77 Saionji unconsciously imitates Sakura Shinguuji, who occasionally poses questions to her daughter Sumire in this fashion, framing them as questions relayed from Sumire's grandmother - a habit she, in turn, picked up from her mother, who did the same with Sakura's late grandmother.

177 The composite nature of Hyatt - who is mainly a pull-in of an Excel Saga character - happened because of the "Martian princess" collision, and is yet another example of how fun things happen in a multi-source universe whether you go looking for them or not. Her UF first name, "John", is partly a riff on J'onn J'onzz, Manhunter from Mars, and partly a nod to Buckaroo Banzai, where all the alien Lectroids were named John Something.

196 Hyatt's perpetual state of illness is a toned-down version of a quirk the original version has; in Excel Saga, Princess Hyatt has an unfortunate habit of, well, dying.

331 Another case of Juniper catching onto the dynamics of certain pairings that those involved don't yet acknowledge. PJM

374 "Turning Japanese" is about masturbation, if you didn't know.

408 Indeed, Kanna's way too old for Moose. They're just pals. Still, it's hard for outsiders to tell Hoffmanite buddy customs from Hoffmanite courtship customs, since they all tend to involve smashing stuff.

471 Crap! I can't believe I said that!

493 Yeah, she's sure, even this early on. Hell, she knew during the scene on the balcony. Elven women always do. That second round was for funsies.

546 Yay! "Stoning"! I don't re-use music cues all that often, but "Stoning" has become one of the Symphonies' signature BGM tracks, so I'm never bashful about tossing it in where I think it fits the scene.

574 Katsujinkenryuu party stunt. Impressive, but not of particular use in combat.

586 Er, no. In fact, if asked, he'd have refused - because he's wise enough to know that, for all that he's tamped it down and made something useful of it, he still has a fire for Anthy inside him, and if it were fanned like that, he would never be able to control it again.

844 The charming protagonist of Read or Die, who has what may be the most peculiar superpower ever.

865 Gutenberg, also known as the Library Planet - the bibliophile's paradise. The planetary government's stated goal is to possess at least one copy of every book in the galaxy somewhere in the vast archive, and the entire planet is geared toward collecting, cataloguing, and tending the books. The vote on whether to call it Gutenberg or New Alexandria was a very close one.

914 The rest of the time it's more like a truck.

947 Just old friends. Yomiko is not one of Gryphon's past or present lovers - though she is a member of the Grave Feminine Conspiracy. (Not that you would have to hold a gun to his head.)

949 Later changed, after it became apparent to the band members that things were just going to keep going wrong all summer long, the Outrageous Fortune Tour, after the famous line in Hamlet.

976 Jealous, but also protective. In the Revolutionary Girl Utena episode "Landscape Framed by Kozue", she pushed a teacher down some stairs, making it look like an accident - but said teacher had been showing inappropriate attention to Miki. Later, she left an anonymous threat on his voicemail, saying that the next time it wouldn't be so "accidental". As she said to Juri in that same episode, "I will never forgive anyone who disgraces Miki."

1067 More B than A; in my experience, you never really quite get over your first love, even if nothing ever comes of it.

As one of my psychologists has said, relaying something he'd learned from one of his other patients, "You never get over a thing, you just get used to that thing." PJM

1092 And a line from a Butthole Surfers song, but Juri doesn't know that.

1117 Nowadays, I always think of Juri when I hear part of "Twistin' the Night Away":

Here's a man in evening clothes
How he got here I don't know, but
Aw man you oughtta see him go
Twistin' the night away
Cat's dancing with a chick in slacks
That chick's a-moving up and back
Aw man there ain't nothing like
Twistin' the night away

1121 The classic Jack Benny pose, which, oddly, Juri does from time to time in promotional art.

1178 There are some out there who have admitted some confusion or disbelief at the development of the Juri and Miki relationship, feeling that it had come out of left field. However, it has a pretty solid grounding in the source material - not only in the TV series, but also the movie (there's one scene where the movie version of Juri flirts briefly with Miki, in a garage of all places), and official promotional artwork for both. There are at least two official TV-series artbook images of Juri and Miki together: one which has Juri with a friendly arm around Miki's shoulder, mugging for the camera (and Miki with a "Um, little help here?" expression), and another with Juri holding Miki and his dueling saber with enough innuendo in the pose to fill several paragraphs.

