9 A reference to the long-running home improvement show This Old House, though it's a bit disrespectful of us to refer to the Castle as a "dorm".

128 Aya would have given away Derek Bacon's impending involvement in the Babylon Project if Mac had any idea who she was talking about.

189 A useful and potentially fun feature of a character when it comes to projects they're trying to accomplish, perhaps - Corwin is sometimes guilty of this himself - but in the arena of interpersonal relationships, it can get, er... awkward.

236 Based on James Cromwell's performance as Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact.

240 In earlier drafts, "Zee".

243 The Rubicon is part of the first production run of Danube-class runabouts, which would mean it was built sometime around 2390.

272 By a curious coincidence, 117 is the Project SPARTAN subject number of John Spartan, aka the Master Chief.

298 As seen in the Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark".

309 Keraht is a tip of the hat to Ensign Naraht, the Horta Starfleet officer seen in the old DC Comics Star Trek series.

325 The Feng Shui is named for the Chinese practice of harmonic design, not the chop-socky RPG.

326 Vitruvius was an ancient Roman engineer and architect about whose life relatively little is known. He is believed to be the author of of De architectura, the most complete treatise on Roman architecture, which contains (among much else) the notes on human proportion that led Leonardo da Vinci to draw his famous Vitruvian Man diagram. He is also sometimes credited with the invention of concrete.

337 In addition to planetary facilities, a Vitruvius-class construction ship has tools and equipment that can enable its crew to build modest-sized space habitats and certain smaller starships if supplied with the right materials.

340 Though, as we will see, the permanent population of the moon will increase considerably as well.

386 In addition to being culturally sensitive, this is just a good safety practice. As sci-fi history has shown again and again, ancient ruins are almost always dangerous - occasionally to far more than just the people poking around in them. The last thing the Corps of Engineers wants to go down in history for is having been the guys who released the Flood.

393 Vedek Bareil appeared a few times on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He was a decent, compassionate guy who wanted the best for Bajor, so naturally he got killed off and replaced by a power-hungry dick.

401 At the Academy they called her Toolbelt T'Vek.

438 Marc Okrand's tlhIngan Hol again.

464 I'm not a Star Trek Voyager fan; in fact, I've only watched one episode all the way through, after Derek Bacon and Andrew Petrarca all but begged me to give the show a chance, and the episode that aired that day turned out to be "Threshold", possibly the worst hour of television ever broadcast. So why is B'Elanna Torres here? Well... because I have played Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, and she's a hoot in the cutscenes she's in. Plus, I rather like the idea of a Klingon engineer. Besides, in making her Duelist-age, I more or less declared a do-over on her personal history, anyway. I think I've hung onto some undefinable spark of the original character's spirit, which is why I kept the name, but these things are very hard to gauge, let alone explain (see also the UF version of Darth Vader).

469 That's because it is a human name, Utena.

513 Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Military rations, but pretty good for all that. The 25th-century version comes in a self-heating pouch. WDF MREs are ordered en bloc with the Royal Salusian Armed Forces and have a lot of meat in them; as we have seen in the CSI: New Avalon stories, there are few Salusian vegetarians.

628 Most Minbari don't give their family name as part of their own. Delenn, for instance, belongs to the House of Mir (that's even canonical), but it would never occur to her to introduce herself as "Delenn Mir". The fact that Mia does so is another thing that sets her apart.

671 Originally, I'd planned for Chip and Reiyna to be cameos at Corwin's senior prom. They would have been one year behind him, and interaction would have been minimal. That changed the moment I wrote this scene during my lunch hour. The next thing I knew, they'd skipped a year thanks to either high test scores or flexible enrollment. DOC

730 And so begins a running joke, and one of Chip's defining characteristics--he truly is a loyal friend. DOC

813 Who wouldn't enjoy spending a double class period screwing around with a cyclotron? I liked doing this bit because it provided a glimpse of what I figure the future of classroom tech will be like: namely, exactly like it is now, just with an elevated tech base underneath it. The particle colliders they have in Mr. Sulak's classroom are, well, particle colliders, but they're still school equipment - clunky, kind of bodged together, probably been in service longer than they really should've been.

