[13] Yes, this is the same person who is credited in previous pieces (and still appears in-story) as Janice Barlow.

June 20th, at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. It was lovely, and it was short enough to upload to YouTube. The bride and groom wore kilts by Steve Ashton of Freedom Kilts, and T-shirts by Graphitti Designs. ARD

[19] The Garden is perhaps best-remembered by Babylon 5 viewers as the place where John Sheridan nearly became a grease stain, but for the intervention of Ambassador Kosh, in episode 222, "The Fall of Night".

[31] This implies that Babylon 6 would have artificial gravity, if they turned it on. Under normal conditions, though, they don't have to; the station's longitudinal spin takes care of that.

[39] The Colosseum is not technically an indoor location, since it has no roof, but it does have a climate management system.

[42] On the flip side, the Battledrome (last seen in Arena) is an entirely enclosed space that's built to seem like it's outdoors.

[158] There were several different cuts of this scene, but this was the first one and ended up being the winner. Other songs considered were the 1962 studio version of Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night Away" and "Don't Bring Me Down" by the Electric Light Orchestra (1979).

[219] 455,294,119:1 against.

[262] The two lines between the previous excerpt and this one ("Are you old enough? / Will you be ready when I call your bluff?") presumably played between the time of the door opening and Eve noticing the Chief standing there.

[283] dieselsweeties.com sells more of these T-shirts to customers on Ragol than everywhere else in the galaxy put together.

[333] Sharp-eyed space geeks will notice that the One-Hit Wonder's controls in this scene resemble those found in the Apollo command module, down to the toggle switches and grey-flag/barberpole mechanical indicators. No real reason for this; I just like them, and the Wonder is about the right age (that it wasn't even built on Earth notwithstanding). They provide a certain ambience to the Wonder "set".

[403] This is a reference to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas; if you're scoring at home (or even if you're alone) the specific reference to a Pendleton shirt instead of just a wool one further identifies it as a reference to the book, not the movie.

[526] Ironically, Gryphon was one of the driving forces behind the Turing Institute's development and adoption of the field certification process in the first place, after R. Dorothy's ridiculously protracted evaluation.

[569] That it's Vigdis doing this - indeed, that she's Utena's best friend among the Valkyrie by 2410 - is quite something when you consider Year's End Confrontation Blues.

[622] One of the bases for this assertion, inasmuch as it has historical bases, is the legend of Freydis, Lief Eriksson's sister, who was part of the Norsemen's ill-fated attempt to colonize Vinland (modern-day Newfoundland) and who, the story goes, grabbed a sword and helped drive off an attack by native tribesmen - by some accounts, in fact, she drove it off herself while the menfolk whittered ineffectually - all while heavily pregnant.

[676] Another way of looking at it would be to say that the wedding-crown doesn't make her Corwin's princess; it makes her his queen.

[718] Avalon Standard Time is the official time for all IPO installations and ships. It coincides with Eastern Time on Earth and Cheltar Central Time on Salusia.

[783] Corwin's heretofore-undisclosed middle name is "Virgil", after Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom. More on this later.

[820] Burst code isn't quite the same as the basic signaling R-series astromech droids are famous for; it's more like the noise you get if you pick up the phone and listen to a modem or fax machine.

[836] Trivia: It is illegal to use straight-slot ("regular") screw fasteners on industrial products in the Republic of Zeta Cygni. They're just too big a pain in the ass.

[928] Günter is one of my favorite characters from the golden age of Western space exploration (which I define as Projects Mercury through Apollo), and wrote one of my favorite memoirs of the period, as well (The Unbroken Chain). The semi-AI version seen here is based in part on Max Wright's performance in From the Earth to the Moon.

[996] I wrote this scene (and "The Sheep Incident," or some of it, at least) four years ago, July 2004, and dug it up in time for S5M2. Fortunately, the required edits didn't take long to knock out, and Wedge had written a useful hook for it somewhere else. ARD

[1049] Heh. Hokey religions, ancient weapons, etc. ARD

[1066] Alderaan has a lot of Salusians, some of them voluntary expatriates, some of them refugees from the Kilrathi wars. It doesn't have nearly as many Kilrathi. Memories and the accompanying prejudices can be pretty persistent. ARD

[1071] As chronicled in Decadent & Depraved: From the Don't Panic! Sports Desk, if we ever get the damn thing finished.

[1159] After a couple of false starts and several offscreen mentions, Aeryn (The Littlest Valkyrie By Weight™) finally makes an actual appearance.

[1169] Aeryn is based on a halfling monk I played in the 2002 Neverwinter Nights. I forget precisely the character generator settings I used, apart from setting her hair to black and using the sorta-Kozue-ish hairstyle. As D&D3E monks generally do, she started slow, but eventually became a terrifying engine of destruction. In 3E terms, the UF version of Aeryn we see here is about level 30, so. Nobody you want to mess with, 3'2" or no.