So it's not that far of a leap that if Juri got a chance to move forward in her life, that such a relationship could develop. It'd just need a kick in the rear to move forward, which the schnapps has quite readily provided. PJM

1190 What this says about Juri's assessment of Kozue's looks has never really come up, which is probably just as well.

1200 She's joking, of course. One of the reasons she hasn't done anything up to now, besides her own confusion and other inhibitions, is because he's so much younger than she is. Miki's the same age as Corwin, which you may recall Juri gave Utena a bit of a hassle about back in the First Symphony.

Back during the Lost Tournament, Juri was 16, while Miki was 13 (he had managed to place ahead his grade level). Now, however, Juri is 21 and Miki is 18... what a difference five years make. PJM

1267 Serge hates it when he has to sleep on the floor. The floor is for pets.

1314 This line is well-established by this point that I can play around with it a bit, as we see here.

1366 Gunnr was created after fan artist Yul Kim posted a sketch he'd drawn of an unspecified "modern Valkyrie" to the EPU Forum. It depicts a woman with a Nordic braid wearing tactical gear and holding a pistol in each hand. I liked it so much I invented the character of Gunnr Brynjelfr, Valkyrie handgun expert, to go with it.

1420 I actually did this because Yul's picture depicted a human woman (and one considerably more sturdy-looking than your average FRP elf), but then I decided to run with it and came up with Gunnr's background as she outlines it here. The mountain elves of northeastern Alfheim, whose territory borders the dwarven kingdom of Thar-Kirath, are a hardy, rugged, practical and individualistic breed, very different from the classically willowy wood elves or the dark and secretive elves of Svartalfheim. They live in stone-built cities and don't mind being underground - they get on famously with their dwarven neighbors and, indeed, it's hard to tell where one kingdom ends and the other begins. The other elves consider them very weird. There are unfounded rumors that the Bergalven, to use their proper name, have some particularly adventurous dwarves in their ancestral bloodline, but this is unlikely, as dwarves and elves can't interbreed anywhere else in the Nine Worlds.

1436 The revelation that elven ears are an erogenous zone puts an interesting shading on the whole "Nall bites Umi on the ear" thing from Endgame, doesn't it?

1463 Semper paratus: Latin for "always ready". Incidentally, the motto of the United States Coast Guard.

1500 The original plans for this incident called for Juri to get inadvertently lit up during a night out with the NIT fencing team, celebrating after a regional championship win, and for Kate to find out about it when Miki dragged her home to pour her into bed. The framing changed as the structure of S4 evolved, but not the content.

1523 And it never works, much to Kei's annoyance. It's enough to make a girl feel like she's losing her touch. Gryphon pays dearly for his neighbor's recalcitrance every year.

1531 Not for the first time, Juri jumps to conclusions. You'd think after three-plus years with Kate, she would have been broken of that bad habit... PJM

1574 No comic books?! Now you REALLY know Orron IV is a world where hopes and dreams die. PJM

1585 All Hoffmanites know the basics of cuisine, because nobody likes to eat more than a Hoffmanite, and you can't always count on having a cook around. Kanna takes that a step further; her father, in addition to being a karate instructor, ran a restaurant. One of my favorite scenes featuring Kanna is in the Sakura Wars television series, in which she observes Sumire Kanzaki's inept attempt at boiling eggs (Sumire, who has always had servants cook for her, is under the impression that you have to crack the eggs into the water, where they will assume a spherical shape as they cook) and remarks cheerfully, "What were you, raised by wolves?"

1607 The Kuratai's seldom-seen full name merely means "Kuratai, ship of House Ishkarat". The word kuratai itself, as we have seen, refers to a cayenne-like ground spice of which t'skrang are fond.

1641 T'skrang do love their mud baths. It may have something to do with the fact that their eggs are kept in warm mud while they wait to hatch.

