5 In Magic Knight Rayearth, this turns out to be Princess Emeraude praying for the Magic Knights to come and save her world.

Here, well... we'll come back to that.

39 I don't think anybody would enjoy even ONE repetition of the Million Swords dream. That Corwin (and Utena, and Anthy) have had to endure it multiple times in the past says something for their strength of will even while asleep. PJM

41 This first part of the fifth movement was written long before parts of the rest of the First and Second Symphonies fell into place with a more solid structure. While it required some tweaking (and in some cases, blunt hammering) to fit the new overall plot-arc, I feel it improved from this treatment, making strands of connection between Corwin and the Rune Knights stronger, while heightening the tension of "What the Hell is going on here?" being shared by Fuu and Corwin. PJM

67 *bwong* Welcome to CorwinOS! PJM

69 The original draft of this scene is very much older than the rest of the Second Symphony, and when it was first written, Corwin didn't already know Fuu; he was meeting all three Knights for the first time.

80 That would have been a semi-delirious Corwin bellowing his disapproval of the situation to the gods... or anyone else within about a quarter-mile.

210 Corwin: Not a medic.

236 Yes it is. Mithril is one of the so-called "immortal metals" (metals which are magical in nature, but not alchemical elements like uru). Stronger than steel, it weighs very little, making it ill-suited for most weapons but perfect for armorsmithing. Elves are especially fond of it for that purpose, since anything reducing the amount of weight their slight frames must support in battle is welcome. Mithril plate armor is unusual, though; traditionally, the smiths of Asgard and Alfheim make mail out of it.

273 It must be cold if Hikaru is saying it's cold. Kumbaria, her Salusian homeland, is largely an arctic icescape. She's accustomed to cold, snowy weather.

282 Umi, on the other hand, is originally from the capital region of Hyeruul, where it rarely snows at all. She's had to get used to New Avalon's chilly winters, but even so, what's going on outside the egg right now is well beyond the pale as far as she's concerned.

313 Leo; Q (Salusian "universal donor", equivalent to the human type O).

392 I've always been rather fond of this moment and the exchanges leading up to it.

479 Hikaru was originally going to be Corwin's girlfriend. They were first depicted as adults in a standing relationship, in a draft of a story intended to follow Road Movie to Berlin. That piece went by the wayside when that story became Road Movie to Naboo. This material was originally written as a prequel of sorts to that piece, explaining how Corwin and Hikaru met (and, incidentally, how Corwin became the deity he's depicted as in the future stories). The way the First Symphony developed blew all that to hell, but I was able at least to salvage this chunk.

512 Later, of course, there's also Emmy Kyn'o'bi - but at this point in the timeline she hasn't even left Hyeruul yet, let alone met Leonard.

541 Umi thinks they're on an unexplored planet somewhere in Midgard. Not unreasonable; Hyeruul itself is similar to Cephiro in ways, and there are other worlds on the Rim - Barsaive and Abeir-Toril, for instance - where magic is significantly more prevalent than it is in the inner galaxy.

599 Why, in comparison to Lesser Cat Dragons, of course. These rather simpleminded cousins of the Greater Cat Dragon rarely achieve a full-grown length of more than ten feet.

601 Not very likely, as Umi's reaction testifies. Hyelian children mature very slowly. Most don't learn to speak intelligibly until they're in their twenties.

639 Rather a silly thing to say, since Corwin would die long before Nall if exposure was the cause.

680 We had a half-formed idea at this point that, when she got a little older, Fuu might become Saionji's girlfriend. Of course, that was when we still thought Wakaba was going to dump him and move back to Cephiro.

699 Hikaru can usually pass as human - many people never even notice humanized Salusians' primary ears, for some reason - but Umi certainly can't. One gag we never got a chance to use is the reasoning behind most people's reactions to these three in the more backward rural parts of Cephiro. Villagers tend to assume that Fuu is a traveling sorceress, Hikaru her hired sword, and Umi some kind of demonic familiar masquerading rather ineffectively as a human.

704 To an extent, Fuu is right, but really, they're always like that in this town. This is the very same town the locals chase Gar Logan out of in Titans: Convergence.

735 It has occasionally been rumored that the R'yuu-z'ky clan has in its ancestral tree at least a couple of kender explorers from the Krynn system. Taunting people does seem to run in their bloodline.

756 In addition to turning her hair white, Alcyione's brush with the Death of Dreams has left her rather... unhinged. She was never terribly wise, admittedly, but now she's outright crazy.

