[103] It's implied in a couple of places in Star-Crossed and Correspondence that, Tali'Shukra having been orphaned at a fairly young age, she was effectively part of the Zorah family long before she ever married Vedik. This is evident again here, as we see that it was Vedik's grandfather who made her pilgrimage suit (and yes, it is the same one she was wearing in Star-Crossed).

[131] The first, we saw in Star-Crossed; the second Tali the Younger refers to here was her grandmother's years-long search of the cosmos for evidence of what had happened to Gryphon after that story.

[294] I am informed by staff that the phrase keelah se'lai was translated in the Mass Effect game I hadn't played, and that keelah turns out not to be (as I had inferred) the name of the quarian chief deity after all. I'd already written several scenes in which it was used that way, however, so I've decided to let it stand.

Properly translated, keelah translates as "By the homeworld" and keelah se'lai translates to "By the homeworld I hope to see one day". In a sense, the quarians have shifted from their ancestor worship to worship in general of the homeworld none of them have actually seen.

[299] Not that there's necessarily a waiver to sign for the Pilgrimage.

[374] Hyperspace travel is (relative to the "real universe") actually many times the speed of light, but the label has stuck in many hyperdrive-using cultures. One speaks of "jumping to lightspeed" rather than what you're really doing, which is jumping well past it. Mind you, as we saw in Last Transport, you do basically end up going the speed of light if your motivator fails in such a way that you don't cross into hyperspace when you reach the light barrier.

[496] Very late in the process, after I'd done my first-pass annotations, this scene needed to be pretty extensively rewritten. I set myself the challenge of doing it without changing the line count so that the rest of the notes wouldn't have to be rejiggered. This was a pain, but also interesting, and resulted in some intriguingly ruthless cuts. I begin to understand why working to a word count can be useful, but also maddening.

[531] Ironically, Kaname would have had less trouble on Babylon 6 if she'd been wearing her standard DSM uniform. The station's criminal element has long since learned not to go NEAR any DSM students because they have no idea what any of them may be capable of.

[536] Presumably not an official sign, but then again, on B6 you never quite know.

[539] Babylon 6 consists of 6 major sections : Blue, Red, Green, Brown, Grey and Yellow. Blue is docking and station control, Red is commerce, residential, and support, Green is the diplomatic sector, Brown is residental, life support and waste reclamation facilities, Grey is the atmospheric monitoring, fabrication, and maintenance facilities, and Yellow is the primary fusion core, fuel tanks, and zero-g facilities.

[545] The other being her younger sister, Ayame Sterling. "Great, I'm a demographic of two."

[590] The Sternsnacht was one of the personal weapons in the old MechWarrior game; it appeared in the Battletech Technical Readout 3026, if memory serves. The details regarding it which turn up later in this piece are largely made up anew, but the "giant, not very practical gun" aspect remains the same.

[681] "But body banks are for dead people."

[829] Lt. Merkretsch commands Unfathomable despite his fairly low rank because that's the way they do things in the Royal Salusian Navy. U-ships are quite small, with crews of no more than a dozen or so men and a handful of officers. The 25th-century RSN follows an officer rank scheme similar to that found in Napoleonic-era sea navies on Earth - there are basically only lieutenants, captains, and flag officers. To the Salusians, "commander" is a job description, not a rank. It's therefore not at all uncommon for smaller ships to be commanded by particularly senior or well-regarded lieutenants; in fact, it's an important rung on the career ladder for anyone aspiring to a full captaincy and a bigger ship one day.

Other fleets which do have ranks between lieutenant and captain also follow the convention of assigning officers of middling rank to command smaller vessels - the WDF, for instance, routinely puts officers holding the rank of lieutenant commander in charge of destroyers, and full commanders may turn up as the COs of vessels up to cruiser size.

Also, Lt. Merkretsch is named in honor of "Silent Otto" Kretschmer (1912-1998), a WWII German U-boat captain known for his punctilious treatment of lifeboats and survivors of his sinkings, and who went on to a long and well-regarded career in the West German Bundesmarine after the war.

[907] Garrus "Archangel" Vakarian owes Sosuke Sagara a drink, save for the fact that as far as we know, UF Garrus never had a beef with Dr. Saleon, and Sosuke Sagara, regardless of the circumstance, doesn't drink alcoholic beverages.

[994] We always seem to run across Ivanova when she's having a trying day, though in fairness, that's largely because her non-trying days generally don't have anything that interesting going on.

[1049] The overall effect is the same as happens to Kaname Chidori in the Full Metal Panic! anime, though in this case the reason for it is different.

[1070]

[1206] Doctor No, 1962.

[1236] Thade originally appeared in Genesis Climber Mospeda/Robotech: The New Generation as a single Stage-5 Invid whose sole purpose in the series was to show up, get shot down, be revealed as human, and die. He didn't even get a name in the series, just the novelization. In UF, however, he's gotten a much better deal as one of the first Invid Solugi created by Ariel, who later became an "elder statesman" for the slowly rebuilding Invid, working closely with Miranda Sterling (who handled personnel and intelligence matters for Mars Division during the Exile), and bonding over hair care products.

[1246] Doctor Lyneh is one of the preeminent doctors among the Invid, specializing in their adaptable biology and sociology. She looks very strikingly like Ritsuko Akagi from Neon Genesis Evangelion, save that her lemon-yellow blonde hair is natural, not bleached. And she has much less of a stick up her butt. (Though she can fake it easily, as Dr. Bashir and Mizuki find out.)

[1292] This may or may not involve dinner and dancing.

[1302] "Are you okay with her learning about the mindlink?" "Yeah, Mizuki knows I'm part-Invid, she has a right to know." Just telepathically.

