(Mind you, we never tried to play in the Dragonlance setting back in the day. It was our considered opinion, having read the campaign setting sourcebook, that only an idiot would actually try to play AD&D in Krynn. :)

Anyway, I was at a bookstore the other day and ran across an annotated omnibus edition of the original Chronicles trilogy. I had just been thinking it might be nice to re-read those old chestnuts again, and here was a compiled edition. What luck! So I snagged it.

I have to confess a certain fondness for annotated editions of things. I'm a big fan, for instance, of the two-disc special editions of the Star Trek movies largely because they have that extra subtitle track that's all production and/or background-story details. So, reading through the annotated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I thought, Why not attempt something like this for at least the early Symphony pieces?

So here we are. S1M1: Wounded Rose, annotated by line number. Depending on how hard/time-consuming this is to do and what kind of response it gets, there may be more.

Unless otherwise noted (and in this case, there aren't any), the notes are by me.

--G.

1 This opening line comes from the prologue to Electric Light Orchestra's "Twilight", on their 1981 album Time. It was suggested as the tagline for Future Imperfect by Kris "Redneck" Overstreet, I think during development of Twilight, and has appeared on almost all FI stories written since (the most notable exception being The Vastru Encounter, which for obvious reasons substitutes the opening-screen line from Marathon, "somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting").

18 These creator credits are deliberately vague because I didn't want to give away who was appearing. Of course, it's a double-edged sword; now I sometimes have a hard time remembering who some of them are. The first set covers the Revolutionary Girl Utena characters; in this case the second refers to the pair from Cowboy Bebop who appear at line 758.

35 Morgan 412 is across the hall from Morgan 413, where the real John Trussell lived during his freshman year at the real WPI, and down the hall (on the opposite side) from Morgan 401, my own room two years later. The description is as accurate as our memories could make it. Rooms in Morgan in the late '80s and early '90s really did have the most remarkably tape/FunTack-resistant paint.

56 "after last year, they owed her" - first reference to what was originally going to be a running joke regarding Kate's luck with roommates. We'll come back to this later.

73 "Aesthete" is here meant simply in the sense of "one who enjoys looking at pretty things", not the more modern pejorative sense of "an art snob".

91 Miss Claudia Montaigne owes a spiritual debt, if in no way a design one, to Chris Jacimowicz, who was dean of student activities at WPI when I went there. A huge James Bond and Blues Brothers fan who was always up for a game of Blood Bowl, Chris was a member of the WPI Science Fiction Society and an all-around great guy. Miss Montaigne has a similar belief in befriending students rather than dictating to them.

134 Utena's haircut when we first meet her is a reference to the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie, Adolescence Mokushiroku, in which she initially appears much more mannish than she is in the TV series. It is one of only two references that specifically point to the movie rather than the TV series, from which everything else Utena-related in UF is drawn, and was done, among other reasons, so that Kate and her bandmates could have a slightly different starting impression of Utena than people who would meet her later.

141 If this is literally true and Kaitlyn's never had a haircut of any kind, shampoo technology in the 25th century must be very good at preventing split ends.

189 Kaitlyn's speech impediment was part of her design from the earliest days. There is no really significant out-of-story explanation for it; I wasn't trying to make a point or anything. It just struck me as right for her. In-story, most people attribute it to an assassination attempt Kei Morgan suffered during her pregnancy, in which she was poisoned with a persistent neurotoxin, but Kate's doctors have never been able to pin down any specific neurological defect that might cause it.

224 Poor Utena's awfully twitchy in this piece, though, if you've seen Revolutionary Girl Utena, you know she has good reason to be, given that the last episode of the show happened, for her, the previous day. Here she flinches away from Kate because, when Kate comes up behind her, Utena flashes back to the way Wakaba always used to jump on her back. Remember, at this point she doesn't think she'll ever see anybody from back home again.

