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!

Are you ready for even more Scyther?!

This chapter was published at 1:45 in the morning on Christmas Day 2005, the final chapter of that year - a bit less than a month and a half after the last one. Gone are the days of me writing chapters I was excited about in like three days; this is a chapter that's basically 100% Scyther, no battles or fiddly bits or transitions, but it still took this long.

I actually kind of preferred how this chapter opened in the UMR:

Mark wasn’t sure what would be waiting for him when he returned with the doctors to show them where the trainer was. He hoped that Scyther had been sensible enough to hide the body somewhere and then come back and claim that some other pokémon took him and he followed but couldn’t catch up. But what if Scyther was still having the pleasure of cutting him up? How would he explain that? He had told them, as well as May and Alan, that the boy was attacked by a wild Sneasel, like Scyther had advised. Now it was just hoping that Scyther wouldn’t get him into serious trouble...

The ILCOE version tells us that Mark thinks obviously Scyther would've killed the trainer, but the UMR version shows it more with Mark already convinced there's no way the trainer is still alive, just hoping Scyther had the sense to at least hide the body where it wouldn't be found. That's just a more fun way to convey it to me.

It is neat that they actually make use of teleportation for something like this. I guess the psychics can use the phone signal to teleport blindly to the location of the call? I doubt that I was properly thinking about it at the time, though.

I also like that May's exceedingly difficult about it, because of course she is, although being difficult before she even lends Mark her phone is a bit much.

These probably should be paramedics, not doctors, shouldn't they? I think I called them paramedics in chapter 49. But I suspect I didn't know that word here.

You can just say "that didn't make any sense" instead of "the logical failure in that assumption", fifteen-year-old self.

Of course, Mark never gets contacted for a report.

In the UMR, Scyther just sort of mentioned as they walked that he'd used to live there when he was wild; here, I tried to tie it back to the incident. I think it works out reasonably smoothly, although the idea that these Sneasel just happen to hunt late is annoyingly lazy.

That's impressively wordy and stilted.

It feels so weird and jarring for him to suddenly realize this when literally seconds ago he was just wistfully looking around the forest, and before that acting very cool about the whole incident. Yet again, his emotional process just doesn't make sense.

Mark. Mark, why aren't you trying to do something about this. Your Pokémon attempting suicide in front of you is not a time to just stand there or be "a bit wary".

The unbearable amount of ellipses makes Scyther's dialogue sound even more over-the-top and melodramatic than it would without them. Please stop, fifteen-year-old self.

In the UMR he mentioned this much more casually, like he just genuinely considers this a normal and reasonable way to keep his scythes maintained: I myself developed a special way to know when I should sharpen them. Every night, I test them, and if they hurt, I need to sharpen them more. The "special way" sounds awkward, but it's a lot better than doing it as this dramatic ellipse-filled declaration.

This chapter, of course, is from before I properly developed Stormblade and Shadowdart in Scyther's Story, but I had begun to think through Scyther's backstory and what happened between the three of them before he left the swarm. I don't think Stormblade quite sounds like himself here, but overall, in this conversation Stormblade and Shadowdart definitely sound way more like themselves than they did in the UMR.

Later I'd describe their color differences as being pretty subtle and only really significant to a Scyther, but here I'm absolutely making them sound very pronounced from Mark's point of view. I don't blame everyone who assumed Shadowdart was shiny, and in hindsight it should've been fairly predictable that people would make that assumption.

He's oddly meek and submissive to Shadowdart here, given what their dynamic turns out to have been like in Scyther's Story, but I guess that can be chalked up to him being kind of ashamed of having a trainer and mingling with humans now that he's confronted with his old friends.

ADVERBS

Generally, I regard all the Pokémon speech in this fic as being a magical perfect translation of meaning and connotations, without having to be entirely literal, and as such I haven't tried to avoid having the Pokémon's dialogue use human terms that they wouldn't know per se - the name Razor, for instance, is just a word that Pokémon use for a very sharp edge, the same one they'd use for the attack "Razor Leaf". However, I do find it a bit jarring to have Shadowdart reference robots. Surely the word he's actually using has some closer English analogue than that.

God, these lines.

Maybe you should've called her Nightmare earlier, then? I did this in the UMR, but by the time I was writing this version, I knew he called her Nightmare, so I'm not sure why I still didn't reveal the name until here, especially when I have him make a point of how he hates the thought of Mark calling her Scizor.

