22 Admittedly, it would've been very difficult for Utena to travel in space before coming to Midgard, since Cephiro is an Aristotelian/Ptolemaic pocket universe, with the world in the center surrounded by various celestial bodies (sun, moon, etc.) moving on crystal spheres.

32 This is metaspace, which is what we call Babylon 5 hyperspace in UF, UF's "hyperspace" being of the Star Wars type.

69 Not only is this a good opportunity to flesh out Corwin a little (by showing that he can put his discomfiture aside if he has something technical to talk about, and that he likes to teach people what he knows), it's also an excellent excuse to tell the readers a bit about FTL travel. They use this trick on Doctor Who all the time. It's why the Doctor has traveling companions in the first place.

99 Later stories have given indications that hyperspace travel doesn't take as long as all that, which is one of the reasons why UF has never claimed to be hard sci-fi.

163 This really is how one perceives existing in warped space, according to Einstein.

174 The B-17 Broadsword strategic space bomber (Wing Commander 2).

178 This is, believe it or not, an oblique reference to a real thing: NS Savannah, the world's first (and very nearly last) nuclear-powered freighter. Unlike the notional spacefold freighter mentioned here, Savannah was really built, but was not a commercial success.

187 CABIN AUX HEAT on, CABIN AUX HEAT off...

230 And here's Nall, putting in his first speaking appearance. He's originally from the console RPG Lunar: Silver Star Story, the PlayStation version of which I spent many a happy hour watching Truss play through not long before production on the First Symphony began.

236 Ah, the Zeta Cygni Dyson Sphere. Never before or since have I made a major design decision with less consideration of the consequences. Though it's certainly an eyecatching conversation piece and provides many benefits to its inhabitants, it's also made for a great many headaches for me.

246 Mathews Memorial Spaceport is named for Ryan Mathews, whose Dirty Pair fanfic was, as far as I know, the first English-language anime fanfiction on the Internet. He's not dead in real life, despite what some startled people thought when this piece was released.

248 I've always been fond of the phrasing of "he went aft and realized he was an idiot."

259 Actually, it's a sports bra, Corwin, but it's probably best that you didn't consider that too closely at the time.

292 Nall's full name and realm of origin are unique to the UF version, though in Lunar he is also a dragon.

300 There are many breeds of dragon in Alfheim's draconic territories. In UF to date we've only seen a couple. Great Cat Dragons are relatively rare; most of the dragons we've seen on screen have been Western Wyrm Dragons (and yes, I and the taxonomists of Alfheim both know that "wyrm dragon" is technically redundant) of one color or another. The Western is the classic D&D-style dragon, though unlike D&D dragons, the alignments of Alfheim's dragons are not coupled to their colors (obviously, Nall isn't chaotic evil).

333 New Avalon! The City in the Sphere! The ongoing evolution and maturation of New Avalon has been one of my favorite things about working in the FI era. What is known and what remains unknown about New Avalon could easily fill a book by itself, but here are some quick facts: population approximately 13 million, 48 percent human, 40 percent Salusian, 12 percent "other"; climatically similar to Boston; has twenty daily newspapers in seventeen different languages.

363 The Entire State Building stands 4,500 feet from sidewalk to roof and 5,280 feet in total height if you count the television transmitter on top. It has 275 floors above ground and 25 below, amounting to roughly 20 million square feet of floor space. Among many other things, it contains the offices and studios of the Avalon Broadcasting System and its flagship station, Avalon 17. It was also the first headquarters of both the reconstituted Wedge Defense Force and the International Police Organization before those organizations complete their own headquarters buildings.

367 The Imperial Hotel Monolith (part of the Imperial Hotels chain, as the name suggests, but often referred to in town simply as the Hotel Monolith) has 20,000 rooms on 200 floors. It's named for and resembles the hotel from the 1994 film version of The Shadow.

369 Though a mere 120 stories tall, the Aztechnology Pyramid has a base so large that the building is the largest office building in the galaxy by floor area, with more than 50 million square feet. Some dispute this claim, pointing out that much of the space inside the building is actually given over to manufacturing, not office space.

384 Highway 29, the New Avalon ring road, is named for Interstate 290, which connects Interstate 90 (the Massachusetts Turnpike) with Interstate 495 via Worcester.

394 I lived for many years at 105 Morgan Lane in my old hometown, which made the fact that I was assigned to Morgan Hall when I went to WPI that much more amusing.

449 A tip of the hat here to David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the nonfiction book that was the basis for the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street. In it, a suspect cranked up on drugs is at one point described as possessing pupils the size of purely theoretical particles.

