Kowloon-class freighter - The Kowloon class is the classic civilian freighter from the first Mass Effect game, where it invariably appears as the site of some hideous space-travel cautionary tale or another, to be boarded and investigated by Commander Shepard and her crew.

Broadsword heavy bomber - From Wing Commander 2.

Bryce Tarquini - Named for Italian racing driver Gabriele Tarquini, for no real reason other than that Tarquini was mentioned in a clip from the British Touring Car Championship that played in an episode of Top Gear I was watching while writing this piece.

UGS Chasseur - French for "hunter", chasseur is a military term used to describe rapid-response forces.

EPSRB - The outer-space sci-fi equivalent of the real-life EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), a safety device carried by many boats and aircraft.

Blue Harvest - Named for the codename used by the Return of the Jedi production crew in a (failed) attempt to obscure what they were really working on. Blue Harvest was supposedly a horror movie (the tagline was something along the lines of "horror beyond your imagination"). Also a reference to the fact that it's the story wherein we, well, harvest Azula, for UF purposes.

vitrifier - I had in mind those Lucite paperweights with butterflies and whatnot encased in them.

samizdat.ort - Samizdat is a Russian word for underground publication of illicit or unauthorized writings, which was a common practice among dissidents under the Soviet system of censorship.

Book 2: Laura Kinney and the Maiden in the Ice

Karafuto - "Karafuto Prefecture" was the name of the part of Sakhalin Island that was part of the Empire of Japan between 1905 (when Japan won the Russo-Japanese War) and 1945 (when Japan lost World War II). The other place names in this story are now-deprecated Japanese names for places in south Sakhalin as well.

green and white with a... dragon - New Snowdonia's flag is the same as the real-life flag of Wales, possibly with a slightly more "modern" art style on the dragon.

the Maiden in the Ice - One of the Brother Cadfael novels by the late Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) is entitled The Virgin in the Ice; I had misremembered it when I originally thought of using it as the title for this piece, then decided to leave it. The latter is most likely also true, but it is not an actual plot point here as it is in the Cadfael novel.

Lefortovo "Lefty" Szoroda - Lefty was first created in the role that was eventually given to Dr. Saleon from Mass Effect in First Dates and Firefights. He appears here in a very similar capacity to his originally planned debut, albeit he fares rather better in this instance.

His first name, as an aside, is the name of what was the Soviet KGB's most infamous prison.

ethnicity ambiguous - As is often the case with animation productions, not many people in Avatar actually look particularly Asian even though virtually everyone is supposed to be. Azula gets closer than most, though.

Mrs. Arata is a combat veteran - Haruko Fukuda (b. 2280) served 20 years with the Greater Rigel Sector Co-Prosperity Sphere Joint Strategic Self-Defense Forces (say that five times fast), and saw action in the 2310s during the failed invasion of the outer Rigel sector by the pirate clans of the Terminus. She retired after the war with the grade of master sergeant, and returned to her ancestral village to marry innkeeper Shigeo Arata (2272-2329).

Laura doesn't know all that in detail, of course, but she knows someone who's carried a rifle in a war when she sees one.

somewhat archaic - To the 24th-century (or 25th-century, come to that) ear, the languages of Dìqiú sound like various Earth languages circa the mid-1800s. Tongyu (the language of the Earth Kingdom and the lingua franca of the whole world) is basically Victorian-era Mandarin, Kokugo (the native language of the Fire Nation) is similarly antiquated Japanese, and so forth. To Laura, Azula's speech is perfectly intelligible but sounds a bit quaint.

her mysterious benefactor - Gryphon, of course; see Weapon of Choice. Though she knew it was the right call for both of them, some part of Laura will always wonder what the arc of her life would have been like if she had gone with him instead of staying on New Snowdonia as he asked.

34 years - The United Federation of Planets Health and Safety Authority's guidelines specify that carbonite and crystallite freezing is not suitable for live suspension except in emergencies, and stipulate that such emergency treatments are to be sustained for absolutely no longer than six months.

the Guide Law - A set of six principles to which all the Girl Guides of the Crown Colonies must affirm their commitment:

1) A Guide is honest, reliable, and can be trusted.
2) A Guide is helpful and uses her time wisely.
3) A Guide faces challenges and learns from her experiences.
4) A Guide is a good friend and a sister to all other Guides.
5) A Guide is polite and considerate.
6) A Guide respects all living things and takes care of the world around her.

This is substantially unchanged from the actual Guide Law observed by Girlguiding UK.

