When I decided to do another story to balutin it all up, I went back to that one poll I was talking about earlier, where it asks, “What would be a good story for a PG-13 A&O movie?” and one of the suggestions was “Kate and Humphrey are taken hostage sa pamamagitan ng King and the Rogues”. So, I decided to use that for a plot and now, that part in chapter three of Missing Parents when Cando and Hutch say they have to stay behind has meaning because the Rogue mga lobo did end up attacking.

But before I could bring the Rogues into the story, first, I had to balutin up the mystery of what happened to Humphrey’s parents and tell the entire story from all viewpoints. So, I made the first chapter about everyone telling the whole story. It took a while to write, mainly because I was pretty much rewriting what I had written in the last chapter of Missing Parents, so it was a bit tedious.

Once I was done telling the story and filling the plot-hole that everyone (including myself) had been upset at for so long, I could finally bring the Rogues into the story. But I knew that to make this a satisfying conclusion, Humphrey needed madami backup than just the few remaining members of his pack. So, I thought and thought and then decided to renew the friendship that he and Kyle once had and then Kyle’s pack would sumali the fight.

Once that was done, I brought them back to the Western Pack and I imagined it to be kind of in ruins, and while they would be staring in awe at the state of their home, that would be the perfect opportunity for a rogue lobo to sneak up and kidnap Humphrey.

The part about King threatening to throw Humphrey off the cliff seemed like a good thing to include. This was the big finale of the franchise, or at least it was supposed to be, so I needed to build up the tension and constantly put Humphrey in danger. And the entire distraction and stalling that Kate and Garth did to rescue Humphrey seemed like a good and simple way to rescue him.

When I got to the part of Humphrey and King fighting, I had decided to actually kill Humphrey this time. But I couldn’t see any way to really do that with this fight. Plus, the story would be too short. Seeing as how this was the final chapter in Humphrey’s story, I wanted The Legend of the Peaceful Warrior to be longer than Missing Parents. Plus, I had called it “The Legend of the Peaceful Warrior” because the name “Humphrey” means “peaceful warrior” and I wanted him to be remembered as a legend and at this point in the story, he hadn’t done anything that was worthy of remembrance.

So, what other enemy could I bring into it that would 1) be able to kill Humphrey while offering a pretty good climactic fight before-hand 2) give a true sense of peril and hopelessness so that Humphrey would need to rally the mga lobo together, and 3) would be such a terrible foe that the Rogues would agree to fight with the Western Pack instead of against them. Who better than humans?

But I knew that even if I extended the story sa pamamagitan ng adding a large-scale battle with the humans, I needed actual fighting to fill in the gap until we ultimately got to the fight that killed Humphrey.

I was eventually to get some ideas, but at first, I separated them all into their own chapters, just to have madami chapters. But they were all pretty short, so I eventually combined them all into one. Originally, the story was sixteen chapters long.

I eventually realized that if the entire town was at the battle, then Kenya’s former owner would be there, too. And so, it would only make sense for them to meet since this was the end and it would make for a good way to balutin up her arc, for her to finally break her ties to her domesticated life. I also figured this guy, who I later named Lucas as I was working on A Hero’s Past, would most likely want to get her back and Humphrey would obviously try to protect her which would create tension between the two sides and would also give Kenya a choice to make.

Originally, Kenya was abused sa pamamagitan ng her owner who was a drunk, but as I was Pagsulat A Hero’s Past, I needed a filler chapter and so I decided to make him sober up and tell about how things got better for her and how she had formed a bit of a bond with him, which created a plot-hole in The Legend of the Peaceful Warrior as when Lucas confronts Kenya in the valley, he’s still pagganap abusive and she is afraid to go back to him and acts like they don’t really have a bond, which they ended up developing as I wrote A Hero’s Past. So, I ended up going back about a taon later and rewriting this part of the fight so that he accepts her choice and walks away.

Once I started getting to chapter fourteen, I figured the story was long enough now and that it was time to balutin it up and trigger the final, climactic showdown.

