32 A nod to my senior year math teacher in High School, who was utterly brilliant. ALC

91 Fritz is a nod to Fritz Brenner, the Swiss chef/majordomo of Nero Wolfe's townhouse in Rex Stout's long-running series of detective novels. I thought it would be fun to have a 3P-series droid with an accent other than Fussy English Butler No. 1, and besides, Kate's townhouse is itself inspired by Wolfe's home.

100 This bit has the flavor of a Wolfe novel as well. Wolfe's assistant, Archie Goodwin, who narrates the books, eats his breakfast in the kitchen, usually has johnnycakes, and he and Fritz often talk baseball.

106 Names with a capital N are absurdly important in Barsaivian magic. They're very important in any sort of magic, of course, but the Barsaivian traditions take it to something of an extreme.

112 Kate's brownstone has a dojo on the roof instead of the greenhouse full of rare orchids found atop Wolfe's.

122 Transdimensional transportation spells get really funky effects when their target is an unknown "fit these parameters" kind of thing. You really either need to know who you're transporting or have a permanent anchor "move anybody from here to here" to get the crossing effects down to anything like a normal transition. ALC

151 In the early drafts of this scene, which were put together while the Third Symphony was still in flux (to say nothing of the Fourth), this was Wakaba, not Kanae. Because of that, and because Kanae has proven so hard to characterize in her own right, some of her dialogue is still quite Wakaba-ish.

185 Actually, a little less than a year; it appears this scene got moved a bit during development.

220 Is this a challenge? Yes! This is a challenge. OK, kiddo, pop quiz! ALC

241 "You will have to do" is not really something a person wants to hear in a the-world-needs-saving situation, but having to improvise in this way seems to be Clef's dharma.

269 Hmm, indeed. This is an artifact of an earlier draft that we decided to leave in. Whether it means anything at all is still up in the air. ALC

273 He's talking about the first three Rune Knights - mostly Umi, actually - who were not, shall we say, as much on the ball as Anne is here.

301 Everybody does this the first time.

313 A variation on Shepard's Prayer, which is more canonically rendered, Lord, please don't let me fuck up.

332 It is a painful thing to be an empath around semi-sentient trees that have been magically poisoned. And these trees are old enough, and magical enough, that they have achieved more than enough sentience to broadcast their pain. ALC

353 I take it back, this isn't a quiz, this is a pop final exam. ALC

390 There are going to be a lot of people who are going to lose faith in Saionji over what he's doing. Juniper isn't one of them; she will never, ever forget that he saved her life and her mind and her spirit, and she trusts him implicitly. This will briefly get her into trouble later, but then again, it also gets her out of it. ALC

409 Touga, meet another protege of the Juri School of Dealing With Slimebags. ALC

430 Into trouble... ALC

473 ...and out of it. ALC

488 This is the first swordfight that I wrote for the Symphony; Gryph wrote most of this draft years before we got to it, but this part was always blocked out with, When it got close to the time to release the story, he wasn't feeling inspired, and we had just started staff forms in Karate, so I took a stab at it. I'm looking forward to the next one I write after we get to actual sword forms in Kung Fu. I think I can probably do better. ALC

584 For the first time, somebody cheats the stairs and doesn't climb them all the way up. ALC

600 And here her sense of the dramatic gets her into trouble. Or perhaps it's just the way the dueling platform works. If Juni hadn't stopped to yell at Touga, she probably could have crushed his skull before he got the pyramid open. ALC

618 Or perhaps not. ALC

648 Second swordfight. This one was more fun to write, since I didn't like the bad guy and didn't care how beat up he got. ALC

675 The act of lowering her shields is a kind of mental relaxation that opens Juni up to rather more than just the feelings of others. Only she doesn't quite realize it. ALC

677 You'd be a little crazy too if you were Touga at this point.

714 One of the neat things about TK is that it isn't easily detectable through the Force. Like Telepathy, it makes ripples, but if you don't know to look for them (or you're just too batshit to try) it isn't something a Force-user senses immediately. This is why Touga doesn't know that she's about to get Tonerikoken back into her hands. ALC

726 This isn't just empathy. She's opened herself to the Force now, and it's combined with K-ryuu training to give her the true precognitive flashes that Jedi get in a fight. ALC

740 This, on the other hand, is plain old psionics. She doesn't need the Force to deal with Touga physically, she's already got everything she needs in that department. ALC