761 This is so very Hikaru, too.

807 Can you really blame these people for freaking out at the presence of a shapechanger and being automatically hostile to a traveling sorceress in Convergence?

816 Kind of a backhanded Earthdawn reference. There exists in Earthdawn a kind of packable food called dwarven iron rations. These keep forever, don't weigh much, and will keep a man alive pretty much indefinitely, but they're so unpalatable that most characters will eventually be literally unable to bear the thought of eating any more. ... Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure this is a canonical Earthdawn rule, or one of Eric Reuss's house rules. Eric has kind of a... thing about hideous food in his games, which I suspect comes from the fact that he's played enough Paranoia to permanently damage his mind write supplements for it.

No, actually, that's exactly what the source material says. You have to make Toughness checks to choke it down after the third day of eating the stuff, because it's so unappetizing.

I made a house rule for my campaign that this was not the case, because I figured somebody must have figured out that if you add some honey and a few spices, life is much better. Idiots. It's not useful to have food you can't stomach if you're starving to death. I think the original Earthdawn writers must have eaten too much early-period backpacking food. ALC

828 And we did consider that, briefly, before deciding that everything worked out much better this way for us, if not for the characters.

851 Perhaps Buster Poindexter's cover of "Hot Hot Hot".

892 So volatile is Cephiro's magisphere at the moment, and so much are Anthy's sorcerous powers waxing, that she somehow manages to animate that cloth across hundreds of miles and create within it a prophetic spirit echo without specifically trying. PJM

She was praying just as hard as Emeraude, and while she didn't have the power of the Pillarship behind her, Anthy is a very potent witch. She and Corwin will work out what was going on here in Ceremony and Celebration. ALC

905 Nall and Corwin are best friends, but there comes a point in everybody's life where you know you're going to break something, and if your best friend's handy, that's what you'll break. Corwin, recognizing this, wants to get the hell away from Nall - and Nall's smart enough to let him. ALC

923 Oddly, I think I got this term from Tolkien, who used it to allow for the varying lifespans of the races in his fantasy works, while preserving the idea that they each had their "teenager" phase. (Just because I didn't particularly enjoy The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't mean I've never read it.)

948 Upon their arrival on the Game Grid - er, I mean, in Cephiro - the future Rune Knights got a sort of "flying tour", not that any of it made sense to them at the time. (This is a holdover from Magic Knight Rayearth.)

955 Anime standard art-style change for mind control and such-like mystic states of altered consciousness.

973 The flying cereal bowl is from MKR as well.

1009 As we saw in Tower Shrouded in Frost, snow unicorns are commonly regarded as harbingers of death in Cephirean legend.

1016 Actually, he'd kill her where she stood. His plans require the Rune Knights to succeed in their mission.

Ahh, but in her unhinged state, she doesn't realize that. Alcyione really is one of those people who are too dumb to live. I don't know what Clef saw in her. ALC

1048 Around the studio, those of us who watched Homicide: Life on the Street called this Corwin's "Bayliss moment", after the scene in which an overstressed Detective Bayliss sticks up his neighborhood convenience store over a discrepancy of something like 12 cents when he's trying to buy some beer at the end of a hellish week on the job. Actually, he doesn't so much stick the place up as check out at gunpoint. "Now. I would like. A bag please."

1094 UF-Fuu's Funkotroni heritage occasionally sneaks out in entertaining ways. In fact, we made her Funkotroni specifically for those moments, since she is normally the most grammatically punctilious of the Knights.

1106 Alas, we never see Corwin's Shalharan flying boat again. Perhaps it's still there, moored to whichever island he landed on.

1126 As a nephew of the King of Dragons, Nall is no ordinary white; he is, or will be when he completes his trial, the White Dragon, the archetype of the dragons of winter.

1130 Here we see Nall's draconic aura manifesting again, as it did for Mia in This Old Dorm. An effect taken straight from Lunar.

1186 Like their weapons, the Rune Knights' armor is very special. Made by the Master Smith, it's tied to their spirits and evolves with them, becoming more elaborate and more effective as their powers awaken. Note that their destinies are so intertwined that the armor of all three Knights reacts to an evolution in one of them. Unlike the Iron and Rose Knights, who complement each other, the three Knights of the "universal" elements make up a sort of mystic triumvirate unto themselves - which is appropriate, since they exist to redress the unsettled balance of a broken Trinity.

