231 wa'maH: Klingon cardinal number ten.

358 Battlecruiser Vengeance is a creation of the late John M. Ford, who made it part of the cultural backdrop of his take on the Klingon Empire in his two Star Trek novels, The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet? The UF version is considerably embellished, but I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original.

375 The Battlecruiser Vengeance equivalent of the Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain". One of the recurring features of the UF version of Battlecruiser Vengeance is that it is, in many ways, the opposite of Star Trek - so particularly awful Star Trek episodes like "Spock's Brain" are among the most beloved eps of Vengeance.

459 Part of Kozue's story arc in the original Revolutionary Girl Utena was that she was, in a sort of sibling-rivalry backlash against Miki's shy circumspection, recklessly promiscuous.

552 Here we see Durandal fully into his accustomed "go here, flip this switch" mien, as immortalized in the last half of Marathon and most of its two sequels.

577 And now we learn that Janice is much more than just a resident advisor. As a native of the planet Ragol and a member of the Ragolian Hunters' Guild (though, in Phantasy Star Online terms, she's actually a Ranger, not a Hunter), she's more than equal to the situation she finds descending on the campus.

594 It didn't help that one of the first things the original colonists did was botch an attempt at harnessing the planet's unusually powerful Getter-ray flux, causing a huge explosion and a planetwide wave of mutagenic energy that boosted the size and aggression of the already impressive local fauna quite a bit.

624 The original Ragolians were organized into a number of groups called Sections after the parts of the colony ship they were assigned to. When they settled the planet, each Section was granted a particular area of the surface to colonize. The Section IDs persist on modern Ragol as geopolitical identifiers. (In Phantasy Star Online, a character's Section ID is determined by his name and governs what sort of loot drops he can expect to get.) Janice belongs to Greennill Section.

635 The similarity in color and general "mystery sci-fi super energy" theme eventually led us to conflate Getter rays and Photon technology in UF.

644 They feel the disturbance in the Force caused by the aggressive presence of the Psi Corps and Earthforce troops in what had been a peaceful area. This is one of the first indications that Utena is Force-sensitive.

665 The first appearance of Carmela Sunderland, about whom we will learn much more in the Fourth Symphony.

696 This is surprisingly un-insightful of Amanda, but then, she is a bit preoccupied.

722 Demonstrated by Hal Jordan in one of my favorite issues of the old Silver Age Green Lantern series, in which he observed conversationally while beating the hell out of Sinestro that it's hard to concentrate on your power ring when your opponent keeps hitting you.

724 Sunderland gets a name - the name, as it happens, of one of the heavy bombers fielded by the British RAF during World War II. She was almost named Carmela Lancaster, until I decided I wanted to be slightly more obscure with the reference. Her first name was just pulled out of thin air.

762 At last, the k'tayyl gets its proper name as well.

837 Latin for "Thus always to tyrants."

871 The enmity between the Freespacers and the Earth Alliance has roots that go back long before the foundation of the Psi Corps, or the EA, for that matter. The Freespacers' habit of interfering in affairs on Earth (primarily in North America) in previous centuries isn't something many modern Earth politicians are yet prepared to forgive.

923 Mac is named for the infamous interstellar con man Harry Mudd, who was a friend of his great-great-grandfather, the equally infamous Corellian space pirate Coros bel Bendi, back in the day.

953 Yeah, I'm not sure how this works either.

966 Professor Louis Curran was a choral instructor and taught music theory at WPI when I was there. Among other things, he was the director of the Men's Glee Club.

1004 As it was written in the great library of Azarath: The clouded mind sees nothing; the clear mind reveals nothing.

1115 In retrospect, one tends to doubt they'd have hit him quite that fast, even if he's not accustomed to strong drink.

1127 In G'Kron's case, because they doubt he knows anything useful; in Sky's case, because the Earth Alliance would prefer not to make an enemy of House Ishkarat, which handles a significant quantity of the trade coming from Barsaive's corner of the Outer Rim into the Centaurus Sector.

1145 Azalynn is pretty sure she knows why this is happening.

1170 Actually, like most Confederate Freespacer gear, it's a RebelTech knockoff.

1186 Now is the time for everybody who's got a hidden dimension to reveal at least part of it, it seems; this isn't the last time we'll touch this theme today, either.

1203 The old Wakaba would have been a passive participant, if a participant at all. The new one? Not so passive.

1277 We were speaking of hidden dimensions earlier?

1295 Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

1302 This is just the first time that Janice's life will start to mirror those of the protagonists of Bungie's most famous games, Marathon and Halo... PJM

1306 Flipping switches and moving on is a perennial task for those who serve Durandal.

1342 A popular and much-sought-after foodstuff in the Babylon 5 universe, spoo is rare and expensive. B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski presumably gave it an embarrassing name on purpose.

