The Quest for the Legends

This is an author's commentary intended for readers who have already read the entire ILCOE. My retrospective comments on the chapter are in bold below, with some remarks within the text and then some overall thoughts at the bottom. The commentary will contain significant spoilers! Do not read the commentary on your first read-through!

This chapter was posted on October 28th, nine days after chapter 12. This was another one of my favorite chapters! Mortal peril plus my cool mysterious gym leader character who is mysterious and cool. What could be better?

That's amazing. May's so impatient to get to the next town that she tricks Mark into agreeing to a different question in order to socially awkward penguin him into following her into this ominously named desert. I love it.

In the previous versions, there was no indication that going through the desert wasn't the normal route. By the time I was writing the ILCOE, though, I'd realized this was a bit weird: if it takes more than a day to cross the desert, and the desert fills up with a flood of deadly scorpions every night, obviously the main route between these towns has absolutely no business going through this desert. Thus, here I had the actual official route snaking a path around the mountains surrounding the valley, while May in her recklessness figures it'll be shorter going through the desert and surely the normal route is for normies, not ambitious Pokémon trainers who can fend for themselves.

This just opens another glaring issue, though: May may be from a different region, but why hasn't Mark ever heard of this desert full of deadly scorpions and why it should be avoided? And even if for some reason this isn't common knowledge, why aren't there extremely clear information signs everywhere making it clear to trainers why they should not take a shortcut through the desert? Surely May isn't the first person ever to think of taking a shortcut here, and most anyone who does so is going to end up dead or nearly so, so somebody really ought to have noticed the problem by now.

I enjoy the dynamic between them here - Mark complaining about the heat and being bothered by the name thing, May just doggedly ignoring his concerns.

In the previous versions, Charmeleon was a little more in the foreground here - Mark used him a lot to battle the wild Pokémon, he was pleased to be getting to battle more than Scyther, and when Mark was wondering why the desert was called the Black Desert, Charmeleon also dismissed it with "They can call it what they want." It's a shame I reduced this to just the one mention of having him out for his flame here - what was there in the original wasn't much, but it meant he was present as a character in a way he isn't here.

Hi, random Murkrow! And goodbye again. Thank you for serving as an arbitrary focal point in this brief omniscient introduction of yet another one of my overly morbid fake Pokémon.

The introduction of the Scorplack has always been dramatic; this is how it looked in the original (almost identical to the UMR):

Like a century’s production of ink, a black flood flowed over the sand. Actually, it wasn’t a liquid. It was a horde of the terrors of the Black desert, Scorplacks. Those black, dangerous scorpion pokémon spent the day deep in the sand, but at night, they went out to hunt. They killed each other if they found nothing else, but if an unwary pokémon – or human, even better – was around there somewhere, they all helped each other to kill it. Only their yellow eyes could be seen in the dark. By counting the eyes, one could see there were hundreds of thousands. All ready with the deadly poisonus stingers on their tails in attack position.

The Scorplacks had quickly noticed that there was something happening at a certain place. Something happening meant prey. That was why they flooded, each trying to be the first to their meal, to that place. After each sand wave they went over, a hundred more joined. The desert was covered with the Scorplacks.

Scorplack was my very first fake Pokémon that was completely my own design rather than being a hybrid of other Pokémon. This GIF file is from December 15th 2002, but it was created earlier; that's just the date I seem to have saved all the fake Pokémon I'd made in Paint as GIFs and put them into the site folder. It wasn't created for the fic as such - I remember the motivation behind it just being that after making a bunch of lazy hybrids, I wanted to make a Pokémon that was properly my own. Scorpio City, Scorpio Valley and the Black Desert were then designed around Scorplack when I started putting together my plans for the Ouen region (though originally they were called "Scorpion City" and "Scorpivalley").

