31 The alien race from the 1988 movie Alien Nation. In the film, the Tenctonese (known on Earth as "Newcomers") often have names that either belong to historical figures (Rudyard Kipling) or are embarrassing puns (Sam Francisco), thanks to the apparently bored or perverse immigration officials who gave them their Earth names.

38 Not the heaviest-gravity world settled during Earth's first colonial period; that honor goes to Valeria at 3.5 G.

82 This bit indicates that the events of Alien Nation occurred in UF - that a population of Tenctonese arrived by accident in Los Angeles at a time before Earth was fully connected to the galactic community and settled there, such that subsequent generations are legally Earthpeople. Davy, as Miss Montaigne notes, isn't one of these - so why his name is David Crockett is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps such naming conventions have become popular on Tencton proper, or native Tenctonese who are moving to Earth adopt similar names in deference to Newcomer tradition. Had we had occasion to explore this further, we'd have seen that the descendents of the original Los Angeles settlers retain the nickname "Newcomers", which in the 25th century distinguishes them from ethnic Tenctonese born elsewhere. I like working out background details like this, even if they don't end up appearing on screen; it gives the universe more... heft.

95 Technically, Zeta Cygni could be called the first Earth colony, since its first settlers, including Wolfgang von Fahrvergnügen, arrived from Earth in the 1600s - long before the planet supported a spacefaring civilization.

148 The presence of both three and five in the makeup of this game suggests it may be of Minbari origin.

180 Some modern card games, including a number of canasta variants, involve a secondary hand.

275 Devlin's grey duster was given to him by his unidentified telepath mentor and is something of a fetish object (not in that way) for him. Though it has no special intrinsic qualities, he only feels truly comfortable when he has it on.

359 In a non-Mini-DĀKA context, readers may recognize this food object as an Egg McMuffin. At WPI, before Mini-DĀKA became a Burger King Express, they were called "Tech Muffins".

382 A real Worcester public high school, located a few blocks from WPI on the far side of Park Avenue.

464 These details of the housing situation at WPI are drawn from life. At the real WPI, the "commitment to diversity" residence is called World House. The internal layout of Galaxy House is from whole cloth, though, as I've never been inside the real World House to see how it's laid out.

481 Ah, G'Kron. I can't remember now which of us came up with him - it was either me, Kris, or Truss - but Kris wrote most of his best speeches. We will later learn that he's a nephew of the prominent Narn statesman and diplomat G'Kar, and himself preparing for a career in the Narn foreign service. His habit of declaring things "an outrage" is a direct reference to his famous uncle.

554 She's wrong about this.

830 Professor Harris isn't based on any particular real person. At one point I had quite a bit of backstory piled up explaining why he's kind of a dick (and why he has such a problem with robots), but there was never a good place to go into it.

851 That is, Akio Ohtori.

873 Utena doesn't like to lie and, as noted here, isn't very good at it, but in this situation, the truth would never have been believed, so she didn't really have a lot of choice.

886 I could and should have phrased this better. The use of quotes gives the impression that her distress is entirely feigned, which is hardly the case. She's as genuinely shaken by the thought of what really led her to leave Ohtori Academy as she would be by the "raiders on the Outer Rim" story if it were true, and her feelings - if not the stated reason for them - are quite genuine here.

894 " - a point."

988 If memory serves, Anne Cross wrote this dialogue - her first, uncredited contribution to a UF story.

1065 Nanami fears Anthy because she once saw Anthy at her most fey, fully under the control of the Lost Tournament's broken Dueling Code, serving the End of the World's darkest whims - and she knows Anthy saw her.

1139 How indeed? This is the first, but not the last, reference to the Revolutionary Girl Utena episode "The Great Curry High Trip", in which Anthy's combination of inept cookery and uncontrolled witchcraft had a number of unfortunate side effects, most notably causing Utena and Anthy to spend a day in the guise of each other. At this point Saionji doesn't know that it was actually Utena he foisted his exchange diary on that day. He'll eventually piece it together, though...

1339 You've got a chance to confront the world today
Desperate romance is the curse of castaways
What good is skill if you don't make it to the dance?
Despite circumstance
You've got a chance

1366 Utena learned this move well; it reappears in future duels, most notably against Bastila Shan in In for a Penny...

1374 Not strictly true. For instance, it would probably be frowned upon to use a firearm, even in a Rose Duel.

1391 WPI's football field is surfaced in Omniturf, which is like Astroturf, only not as realistic. No, really. I used to be able to look out the window of Morgan 401 occasionally and watch the grounds crew vacuum it.