[1339] One of those reasons being to reduce the accidental bleed-over effect through the mindlink from the Invid population living in New Avalon.

[1424] Here we have confirmation that Avalon 17 is affiliated with Network 23; though not a full Net23 station (they don't, for instance, show It's Not My Problem!), 17 carries Network 23 News programming as the channel's "national news" equivalent. In return, 17's coverage of New Avalon Knights, Cossacks, and Razors games is broadcast by Network 23 Sports to the teams' large expat fanbases.

[1473] A material's yield strength indicates how much stress is necessary to deform it such that it won't return to its original shape when that stress is released (i.e., to exceed its elastic limit). This is as opposed to its breaking strength, which, well, it ought to be obvious what that is.

[1501] This is probably my favorite Pete Stacker line of all time.

[1618] As seen in Top Gear: Road Film (With Fighting).

[1690] Mizuki Inaba, Maya Mukai, and Shiori Kudo are classmates of Kaname's from Full Metal Panic! Hey, we needed to fill up the class roster for DSM somehow...

[1762] Sosuke's man enough to admit when he's been wrong, as he originally wrote off Lindsey as no threat in DSM Panic! Mission 1: The New Student Is A Sergeant?

[1833] In Rory's debut story, DSM Panic! Mission 3.5: Transfer Students from Beyond Time.

[1872] Charlie Kallon's come a long way from his original conception as a somewhat ineffectual but sincere EA imperial bureaucrat. This happened out-of-band, so to speak, as his original appearances were being written, and in-story he'd always been a stand-up guy, so it's not really an example of mere exposure to Utena bringing out the best in people - except possibly in a somewhat meta sense.

[1889] Im Westen nichts Neues: German for "no news in the west". The original title of German author Erich Maria Remarque's famous World War I novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.

[2002] I've been waiting years to tell this joke.

[2023] Ave, praetor: Latin. Roughly, "Hail, my lord." A praetor in ancient Rome was either the commander of an army or a magistrate, often one with dictatorial powers. In the more general sense it's a term of very high respect.

[2035] Legio XX Valeria Victrix was one of the legions with which the Romans conquered Britain in the first century AD, and the last to leave when they abandoned the province in the fifth century. At around AD 103, it was stationed near what is now Chester.

[2038] Corinium was another Britannian town; today it's known as Cirencester. His contemporaries believed that Roranicus came from there, though in all likelihood he was actually from the hinterlands around Glevum (present-day Gloucester) and had merely joined the Legion in Corinium.

[2058] By this point, very few people even remember the Pandorica's name, much less what it was. Most of those who do know the name now think it was a legendary metaphor, like the Holy Grail, not an actual physical object... and from certain perspectives it may well have been.

[2111] CalorieMate is an energy supplement from Japan; it comes in cookie, drink, and jelly forms. In the original series, it was parodied as "CalorieMark".

[2148] Kyoko Tokiwa is the Voronda Elendil's comm officer, and has been so for the majority of its operation during the Exile and post-WDF Reformation. She also maintains the Mars Division internal company website, populating it with her frequent pictures. Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa is the Voronda Elendil's chief engineer, and she was responsible for many of its upgrades, including the late installation of its Reflex Furnace that makes Nethiril, the Flame of the Wedge, much more potent than other Ikazuchis' weapons.

Tessa is also responsible for Kaname's longstanding affection for Bonta-Kun, and gave Kaname her first Bonta-Kun plushie when she was about 5 months old.

[2131] Having been around this long, Tessa does not ALWAYS trip on her feet like did she way back then ...

[2330] As seen in The Burdens of Command.

[2342] I'm not sure why, but I'm really, inordinately fond of this little bit of byplay.

[2374] Possibly in part because it leads into this one.

[2451] Summarized in Utena's after-action report with the marvelously pithy remark, "MCPO Spartan was obliged to subdue him."

[2581] Had a hard time keeping Shuten from just outright channeling Sting as Feyd Rautha in this sequence. "I will kill him!"

[2677] It only consciously occurred to me after I wrote this bit that I'd just put Rory and Amy having a nap at the base of a statue depicting a winged woman in a flowing robe. It's not an angel, though, it's Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

[2755] She says that, but at the same time, you'll notice she wouldn't ask him for it either.

[2934] Probably not. The Hand of Acedia, in particular, would be pretty bloody useless.

[2949] Vincent Grant is one of the founders of Mars Division, and is the Commander Land Group (CLG) with ultimate command over the infantry (normal and mechanized), Cyclones, and Destroids. When he does take the field, he serves as the squad leader for the cyclone squad "The Fighting Uruk-Hai"

[2978] ...but sadly, sometimes Tessa still cannot avoid being a dojikko.

[3038] And, unlike the original series, thanks to the power of inertial dampeners and force fields, you can launch the Destroids with pilots still inside!

[3106] It says something about her current experiences that Kaname's more willing to accept the infodump now from the mindlink than she was before.

[3116] One of several incongruously creepy bits of occasional zone deco to turn up in City of Heroes. I mean, resisting the Rikti invasion is one thing, but all the various friendly-alien, and indeed from-Earth-but-not-human, heroes will have found that less than welcoming.

[3151] The Trojan War depicted in Homer's Iliad was largely the result of Eris's revenge for having been snubbed at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.

[3208] We haven't seen Utena and Wakaba do the old-best-friends thing for a long time. It was nice to have the opportunity.

[3486r; A castellan in medieval times was the governor of a castle - essentially a sort of military butler, tasked with organizing the domestic staff and seeing to the defenses. The chief of Gallifrey's Chancellery Guard also holds this title.