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"Gallian Gothic Book 3"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Aug-19-22 AT 03:36 PM (EDT)
 
Act I: "Nuits à Paris"

Hôtel de Crillon - Yes, it's the same hotel Mio and Minna stayed at back in OWaW episode 7! This was not deliberately planned, it just so happens that it's the hotel nearest to both the Palais de l'Élysée (the official presidential residence) and the nearby headquarters of the Interior Ministry on Place Beauvau.

our baggage should be arriving from Gare de l'Est - One of the six major railways termini of Paris (the others are the Gare du Nord, the Gare d'Austerlitz, the Gare de Lyon, the Gare Montparnasse, and the Gare Saint-Lazare), the Gare de l'Est, as its name suggests, is the traditional arrival and departure point for trains to and from eastern France and the countries directly to the east, such as Switzerland and southern Germany. Today, Paris-Colmar trains actually follow a route that swings to the north of Paris and arrive at the Gare du Nord, but in 1946, that would not have been the case.

it is customary for guests' servants to be accommodated separately - As at home, so in the grand hotels of Europe. Guests' servants were traditionally not treated as guests in their own right, but consigned (in whatever off-duty time they received) to rooms so small and remote that the hotels could never have housed "proper" guests in them.

consigned to the garret - That is, the rooms on the highest floor, under the eaves—the least desirable places in most buildings built before the advent of elevators and ubiquitous air conditioning (even if, like the mid-twentieth-century Crillon, they have since been retrofitted with one or both).

the man at the desk never said what it cost - I don't know either, being uncertain of the prices of things in 1946 France (and anyway, given the different character of the war and the global economy in this setting, values are probably not quite the same here), but I can assure you that it is a lot. The Crillon is the most expensive hotel in Paris.

a louis d'or, the coin of the ancien régime - A one-louis coin of the mid-to-late 18th century (the reigns of Louis XV and XVI) comprised between 7.6 and 8.2 grams of .917 (that is, 91.7 percent pure, or 22-karat) gold, depending on the year. Similarly, I don't know the value of these coins in 1946, but just to give you a feel for it in a modern context, I found listings online for Louis XV-vintage louis d'or which gave their bullion value (at current-as-of-this-writing gold prices) as $426 apiece, and such coins listed for sale at prices ranging from $1,200 at the low end to more than $3,000 at the high. That bag probably has a hundred or so in it.

her continued love of stuffed toys - Because of her customarily childlike personality, Flandre is often depicted with a stuffed toy, usually either a bear or a rabbit. Given her destructive nature, that toy is often pretty dilapidated. Ours has grown up mentally past the point she's usually at in fan works, but she hasn't abandoned her stuffed friends—at least in part because Gryphon either made them, as with this bear, or repaired them, as he did for all those she had owned in her previous life.

a bear Gryphon made for her out of odds and ends - We've seen before that Gryphon knows how to make stuffed animals, or at least isn't afraid to try. If you're curious, this one is mostly made from corduroy, as well as mohair salvaged from a worn-out winter coat, and is a one-piece design, not articulated like Steiff-style bears.

made in the likeness of a Liberion president - Remilia has slightly misunderstood the "Teddy bear" legend here; the original Teddy bears were not meant to look like Theodore Roosevelt himself, but represented a bear cub he had famously refused to kill during a hunt in 1902.

a large brown leather Gladstone bag - A Gladstone bag is a valise with the opening at the top surrounded by a rigid, jointed frame, so that it opens up to a cavity that is the full size of the bag's base. Modern tool bags are often built on something like the Gladstone pattern, but of canvas rather than rigid leather.

a lot of Parisians hated it - The author Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower's restaurant every day after it was completed, on the grounds that it was the one place in the city from which the Tower couldn't be seen.

what do you want, you angel-faced assassin of joy? - Old-timey Babylon 5 fans will know this is not the correct quote, but even half-awake and disgruntled, Remilia can't bring herself to be uncomplimentary about Sakuya's face.

the 3rd arrondissement - Paris (in common with many French cities) is divided into 20 administrative districts called arrondissements. The 3rd contains the oldest of the city's several "Chinatown" neighborhoods, which dates to around 1900.