1433 This is a classic Utena Tenjou duel, reminiscent of her earliest fights, which is understandable, since it's been so long at this point since she last fought one. In the early going it took her a while to hit her stride, but once she did, a moment like this became inevitable. If Liza were sensitive to such things at this point, she'd be able to see Dios's aura rise up within Utena, just as Gryphon did, but right now she's blind to such phenomena.

1435 I like this imagery because I think it nicely evokes the visual style that they often used for duels' ends in Revolutionary Girl Utena.

1437 Another kenjutsu move she's learned, adapted somewhat for the different format of her sword.

1443 This always happens when Dios's spirit manifests in Utena, at least when she's wearing her uniform (which is why it didn't happen in A Rose for the New Year - later in her career, as their integration progressed, a moment like the one in Gryphon's dojo would have changed whatever she was wearing into her uniform.)

1457 Zoner.

1536 Sky is a t'skrang, a member of one of the fantasy races in the roleplaying game Earthdawn, formerly produced by FASA Corporation and now a property of Living Room Games. In UF, he comes from the planet Barsaive, which is the name of the continent where the action happens in Earthdawn (in much the same way that the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons mostly takes place on the continent of Faerûn). I owe Anne Cross and Eric Reuss for my exposure to Earthdawn, and for much of the background information on the t'skrang that made its way into the UF incarnation of that admirable people.

1542 Sky's name is a trifle cumbersome even by t'skrangish standards. His third name is that of his clan, and literally means "They Who Took Refuge in the City of Vraihelt During the Scourge". "Ishkarat", as we will see, is the name of his aropagoi, or trading house, a sort of mercantile superclan.

1549 Jikharra (seen here with an extraneous apostrophe) is one of the core virtues of t'skrang culture, and tends to be translated loosely as "fearlessness", although it embodies more than that. To pursue jikharra is "to live with a passionate intensity."

1552 T'skrang are matriarchal; their women wear the pants, as it were.

1582 Harcourt Mudd "Mac" McKenzie was created by Redneck to fulfill a simple request: "I need more housemates for Galaxy House." He grew, of course, to be considerably more than that, to the point where even Kris acknowledged that he was running away with things a bit. Since I already had several characters who were "running away with things a bit" by then, the logistics would eventually get pretty hard to handle.

1778 There is far more to Durandal than anyone - with the possible exception of Ed and Ein - realized at this point. I don't want to spoil a major future development, but for now, suffice it to say that if the Earthgov people who were responsible for his being given to WPI had had any idea what he really was, they'd have gone insane with terror at the very notion of his being activated again, let alone installed at a high school. He's originally from the Marathon series of games, and also appeared in NXE.

1821 We now know that Devlin was so comfortable around Dorothy because she was the only person in his immediate peer group whose mind he would never have to worry about accidentally reading or influencing - and who could never, willingly or not, betray him to a Psi Cop.

1828 The Long Goodbye, 1954. Devlin misremembers the last word he mentally quotes; it's actually "nowadays".

1876 Professor Harris is so angry because he's a member of the Galactic Church of Man, a radical pseudo-Christian religion whose dogma holds, among other things, that lifelike robots are an abomination before God. He does not, however, belong to any of the Church of Man's violent, militant subsects.

1963 Or hear his thoughts.

2009 Got a lot of sleep in Kinnicutt Hall over the year I was at WPI. Part of the reason I was only there a year.

2102 Liza's father, whose first name changes spellings occasionally, was only serving as the #2 man in Aztechnology while he waited for the board to finish ousting his predecessor, who had been installed by Broadbank's own father before his death because he felt Ephrem wasn't mature enough to take control of the company yet. The story of Aztechnology is another one I never got a good vector to delve into as deeply as I'd have liked; more on this later.

2109 A lot of New Avalon's "Corporate Society" people are remnants of the pre-reformation GENOM elite; dispossessed from that company during the reorganization, they found jobs at other, slightly smaller companies, many of which also located offices in New Avalon after the War of Corporate Occupation. As such, they are the WDF founders' natural enemies.

2125 Named after one of the two elementary schools I attended.

2146 Carly Simon, No Secrets (1972).

2165 Devlin's benign burglary skills make another appearance.

2189 The Thrashing Gnoberts were a popular band in the setting of Derek Bacon's Teenagers from Outer Space campaign. Their hit song was "Phunge My Zobon".

2219 Given Kozue's resemblance to Miki, Liza either didn't look very carefully at the picture, or she's being extra-snide by calling her his girlfriend.