Beowulf, the Kutune Shirka, or the Cheltariad - Works of epic literature from antiquity. Two are real, one fictional. Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem from the Middle Ages. The Kutune Shirka is a prose epic of northern Japan's indigenous Ainu people, chronicling the adventures of a man and his magic sword. The Cheltariad is the seminal work of mytho-history in UF-universe Salusian society, concerning the founding of the city of Saenar and the expulsion of the Sardaukar from the planet by the Empress Cheltaria. Human scholars have described it, with some justification, as the Salusian Aeneid.

he's done it to me too - Exactly when Aang would have had the opportunity to take away Azula's power to firebend, even in her own weirdly disjointed internal narrative of events, is unclear - for some time after she last saw him, she was still in full possession of that faculty, at least - but, since she still believes at this point that she's being held under his orders, she probably assumes he did it while she was unconscious.

It may say something about how highly the benders of Dìqiú prize their arts that Azula is more frightened and hurt by this discovery than she was when she thought she'd been permanently blinded.

not going to be able to leave - It can be assumed that Mairwen's and Rhian's parents were consulted, or at least notified, about this; I considered mentioning that in the montage, but c'mon, this is a Girls' Own Adventure story. You don't involve the grown-ups any more than you absolutely have to.

Rhian's relentless good cheer - This aspect of Rhian's personality probably triggered residual nostalgia somewhere in Azula, although Rhian is a lot less manic about it than Ty Lee was.

So You're Batshit - Subtitled A Survival Guide to Mental Instability, this would be published 40 years later, under Wade Wilson's byline.

a Rigellian - Like Tregonsee, one of the Second Stage Lensmen in Edward E. Smith's novels. See the cover illustration from David A. Kyle's Lensman from Rigel.

little furry ears - Salusians, naturally. Salusian expats can be found running shyam joints in spaceports all over the galaxy, even on planets like Karafuto.

I may be going mad - The irony, of course, is that Azula never thought this might be the case when it actually was.

his right arm - Yes, that's correct, Lefty Szoroda is right-handed. It's one of those underworld nicknames, like calling the big guy Tiny.

3C45932 - Who says Laura has no sense of humor?

"The Phoenix" -
You are a brick tied to me that's dragging me down
Strike a match and I'll burn you to the ground
We are the jack-o'-lanterns in July
Setting fire to the sky
Here comes this rising tide, so come on
Put on your war paint
Crosswalks and crossed hearts and hope to die
Silver clouds with grey lining

So we can take the world back from the heart-attacked
One maniac at a time, we will take it back
You know time crawls on when you're waitin' for the song to start
So dance alone to the beat of your heart

Hey young blood, doesn't it feel
Like our time is running out?
I'm gonna change you like a remix
Then I'll raise you like a phoenix
Wearing our vintage misery
No, I think it looked a little better on me
I'm gonna change you like a remix
Then I'll raise you like a phoenix

Llanfair am byth - Motto of the Regiment. Welsh: Llanfair for ever.

taser arrow - No, Mairwen isn't carrying around a stack of Green Arrow-style trick munitions; this is actually not an uncommon piece of kit among 24th-century woodsy types, including Neo-Snowdonian Guides. After all, some days you don't actually want to kill the bear, just discourage it from eating your campmates.

let herself fall - This caused some consternation at Maiden's original release, as there were those who felt that suicide was out of character for Azula, even at this nadir of her life. I never actually considered it an out-and-out suicide attempt so much as a moment of complete dissociation from reality: Basically, she thinks she's already dead and is just acknowledging it.

grab your life with both hands - If Laura had a coat of arms, this would be the motto on it.

Book 3: Power Politics

this Machiavelli person - I had to read The Prince (again) for a class I was taking at the time that I wrote Maiden. This little coda occurred to me afterward.

Book 4: Mojave Interlude

hey hey, baby doll - This sequence is adapted more or less directly from part of Fallout: New Vegas, modulo bending, of course (and the rest of the Chairmen, apart from Benny's bodyguards, being so shocked by the whole affair that it doesn't occur to them to aggro on Azula themselves).