1660 Xenophiles need not apply; t'skrang aren't equipped to "do business" with humans, even if one were strange enough to be interested.

1714 T'skrang do not, in fact, bother much about nudity among themselves, let alone by members of species with which they don't care to mate. They haven't got external bits anyway; they wear clothes for style's sake (and protection from the elements, if necessary) alone.

1779 The same class of vessel as the EAS Hieronymus, destroyed by the Lorica back in Valiant Rose.

1839 We don't see the rest of this incident because it's entirely mundane. Valiant and Kuratai secure the scene, don't learn much about whatever went on before Lundgren and his pirates showed up, and hand the matter off to the local authorities, which are out of Tau Ceti this close to the colony anyway.

1841 Not mentioned in this story is the fact that Tau Ceti IV is only one of two inhabited worlds in the Tau Ceti system. The other, Tau Ceti II, is the homeworld of the reptilian species known as the Race (as seen in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series), and is an independent Federation member state, not part of the Earth Alliance. The Earth Alliance knows better than to mess with the Race; they're fiercely territorial and, though peaceable if not provoked and no longer expansionistic, would exact a terrible price from any force foolish enough to invade their homeworld.

1948 The basic concept for the Church of Man comes from the Wing Commander game universe, though the UF version is very different in execution.

2004 The sheer hypocrisy of this practice should be obvious. Of course, the members of the Church of Man aren't exactly known for being clueful. PJM

Well, they don't have a problem with cybernetic and bionic augmentations to people who were born "normal"; their beef is with the entirely synthetic. --G.

2008 Presumably not his original name.

2087 Gunnr's words stay with Juni; we'll see her use this very phrase to describe herself in Ash Knight.

2137 To a fully sapient machine lifeform, the restraining bolt is an abhorrent thing, not to say one of considerable menace. Though it's illegal to apply one to a Turing-certified robot without a court order, there are those who employ them as, essentially, robot roofies.

2190 I only realized after I wrote this scene that this is a very Lara Croft sort of moment for Gunnr - but then, it's entirely possible that she learned some of her tricks from that august adventurer, who in the 25th century is a well-regarded member of the Einherjar scout corps.

2197 The alchemical treatment that alters Gunnr's ears also suppresses her elven night vision.

2212 Tungsten is a member of the radical Church of Man cyborg militia known as the Trueborn, later to be seen in A Certain Obligation.

2444 This scene is 100% pure Yomiko Readman, and still gives me giggles whenever I read it. PJM

2475 As Steinbeck's Larry might have put it, he shouldn't ought to've done that.

2504 Similar to what Elementals' powered suits do in Clan-era Battletech; for all that the Clans flagrantly disregarded balance and ruined the game setting, they did have some nice toys.

2543 A little nod to Stan "The Man" Lee and the famous Daily Bugle headline, "SPIDER-MAN: THREAT OR MENACE?"

2583 The artwork of Yomiko in the library used for the comic book cover originally started out as a Trump that I made for the Amber game I was involved in. Recycling: your key to making art deadlines! PJM

2683 The Hammerless is based on a weapon in my own collection, though unfortunately mine is not enchanted. If D&D had guns, this one would be a Light Pistol +3.

2727 Liza probably doesn't even know what that means - I'm not 100% sure myself; she's picked that kind of battlefield chatter up from her t'skrang friends, especially Sky.

2827 "I owe you one from Sherman Dam, Rumble!" "You couldn't swim; what makes you think you can fight?"

2886 There also exists in the Katsujinkenryuu manual of arms a maneuver called senken-no-arashi, the Thousand-Blade Storm, but it is rarely attempted; like the Dragon's Tail shown in Blood Ties, it requires such focus to use and has such a huge area of effect that its usefulness in combat is limited, and thus it's primarily for show or intimidation. For that matter, the book contains a description of hyakumanken-no-arashi, the Million-Blade Storm, as well. It is not believed that anyone could actually execute that one; it's presented merely as a thought exercise, an extrapolation from the two versions that have been performed by K-ryuu samurai over the centuries.