2346 She'd win this bet.

2387 I hadn't given Cephiro countries or named Gaulia yet. It's actually to the east of Nihonia.

2464 Here's Miki's theme again, this time played as he used to play it with Kozue.

2515 Here's the first mention of Mia Ausa, who will appear in a bit. Her middle name is unique to the UF version.

2516 Devlin's middle name is, of course, a reference to his uncle.

2522 You'd go by "J. Maurice" too if your first name was "Jehoshaphat".

2532 One of Durandal's lines in Marathon. The style in this post is designed to be reminiscent of early messages the player receives from Durandal, when the AI is in the early stages of his rampancy.

2572 Janice Barlow, Ardie's UF avatar, makes her debut.

2574 Zorak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

2576 Hailed by all who know her as "a very Ardie line."

2732 Chu Chu, Anthy's animal companion from the original RGU series.

2887 As immortalized by Phil Moyer in "Sad Girl with Robot".

3001 The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). "Getting Better", another track from the same album, rather neatly sums up Saionji's Symphony transformation, and was featured as the ending credits track on Azalynn's Winter Holiday.

3041 Alas, there is no "Sad Girl with Chaoswalker".

3086 Like Skuld, Aunt Bell is from Kosuke Fujishima's Ah! My Goddess. "Belldandy" is a rather torturous re-romanization of a phonetic Japanese approximation of "Verthandi", her real name.

3123 All real places in Worcester. The Higgins Armory Museum is especially excellent.

3164 Juri has an incredible backhand, as Anthy discovered in the first Revolutionary Girl Utena episode in which Juri fought a duel. PJM

3210 Skuld had difficulty with her coming-of-age because she didn't accept that magic and technology could coexist - an error she's made sure her son won't repeat.

3305 One of the few and fleeting references to Moose's spiritual search.

3312 Not until later would this weapon acquire its proper Gamilese name, k'tayyl (literally, "sword of honor", as opposed to ha'tayyl, "common sword").

3325 It does.

3334 Earthdawn players will recognize that what Sky is actually doing is a karma ritual.

3351 As Sky is a Swordmaster Adept, this is an act of considerable regard.

3356 Mia Ausa's first appearance. The original character is from Lunar: Silver Star Story, but the UF version has other influences worked into her, not least of which is her half-Minbari heritage.

3363 This is the emblem of the Anla'shok, known in English as the League of Rangers, an order of warriors headquartered on Minbar. The Minbari and the Rangers are from Babylon 5, although, in keeping with UF's tradition of amalgamating things, the UF version is an order of Force-sensitives with ancestral ties to the ancient Jedi Order.

3434 Mia recognized Bell for who she really is because, as a sorceress and a Ranger, she's both Force- and magic-sensitive - both of which would be enough to tell her that she's looking at someone very special indeed.

3455 We know now that Liza's just fronting when she calls Juri "unfeminine" here; a lot of her First Symphony-era hostility toward both Juri and Utena actually stems from the fact that she thinks they're both hotter than hell.

3532 The people of Barsaive demonstrate that they are free of the taint of the extradimensional monsters they call the Horrors by way of artistic expression - those who are Horror-marked cannot create. Thus, the arts are very important on Barsaive. Everyone pursues at least one art form actively and the planet produces many noted artists across the full range of disciplines. Sky happens to be a painter.

3574 Once you've seen Brunnhilde Silverspear passed out on the couch in the Valkyrie wardroom, "HILDY CAN'T HACK IT" Magic Markered in Vanaheim Halfling Thieves' Cipher on her stomach, after a long and mead-soaked victory party, you lose a lot of your instinctive awe of tall, regal women.

3648 The trick she refers to is the way in which she lost her first duel against Utena in the original RGU series: she was Utena's superior in every measurable way, but lost because of what appeared to be blind luck, when Utena's sword, which she had flung into the air in a violent disarming maneuver, fell from the sky to clip off her rose before she could take Utena's.

3691 Lest you think Azalynn is just making these things up, Greg Sanders refers to ordering pudding for his Terzayyl observance in CSI New Avalon: Locard's Exchange.

3761 Zoner provided his own dialogue for this scene; it's some of my favorite work of his.

3769 We learn later that it's not ScudCo revenue, it's Aztechnology stock. The untold story here is that Zoner and Gryphon both received a chunk of that company's stock long ago, just before the fall of the WDF, when they helped a young inventor named Zebulon Broadbank - Liza's late grandfather - start the company. Then things got very hectic and they both forgot all about it.

3837 Luckily for her, she didn't realize it was Corwin's. If she had tried to, say, key the paintwork or slash a tire, she'd have found herself in a whole new world of pain.