[1174] As in the Icelandic rune poem. "Týr er einhendr áss/ ok ulfs leifar /ok hofa hilmir." "Tyr, one-handed god/ and leavings of the wolf/ and prince of temples." ARD

[1338] Albeit not without a certain measure of panic.

[1363] Lenneth harbors a certain disappointment that she didn't win the old Corwin Sweepstakes; she had quite good odds once, in large part because of things like the aforementioned jet engine incident, and as seen by her selection here, she's one of his best friends among the Valkyrie, but it wasn't to be.

[1412] Ana Drax is also based on a character I originally made for a D&D3E computer game, in this case Neverwinter Nights 2 - though obviously her biographical information is somewhat different.

[1439] Here's the first of several - arguably too many, but what the hell - movie references packed into this section of the story. This one, with one modification, is from The Blues Brothers.

[1483] The Right Stuff ("It's called Sputnik!").

[1512] Regal, the real dog on whom Wolfgang is based, has always been an excellent judge of character, and this was most famously how he reacted to the old Superintendent of Schools here in town whenever their paths crossed (which used to be often, since both my mother and her husband worked in the school system until a few years ago).

&l534] Star Wars, of course.

[1536] There were many prototype versions of this scene, each with a different character in the role that eventually went to X. Among the other candidates were Derek, Ivanova, Mace Windu or Invader Vert (both of whom ended up not being able to attend), Chad, and Kosh, before the last ended up with his own segment. Eventually X got the nod mainly because Riddick's involvement made it seem like the thing to do.

[1545] Akio has no idea whatsoever what a Vorlon is; the politics of Midgard do not interest him. As such, he's doubly taken aback that the Vorlon Ambassador seems to know what he is.

[1562] One has to wonder precisely who "we" is in this context... but that's all part of the magic of Kosh.

[1576] The Hunt for Red October, more or less. Derna is the fourth moon of Bajor - quite some distance from Babylon 6.

[1601] See the flashback to Corwin and Freyja's fall-2409 conversation in S5M1: Ash Knight.

[1662] Also a rather oblique Hunt for Red October reference. ("I told you to speak your mind, Corwin, but Jesus.")

[1700] CAUTION. ROGUE ROBOTS.

[1797] In Raven: Blood Ties.

[1892] Since Utena is not actually a member of the pantheon, this symbol isn't an "official" System Mark; Bell painted it on as part of the process of making her up. It's intended as a gesture of welcome. As for what, if anything, it means, only Bell can really say, since she made it up on the spot.

[1938] The clothes Utena and Corwin wear in this scene were derived, with modifications, from the costumes of a couple of the supporting characters in an Ah My Goddess anime I haven't actually seen, courtesy of suggestions (and the diligent digging-up of screencaps) by Phil Moyer.

[1954] This bit of dialogue just kind of happened; I had no concrete plan beyond "You look fantastic." After it came out, I was sorely tempted to abandon the game plan and just go ahead with the whole shmeer after all, but in the end I decided to stick to the original idea. Still, it's one of my favorite exchanges between these two.

[2085] I'm not sure when Corwin took it, but we saw Utena take this oath back in Fanfare for an Exiled Prince.

[2124] "Yes. I know who you are." was a running gag in the first Doctor Who Christmas Special after the series was revived a few years ago. People kept saying it to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after she, by force of habit ingrained when she was just a Member of Parliament, introduced herself.

[2168] Roughly, "The Repo Men will fuck them up, boss."

[2203] Actually, Steamrunner-class starships technically do, but with their 25th-century boiler technology, it takes mere moments.

[2224] Presumably because of its three-pronged strike force.

[2227] The heliopause is the distance from a star at which the solar wind ceases to be detectable. This is some distance beyond the termination shock, the point at which solar wind particles slow to subsonic speed relative to the star, which in the case of our own Sun is between 95 and 70 AU out depending on where in the heliosheath you are. The reason they're rendezvousing at the trailing edge of the heliopause is because at the leading edge, the star's progress in its orbit around the galactic core causes a bow shock, which, while not strong enough to endanger a starship, can make rendezvousing a fleet a pain in the ass.

[2234] The reptilian Race, who are native to Tau Ceti III, are staying the hell out of this, primarily because they'd prefer not to give Earthdome an excuse to conquer them. Unlike the Martians, they probably haven't got the military clout to fend off an annexation attempt.

