So uh, hi guys...it's been a while, huh? Yeah, like...'a few months ago' while.

Don't panic; I'm not leaving or abandoning the story or anything. I just wanted to give a brief note about why I haven't updated this lately.

If you were around since the beginning of this fic, you'll know that things were really picking up speed compared to my normal updates. This is because I actually wrote out about 100,000 words of this story in advance (like, WAY back in 2015 when this was only going to be a 7-chapter parody fic), so I was pretty well-prepared.

The only problem with that is...my writing skills leveled up, and those 100,000 words don't look so appealing anymore. They look decent, but they could be a lot better-written. So uh...yeah. I can't use any of those 100,000 words anymore.

Honestly, I WANT to salvage stuff from them. I'm lazy; it would make my life easier. But there are, uh, quite a few major plot and character changes I made in between too. Liiiike you know when Meta Knight was sitting out by himself reflecting a few chapters ago? In those original 100,00 words, he wasn't alone. Bandana Dee came looking for his friend, managed to find him, and persuaded Meta Knight to confide in him about what happened and thus knows all the plot info about Kajinara and Meta Knight's backstory. However, being naturally untrusting and suspicious of people myself, I found that kinda OOC, and as you can see, I decided to change that and rewrote the entire chapter. As a matter of fact, the original chapter with Bandana actually went through five rewrites; I have at least 50,000 in words that didn't even make the original's cut. That says something about some of the things I wanted to touch up.

And besides updating scenes to my current writing style, I also wanted to adjust a few of my headcanons for the world and characters in general. For example, the first chapter of this fic...wait, I did revise that one; I rewrote it completely. ANYWAY, the first chapter (STILL MISTAKENLY) says that Meta Knight is able to store things in his cape. It's not that that's not a neat headcanon (as a matter of fact, it IS neat; I stole it from someone), but I forgot that puffballs can store things in their stomachs anyway, which gives no reason for Meta Knight to do that at all. I'm just patching little things like that, or characters' response to things, or how obvious/unobvious my hints were.

I also decided a while back this year to...crap this was a tough decision...go completely gameverse. Now I don't get many reviews like this, but when I combine game and anime canon (since it IS possible to do canonically), people expect me to do like everybody treats game-anime combo stories and use the anime as the base, treating the games as just a source of inspiration and not actually sticking to any game canon. However, I used the games as the base and used the anime to fill in backstory, which made some people call my canons/theories baseless or say that I was making characters OOC or screwing up facts...since, y'know, they'd only watched the anime. Combine the fact that there aren't a lot, if any, gameverse fics and I made this call.

By making that call, I could eliminate having to shove the GSA into the past timeline and therefore make Meta's past a lot more interesting (as you've seen if you've kept up with Scrapbook). Overall, I'll miss the anime background and the characters it had to offer, but since when is Cos known for doing things that everyone else is doing? My biggest peeve with any fandom is when people just copy stuff over and over and never do anything new even when new canon material comes out. That was one of my reasons for writing this story in the first place, and I should...y'know...really stick with my heart and reasons, even if I lose viewers for doing so.

TL;DR, this story is still being updated. As a matter of fact, I am actually revising some of the older chapters whenever I have writer's block, as you can see from the first and second chapters of this project. I'm not sure whether to update all of them before posting a new chapter, though, or to post new material and just update the old chapters whenever I feel like it. I know a lot of my viewers are still active (and probably DON'T remember what happened in any of the previous chapters at this point lol) but any new viewers I'd get would experience severe style whiplash between chapters.

I already rewrote chapter 9 (and 1, and 2) just for the heck of it and it didn't take more than a few hours, so check that out and give me a judgment call on that. The original is posted on my deviantArt account under the same name, buuuut there's probably only 100 words from the original in the rewrite at all, so have fun comparing it. FYI, there are still a few things about the introduction that I wanted to change; mainly introducing important theories/headcanons...buuuuut if you remember the original introduction (also probably on deviantArt), Meta's character development is a lot better explained than before. -.-

But as for new content...fear not! I went through and made a huge outline of all the main things I wanted to happen in the story and which chapters they'd happen in, so writing when I have spare time won't be as hard from now on. (Now I just need spare time :p) My estimate for the project length is about 30 chapters, excluding the epilogue and any bonus scenes I may throw in afterwards.

Also, I, uh...updated the chapter titles. Heh heh. No reason I would mention that at all; it's not like there's anything suspicious about me mentioning that...

Anyway, just wanted to tell you guys what was going on! I WILL delete this chapter and replace it with the update whenever I can finish it, but it's becoming a bit lengthy, so hopefully it will be worth your wait. I've spent more time writing the chapter after that one, so uh...another update should come soon after...?

(I'm also in need of a better description; what can I say that sounds interesting without spoiling anything?)

(Also, the reviews for requests thing...I have an update for that on Scrapbook that's coming out soon, so I'll explain there. Just be aware that if you leave a review on this note and you're signed into your account, it won't let you post another review when I delete this and upload a new chapter, so I'm not sure I'll handle that when counting reviews unless you left one anonymously...Sorry about that. -.-)