northeastern Gallia and Helvetia - That is, the local equivalents of the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, and Switzerland.

that's the Panthéon, isn't it? - The Panthéon is a monumental building in Paris, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, that was originally planned, and sometimes used, as a church, but which for many years has been a mausoleum for the remains of distinguished French citizens, including literary figures like Victor Hugo and Voltaire.

and here's Les Invalides - Formerly the Hôpital des Invalides, a complex of buildings in Paris that were, as the old name suggests, originally a hospital and retirement home for disabled veterans of the French Army. Nowadays they're a collection of museums having to do with France's military history, and the main building with its iconic dome is, like the Panthéon, a national mausoleum, but one devoted to war heroes rather than literary and political figures. Napoleon is buried there, as is Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a hero of the First World War. Charles de Gaulle, interestingly, is not, having chosen instead to be buried humbly (possibly the only humble thing he ever did) in his hometown of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.

Is that what I really look like? - Flandre has seen herself in (non-silver-backed) mirrors many times, of course (the one in her bedroom is mentioned in a previous episode), but the experience is somewhat different when one sees oneself through another's eyes, as it were.

he lives in Montmartre - A neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement, named for the hill in the middle of it, which is one of the highest spots in Paris and has an enormous, unmissable church on top. Stereotypically the home of the city's artists' quarter (albeit less so by mid-century than it was in the belle époque, before World War I), as well as a hotspot of the racier nightlife (it also adjoins Pigalle, the city's historical red-light district).

May we come in? - I decided to do this part mostly from Julien's point of view, which meant skipping the scene in which Remilia and Flandre arrive at the building itself. They weren't actually certain they'd be able to enter, never having encountered an apartment building before, but it turns out that the individual apartments are what count as "dwellings" for vampire purposes.

Of course, if it had turned out that they couldn't, they could always have summoned the concierge. French apartment buildings traditionally have these, in a different sense than the all-purpose fixers in finer hotels; apartment-building concierges are more like caretakers, keeping up the common areas of the building and monitoring the comings and goings.

you don't seem to have a telephone - These were not ubiquitous in Parisian private homes until the 1960s, due to a combination of low supply, high cost, and fairly slack demand (many Parisians simply didn't see the point).

Act II: "Fait avec Soin"

the Basilica of the Sacred Heart - IRL, the basilica at the top of Montmartre has a fairly dark backstory. It was built after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, a socialist revolutionary government which arose in the power vacuum left when the Second Empire collapsed, and the Third Republic moved the capital to Tours, during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War. One of the Commune's stated aims was to free France from the domination of the Catholic Church, so when the still-Catholic-aligned Third Republic took possession of Paris again after the war, what better way to assert its authority over the rebellious heart of the Commune uprising, the Montmartre neighborhood, than to build a whacking great church at its highest point?

In the context of OWaW/GG, where the religious landscape is different, the precise details of Sacré-Cœur Basilica's origins and meaning are also somewhat different. (For one thing, the "sacred heart" the name refers to is the symbolic heart of Gallia, Paris, and not the literal or figurative heart of any historical personage.)

As an aside, as perversely pleasing vs. the traditional mythos the idea of vampires hanging around on the dome of a church is, Remilia and Flandre aren't trying to make a point or anything; they're just there because it's the highest point in the area and has the best view.

"Fait avec Soin" - "Made With Care".

The Adventures of Tintin - In the Tōhō source material, Remilia and Meiling have a better relationship than the stock fandom interpretations usually credit them with, and one of the features of their friendship is said to be that they're manga buddies—swapping volumes, following the same series, and so forth. This scene is Gallian Gothic's reflection on that, through the medium of one of the Francophone world's most popular comic-strip characters.

At the time this story is set, there were twelve Tintin albums in print, with the thirteenth story, The Seven Crystal Balls, still being serialized in Tintin magazine (which was founded after the Belgican people, like the Gallians, returned to the Continent from their Britannian exile in 1945). The comic was previously carried in children's supplements of the Belgican newspapers Le Vingtième Siècle, before the war, and Le Soir, during the Belgicans' exile in Britannia.

