LAST EDITED ON Jun-17-13 AT 03:36 AM (EDT)
 
>It might be beneficial to weave some of the mini-stories into the
>official chronology at this point; someone trying to jump into this
>one directly S5M2 might be a little bit lost without reading some
>DSMP.

That bears thinking about. The "mini-story" tool has rather exceeded its original spec - they were supposed to be specifically non-vital pieces of work, so that people not using the Forum for whatever reason wouldn't miss out on anything important, but keeping that kind of thing separate on the creative side proved to be a hassle and would've made for lost opportunities on both sides of the line. A tighter integration of presentation may well be called for now that such an integration has started occurring creatively...

>I'd like to take this moment to express the hope that in UF,
>there are (...)
>quarians still alive and well on Rannoch.

On Rannoch, almost certainly not. However, the Rannoch Hegemony was a fairly big space nation. Among Tali's people, there are persistent legends - more like articulated dreams, really - that there still exists, somewhere out on the far end of the old Hegemony where the Flotilla dared not go, at least one old colony which was passed over by the vicissitudes of the Morning War. It's a kind of quarian Shangri-La, or the kingdom of Prester John. Individual quarians tend to impress their own views upon it. Hardliners believe (or wish) that it's a place where the quarians won the Morning War and their geth were destroyed. Reconciliationists think the quarians and geth of the borderlands (not with a capital B) will have settled their differences before reaching the point where either side faced annihilation, and now live together in a peaceful and synergistic society. Those who most fervently wish the whole thing had never happened prefer to believe that, well, the whole thing never happened, the border geth never rose up in the first place and all is as it was.

None of these things is terribly probable, and if any of them did come to pass, no one has ever been able to establish contact with the world or worlds on which it may have happened. By 2410, most educated quarians think it's a pleasant fantasy, nothing more, and that nothing lives within the Perseus Veil now but the geth (if indeed the individual thinker in question perceives the geth as alive).

>Hmm, interesting. I take it Tali the Elder didn't take her husband's
>name when she married Vedik'Zorah?

No, that isn't the custom among quarians, at least in UF (no data existed about such conventions in the games that were out when Star-Crossed was written, and I haven't played the third one). Children usually take the name of their father's clan (though there are those in the modern day who challenge this as a quaint custom that is driving some of the noblest of the old clan names, such as Shukra, into extinction), but name changes upon marriage are rare.

>Given their relative sizes (seriously, Nanami needs to eat something)

She's not skinny, she's just small-boned.

>I sort of imagine that Thor could get his entire hand around her neck
>if he wanted to. :)

Pretty much, yes; in this case the phrase "scruff of the neck" is intended to indicate that he's holding onto her from behind rather than in front (then it'd be "seized her by the throat", which has rather different, more... confrontational... connotations). It's possible that she didn't bother to struggle because she responded to this stimulus as a cat would have, and went completely limp. Honestly, that's probably the best approach to take when Thor picks you up by the neck no matter which side of it his thumb is on.

>From what little we've been told of him, the UF flavor of Sifu-Dyas
>sounds like he was extremely old school; that is, he'd take the
>position that everyone who is strong in the force should, properly, be
>a member of the Jedi Order, which has a monopoly on the proper way of
>developing and extending ones connection to said force.

Many modern Jedi have trouble with that. The problem is largely historical. The ancient Jedi once adopted - and held for many centuries - the view that the Force is a universal thing and that there are many ways of perceiving and interacting with it, all equally valid for their own purposes, which should be respected and coexisted with. There were even ways of interlocking the various traditions to achieve spectacular cooperative results (kamor bakhva, for instance).

On the other hand, there was also the Sith-Yoma War and the Santovasku Purge. That kind of thing will stretch a being's commitment to philosophical diversity.

>... oh, right. She's part Invid.

Fortunately not the sluggy part.

>So now I'm operating on the assumption that Sosuke has Kaname chipped,

Leaving aside for a moment the way that just soared out over the left-field fence, 354 feet away from the very fine and delicate line that is the comedy-creepiness threshold of the DSMP scenario, Lindsey would know if that had happened. And she wouldn't have been very pleased about it, either.

>or he's carrying some manner of very sophisticated biometric scanner
>that can home in on her.

This is more likely.

>Big risk to run just for some healthy organs.