490 In other words, a dream of the last few minutes of the final episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

506 Battletech reference!

517 The real Worcester Crowne Plaza, formerly the Worcester Marriott, doesn't have a palace suite, as far as I know.

528 I believe this is the first appearance of So You've Just Arrived from a Parallel Dimension, the first in Derek Bacon's bestselling So You've series of helpful guides.

545 By which she means Akio, of course.

551 Like many of us, Zoner often quotes movies without even really trying to. This one's from Airplane!

577 This paragraph betrays an early, and later discarded, feature of Cephiro's design; it was originally going to be a pure medieval-fantasy world, as the source Cephiro in Magic Knight Rayearth, such that Utena had never seen a high-rise building or an aircraft before arriving in Midgard. Plainly, though, this is nonsense, given how much of the later part of her origin story involves automobiles, cell phones, and what have you. To take that into account, UF-Cephiro later evolved into a hybrid tech-fantasy world - reflecting aspects of both Midgard and Asgard as it stands in the gap between them.

598 This is one of the few changes made to the events shown in Utena's source material for UF; in the TV show, IIRC, she doesn't lose her rose ring when her hand slips through Anthy's at the end. I needed it to be back in Cephiro, though, for later use.

602 Hence her Audrey Hepburn bob when Kate first met her in Wounded Rose.

651 Quite expensive indeed, but the hotel staff never found out about it.

762 Presumably Zoner wasn't expecting Utena to be familiar with Dennis Miller's "The International House of Pancakes" routine, from 1990's The Off-White Album.

768 Or Tom Lehrer's "New Math" (That Was the Year That Was, 1965).

780 And here's Len, eight years prior to his reappearance as a Jedi Knight in Road Movie to Naboo.

798 De-aging Priss and Sylvie to their not-quite-teenage years was very amusing. Note here that she gives Len's almost-full name. He is, indeed, named Leonard W. Hutchins III, after my grandfather, Leonard W. Hutchins Jr.

818 Guy was a later addition; at the time Priss and Sylvie were originally introduced, he didn't exist, mainly because he's semi-cadged from a show (King of Braves Gaogaigar) that didn't exist either at that time. I believe this is his first appearance.

832 Presumably Gai Morgan prefers to spell his first name "Guy" because otherwise, his non-Japanese-speaking schoolmates would tend to pronounce it "gay", schoolchildren being what they are. Why Kei, who despite her own name is primarily of German extraction, gave her second son a Japanese name is a question for the ages.

860 Here we see for the first time that Kate doesn't stutter when speaking to her father.

881 Yamaki, a planet in the Rigel Sector and a member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere of ex-Japanese colonies (as are New Japan and Tomodachi), was the site of the first Experts of Justice operation and is still believed to be one of the centers of power for Big Fire.

888 Gryphon refers obliquely to the events of the Exile story On a Winter's Day.

889 Larry "R-Type" Mann, of course.

935 Having lived in a couple of different one-bathroom apartments with Zoner, I became determined early on that if I ever had the gelt to build my own house, everybody who could possibly live there would by God have his or her own bathroom.

938 Building #19.

953 J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G (BWV 1048).

958 Seven (the ragged tiger) takes his name, of course, from Duran Duran's 1983 album Seven and the Ragged Tiger.

976 NAIS is the only feature the City of New Avalon shares with its namesake, the planet New Avalon, capital of the Federated Suns in the Battletech game setting.

986 The N is called the N because Boston's public transportation system, operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, is called the T.

995 Or so Gryphon thought until A Night to Remember.

1007 R. Dorothy Wayneright makes her first appearance. Borrowed from Big O (as are many bits of Corwin's personal kit, as it were), she has had one of the most dramatic personal transformations of all the Symphoneers. I have, if it wasn't obvious from my body of work, a certain weakness for the "creepy girl" character type.

1030 "Back off, man. I'm a scientist."

1064 No one knows how Marty manages to spell Kate's nickname differently when speaking it. It's one of the man's many mysteries.

1092 Kate doesn't stutter when speaking to Marty either. No one, least of all Kate, is entirely sure why, other than the fact that he and her father have been closest to her heart the longest.

1100 Whether Marty works for the IPO CID or the New Avalon Police Department CID is not exactly known even to those two organizations, but on paper, at least, he's a New Avalon cop first and Lensman second.

1145 Utena's kind of reaching here. Eiko's hair color resembles Touga's, but that's about it (though she does at least acknowledge that).

1161 Eiko Magami Rose, AKA A-Ko from Project A-Ko, established the grand UF tradition of rearranging the names of borrowed characters with obviously jokey names that didn't fit the "flow" of the UF universe. Since then we've done it with quite a few people, including another A-Ko, Ohtori/Tenjou Academy Theater Society President Eiko Kageshoujo (literally, "Shadow Girl A", which is all she was ever called on Revolutionary Girl Utena).