Naturally, my first proper fake Pokémon was a SCORPION that was DEADLY and would KILL YOU, and then I made a CAT with HUGE FANGS that are COVERED WITH BLOOD, and then I made ANOTHER CAT that GROWS AT THE TASTE OF ITS OWN BLOOD. Those weren't even the only ones; I also made up yet another morbid cat Pokémon that started off as a smoky ghost cat that feeds on corpses, then became a frozen ghoul-cat that drinks blood, then became an only-slightly-translucent ghost cat, and it's probably sheer happenstance that that one never appeared in the fic. I love how endearingly obvious it was that I had some very particular interests. I knew as a kid that some of my fascinations were pretty weird, and I made some effort to hide it - but boy, I wasn't very good at it.

So: this was Spirit waking them up. She'd been discreetly following May in her spirit form ever since Entei chose her, and now that she saw May was in serious danger, she used her powers to break into their dreams. That's why the dream bursts into flames specifically: she's a Ninetales, and that's what comes most obviously to her.

This wasn't the case in the original, which was before I ever came up with Spirit; rather, I'm pretty sure it was just meant as Mark magically knowing he had to wake up, as some kind of lowkey destiny or sixth sense sort of thing. However, I wrote it like it was someone:

Somehow, Mark woke up like he just had to. Like some voice inside his head was saying “wake up, now, you must!”. He opened his eyes, but didn’t believe what he saw. He blinked, and he rubbed his eyes, until he finally accepted the truth; there were millions of evil-looking scorpion pokémon surrounding them in every direction.

And after a while that started to bug me, which is to say, I decided actually it had been someone and I would just have to figure out who. I'm not sure if this prompted Spirit or if I connected Spirit to it after I'd come up with her in general, but either way I realized this had been her sometime while I was writing the UMR (but after this chapter).

Spirit never actually appeared in the UMR, but she was slated for chapter 37, and I'd already made up the whole conversation where she would reveal herself in my head, including that detail. Thus, by the time I got here in the ILCOE, I knew this was her, and the change from the unknown voice to silent flames was very intentional as foreshadowing. In hindsight, though, I think this is ironically less foreshadowy than the original version unintentionally was: the voice clearly suggested somebody trying to protect them, but the flames just sound like Mark's having more prophetic dreams that incidentally woke him up.

Obviously, the unstated reason May is also awake is that Spirit woke her up too. Wow, though, Spirit, way to leave out Charmeleon. That's a little dickish of you.

Bwahaha, I sincerely love that joke. This is somewhat better than expected in general! Until the last couple of sentences, I think I'm actually doing okay at showing Mark is scared here, and the idea that there can be scientific debate on how to classify a Pokémon is kind of neat worldbuilding, which I go on to make actually relevant to the scene as the possible Dark-type specifically makes Mark wary.

Naturally, the "scientific debate" is actually because originally I couldn't quite decide between the two typings.

I must wonder along with Mark why they haven't attacked yet - I think I was actually going for Spirit having tried to warn them off with the vision of fire, too, but unfortunately there's no way to infer this from the text, so the fact I call attention to it really isn't very helpful here. (Also: wow, Spirit, you gave the vision to literally everybody in the vicinity except Charmeleon.)

This is also yet another instance of Mark not knowing anything about his own region for some reason. Not only does he have no idea about this desert, he's also never heard of the deadly scorpion Pokémon inhabiting it by the millions.

I guess this is technically my first crowd battle, leading up to the legendary fights later. I wonder if I was thinking of that at all when I was writing it here - the UMR was cut off just a few chapters before the Thunderyu battle would have taken place, so I still had never actually gotten to write one, but knew it would be coming. Oddly, I don't remember thinking much about the upcoming legendary battles when I was writing the UMR - I probably wouldn't have looked particularly forward to it since battles have never really been my favorite thing to write, but it's still a little funny that I can't recall it ever really being something I was planning or dreading or just thinking about at all in any capacity.

In the previous versions, May falls unconscious first and then Mark thinks of flying away on Skarmory. I definitely like this version better. Love May's hostile, sarcastic deflection there after being stung.

It's funny nobody thought of flying away on Skarmory before this, though: I've made a point of how the desert is like an endless sea of scorpions, so fighting all of them off should have been pretty obviously impossible.

