[65] I think the names of Queen Amidala's various handmaidens were included in the Episode I Visual Dictionary, but no official source I've ever seen included what their actual jobs within Amidala's court are. Probably they don't have specific roles, but I figured I'd give them some in UF, if for no other reason than to avoid proliferation. Why come up with whole new characters to fill palace functions when I can just assign them to the handmaidens?

[174] This sequence was actually written before the Duelists' Castle appeared, and it was mainly because this part was in the works that the Castle turned out to be an abandoned Jedi temple.

[207] Solitaire. Lots and lots of solitaire.

[288] Contrary to popular belief, this was not inspired by "come to the dark side, we have cookies" bumper stickers; I first saw one of those a long time after this scene was written. It was, rather, inspired by the back page of the HŌL: Human Occupied Landfill game manual, which featured an illustration of Death offering a plate and asking, "Would you like a sugar cookie? I bake them myself."

[306] This is Alec Guinness Obi-Wan, naturally - still looking like he did when he first became one with the Force.

[348] In UF, Eirtaé is Her Majesty's private secretary.

[353] At the time this scene was written, the only thing Padmé had appeared in was The Phantom Menace, which, for the record, I enjoyed (fashionable though it almost immediately became to diss it). This is largely why the UF version is a teenager, just beginning her career as a prodigy of statecraft. It's always kind of bummed me out that we didn't get to see more of that career in the films, since by Episode II they'd jumped ahead to the second phase.

[359] She does this voice trick for two reasons: One, at her young age, she finds it harder to be taken entirely seriously by strangers when she speaks in her normal voice; and two, it makes it easier for her decoys to fool people, since her "official" voice is just as much an act when she's doing it herself.

[414] A slight exaggeration.

[508] The three royal spacecraft are named Hydrargyrum, Quicksilver, and Mercury, all names for the same thing: element number 80 (the first name being why it has the periodic table symbol Hg). They are, respectively, the small vessel from the later bits of Revenge of the Sith, the big flying-wing ship that appears briefly at the beginning of Attack of the Clones, and the SR-71-ish ship from The Phantom Menace. The fourth Naboo starship seen in the prequel trilogy, the Flash Gordon rocketship from later in Attack of the Clones, does not exist in UF - at least not yet.

[515] Though it doesn't come up often in these pieces, the newly organized form of the Jedi Order is a Special Assignment Branch of the International Police Organization, which is why all the support staff at the temple are Technical Division bluesuiters. (This affiliation is one of the reasons why some of the Jedi won't come in from the cold, as it were.)

[542] In the millennia since the fall of Atlantis (of which Alderaan was a late-established, far-flung colony), the temple stood vacant until the planet rediscovered space travel in the early Salusian era, after which it was used for a number of civic functions and was even briefly the headquarters of a bank.

[571] Gajic remains aloof not because he distrusts the motivations of the International Police in reconstituting the Order, but simply because he doesn't feel a centralized order is a good idea in general (it didn't turn out so well last time).

[740] Orlyn's sudden appearance in this scene is a modified application of Chandler's Law.

[884] This little bit was a lot of fun, though it did have the interesting twin side effects of making some readers assume - some with dread, others with glee - that Draco Malfoy's appearance indicated plans for much greater involvement by characters drawn from the same source. But no, not really; they're mostly just there for flavor. I needed some middle-teens Jedi students; I forget who suggested this particular group.

[913] I developed the UF version of Hercule Poirot essentially on a dare; someone said I couldn't possibly conflate, say, Star Wars and the Edwardian drawing-room mysteries of Agatha Christie. So I did.

[977] Master Poirot and Captain Hastings are fun to write dialogue for. I especially enjoyed doing their exchange about Hermione.

[1004] It entertains me that I named Or'lyn'do years before seeing anything with Orlando Bloom in it, and decided to make him an ex-pirate well before I ever got around to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean.

[1008] Not Captain Jack Sparrow.

[1126] I guess his off-and-on thing with Sara Sidle is currently "off".

[1264] Or just Santov, depending on which gazetteer you're looking at.

[1536] The return of Obi-Wan Kenobi - as his younger self, no less - is a direct result of something Ardie said after seeing Revenge of the Sith: "Obi-Wan is the Indiana Jones of the Jedi Order." And, really, she had a point. Whatever you think of Episode III, and I have decidedly mixed feelings about it myself, Obi-Wan was one of the highlights. After that, we couldn't leave him dead. It wouldn't have been sporting at all.

So, we finished Road Movie, and there was this draft sitting in the WIP directory for ages called "next.txt" - really engaging name, don't you think? - where Gryph had noodled about a bit with what Emmy and Len were going to do next. It had the sugar cookies and a couple of other bits, but not a whole lot of structure. Then Revenge of the Sith came out, and Gryph shot me an email saying, effectively, "We have to get Obi-Wan alive, he's just too cool to leave dead."

And I said, "Sure, but Len and Emmy are your characters..."

And he wrote out the beginnings of Fulcrum I, and said, "I don't know where I'm going."

And I said, "Well, what if..." (and you don't get to know the what if until we finish Fulcrum IV) and he said, "Got it," and finished Fulcrum I. I got a lead credit mostly for the brainstorming on this one, I think, because it contains almost nothing written by me, but my name was on the big "next" draft. Juni