"Phoenix Reborn" Notes

Ch. 1: Paradise Remembered


Whee! First chapter done! I wish TK3 were out for home systems,
though, it would make my work a lot easier (the fight scenes,
anyway...). What's really annoying is that I'm having trouble
uploading stuff to my /sglkht web site. It won't register as ASCII
text, even though it's saved in that format and I click the ASCII text
button. I don't know if this is an AOL glitch or what. But it's still
out on the newsgroups/e-mailed to the mailing list. I got like seven
e-mails back today, all enthusiastically positive... people like my
story! Yay! ;-)

This is probably the most experimental format I've tried yet. It's all
documents, records, & interviews. The interviews are actually what
my father calls "monologue format," since you don't get to hear
what the interviewer says (I try to make it deducible without have
the interviewees sound too repetitious, though). I'm not at all sure
*why* the story is this way; it's just how it presented itself to me in
my head. Maybe it's because I keep hearing the char's individual,
first-person points of view so much. There will also be some
journal entries and the like. Impersonal documents such as the
Toshin Expedition log will probably be sparse, but I know I'm
going to have at least one newspaper article to start off the next
chapter.

-Yamada and Kobayashi are two more, extremely common
Japanese last names that I picked out of my textbook. I needed
some chars to kill off (this is in keeping with the official TK3
storyline, where the initial Toshin Expedition had no survivors).
Guatemoc is the name of the last Aztec emperor - he declared
himself emperor after Cortez polished of Montezuma II, but I think
he surrendered after a few weeks. This guy's a
descendent/relative/whatever. (Actually, I just needed an Aztec
name that most people wouldn't recognize immediately, and
Guatemoc was the only one I could find on short notice. :)

"Glory to Mishima-sama!"
-I have things like "Vivat Grendel" going through my head when I
write this. I don't particularly like the futuristic Grendel stories, but
I do respect them in a very high degree. 

-Yad Vashem Self-Defense Force
This was the "Metzadan" force in the rough draft, but that's taken
directly from Joel Rosenberg, and I think it's too blatant to qualify
as an in-joke. Besides, Joel Rosenberg's Metzadan Mercenary
Corps novels paint a *very* dark picture of the future - darker than
I'd ever hope to have (basically, as bad as things currently are in
some of the worst places in the world).
    Yad Vashem is the name of the major memorial to Holocaust
victims in Israel. It's the one place that Israel takes all its visiting
dignitaries. Self-Defense Force is, of course, what you call yourself
if you don't want to admit you're a mercenary corps. The Yad
Vashem Force is not the same as the Israeli army, although the two
are connected, and often support one another. The Yad Vashem
Force has worldwide influence, and is entirely private. Its members
are all top-notch paid professionals, and it does not accept tax
money (well, not officially...)
    As for New Gethsemane... hey. It's 15 years in the future. I can
make up whatever I want. :)
"I speak my mind. You hear what you will."
-I have Steven Brust's "Brokedown Palace" in mind, when Bolk
speaks and three different people hear COMPLETELY different
things. That scene made no sense to me the first time I read it, but I
think I'm beginning to understand now... 

"Posted on either side of the door are two extraordinary, primitive
mannequins, composed of wooden blocks connected in the rough
shape of a man and a woman, respectively-"
-There will be more about the Mokujins later, I promise. I'll
probably use them to show off exotic TK3 moves belonging to
chars who aren't slated for any significant role (i.e. Eddy Gordo). I
decided that there had to be two of them, since they look so
different. Oh, and you'll get a better description of them, too...
   One of the tricky parts of this format is that there aren't so many
opportunities to describe the various char's appearance, and I do
want to do that for at least all the major chars (minor chars such as
Seung Mina may sort of fall through the cracks)... 

"They... they stopped? I thought they were going to beat me to
death, and they stopped?"
-The Mokujins are ancient training dummies; they are programmed
to teach through combat, but not to kill. Kobayashi is paralyzed
more from shock than from any permanent damage; he has a low
pain threshhold.

+YOUR SOUL IS WEAK.+
-The TK3 storyline suggests that according to Native American
legend, Toshin is an ultimate weapon of war left behind by
spacefaring beings. I'm not sure about that, but I'm making him talk
with the artificial resonance of a computer anyway (I've also used +
symbols to describe Sektor's speech, and the occasional
computerized voice.)
   BTW, Toshin is his Japanese name - I know the American
version of the game calls him Ogre, but I think that's kind of
boring... besides, I called Eyedol an "ogre" in "The Coming of
Winter."