More ellipseees

The whole thing about Shadowdart challenging the Leader was new here - in the UMR, he still had a piece cut out of his scythe, but it was just a random injury to make him more menacing, same as Stormblade's lost eye. Obviously, this would then be the subject of The Fall of a Leader, and followed up on in the main fic in chapter 60.

Apparently I still managed to think nah, there's not going to be an official Route 212 before I finish this fic, no way. (Later I retconned it so that the Ouen routes start in the 300s, and with Gen V the games started just counting each region's routes at 1 again, so I never had to change it again after that.)

I guess May and Alan just didn't notice the two suddenly appearing Scyther and the vicious half-duel between them?

I guess May's learned from the previous time she decided to take the shorter path through the middle of the dangerous area.

I like "As you can see, this is a very annoying patch of grass."

Of course, Scyther's Story doesn't show this happening at all; everyone's just obsessed with dueling. I think by that point I'd started finding the idea of Scyther spending their free time cutting down grass (I mean, how much tall grass can there be in the vicinity for a swarm of Scyther to be able to make a regular hobby of it) a little silly. I just thought this whole and he cuts the grass down, really quickly!! thing was a really cool scene for some reason when I was fourteen (I'd turned fourteen in the interval between the equivalents of this chapter and the previous in the UMR).

A rare comma splice in the ILCOE. I think I recall first learning about comma splices while I was writing chapter 36 of the UMR, but after that I think I tried to be very diligent about them.

In the UMR, this conversation happened in a different order; Scyther made the random comment about how it was ironic they were talking when he could murder him kind of out of nowhere, and used rather more visceral detail:

“I could kill you, Mark,” Scyther said slowly, with his eyes closed. “I could sneak up on you in the middle of the night, dash forward when you’re looking in the other direction, knock you down, swing my scythes at your friends so they run for it, cut your throat, rip open your ribcage, tear your lungs apart for the sheer pleasure of it, eat you, I wouldn’t even need to be hungry, because killing gets fun when you’ve done it your whole life, the smell of blood makes your heart pound, it becomes a pleasure to rip the meat off the bone, just the color red alone gets you high… am I disgusting you?” he suddenly added, looking into Mark’s face again.

“Just a bit,” Mark said, when in fact he felt totally sick. What bothered him more than the gory description itself was that Scyther had said all of this in a certain tone of voice that made it sound more like a memory than something made-up.

Mark then just figured out based on that that Scyther must have killed a human before, and from there Scyther explained First Prey to him.

WHY DOES EVERYONE JUST RANDOMLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE ANIMAL WORLD

In the UMR, Scyther specified about a billion refugees had made it to the Pokémon world. He also mentioned that animal world humans had repeatedly tried to sell weapons to the Pokémon world, but the Pokémon world governments adamantly refused.

Ultimately irrelevant worldbuilding infodump, ho!

Nobody's training Pokémon in order to connect with them, though; it's a sport. People aren't just going to stop enjoying a sport because it's not needed to connect them anymore. What nonsense is this.

Also, don't act like Mark trusting you is about humans and Pokémon evolving to trust each other in general. Surely Mark trusting you specifically at the moment is more about the bit where you didn't kill this one dude he was convinced you would, remember? The idea that Mark trusts him in spite of everything simply because of the general Pokémon-human bond just makes the whole thing sound kind of creepy and unhealthy.

It's Spirit!

This little scene was here in the UMR too, at the end of chapter 35. I'm pretty sure this was the first deliberate reference to Spirit in the fic. When I put up chapter 33, I'd written on the update blog I had at the time that I'd just "planned a new plot twist out of an unsolved mystery I found", and when I put up chapters 34 and 35, I repeated that I had something great planned that would be explaining two old mysteries. I think I must have been referring to Spirit and the Chosen plot in these updates, meaning I likely didn't come up with that until this point in the story. From there, I planned to have Spirit's appearance where she explains about the Chosen plot in chapter 37... but I dropped the UMR after chapter 36, meaning it had to wait until I finally made it back there in the ILCOE.