832 I think this is the first speaking appearance of any of the three Utonium sisters (who are, of course, mostly-grown-up versions of the title characters from The Powerpuff Girls).

844 Not that anybody ever calls the Science Center anything but "the Science Center", even after it gets a fancier name. DSM's Science Center is based on the one at Wellesley College.

878 In a year or so, we'll see that the galaxy's attitude toward Babylon Station changed after it opened. Most people still don't really buy the rationale behind the Babylon Foundation, but they can't deny that the station quickly became one of the crossroads of the galaxy.

926 An IPSF warrant officer is a non-commissioned officer who possesses advanced technical skills and/or higher education degrees that are normally only possessed by commissioned officers, but who hasn't undergone the administrative training required to hold a commission. They're considered superior to enlisted personnel and subordinate to commissioned officers, though in practical terms a chief or master chief warrant officer usually commands the respect of the commissioned officers he serves with by virtue of plain competence. Such is certainly the case with Chief O'Brien.

931 Captain Pellew, like the name of his ship, is borrowed from C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels. In the books, Pellew was young Midshipman Hornblower's first commander, the tough-but-fair officer who gave Hornblower a chance to make a name for himself in the Royal Navy. (He was, in fact, a real person - Admiral Edward Pellew, first Viscount Exmouth.) In the A&E Hornblower TV-movies he is ably played by Robert Lindsay. The UF version can be assumed to be Lindsay's.

951 The FI-era WDF Navy uniform isn't derived from any particular source, but its styling is reminiscent of your sorta standard anime space captain outfits (Captain Harlock, Captain Gloval on Macross, Captain Avatar on Star Blazers, etc.), in royal blue and white.

974 First thing I ever heard Derek say. (It's a quote from the old Fat Albert cartoons.)

1042 Jer served with Zargh for many years and understands the situation instinctively.

1213 Apparently Gryphon did his traveling with Londo after he left Ishiyama (following the events flashed back to in Aegis Florea 2) and before ending up in the Split Infinitive universe.

1243 As we will see, DSM's sports teams will be called the Griffins - not because of the Chief, but because ReRob claims Sir John Mandeville, the medieval bullshit artist often credited with the invention of the griffin, as an ancestor.

1252 I'm not going to give it all away here in case I get a chance to tell it elsewhere, but it involves "the Medal of Va'Lor".

1265 Are you starting to see the pattern?

1281 G'Kar rather got off on the wrong foot with Delenn, as was shown in the Babylon 5 pilot, "The Gathering".

1310 Ambassador Kosh is playing worm, a text-graphics game found in most Unix distributions. In it, you try to steer an ever-lengthening string of lowercase os around the screen, eating numbers that add more os to the chain. If you run into your tail or the side of the screen, the game ends with the error message, "well you ran into something and the game is over."

1321 This gag was planned years before the Symphony ever came along. We had long planned to introduce Babylon 5 and its diplomatic staff for the later part of FI, but had held off for years in observance of show creator J. Michael Straczynski's request that people not do B5 fanfic until the series was over. One of the things we'd discussed dozens of times was a scene for the station's grand opening in which Gryphon, much to Derek's consternation, already knows all the key ambassadors - including Kosh. Exactly why we haven't had an opportunity to show yet - but it's all been planned.

1330 The alluvial damper is a tool mentioned, but never explicitly shown (it might be somewhere in the toolbox shown, but they never indicate which tool it is, if so) in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

1407 It is not a coincidence that the duelists involved in a Grand Tournament wear their rose seals on their left ringfingers - the finger traditionally reserved for wedding rings.

1462 A concept borrowed from The Matrix.

1470 Technically, in 1969 the cape was called Cape Kennedy.

1499 This consequence of the way the UF universe's history is set up occurred to me all at once as I was considering what learning experiences Corwin would be lining up for Utena's summer of spaceflight training. From our perspective in the real world, Apollo was a major achievement, one of the greatest human endeavors ever attempted - but from the viewpoint of a well-established galactic society, a people having managed to make it only as far as their own moon would tend to be considered rather quaint. Corwin doesn't appreciate the fact that the magnitude of the achievement's been minimized by history's tendency to take it out of context.