1186 Eiko's Storm-Breaker is not to be confused with Beta Ray Bill's Storm-Breaker, a copy of Mjollnir, from the old Thor comics. Eiko's is rather a very-much-larger cousin of Skuld's hammer, Bjarnnil. (However, the name is an out-of-story Beta Ray Bill reference, per Marty.)

1243 Lensmen work differently in the UF universe than they do in E.E. Smith's Lensmen books, but some of the terminology is the same. As in Smith's books, UF's Grey Lensmen have very broad discretionary powers and don't answer to the standard chain of command.

1315 The Avalon Centre Galleria was last seen back in Checkmate. It takes its name from the Aroostook Centre Mall in Presque Isle, Maine, and the Worcester Galleria (now the Worcester Fashion Outlets), but is a much nicer mall than either one.

1372 Centre Street and its accompanying N stop, Centre, often confuse newcomers to New Avalon, since not far away is the City Center district and its eponymous N stop.

1395 And, gods willing, we'll never see her act that way again. This scene was very difficult to write.

1467 Such an ordinary name (and such a short screen lifetime) for a character who had such an impact.

1559 Meizuri, another planet in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Worlds Welfare Work Association's headquarters is in the capital, Eleanor City.

1619 Specifically, Touga Kiryuu.

1644 One of Touga's distinctive habits.

1696 If Mike thinks WPI is "fancy", he's obviously never been there.

1846 The Tindalos Mountains stretch from Jotunheim, land of the giants, through Hel, land of the "ordinary" dead, to Niflheim, the frozen hell of the dishonored. Jagged, icy, and thoroughly disagreeable, they are among the most dangerous territory in UF's version of the Nine Worlds. Their decidedly un-Norse name comes from H.P. Lovecraft, who named one of his many otherworldly monsters "the Hound of Tindalos".

1849 I'm especially fond of the last bit of Corwin's aborted vow, because it demonstrates the full depth of his fury. One would not, after all, simply walk among the ranks of the armies of the damned, come the Ragnarok, seeking a particular soldier. What Corwin is saying is that he'll kill his way through whole armies if he has to, until he comes to his true target.

1875 Ymir, in Norse myth, is the primeval frost giant from whose corpse Odin, Vili, and Ve purportedly fashioned the Nine Worlds as they are now known. Thus, "Ymir's bones" refers, broadly, to the whole of Creation.

2069 The Cosmic Rod, a weapon of unparalleled sophistication, as seen in James Robinson's Starman series for DC Comics.

2086 Kaitlyn's roommate at WPI the previous year was Hiroe Ogawa, the protagonist of the anime porn series F³ - a nice girl, but also a compulsive masturbator, which isn't so funny now that we know why Kate went to WPI in the first place.

2091 Kei quotes the Megadeth song "Sweating Bullets", from their 1992 album Countdown to Extinction: "Yeah, just keep on thinking it's my fault / And stay an inch or two out of kicking distance!"

2101 What'd I say about characters quoting movies even when they don't really intend to? Here Gryphon automatically responds to "took the liberty of" with a Blues Brothers reference.

2154 Kei has achieved considerable serenity since Twilight, thanks to what happened to her during that incident - but she still has quite a temper, and if she loses control of it, it can still make her do the Wrong Thing from time to time, as we see here.

2195 The Caine Health Center is named for former GENOM CEO Kwai-Chang Caine. We can take from this that Mike Carpenter belonged to GENOM's corporate health plan, probably because one or the other of his parents worked for the company.

2204 The Zardon Far Legion are, of course, based on the French Foreign Legion, who really do give their recruits new identities and whisk them off to the far corners of the world without asking too many questions about what they may be getting away from.

2249 Kill-O-Max is the street name for an illegal combat stimulant of which Kei was fond in her more reckless, self-destructive years (for which read: most of the Exile). It increases strength, reaction speed, pain threshold, and aggression, but degrades judgment and can cause psychotic episodes and cardiac arrest. In the 25th century it has been largely supplanted by still worse combat performance enhancers like Superadine (a strength and aggression booster) and Velocity-9 (which bestows temporary super-speed at the cost of a year or so of the user's lifespan per dose).

2297 Which isn't to say that Zoner's usual wacktastic style is an act, exactly... but it's not, as he displays here, all there is to him.

2436 Shinkichi Mitsumune's "Hikari Sasu Niwa" ("The Sunlit Garden"), Miki's signature composition in Revolutionary Girl Utena. By a strange coincidence, it's exactly the same length as Toshihiko Sahashi's "Stoning", from the Big O soundtrack, which appears multiple times in the Symphonies.