Tintin in the Land of the Tsars - The real-life first Tintin story, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was serialized in Le Petit Vingtième in 1929 and 1930, and was a heavily politicized indictment of the still-fledgling Soviet Union's apocalyptic human rights record, and of Soviet Communism and Marxism-Leninism generally. To be honest, it's pretty rough sledding nowadays, partly because Hergé was still finding his style, and partly because the political message, for all that I would contend it's hard to argue with in the light of history, is too heavy-handed to even masquerade as entertainment. Even Hergé himself was embarrassed about it, labeling it "a transgression of my youth" and refusing to allow it to be reprinted or to redraw it in color (something he did for the other eight Tintin serials that were originally published in black-and-white).

The OWaW universe's version, set in interwar Orussia, is still pretty political—the decay of Nicholas II's regime that led to the Winter War with Suomus and the Orussian Revolution of 1940 was already plainly apparent in 1929—but less bleak in its assessment of the country's prospects. Meiling did hesitate slightly over whether she should start Remilia off with that one, or skip straight to volume 3, Tintin in Liberion, which is really the first of the serials to have a proper plot.

(With the best will in the world, and I say this as a fan since childhood, The Adventures of Tintin as a series does not start strong. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, the second volume, are both pretty dire.)

Le Marais, in the 4th arrondissement - The Marais as a neighborhood actually spans parts of the 3rd and 4th arrondisements. Once the richest and most fashionable neighborhood of Paris, where the nobility and much of the royal family lived, its fortunes fell with the ancien régime, and by the 1940s it was one of the shabbiest parts of town. It's hella gentrified nowadays, of course, because that is the way of these things. It's also been home to the city's historical Jewish community, which, as you might imagine, did not fare well during the Nazi occupation of northern France.

T. CONSTANTIN et FILS - JOUETS et JEUX - "T. Constantin and Sons - Toys and Games".

an elephant, dressed in a man's green business suit - Babar here is the protagonist of a series of children's books (which later evolved into a broader media franchise) begun by the French author-illustrator Jean de Brunhoff (1899–1937) and continued by his son Laurent (1925–) after his untimely death from tuberculosis. Babar is the king of a nation of anthropomorphic elephants who live somewhere in West Africa; he learned the ways of Western (for which read French) civilization while wandering after his mother was killed by a hunter and returned home to modernize his country along those lines, in a self-conscious satire of early-twentieth-century French colonialism.

Absent the subtext of political satire, he's one of the most popular children's-book characters in the world—sort of the French equivalent of, say, Paddington Bear, or Winnie-the-Pooh.

This scene, Flan's later reflections upon same, and the second one set in M. Constantin's shop all come from a Forum suggestion by Cassie Heath.

I would have thought, at your age... - Since the first Babar book was published in 1931, and Flandre looks to M. Constantin as though she were 14 or 15, it puzzles him that she's not familiar with Babar; she must, by his reckoning, be just about the only Gallian girl of the age he thinks she is who isn't.

Les Grands Magasins du Louvre - Once one of the finest department stores in Paris, dating to 1887. IRL, the Grands Magasins du Louvre closed in 1974 and was replaced by an antiques store, which itself closed in 2015. The building still stands, and is being renovated into a high-end shopping mall.

"You'll do no such thing." - I leave it as an exercise for the reader whether Flandre is using the Jedi Mind Trick, straight-up Vampire Domination, or some combination of both. She's probably not completely sure herself.

Cigars of the Pharaoh - The fourth Tintin story, serialized in Le Petit Vingtième from 1932 to 1934. Remilia is reading the 1936 edition of the collected album, which included a few colored plates. The entire serial would be redrawn in color for republication in 1955.

the anniversary clock on the mantelpiece - An anniversary clock, more formally a torsion-pendulum clock, is a once-commonplace but increasingly rare style of mechanical clock which is cased in a glass dome, so that its mechanisms can be observed. As the formal name suggests, it uses a pendulum action that rotates rather than swinging. They're called anniversary clocks because they can run for more than a year between windings.

give me a long enough lever... - This quotation is a paraphrase from the writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, the Greek scholar who set down some of the first detailed observations of the principles of leverage in the third century BC.

history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes - This remark is usually attributed to Mark Twain, although there is scant evidence that he actually said or wrote it, in much the same way that no one has ever managed to prove that G.K. Chesterton was the author of, "If a man isn't liberal in this twenties, he has no heart, and if he isn't conservative thereafter, he has no brains."