3886 A rare glimpse of Azalynn's darker side. Though most xenologists focus on the fact that Dantrovians are highly adapted to the task of avoiding larger predators, it's a fact that they themselves are also predators... they're just not their native ecosystem's apex predators.

3913 Inspired by the sublime delivery of a similar line ("Push me that one final inch" is a direct quote) by Dinobot in an episode of Transformers: Beast Wars.

4018 Mia's bone crest is a design element directly adapted from the seasons-2-through-5 version of Minbari Ambassador Delenn on Babylon 5.

4053 The trusty Minbari fighting pike (though why it's called a pike when it's clearly just a staff, I'm not sure), signature weapon of the Anla'shok. It's considered a quaint affectation by modern non-Anla'shok Minbari warriors - the equivalent of a real-world policeman carrying a Roman gladius.

4142 We'll see what has Edward so concerned in A Question of Faith.

The way I remember it, they got a little punch-drunk partway through processing two hundred and fifty thousand aliens at high speed...

>95 Technically, Zeta Cygni could be called the first
>Earth colony, since its first settlers, including Wolfgang von
>Fahrvergnügen, arrived from Earth in the 1600s - long before the
>planet supported a spacefaring civilization.

The part that confuses me is the "been independent for four hundred years." It gives the impression that at one point they weren't, and when would that have been?

>830 Professor Harris isn't based on any particular real person.
> At one point I had quite a bit of backstory piled up explaining why
>he's kind of a dick (and why he has such a problem with robots), but
>there was never a good place to go into it.

If you still have it, I for one would like to see it, even if only as a context-free expository lump. (Edit: see below.)

>1065 Nanami fears Anthy because she once saw Anthy at her most
>fey, fully under the control of the Lost Tournament's broken Dueling
>Code, serving the End of the World's darkest whims - and she knows
>Anthy saw her.

And possibly because she's figured out that most of the weirdness that happened to her that year was Anthy's subtle and silly revenge for the dress incident... (see below)

>1139 How indeed? This is the first, but not the last,
>reference to the Revolutionary Girl Utena episode "The Great
>Curry High Trip", in which Anthy's combination of inept cookery and
>uncontrolled witchcraft had a number of unfortunate side effects, most
>notably causing Utena and Anthy to spend a day in the guise of each
>other. At this point Saionji doesn't know that it was actually Utena
>he foisted his exchange diary on that day. He'll eventually piece it
>together, though...

I have to question how much of that was uncontrolled, and how much (here and in many another episode) a quite deliberate means of tormenting Nanami... and only a day? That little elephant-studded trip to India/equivalent looked like rather longer...

>1391 WPI's football field is surfaced in Omniturf, which is
>like Astroturf, only not as realistic. No, really. I used to be able
>to look out the window of Morgan 401 occasionally and watch the
>grounds crew vacuum it.

And here I'd always thought you'd made it up for The Future.

>1457 Zoner.

Ah. Epiphany. :)

>1536 Sky is a t'skrang, a member of one of the fantasy races in
>the roleplaying game Earthdawn, formerly produced by FASA
>Corporation and now a property of Living Room Games. In UF, he comes
>from the planet Barsaive, which is the name of the continent where the
>action happens in Earthdawn (in much the same way that the
>Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons
>mostly takes place on the continent of Faerûn). I owe Anne Cross and
>Eric Reuss for my exposure to Earthdawn, and for much of the
>background information on the t'skrang that made its way into the UF
>incarnation of that admirable people.

Wild guess: Barsaive-planet's continental layout is nothing like that found in the game...

>1778 There is far more to Durandal than anyone - with the
>possible exception of Ed and Ein - realized at this point. I don't
>want to spoil a major future development, but for now, suffice it to
>say that if the Earthgov people who were responsible for his being
>given to WPI had had any idea what he really was, they'd have
>gone insane with terror at the very notion of his being
>activated again, let alone installed at a high school. He's
>originally from the Marathon series of games, and also appeared
>in NXE.

Wow. That sounds even more ominous than the original version, somehow. (Though perhaps not so ominous as what I suspect the NXE iteration is up to. Perhaps.)

>1876 Professor Harris is so angry because he's a member of the
>Galactic Church of Man, a radical pseudo-Christian religion whose
>dogma holds, among other things, that lifelike robots are an
>abomination before God. He does not, however, belong to any of the
>Church of Man's violent, militant subsects.

Ah, that'll do for a start... :)

>2189 The Thrashing Gnoberts were a popular band in the setting
>of Derek Bacon's Teenagers from Outer Space campaign. Their
>hit song was "Phunge My Zobon".

Is the G hard or silent? Inquiring former TFOS players want to know.

