My Hero Automata - Grand Finale! (Patreon)

Alright folks! First off...sorry this was even later than I mentioned in my delay notice. Someone at the family Easter meetup ended up being a positive Typhoid Mary, with virtually every other person there getting sick a couple of days later. Including me. Honestly, I got off with a relatively weak version compared to some, but I still slept a ton for a couple of days there. Even with that, I almost made it, having had the writing fully done yesterday morning. Only to end up getting mild food poisoning yesterday evening, which kept me from finishing the editing pass.

Yeah. It's not been a great week -_-. It's likely at this point that Halfway Broken's update will likely be a day or two behind the usual as well.

Anyway, despite all of that, it's done! I have to admit I'm not...entirely happy with the final battle or the Epilogue. The battle is probably a case of 'can't be fixed,' as combat has always been my weakest point and I did my best with it At least, my best without drawing it out for multiple chapters. The Ending/Epilogue MIGHT get a bit of reworking in the future. Honestly, it's suffering from the fact that I changed course twice regarding the ending of the story. One in a major way, back when my Patrons of the time voted overwhelmingly to shift from focusing on the Guild to focusing on the Infrastructure and Engineering projects.

That one was the big shift, by the by. The original planned ending from the first words I put on digital paper was actually supposed to be 2B sacrificing herself to create a space-based shield that would protect Earth from any more invasion via Rifts. Something that would have been built up to as events with the Guild and Rift Bubbles escalated. Covering the war on Ziltmach wasn't something I originally intended on at all, but rather a thing that grew out of my need to do something active with the industrial capacity they were building. So that it wasn't just a ton of engineering and politics.

I mention this as some of you might be interested in the little detail that such was originally going to be how A Very Confused Pokémon Adventure started.

Had I continued on the story's original plan, after sacrificing herself 2B was going to end up back in the Void, speaking with the same entity that made her a Quirk in the first place. An entity that would reward 'the bright little spark' for saving a version of humanity...by making her a Real Girl in the Pokémon world. Notably, it was after the swerve away from that original ending that I decided I still wanted to write a version of 2B in the Pokémon world, which is how A Very Confused Pokémon Adventure came to exist in its current form.

The second ending I planned, after that swerve, wasn't actually all that dramatically different than the one contained within this Finale. It would have been a bit more potent, though, as it would have contained a hook for a sequel of sorts. Specifically, a sequel that was intended to be a My Hero Automata/Mass Effect crossover. You'll see when you read the Epilogue I actually did write how that would have been pretty easy.

It should be obvious, but the reason I made the minor tweaks to remove that possibility is partially because of the massive nosedive in popularity My Hero Automata took compared to my other works. At this point, it doesn't seem to have enough fans to justify a sequel :-(. Doubly so when I have so many other stories already ongoing. The other reason is that I generally don't like writing two stories that both take place in the same reality, at the same time. With Stripper With a System existing and being fairly popular, introducing another ME fic doesn't appeal. Particularly one that has the complication of building off a less popular work.

Anyway! With all that rambling out of the way...enjoy the last few chapters of My Hero Automata! As always, the new bits of the story are attached here in various formats, and a master file update will be added to the pinned post shortly.