Hôtel de Beauvau - The French word hôtel is not always perfectly synonymous with its English equivalent, as here, where it does not indicate that the Ministry of the Interior is headquartered in a hotel; instead, in this context the word indicates a large, palatial building that isn't anyone's personal dwelling.

Édouard Depreux - By an odd coincidence, the real-life Édouard Depreux assumed the office of Minister of the Interior on the very day this scene is set. Since the founding of the Fourth Republic in OWaW took place a year or so before it did IRL, he's been in office for some time in this setting.

hiding the bodies - This is a play on a phrase I first heard, in the context of using later steps in the process to conceal mistakes made in the course of building something, in one of Adam Savage's "one-day builds" videos on YouTube, where he called it "hiding the crimes."

the Salon Doré at the Élysée Palace - The "Gold Room", the room in the official residence of the President of France which is traditionally used as the president's office, comparable in role to the Oval Office of the American White House.

a sip of red tea - "Red tea" is in fact what black tea is called in most of East Asia, although in this context it does specify tea with blood in it.

Act III: "Enfants de la Patrie"

Garde Républicaine - The Republican Guard is an arm of the French National Gendarmerie (the national police force that is part of the armed forces, as opposed to the civilian Police Nationale) that is tasked with providing ceremonial guards for important public buildings and institutions. It is not the agency that provides personal security for the president himself; that's the responsibility of a joint Gendarmerie-Police Nationale unit called the GSPR (initials for the French phrase meaning "Security Group for the Presidency of the Republic"). Like the redcoats outside Buckingham Palace, they wear old-fashioned, showy uniforms and they're mainly guards of honor, but they're trained and armed and it would not be wise to mess around with them.

"Enfants de la Patrie" - "Children of the Fatherland", the phrase with which the people of France are described in the first line of their national anthem, "La Marseillaise":

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

(Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!)

the Salon Doré - The Gold Room, the room on the second floor of the Élysée Palace which is the traditional office of the President of the French Republic (akin to the Oval Office in the American White House).

the unconscious image of the Countess - Since The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle didn't debut until 1959, it is only a coincidence that M. Auriol's mental image resembles Natasha Fatale.

he looked more like an aging schoolteacher, or... lawyer - In fact he is a lawyer, having practiced law from 1904 to 1914, when he entered politics.

a third force in Gallian politics - This reflects Auriol's postwar position in real life, where he, a lifelong Socialist, advocated for a political path in between the militarism of the Gaullists and straight-up Communism.

the Senate and the National Assembly - The upper and lower houses of the bicameral Gallian Parliament.

a woman in the uniform of a general of the Free Gallian Air Force - Lieutenant General Marcelle Valin, Chief of Staff of the Air Army of Gallia, who still wears her Occupation-era Free Gallian Air Force colors (as do many Gallian witches who are veterans of that era, including Perrine Clostermann).

"La Vie en Rose" - Although it was not released as a record until 1947, Piaf had been performing the song live for more than a year by that point.

La Môme Chiroptère - "The Little Bat".

War Minister Coste-Floret - Paul Coste-Floret, a long-time fixture in French governments of the late 1940s and early 1950s, although IRL he was better known for his work on the constitutions of the Fourth and Fifth Republics and as Minister of the Overseas (i.e., the colonies) than as war minister. That was his role in the real-life Ramadier government, however.

Ebenezer H. Wentworth - Young Wentworth gets his first name (in full and shortened form) from Ebenezer M. "Eben" Byers, a socialite, industrialist-heir, and semi-professional athlete who is mostly notable for the circumstances of his death in 1932. He died from multiple cancers contracted as a result of drinking several bottles of radium-infused water, which was sold as a "health tonic" at the time, per day between 1927 and 1930--an achievement immortalized in the memorable Wall Street Journal headline The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.