There's a fine thread of extremely dark comedy running through Dr. Saleon's intentions, actually: He thinks she's human. If he'd succeeded in his acquisition, he'd have discovered to his dismay that nothing he just acquired is of any use to anyone but its original owner. So he'd have incurred the complete shutdown of Brown Sector and the kind of search-and-destroy mission you only read about in Mark Bowden books for nothing.

He's almost better off having been killed the way he was.

That's right down in the far infrared of my personal humor range, but it's there.

>Sosuke is a soldier. (I'd quibble with the 'true warrior' stuff, but.)

I (or rather Kaname) didn't say "true". It's not a philosophical reflection, particularly - it's the distinction between a person who belongs to a uniformed armed force but may or may not be particularly into it (ISTR reading once about an Army study in which it was found that only about 10% of soldiers in combat even attempt to actually shoot anyone, which the Army, being the Army, found shocking and disgraceful), and a person whose vocation (not just his job) is the application of violence. It may not be a pleasant vocation, but a vocation, nonetheless.

If Kaname had had the luxury of considering it further, it would have occurred to her that those two conditions are separate bits in a person's configuration, and that in Sosuke's case what makes him special is that both of them are turned on. A lot of soldiers, as we see from the Army's math above, are not warriors. A lot of warriors - including a number of the Duelists - are not soldiers. A man (or woman - Virginia Shepard comes to mind) who is both is incredibly dangerous and incredibly safe to be with at the same time, if you're standing in the right region of his or her personal threat assessment Venn diagram. :)

>37 is somewhat young to be a Captain, at least would be in the modern
>USN, and humans in the 25th century have longer lifespans and thus
>probably longer and more delayed careers as well. Captain Davidson
>must know... her?... trade very well.

She didn't beat Jim Kirk's record, but it's a respectably early age for such a position. On the other hand, despite the longer overall lifespan, that doesn't really mean humans have slowed down in terms of what they do during those lives. If anything, they've stepped up the pace a bit compared with what we'd think of as normal. In most places, for instance, the majority age for a human or near-humanoid (based on various abstruse biological metrics) is 16 Standard years. (Which means that, in the Republic of Zeta Cygni where her passport comes from, in any case, Kaname's not in fact underage. She can vote, undertake legal contracts, join the Defense Force if she wanted, etc.) What most humans do instead is use that extra time to have several careers, often wildly differing from each other. DSM's own Arthur Haineley, for instance, served in the United Earth Navy for many years, then had a very successful career as a concert pianist, and then trained as a psychologist before becoming a youth counselor.

>I've long wondered; why wasn't the IPO/WDF involved in the Proxima
>Centauri conflict?

The IPO, as you note, didn't have a fleet yet. IPO operatives were involved in the ground war, though they didn't officially take a side; they were ostensibly there to try and protect civilians while the government (which was, after all, as legitimate as these things get in such a situation) and the resistance fought it out.

In practice, one imagines this neutrality was probably observed more in the breach than otherwise, one of many reasons why the Dome felt it necessary to dispense with them in the Alliance altogether after the Argentina incident in 2406.

As for the WDF, they had no dog in the fight. Their contract is with the Federation, not the Earth Alliance, and they mainly guard against external threats anyway. The WDF's charter does have the deeply buried "good of the galaxy" clause - the one invoked to justify, for instance, the Force's interference in the matter of the Salusian succession in 2015 - but Daver is very cautious about when he pulls that trigger, and at the risk of seeming a bit Darwinian about it, Proxima just wasn't big enough.

>so far every ranking officer in Earthforce
>we've seen who isn't named John Sheridan has been both an idiot and a
>tactical incompetent.

In fairness, you haven't seen that many, proportionally. On the other hand, of late it's an organization that's mostly run by its zampoliti, which, as the Soviet military repeatedly demonstrate in the 20th century, isn't really any way to run a railroad.

In Captain Davidson's case, I suspect she'd have done considerably better if she'd been allowed to manage the affair the way she wanted, but - as Jim Kirk has noted with chagrin many times during his career - in the 25th century, with instantaneous galactic telecommunications, a captain is virtually never really the final authority in these matters.

>That actually sounds kind of silly. If a Blue Suns squad shows up B6
>is going to let them just walk into the station in full kit so long as
>their IDs check out?

