'll finish, exactly, because I'm still not quite sure how long it's going to be (I'm going to wait for how things evolve organically to decide whether and how certain things should happen), but I'm at least definitely more than halfway done.

I quite like this chapter so far. Writing it feels like writing Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader. I'm a little worried about how this chapter will come across to people who haven't read the spin-offs, though; maybe it'll just seem to be introducing a bunch of tangential stuff without going into it properly. Oh, well. It all does serve a purpose and I don't think it's confusing without having read the spin-offs, so it should be okay.

I dreamt something about Mark and May being engaged for an arranged marriage or something (it could also be that they somehow got engaged by accident or that it was necessary to save the world or whatever; either way, they were still twelve). They were having lunch somewhere talking about how annoying that was and how they're kinda friends and all but why do they have to get married? I really enjoyed that dream because they were delightfully in character about it and I just generally love dreaming about my characters. Also, it just amused me that even in a dream where they're somehow engaged, they're just there going "yeahhh no".

Something about a particular character that I didn't know before just came to light as I was writing chapter 73. Then I realized it had been carefully set up by a couple of different scenes in a much earlier NaNo chapter that I'd had earmarked for being messed with in editing because they seemed strange and sounded like they were leading up to something when they weren't, or so I thought.

How do these things even happen, seriously.

Like I said in my last update, I've been doing most of my rambling on the progress of TQftL on Tumblr lately, so for those of you who aren't following that, here's an update on how it's going.

As I've explained before, I'm editing chapters 66-69 at the same time for various reasons. I'm pretty much entirely done with 66 unless I make some last-minute decisions, have made the major additions I needed to make to chapters 67, 68 and 69, and am in the process of smoothing them out better and deciding what to do about a couple of scenes in chapter 67. Once I've finished all these chapters, I'll be posting all four chapters on a schedule.

My speed has been picking up quite a bit recently because I've been doing a thing where I work on the fic for at least half an hour daily. This has been helping me a lot - I've had problems with not writing anything for long stretches of time, or rereading but then wandering off to do something else before I manage to make any actual progress, and half an hour is just enough to get me past that threshold into doing some useful work (I'm allowed to write for more than half an hour, of course, if I have time and energy). Moreover, by doing it every day, I can keep up my general train of thought a lot better than when I leave it for weeks and then come back to it - I remember what I was thinking the day before and it's easy to come back to it. So, if you write, I highly recommend doing this. It's a lot of the helpful things about NaNo without the pressure to churn out words regardless of sense. (Not to knock NaNo, mind you; just getting the words down somehow is a great thing, too.)

So, it's been a while, but as usual, the story is far from dead, and in fact, I expect it to be picking up the pace from here on.

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.

As of today (uh, by which I mean the nineteenth, that's totally today, shut up), The Quest for the Legends is fourteen years old. I've been writing it for well over half of my life now, of course.

I wanted to post the Waraider-themed extra today, but it's not looking like that's going to happen; I'm on vacation in America right now and we've been having too much fun to leave me with significant writing time. Coming soon.

I'm still hoping to finish posting the fic before the fifteenth anniversary! It's like two months a chapter from this point, and with the Habitica boost to my speed I can probably make that. Fingers crossed.