I'm going to bump this up, because I need to note a rather serious mistake I have made, and now have to go back and change.
I refer to two different documents for my real world locations of Pokemon cities. Both of these are saved PDF's, because the bookmarks for both of the sites had died (one got shut down by a request from The Pokemon Company, and the other was a free hosted site that simply died). Neither of these documents are stored in a place I can easily find them, so I have to dig for them to find them, and don't have them to compare.
The problem is I have Blackthorn in the wrong place. I noticed this originally when I was trying to figure out how far away Mt. Mortar was, because that was where I was originally going to write this update, as a simple, passby section paired with another one to finish this line of events and move onto the next one. However, looking around the country with Google Maps, I started to realize there was a problem. I realized I was in the very wrong place after tracking down Mt Fuji, which is what Mt. Silver is. Suwa, Nagano Prefecture is far too north of Mt Fuji, and also is located north of Lake Biwa (the Lake of Rage) so it couldnt possibly be the right place. After searching around, I found both of the documents, and realized not only that, but a number of Johto areas are in disagreement between the two. The other document had it placed in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture. Looking at that area, I noticed theres a river running through/around the city, which fit the bill for the setting they used in the anime episode where Clair was getting the Dratini up the river to evolve. There is a 90 mile difference between those two cities, putting the former much too far away to be a proper part of Johto.
Searching the internet after that, however, I found that the second document, that had it in Gifu, was still around (
linked here if you want to see it, the entire site's in Japanese though). So I will be referring to that document solely.
The 'Ditto Ring' is an idea I got playing Nethack. I play it on my PDA, and use the names of characters from here, the characters I use in MMORPGs, and from Fate/Stay Night. I started one game as Sabrina and a Wizard, and got as a starting item this ring of polymorph. as I went around, it would randomly change me into different monsters (or sometimes back), but when I took off the ring I still was affected by the power. reading some Nethack spoilers I read there's also a version of the ring you can control, so I combined the two rings into the Ditto ring as described here (was going to go into some more description originally, but i declined to do it with how big this update got). as I was originally planning on going simply going into Mt. Mortar and fighting the guy with the Ditto ring,
However, I realized back as well one other minor detail, they were following the guy who summoned the Tyranitar
east, not west towards Mt. Mortar. Not wanting to bother changing that as well, I started to look at what was west of Gifu, when I realized exactly where I was. I was right near Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture, which is what Hinamizawa was based off of in Higurashi No Naku Koroni, which happens to be a recent favorite anime of mine because of the setting. So I picked that for this update, and it grew into something rather massive as I explored some ideas to set up for things that will happen later in the story. (And, since it was released in English today, I held off the update for today in celebration
) Storyline-wise, I aborted the endless summer at Tatarigoroshi-hen/Himatsubushi-hen. The conversation at the beginning where Sabrina recounts the recording is from the "Maebara Keiichi's Interview" from the TIPS of Tatarigoroshi-hen.
So that's that. I will go back and correct the previous sections with the mistakes, and try to be more careful in the future. If anyone knows how to save multiple Google Earth placemarks into exported file, I'll make up a group of placemarks pointing out where various things are in this story.
