Bollocks.

>Awww, Corwin. I wonder if his Dad saw fit to inform him about the
>soul-destroying, stomach-churning fear parts of being a father that
>will eventually come along, or if he wants the lad to get the full,
>unfiltered experience on his own.

In fairness, Corwin has seen at least one of those happen already. You even alluded to it yourself a ways down. She was born yesterday and he's already woken up in the night at least once thinking about it.

>I look forward intensely to the moment that Annabelle becomes even
>slightly mobile and Corwin has to baby-proof a whole bunch of houses.
>Corwin being Corwin, one imagines that he will deploy over-engineered
>technological solutions for this, and it's going to be amazing.

For crying out loud, you make him sound like Emmett Brown. Corwin does at least know better than to reinvent the wheel for its own sake. :)

>That was a fun little bit with Maki and Izumi, but on a more prosaic
>and much more depressing note...

... because, really, this story's all about prosaic-and-depressing asides, am I right?

>And, frankly, it may have been a mistake on Gryphon and
>Kei's part to have left their first round of kids without full-time
>protection; if a pathetic slimeball like Mike Carpenter can get at
>Kaitlyn without anyone knowing

I call foul on this line of comparison. A, we'd all sort of tacitly agreed we weren't going to mention him on this forum again, but you probably haven't read the archives so I'll let that slide. B, Carpenter was a schoolmate and believed to be a friend, and turned out to be a Random Shitheel, he wasn't part of some kind of Manchurian Candidate scenario. To reliably prevent something like him from happening, the kids would have to have been home-schooled in a bunker. G&K weren't looking at repeating the Clark Savage, Jr. experiment, they were just trying to raise a goddam family.

(And frankly, the Chief feels bad enough about the whole business already, without some armchair analyst telling him his parenting style is reckless and lackadaisical, and this was a direct result. You may recall his own ruminations on the matter on New Year's Eve in 2404.)

>God dammit Ryo, I need to decide if I find you or your sister more
>awesomely adorable and you are not making it easy.

They can get very competitive sometimes. :)

>"Well, gentlemen, we've successfully confirmed that Annabelle is, in
>fact, a baby."

Heh, apropos of nothing, you just reminded me of another one of those "at the movies" images I had in conversation in the studio a bit back.

INT. DAY - ASAMI'S OFFICE

ASAMI stands behind her desk, looking sternly annoyed while MAKO and a TINHEAD unroll a small rug on top of it to reveal a charred and mangled metal object. Her mood is not improved by the sight of it, though the two cops seem tentatively hopeful that it would be. After a few moment's consideration, she folds her arms and glares at MAKO.

ASAMI
(sarcastically)
Well, congratulations, gentlemen. Thanks to the diligence of the Republic City Police Department, it appears this particular vacuum cleaner did not fall into the wrong hands.

>>"Aw, are you leaving?" said Garnet drowsily from her new
>>station. "I was just thinking I'd like to look at you for maybe a
>>couple more hours."
>
>Oddly enough, probably not even close to the weirdest line Azana has
>ever received.

Probably not, but it is one of the most sincerely meant.

>>He bowed again, first to Utena, then to Corwin. "Maximilian Chin
>>Yongmin XVII, Supreme Civil Servant to Their Excellencies the President
>>and Senate of the United Republic of Nations and Hereditary Chief
>>Bureaucrat to the Celestial Emperors of the Western Reaches, at your
>>service."
>
>Hmm. That sentence scans oddly to me; I think of "excellency" as a
>title used for a person, rather than an institution like a Senate. But
>that might just be me.

It scans better than "Their Excellencies the President and Members of the Senate", and achieves the fine but important distinction that Chin works for the Senate, but not necessarily individual senators.

>I am very happy that the Republic practices jus soli rather than just
>jus sanguinis.

Given the nature of the country, it almost has to, or at least had to be set up that way, and has never bothered to change the rule now that it's better-established. I suspect that particular idea is de rigueur in most if not all of Diqiu, anyway.

>You know, I'm well aware the technology wasn't available back in their
>day, but god damn if Minami isn't what I imagine you'd get from a
>mixture of Korra and Asami's genetics.