Act IV: "Les Voyages d'une Diable (Sur la Route de la Vie)"

Sakuya and Meiling's ID numbers - These are based on the format of the real French INSEE codes used since the early 1940s. The breakdown on Sakuya's is like so:

2 - number's holder is female
8003 - last two digits of birth year, two-digit birth month (March 1780, since she observes her birthday on the day of her rescue, March 30, and thinks she was about 10 when she met Victor in 1790)
99 - born in a country other than Gallia (for Gallian-born citizens, this is a two-digit code indicating the départment in which they were born)
990 - district of birth not known (ordinarily this is a code denoting the comune, or municipality, of birth)
001 - first, and in this case probably only, citizen recorded as born in that month, year, and place
29 - trailing two-digit "control code", calculated out of the rest of the number by a slightly abstruse method we don't need to get into here

Meiling's has mostly the same parts as Sakuya's, except for the birthdate piece, because her birthplace is also unknown (at least to Gallian geographers); the "control code" comes out differently as a result of the difference in the base number.

If I had a table of the départment and comune codes, I could come up with authentic-ish numbers for Remilia and Flandre too, although the authorities would probably be guessing on the final three digits before the control code, as they are unlikely to have exact records of how many people were born in Colmar in the relevant months and where in that sequence Remi's and Flan's births fit.

Les Voyages d'une Diable (Sur la Route de la Vie) - "The Voyages of a Devil (On the Road of Life)". Suggested by Geoff, although I threw in the parenthesis for no better reason than I was feeling kind of '70s-song-title about it.

built in 1932 by the Duesenberg brothers - This is not strictly accurate; this particular car is legally a 1932 Duesenberg, but virtually all the Duesenberg Model J chassis ever made were actually built in 1928. The practice at the time was to title automobiles by the year they were sold, rather than the date of manufacture, and thanks to the Great Depression beginning in 1929, it took nearly ten years for all the Js built in '28 to be sold.

coachwork by LeBaron - Although Duesenberg did sell some complete cars, most of them came from the factory as running chassis only—frame, engine, suspension and wheels—as was customary of luxury cars in that era. All the rest was built to order by the buyer's coachbuilding firm of choice. Duesenbergs were bodied by a wide range of both American and European coachbuilders.

LeBaron, the builders of this particular Duesy, went on to be bought up by Chrysler (hence the later appearance of a model called the LeBaron under that marque).

Here are some photos of a LeBaron Sweep Panel phaeton-bodied SJ, very similar to the car in this scene (the red bits are perhaps a bit more red in-story), which I cadged from an auction site. Click the one below to open a folder with the rest of them.

the SJ remains the fastest car ever produced in Liberion - There was actually an even more powerful and faster Model J variation, now called the SSJ, which had 400 horsepower, but they only made about 20 of those. He's right that the Model J family, in one guise or another, was the most powerful American road car until the hemi-engined Chryslers of the 1950s.

synchronized gears and an overdrive - Duesenbergs were only sold with three-speed "crash" gearboxes (that is, the gears weren't automatically synchronized, requiring the driver to either double-clutch or be very, very skilled at matching revs to avoid grinding), because at the time, no one made a synchromesh transmission that could handle the massive torque of the Duesenberg straight-8 engine.

Sabine Völlmer - Fräulein Völlmer is named in honor of the late Sabine Schmitz, a professional driver and sometime TV presenter known as the unofficial queen of the Nüburgring, who met an untimely end from our old unfriend cancer just a few days ago at the time of this writing.

I paid ten thousand dollars for it secondhand - Circa $125,000 today. That's a lot of money, but still must have seemed like a good deal at the time, since when new, the car would've cost about half again as much as that. Duesenbergs were the most expensive cars you could buy in the USA when they were new.

their value fell quite a lot - Strange as it is to consider nowadays, when a running Model J will set you back multiple millions of dollars, this is true to life. After the Duesenberg company folded in 1937, their used values cratered. During and immediately after World War II, it wasn't uncommon to find them offered for $500 or less—around $7,000 in today's money. Their value didn't start recovering significantly until classic car collectors rediscovered them in the '60s.

the cognoscenti find them antiquated - In part because of the absence of features like synchronized gears, which became de rigueur in the mid-'30s.

misquoting a book that wouldn't be written for another 24 years - Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The complete line is Thompson's reflection on Oscar Zeta Acosta, aka "Dr. Gonzo", when they part in the middle of the book: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

open the rear cowl - In LeBaron's dual-cowl bodies, the panel across the top of the bulkhead dividing the cabin (which has the rear seat's windshield on it) has to be opened before the door.