-I had to have Ishida and Kimura back. I just had to. These are, of
course, relatives of the Ishida & Kimura who died in "Ashes"
(same last names). They couldn't be the one's who'd get offed in the
Toshin Expedition, because a) they're not officers of the Tekkenshu
(official storyline is that Heihachi's Tekkenshu force did the
expedition), and b) they are as similar to one another as the old
Ishida & Kimura were, hence not enough difference in
personality/age/etc. to stage a cruel little side-drama into the
prologue. Besides, I think I want to work in more running gags
about how (almost) *no one* can tell them apart (Heihachi doesn't
even try :). Like the Ishida & Kimura of old, though, they aren't
_exactly_ the same... it just seems that way.

-The chapter title, "Paradise Remembered," seemed clear enough; I
have Jin's perspective so locked in my head that I doubt I could
have called it anything else (even though, say, Xiaoyu isn't
particularly remembering any paradise). For that matter, the novel
title "Phoenix Reborn" seemed a logical enough followup to the
last title...

-The "Alice in Wonderland" quote seemed to go well with the
paradise remembered theme. "Alice" & "Through the Looking
Glass" were two of Jun's favorite stories ever since her childhood
(in fact, there is a brief allusion to "Through the Looking Glass" in
the Interlude of Ch. 14 of "Ashes"). She used to read them both &
many other stories to her son. The quote is also in keeping with the
fact that when Jin was growing up, animals were his only friends...

-Can you imagine what that must be like? To have to wake up each
morning of your early childhood, knowing that no one wants you,
knowing that you're all alone?
   "Ashes" made it clear that Lee always hated to be alone, a
sentiment that he still carries... I think the roots of this are probably
in his childhood.
   I've been rewatching my beloved tape of TK2 endings. In
particular, I studied Lee's ending, and noticed it's the one ending
where you also see the Angel (other than the Angel's own ending,
of course) - I wonder if it had a subconscious influence on me? I
*also* noticed, for the *very* first time, that Lee's desk doesn't
only have two unicorns carved on it - in the center is the carved
subliminal message "OBEY, OBEY, OBEY" (the words are large,
they're just very subtle against the grain of his desk.) Creepy. I used
to think that I took creative license with making Lee more evil than
Namco's char; now I wonder if maybe I went in the opposite
direction... I'm no longer sure that Namco's char is any nicer a guy
than Kazuya or Heihachi. I know at least one person on the net
used to insist that Lee's cutthroat gesture at the close of his ending
implies that he's going to have Kazuya & Heihachi executed.
   Of course, my Lee has changed for the better since "Ashes"... in
fact, he changed during "Ashes," and continued the process after he
became a Guardian. I'm *really* looking forward to writing Lee's
first interview, so much so that I think I want to move it up to the
end of Ch. 2.

"But it was my hairline that disturbed me the most. I have a
conspicuous widow's peak, and I'd read in a book that such things
are caused by a dominant gene"
   I could SWEAR I've read this in SOME high school biology
textbook, but I had a horrendous time trying to look it up, the
Health Science Library closes early on Saturdays, and I didn't want
to postpone getting out the chapter another day. I did find that,
generally speaking, the presence of hair (such as, say, down the
middle of your forehead?) is usually dominant over its absence, so
I figured that was good enough. I could go down to the college's
Health Science Library and try to search out that copy of
"Mendelian Inheritance in Man," but I'd be so agonized if I found
out I was wrong... ^_^
   Jin's widow's peak isn't actually all that "conspicuous" compared
to, say, Bryan's widow's peak (take a close look at them both and
you'll see); but this is Jin's perspective, which is to say, not always
100% objective (although he tries). 

"Both my parents had lost the last of their relatives before I was
born; my father's mother perished during the Great Invasion, and
my mother's kin had passed on before then."
-Lei's mother was one of the one billion people whose souls got
taken (and eventually freed) during the Shao Kahn's reign. She was
selfish enough (and knew it) to fall victim to the Shao Kahn's
aether. Namco's official storyline mentions that Jun's father is dead
(in fact, it says something about how seeing her father's ghost
prompted her to enter the TK2 tournament). It doesn't say anything
about her mother, but if Jun's mother were still around you'd think
that Namco's Jun would go to her for help when she found herself
pregnant & unmarried...

"He explained that when my mother married him, she had wanted
to keep her ancestral name, and when I was born, she'd wanted to
pass her name on to me."
-well, I had to make up something to explain why Lei's & Jun's last
names are different (in fact, it made a good closing line for "Ashes"
:). It's probably more uncommon in Japan than it is here for a
married woman to keep her maiden name, but Jun is very
independent and feels a deep tie to her ancestors, while Lei is very
accommodating (note that *he* is the one who commutes massive
distances so that Jun can live out in the wilderness she loves so
much) and doesn't particularly care about passing on his name.

"Julia has called me borderline obsessive-compulsive. I think she's
deliberately exaggerating, a little. I think."
-Jin doesn't truly have anything as severe as OCD; he's not
compelled to, say, wash his hands for half an hour eight times a
day. But whenever I see his intro animation where he gives his
fighting gloves one extra tug a second before the actual fight (and I
just *know* he's already checked his gear securely several times,
he's *compelled* to check it one more time), I see someone who is,
well, mildly obsessive and compulsive. 
   Yeah, I know Ryu has animations like that too (in SFA, I think).
Dunno what it says about him, but you know, there's probably
something pretty obsessive-compulsive about a guy who devotes
his life exclusively to fighting, you think? (In fact, I feel the SF2: V
anime softened the live-only-for-the-fight aspect of his character in
order to make him a more sympathetic main hero).
   The really frustrating thing about did-I-check-it-I-can't-
remember-I-*have*-to-check-it-again sort of thinking is that once
in a long, long, long time, you really WILL miss something unless
you *triple* check it, or *quadruple* check it (personal experience
here - the first example that comes to mind is when I was regularly
videotaping cartoons; there are others...)

-I've gotten two requests so far for Kazuya's perspective, or for
Kazuya to be a significant char. I'm afraid I just *can't* give him a
major role; he was *too* overwhelming a character in "Ashes." He
will definitely appear, though, in at least two flashbacks - the scene
of the fate of his soul is very strongly engraved in my mind; I can
actually see it as a visual movie. I'll probably write it into Ch. 2.
This is why he's in the main dramatis personae & not the "referred
to only" subsection.

-I looked up Yakushima island on an atlas. It's part of the Osumi
islands, off the southern tip of Kyushu, and it's got some mountain
whose name I can't remember but did write down... (the island
name is, of course, directly from Namco's TK3 storyline).
Other details taken directly from Namco's storyline/char profiles:
  -Lei's love of Sony products (such as the TV) and naps
  -Jin's liking for forest bathing (and his mother's teachings) - forest
bathing strikes me as *weird*, but what the hell do I know...
maybe it's a family thing, 'cause Heihachi likes to take baths too.
Just not in forests.
  -Lei's height
  -Xiaoyu's favorite foods (except the cotton candy, but it seemed
appropriate...), also that she's related to Wang Jinrey
  -names of Jun's, Julia's, & Xiaoyu's martial arts styles
  -Julia's college major (Archaeology)
  -pretty much all the Tekken char's ages in the dramatis personae.
Most of those ages reflect how old the char was at the time of the
TK3 tournament, unless said char got killed before the tournament,
in which case it's the oldest age that the char lived to be.
  -most of the "a.k.a." side-names in the dramatis personae, though
I don't know how many of them will be worked into the story
itself... 

-Lei is a big King fan. King had a cameo in "Ashes" (he wasn't
referred to by name, but you saw him do the Giant Swing on a
Jack-2 when all the sleepers woke up). After the battle for the
Mishima syndicate, King continued to fight for the good guys until
the end of the Great Invasion, and Lei happened to become
personally acquainted with him (they do have something major in
common, after all - they're both recovering alcoholics). By now, it's
been a long time since Lei and King last saw each other, but Lei
still loves to follow King's wrestling career.
   Here you see King's most commonly performed five-part multi (I
think I left the German Suplex out of the rough draft - oops!), and
his knee smash basic throw. I thought about doing one of King the
Second's new multis - it's possible that King the First learned them
in the past few years - but then again a) I don't have TK3 on a
home system, and b) if King the Second does show up, I think I'd
like for *him* to do the new multis personally. I'm not sure he will,
but it's not something I want to rule out.

-Jun's vegetarianism never came up in "Ashes" because nobody
had to eat (on account of the Shao Kahn's aura). She wanted to
raise her son to be a vegetarian, too, and Lei, nice guy that he is,
accommodated her wishes (although he's secretly grateful he can
get "real food" 4-5 days a week. :)

"In fact, he'd bring so many that my mother was in the surreptitious
habit of waiting until he left, then quietly donating the surplus to
the village's poorer families."
-my mother started laughing when she read this. I think it reflects
something about my dad's tendency to hoard food, while my mom
keeps wanting to bring treats to the kids at school or whatever... 
   In any case, Lei actually makes a very nice salary; it was Jun who
wanted to keep her life simple, and limit the amount of
goods/conveniences that come into her home.

-Jin probably would be better off eventually marrying someone like
Julia, i.e. who has little or no talent for sorcery/telepathy/empathy.
Kazuya's incredible power combined with Jun's magical talent &
innate empathy (not exactly to an extreme or magical degree, but it
is what allowed her to sense the wind spirits) reinforced one
another, and so Jin's powers are *so* strong that they hamper his
ability to function in society (although he's gotten better at coping
over time). If his genetic tendency were reinforced any more, his
kids could be effectively dysfunctional...

"I used it a lot, too, typically to cover the black eyes or bruises that
I'd get whenever I had to visit that damn village"
  -I have the Vlad Taltos books in mind, here... especially young
Vlad getting beaten up by gangs of Dragaerans (and the rare gang
of other Easterners) when he was growing up.

"My mother was the day; my father was the night. The essence of
Yin and Yang reversed."
  -traditionally, as far as I know, Yin represents dark/earth/female
while Yang is light/sky/male. Lei's and Jun's balance had the
opposite aspects though...

"my mother and I did Tai Chi nearly every morning"
-Lei taught Jun Tai Chi, and she practiced it more faithfully than he
ever did. Lei is also not really a morning person (his TK2
background was at night, after all). Hmph - ever notice that Lei is
the *only* new TK2 char who showed up for the TK3 tournament?
Unless you count the "new" Jack-2 reworked as Gun Jack,
anyway...

-I rewatched Lei's TK2 ending a few times before my final edit of
the training scene, hence the goggles & earphones.

-Guns are, for the most part, still illegal in Japan. But it's easier to
get exceptions in the future. In particular, the Mishima syndicate
has "petitioned for" and gained the official privilege to arm its most
trusted employees with firearms. When I say "petitioned," I mean
that the syndicate actually *owns* about half of the Japanese
government, and has hooks in the other half...

"It was the old thrush - Siberian blue robin, actually, member of the
thrush family"
  -I had no clue what kind of songbirds Japan has, but Jun would
know all about it and she would have taught Jin, so I had to look
something up. The Siberian Blue Robin flies up to the Japan area
every spring & summer just like red-breasted robins (also members
of the thrush family) fly up here. I didn't want to call the bird just a
"robin" because that's too easily associated with a) the red-breasted
critters we have around here, and b) Batman's sidekick.

"Say bye-bye birdie."
  -I've been crew for two different amateur productions of Bye-Bye
Birdie. I couldn't resist the joke and neither could Lei: "We love
you Co-onrad, oh yes we dooo..."
   Lei didn't really want to give his son such a severe shock, but he
felt it was necessary. Lei also sees the thrush as just another
birdie/critter, in essence no different from the fried chicken he gets
to eat when he's away from home. He reasons that the skill he's
trying to teach his son could potentially save human lives (Lei has
seen good friends on the police force die of bullet wounds too
many times to discount the value of a projectile ward), and he
values that a lot more than the life of a birdie any day. 

-Julia's insistence on the importance of proper grammar is
somewhat inspired by the comic book character Adam Warlock... I
kid you not... although unlike Adam Warlock, she recognizes that
there is a time and a place for dialect.

-Julia's tribal name, "Restless Gopher," is something I made up.
Namco lists her as a.k.a. "the warrior returns" which is too stupidly
generic for me to care. BTW, although Julia knows Michelle's
tribal name was "Dark Mane," it probably won't be mentioned in
"Phoenix" in order to avoid confusion.

-We studied "The Speckled Band" in English 207. What the heck. I
wonder if anyone from my class will ever read this.

-*sigh* Namco's official Michelle storyline is different from mine
in several details (Chinese mother, Native American father, father
lived to see his daughter grow up, gave her the pendant on his
deathbed), but I had it like this in "Ashes" and I won't change it
now. And Namco annoyed me in that it never mentioned what
happened to Michelle's mother after Kazuya kidnapped her. Julia's
official TK3 storyline does not say. Hmph.
   And if Michelle's mother was the Chinese one, then why does
she have a Chinese last name? Did her mom also insist on keeping
her maiden name when she got married? Or is her tribe
matriarchal?

-it was Catsclaw who had to give Michelle's mother the terrible
news, after she awakened along with all the rest of the sleepers and
the battle for the Mishima syndicate was won. He stayed in touch
as a friend of the family ever since, just sort of looking out for her
(and also Julia). Eventually Catsclaw retired from Sonya's
Outworld Exploration Agency (which was very stressful work) and
became a full-time member of Sanctuary's diplomatic staff. 