1551 I based my descriptions of the events on books I've read, NASA films, and the re-enactments of Apollo launch prep in From the Earth to the Moon and Apollo 13.

1563 Hell, there's more computing power in Miki's stopwatch than in the Apollo command module computer. Even by today's standards, let alone those of the 25th century, Apollo's computers were barely worthy of the name.

1592 One of the Mavericks is a guy I very vaguely knew in middle school band. I'm not bragging or anything - I barely knew the guy, he was a senior in high school when I was in the sixth or seventh grade - just sayin'.

1598 She's right.

1671 For all that he's a little bit crazy, Saionji is very wise, when he has his wits about him. There are occasional flashes of this in the source material, providing the foundation for expanding on that quality in the Symphonies, but he never really gets a chance to get out from under his baggage and exercise this wisdom in the TV show.

1847 One of the more "Awwww" moments of the Symphony. Say it with me: "Awwwww." PJM

1872 Another bit of RGU-ish imagery, though in RGU it would probably have had a slightly sinister overtone. People getting kissed usually did.

1875 Another scene I wish I could get down right in artwork. Sadly, while my skills have improved over the years, I don't think that I'm quite at the level of artistic facility this demands. It'd either have to be comic-panel-layouted (with a full-page shot for the kiss), or animated, and regrettibly I don't have the time for that right now. PJM

1899 I can't stand characters who laugh like this either. Except Sumire. And that's mainly because the UF version stopped doing it years ago.

1911 A traditional t'skrang valediction.

1923 A popular tourist attraction, somewhat akin to Niagara Falls.

1925 Have a good time but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love?

2031 For those playing costume designer at home, Azalynn's outfit here (and at the Spring Formal in the First Symphony) is based off the costume her visual reference character (Koalla Suu, from Love Hina) wore in "Transformation". PJM

2040 My favorite costume we don't have a picture of.

An outfit like that, you'd expect him to be posing for exotic beverage advertisements. Then again, if he did, sales would probably triple. PJM

2059 Yes, it's a real holiday. The event that led to it involved a 50,000-gallon tank of fudge sauce that fell from a colony transport and what the native Dantrovians, who had never encountered such a thing, did with it. The traditional retelling of the legend, delivered by each town and village's lorespeaker at the start of the festival, includes the punch line, "And you thought it was coolant!"

2093 This is kind of an injoke regarding Corwin's possession of some of Big O protagonist Roger Smith's stuff; in this scene he's actually dressed as Roger Smith. It seemed fitting, since this scene revolves around R. Dorothy.

2104 A heavy space freighter from the Wing Commander games.

2107 Tomodachi's nearest neighbor, New Hokkaido has a sub-arctic climate and is renowned for the quality of its local beer. It's another member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

2122 An important milestone in her training as a spacer - Utena has mastered the Picard Maneuver.

2131 The panelists are: Rewind, the Autobot historian (one of Blaster's cassettes); a couple of humans I made up; galactically famous Vindari Salusian cyberneticist Li Tsiandra, who in her younger years (like, the 2100s) was an equally famous comedienne under the stage name "Slappi Sqirl"; and Bordag Gelp, an amorphous Dralasite from the old RPG Star Frontiers.

2163 The general public is unaware that Skuld is a Norse goddess, mainly because they wouldn't believe it anyway, but she's very well-known in academic and technological circles as an NIT lecturer/researcher and the Chief Technologist of the International Police.

2169 Professor Chandrijan is an original character, vaguely based on a couple of kindly Indian professors I met at WPI.

2191 Gelp isn't moved by much of anything; Slappi knew Dr. Soong and thought he was kind of an asshole.

2230 I considered actually writing Kate's testimony in a sort of Anglo-Saxon epic verse form, à la the English translations of Beowulf, but decided my prosody skills weren't up to the challenge.

2265 For that matter, Janice (like all Ragolians) is also very familiar with non-simple droids, but as she lacks formal robopsychology credentials, she didn't get into that.