Oh behave. You know Phil gets cross. If I have to have that argument with him again, I at least want to have started it myself and not just inherited it from you. :)

>I'd just like everyone to know that my mind wandered off on a long
>digression as to which, if any, of the Trinity own the upside-down
>castle in Cephiro, and how they've decorated it.

No one owns that or lives there; it's not in Cephiro and it's not even really a castle so much as a colossal art installation, purpose unknown.

>Oh. Huh. Okay, I was rather gratuitously wrong, then. I'd somehow come
>to the conclusion that the Trib and/or Emily was going to go with the
>theory that Corwin was Korra's illegitimate spawn

Why would that even be newsworthy? I've never received the impression that "legitimacy" in the European-nobility sense particularly matters to the person-on-the-street in Diqiu. Would anyone in the Tribune's readership even care if she had a child they hadn't previously been aware of? It's not like being the Avatar is a hereditary job.

>Assuming its at all like memory diamond, Emily is going to love
>datacrystal technology when it gets to Diqiu. All the convenience of
>digitized information combined with archival permanence that rivals
>letters carved onto stone slabs.

At least until people stop making crystal readers, which, as we have discussed, is the real problem with most other lost media...

>I will never stop thinking that Minami should have given Corwin a
>full, open-palm slap on the ass right in front of everyone before
>flying away in her awesome autogyro.

Please! Minami Sato is a woman of class, poise, and distinction. She would never stoop to a gesture as blatantly blue-collar as that.

Not without too much sake in her to for flying the autogyro to be feasible, anyway.

>>"Nyima has something she wants to tell you, Corwin!" said Lhakpa
>>cheerfully from the hall. Then she slid the door shut with a bang and
>>could be heard trotting off down the hall, humming tunelessly.
>
>Oh God.
>
>Nothing good ever starts this way. This is how conversations
>with the words "slept with your wife" or "this one time, at band camp"
>in them begin.

Although coming from Nyima to Corwin, the former would have been mighty interesting. I mean, absent all the other considerations, when would they have had the time?

>The extreme irony here, of course, is that I can't imagine Korra
>getting along at all with Vulcans who are seriously into the
>Way of Surak

In fairness, that has less to do with Korra and more to do with the fact that nobody but other hardcore Surakites and the Cybermen of Mondas get along with hardcore Surakites.

>One imagines that the senior Lotuses now had
>their formative years during the whole Vaatu... incident.

What, 120 years ago? Apart from Jinora, not so much.

>", Asami's amazing brain, spirit of adventure, and fine, fine ass."

        Then Utena said, "By the way... "
        "Mm?"
        "You look pretty sharp in the old crimson and black."
        He grinned.  "Thanks."
        "Have you tried the shorts?  They're very comfortable."
        Corwin chuckled.  "No, thank you.  Not everybody's got legs
like yours."
        "You'd look pretty funny with legs like mine."
        "Isn't -that- the truth."

>Depending on the logistics involved, it might be simpler and easier to
>see if they could get a freighter into orbit. Rent one in New Avalon
>for a week, buy everything they need there, trundle over to Diqiu, pop
>through the veil, and just beam everything they need right to the
>site. Any incidentals they forgot they can haul in by air later.

Bah. Cheating.

>>"He had a flair for titles, too. Crazy from the
>>Heat... The Adventures of Snow Savage and Dirt Girl... To Wang Fire,
>>Thanks for Everything! Ty Lee."
>
>Aheh. That thread had longer legs than I thought it did, I guess. ^.^;

They're not quite the same books postulated there - for instance, Crazy from the Heat is almost completely different, as Azula in UF, alas, never got to the "eccentric palace fixture" phase, having gone straight from Bedlam to the Valley to crystallite, and was never seen again in Sokka's lifetime. The titles were too good not to call back to, though.

>Seriously though, thanks for the shout-out. It's more than I deserve,
>really; all I did was come up with a few moderately interesting plays
>on words, one of which you liked enough to use.

Well, y'know. Credit where it's due. You came up with it, I liked it enough to use it, that's kind of how it works. Ironic given that my entire literary career involves basically stealing stuff at a rate of knots, but I do have standards.

Try not to read too much into it. :)

>And that was in the
>middle of kinda-sorta playing around in your sandbox without being
>explicitly invited to.

In an uncanonical screwing-around thread! That's what they're there for. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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