[34] run off to New Avalon - Of course, New Avalon is only where they ended up; the Ryuuzakis left Hyeruul long before the city was founded. They've been all over the place. Umi was actually born on New Japan.

[47] K'yr'wan, Duke of Kyn'o'bi - Yep, Emmy's father. He's quite a lot older than M'belyyn'da the Younger, which is one of the several reasons why she opted not to marry him.

[84] her Lens - The Rune Knights' Lenses were not originally part of the International Police Lens network; they served a different purpose, being Cephirean mage gems. Skuld connected them to the rest of the network later on, conveying the usual IPO Lens attributes upon them in the process. Fortunately, all of them passed the Test of Light! I'm not sure Skuld had a Plan B.

[86] everyone on the network would see her - This can't actually happen. It's possible to convey something to the whole network that you only wanted one other Lensman to see, but not something you weren't trying to transmit at all.

[99] an audible pause where... - Callback to a similar moment in Knights III, in which Corwin omits a heartfelt profanity in deference to the Rune Knights' tender years.

[122] the least formal... People nowadays often use the archaic "thee/thou" form of the English second person when they want to seem ostentatiously formal, but it only seems that way because it's archaic. In its day, it was actually the informal form of address (compare the German du or Spanish tú) and was very rude to use when speaking to strangers or anyone of a higher social status than oneself. Quakers were notorious for addressing everyone as "thee" regardless, as part of their somewhat obsessive bent for egalitarianism; it was one of the many things that got them into trouble with mainstream English society. It's used here to simulate a similar effect in the form of Alvish Umi is using.

[132] a breeze through your hair - Umi is too angry at this point to be amused at her grandmother's misapprehension of the matter here. Unlike the old lady, she knows the situation is exactly reversed, barring accidents. Hyelians are long-lived, but dragons, unless they die by accident or battle, are immortal.

[166] forethought, planning, and cunning - Our own Pearson Mui contributed the original draft of Duchess M'belyyn'da the Elder's dialogue, here and in the "breeze" speech above.

[183] than doth exist in thy philosophy - Umi, conscious that she is speaking in the Hyelian equivalent of a Shakespearean dialect, is deliberately riffing on Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5:

Hamlet
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

This goes straight over her grandmother's head, but Hikaru and Fuu, with whom she suffered through Pre-Contact Earth Literature II the previous semester, would have recognized it instantly.

[232] they do things differently here - "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." - L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953). Another artifact of the aforementioned lit class.

[318] is you is or is you ain't a dragon? - "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?" Louis Jordan, 1944. Fuu's favorite version is the 1981 cover on Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive. "Is you is or is you ain't my baby? / Way you're actin' lately makes me doubt."

[332] a mere lad - Hereby hangs a tale: Rob Shannon first proposed the central gag of this story, Nall wrecking a church in dragon form and carrying Umi off from an old-fashioned Hyelian arranged marriage, while Knights III was in production. I seem to recall we all thought it was pretty funny, and a memorable image, and I jotted down a mental note to use it sometime. When the time came to actually develop into a story, though, and I looked more closely at the central premise, I had serious doubts that I could make it work in a satisfactory way. When originally presented as the background framework for a Madcap Church-Wreckin' Dragon Adventure, Umi being forced by her grandmother into an arranged marriage with a stranger somehow didn't seem as titanically creepy as it is when you just write it down like that.

I'd already written the hook for it in Try, Try Again, though, so Nall and the gang had to have gone and done something that involved Umi and a lot of hard work. I agonized about it for a while one recent evening, and between us Phil and I managed to hammer out a scenario in which it became acceptable again - that being that her "groom" was just a boy, and probably more scared of Umi than of anything else in the room, such that even if the ceremony hadn't been interrupted, it's likely nothing would've resulted other than a protracted legal battle. That development made it silly enough to proceed again, and gave us an entertaining bonus character to boot.

[404] fo krah diin - Players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will recognize this as one of the Dragon Shouts available to the Dragonborn player character, Frost Breath. The version that freezes the priest in a coating of ice (like another Shout, Ice Form) is available with a special bonus power that's added to the game in one of the DLCs.

[422] "2500 Tons of Awesome" - Phil persuaded me that "Category 5" would be overselling the matter somewhat. Admittedly, Nall's full dragon form weighs nowhere near 2500 tons, either, but still.

[466] some kind of thief-acrobat - This is apparently what a girl in a leather jacket, tight jeans, and cowboy boots looks like to an elderly Hyelian noblewoman.

[474] you must help me - I thought it was important to portray Prince Bogan as sympathetically as possible, as part of the aforementioned effort to defuse the inherent creepiness in the premise. He's really a good kid, even if he is completely overpowered by his elderly great-aunt and generally in way over his head. His heart's in the right place.