Hotel Helvetica - Based on the real-life Hotel Schweizerhof, which really does stand just opposite the Hauptbahnhof with the streetcar line in between.

Sadly, the sign on the roof is not in the actual font called Helvetica, which wasn't developed until the 1950s—although it may be in Helvetica's precursor, Akzidenz-Grotesk, which dates to 1898.

an elaborate map of Helvetia and Alsace - Flan's map was printed by Kümmerly + Frey, the famous Helvetian mapmakers, headquartered in Berne. K+F maps were, and remain, the gold standard for European cartography.

Jurapark Aargau - The "Jura" in the name comes from the Jura Mountains, the mountain range running along the Gallo-Helvetian border, which is also where we get the name of the geological period known as the Jurassic.

Act V: "Nord par Nord-Est"

Koakuma - This character is an excellent example of a minor figure in a fictional setting getting more attention from fanworks makers than from the official creators. She's the midboss of Patchouli's stage of The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, and canonically doesn't even have a name, let alone an actual role in the story. "Koakuma" is a fan-given name that is really just the Japanese phrase for "little devil", because that's what she looks like. Here, I'm taking the common fan interpretation that she's a minor demon whom Patchouli summoned to be her familiar.

Le Matin - A morning newspaper, Le Matin is imaginatively entitled "The Morning". (As an aside, this is where the word "matinee", as in the early showing of a play or movie, comes from. With an accent on the first e, it's a French word, matinée, meaning roughly "the morning one".)

In real life, Le Matin is the name of several French-language newspapers outside of France. There was a Paris paper by that name from 1884 to 1944. Politically right-leaning, it took a pro-Nazi stance during the German occupation of France in World War II, which may help explain why it ceased publication in the year when France was retaken by the Allies. In this timeline, it's still staunchly nationalistic, but that's less of a problem.

RETOUR DES VAMPIRES! - "Return of the vampires!"

She Who Knows One Million Things - Wan Shi Tong, the owl-spirit keeper of the Great Librarian in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, refers to himself as "He Who Knows Ten Thousand Things" (a literal translation of his name from Chinese, I believe). He believes he is the most knowledgeable being in the world, intellectually far superior to anyone else. Or at least he did before Patchouli showed up.

"Nord par Nord-Est" - "North by Northeast".

a year's worth of her OSS pay per night - Marisa's pay as an operative of the Office of Strategic Sorcery is equivalent to that of a United States Army captain with her seniority (as of mid-1946, just over six years), or $2,640 per year (paid monthly, $220 per month).

the pythia of ancient Achaea - In real-life Greek mythistory, the Pythia was a singlar individual, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, who was known for her gift of prophecy. Here, I'm taking the line that in our version of the World Witches setting, where magic-using women have protected humanity from monsters since prehistory, pythia was the collective name of an entire class of Achaean (i.e., Greek) priestess/witches in classical antiquity.

a Liberion hedge witch - "Hedge witch" is an old slang term for a magical autodidact—a witch without formal training. More broadly, in the OWaW universe it can refer to any witch who commonly employs unorthodox or antiquated methods unlikely to be part of the curriculum in modern military witchcraft training programs.

A-2 jacket - The classic "Flying Tiger" summerweight leather flight jacket, officially United States Army Air Corps Jacket, Flying, Type A-2, adopted in May of 1931 as an updated replacement for Jacket, Flying, Type A-1. Though officially replaced in mid-1944, the A-2 continued in production and remained popular with pilots (and accepted by the Army, and later the Air Force, as an alternative standard garment) long afterward. Compare the much heavier sheepskin B-2 jacket, commonly associated with high-altitude bomber crews, one of which G also owns for heavier weather.

je t'aime beaucoup - Roughly, "I love you a whole dang bunch."

coals to Newcastle - A shortened form of "That's like taking coals to Newcastle." Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a famous point of export for English coal, so the idea of taking coals to Newcastle is a shorthand for taking the trouble to do something unnecessary.