2959 It's a good thing Wakaba showed up when she did, partly because she probably saved Kaitlyn, and partly because if she hadn't arrived just then, Dorothy would've started breaking MilCops like cheap Korean G.I. Joe knockoffs within moments, forcing the other Duelists to either let her be killed by massed counterfire or join in and turn the engagement into a wholesale slaughter that would have cost both sides dearly.

3073 Very rarely does Juri lose control to this degree; even when she was raging at Utena just after they met (before their first duel), she was still mostly composed, even if she was trying to yank Utena's Rose Signet off her finger at the time.

It took us a while to decide that this was going to happen, but given everything that Juri's lived through in the Symphonies, along with her usual tendency to bottle up her emotions, it became obvious that there was a powder keg inside her ready to blow. Ironically, it couldn't have done at a better time. PJM

3081 Carmela has inadvertently hyperstimulated the part of the brain that takes over in rage fugues, which is, coincidentally, the only part of Bruce Banner's brain that works when he becomes the Hulk without his Lens on. Puny human try to hurt Juri! JURI SMASH!

3082 Fury with a capital F: a reference to the Erinyes, the Furies of Greco-Roman myth, who are female personifications of wrath and revenge.

3094 Here's the moment at which the "new" Carmela is (metaphorically, of course) born, on the brink of the "old" one's death.

3106 And in turn, Kaitlyn puts herself on the line to keep Juri from doing something that would have been bad for all concerned, pulling her back from the abyss and forging what they already have into something decidely stronger. PJM

3163 Janice's own prejudices put the slant on the narrator's musings from her point of view here; Governor Kallon is, as we will see, truly appalled at what's happened.

3186 This happens to Hyatt all the time on her source show.

3214 "Shut up and kiss me, you fool." PJM

3310 There was a time when this entire conversation wouldn't have been possible, for a multitude of reasons. That Juri and Kaitlyn have come so far to be able to have it, honestly and openly, does my heart proud as a Juriologist. And hell, I barely even tweaked the scene as written. PJM

3428 The Lido Deck's name comes from, of all things, a joke in the old LucasArts computer game Full Throttle. At one point the game's protagonist, leader of a biker gang, wakes up from a slugging to find himself alone in a dumpster behind a bar. When he goes inside and asks the bartender where the rest of his gang has gone, the bartender replies sarcastically, "What am I, the cruise director? Maybe they're up on the Lido Deck."

3461 A sure sign Juri's recovering: her dry sense of humor has returned. PJM

3543 Recorded during their last (of three) shows on Heston's Planet in the 2007 tour. This album is also the one their cover of Journey's "Escape" was released on (to be heard playing on the T-bird's radio in Sympathy for the Devil).

3600 Shiori filling in for Miki is a nod to the Amber Diceless Roleplaying campaign Phil used to play in; that version of Shiori is a famous musician.

3609 A similar thing happened to me when I got my copy of Joe Satriani: Live in San Francisco, in which the crowd greets any mention of bassist Stuart Hamm with an enthusuastic, "STUUUUUUUUU!"

3820 I hope to do more with Major Galantine at some point; he's a much more interesting character than his brief appearance here can reveal.

3907 "Harshbarger Committee" refers to an old GweepCo in-joke involving political campaign signs that were seen around Massachusetts many years ago, when I (and many other gweeps) worked at Leading Edge in Westborough. They belonged to the campaign of one Scott Harshbarger for some office or another (Harshbarger later served as Massachusetts Attorney General), but instead of belonging to The Committee To Elect Scott Harshbarger or some such, they were marked as the property of "The Scott Harshbarger Committee". This fact led Andrew Petrarca, who noticed it on the way to work one day, to speculate that the Scott Harshbarger Committee was, in fact, a shadowy conspiracy of men named Scott Harshbarger, or possibly clones of the same Scott Harshbarger, bent on world domination one elected office at a time. ("Hey, Scott." "Morning, Scott. Say, have you seen Scott?" "I think he's in Scott's office with Scott and Scott. Why?" "Scott wants to talk to him." "Scott who?" "Harshbarger!" "Oh, right.")