[534] VALLEY OF THE ORCS - ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! - A nod to the sort of comedy-FRP roots I like to think of as the heart of Hyeruul. Even when it's dangerous and horrible, it's sort of weirdly comical.

[544] a simple tunic and trousers - Izumi's civilian clothes are Earth Kingdom civilian clothes, after all, not jeans and a T-shirt.

[563] shallow jars of makeup - I really enjoy the idea that, even when they're off-duty and/or wandering off to the far corners of the galaxy, the Kyoshi Warriors are always prepared to go into action and look the part.

[592] gained entry... by leaping down - Freerunning (or what the French call parkour) has long been one of the standard tools in the Kyoshi Warrior toolbox, to the point where the several among the Einherjar are famous for it across Valhalla (as Gunnr Brynjelfr noted in Try, Try Again).

[641] brown and cool and unsympathetic - A nod to my favorite H.G. Wells phrase, from the introduction of The War of the Worlds, in which he describes the Martians as "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic".

[767] Naxnehaaz - The dragon Names in this story, like the Dragon Shout Umi used to take out the priest, come from the Skyrim setting. I constructed Nax's Name from existing words in the ancient dragon language presented in that game.

[780] Scourge of the Islands - The war crime for which Nax was exiled to Midgard was the devastation and virtual depopulation of an Alvish province comprising an island chain in the Western Sea, for reasons and under conditions which need not concern us here.

[787] Bromjunkaal - Nall's late father and King Bahamut's younger brother. His Name breaks down to:
- Brom: North;
- Jun: King;
- Kaal: Champion, reflecting his status as his elder brother's war minister. He was killed in battle with the fire giants of Eldgard long before Nall hatched. (It's not unusual for dragon eggs to be kept for centuries before some circumstance or another prompts them to hatch.)

[802] Odahviing - Nall's formal Draconic Name is taken from one of the main dragon NPCs in Skyrim. (In the game, Odahviing is a dragon who acknowledges that the Dragonborn PC's kung fu is best and serves him (apparently cheerfully).) Nall presumably adopted it later in life than the name he uses every day, re Matalde's grumbling at Corwin that Nall's full Asgardian name, Nallénskuldgändr, can't even be rendered in dragonscript. Although if she doesn't like that one, one can only imagine what she'd make of his Water Tribe name, Nalliuniqsiutsiarit, which even he can't pronounce more than about half the time.

(It's Inuktitut for "happy birthday". Seriously, it is.)

[808] White Dragon - There are official paragons for most subtypes of the dragons under Bahamut's authority. The word "paragon" here simply means "exemplar", it doesn't necessarily imply that these are nice people; Matalde, for instance, is paragon of Reds, and she's... prickly at best.

[812] Kulaansebrom This is a word I built from the in-game dragon vocabulary available, and reflects what even those non-Draconic-speakers who attended his White Dragon investiture didn't realize: With his father dead and Bahamut himself childless, Nall is actually Crown Prince of Draconia. If anything happens to Bahamut (which is exceedingly unlikely), he's up. He downplays this big-time, as you do when you want anything resembling a Normal Life and you have something like that on your CV.

[822] the old customs - The dragons of old were not nice neighbors to have, and some of the older ones still rather pine for the days when they could just do whatever the hell they wanted. King Bahamut made semi-joking reference to another of these old customs in Ash Knight, when he remarked of Umi's family, "In [Nall's] place, I'd have burnt their freehold and eaten their cattle by now, to teach them their place."

[869] the relentless savagery of it - Between the faultlines appearing in Umi and Nall's relationship and the draconic duel to the death, the second half of this story went to a much more serious place than I was expecting when I started.

It's also a little different from many I've done in that the first matter above is not resolved in the course of the same story in which it occurred. They're obviously at least civil again by the end - Umi's clearly, if wearily, affectionate toward him in the breakfast scene in Try, Try Again, which happens immediately after this - but they haven't really addressed any of the issues that unexpectedly arose in the course of this emotionally fraught time. I guess we'll have to stay tuned...

[897] Nax's body began to disintegrate - This is from Skyrim as well. In the game, the player character absorbs the released energy (described as the dead dragon's soul) and can unlock various useful powers with it. Here it's more of an inter-dragon Highlander Quickening sort of a thing.

[915] the ragged little spot on... her right ear - Where he bit her in an attempt to snap her out of an exhausted brownout and get her to defend herself from Nanami Kiryuu in Knights III. Originally a strange sort of bonding marker, but now also an uncomfortable reminder of her remarks about territoriality...

[924] Umi's got a cousin - The person Nall is thinking of is actually Umi's aunt, but she's much younger than Umi and Nall often forgets.