-Xiaoyu has ADHD, that is, attention deficit disorder with
hyperactivity (usually girls have just ADD without hyperactivity -
ADHD is more commonly seen in boys - but ADHD girls do exist.)
"Deficit" is actually something of a misnomer for this condition,
because people with AD(H)D can in fact concentrate and focus.
They just experience a strong lack of control concerning *when*
and especially *upon what* they focus. If they're really interested
in something, they often (involuntarily!) hyperfocus on it, whereas
if something bores them, then the whole world is a distraction to
the nth degree, as they'll involuntarily focus on anything *but* the
boring stuff. Xiaoyu sincerely enjoys martial arts, and in this
respect her ADHD has worked for her, allowing her to hyperfocus
and become a child prodigy...
   She's currently on a Ritalin prescription during the day - Lee very
recently (within the last month) arranged to have a doctor look at
her. She goes off her medication at night, though... such as when
this interview is conducted. 

-yeah, that stupid Panda's around, I just don't want to write about
it... ^_^ Oh, and it was "Quadruple Flying Catapult Plunge of
Death" in the first draft, but that seemed a bit severe for an
amusement park ride, so I made it "of Doom" (shades of Final
Fantasy translations, anyone?)

-When Seung Mina was put in charge of the Temple, she arranged
to have it transported (again by mass teleportation) back to China's
Honan province. Its wards are not as strong as Sanctuary's old ones
during the Great Invasion because Seung Mina does not want the
Temple to exclude all uninvited visitors, just evil ones, or
"creatures of darkness." Seung Mina does also not want to risk that
an innocent person might suffer or even succumb during the long
journey up to the Temple, so the wards do not induce weakness
(Sanctuary's wards weakened anyone who approached it without
invitation). 

-I don't like Hwoarang's white gi outfit. I think it makes him look
*awful*, and his hair is atrocious, too. But it seemed more
appropriate for the Temple setting, so I figured I'd show it off.
Make no mistake, though, the next time he appears (and for the rest
of the story) it'll be in *cool* demonic black leather with raptor
hair! (And I *do* mean demonic; I swear you can see the skull of
Satan on the back...)

-the Soul Edge arcade machines list Seung Mina's weapon as, um,
"halberd," I think, but the home version calls her default weapon a
"zanbatoh" (her other weapons include the "Tiger Fang," which she
used to fight Baek in "Ashes." The zanbatoh was what she had on
her when the alarm was raised, though.)

this was "without hurting"? 
  -from Mary Jane's thoughts when the Black Cat threw her in a
chair in a Spider-Man comic. Seriously.

"so that I doubt he was referring to a continuous projectile ward,
such as Kazuya once used."
  -just in case ANYBODY who's reading this doesn't know that
Kazuya is Jin's dad, I thought I'd throw this in as foreshadowing
before the "secret" is directly revealed in Ch. 2...

"They were this ugly brown, brown like rotting wood, so dark and
cruel and mean and evil!"
  -I really do get this impression whenever I look at Hwoarang's
eyes on the TK3 cabinet, or in several pieces of rendered art. He is
not a nice guy. But he is, perhaps, just a little more tormented that
he is truly evil... perhaps.

"I may look like one of you, but _I am not like you_."
  -from Babylon 5, a Lennier line, when he grabs Marcus by the
throat and hoists him off the ground - this scene (not the dialogue)
was part of the 4th season intro sequence.

-Whew! I wish I had TK3 on which to do Hwoarang moves,
particularly his *brutal* side throw, which he uses in response to
the break in Seung Mina's B attacks. He does a Ki power up and
tries to axe-kick her, but she gets up with a sweep. She uses her
axle kick, followed by her burning fire wheel, Hwoarang responds
with something that's really more like Nina's takeoff kick, but he's
a goddamn immortal, he's learned any flying kick I damn well feel
like giving him. Seung Mina tries to do a Yoshimitsu-style tackle-
stab, but she's not Yoshi and Hwoarang pushes her off. So she flips
away (a little more acrobatic than in the game, but heck) and
returns with her baton twirler combination, Hwoarang switches
stance and attacks with his torpedo kick. Then he turns around and
does a hook kick like I used to do in Tae Kwon Do, only he's a lot
better at it than I ever was. Finally, he goes for a running sidekick
(one of my favorite TK3 moves) and - wham.

-Hwoarang can only be destroyed by one who has beaten him in
single combat. But he won his fight with Seung Mina the instant
she lost consciousness, and so his impalement is not fatal... as it
might have become if she were still able to get up.