Now, my original plan for Humphrey’s death was kind of lame. It mainly relied on his bullet wound from the end of Missing Parents. I had this whole complex reason why he would die. So pretty much, I planned on having him jump on one of the humans and another one would tackle him. The force of the impact would be so strong that it would knock the bullet out of place where it had lodged itself in his lung. The bullet plugged up the hole, keeping his lung inflated, but as soon as he got tackled, the force of the impact would dislodge it and his lung would collapse.

But I figured that a regular human wouldn’t really have the power to hit him that hard so that’s why I decided to include military (which I eventually changed to a group of Viggo’s men). But I also decided that because this was the end, we needed a one-on-one fight between two characters to end this, not some walang tiyak na layunin accident. So, I scrapped the idea of the collapsed lung and started thinking of a new one. Plus, it was super farfetched.

I was thinking about how this entire battle between the mga lobo and the humans would play out now that a superior force was involved and that’s when I got the final idea that made it into the story. If this is a military group, then there’s obviously going to be some sort of commanding officer, like a colonel or a general and I thought that the commanding officer would be the one to kill Humphrey.

I knew that there was going to be this huge fight involved and I was excited to get started on it, but I only knew how it was going to end. I had no idea what would happen during the fight or how it would even get started. I worked on the latter first. I knew that Humphrey would only target a specific person if someone he cared about was threatened. So, I thought and then remembered, we just had this moment between him and Kenya. So, she was the one that was going to be threatened.

Coming up with the content of the fight was probably the trickiest part. I personally feel like the hardest part of ending any trilogy or franchise or TV ipakita is the final conflict because everything that’s been going on from the very beginning has been leading up to this specific moment. And so, you need to end it in a way that will make sense to the story, and you also have expectations made sa pamamagitan ng the fans that you have to uphold so you don’t let anyone down.

I had a lot of fun coming up with what was going on during the fight. I eventually ended the fight with the General on his back and Humphrey on tuktok of him. The General is holding Humphrey up as Humphrey tries to bite him and then the General stabs him.

I liked this way of doing it at the time, but a couple years later, I read back through it and realized, this isn’t Humphrey. Humphrey’s not the vicious animal I made him out to be in that last sequence, so I ended up rewriting it so that instead of having him get stabbed while trying to rip the General’s face off like a rabid animal, he sacrifices himself to save Kate.

Once Humphrey had been stabbed, I finished up the fighting and made the humans retreat while the mga lobo chased them. But the three closest mga lobo to Humphrey stayed behind to fight the General. He eventually retreated too, but he grabbed his pistol up off the ground because he planned to return to claim Humphrey as a trophy.

Humphrey’s dying words literally took weeks of thought. I started coming up with ideas back when I had just started Pagsulat chapter fifteen. That was around mid-December, and I didn’t write Humphrey’s death until sometime in January. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task. This was the main character of the franchise, so I had to do a good job completing his story and that included his last words. I figured he would say something special to everyone he cared about. Kenya, Adam, his pups, and Kate. Kate was definitely the hardest to think of because she was his wife and they had been through so much together.

When it finally came time to kill him, I admit, I hesitated for a good five minutes. Humphrey represented a staple of my childhood, so it was hard to actually kill him off. I even considered the idea of not killing him completely, but I knew that wouldn’t be good for the story (even though that kind of ended up happening anyway).

I originally intended for there to be another chapter of just grieving for Humphrey, but I couldn’t think of how to fill that space, so I just scrapped the idea. I knew Kate would be heartbroken, though, and I really wanted to bring the emotion home. So that’s why I went into madami detail than usual describing how she would never feel his soft balahibo again, or how she’d never see his playful smile. I never planned out what I was going to write for that part. I just wrote whatever came into my head.

I decided to have them erect the logboard in Humphrey’s honor because I figured that his sacrifice would be an inspirational story told for many years as a tradition. And usually when great tales and legends are told, the group that it’s being told to usually gathers around some kind of memorial to hear it. So, I decided that they should gather around the logboard.

I included an epilogue to really bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. Basically, wrapping up everyone’s story once and for all, even though it didn’t stay that way. Looking back, you can really see the change my Pagsulat style went through. When I wrote the first two stories, I was trying too much to stick with the same tone of the movies, but once I veered away from that, they were madami grounded in realism and started getting good.