263 First appearance of Kotetsu no Sasayaki ("Iron Whisper"), Kaitlyn's zatoichi.

267 The food at WPI in the early '90s was really this bad. It was provided by a food service company called DA-KA, which offered several different grades of service. WPI opted for the cheapest possible one, which was demonstrably worse than that provided by the same company to hospitals and prisons. Also, this line has a reference to shyam, a Salusian noodle dish which I randomly named after Shyam Das, a man Bay Networks hired to take over the tech support department at Xylogics after they bought Xylo out and one of the main reasons I took a job at Livingston and ended up moving to California. The dish is in no way a reference to the man; I just grabbed his name out of my Pile Of Odd Foreignish Words when searching for a name for the dish.

280 The Hon. J. Maurice MacEchearn IV makes his debut. Moose is an original character, though his species is not (Hoffmanites are from Phil Foglio's Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire). He was originally supposed to speak in a semi-Caribbean accent, but I could never quite make it work and eventually dropped it altogether. In physical appearance, he's kind of a giant, Hoffmanite version of Big Country bassist Tony Butler.

318 Another original character, Devlin Carter speaks with an exaggerated Lord Peter Wimsey accent and in my mind always ends up looking a bit like a blond version of Largo from MegaTokyo. It's never come out on screen, but he's related to Network 23 news director Edison Carter (he's Edison's nephew) and is descended from an uncle of 20th-century dreamsage Randolph Carter. He also has a cousin named Samantha whom he hasn't seen in years.

330 Ah, Azalynn. An original character and an original species, possibly the first one I've ever really fleshed out a design for. Amusingly, she looks like a character from a show I've never actually seen. I blame Truss for that; he's the one who went on that Internet-wide anime music video bender while I was working on the pre-writing development for Symphony 1.

352 First mention of one of the Dantrovian calendar's more than 500 holidays and feasts. Falling Leaves is one of the most important of Dantrovian holidays, since it marks the passing of the most important and revered season in Dantrov's temperate regions. It's named after - but in no way resembles! - something they do at Wellesley College.

366 Originally I did intend the next school year to see Kate and her crew in one of WPI's on-campus apartments, though it was going to be a seven-student Fuller, not an Ellsworth quad.

380 And now the Art of Noise is complete on screen. Princess Dessler is another original character springing from a borrowed source, in this case the Gamilons, who were the villains in the old Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers) series. As we will see later on, her father has both the Japanese and English-dub names he bore in the original, since his full name is Desslok (the First) Dessler. The running gag I had planned for her - that she was involved in a different brushfire war somewhere on her empire's borders each school break - never quite panned out.

407 Hyperzone is a band, not an amusement park as some have speculated.

413 The Forbidden Love Poetry of Surak of Vulcan makes another appearance; we saw the Chief reading part of it in Split Infinitive.

457 "I'm not very x, but I'm y" was one of my favorite features of Devlin's design in the early days. I rather fell out of the habit of using it later on, which is a shame.

486 We find out, at least by allusion, how Devlin was "rewarded for that service" in The Courtship of Princess Dessler.

588 The last few notes of something like Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner". Respect the classics, man.

622 First mention of Liza Broadbank, who was originally supposed to be a never-seen, often-mentioned foil for Kate in matters of student affairs. Originally, Liza was developed (as Lady Elizabeth Broadbank-Mountbatten) to be a rival to a main character in an unproduced non-UF series.

686 The faithful autotailor, a piece of equipment relied upon but never seen. In my mind it resembles a vending machine with one of those ring-of-lasers automatic size scanners from Bubblegum Crisis attached to the side. Some are fully automated; the WPI one has an operator stationed next to it with a control console to prevent students from hacking the machine and getting it to make them unauthorized clothing out of their student wardrobe budget. As we see a bit further down, this system can also be hacked.

754 Moose makes reference to one of his homeworld's mythic figures, Buck Godot, who has a standing among UF Hoffmanites similar to that of, say, Paul Bunyan among people from Maine or Minnesota.