Sure, if they could demonstrate a genuine necessity for it. Operating at the squad level in a personal security situation is a pretty hard sell, but one Blue Sun with his kit and a proper contract in hand to look out for a specifically identified dignitary? Sure. Garibaldi would assign him a liaison officer, who would follow him around the entire time he was on station - strictly to provide backup and make sure things went according to plan, you understand - but that's because he doesn't like their faces. He likes Sosuke's. :)

>Pedantic nitpick: is the Ikazuchi classed as a BC or a CV?

It's a battlecarrier, so, sort of both. Carriers that can fight other capital ships without requiring extensive escorts are fairly commonplace in the UF universe. (Star Destroyers, Colonial battlestars, et al.)

>You gotta wonder what he made of Akio.

Somebody else's problem.

>Utena is, of course, much better at this sort of thing than I am, but
>one hopes that as she gets more experience under her belt she learns
>not to set up big, complicated, set-piece battles like that.

It wasn't entirely by design; she had to work with the situation she was handed. This, That, and The Other Thing all had to get done first, and she didn't have sufficient assets in hand to do them all without then having to rely on most of the forces she'd used to do them being available for reuse in the main dance.

>2) Earthforce Marines are
>unlikely to view the Navy saying "sorry, we got our asses kicked,
>you're on your own" with a great degree of sympathy.

Indeed. As the byplay between the Master Chief and Sgt. Stacker ("typical swabbies... ") indicates, such sentiments are not uncommon nor confined to Earthforce. They're joking around, of course, but there's a distinct element of "ha ha only serious" involved.

>I know that "Teletha" is her proper, canonical, creator-confirmed
>actual name from Full Metal Panic. But lord, that is an UGLY
>romanization. Would "Theresa" have been so hard for them? Really?

How is this our problem? Besides, I kind of like it. It's, I'unno, exotic. And fun to say.

>Also, that thing is unspeakably ancient. I mean, geez. If what Mikage
>is saying is true, it's older than Thor's hammer or Odin's spear. It's
>older than Boba Fett's genuine Mandalorian battle-armor. It was old
>before Cybertron's sun went out, before Primus came to this universe.
>It's older than GALLIFREY. It was probably old before the Milky Way
>condensed from a cloud of gas and dust.

Might not be older than Gallifrey, since Gallifrey exists outside the normal multiverse's timestream. The rest is probably true, though. If Mikage's right.

>>"I... I had heard that you were... alive again," said Anthy
>>hesitantly. "Corwin said he'd seen you at Christmas."
>
>I don't know that alive is the proper term for what Nanami is now.

It's a hair that would be too awkward to split in such a conversation. Biologically speaking, she's not dead and she's not undead (there are very specific and observable criteria for that).

>>"He hates you and all you love with a passion that moved the Great Fire
>>himself."
>
>I'm sure a million other people have pointed similar things out,
>but... one the things "great" can mean is "immense." Or "large." Or
>other words connoting... bigness.

That's true, that is.

As an aside, you stopped short of what is my personal favorite phrase in Nanami's speech:

"Think of that. A hatred so pure that the Enemy of All perceives it as beauty."

They say even the Daleks (well, you know, the bad Daleks) have a concept of beauty. It's probably a bit like Surtur's.

>Probably because unless I miss my guess, Kaname has some mild but
>definitely present PTSD. Counseling would probably be indicated.

Or at least a hug and a trip to the beach.

>Basically, the Federation seems like it's basically the European
>Union, but with it's own military.

Sort of more a combination of the UN and NATO, but yes. It's not supposed to be a strong polity. The United Galactica was a strong polity, and - once the Old WDF was out of the picture - that didn't end well. The Federation was an attempt to avoid making that mistake again. Its framers may well have made other, equally critical ones in the process, but then that's usually the way sapient affairs go.

>It certainly doesn't have a
>universal guarantee of sentient rights or to representative
>government, for example.

It's supposed to, but it rather lacks the teeth to enforce them.

>Corwin, Utena, and Anthy aren't what you'd call vengeful people.

Well, Anthy kind of is. She prefers it on a time scale that would make Klingon thought admirals start looking ostentatiously at their watches, is all.

>I think maybe Akio wants them to come for Nanami in some way. Which
>probably means doing so is bad, bad news.

Any comment I could make regarding this point would be giving something away one way or the other, so I believe I won't. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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