1344 All Hoffmanites are formidable opponents in a Standard-gravity environment simply because of their size, strength, and durability, but Moose, as the son of the planetary governor, has had self-defense training. Though possessed of a normally peaceful disposition, he is well able to take care of himself in a fight.

1408 Another hidden element of a character's design - in this case, one the character herself isn't even aware of yet.

1461 Corwin originally intended both Lesser Mazinger and Tiny Robo to be unarmed entertainment units, but he very quickly saw, thanks to the incident with Mike Carpenter, that trouble follows Kate and Utena, and adjusted his plans accordingly. His desire to protect his loved ones - by proxy if necessary - will inspire many of his greatest creations over the years.

1513 In Phantasy Star Online, it's possible to "feed" unwanted weapons and equipment to one's Mag companion. Eventually this will increase the Mag's power.

1531 In naval parlance, a midshipman is an officer candidate who has not yet earned a commission. In the real world today it's usually used to refer to naval academy cadets; during the Napoleonic Wars it referred to young men who were considered of a better class than common seamen and thus potentially capable of becoming officers after a few years of hideously demeaning grunt labor. The Freespacer interpretation lies somewhere in between. They are among the few forces in the UF universe to use the slightly more archaic "midshipsman" tag, with its extra s.

1536 Presumably a reference to the Morrígan, a figure from Irish folklore, and not the Darkstalkers character.

1575 Professor Susan Vick, beloved drama professor at WPI in the early '90s (and possibly still today; I'm quite out of the loop as to what's going on at WPI nowadays).

1655 This will not be this luckless Psi Cop's last encounter with Duelists. A few years hence he'll burn to death in the concourse of a mall in Nekomikoka after trying to apprehend the fugitive pyrokinetic Anne "Juniper" Cross.

1776 S'thaai dvhala, makhanai: roughly, "Spirits keep you safe, my beloved." (There's the root word makhana again.)

1811 "The Sunlit Garden", naturally.

1911 This line, and the byplay with the cat in general, is from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Also, the inclusion of the cat is a nod to an episode of Big O in which Dorothy adopts a stray (much to Roger's dismay, since cats in the post-apocalyptic world of Big O are vanishingly rare and immensely valuable).

Proof positive that Dorothy came from Kane's World - a disturbing tendency to occasionally mimic the Dark Knight. PJM

1919 Roger is at a distinct disadvantage here. He can't do anything that might reveal the fact that he's more than a normal Psi Cop, which rules out his lightsaber and most of the more overt Sith techniques. Moreover, he's taken flat-footed by the furious resistance this group of children is offering him and his minions. Such is his arrogance, long cultivated by both his Sith masters and his Psi Corps training, that the mere idea of a normal being able to offer the kind of fight Amanda's putting up is almost unfathomable to him.

1973 Giant Robo's Atomic Buster Cannon is a huge and terribly impressive weapon, the ultimate destructive capability of his world's most powerful robot. In the Giant Robo OVA series it's shown to be capable of obliterating not only another giant battle robot, but also most of the island that robot was standing in front of. In UF terms it would easily qualify as an Omega-class weapon. Given Tiny Robo's scale, his version's not too shabby either.

2024 "But... we... have... phaser two!"

2040 Earthforce's Nova-class battleship is roughly the UF equivalent of the Omega-class ships often seen on Babylon 5, despite having been the Omega's predecessor on the show. The reason for this is simple: one of the main improvements between the canonical Nova and Omega was the addition of the spinning gravity section to the Omega design, which the UF universe's tech base renders entirely superfluous. Thus, ships like the EAS Agamemnon in UF aren't members of a new class, but rather "Mark II" Novas. Also, there are some discrepancies in naval terminology between UF and B5. In B5, the Omega-class ships are called destroyers, whereas UF's naval nomenclature, in which a destroyer is a small, agile vessel primarily intended for interception and patrol duties, calls them battleships.

2044 Hyperion-class destroyers, also from B5, appear in UF relatively unchanged. By the time of this story they're a bit obsolescent but still front-line hardware.

2046 More nomenclature conflicts: in Star Trek: The Next
Generation, Starfleet is presented as a primarily non-military force, and its most powerful ships, like the Galaxy-class vessels, are called "explorers". In UF, Starfleet most definitely is a military organization, and as such its largest, most powerful ships-of-the-line are called battleships. Actually, a Galaxy could probably qualify as a dreadnaught.

2055 A rare sighting of the metric system, which is not commonly used in the UF universe.

2080 Kris brought Aya and most of her supporting cast in from Star Trekkers, a Star Trek fan comic that had a short run before being crushed by Paramount.