"He was bleeding from his eyes."
-Hwoarang can't cry as mortals do; he sheds tears of blood (a
singularly compelling concept I lifted from the "Kindred" TV
series, and the Vampire: Masquerade games that was based on. Or
maybe the "Blood of the Martyr" Magic: the Gathering card. One
or the other.)

Next chapter is tentatively entitled "Paradise Razed" (someone else
already used "Paradise Lost" :) so you can probably guess what it's
about... Ch. 2: Paradise Destroyed notes 
December 25, 1997


I read something on the Babylon 5 mailing list the other day.
Straczynski (author of the series) said that his goal was "to write
faster than anyone who can write better than me, and to write better
than anyone who can write faster than me." Well, I doubt I can
write better than him (yet? :), and I *know* I can't write faster than
him, but it's a worthy goal to strive for...

The title, "Paradise Destroyed," is pretty straightforward, but
seemed a logical follow-up from the first chapter. Especially since
this chapter is a more coherent narration of a single thread (i.e.
Toshin's coming for Jun and the fallout thereof), instead of a
disjoint sections of three char's lives like the last chapter was.

The epigraph (that's a fancy word for "chapter quote"; I learned it
in my English 207 class) was also used to precede a story in the
anthology "Dragons of Light." I'm not sure when or where Carl
Sagan originally said it - probably in one of his books, I'll bet. I've
read "Cosmos" cover to cover more than once, though that was a
long time ago. What really struck me about that book was a
fanciful "alien" analysis of humanity, which put our species' long-
term survival odds at around 40%... brrr. Anyway, I felt this
epigraph suited this chapter in more ways than one...

I don't know the names of any HK newspapers, so I just made one
up - besides, I'm sure a lot of publications got
created/renamed/changed hands in the wake of the chaos of the
Great Invasion. The Mishima syndicate does exert a certain amount
of influence over the Hong Kong Daily Register, but it doesn't
actually own it like it owns just about every other Hong Kong
newspaper, which is why Lei prefers to read it.

-King (no other name listed on any official records)
Namco never gave King any other name, and since he doesn't have
any big role here, I didn't feel justified in making up a Spanish
name for him, like I did with Kabal/Galgo. If King the Second does
show up, I may give him a name, but that is an "if" (I think I just
want him around so I can write more Spanish. :)

-in 2001 it modified its mission statement to become an agency for
sheltering needy children, and placing them in foster care.
In psychology class, I learned that in America these days,
orphanages are largely replaced by foster care networks et. al. for
the psychological health of the children. It's generally better if kids
can attach and bond with parental care-givers; the impersonality of
an orphanage can contribute to depression, etc. When the church
was small enough to be a single family by itself (remember the
half-dozen little rugrats and the mommy-type woman in King's
TK2 ending?), it wasn't a problem. But as the church grew larger,
King eventually did (well, worked with the church leaders to do -
he didn't dictate the church, it's just that his patronage and status as
a priest were held in high regard) what was best for the children.

-I'm going to hunt down the idiot who dreamed up this voice-
exclusive OS, kill him, and bury him in concrete next to the
Windows 2005 development team.
Hehheh. I possess lingering resentment toward Windows '95 and
all those associated with it, because it SUCKS on our computers! It
is SLOW! It slowed everything down so much that Dad couldn't
keep it installed, he had to rip it off so he could print out business
letters at a constant rate! But worse still, infinitely worse, is that
THE BEST NEW COMPUTER GAMES *REQUIRE*
WINDOWS '95! I can't play Might & Magic VI, Mandate of
Heaven! Aaargh...
   Of course, Windows '95 is ancient history by 2017, and Windows
2005 has also fallen into disuse. Most modern computers rely on an
OS provided by the Mishima syndicate (and which actually has its
roots in a computer language/OS that Lee Chaolan developed, back
when he was working for Heihachi & later Kazuya). Rumor has it
that the Windows 2005 development team "disappeared" without a
trace because their product was in direct competition with the
syndicate's...

Regarding Tracy: I needed a name, and the Hong Kong detective of
Battle Arena Toh Shin Den 2 came to mind (so what if she doesn't
have a Chinese name? You wanna argue that with *her*? Well, she
might not beat you up, because she doesn't "fight" people. She
"attacks in self-defense." :-) However, I don't think she'll have any
significant role in this story. I kind of want to keep it exclusive to
TK3 and Soul Edge characters.