Desu ka? - "Is that so?", the Fusōnese conversational equivalent of ending a sentence with, "Right?" or "N'est-ce pas?"

Suntory - A popular brand of Japanese single-malt whisky. Ordinarily (like the sake Reimu is drinking in this scene) not someething you'd expect to find in an English pub in 1946, but in this setting, keep in mind that not only has the Imperial Fusōnese Navy's Atlantic Fleet been based right there in Folkestone for much of the war, the close Britannia-Fusō alliance goes back decades. It wasn't by random chance that Dr. Miyafuji's interwar Striker Unit development laboratory was in Britannia.

Deputy Mayor Théo Trautmann - A character not based on any actual 1940s French rural politician. If his name sounds more German than French, it is, but that's not unusual in Alsace, where half of the towns have names ending in -heim.

a young Liberion airman - It didn't really occur to me until I wrote this scene how G must have come across to Théo at their first meeting. Given how much younger he seems (and his paperwork claims him) to be than Remilia, Théo probably took him for whatever the mid-century French equivalent of a toyboy was--an impression that would only have been reinforced by the fact that he didn't do much of the talking.

the banns... must be displayed for ten days - The practice of posting public notices of upcoming marriages, and giving interested parties ten days to notify the authorities of any procedural objections (such as existing marriages or inappropriate familial relationships not disclosed by the applying parties), was originally a Church practice, but is still enshrined in France's officially secular civil marriage law today. It's sort of a bureaucratic counterpart to the bit of the ceremony about "speak now or forever hold your peace."

its license plates' terminal -75 - Until a recent overhaul of the system, French license plate numbers ended in a two-digit code corresponding to the official départment where the car's registered owner resided. (These codes were, and I believe still are, also used for other functions to do with governmental tabulation, such as the "where born" part of the ID numbering system mentioned in the previous episode.)

Act VI: "La Grande Bibliothèque Immobile"

La Grande Bibliothèque Immobile" - "The Great Unmoving Library", one of Patchouli's magical titles (and her epithet in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil).

Frontnachrichtenblatt der Luftwaffe - Literally means "Front Newspaper of the Air Force", the least imaginative possible name for an air force's paper of news from the front. Also what the actual WWII Luftwaffe's front newspaper was called—not to be confused with their in-house propaganda magazine, Der Adler (The Eagle).

some elemental spell I've never seen the like of - Probably a low-power version of Sun Sign: Royal Flare, which is usually shown in fan works as a sort of Martian Heat-Ray equivalent.

Giovanni II Cornaro, 111th Doge of Venezia - Born 1647, died 1722; elected Doge in 1709, succeeding Alvise II Mocenigo (1629–1709). IRL, Giovanni II is most notable historically for having led Venice in the Seventh (and final) Ottoman-Venetian War (1714–1718), in which the Venetians got comprehensively clobbered and lost the last of their Aegean possessions. Patchy would have been born two years after the end of the war.

ADMINISTER MEDI-GEL IMMEDIATELY - The mechanics of how the omni-tool does its thing in this sequence is based on a train of thought I had years ago about what was going on in a particular scene in Mass Effect 2. At one point in the Omega part of the storyline, Shepard comes across a batarian NPC who's dying from the synthetic plague that's been released on the station. When she tries to talk to him, he gets worked up and goes into respiratory arrest. The player can either watch him die or use a Paragon interrupt to save him, but it's entirely unclear from what happens on screen how that works—Shepard just waves her omni-tool at him, the medi-gel counter decrements by one, and his condition stabilizes. How Patchy's treatment unfolds in this scene is basically how I reckoned that sort of thing would work with a tool that operates on an omni-tool's principles, even though the animation in the game doesn't reflect it.

you silly little devil - As noted above, Koakuma's name literally means "little devil". (Here, as in a lot of fan works, it's a handle standing in for her actual Name, which presumably only she and Patchouli know.)

Pazienza Sapere - Patchy's original Venezian given name is Italian for "Patience".


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