The Quest for the Legends

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.

Yay! What a great day!

First, I finally find someone willing to trade me a Vullaby, then, minutes later, I get an E-mail about a chapter update.

Oh, wow, 'tis a day to remember. All that anticipation! I actually checked here quite regularly to see if it was up. Thanks, Butterfree!

You shouldn't thank me for "beta-reading" when all I do is read it and tell you how much I like it. D:

Sorry for posting the same thing twice, but I feel like it was ignored last time, so her goes. I'm not sure whether you've got time for this sort of thing, but have you by chance read either of Burninating Torchic's (aka, Jirae) fanfics. I personally loved reading them. They are both based off of different ideas regarding pokemon, heroics, and general coolness. If you have read them, sorry to have wasted your time. If you haven't, you should at some point. Just my opinion. Thanks for reading!

Never heard of them. :/ I Googled the name and found their Pokémon Tower profile, but I hope that's some old version of the fic because it's eleven chapters of huge impossible-to-read block paragraphs.

Have you looked at the stories he posted on the Pokegym forums? They're a bit more tedious to read because other people commented all throughout the stories, but they're still good. There are two main stories that both have sequels: Elemental Legacies and Daieoskail. If you've got the time I'd suggest reading both and their sequels.

Did you just add a Sneasl to Mark's roster?

YEEEAAH.

The… the first sentence has relievingly i it. D: (Not a word.)

You're right; this chapter does feel very filler-ish. Why did you decide to actually write out the full Safari Zone episode instead of just referencing it in the next chapter and introducing the new pokémon at that point?

The… the first sentence has relievingly i it. D: (Not a word.)

It isn't? Hm, my Word didn't object to it, though Firefox does. Why isn't it a word, anyway? I find it pretty useful, but then again I use way too many adverbs.

Anyway, I've been kind of waiting for somebody else to notice the fillerness here. The reason I wanted to include it was mostly that May choosing to catch a Stantler seemed like a moment too important to her character arc to just skip over and reference later. Unfortunately that's a single moment and I didn't end up finding much else to make that scene feel less pointless, save a bunch of Letaligon being herself.

Nope, it isn't. (I love that I made a typo in the sentence pointing that out in the above post. Best critic, I am the.)

As for why it isn't… I suppose because nobody's coined it yet? It just makes me cringe because it seems like such an awkward adverb, like "relaxingly" or something. I can't say why, but the word just repelled me immediately on sight. It's also kind of redundant (what would you use if you axed "relievingly" there?). But in general, I find the sentence kind of clumsy in general.

Hmm, I actually think that the stantler-catching thing would be a pretty good thing to return to later–in the next chapter, May just suddenly has this stantler, and Mark's kind of unnerved by it. For a while he just stews over it, until finally he can't stand it anymore and is like, "May, what's up with you? Why did you catch this thing anyway? What's your problem?" which would invite a little flashback and some discussion of May's current mental state. That's just how I would probably choose to swing it, though.

What if you had started this chapter at, "The ball shook three times and went still. / May didn't bother to pick it up…"? You would need to tweak what comes after a little bit, but it lets you keep the stantler capture (or the essence of it, anyway), and leaves you with something short enough that you could probably glue it to the top of the next chapter or something.

Dunno. "Relievingly" isn't the prettiest word around, no, but it feels much more natural than "relaxingly" to me at least, and I feel like there's a genuine niche for it to fill, meaning-wise - if it is relieving that a thing can be described with some adjective as opposed to not, it seems useful to be able to tack a "relievingly" on it, and "thankfully" (the only alternative I can think of off the top of my head) doesn't have quite the same meaning. But nobody should ever listen to me on adverbs and yeah, I dislike that sentence too on the whole. If it helps, it was even worse before opal complained.

The problem with starting the chapter with the ball shaking is that then there would have to be something of substance immediately after it, or the next scene break would just feel abrupt and weird. It would almost definitely work better that way if I did think of something of worth to put there, though, as you say, or even possibly skipped over (in my mind it never really felt like an option to just skip straight to the aftermath, so I didn't really consider it). I'm not precisely sure what I should do with this chapter, though; it seems kind of pointless and awkward to just take it out after it's already published and I'm tempted to just leave that to the IALCOTN (which will surely get to this part in 2030 or so), but that would mean having it remain here in all its fillery glory.

Thanks enormously for the comments, by the way. I really appreciate that you stop by to criticize on occasion; you address a lot of issues that don't really get properly noticed as real problems otherwise.

I had to post here because there was no other place to post…I'm dying here! How long does it usually take for you to write a chapter?! AAAAAAAA!!!Please, please, PLEASE finish 57!!! I'm on summer break and I have nothing to do, So I'm at my wits' end. :'(

It can take me very long to finish a chapter, depending on how interesting I find the chapter, and chapter 57 is unfortunately not very interesting. However, I'm planning to try to finish it before the fic's ninth anniversary on the nineteenth, so hopefully two weeks.