Oh, don't worry. Next issue will have your full recommended daily allowance of big set-piece battle scenes.

>> "Oi, Zoner! Tell Stark to come catch my show Friday night at the
>> Tunnel Rat. I want to show him what I think of my new toy."
>
>Did he make the show? It's never mentioned again.
>

Alas, probably not; he spent pretty much the whole weekend running the conference.

>May as well stick this query up front. Clearly this universe's Soviet
>Union is much more in the traditional Cold War mold than what we have
>over in NXE. Did the collapse of 1989-93 in the real world just ...
>not happen?

Yes, pretty much. There are a few old posts lying around here that imply the USSR did collapse and then was reconstituted, but I had mixed up this setting's backhistory with that of NXE (where that did happen). More on this in a moment:

>And is that canonical for
>BGC, or specific to this version? (I haven't watched any BGC at all.)

The original Bubblegum Crisis predates the fall of the real-life Soviet Union, and as far as I can recall it doesn't particularly mention happenings in the Eastern Bloc one way or the other. For our purposes, we can assume that the setting has the stock "1980s cyberpunk set in the 2000s" backdrop in which the 1917 USSR is still a going concern (albeit with a somewhat more functional economy). The whole thing with Natasha and Ben's backstory is futurized Cold War spy stuff.

>> "Can it be that you find yourself... drifting away from journalism?"
>
>I didn't actually expect to see Stark's prior history with Natasha
>appear at this point—I thought its presentation as a Forum
>standalone meant it would be omitted. Probably the right choice in
>terms of pacing, though.

Well, you didn't see all of it, just the first encounter. He mentions another in his conversation with Nene, but as we will see at a later point, their paths have crossed several times since 2027.

>> ... my other 'assistant', Boris ...
>
>It had to be.

It did, although, oddly, not as a direct Rocky & Bullwinkle reference. Natasha had at least two KGB partners named Boris in the 1960s comics. That may itself have been a Rocky & Bullwinkle reference on the part of Stan Lee & co., the timing would have been about right for it, but it's not the joke I'm actually making. :)

>> I WISH TO DEFECT TO THE WEST. CAN/WILL YOU HELP ME?
>
>The way this was set up, I didn't realize it was Vanko who wanted to
>defect until I got to the bathroom scene. I thought it was a Soviet
>AI inhabiting the "Tireless Worker," or else possibly Natasha.

The former is an interesting idea, although in a situation like that, "defect" would not quite be the right word.

>> "I do believe I can get you in touch with some...let's say 'deniable
>> contractors' who would be happy to help for the right price."
>
>It's good to have contacts, isn't it?

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them...

>> Nene was dressed in her Knight Sabers datasuit, augmented by a
>> headset that was projecting a small holographic HUD for her at eye
>> level
>
>I'm a little surprised it's Nene running the tin suit for this show.
>Would have expected Rhodes.

Rhodey still works in the US at the moment; he's chief test pilot for Stark Aerospace, so he spends most of his time in Burbank.

>(The arc reactor must also be capable of throttling back to only about
>ten watts at idle, or it would always be too hot to touch!

Well, yeah, it doesn't actually have to do anything but sit there making a bit of visible light. (That's where most of its waste energy goes.)

The performance figures he's giving there are extremely ad-hoc; he's not actually saying he expects the thing to be able to pump out three megawatts of electricity continuously for ten years, rather that its maximum output is three megawatts and, in "normal use" (however he's arrived at that standard with such a limited sample size), he expects the fuel core to last ten years. That's in the Iron Man application, where most of the time it's not really doing much of anything. Running, say, a hospital, you would probably need to throw a new unobtanium triangle in it every year or so. :)

>What I'm saying is, I understand why Benjamin Stark doesn't like to
>call himself an engineer, but this thing is one damned impressive feat
>of engineering, even if it's not yet ready for mass production.

I think he's kind of semi-deliberately not looking directly at that; there are some pretty significant existential conundra there that he's not really ready to confront just yet.

>(Possible typo: GTrans thinks it should be "боже" rather than
>"божэ.")

Oops, that's an artifact of how I have to render Cyrillic lettering in the HTML source files. My text editor, which is otherwise very capable and for which I've developed some specialized regexps and whatnot for formatting large files semi-quickly, doesn't support the fully extended Unicode character set, so I have to render things like Cyrillic letters and beyond-Latin-1 diacriticals (the lowercase o with macron that appears in Kongō's name, for instance) as their ampersand entities. Cyrillic actually has two e characters, one for the "eh" sound and one for the "ee" sound. Amper ecy semicolon is the one for the former; what I actually wanted there was amper iecy semicolon, the one for the latter. боже.

>> "I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that Zoner decided to make a
>> move there, or that he's apparently her type."
>
>Are we sure it isn't Sylia who made the move?

In fact, we're pretty sure it was.

>> "The market will grow, and our monolithic friends will find that
>> iron-fisted grip of theirs loosening as they start finding less and
>> less people are interested in putting their money into a dying
>> paradigm."
>
>One could read this as a criticism of Soviet central planning,
>if one were so inclined. :-)

Oh, it is. I mean, cosmetically he's talking about GENOM and the like, "free"-market monopolists, but he is well aware that Natasha is in his audience, and he rarely misses an opportunity to tweak her about the Virtues of Communism. Goes back to the time they crossed paths in Havana and she spent most of an evening explaining the dialectical-materialist basis for the inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism over capitalist greed. Weirdest pillow talk ever. Havana in August; it was too humid for murder. :)

>> "You will hear from me again once I know what part you played in
>> it... because I know you played one."
>
>So I have to wonder, to what extent is Angry And Not Even Pretending
>Not To Be A Spy an act, versus her more congenial bodyguarding-the-VIP
>persona (in which she was at least smiling at Stark's jokes) or the
>five-year-old honey trap persona? Are they all an act? I do
>hope we get to find out if there's still someone in there whom Nene would
>recognize as her sister.

Like many long-time espionage officers, Natasha is no long entirely sure herself what is and isn't an act sometimes.

>> «I know that bastard Stark had something to do with this, and I am
>> going to need everything to find out what. He won't outmaneuver me
>> this time.»
>
>This sure does make a pretty sharp contrast with "...but she wouldn't
>mind encountering this American again" from the flashback.

Well, like I say, she's conflicted. By this point they've tangled (... in various senses of the word) several times, and on the overall scorecard there is no clear winner. He is, if nothing else, a worthy adversary, and however hard she has worked not to disclose it in any official debriefing, she finds herself harboring a strange sort of affection for him. He makes her smile. He also makes her want to kill him. She's not sure any longer which of those is her "real" response, although she's open to the possibility that they both are.

She's a complicated woman, Natasha. No one understands her but... actually, I don't think anyone understands her.

--G.
-><-
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.