2) Bèthildr's name is pronounced BET-hilder, not BETH-ilder.

3) I haven't actually read anything with the Red She-Hulk in, but I felt the joke was too good to pass up, and the UF version developed fine pretty much independently. Basically, I needed a Valkyrie who could at least get close to keeping up with the Hulk, and for obvious reasons, Gudrun Truemace was out. As it turned out, that was fine, because it gave me the hook I needed for the Big Fight at the End - namely, the idea that Betty's an Eldjotun (fire giant) exile whose former people want her back, now that she's made her name as a Valkyrie, for debriefing and possibly, er, chastisement. The Hulk doesn't give a damn about Jotun politics, naturally; he just won't put up with people roughing up his friends.

4) The original outline for this story arose after Excessive Force, when I decided that I like Savage Hulk too much to write him out as just a symptom of something going wrong with Banner's mind upon transformation, which his Lens then corrects (which is what he and Skuld thought was going on). Obviously my take on the Hulk isn't 100% serious, though he's far from being played entirely for laughs either.

5) By a strange coincidence, while I was working on this I saw an early episode of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, in which Banner asserts that he's "reached out" to the Hulk and achieved an understanding with him. I was already heading that way with The Balance, but it was nice to see that I'm not the only one who's had the thought.

6) Again, as I noted in a comment response above, Caitlin Fairchild's transformation between the intro and the epilogue has nothing to do with her work in the Getter-ray lab. It would have happened just the same if she was teaching physics at NAIS or working the night shift at the In-n-Out on Satriani Avenue. I think it's actually funnier that way - that it's just One Of Those Things that happen in New Avalon sometimes.

7) Betty's father's name, Elding Grimmuryfirvaraskegg, is Internet Icelandic for "Thunderbolt Fierce-Moustache". So you can probably tell who he's supposed to be. I was going to do an epilogue showing Hargrim, with his face mostly covered in sticking plaster, reporting to his king so that you could actually see ol' Thundertache, but it never quite fit right. Props to Geoff for thinking of and looking up the translation for his surname.

8) As noted in the note at the top of the story, the "voice mail" gag was Chad Collier's idea.

9) The song Banner is humming to himself at the end is Barenaked Ladies' "It's Only Me (The Wizard of Magicland)":

10) "This is above my pay grade" is something Virginia Shepard says.

11) Can you see them tackling the ogre RPG/Hulk sonic hand clap thing on 25th-century Mythbusters, or is it just me?

12) Note that the day Dr. Banner gets back to work is the same day that General Zod comes to town in Last Transport. Hulk was rather disappointed that none of Zod's people tried to gain access to the R&D sublevels. It would have been an interesting scientific test of his principal hypothesis ("Hulk is strongest one there is").

--G.
"There's only one thing for it: We're going to have to build a Hulk robot." "Oh, that can't possibly end poorly."
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.