760 This is my absolute favorite line of the whole story. ALC

807 The author has done this while dancing. It sucks. Do not try it at home. ALC

843 Very nearly a Pyrrhic victory, however. Fortunately, help is at hand. ALC

961 Juni has no idea how badly hurt she was. That's how good the healers in Asgard are. ALC

991 Once again we almost, but not quite, get to see Aeryn Stonefist.

1030 Ah, the Asgardian House of Pancakes. The coffee's not very good, but it's always hot.

1274 In Raven: Blood Ties #3.

1296 Most humans have at least a little bit of a sun-worshipper in them. It's very hard to stay tense when the God of the Sun smiles at you in a friendly way. ALC

1370 She's talking about Frey, of course, not Balder. ALC

1421 Also known as duergar, the Nidavellim are to the dwarves of Alfheim as the svartelves are to their cousins who walk in the light - dark, cruel reflections, just as clever but twisted and vengeful.

1424 And from the perspective of 2 years on the Rim, Juni has seen just how bad the aftereffects of a single rape can be, let alone four of them. ALC

1436 It was relatively easy for Loki to find out about the incident with the necklace, since he engineered it.

1806 Dannen is building this piece for Gwyneth Longrifle, the Valkyrie sniper. He's as fine a gunsmith as he is a bladesmith, but the traditional weapons of Alfheim are his first love. No smith in Asgard forges a deadlier axe.

1808 He's working on an urgrôsh, a traditional dwarven weapon which can be used as an axe or a short spear - kind of a compact halberd or bec de corbin, suitable for use in tunnels and other enclosed spaces.

1844 The Masho come from Yoroiden Samurai Troopers; Anne, who is rather a huge fan, brought them in to bulk up the Black Rose's numbers while most of the order's recruits are still students. In the UF universe, they're the hereditary Warlords of Kaneko, the fascist state that occupied a little less than half of the planet Ishiyama. They're something of an opposite number to the Hanagumi, who serve the Empire of Morita, and served a similar purpose protecting their homeland from the Roots of Evil during the Shadow War.

1952 What Saionji was about to say - and caught himself before he could say - was, "where Kaitlyn-sensei tells her to." ALC

1958 In this, Saionji is probably incorrect, but he doesn't have any psionic gifts to tell him otherwise. ALC

1984 This is not, as some readers have theorized, dragon blood. What it is will have to remain secret for now.

2044 The precise constituents of Ironbridge's special alloy are a closely guarded secret, but it's known to contain primal silver, meteor iron, and mithril. Customarily used in armor, mithril is included here to offset meteor iron's unusual heaviness and make the blade handle normally.

2068 Herlod Thunderfall, the Valkyrior's dwarven demolitionist, owns the piece that, if pressed, Ironbridge would say is his proudest achievement. It's not every smith who can balance an adamantine dwarven war axe so it'll fly in a circle when properly thrown.

2075 Why Corwin is under the impression that he'll require his own room is a bit beyond me, I'm afraid. Maybe he just wants somewhere to put his stuff.

2214 Speaking of arrogance, Venger seems to be so impressed with his Sith teachings at this point that it doesn't occur to him that Mia might already find it trivial to crush the Grey Council, if she really, really wanted to.

2247 Kayura is also from Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, like the Masho. She takes Shuten's place in the show when he defects to the side of the Good Guys, but here, she's merely a citizen of Kaneko who has the unfortunate mischance of being born female in a rigidly patriarchal society. The Warlords of Kaneko serve until death, at which point whoever their armor (Yoroi) responds to replaces them. As Kayura observes, they've never chosen a woman, though it's unclear if that's because they're sexist or because a man would do the job the Yoroi were created to fill better. Regardless, this has left Kayura with no real purpose in life but bitterly honing her psionic abilities and then using them to hurt men. Especially men like Roger. ALC

2310 Kurenaikaze was inspired by a damascus katana they used to sell at Museum Replicas (to commemorate the last Year of the Dragon, 2000).

2335 This is not the customary Valkyrie motto, "Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty"; rather, it bears the Ash credo, "Stand tall in life, burn brightly in death."

2449 Nanna is the reason Juni's a heathen, though she can't remember it consciously. Shortly after she met the Goddess of the Moon for the first time, she shifted from muttering, "Oh God," to "Dear Goddess" as her exclamation of choice when invoking deities. Unlike other people in the UF universe, she is only vaguely Discordian and a passing follower of Eris, in the 'well, I know she's out there, but maybe she won't think it's funny to mess with me right now' kind of sense. ;) ALC

2506 Nanna refers to Anne's observance of the Day of the Struggle Within with Azalynn back in Page of Swords.

2509 Signs like this were commonplace for shops in medieval times, when most people couldn't read. Asgard has near-total literacy, but the traditional signs remain.

