I admit, I'd already envisioned the cutscene starting, with you tied up and looking at Benny explain that it's not personal as your grave is being dug in front of your eyes. And then the pyrotechnics start, beginning with cooking off the ammo in his gun while he's pointing it at one of the diggers and going downhill VERY fast from there. There's just no way a glorified mook like Benny has a real chance against Azula.

>Not as such, no. Quite a few opportunities to get one's end away on
>the cheap and nasty, but no love stories to speak of, which I suppose
>fits the overall ethos of the wasteland. (They cut a plotline where
>the Courier could marry Rose Cassidy. The King was going to
>officiate. Seriously. Well, who else would, if you're getting
>married in Vegas?)

Yeah. :/ Every Obsidian game so far has suffered from their deals with some other company involved in its making, usually by there being no time to do it right, though in this case Bethesda was responsible for QA. (Ouch.)

Basically, seeing stuff cut out doesn't shock me in the slightest, and that marriage thing sounds awesome, actually. (It parallels a marriage option in Fallout 2, IIRC, which involved a shotgun.)

>
>>One wonders
>>how she'd have reacted to someone with Azula's looks...
>
>"Hey, no offense, but you look........... amazing."
>
>"Why thank you."

Oh, Azula, Azula, Azula. Look, I know Machiavelli probably never wrote about vamping for fun and profit, but at least capitalize on the advantages you're given. Of course, I have no notion which way Azula swings, nor do I claim to. I haven't seen ATLA or LOK but I get the impression whenever they tried to handle romance at all in the show it wasn't done well.

>
>>-Did anyone else notice the byline? Rhian! I guess she must have
>>married into Dr. McCoy's family (or the man himself; I have no notion
>>where he is in the timeframe involved)
>
>Well, funny story. When I wrote the byline for this article, I threw
>that in more or less on a whim, and it turns out I didn't think it
>through well enough. I had the notion that it might be amusing if she
>turned out to be Leonard McCoy's mother, but the timing doesn't work,
>on account of I stupidly calculated when he must've been born starting
>from the wrong year. On the original Star Trek, Dr. McCoy is
>in his early forties, a few years older than Captain Kirk, as one
>might expect from a well-established surgeon of his caliber. Since
>the Enterprise is described as approaching the end of her first
>five-year mission in Manhunt (2380), that would mean Dr. McCoy
>was born sometime in the late 2330s.
>
>I, on the other hand, ran that calculation from Twilight (2390)
>instead for some addle-brained reason, and came up with a birth year
>of around 2347. That would have worked. 2337, on the other hand,
>doesn't. That's the year after Laura Kinney and the Maiden in the
>Ice, and though some people do, Rhian's not going to have started
>on her family at 17.

Aye. Especially since she's still a Girl Guide and having adventures with the crew (and the band!) at that point, I think.

>
>As such, there are two main possibilities:
>
>1) It's a coincidence, and each is regarded in the other's circle as
>"the other Dr. McCoy"; or

Possible but a cop-out.

>
>2) She's his aunt or something, having married his father's brother
>(or sister - one cannot entirely rule that out nowadays!**) at some
>point.

Also possible, less of a cop-out.

Couldn't be sister, though. Not because that's not possible, but because if she swung that way, she and Mairwen would already be snogging in secret since before they met Laura, let alone Azula.

Which is...not impossible.

>
>I suppose 3), she's either the ex-wife he occasionally goes on about
>or the second Dr. Mrs. Dr. McCoy, is also possible, but she's 17 years
>older than he is, so I dunno how likely that is.

Well, that is possible, too. More of a cop-out than option 2.

>
>>and since it was the
>>Enterprise that picked Azula up, I wonder if Rhian was there at the
>>time.
>
>Not in 2382, no. Rhian may well have gone through a
>Flying Doctors
>phase earlier in her career, but by then she's quite happily settled
>in a steady hospital job - the better to conduct really cutting-edge
>research - and leaving gallivanting around the cosmos to those with
>more of a taste for it.

Not exactly a Dr. Chakwas, I guess. =)

>
>>Incidentally, did Mairwen or Laura have anything to do with
>>this?
>
>Which this? The Mojave incident, Rhian's marriage, other? In either
>case the answer is probably no, though it's not out of the question
>that Mairwen might have introduced her to her future spouse at some
>point.

I meant more the incident at Mojave itself, possibly by dint of being on the Enterprise at the time, but that's already been confirmed not true, so no worries. As for Rhian's marriage, the who is a somewhat more important question to answer before we worry about the how. ^_^

>
>>-I must admit, I have a feeling these vignettes are by no means over.
>>I'm looking forward to finding out how things are going in the
>>'present' (circa 2410), and/or what happened to everyone.
>
>Oh, there'll be more, I expect. I've taken this approach - glancing
>in on what Azula's up to every now and then, rather than documenting
>her career meticulously - for a change of pace and because it's really
>more fun to leave a lot of it implied. In practice it feels a little
>like tuning in only sporadically to catch episodes of a long-running,
>convoluted TV series, which some people may find a bit offputting, but
>I'm having fun with it.
>
>It also provides more flexibility in how her story's told. This
>particular item, for instance, would have been fairly dull as a story;
>either the reader had played Fallout: New Vegas, in which case
>much of it would have been redundant, or the reader hadn't, in which
>case omitting the redundant parts would've just made it confusing.
>Instead, presenting it as a sort of gloss in a Featured Document means
>that either way, the details are left to the reader's imagination -
>they'll be different for those who haven't played the game, but
>possibly no less entertaining. I mean, think of her living a
>spaghetti Western with laser guns and robots, and you won't go far
>wrong. :)

*nod* I can see that. There's not enough change from the events of the game to make a new narrative all that important. I mean...she had more companions (Caesar's Legion must have been heeling and toeing it from Fisto!) and probably didn't take a bullet to the head. And probably incinerated Yes-Man and Victor with extreme prejudice. Other than that, can't see what would have changed.

>
>Next up, I think, will be a glimpse of what she was doing about eight
>years after Mojave, during the run-up to the (temporary) end of the
>universe.

Looking forward to it.

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu