Master Kirby: I hoped you would come back! I saw that you hadn't been around since June, and wondered if you'd left us for good. Thanks for reading and replying once again.

The further away we move from Chapter 61, the more it feels like a real anomaly to me: it definitely was quite uncharacteristic in a number of ways. But what you said - "Now that she has let out all her guarded secrets she will probably feel less of a mental/emotional burden when she reenters the world" (and about showing Lisa as a normal teenage girl) - was exactly what I was aiming for with that chapter. It's just that I didn't carry it off very well, but at the time I thought it was all right. Oh well. You live, you learn.

Yup, Lance is a very clever leader, so he's got a whole lot of schemes going on behind the scenes. One of them is to work out exactly what Gavin's relevance to the Legend (and therefore, the Guard's plans) is; and of course, to help him master his psychic powers. As to the time you referred to in your post, that was at the Water Colosseum in (I think...) Chapter 15; and yeah, I think it was Dratini and Anna's Psyduck who were trapped. Good observation about Gavin, too: mastering his powers would be hugely beneficial, not just for him, but for the rest of the Guard.

To be honest I'm not sure how much of Gavin's journey will be shown ... we'll have to wait and see. Anyway, thanks very much for returning, mate; and I hope to see you back for the future chapters. (Btw - nice call about the 'months for her, years for us' ... We're coming up on six years now. It's terrifying.)

UPDATE

Everyone: Howdy. I think it's about time I shared some actual news of progress with you. Since July I've been fairly vague, so here's something a bit more quantifiable. For my plans for this last book of Lisa the Legend, I've basically split the book into 9 sagas, which are comprised of 2-4 chapters each (do the math if you want an extremely rough idea of how many chapters we'll be ending up with). These sagas are used purely for my sake as I write the book, just so it feels less onerous than embarking upon a massive novel; it breaks it up into achievable chunks. To give you a rough idea of how my planning is going, I've essentially done the planning for 7 of the book's 9 sagas. So I'm getting quite close to finishing the planning stage now. One or two of those sagas need some tweaking, and there's something giving me issues around chapter 67/8, but apart from that, I'm pleased to say it's shaping up really nicely.

I'm at the point now where the next step is to begin planning out the details of the Endgame of the whole fic - the big finale or whatever you want to call it - which is going to be heaps of fun and also quite difficult, I reckon, because it's so involved and full-on. But I'm excited nonetheless, because it's all falling into place now. And lately I've been getting more of an overview of the fic as a whole, and it's really helped to get that sort of "omniscient" perspective. For a long time I've been writing this with almost the same naivete that Lisa once had: now I feel like I'm getting a better grasp on how the world really runs (Lisa's world that is), and her place in it - and indeed, her character itself.

I hope that's a bit more satisfying to read than "planning going well" or whatever it is I usually say. Rest assured this fic is going to be charging onward once again very soon - I wouldn't be doing all this work for nothing! I'm flat out with exams until late November, but then I have three months off for the summer, and I intend to do a great amount of writing in that time.

Chapter 62 sits at just under 3000 words at the moment, but that doesn't mean much, because a lot of it will be changing. Anyway - thanks for being so patient guys (you know, assuming at least a few of you are still floating around somewhere) and sorry for taking so damn long to produce something!

Cheers!