2087 Captain Sheridan, Bruce Boxleitner's character on Babylon 5, shown here having a somewhat more conventional military career than his B5 counterpart. Actually, this is happening at a point in his career before the B5 version was assigned to Babylon 5 in the first place.

2091 One of the UF universe's several felinoid species, the Caitians come originally from Star Trek: The Animated Series, where, freed from the need to only design alien races that human actors could play, the designers threw in a few characters that would qualify in Teenagers From Outer Space terms as "Not Very Near Human" - including the Caitian comm officer Lieutenant M'Ress.

2226 ISO Standard Anime Sound Effect.

2346 The boom noise the Millennium Falcon makes when Han Solo hits the gas on the way out of the Mos Eisley docking bay in the original Star Wars is one of my favorite sound effects.

2351 Here we get a rare glimpse of the machinery that makes the Avalon pseudocontinent work.

2395 One presumes Colonel Ruurlkyr's troops are not all Wookiees, though that would certainly be impressive. Aya alludes to the fact that her battle group's contingent of Freespacer Marines, like the Royal Salusian Marine Corps' Orbital Drop Shock Troopers and the GENOM White Legion's Strike Force Helldiver, are equipped and trained to be dropped straight from their mothership into combat - unlike standard marine units, who descend to the surface in dropships.

2436 The megalight (abbreviated MGLT) is the arbitrary speed unit from the X-Wing computer game series.

2441 Daggerdisc's name comes from the Battletech Technical Readout: 3026. Each AeroSpace Fighter type described in the book listed a couple of "notable examples", famous pilots who flew that particular type, and often the names of the pilots' personal ships were mentioned. One example for one of the book's several disc-shaped fighter models was called "Daggerdisc", a name I thought had a terrific ring to it. (See also the YT-1300 freighter in the gameplay examples from the original West End Games Star Wars RPG manual, Dorion Discus.)

2455 23,500 miles up, as anyone who read Justice League of America comics in the 1970s can tell you.

2497 Unlike Han Solo, Corwin doesn't bother with any wimp-ass single-barrel anti-personnel pop-down blaster.

2518 One of the techniques incorporated in Katsujinkenryuu from Talar Kem's Jedi training.

2526 The staging of the rescue scene was something Zoner and I had discussed many times and were very much looking forward to sharing with the readers. (Also, here's that Corellian ion thruster boom again.)

2559 Network 23 still uses these antiquated contraptions - the cameras, not the droids - because they're damned near indestructible.

2567 The only one of the several world-dominating television networks in the world of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future to have any integrity or class, Network 23 was an obvious choice when the time came to get UF-Truss some gainful employment after his time in the Wedge Defense Force came to an end.

2576 Given how badly banged up Roger is, it's safe to assume that only the Dark Side is keeping him on his feet at this point, let alone enabling him to try and punch Truss.

2607 Lucky he's not a HAL 9000!

2689 A reference to the play mechanics of the X-Wing games, in which cutting back the power going to weapons and/or shields can increase a fighter's speed at the expense of offensive or defensive strength.

2698 Daggerdisc's chin blasters were inspired by the chin turret included on the G model of the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in World War II.

2736 Corwin learned to swear in part from Rhinox, the Maximal engineer, who's an old pal of his mother's.

2750 A bit of imagery I've always particularly liked.

2824 I had wanted to do this with a Millennium Falcon-type ship since the first time I saw the SDF-1's Reflex cannon in action and realized that the basic visual effect could be applied to anything with a "fork" configuration.

2839 Hyperspace may be one of the slower ways of getting anywhere in the UF universe, but it undoubtedly has the most visually exciting "getaway" effect.

2864 Not just his first kiss with Utena, but his first real kiss, period.

2924 In X-Wing, an X-Wing with its laser and shield recharge rates set to neutral (not recharging, but not draining either) tops out at exactly 100 MGLT. With the laser recharge bumped up to the first of the two levels at which the weapons actually recharge and the shields left neutral, it does 88. The X-Wing is the baseline by which the performance of all other ships in the game setting are measured.

2941 Renown and Indefatigable are both named for ships aboard which Horatio Hornblower served in C.S. Forester's series of novels chronicling the character's naval career.

2965 0.25 is hell of fast for a hyperdrive - as fast as the Millennium Falcon. Hyperdrives get faster as the rating gets closer to zero.

3022 And now we know who Xenia phoned at the end of Courtship.

3060 In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Bajor isn't in the Epsilon Eridani system. The fact that it is in UF is because that's where Babylon 5 is, and - because of all the fandom pissing that ensued when two shows with space station themes debuted at the same time - I had always wanted UF's version of B5 to be conflated with elements from DS9.

