Dealing with Benny certainly would have been easier. Frankly, I'm surprised he even managed to reach the opening cutscene. Maybe he didn't, and the whole adventure was predicated instead on Azula standing amid the charred corpses of Benny and the Khans* and wondering, "Now why would some clown in a checked suit try to kill me for this thing?" :)

>-Veronica. Y'know, playing a female character, I always thought the
>only reason she didn't -jump my bones- was because Obsidian didn't
>script anything like a romance into the game, at least not that I saw.

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?)

>One wonders
>how she'd have reacted to someone with Azula's looks...

"Hey, no offense, but you look........... amazing."

"Why thank you."

>-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.

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

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.

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.

>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.

>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 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. :)

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.

--G.
* Not to be confused with the do-wop band from Ulaanbaatar.
** I almost bylined her as "Rhian Porter" just to see if anyone was paying attention. I may yet do that, in fact, since the Dr. McCoy joke doesn't work!
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.