[2248] Iron Man. I believe this is the last of the completely gratuitous movie references in this episode. :)

[2257] Illustrious is one of two battleships belonging to the Imperial Guards rather than the Royal Salusian Navy (the other being HMS Thunderer). In this instance, she's the ship assigned to escort the royal envoy (HRH the Princess Jessica, Baroness d'Alkirk) to the wedding. Salusia isn't signatory to the Tau Ceti sovereignty/defense pact signed back in The Ceti Solution, but unlike the RSN, the Guards don't answer to the Ministry of War; anything they do is on the imperial family's personal dime, not that of the political entity that is the Empire of Salusia. This is perhaps a fiddly point, but it'll stand up in court. Technically, Illustrious's involvement isn't the Salusian government butting into a treaty situation in which it is not involved; it's Jess bringing along some bodyguards. ... Okay, about 1200 of them, but still. :)

[2304] As its name suggests, a Royal Salusian Navy U-ship (the "U" stands for "undetectable") is a scouting vessel equipped with sensor-confounding technologies. It's not a true cloakship, in that most of its stealth capabilities are passive, which makes for much lower energy consumption and thwarts some of the more esoteric methods of detecting a ship with active cloaking. The downsides are that they can't stay "submerged" forever (since they achieve part of their stealth by not venting waste heat overboard) and that all you really have to do to detect one is look out a window. All the RSN's U-ships have names beginning with U (the class vessel is HMS Unseen, and no, that's not a dime novel reference).

In this case, Unfathomable is involved because the WDF, which is one of the Ceti Pact signatories, requested her help from the RSN under the mutual-aid agreements between the two navies. She's not expected to shoot at anyone and, indeed, if she does her job right, no one on the Earthdome side will even know she was there.

[2318] This is presumably why they're not using Illustrious's fold drive to do precisely that. Hey, what do you want, he's a dragon, not a space geek.

[2342] Flavia is another of the proliferative Satori family, who are to be found in every branch of Salusian military service. She was a Royal Salusian Army scout and was killed in 2175 during the defense of a remote colony against the Covenant.

[2343] Agrippa (ca. 63-12 BSC) was a son-in-law and close friend of Octavian, whom you may know better as Rome's first emperor, Augustus, and was the military man most significantly responsible for Octavian becoming emperor in the first place. Interestingly, he was also one of ancient Rome's only decent admirals (they were not a particularly nautical people).

[2407] Astronaut Gus Grissom was killed, along with his crewmates Ed White and Roger Chaffee, on January 27, 1967 in a spacecraft fire during testing for Apollo 1. They were among the first people a very young Skuld Ravenhair personally conducted to Valhalla, shortly after her investiture as a Valkyrie. She went on to become good friends with Grissom, who was the most engineering-minded of the three, and eventually named her son after him (though he professes to dislike his given name himself).

[2478] The sword exchange is taken directly from what little is now known about Viking wedding practices. In the Æsir version, the bride gives her new husband a brand-new sword with which to defend his family, while the groom gives his new wife a sword with longstanding ties to his family, theoretically to hold in trust for their eventual firstborn son.

[2505] Ragnhildr is an Old Norse woman's name, and is a combination of the words for "counsel" and "battle".

[2520] Ivaldi's sons, Eitri and Brokkr, became famous in their own right some time later as the master artificers who created, among other things, Odin's magic spear Gungnir, Frey's wondrous boat Skidbladnir, and Thor's iconic hammer, Mjollnir. (In the Norse version of this legend, Eitri and Brokkr weren't Ivaldi's sons, and indeed made Mjollnir as part of a bet that they couldn't make anything better than the stuff the sons of Ivaldi made, but there we see the difference between the Vikings having gotten everything right, and just having come closer than most other mortals.)

[2521] We've seen one of these three swords before. The one made for Odin, which is variously known by mortals as Durandal or Grayswandir, was eventually used as the Master Key of Yggdrasil the World-Engine, and appeared as such in Twilight. The third, made for Vé, remains lost.

[2523] In the light of the above, readers with a little bit of sword lore should have a 50-50 chance of guessing one of those names - but we'll find out in S5M3, in any case.

[2561] Frigg is presumably referring to Corwin's "I love you, Utena Tenjou, on whatever terms you'll have me" speech from Interlude at the Hotel Monolith, and Utena's thematic response to it the following day.

[2617] I had originally thought to make Wall-E's serial number "3263827", but I'd already used that in UF as Kozue Kaoru's Colonial Forces serial number, and it'd appeared in this very story, so I went with 366117891 instead. Both of them are the number of the Death Star trash compactor in Star Wars; one is from the movie, the other the novel. Now, obviously, there weren't 366,117,891 WALL-E units built, only about 20 million, so my guess is that USR's serial numbers worked a bit like VINs. "366" is probably a model/revision descriptor.

[2681] Frigg's surname, Fjörgynsmær, roughly means "Daughter of Earth". She is reputed to have sprung from the primal substance of the Nine Worlds very early in recorded time. Whether this is literally true, only Frigg can say... and she doesn't.

I have quite a bit of sword lore (it was a hobby, once upon a time). So I'm guessing one of these:

Gram,
Hævatein
And, of course, Withywindle.

To borrow a phrase from another fandom, Utena befriended the *crap* out of her.

When I read this the first thing that came to mind was the George Carlin skit where he is in front of the priest and is asked if he wants to marry a woman. "WHO? Oh, her? Hell yeaahhhh...."