Any story with moar Kei is awesome. She just adds that je ne sais kaboom to the story.

The thing about Gryphon's life story from that point onward, he decided, was that if he described it out loud, it was so absurd in spots that even he began to doubt whether most of it was true. The HoloDECstation, the Wedge War, the escape into space... had any of that really happened? It must have, he was who he was now, and none of that would have been possible without Starship Wedge and the flight to Zeta Cygni, the mad Prussian with his visions of a space defense force, the man from the 413,000th millennium and his retrovirus... but all the same, at several centuries' remove, it all seemed vaguely... preposterous.

It's hard to read that as coming from inside the fourth wall. Is this a consequence of the universe changes in CORE-4, or is this more about the author forgetting how preposterous the real world is? From where I'm standing, UF is slightly more realistic than a newspaper.