The material from chapters 34 and 35 of the UMR was reordered a lot for this version, with a lot of interesting changes in emphasis. Originally, this is how the flow of the conversation went:

1. Scyther randomly mentions he used to live here.
2. Mark asks if this is where he met Scizor, and if she was beautiful. (Why.) Scyther says she was beautiful, but unlike shallow human beauty standards that are all external, their standards of beauty are mostly about scythes.
3. Mark asks well, isn't that external too? Scyther says nope, your scythes reflect who you are. How much you maintain and sharpen them shows how much respect you have for yourself, and also for those you fight, because cuts from sharp blades hurt less. Scyther vary in how often they sharpen their scythes; he himself decides if they need sharpening by testing them on himself. Mark's weirded out but doesn't comment.
4. Stormblade and Shadowdart appear. Stormblade asks what he's doing with humans and interrogates him about what happened with Nightmare; he's extremely anti-human throughout, and also seems kind of paranoid (“I don’t know what she was thinking, though, going to sleep. Who needs sleep? There are enemies on every side.”). It's hilariously out of character.
5. Once Scyther confesses he saw a human capture Nightmare but didn't do anything, Shadowdart cuts in to call him a coward. Stormblade just says it's unlike him, because he always used to have more guts than the two of them. Apparently in consideration of the kids present (despite his antagonism towards humans), he talks around the fact he's referring to First Prey, but references that Razor did it on his first try, but Stormblade needed three, and Shadowdart took nine and had to close his eyes.
6. Shadowdart lashes out, calling Razor a coward again and making that remark about how maybe it's true he begged for mercy, and Stormblade contradicts him. Stormblade's theory is that Nightmare spared Razor because she thought he was too cute to die this young. Guess he ships it.
7. Shadowdart says he doesn't believe in love, and Nightmare was also a coward, and she probably didn't even mind becoming a Scizor.
8. At this, Scyther is enraged and demands a duel to defend her honour, I guess. Shadowdart says he doesn't duel with losers. Scyther taunts him about taking nine tries to kill for the first time again (he, it seems, doesn't have the same consideration for the kids that Stormblade does).
9. As Shadowdart's about to answer, Stormblade cuts him off to say he's more concerned about what Razor is doing with these humans. (They never actually fight in the UMR.)
10. Scyther goes off on an angry monologue, explaining what happened and then that the reason he went with Mark after leaving his previous trainer was that he knew what they'd think - that Stormblade would reject him for being caught by a human, that Shadowdart would hate him for failing to help Nightmare, that every other Scyther would despise him for having been defeated in a duel. He also says his parents didn't even want to know him anymore. And then he declares that their society sucks and he doesn't want to be a part of it anymore. (Poor ILCOE Scyther is going to take some thirty more chapters to realize this.)
11. Shadowdart says he should've rejected him the moment he was beaten, Stormblade asks if he really prefers humans over the rest of his kind and wants to throw away the little he has left of his reputation, and Razor says yes. Stormblade and Shadowdart leave, and chapter 34 ends.
12. Continuing after the chapter split, Mark asks about the name Nightmare. Scyther explains Pokémon nicknaming for the first time in the UMR.
13. They stop at the very annoying patch of grass, and Scyther cuts his way through it.
14. May asks how he did that; he says it's the first thing they learn to use their scythes for.
15. Mark asks if that means they learn it before hunting. Scyther says yes, they do it for fun and to practice their reflexes; if they learned to hunt first, they'd just want to do that for fun.
16. Mark is surprised to hear Scyther don't hunt for fun. Scyther sarcastically asks why they don't just take over the world while they're at it.
17. This prompts him into a ramble about how they just know better than to attempt some kind of world domination, unlike the humans of the animal world, etc. etc. Mark is amazed that these humans managed to wage not one, not two, but three world wars.
18. From there, Scyther brings up how ironic it is that they're talking and how he could murder Mark in gory detail, Mark asks why he killed a human, and he explains First Prey.
19. Mark asks him why a human, and he says three kids walking were just the first creatures he came across. (A detail that gets lost here! I liked the ominousness of it being three kids.)
20. Mark decides he probably doesn't want to know and drops it.

I pretty much chopped up all of this and rearranged it - many of the same individual pieces happen, but in a different context and emphasized differently. In the UMR, most of the conversation outside of the Stormblade and Shadowdart interlude was about Scyther's general worldview and philosophical musings, and the Stormblade and Shadowdart bit was mostly about how other Scyther view someone like him.