758 Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV and Ein are originally from Cowboy Bebop.

854 The real WPI also had a student activities van, which was always parked at the end of Morgan Hall where I could see it from one of 401's two windows. The SFS occasionally signed it out to take people to King Richard's Faire, a renfest out in western Massachusetts.

905 Very similar to my own first attempt at driving a van.

934 I think there are references to SegAtari in the old R. Talsorian Cyberpunk 2020 game setting, but I could be misremembering. At any rate, the Wonderbox is kind of a reference to Sega's last console, the Dreamcast.

944 Kru the Executioner is one of the UF universe's Gamilon race's two main deities (the other being Dolshaia the Redeemer). "By Kru's bloodstained axe" is an epithet you'll see Amanda employ from time to time. In their source material, the Gamilons don't appear to have a religion.

961 No, the Big Dig wasn't still going on in 2404. Rather, at that point in UF-Boston's history, the Central Expressway was being dug up and run through the center of downtown as an elevated freeway. Whatever possessed the 20th-century ancients to tear down the elevated and bury the Expressway in a tunnel is quite beyond modern historians' ken.

1019 Edward apparently watches a lot of ancient television.

1076 One of the relatively few indications that students at Worcester Prep aren't simply left to their own devices like adult college students.

1092 Moose is ten ninjas!

1116 Devlin can also crack safes, but so far we've never had an excuse to have him do that.

1132 The Package is a Yamaha U5 upright piano.

1212 Exactly why "Doctor Devlin" is so good at telling how his ministrations are affecting his patients would only become clear later.

1247 Anne Cross suggested this song ("Silver Thunderbird", from Marc Cohn's self-titled 1991 album), which I hadn't heard before. Obviously Cohn doesn't sing "Kate, you must take my word" in the original.

1411 Kate's fondness for tigers makes its first appearance.

1427 My real-life dog has been known to do this.

1441 I have occasionally been tempted to dash up a quick, short meta-story involving the adventures of the year-one WPI crew's D&D party, but I'm hampered slightly by only having really considered two of the characters - Utena's paladin of Tyr and Devlin's wizard.

1501 Sir Morgan's Cove, now defunct, was an actual bar/club in Worcester, and was really known in my circle as Sir Morgan's Dive. Truss and I once got thrown out of the place while we were helping our friend Josh's band set up there and had to walk back to WPI. Josh wasn't legal to be there either at the time, but he was in the band, so he got to stay.

1536 The Art of Noise is named after the British techno band of the same name, whose hits included the theme to the 1984 Dragnet movie and the version of the Peter Gunn theme used in the movie Cool World. In modern terms it seems odd, but given the span of time that's passed in UF since the original Art's heyday, it's no worse than naming a modern band "Camper Van Beethoven".

1566 Shameless plug for a real farm store near where MegaZone's parents' camp is in Ballston Lake, NY. Such good donuts.

1608 The Day the Colonists from Earth Finally Understood commemorates just what it says - the day it finally dawned on Dantrov's human settlers that those indigenous life forms they'd been spotting from time to time were, in fact, sapient beings who had a highly developed technological culture, much higher up in the trees than the colonists had thus far ventured.

1639 We will see Azalynn's frustration at the way most Earthpeople view her religion again.

1661 And her powers of insight into the relationships and affairs of her friends' hearts as well. Azalynn is a bit of a Mercurian, for those of you familiar with the In Nomine game system. She can sense these things intuitively.

1679 Later events would indicate that Devlin looked a bit nervous at Customs not because he was ill, but because he spent most of Symphony 1 living in very justifiable fear of law enforcement.

1718 It's a bit rich of Amanda to be called Devlin inbred, given that she has an ongoing love affair with her brother, but then again, she and Garon aren't planning to have children, I suppose.