Book 5: Put On Your War Paint

The title of this part is one of the lyrics from Azula's personal theme music, Fall Out Boy's "The Phoenix".

go out Martian Legion style - The fall of the Martian Legion during the Covenant War, as detailed in the Mini-Story The Honor of Mars, is ever after a touchstone for suicidally tenacious rearguard actions. It's the Galactic Age's Battle of Thermopylae.

burst-firing naval phasers - Compare the way phaser fire is depicted in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Book 6: Agreement in Principle

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria - The last and longest-surviving of Stalin's secret police chiefs, Beria may have been the most evil man who ever lived. It's said that his personal habits revolted even Stalin himself. I had to think long and hard about using even a fictionalized version of a man like that, particularly in a story wherein he ultimately gains the upper hand over a female protagonist.

we're going hunting - The original version of Agreement ended here, and did not depict Azula's actual capture by the forces of Muspelheim - partly for the reasons outlined above and partly because I felt that it would detract from the cold opening I had planned for the next installment.

code A-one-one-three - This (a WALL-E reference) would later become the standard IPO code for "agent returning to base with high-priority intel".

you owe her a Grigoriy - Copy Azula didn't know that she was supposed to reply to this by saying, "Tell her I'll get her two Evgeniys and a Lyudmilla when we get back." So Boone killed her. Tradecraft!

Book 7: Nothing That Is In Between

Vorpanol - A frequently-seen 24th/25th-century UF-universe medication, Vorpanol is a neural regenerator used to reverse the effects of concussive brain damage. That also makes it handy for undoing various forms of neural-rewrite memory alteration and such-like brute-force mind control.

when you get back to Hell - Azula is unaware at this point that, for gods and demons, dying on the day of the Ragnarök is permanent. This is the full and final end of Archduke Ozai. He won't be back.

Book 8: Tyrants If They Could

PHOENIX module - A piece of extremely rare pre-War cyberware in Fallout: New Vegas. It grants slow but inexorable HP regeneration - not fast enough to be tactically useful, but capable of restoring a character to full health in the space of a "fast travel" trip taking a few in-game hours. In UF it has the side benefit of effectively arresting the aging process, similar to Logan and Laura's healing factor.

for the fairest one - When I was working on this scene, I was delighted to realize that there was a perfect mythological convergence here. The apple Zoner gives to Azula is one of the golden apples of the Norse goddess Idunn, which grant the gods their eternal youth, but it also fits neatly into Zoner's "agent of Eris" persona, since Eris was responsible for the Greek "golden apple" myth (which provoked the Trojan War).

practically every Legionary in the Fort - This is supposed to be an unwinnable, "wrong call, you lose, reload and try again"-type fight in Fallout: New Vegas, but that's not how Azula and crew roll.

I hardly ever blow up any more - Reference to an Elder Days GweepCo joke, in which Josh Brandt appended "... and it hardly ever blows up any more!" to the tagline of a magazine ad for a feminine hygiene product ("It's new, it's neat, it's discreet").

please inform Princess Azula... - The central joke in this scene was inspired by a scene in the 1970 biopic Patton in which General Patton, at a victory celebration after the end of the European part of World War II, politely declines (through a terrified young interpreter) to drink with a Soviet general "or any other Russian sonofabitch," prompting an indignant response from the Russian ("he says you are a sonofabitch too!") that Patton decides he can drink to after all.

all bitches would be tyrants if they could - Azula's making a play on a couplet from the poem at the end of Daniel Defoe's 1701 History of the Kentish Petition,

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men would be tyrants if they could,

which was more famously paraphrased by Abigail Adams in a 1776 letter to her husband, John Adams, then serving as a member of the Continental Congress that was about to declare the independence of the American colonies from the English Crown.

Armistice Day

good morning, sweetie - Azula's not just twitting Katara for having (literally) slept with her, she's also deliberately using the eyeroll-inducing pet name Katara and Aang call each other.

oh, Zuzu, really - Azula has always assumed something was Going On There, even when it wasn't. Besides, she's always enjoyed making fun of Zuko's poor impulse control.

T'ien Zhan Reserve - Like plum wine, only... more so.

fruit-of-the-poison-tree doctrine - A legal principle stating, roughly, that evidence obtained by a legal search prompted by information acquired illegally is itself illegal. Katara initially took the line that whatever good Azula might've done since Karafuto was invalidated by her having previously been the worst person in the world.

even when I was strong I was weak - Credit where it's due, this is one of two things I liked in the otherwise catastrophically disappointing ATLA: The Search comics enough to reuse. (The other hasn't appeared in UF yet.)

Book 10: Royal Progress

Fire Lord Qinzon - My mental image of Qinzon in this piece is basically John Hurt as the War Doctor in Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, only a bit less unkempt.

three or four times a year - Because Dìqiú's Spirit World is not usually reachable from the Big Universe, Azula's visits to Katara's mirror coincide with her "vacations" in Valhalla.