1196 Hikaru has played a few too many video games, and is a little bit lacking in real life experience. She's a 'tweenager and she's having an Adventure... and so, everything is cool and neat and special. At least for a very short while longer. Then reality's going to hit, and it's going to hit hard. ALC

1228 Dau'kar: Kumbarese for something to the general effect of "Holy crap."

1248 One of my pet peeves is stories - usually detective stories - where the writers clearly don't know the difference between a revolver and an automatic, or otherwise commit egregious firearms-related gaffes. Here that expresses itself in what is admittedly a slightly overlong and -detailed description of the process for reloading a Mauser broomie, which doesn't have a detachable box magazine like a modern automatic pistol.

1257 The UF Valkyrie are not merely spirits who wander the battlefield nominating fallen warriors for Valhalla, as the myths describe them. Indeed, they don't do that at all. Their title, "Chooser of the Slain", refers to the fact that they're authorized to take life in the performance of their duties - literally, they decide who lives and who dies. Valkyrie are, as the saying goes, licensed to kill. (As opposed to, say, the agents of the Celestial Relief Agency, who are forsworn from violence against mortals.)

1299 Umi doesn't like people getting underfoot when she's trying to cook. Hikaru likes to taste things and ask what ingredients are. It's not a good combination.

In canon MKR, Umi just bakes. But since we made her Hyelian, I figured Umi had spent enough time in the kitchen during her lifetime that she'd probably branched out. ALC

1322 Indeed, by the end of the Knights' evolution in Magic Knight Rayearth, Fuu's sword is nothing short of colossal. I'm not entirely sure what the animators were trying to tell us there.

1340 One of Anne's trademark recipes in the real world. I have driven hundreds of miles for a piece of that sherry bundt cake. ... Well, OK, and to see Anne and Eric and whoever else. But the cake was a factor!

1353 Zarquon is an oft-referenced holy-prophet-type in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe. In UF he's a famous Asgardian wizard, something of a patron saint to sorcerers and weaponsmiths like Corwin.

1367 Not sure what this word means. Presumably it's something not nice. I would guess that it's Alvish or Low Draconic.

1443 Another reference to the original setup of Rayearth, and the general fantasy trope of mysterious proclaimers of cryptic wisdom following the heroes around. PJM

1478 As always, the Hyelian profanities were provided by our own Professor of Hyelian Studies, Marty Rose. This one's literal meaning is unknown, but linguistically it serves much the same function as the Standard, "For crissakes!"

1480 T'ch'nn-k'luongo, sometimes Standardized "jungo-lungo", is essentially Hyelian for "Oh, for cryin' out loud!" or "Great googly-moogly!"

1495 Once Umi decides someone's a friend or companion in arms, she will do everything in her power to back up that person. She just takes a little longer than some other heroes to decide that a person's worth helping. ALC

1576 Corwin's main tutor in the arts of war was Brünnhilde Silverspear, in her capacity as Valkyrie master-at-arms. All of the Valkyrie had a hand in his training, though, especially Kijana Whitestaff; as we will see later, his weapon of choice is Draconic in origin.

1608 This is true in every RPG I've ever played. Single people can sneak around challenges, whole parties have a much harder time of doing so. However, if a single person gets caught, he's hosed. ALC

1668 Ascot knows what's up, but he doesn't understand why. However, as a loyal mage and a student of the High Priest's, he feels it's his duty to save the Pillar and stop the Knights. ALC

1676 Around the studio, this monster is affectionately known as Lob-Storr.

1768 Not sure why I felt compelled to be coy about this; obviously it's just ice. This might be an artifact of this scene having originally been cast as an introduction, such that the observers (Hikaru and Fuu) wouldn't already know that Nall's an ice-breathing white dragon.

1779 A little-used capability of Stick, this trick hasn't reappeared.

1787 Nall does love his seafood.

1862 And here's Toraneko again. Luckily, nothing happens to him.

1892 See line 2831 of Reflections in Transition.

1899 Like any good hitchhiker, Corwin knows where his towel is.

1949 How can Nall be a close relative of Bahamut VII when Bahamut is a Western Wyrm and Nall is a Cat Dragon? They're dragons, dude. It's magic.

1984 Yes there are.

2020 I love this image. It makes me giggle every time I read it. Imagine waking up to a nose as big as your head looming right over you. ALC

2091 Anne addresses one of those pesky logic puzzles that spring up when we alter settings like this: "If UF-Cephiro is a modernish world with mass transit technology, why are the Rune Knights walking everywhere?"