3061 I started out using the Standard and local names of Bajor's primary more or less interchangeably, then settled slowly into the habit of only using "Epsilon Eridani" when context indicated that a perspective outside the B'hava'el system was needed. Also, the persistent references to "Bajor-B'hava'el" came from my misreading a note on a map; the star's local name is just "B'hava'el".

3093 Mac suffers from phototachyphobia, an irrational fear of faster-than-light travel.

3131 Frankly, I don't think hunting the Ancients of Mu would be justified.

3159 Like the previous four Babylon Stations.

3175 Challenger, seen here from the outside for the first time, is a Sovereign-class dreadnaught. The type originated in the feature film Star Trek: First Contact as the new USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-E.

3198 As will be noted in a later story, Challenger's comm officer, Hoshi Sato, is named for a famous ancestor of hers who served - and disappeared - on the long-missing WDF survey ship Enterprise (NX-01), the first starship to bear the name.

3211 I was pleased with the Chandlerian feel of this line.

3249 Ruri is part of a small group of characters who hold the interesting distinction of having been imported from shows I don't really like. She's from Martian Successor Nadesico, which I just couldn't get into - but I liked her, so I swiped her.

3269 In-story, IPSF starships have five-digit hull numbers starting with zero to mock the fact that Starfleet had recently gone - for no apparent reason other than to make their ships look a little more important - to five-digit hull numbers starting with 1. There have not been more than ten thousand Starfleet vessels since the start of the fleet, so Gryphon's assumption is that they're just being pretentious. Out-of-story, they're East Coast ZIP codes. "04462", for instance, is the one for Millinocket, Maine.

3388 Jer is an old friend from the GweepCo Elder Days and a regular around the online studio. Among many other claims to fame, he performed the original transcription of the Principia Discordia into ASCII under the pen name "Dru'el the Chaotic" and wrote Xtacy, the trippy visual generator of choice for the X Window System. Here he gets his due at last by being chosen as the first commander of Babylon Station.

3406 UF-Starfleet officers wear the uniform seen on the last few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the colored jackets (before they went to the kind that was mostly black with a colored bit on the shoulders).

3412 And here I finally achieve my years-long dream of getting Susan Ivanova and Kira Nerys on the same stage.

3460 At this early stage of the proceedings, Ivanova remains an Earth Alliance patriot and a believer in the promise of the Federation. As such, it irritates her when Gryphon is cynical about the EA.

3486 More real-life pets achieve a kind of immortality.

3491 The name of Dorothy's cat, Peril, is a bit of a joke. In the Big O episode "Missing Cat", Dorothy named her adopted cat "Perrault", a reference to 17th-century folklorist Charles Perrault - compiler of The Tales of Mother Goose, which included the traditional story of Puss in Boots. Before "Missing Cat" received an official translation, various online fans speculated about what she was saying when she named the cat. Some spotted the Perrault reference; others insisted that she'd named him Perro (Spanish for "dog"), possibly because the extinction of domestic animals in the show's setting meant no one knew what a dog or cat was supposed to look like. In honor of that goofy fandom argument - and because when she first meets him, both Dorothy and the cat are in considerable danger - I named the UF version Peril.

3514 Another line I'm still very pleased with.

3525 Yeah, I know, Zoner ex machina, but hey. We did want to establish him as a powerful but capricious figure, and we did need a way to get Amanda into her father's presence (since you can't really threaten someone through a viewscreen).

3548 At the beginning of Space Battleship Yamato, the Gamilon Empire is, in fact, in the process of destroying the Earth through comet bombardment, apparently just for the sake of being villainous.

3555 Earth's population has declined from its 21st-century high of 17.7 billion thanks to colonization, exploration, and people wanting to get the fuck away from the Psi Corps.

3654 Damn right he would.

3742 This expression presumably doesn't make any sense at all to a 25th-century listener.

3769 The bluapple is native to the planet Winath, homeworld of the Ranzz twins (originally from DC Comics' Legion of Super-Heroes).

3800 Why Gryphon feels the need to introduce himself this way, I'm not sure.

3841 Gryphon refers here to the historical people of the Greek city-state Sparta, not the Salusian supercommandos.

3846 The WDF's CVR-series armor evolved from CVR-3, the armor worn by human pilots in Genesis Climber Mospeada.

3861 Ragol's population includes a large percentage of free mechanoids who are much more sophisticated than pit droids, but most of them are Hunters and Rangers, not miners.

3999 Won't be the last time.

4172 Here's one of the Thorn's enchantments in action (specifically, the one prohibiting it from being used by its master's enemies).

4179 And also because, as we will eventually learn, being a Psi Cop isn't his "real job" anyway.

4191 Similar to the one Lando uses on the Millennium Falcon near the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

4291 Usually I don't bother including everybody's titles and ranks in the credits, but since the ending theme was an instrumental this time, I had the space, so what the hell.