...Of course, then Green Town turns out to be one of the region's bigger cities, and also has a gym, so not sure how I thought this'd be a reasonable thing to say. Originally, I made up the town names before I developed anything about the towns, and then I didn't actually make any attempt to ensure it made any sense what got called a town and what was a city. This is a thing that has bothered me for like fifteen years at this point.

I was doing okay with the emotion before, but this bit feels a lot flatter despite that Mark really ought to be panicking. It's a shame.

Oh, I guess this was when I was trying very hard not to list descriptions, so I went out of my way to write random "actions" like hair flashing back as an excuse to cram the description in instead of just saying he had shoulder-length silver hair. Sort of a good principle but not the right way to actually do it.

In the original, I just said Mitch's eyes shone in a very special way. As the fic went on, I continued to describe Mitch's eyes as particularly striking, and here, I escalated it to this X-raying feeling, just because. Later, I wrote a throwaway line continuing this escalation by having Mark remark that his eyes somehow reminded him of Chaletwo's (specifically, the can't-look-away aspect). Eventually this accidentally sparked the entire revelation that Mitch was actually harboring Chalenor, so good thing I couldn't stop going on about this dude's eyes.

(Still gray here.)

In the original version, May had saved Mark's life at the Lake of Purity, when he jumped into it earlier, so when Mark saved her life here that made them square. In this version, since I took out Mark's near-drowning, him saving her feels less like they're simply even now and a bit more like the girl just needing rescuing. Granted, May does rescue Mark in chapter 10, but not against a direct threat on his life in the same way. May does get to pretty much save Mark's life in chapter 62, though.

Mitch's habit of looking up while he talks has also been a thing since the original, and like his eyes, it didn't originally mean anything; it was just a mannerism. Later, as his eyes became increasingly tantalizing, I realized he probably does that because he knows his eyes do something and he's uncomfortable with it. He probably assumes it's just the psychic powers, but of course, it's actually the faint echo of Chalenor.

In the original, Mitch's dice analogy was less elaborate:

“Have you ever got six on a dice?” Mitch suddenly asked.

“What do you mean? I mean, yes, of course, but does that have anything to do with Scorplack venom?”

“Then imagine this is a dice with ten faces, and she will live if we get ten.” Mitch yet again ignored Mark’s question.

“That doesn’t help very much...” Mark said.

“Yes, it does. I have much experience of bringing bad news to people,” said Mitch and looked up again.

Love how Mark goes "This isn't helpful" and Mitch just goes "Yes, it is." If you are not feeling helped, the problem is on your end.

In the ILCOE, the totally helpful analogy was expanded into this entire philosophy on chance, which Mitch presumably developed after his miraculous survival in the desert and subsequent weird psychic intuitions that he can't explain turning out to be correct, plus witnessing a lot of people both dying and making it. That's not an unreasonable way to develop an eccentric way of thinking about odds. I like that the amounts I picked for the hypothetical bet actually match up so that the expected value is the same as the original bet - the fact hardly anyone would take it really is making a point about how our perception of odds doesn't quite match up with the reality.

(Of course, the really big point that analogy makes is about the marginal value of money. This decision is going to be made differently depending on what ten thousand Pokédollars is actually worth for the person. If they're obscenely rich and it's a drop in the ocean, maybe they'll take the bet for the hell of it; if it's all the money they have to pay for groceries for the next week, nope.)

He wasn't alone! He just said he had a Venonat! God, this thing with Pokémon just not counting as people. All I had to do here was say his Venonat had fainted, or that it was stuck in its ball.

The smoothest of segues.

This thing about Mitch believing he should be dead is pretty pivotal - after all, it's what motivates him to give his body to Chalenor. To me this was pretty much Mitch's one big fundamental character trait: he thinks he's dead, Mitch is a character he's playing that kind of terrifies him but has subsumed his identity, and he carries on basically feeling he's a ghost trapped in this alien persona and rightfully he shouldn't be here (ha, I never realized it before, but... Chalenor probably accidentally made those feelings worse, didn't he). However, as it turns out Mitch ends up spending a lot more of his onscreen time rambling about entirely different things than establishing this actually important thing about him. The next revision would more sensibly focus on what's actually significant.