In the ILCOE, the chapter focuses significantly more on Scyther as a person. Look at the bit about Scyther testing his scythes on himself, for example: in the UMR, he's explaining the whole bit about how true beauty lies in the scythes because the way you care for your scythes reflects who you are, and sort of incidentally mentions that he tests his scythes on himself as part of that. It's still self-harm, and Mark still finds it kind of concerning, but it's fairly subtle. Here, on the other hand, Scyther doesn't talk about Scyther beauty standards at all; he's talking about how he's broken yet another sacred law, says the only part of it he's managed to uphold is the part about keeping your scythes sharp, and from there says he's proud of his scythes and sharpens them every day until they don't hurt anymore, showing Mark his scars. It's all about him and the depths of his angst rather than the larger context of Scyther philosophy. Similarly, Scyther no longer rants about Scyther society to Stormblade and Shadowdart, but he does actually attack Shadowdart in a rage when he insults Nightmare, and his big takeaway from the conversation is that the way even his friends have rejected him proves how worthless he is. After they leave, ILCOE Scyther then lingers on that conversation and how Stormblade and Shadowdart have changed as individuals, in a way he didn't in the UMR. Even his musing on the animal world concludes with something more personal as Scyther asks if Mark is ever afraid of him.

It makes sense on one level that I made this shift; I expect I thought these chapters were too rambling and infodumpy originally and wanted to focus more on developing Scyther's individual character here. But I didn't really do that terribly well (like, the bit about Scyther realizing he's broken the last of the laws is in principle interesting, but I just had him very suddenly and dramatically try to kill himself on the spot and then move on to other topics as if nothing happened), and some of the details I left out here were actually really interesting! I dig the thing about scythes reflecting who you are, damn it; that was a totally coherent and interesting way for Scyther to view beauty, and the only reason I can think of for cutting it out entirely here is just that I thought Mark asking if Nightmare was beautiful was kind of cringey (which it is - why is this the first thing on Mark's mind, why does he care if a Scyther is beautiful - but that's no reason not to fit this information in there anyway).

Also, I quite liked how First Prey was built up in the UMR: first there's just this unnamed thing that Scyther did on his first try but Shadowdart needed nine and lashes out at the mention of it, then Scyther goes on to reveal they're talking about killing for the first time and taunts Shadowdart with it, and then later we learn more about what that's about and that Scyther's was a human. In the ILCOE, I took First Prey out of the Stormblade and Shadowdart conversation entirely and just had Scyther bring it up afterwards, which I don't think is nearly as fun.

The change to Stormblade and Shadowdart is kind of fascinating, though. Originally, their characterization was very distinctly that Stormblade was upset about Razor being trained now while Shadowdart was repulsed by his cowardice in not helping Nightmare. Shadowdart was definitely the more aggressive and unforgiving of the two of them, but they were clearly meant to have these two very different issues with Razor. However, in the ILCOE, it's Shadowdart who makes all the disparaging comments about him having a trainer and Stormblade who's mostly concerned with what happened with Nightmare! Shadowdart still thinks he's a coward, and Stormblade is still visibly uncomfortable with trainers too, but ultimately their material concerns end up totally reversed, which is pretty funny.

Obviously, as I was fleshing out Scyther's backstory in the background, I thought a fair bit about Stormblade and Shadowdart, and ultimately they shifted around quite a bit in that process. Stormblade in the UMR was obviously friendlier towards Razor, had been impressed by Nightmare, and appeared to be something of a romantic and invested in their relationship - so wouldn't it make more sense if he were more concerned with the part where Razor failed to help Nightmare? Meanwhile, Shadowdart didn't believe in love and was much more antagonistic and disdainful towards Razor in general - wouldn't he be the one to be openly repulsed to see him with a trainer and insult him for it? All in all I think their characterizations here do make more sense, and though Stormblade especially isn't quite in character, this version of them would form the basis for fleshing them out further in the spin-offs.

Overall, this chapter isn't the most relevant; a lot of what Scyther is saying doesn't really have anything to do with anything (especially all the animal world talk, yet again). Stormblade and Shadowdart do turn out to appear again later, but there's regrettable little followup for the events of the previous chapter, and all in all this chapter is obviously just me indulging in a bunch of Scyther because he was my favorite character. I'm fond of the core of it, and I'd still include Stormblade and Shadowdart's appearance and some of the conversation here in the next revision - but it'd have to be written better to portray Scyther's turmoil without all these cheesy melodramatic lines, and I'd want to bring back some of the focus on showing how Scyther society works, which is relevant to Scyther's arc and also just neat.