-I have to make some kind of record that I know will last, while I
still can, and store it in a format that old man Heihachi can't access,
copy, alter, or delete, which is more than I could say for a piece of
paper.
I didn't originally envision Lei speaking to a computer, but I
wanted something resembling the monologue formal of various
other characters, and that would show how sick he's been getting
lately. And I wanted to slam Windows. ^_^ Lei would sooner just
type, if he could (talking for too long has a bad effect on him), but
the new interface is all-verbal, so...
   ...I'm still taking a few liberties here, as Lei slips into a mode that
is, well, more storytelling than anything like an official police
record. But this record isn't exactly official; Lei figures that no one
will see it until, one way or another, it doesn't matter anymore...

-They don't let cops work on cases that involve their families, you
know. Standard procedure. Good reasons for it, too. I wouldn't
break it if my son's life weren't at stake.
   They don't let cops work on cases involving their families for the
same reason that they don't let doctors perform surgery on their
families - emotions get involved, things get screwed up big time.
Lei is aware of the irony of the last sentence, BTW (if his son's life
weren't involved, then he wouldn't be breaking the procedure); but
of course he can't just sit back and delegate while Heihachi feeds
Jin to the Toshin, now can he?

-"This can't be. Not King. He's like a legend, a legend that never
dies."
So I have Soul Edge going through my head too... a little... :)

Regarding the grey sky - grey is the color of death in the Vlad
Taltos books, and generally speaking, it does not forebode good
things in my story, either. Michelle's mother lost the people she
loved most on grey days, so it seemed fitting to carry on the
metaphor into here...

-the raven strands of her shoulder-length hair
Jun's grown her hair a little since the TK2 tournament (it was chin-
length, there). Not to the extent Lei has, though (I know I'll get a
chance to describe Lei eventually, but it may not be until Julia runs
into him for the first time - Heihachi certainly isn't going to bother.
Hmm...)

-It's the sort of thing I could never ask her, because she devoutly
believed that love isn't something that should be "deserved," or
"justified," or that people should be judged "worthy" of it.
When Jun said to Lee "I can NEVER love the likes of you!" in
"Ashes," she didn't see it as a judgement of worth, per se. It was a
statement of the limitations of her own soul, when confronted with
a person whose cruel deeds seemed nothing like the kind side of
the fiance she once cared about. This is one of the reasons why
she's reluctant to see herself as "pure"; even she can't
unconditionally love everyone and everything, under all
circumstances. However, she is about as close to such purity as
anyone short of Gandhi can be...

Jun's prophetic dream is straight out of Namco's storyline, although
it tied in nicely with the dream-prophecy the Angel gave her in
"Ashes." This dream was sent by the Angel as well. I'm deviating
from Namco's storyline in that the Toshin is at large for only five
days before Jun banishes it - the official line seems to be that it was
around for months before it reached her, and has been wandering
the Earth for the last four years before TK3. But dammit, I think all
that godlike Power would have absorbed continents if it were out
of control for that long. Certainly, it would have gone straight for
Jin and nailed him (it possessed Nina to do that, didn't it?) Besides,
I can't help feeling that it went straight for Jun immediately after it
was let out, only stopping to absorb the strongest souls (King,
Kunimitsu, etc.) that happened to be close to its path.

"Sickness. Corruption. A terrible, terrible wound gone bad..."
Jun had resolved to send Lei and Jin away unwittingly and face
Toshin alone (hence the preparation of leaving behind a note), but
at this point, her fears slipped and she almost confessed to Lei what
her dream was really about. When Lei misinterpreted her vision,
though, she was able to regain her composure and trick him into
getting out of harm's way.

"You're in denial."
"I am not."
Old joke, I know. I can't help it. ^_^

"Kazuya's memories of his father are from over twenty-five years
ago, Lei."
This is 16 years after the Great Invasion, and Kazuya was 28 at the
end of it, and he was 18 when he left home... 16 + (28 - 18) = 26. 
    BTW, I just recently noticed something. Namco's storyline &
char profiles keep mentioning how TK3 is 19 years after TK2, Jin
is 19, and all the surviving TK2 chars are 19 years older. One little
problem with that. Oh, Namco? IT TAKES A WOMAN 3/4 A
YEAR TO HAVE A BABY! 
    In my story, Lei & Jun didn't get married until six months after
the Great Invasion, so Jin was actually born a little over a year
afterward... and no, I am not going to follow Namco's idea of the
three-day pregnancy that is so popular in shows like Xena: Warrior
Princess. Sheesh... I've even doubled back to the dramatis personae
and changed a few ages (Heihachi is one year older, dammit) to
correct this annoyance.
    Jin's birthday is May 20th (I set it to coincide with the day I
finished work on the final chapter of "Ashes," just because I felt
like it :). I don't think I'll go to the extent of setting precise
birthdays for all my other characters, though. Too much work. I
have my hands full keeping track of when they die...