Well, they also had no money. ALC

2117 In the more built-up areas, where the public is a bit more sophisticated, Umi's odd looks don't cause as much consternation. People probably assume she knows an alchemist or transmogrifier and is making some kind of statement.

2130 True, but not very relevant to the poker question.

2180 Corwin may not entirely understand why he is drawn to white Cephirean roses, but...

2193 Hikaru's almost right here, but then, Akio's always been able to make almost right seem completely right, utterly plausible, and to the person's best interests. ALC

2204 I don't know exactly how this got incorporated into Hikaru's UF incarnation, but she's quite the scholar when it comes to ancient human plays and epic stories. PJM

She has a class in ancient Earth lit; we saw it in If You Can Make It There. --G.

2206 I had to give this line to Umi. She's made out to be such an airhead in the original MKR, and I really didn't like that. Fuu is very, very smart, but she doesn't jump to conclusions, and in this case, that's both a good and a bad thing. ALC

2208 Shakespeare's Macbeth, of course. Act IV, Scene 1:

2nd. APPARITION
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man; for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
Descends.

2248 Like the gods, the denizens of the Hells bear facial tattoos indicating their place in the cosmic scheme of things. Unlike the gods, whose forehead markings always have continuity (they may have multiple parts, as Corwin's circle with a dot, but there's always a part that is contiguous), demons tend to have two-part forehead marks, most commonly a pair of diagonal slashes that stand in for the horns most demon types don't actually have.

2333 Hey! Ho! Let's go!

2336 It is never revealed in Revolutionary Girl Utena how it was decided who would possess the Rose Bride at the start of the tournament. Perhaps they drew straws. In any event, the UF version began with Anthy held for safekeeping by Miki, and only one duel in the cycle - the one that transferred her to Saionji - had been fought when Utena came along.

2373 "You can't kill the dragon in your heart... men like us can only fight to make them work for us." (Kyouichi Saionji, S5: Prelude in A Minor)

2384 "If used logically, madness makes a great weapon." (Whirl, Autobot aerial assault expert) PJM

2463 Among students of the Jedi fighting arts, this is known as the Aggressive Back Stance. Katsujinkenryuu students call it The Dragon Coils to Strike.

2470 And now, Saionji gets some of the payoff he so richly deserves from his past years of training and recentering. Let's all give him a big hand... PJM

2544 ... and about a dozen gallons of bacta, 'cause man, he's gonna need it. PJM

2519 Ghan'uul is the Hyelian equivalent of Hell, a place of eternal suffering.

2669 I forget who came up with this phrase during the development cycle, but boy, it sure is catchy. PJM

I think that was me. The reference, of course, is to those "Sanitized For Your Protection" strips motels sometimes put on the toilet seats, though more directly, it's a takeoff on the studio injoke, "Stalinized For Your Protection", referring to a retroactive fix to a released story. --G.

2667 It should be noted, however, that Saionji doesn't know that the Knights have been summoned to kill the Pillar, just that they are part of Akio's plan. Saionji was at best a mediocre student at Ohtori Academy, and besides, the destruction of the Sorcery Department meant that by the time he got there, nobody taught Advanced Arcana - the only class in which it was ever covered - any more. ALC

2711 His old towel has lobster stains on it. Presumably this is one he's swiping from the Tenchuu Royal Arms.

2724 In fact, this would turn out not to have been the case. Akio has better things to do than sit around watching his minions work all the time. He only knows that Lafarga has been defeated, and presumes that Saionji has been as well.

2760 What the hell, it's only gold. Soon enough, he won't need to worry about that any more... one way or the other.

2793 An Icehouse set. Developed by Looney Labs, Icehouse isn't a game so much as a kind of playing piece with which a number of games can be played.

2806 This particular Icehouse game is Zarcana. ALC

2895 There speaks a seasoned adventurer. Or at least one who has been jumped in the night by nasty creatures. ALC

2933 The Hellbore, a common vehicle-mounted weapon in the Asgardian arsenal, is essentially a very large Pyrodyne.

3001 Unfortunately, as Hikaru is about to discover, armor doesn't always help. ALC

3055 One very large bed for the three girls, as established in MKR. ALC

3061 Rayearth is impatient. He really, really wants out. ALC

3140 Fuu hadn't realized it either.

3240 Elven is the modern form of Alvish spoken in most of Alfheim.

3244 There is no elegant Standard translation of tzol'ynn. It basically means "hideous tentacle-covered cave-dwelling monster with an entirely unaccountable desire to mate with elven girls, who are understandably not often up for that". One of Hyeruul's less savory native fauna, but mercifully so rare they're commonly believed to be mythical.