Azulon chair - Sort of the Fire Nation equivalent of a Louis Quinze.

a narrow red stripe - Indicative of Captain Inazuma's prowess as a starpilot; they don't give out the Corellian Bloodstripe for perfect attendance.

the Fire Sages think they own the place - Actually, the Fire Sages do own the island, but Azula probably means Dìqiú itself.

Professor Mosura - In the Toho kaiju eiga canon, Mothra actually is a spirit entity - she's got that whole "guardian of the Earth" thing going on, which is why she never really dies - so when Phil noted that we ought to have a more overt spirit presence in third-century Dìqiú and that Katara's graduation was a good time to show it, she was a natural choice. She's a bit smaller here than in most of her film appearances, but then, she's a spirit, so presumably she can be whatever size she wants.

you are a terrible judge of character - Ty Lee seems to have genuinely liked (or at least sincerely wanted to like) Azula even when she was full-on batshit-and-evil, and always hoped there was a chance she'd come back. Latter-day Azula occasionally makes wryly self-deprecating reference to this.

smartsuit - This is very similar to the way the first "lightweight" version of Iron Man's armor was shown to work back in the '60s comics. They even did a two-page spread in one of the first issues of Tales of Suspense in which the suit appeared, in which Tony Stark broke the fourth wall to explain how it worked to the readers. Ty Lee's isn't made of metal or powered in any way, but the deployment geometry is very similar.

primitive siege engine - Sort of a steampunk version of the Soviet armored train in GoldenEye (the first Pierce Brosnan 007 movie). With toyetic capture claw action!

half his left ear was missing - A deliberately drawn parallel with the dueling scars common to German academic fencers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

make silence your weapon - Also a technique favored by one of my professors in the academic year just ended, which made for amusingly awkward pauses in many lectures.

a proper balance - Zhu makes deliberately mocking reference to the much-vaunted cosmic purpose of the Avatar, to "bring balance to the world," which is one of those standard profound-sounding-but-meaningless-upon-inspection roles Chosen Ones tend to be told they have.

born in the Earth Kingdom - Given how cosmopolitan the world has become, this is no longer 100% a given. Based on very long-standing precedent, it can reasonably be assumed that the Avatar after Korra (if there is one) will be an earthbender, but that no longer automatically implies birth in the Earth Kingdom. But then, Zhu's not really into that whole big-little-new-world thing.

"My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark" -
Be careful making wishes in the dark
Can't be sure when they've hit their mark
And besides in the meantime I'm just dreaming of tearing you apart
I'm in the details with the Devil
So now the world can never get me on my level
I just gotta get you out the cage
I'm a young lover's rage
Gonna need a spark to ignite
My songs know what you did in the dark

So light 'em up, light 'em up, light 'em up
I'm on fire
Light 'em up, light 'em up, light 'em up
I'm on fire

utterly ruthless - Having revealed that Jing was an earthbender, I now wanted to hint that she had still further hidden dimensions, in that her attitude here is evidence of long and hard contemplation of her response to a situation like this one, in spite of the fact that nothing we've seen about her - nothing Katara knew about her - up to this point indicates any reason why she should've given it much thought. "What does it matter to you? / When you've got a job to do, you've got to do it well; / You've got to give the other fella hell."

what is it with you Navy people? - She's thinking of Admiral Zhao, a prominent Fire Navy officer toward the end of the Hundred-Year War who was such a friggin' whackjob he thought murdering the Moon Spirit to obtain a strategic advantage over the Water Tribes would be a good idea. (We saw how that brilliant notion worked out for him in Nothing That Is In Between.)

wherever she went, men and women fell - She's not even chi-blocking them. That's for amateurs.

the most nearly-assassinated man in the world - Zuko, who, in his early years as Fire Lord, found himself in the unique position of being hated by everybody outside the Fire Nation for being the Fire Lord and a lot of people inside the Fire Nation for not being the right Fire Lord. Really, it's a wonder he lived long enough to reproduce, let alone more than a hundred years.

Katara couldn't help but giggle - In fairness to the Fire Princess, Korra's "wait, do what now?" face is pretty epic.

Ryo Zan Paku - Ty Lee has not really been to Ryo Zan Paku, or indeed Cephiro. It's probable that Azula doesn't actually know she's talking about a place that isn't mythical.