I did apparently keep this bit of Mitch being hilariously blunt about the possibility May is dying.

Wow, Mark, that's a remarkably self-centered way of looking at this. (Just wait to see what else this journey has in store for you, though.)

This Mew appearance was always so utterly random and pointless, until years later I figured out actually Mew comes here a lot, because he can't shake the feeling that something about this place still feels like Chalenor. Also, more meaningless talk about fate and obscuring his weird desperate irrational search for Chalenor with coming when he feels he should.

In the original, I used the Pokémon speech to humorous effect here:

“Mew! Just when I need you! You see I have a problem here... can you just heal her or something, Mitch says she’s most likely going to die...”

“Meeew,” said Mew, shaking its head.

“Why can’t you?” asked Mark angrily.

“Meeeeeeew,” said Mew.

“So you think I won’t understand??? I will understand, why shouldn’t I understand?” said Mark annoyed.

“Mew meeeew mewwwww,” said Mew.

“Okay, I don’t understand. Fine. Can you then just resurrect her if she dies?”

“Meww,” said Mew and shook its head again.

“But you could resurrect Scyther! Why not May?”

“Mew meww.”

“Okay. You can’t heal her, and when you’re trying to tell me the reason, you talk in such a scientific nonsense there is no way to understand you. I ask if you could resurrect her, and you say you can’t and say I won’t understand that either. Well, now you tell me both of those reasons until I understand you!”

I love how Mew's overly complex scientific nonsense is simply "Mew meww."

The UMR translated Mew's dialogue, the way I was doing with all significant Pokémon speech, but left Mark's as is, and avoided technobabble by just stating Mew said a bunch of very scientific things about how Scorplack venom works and why it couldn’t be healed just like that. This destroyed the whole joke about Mew's scientific nonsense being expressed in a couple of "Mew meeeew mewwww" syllables. The original version pretty much kept the lighthearted, goofy tone of Mew's previous appearances in the fic, but this scene in the UMR was probably where this started to change, as writing out Mew's actual dialogue in a context like this would've just been incredibly weird and inappropriate if he kept that tone. Instead, though, Mew sounds very blunt and callous there. All in all, though in this version this scene remains very random and unnecessary (or so it seems), this version was definitely an improvement.

Obviously, in the next revision I'd write this to hint better at what's really going on. I could remove it entirely, of course, but more of Mew and hints about Chalenor would only be a good thing, I think.

It's a little funny Mitch would ask about their relationship here in the first place, but I enjoy Mark making sure to mention it was her idea to go through the desert.

Nice job caring about your Pokémon, Mark.

Mitch's ramblings about Pokémon superiority never actually mean anything; it's just something he happens to find fascinating, probably largely because he keeps treating all these human poisoning victims who are dying while their Pokémon are fine.

In the previous versions, we actually got to see Mitch take a sample of May's blood, wait for the poison to separate out of it (he should own a centrifuge), and then analyze the poison with a machine. I was obviously just making up something that sounded cool, but it was kind of fun to properly see Mitch doing a science, which we don't get to see here.

The previous versions also didn't end on a cliffhanger here: just before the end of the chapter, May turned over in her sleep, proving that she would live according to Mitch's earlier explanation that if she moved it meant she'd recover.

Overall, this chapter wasn't so bad, I think. Characters getting into mortal peril is always nice, and Mitch gets his introduction alongside a slew of mysteries. I could definitely make this a whole lot more intriguing and effective now that I actually know what's going on, though. Originally, I'd made Mitch odd and mysterious pretty much for the hell of it and because it sounded cool, figuring I'd be able to come up with the answers later, and of course, I didn't figure it out until years later.

I feel like I had a plan at one point for how I was going to get Mark and May into the Black Desert in the IALCOTN, but by the time a post on Serebii encouraged me to write down some of what my plans had been, I'd forgotten whatever I may have come up with. Either way, I'm sure I can figure out something that makes more sense than Mark being completely unfamiliar with the geography and Pokémon of his own region.