2604 More or less equivalent to grades nine and ten, so, roughly ages 14-15.

2644 This dress is based on one I own, though I don't have the neat accessories to go with it. It is possible to fight in it, even to the level of head-high snap kicks, assuming one doesn't step on the hem on the way down. ALC

2724 Thor in drag. The mind recoils in horror from the very thought, but hey, it's in the sagas. We didn't make it up.

2759 And he probably does. ALC

2836 Yamaou was the last Masho to wear the Yoroi Shuten has now. Shuten is considerably younger than the other current Warlords, and takes a lot of flak for it, especially since he keeps getting pasted by Saionji and some of the other students; he's supposed to be better than that, as Anubishu constantly reminds him. ALC

2850 Given a promise of seeing Saionji get thrashed, Shuten is capable of a great deal of work indeed. ALC

2867 This gentleman is in fact not an elf, but a dragon courier in the form of one. Studies have shown that an elf is least likely of all lone travelers to be attacked by brigands on the back roads of the higher realms. They, especially the golden high-elves of central Alfheim, have a well-earned reputation as deadly archers and swordsmen. Not that a dragon really has much to fear from brigands, but it's inconvenient and wastes time to have to fend off an attack.

2893 Bahamut VII's penmanship is terrible.

2900 That's a really silly question, Corwin. ALC

2980 The English Electric (later BAC) Lightning was a groundbreaking piece of hardware in its day, which is why Corwin has a special fondness for it. Among other things, it was the first aircraft capable of sustaining supersonic speed without using afterburners (the much-touted "supercruise" capability of today's F-22). The T.5 twin-seat trainer model, as Corwin has here, was one of the later variants (and should technically be identified as a BAC Lightning here, since English Electric didn't build T.5s). Uncommonly, the two seats are arranged side by side; in most two-seat fighter aircraft, they're one in front of the other. Despite its trainer designation, the Lightning T.5 was a fully capable combat aircraft.

Incidentally, we can speculate from this scene that Draconia is no more than about 1,500 miles from Valhalla, since that's about as far as a Lightning T.5 can fly without refueling. Then again, distances between the separate celestial realms are hard to reckon in concrete terms, and Draconia is in Alfheim, not Asgard.

3087 It has been speculated by some celestial historians that the dragons were the gods of the saurian people long suspected to have lived on Midgard-Earth in the age of the dinosaurs, millions of years before man and his man-like gods arose, so ancient are the bloodlines of Draconia; but if so, the dragons aren't saying.

3106 Though the colors of dragons don't determine their alignment in the UF universe, every breed has its stereotypes. Copper dragons are widely held to be efficient, brisk, and perky. This one certainly qualifies.

3156 Dragons never stop growing (though after reaching adulthood they grow imperceptibly slowly by human standards), so a truly ancient specimen like Bahamut VII here will always be very, very large.

3159 Platinum, actually. The Dragon King is a nod to good old Dungeons & Dragons, in which Bahamut, the sole platinum dragon, is the archetype and exemplar of all the good-aligned dragons.

3184 I had such fun with the Dragon King's dialogue. He developed into a terribly endearing character.

3197 And Juniper makes her Charisma check to avoid a major social gaffe. ALC

3246 Matalde the Red is not an evil dragon, per se, but she's among the toughest and most powerful, and she's known to be... tetchy. And she values her privacy - as her choice of domicile implies. Choosing to lair among the Tindalos, the ruggedest, fiercest part of Jotunheim, is not something even a dragon would do lightly.

3281 A single coin may seem a small boon for such a great service, but consider: If the alventhaler is the oldest money in Alfheim, one of the primordial celestial realms, that makes it among the oldest forms of currency, period. This is the Alven equivalent of being given a Lydian trite from the treasury of King Croesus. The coin's collector value is almost incalculable, and that's before you take into account that it comes from the Dragon King's hoard.

3404 Katherine is a real person, and one of my two oldest friends. (I really can't remember which of the two I met first.) ALC

3405 Anne did this! Blame her! I had nothing to do with it. :)

Well, I wanted a couple of friends for Juni that were her own age and weren't superheroes, since Juni's not in with the Titans. Miaka and Yui fit the casting requirements, and besides, I like them. ;) But yes, they're my fault, so any and all petitions asking for repeat performances should be directed at me, not Gryph. ALC