So it does. Umi must have been thinking, on top of everything else, that (a) Nall was getting too fresh for words and (b) this was a particularly unsuitable time to be getting freaky.

1841 Not mentioned in this story is the fact that Tau Ceti IV is only one of two inhabited worlds in the Tau Ceti system. The other, Tau Ceti II, is the homeworld of the reptilian species known as the Race (as seen in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series), and is an independent Federation member state, not part of the Earth Alliance. The Earth Alliance knows better than to mess with the Race; they're fiercely territorial and, though peaceable if not provoked and no longer expansionistic, would exact a terrible price from any force foolish enough to invade their homeworld.

I see that the Race has been moved back to its proper home at Tau Ceti from its original UF location at Epsilon Indi. I'd agree that it would be a Very Bad Idea for the EA to get funny with the Race; in the source material, after all, while the Race didn't succeed in conquering Earth outright, they definitely established themselves as the single biggest nation-state in the world. How are their relations with Zeta Cygni and the IPO?

2004 The sheer hypocrisy of this practice should be obvious. Of course, the members of the Church of Man aren't exactly known for being clueful. PJM

Well, they don't have a problem with cybernetic and bionic augmentations to people who were born "normal"; their beef is with the entirely synthetic. --G.

Even so, it's still stunningly hypocritical, especially in the case of those who have "improved" themselves so that they're virtually all inorganic themselves except for the brain and some other important bits (as I believe we've seen in A Certain Obligation). One of these days this is going to cause a schism when some CoM types who actually do see this hypocrisy break off and start a sect that bans such people from joining their church.

2543 A little nod to Stan "The Man" Lee and the famous Daily Bugle headline, "SPIDER-MAN: THREAT OR MENACE?"

The editor of that paper is named Jameson, no doubt. :)

2886 There also exists in the Katsujinkenryuu manual of arms a maneuver called senken-no-arashi, the Thousand-Blade Storm, but it is rarely attempted; like the Dragon's Tail shown in Blood Ties, it requires such focus to use and has such a huge area of effect that its usefulness in combat is limited, and thus it's primarily for show or intimidation. For that matter, the book contains a description of hyakumanken-no-arashi, the Million-Blade Storm, as well. It is not believed that anyone could actually execute that one; it's presented merely as a thought exercise, an extrapolation from the two versions that have been performed by K-ryuu samurai over the centuries.

To me, it sounds as if those maneuvers are also partially in-jokes thought up by Tetsuo Asagiri and Talar Kem (so, samurai masters can't have a sense of humor?)

-Joe-

>408 Indeed, Kanna's way too old for Moose. They're just pals.

Given that she's a Detian, restricting herself to guys her own age is going to become a little problematic...

>493 Yeah, she's sure, even this early on. Hell, she knew
>during the scene on the balcony. Elven women always do. That second
>round was for funsies.

Bwahaha!

>949 Later changed, after it became apparent to the band members
>that things were just going to keep going wrong all summer long, the
>Outrageous Fortune Tour, after the famous line in Hamlet.

I took this as a temporary "we haven't decided yet" tour name anyway.

>1190 What this says about Juri's assessment of Kozue's looks
>has never really come up, which is probably just as well.

Since she's neither blind nor tasteless, I think we already know what Juri's assessment of Kozue's looks would be.

>1436 The revelation that elven ears are an erogenous zone puts
>an interesting shading on the whole "Nall bites Umi on the ear" thing
>from Endgame, doesn't it?

Also gives interesting connotations to elves wearing earrings...

>2444 This scene is 100% pure Yomiko Readman,
>and still gives me giggles whenever I read it. PJM

It perfectly captures her character and showcases her unique power to great effect.

>3609 A similar thing happened to me when I got my copy of
>Joe Satriani: Live in San Francisco, in which the crowd greets
>any mention of bassist Stuart Hamm with an enthusuastic,
>"STUUUUUUUUU!"

"No, no, Mr. Burns; they're not booing. They're... err... shouting BOO-URNS!"