Well, eight years, yeah, but not a few decades. Ye gods, I'm not that old. :)

>Sakura, however...I don't know if you've read any of the comic books
>Udon put out about SFIV

I haven't read any of their yet, but I have got most of the original Street Fighter run in trade - as well as the Sakura volume of Street Fighter Legends, to which there are a couple of references coming up in Battle 07. It seems most, if not all, of the events depicted therein happened before she met Gryphon in WL (though she apparently wasn't corresponding via the Internet with Ryu, since he barely remembers meeting her in Battle 03 - then again, the Internet hadn't developed to the point where a guy like Ryu would be able to use it when I wrote Battle 03, so that might just be an artifact of WL happening in Nebulous Comic Book Time :).

>All of
>which....is probably not forthcoming, because if she loses, or is
>broken or whatever, all Bison'll do is decant another Doll and start
>over.

Indeed. Gryphon figures as much too, which is why probably he doesn't seem to dislike Laura so much as just find her tiring. It's like dealing with your irritating cousin who a) doesn't seem to realize what an asshole Uncle Milt is and b) wants to be just like him.

Mind you, she keeps trying really hard to get him to dislike her, and one of these days she may succeed, at which point she'll probably wish she hadn't tried quite so hard. We've only seen a vague third-party description of what he's like when he gets really riled up, but it doesn't strike me that it's the kind of thing you'd really want to stick around for, much less be the one to have caused. :)

Also, I should note here that, as far as organizations like Interpol and SPECTRUM (who keep track of such things) know, the Dolls aren't clones; several of them appear in the SPECTRUM database as probable missing persons. (Doll No. 7, for instance, appears to be a German national named Julia, last seen a couple of years ago in northern Mexico.) What isn't known for certain is whether they joined Shadolu on purpose or got "volunteered" for the job by somebody else.

That theory would end up with a bit of a hole in it if what Gryphon discovered about Decapre were better known, but he hasn't seen fit to mention it to anyone as yet.

>Hell, with Decapre, it seems that he's tiring already of simply
>"training" his proteges and has settled for simply building them.

Decapre is... well, I'm not going to give it all away right here, but you saw the first revelation in 06, and there's more to her story. Suffice it to say that she's unusual even by the standards of the Doll Agents - and even more so in WL, where she was developed in part to test Shadolu's version of the Weapon X process.

>(That, and the scar makes me wonder if Laura's just a first generation
>Doll herself and thinks she's a Real Girl).

They don't all have them, so it's probably not specifically a Doll thing, but that's all I'm going to say about it for right now.

>And all this without ever seeing Bison in person, or him having any
>lines whatsoever, and being known purely by reputation and
>second-person description. That said, seeing him given some real chops
>(his character seems more overblown and less competent in the games
>than here, where he's a monster in a less Caligula-esque manner) is
>rather nice. I'm very interested to see more.

I'm very deliberately restricting Bison's screen time in WL, for exactly that reason - I want him to be as mysterious and indirectly understood to the readers as he is to the principal narrator. It gives him a much greater air of menace, I think, that of the members of the primary cast, only two have ever met him, and of those, one doesn't remember and the other refuses to discuss it. Hopefully, it'll give it that much more impact when he and Gryphon actually do end up face-to-face.

>But yeah, I really like the universe mash-up this is presenting,
>though a very odd part of my brain keeps wondering when Lara's going
>to meet a certain Mr. Fox along the way, but that would be Bad because
>WL really shouldn't end with Second Impact.

Heh, no, Laura in WL doesn't know any FBI agents - although, interestingly, an very early proto-draft of NXE1:1 was conceived as a post-apocalyptic sequel to WL. Proto-DJ wasn't related to Lara Croft at all; he was blond and Scottish. (There's a tiny callback to that design in the meta-reference humor stuff we did toward the end of NXE, in which it's mentioned that DJ Croft is "played" by a Scottish actor named Dennis MacCrofton. :)

>Still, very yummy. Please, sir, can I have some more?

By a curious coincidence, you can, just as soon as I hear back from one of the Suspects about a bit of future-plot-hook design I dropped into the final scene of Battle 07. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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