>2522 You'd go by "J. Maurice" too if your first name was
>"Jehoshaphat".

No *doubt.*

>3574 Once you've seen Brunnhilde Silverspear passed out on the
>couch in the Valkyrie wardroom, "HILDY CAN'T HACK IT" Magic Markered
>in Vanaheim Halfling Thieves' Cipher on her stomach, after a long and
>mead-soaked victory party, you lose a lot of your instinctive awe of
>tall, regal women.

We need a Dave Menard rendition of that scene.

>3769 We learn later that it's not ScudCo revenue, it's
>Aztechnology stock. The untold story here is that Zoner and Gryphon
>both received a chunk of that company's stock long ago, just before
>the fall of the WDF, when they helped a young inventor named Zebulon
>Broadbank - Liza's late grandfather - start the company. Then things
>got very hectic and they both forgot all about it.

But I'll just bet that Ephrem hasn't. Must gall him something fierce.

--The Evil Midnight Lurker what Lurks at Midnight
"An object at rest--CANNOT BE STOPPED!!!"

I'll go with "Named after a famous/heroic Newcomer."

Peter Eng
--
I'm only a Charter Member because of the DCForum upgrade, and because there's no rank below "Clueless F!wit."

Because it'll drive me batty if I don't know and my DVDs are currently in an area I can't access them, I don't suppose you remember which episode/some context surrounding the line delivery? It's hovering at the point of knowledge in my head(I can HEAR Scott McNeill delivering it), but I can't for the life of me identify where(though it's doubtless addressed to Rattrap. :)

-OM

Actually that made sense to me in the context of the story...after all they have been hanging in the vicinity of Utena, so their lives have been revolutionized to one extent or another. I had assumed that it was deliberate to emphasize Utena' ability.

I was re-reading some of the old archived threads this afternoon and came across the following post by you (dating from June 2002):

The political situation in the Broadbank family (there's really no other word for it) is complex and a bit strange. Part of the problem is that Simon Broadbank is and always has been a serious workaholic. He's tried to retire a few time and never been able to keep himself from coming back to work. Plus, he's one hundred seventy-one years old, which is pretty elderly for a human even by the standards of the early twenty-fifth century, so he doesn't have much energy to spare for non-work. Still another part is that he has some fairly old-fashioned ideas about family relations; he doesn't think it's his business to tell his grown-up son how to raise his children. On the few occasions when he's tried, he's been cut off short - it must be admitted that he didn't do the best job raising his own kids, so they aren't inclined to listen to him if he tries to lecture them about raising theirs.

Another factor is that he simply doesn't know most of the details; he has little contact with the world beyond the company. Until recently, the only one of his grandchildren who would have been inclined to complain was Mary, and she was too reticent to bother him. He's a very important, very busy man, and Mary was reluctant to impose on him with complaints. Since her transformation, Liza might have brought it to him - but Mary escaped at about the same time, and Clarissa doesn't seem to want (or deserve) rescue, so...

However, the old man doesn't like Ephrem very much, and doesn't think he's a very good executive - so yeah, Simon has deliberately limited his advancement. Not so much because he disapproves of the way his son runs his family, but because he's convinced he'll ruin the company if he ever gets control.

(from: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi?az=read_count&om=713&forum=DCForumID1&viewmode=threaded)

Is Simon his original first name, then, or his middle name? Also, the 2002 thread implies that he was still alive as of the "present" in UF then, I believe that would be late 2406. When did he pass away?

This does clear up a question that was bugging me a bit about the Fifth Symphony, because I was wondering how Mary Broadbank and Juri got enough shares to stage their hostile takeover of Aztechnology. Mary must have - I think this is actually implied in the story - inherited the balance of the shares she needed from her grandfather. Considering that both she and Liza respect and like the old gentleman, I doubt they'd have executed such an operation while he was still alive. (Did either Mary or Liza ever sit down with him before he passed away and explain to him what was going on in the family?)

-Joe-

[2630] This rag doll is costumed as a member (not any particular one) of the Hanshin Tigers, a Japanese baseball team which enjoys (if that's the word) the oddest curse in sports. Tigers fans believe that their team hasn't won the Japan Series since 1985 because - I swear I am not making this up - when they did win in 1985, their fans stole a statue of Colonel Sanders from a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Osaka and threw it into a canal. It's said that since that day, the wrathful spirit of the Colonel intervenes whenever it looks like the Tigers might get somewhere in the postseason.

(As an aside, in the UF universe this is almost certainly true.)

Another of Kate's stuffed toys, apparently not visible from Juri's vantage point, represents a WWII German Panzerkampfwagen VI "Tiger" tank.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.