1741 The whole avenue/road/Avenue Road thing actually happened to Truss and Josh once - see below.

1772 This entire incident is drawn from real life. Truss and Josh went to Toronto on the spur of the moment to see a concert by a band they both liked, and Josh mis-heard the directions to the club in exactly this way, causing them to spend quite some time searching uselessly for Batherson's College before randomly finding themselves at the corner of Bathurst and College. Once the scene leaves the street, though, it's entirely made up. Though the club at the corner of Bathurst and College was called Sneaky Dee's when Truss and Josh went there, the internal description of the UF one is not drawn from life.

1798 Amanda's tattoo very rarely comes up; I occasionally forget she even has one. It's a sort of tribal thing, but like most things Gamilon and ceremonial, has a practical purpose as well. If you can read it, it tells you about her service record in the Gamilon fleet.

1818 "Higher Place", from Journey's 2001 album Arrival. A straightforward rock anthem, this was originally slated to be the theme song of sorts for a character relationship that wound up never happening (see the note for line 3496).

1914 Geoff Downes, who played keyboards in the Buggles and Asia, played an instrumental version of "Video Killed the Radio Star" as an intermission bridge in Asia's 1990 Moscow concert; the track title is simply "Keyboard Solo" on the concert album, Asia Live in Moscow.

1917 "B-Side" by Blotto, Zoner's hometown band, most famous for their song "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard".

1920 Probably Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years", from the 1975 album of the same name.

1922 As seen in Hammer Time, and itself a filk cover of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (So, 1986).

1929 Dimitrios's last name is a reference to Colonel Arbuthnot, the British soldier in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

1953 Happy Seven is real, and it's really that kitschy inside.

1979 And we really did nearly get Truss's car towed from in front of it the time we went to Toronto, and the tow truck driver really did salute.

2103 But you'll notice Azalynn doesn't protest being called a rodent.

2131 Truss and I encountered the Shower Stall of the Future in a Courtyard by Marriott in Toronto, not a Motel 6 in Mississauga, but still.

2161 The oddest things become running gags around here. "Button face" has turned up at least three more times in the Symphony.

2176 Apparently the Red Sox didn't manage to win the 2004 Series in the UF universe.

2232 This line was originally uttered by Truss after a game at the same bubble hockey machine.

2305 What would baseball be, after all, without fan arguments resulting from controversial rules changes?

2309 Ah, the Monarchs, New Avalon's better but less popular baseball team. At the time this story was set, they belonged to Aztechnology.

2319 Coco Martinez is a descendent of 20th-century pitcher Pedro Martinez.

2321 Jarvis MacHeath sometimes plays in a kilt, but that's only allowed in American League and Federated League ballparks. As the Raiders are a Galactic League team, he's wearing pants here.

2366 The peanuts guy is based on a real peanut vendor spotted at either the Fleetcenter in Boston or McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, I can't remember which now. He looked a bit like Grant Imahara but had a voice like a foghorn.

2371 We'll see Utena's seventh-inning stretch again.

2375 My own initiation into the Zen of the balk came at LeLacheur Field in Lowell, MA, during a Lowell Spinners game.

2429 An exchange frequently heard on ESPN's SportsCenter when Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne were the primary anchors.

2439 Roughly translated, "Is that the only way you can get a girl on her back for you, Johnny?"

2482 Barry Bonds does this all the time. It's one of the several things I can't stand about that guy.

2517 "Is that the only way you can get Simpkins to go down for you, chiquita?"

2529 Something Truss and I saw Pedro say to Jimy Williams once.

2550 Similar in style to a play Randy Johnson made once when he was with the Arizona Diamondbacks, except he, being left-handed, rather terrifyingly barehanded a comebacker straight up the middle for the out.

2566 "Your mama, Johnny-boy."

2610 The Bata Shoe museum is real, and it historically gets reactions just like this, at least among my peer group.

2625 Moose hesitates because he had forgotten entirely about Kaitlyn's zatoichi when they set off.

2630 Almost verbatim from an exchange Truss had with the Customs guy at Buffalo the time he and I cut across western Ontario rather than go through Ohio to get back from Chicago.