2321 The "climbing out of a box" (and/or "coffin") metaphor is one that turns up often in the later part of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

2361 Dr. Taylor is from Earth, and though he takes a dim view of what Earth's government tried to pull in this case, he's still a bit uncomfortable with the way the Republic of Zeta Cygni is run.

2372 He wanted to say "You bet your ass I do."

2388 There's the theme from Battlecruiser Vengeance again.

2499 In UF, Keiko O'Brien teaches literature at DSM.

2576 I figured a letter from Wakaba would be more fun than another boring old montage.

2615 The bat'leth, or "sword of honor", is widely considered the most Klingon of Klingon weapons.

2742 The question is, who was dueling up there? PJM

2746 One of the main differences between the Cephiro and Midgard branches of the Order of the Rose is the color of their sigil. The Cephirean order's is pink, while in Midgard it's red.

2780 B'Elanna's uncle, Klayvor vestai-Klavaar, makes his first appearance. Later he will style himself Kahless XVI, Emperor of Qo'noS and Autocrat of All the Klingons.

2842 The Klingon tendency to use "the one" in Standard conversation - sometimes referring to oneself, sometimes to the other party in a conversation - is a stylistic cue taken from the late John M. Ford's interpretation of the race. It is presumably a translation artifact, similar to the Russian tendency to omit articles.

2872 Clearly one of the books Mia read during her years in the Great Library of Yedor was a treatise on Klingon culture; she knows exactly which buttons to press.

2876 It is true that the Anla'shok are not now what they once were, but calling them a "joke" is a bit of an exaggeration, even so. Even mainstream Minbari consider their ways quaint, but nobody disputes the fact that they're very good at what they do; it's just that what they do isn't considered relevant any more.

2895 What is it really when they're falling over?
Everything you thought was denied
I'm gonna be the one that's taking over
Now this is what it's like when worlds collide!

2969 The incantation and the visual effect are straight out of Lunar: Silver Star Story.

3010 Despite his near-total lack of a sense of humor, Zargh has many admirable qualities. Here we had an opportunity to showcase the most significant of them: his unbending integrity.

3032 In the original version of this scene, Nall replied merely, "No problem." Truss was quick to point out that, even exhausted from an unexpected invocation of his power, Nall would never miss a straight line as blatant as the one Mia just gave him.

3067 "Learn how punch when learn how keep dry!"

3079 She's not being facetious, she missed the beginning of the conversation. One of the problems with the text medium is that it's hard to convey the confusion that can result when a large group around a busy dinner table is having more than one conversation at once.

3109 Roll the Bones was a new album when Zoner, ReRob, and I were working on the original Undocumented Features. "Dreamline" struck us then, and strikes me still, as something of an anthem for the founding Wedge Defenders. It seemed only natural to extend it to the next generation.

>3032 In the original version of this scene, Nall replied
>merely, "No problem." Truss was quick to point out that, even
>exhausted from an unexpected invocation of his power, Nall would never
>miss a straight line as blatant as the one Mia just gave him.

Huh. I seem to have an older version saved in my personal SotS archive. (I'm using my offline version to read with these notes because it's easier to open it in ConTEXT and have the line numbers available.)

Naraht actually first appeared in Diane Duane's Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally (one of the "Space Welsh" novels), and reappears in some of her later novels as well. I'm pretty sure the DC Comics issues that he appears in were also written by her.

I take it O'Brien doesn't suffer from the disappearing/reappearing commission he had in TNG?

>2499 In UF, Keiko O'Brien teaches literature at DSM.

Does she also have a background as a botanist, as in the source material?

>3032 In the original version of this scene, Nall replied
>merely, "No problem." Truss was quick to point out that, even
>exhausted from an unexpected invocation of his power, Nall would never
>miss a straight line as blatant as the one Mia just gave him.

I seem to remember saying something similar when the story was originally posted. (In fact, I recall saying that I was surprised he didn't ask if was good for her too.) :)

- Sean
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true.'"
-- Terry Pratchett, from _The Last Continent_

The more amusing part of this was that when I read the annotation, my first thought was 'There's an RPG about Chinese decorating?'