2445 Yes, of course it's a Steinway.

2515 Here's Zoner quoting Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters.

2532 This isn't the last Christmas that will involve Sylvie's interest in Miki.

2582 As is her custom, it's unlikely that Utena has any idea the full extent of the forces she's just put into motion.

2632 An M1A1 Abrams MBT; parts of an RFL-3N Rifleman.

2633 A Corellian Engineering Corporation navicomputer, which will eventually be installed in the One-Hit Wonder.

2634 This stealth bomber will reappear much later as Stealth Gao, one of the three Gao Machines that combine with Gaigar to make up Gaogaigar.

2657 Why Dorothy hasn't got an onboard lexicon more current than the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, I couldn't say.

2690 Corwin's only really started thinking of girls qua girls in the last 48 hours or so, so maybe it's not surprising that he doesn't automatically think of Dorothy as one.

2737 We'll be seeing the watch again next movement; it's Tiny Robo's control unit.

2743 The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension reference. The watermelon is undergoing hull strength testing in a hydraulic press. In this case, it's not because it's a special variety of watermelon being developed for air drop into famine areas, as in the original; it's because it's not really a watermelon at all, but a disguised probe droid with an armored casing - a variant on the WDF's old H4-R0 probot series.

2778 I still cannot believe I failed to think of the "Mazinger.Z" joke.

2900 Ordinarily, students at WPI wouldn't be allowed to live off-campus unless their families lived in Worcester, but Zoner was kind enough to set Utena up as an emancipated minor, so they might've been able to swing it with the student life office.

3183 The Koopman High Sledding Hill is based on a hill out in back of my own high school, Stearns High, at the bottom of which is the school's field hockey pitch (Stearns, unlike Koopman, doesn't have a soccer team). My senior year, the school threw a winter carnival, complete with sledding, and I indeed turned up with the giant inner tube from a piece of woods equipment called a skidder, which had to be rolled with a person wedged into the hole in just this fashion. Sylvie's heroic ride clear over the Cyclone fence onto the field beyond was carried out by a classmate of mine.

3224 One observed in my real-life family, in fact.

3234 "... in love."

3242 It's not actually beef, it's belgad, a Salusian meat critter with a very similar texture and flavor. Beef is relatively uncommon in the UF universe, since the belgad can survive in a wider range of climates and conditions than beef cattle. "Snabs and belgad" are the 25th-century equivalent of potatoes and beef, and their collective name comes from the name of a college friend's cat. I don't know how it's really spelled, but it was pronounced "snabblegad" and, my Swedish friend claimed, was the Swedish for "easy to cook".

3246 The Tales of ReRob's Wedding are a popular party favorite in real life as well.

3265 Getting a needle-beam blaster for Christmas is similar to, say, getting a .22 in real life, and I did get my first .22 at about that same age.

3275 Curiously, we haven't seen Len's bokuto again in the stories of his later life. Perhaps he left it behind when he fled to the Rim - in which case he probably should've collected it when he stopped by the house in The Fulcrum of Fate, but, ah well.

3335 "A certain level of functionality" which we will see in Hunted Rose.

3437 Malastare is a Gran colony on the Outer Rim. Gran are supposedly very sensitive and artistic beings, according to the Star Wars RPG, which kind of makes you wonder why, whenever they appear in a Star Wars computer game, they're always thugs working for a Hutt gangster.

3449 Utena has too heard of the Corvette, but in this context it's probably just as well she doesn't know them by name. If she'd thumbed through the book, she'd have realized it soon enough when she got to the 1957 model.

3477 My mother does, indeed, rather like to go to a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve - which, as with Kate, is kind of odd, since she's not Catholic.

3505 We'll see echoes of this notion again, from the other side, in Requiem for a Lensman.

3525 Rush Boulevard is the cross street of Morgan Lane in my old hometown, too.

3538 The N rail system has seven lines, four of which converge under the Entire State Building.

3545 In the UF universe, St. Michael the Archangel is an aspect of Frey Lightwalker, who leads Asgard's standing army in his capacity as god of Security.

3575 My mental image of the N system most closely resembles the painfully clean and tidy subways of Toronto.

3582 "Someday, we'll shine together" appears on the closing card of the last episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena, after a short montage in which the animators try to imply that, despite the nerve-shattering non-ending you just saw, everything'll be OK in the end, really, they just don't have time to show it to you.

3583 This bit of style is swiped from Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and will appear again and again throughout the Symphonies.

3610 They are indeed just models.

3620 "Hey, Jake... gotta be at least seven dollars' worth of change here."

3727 This piece and A Rose for the New Year were originally going to be one story, but as development went on and the scope increased, I started wrestling with some way of making it more manageable. Kris's idea was to break it up into the two pieces it's now in. It would not be the last time.