2711 Devlin is the Fifth Doctor from Doctor Who; Azalynn is that character from Princess Mononoke; Ed and Ein are, respectively, Elwood and Jake Blues. Moose's costume makes reference to a running gag about him that never quite got fleshed out, that being that he had a tendency in those days to experiment with religions a lot. This gets referred to again a couple of times in his encounters with the Campus Crusade for Kalidor, later in the First Symphony, but then disappears.

2783 An inauspicious first meeting for Kyouichi Saionji and his future sensei.

2832 No longer a problem at the real WPI, where the stretch of West Street crossing campus in front of Olin Hall has been closed to traffic.

2914 Here we see the first of a very few conditions under which Kaitlyn could speak (as opposed to singing) without stuttering back then.

2934 No, I don't know why Kate's talking like a D&D character here. Maybe it's the only way she knows how to soliloquize like that at this point in her life.

2956 The first of many appearances of this terrific track from the Big O score.

3004 Hyakken no Arashi, the Storm of a Hundred Blades, is the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu's answer to things like E. Honda's Hundred-Hand Slap and Chun Li's flurry kick in the old Street Fighter II games. it's one of the form's signature moves and, as we will see, a prerequisite for graduation from novice status. Kate had to prove to her father that she could do it before he'd let her carry steel in public.

3051 Kate doesn't know how true her words are...

3075 NyQuil, of course.

3078 And Vicks Vapo-Rub, the first time it's ever appeared in an Eyrie production.

3095 Ragdoll Garon will be referred to again several times, most notably in The Courtship of Princess Dessler.

3097 Some people thought Utena was talking about Kozue Kaoru here, but she actually means Nanami Kiryuu, who was, when Utena knew her, much more blatant than Kozue about her infatuation with her brother.

3137 A rare moment in which even the narrator regards Devlin's names as interchangeable.

3159 Devlin makes unknowing reference to Utena's own life goals here.

3295 An excerpt from William Butler Yeats's 1920 poem "The Second Coming", from which several episodes of Neon Exodus Evangelion took their titles as well. Here we see that, for purposes of Kate's stutter, speaking in verse is apparently equivalent to singing.

3401 Another reference to a long-ago adventure Truss and I had. We met in a sort of summer camp for "gifted and talented" students in 1986 and formed, along with our roommate Kelly White, a group called "The Federation of Lawful Humanoids" to protect ourselves from the marauding horde of pinhead future fratboys who seemed to have overrun our dorm. (What do you want, we were 13, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) The Federation's "recognition phrase", as it were, was "The Federation lives forever," which was one of the first things I said to Truss when, to my astonishment, we were reintroduced by mutual friends at WPI in 1991.

3434 Once again Kate has no idea how prescient she's being.

3447 Corwin's car is based on Roger Smith's car from Big O.

3455 And here's Corwin. He went through a lot of evolution as a character under design, as did all of Gryphon's children. In Corwin's case, this evolution was spurred by the fact that he was originally devised as an adult or near-adult character, and then circumstances dictated that he begin serious appearances at the age of 13. If he seems too mature for his years in his early appearances, as he often does, that's part of the reason why. Despite his name and some overall similarities in personal style, he's not directly based on Corwin, Prince of Amber; indeed, as is shown later on, many of those style similarities are conscious on Corwin's part, since he's read Roger Zelazny's books.

3477 Though this is held to be the first thing Corwin said to Utena by both of them, he was actually answering Kate's question - but he was looking straight at (and if we're being honest, conscious of nothing other than) Utena when he said it.

3496 And in this moment, the course of history changed for both of these characters. Their interactions were supposed to be kept friendly but light. I already had a girlfriend planned for Corwin (from the aforementioned plans to introduce him as an adult character, which would've included a relationship established offscreen), and Utena naturally was going to go back to Cephiro eventually. Except that it became fairly quickly clear that none of that was going to work out at all...