>386 In addition to being culturally sensitive, this is just a
>good safety practice. As sci-fi history has shown again and again,
>ancient ruins are almost always dangerous - occasionally to far more
>than just the people poking around in them. The last thing the Corps
>of Engineers wants to go down in history for is having been the guys
>who released the Flood.

"D'oh! Who let out the drokh plague THIS time?"

>832 I think this is the first speaking appearance of any of the
>three Utonium sisters (who are, of course, mostly-grown-up versions of
>the title characters from The Powerpuff Girls).

I remember coming across this at the first time, along with the attached imagery section drawing and spent a good fifteen minutes laughing at how such a concept which on the face of it sounds ridiculous works SO WELL.

>1213 Apparently Gryphon did his traveling with Londo after he
>left Ishiyama (following the events flashed back to in Aegis Florea
>2) and before ending up in the Split Infinitive universe.

I'm still a bit confused as to why Gryphon's worried about him at this point. I believe you mentioned you chose to go with Londo's 'Decided to Enjoy His Life' phase instead of his post Shadow War continuing downslide into depression, despair, etc. at some point, which he indeed seems to be doing so here. Thus, Gryphon's honest concern seems slightly inexplicable.

>1321 This gag was planned years before the Symphony ever came
>along. We had long planned to introduce Babylon 5 and its diplomatic
>staff for the later part of FI, but had held off for years in
>observance of show creator J. Michael Straczynski's request that
>people not do B5 fanfic until the series was over. One of the things
>we'd discussed dozens of times was a scene for the station's grand
>opening in which Gryphon, much to Derek's consternation, already knows
>all the key ambassadors - including Kosh. Exactly why we
>haven't had an opportunity to show yet - but it's all been planned.

It also apparently served the purpose of giving Kosh rather un-Vorlo-vague lines, which when one pictures him saying them in his usual voice, is all too choicely amusing.

>2059 Yes, it's a real holiday. The event that led to it
>involved a 50,000-gallon tank of fudge sauce that fell from a colony
>transport and what the native Dantrovians, who had never encountered
>such a thing, did with it. The traditional retelling of the legend,
>delivered by each town and village's lorespeaker at the start of the
>festival, includes the punch line, "And you thought it was
>coolant!"

Thankfully, it didn't burst on impact. That would've been a might more inconvenient, I'd think.

>2265 For that matter, Janice (like all Ragolians) is also very
>familiar with non-simple droids, but as she lacks formal
>robopsychology credentials, she didn't get into that.

And stating something to the value of a piece of paper with the letters PhD on it over a full lifetime's experience with sentient machines would likely not have gone over well either.

>2742 The question is, who was dueling up
>there? PJM

I always assumed at least one was Sky, given his natural balance advantage with his tail.

>2895 What is it really when they're falling over?
>Everything you thought was denied
>I'm gonna be the one that's taking over
>Now this is what it's like when worlds collide!

It's a good day whenever I can track down a musical cue from any UF piece. I got into Bad Religion due to a similar dueling sequence from RTtN, after all.

>3032 In the original version of this scene, Nall replied
>merely, "No problem." Truss was quick to point out that, even
>exhausted from an unexpected invocation of his power, Nall would never
>miss a straight line as blatant as the one Mia just gave him.

If he hadn't, sadly no one else would've been properly irreverant to state it. :)

-OM

Speaking of Keraht, I noticed a possible continuity error earlier today. Over in another section, you mentioned that Gryphon, in the 2350's, was expecting Captain Pike to be in command of USS Enterprise when encountered in Split Infinitive as a result of an adventure with said ship under Pike's tenure as commanding officer earlier in the Exile.

S2M1 mentions that first contact with the Horta was at some point before 2275 by USS Enterprise... under the command of Captain James T. Kirk. Assuming that Kirk was Enterprise's third captain (after Pike and Robert April), this presents a slight problem.

It seems to me that use of "the one" to refer to the other party is usually linked to circumstances in which the one is about to put his foot in it something fierce. (And, conversely, the use of "the one" to refer to oneself happens when the one has put his foot in it, or is otherwise feeling the need to express humility.) Is this intentional?