3255 The ghost who walks!

3259 Essentially (though not literally), "Crap!"

3291 The little poems the Rune Knights recite when they are fully invested are designed to reflect the duality that exists in the natures of all their elements - the fact that all the primal elements can help or harm depending on how they're employed. They're original to UF.

3361 One of my favorite bits of repartee in this piece, and a little dig at the way fantasy heroes and villains always seem to be able to make their defiant speeches regardless of the conditions around them. ("From my perspective the Jedi are evil!" Dude, from my perspective this is no place to be debating philosophy, yo.)

3414 Yes, I know lava flows don't really thunder down mountainsides like freight trains, leaving obsidian in their wake. The imagery was too cool to let a piddling thing like science get in my way.

3462 The final form of the Rune Knights' armor is rarely seen, mainly because Anne and I prefer the penultimate version (me for reasons of aesthetics, Anne for reasons of practicality), which still incorporated their school uniforms. Thus, in UF that's the default form of their fully evolved armor, and the "full-dress" version pretty much only shows up at ceremonial occasions and when the Rune Gods are involved.

I love the full armor, but it's so impractical, I can't imagine them tromping all over the world in it. ALC

3619 Corwin feels a certain kinship with the Master Smith; they are, after all, both craftspersons.

3632 Not unlike the canonical Rayearth character whose place Corwin more or less usurps in this version.

3737 He's not so much mad at her as at this whole lousy situation, and the sinking feeling that he knows what's waiting at the heart of the maelstrom doesn't help his temper any either.

3756 In the MKR TV series, we get a brief look into Presea's arsenal; in addition to all the usual fantasy stuff, there's a Napoleonic-era cannon in there.

3771 We put a lot of thought into Corwin's gate medium. As previously noted, all the gods in Ah! My Goddess have them, and we wanted Corwin's to be both unique and useful. We considered things like optical media and data crystals, but decided they're not common enough to be useful. Eventually we hit on windows, which have a nice kind of metaphoric ring to them (though they make the world beyond them visible, they're not usually ways of getting anywhere) and are pretty much everywhere.

3789 In UF, Professor Nemuro was Ohtori Academy's last dean of sorcery. He was a researcher into the history and workings of the Duelists' Code, and may have done the work that provided the foundation for Akio's own twisted mastery of the Code's loopholes and technicalities. Utena would know him as Souji Mikage, the mysterious figure who headed the Black Rose Order during her brief and, from her perspective, largely incomprehensible clash with them midway through the Lost Tournament. He may or may not be dead now. For that matter, he may or may not have been dead then. Phil has prepared a short doctoral dissertation on exactly what the hell was going on in that particular story arc, but we're afraid it would overwhelm the annotation system, so it'll have to be presented elsewhere.

3823 Little has been revealed beyond this little throwaway reference about the Wild Age. It's like the Clone Wars used to be in Star Wars, before George went and actually included the Clone Wars. Presumably it was a time when magic was much more prevalent and powerful in Cephiro than we see in the present day.

3940 A little in-joke, referring to the aforementioned development work on Corwin's gate ability.

3950 The Student Council office's balcony, where so many of their meetings took place back in the day.

3959 Regrettably, this little tidbit seems to come out of nowhere here. I had intended, in at least a couple of places before this story, to note that Corwin occasionally saw incomprehensible fragments of Utena's past in his dreams after he fell fully in love with her, but there was never a good place to put it, so all we got before this bald declaration that it occasionally happened was the rather vague intimation that it might've happened in Vortigern's Lake.

3963 The guardian golems don't exist in Magic Knight Rayearth; we added them to even the odds a little with Nall and Corwin involved in the final confrontation. They are, in fact, the Evangelions from Neon Exodus Evangelion, graciously working for scale to put in this cameo.

3969 In MKR, Emeraude's battle mecha is some kind of weird-ass centaur thing. Not so here, for no better reason than I didn't like the looks of it.

3986 My favorite cliffhanger, not that the Symphonies have many.

4046 The general history of some of the more esoteric bits of Ohtori Academy's history (including that of Nemuro Hall), was handled and elaborated on by yours truly, in order to better fit the RGU/MKR mix in UF. PJM