-You want to feed us nothing but rabbit food, milk, and eggs? Fine,
as long as our son gets enough protein.
   Okay, Phil... Jun & Jin are lacto-ovo vegetarians (they eat only
unfertilized eggs, though, such as most modern farm chickens
produce). That's how Jin got the protein he needs to grow strong
and kick everybody else's butt - when he's not being beaten into the
ground, that is. My Jin-hating friends at the arcade want me to kill
him off. It isn't going to happen, but I console them with the
reassurance that Jin is definitely going to suffer, hehheh... :)

"A battery-powered, laptop computer. It can connect to the Internet
by cellular phone."
    -I read, I think it was in Time magazine, about a remote
monastery that had no electricity or phone lines, but which did
maintain an Internet link and a web page by means of a cellular
phone. Seemed appropriate. Lei probably would have gotten his
son something like this long ago, if not for Jun's aversion to
material goods & conveniences...

This isn't Lei's only record. You'll see more; in fact, Ch. 3 is slated
to start with his next installment. He just had to quit for now
because he couldn't speak and the OS is verbal-only. ("verbal
interface" is a phrase from a recent episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
In general practice, such an OS would really need a text input
supplement, but this is the highly experimental Omega Level
Classification...)

Jin is actually reading all of Lei's records at once, while you just
got to see the first one - but then, he already knows/can infer (most
of) what happened; we don't want to spoil all the surprise for you
yet, eh? ^_^

BTW, Jun hugging herself (as seen here and more clearly in Lei's
description) is from that beautiful Lei/Jun/Heihachi TK2 rendered
art that you see on the cover of the TK2 game, and that was the
primary inspiration for "Ashes"... it was, in part, inspiration for
"Phoenix" too. It is "Phoenix" that brings Heihachi's ominous,
overshadowing face into the main story...

Regarding Jun's talk with her son... heck about Toshin's murder of
her...
   Namco's storyline goes something like this: Jun just senses this
evil presence coming for her, and on Jin's fifteenth birthday, she
tells him about his father Kazuya. "We must prepare for the day of
judgement," she says, or something like that. Then Toshin arrives
and she screams "RUN AWAY!" (Um, this is her idea of
preparation?) Jin raises his fist to attack it, gets knocked out (not
hurt? not killed? Why not?), and when he wakes up he can't find
her body. He searches out Heihachi and begs him for training.
Hmph...
    Well, I take the main pieces out of that (fifteenth birthday,
prophetic dream, tells about father, "Run away!", no body found
for Jun, Jin begs Heihachi), but the "day of judgement" line has got
to go. Out. Out, there's a much more concrete rationale at stake
here; Jun needs a damn good reason *why* she has to accept her
fate, a reason that NAMCO DID NOT GIVE HER! Maybe Anna
will talk about a "day of judgement" later, but not Jun, not here.
And I want a better fight scene, dammit. And Jin is going to get
hurt because he's trying hard as hell to protect his mother; I
promised my friends he'd suffer. And I want Toshin to take its true
form and burn everything to the ground. And Heihachi had damn
well better be on the trail of the Toshin; he wanted the blasted
thing so badly that he let it out, didn't he? 

"It's going to be all right, mother."
   -in my fanfics, almost as ominous as the color grey, is whenever
*anyone* says *anything* along the lines of "it's going to be all
right," or "everything will be all right." You see those words
anywhere, you can expect that someone's plans/hopes/life/soul is
about to go to Hell...

Toshin's appearance here is, of course, straight out of the Tekken 3
intro sequence. That's Kunimitsu's head he's carrying; he cut it off
with her own dagger. Toshin is not a nice guy. The first time I saw
that sequence (with Toshin in front of Jun's standing stones) I
thought he was carrying Jun's head and really started to feel sick.
But Namco's storyline sez that no one found a body for Jun (she's
just dead, is all), so...

It did not speak just with "sound"; it's more as though sound waves
were the by-product...
   -well, I realize the Toshin has to be projecting some form of
sound, in order for the recording log to pick up its voice. But its
communication is primarily of that quality you find among various
gods/supernatural beings, such as Raiden, the Angel, and the
Guardians of the Black Abyss. I may have gotten the idea from
AD&D's description of demons & devils, which all have a sort of
limited telepathy that lets them communicate with anyone or
anything. BTW, Lee's voice in his true form (as marked with "*"
instead of quotes) also shares the same quality - when the other
TK3 chars hear him speak in that manner, they'll be certain to
mention as much, too. One of Lee's powers as a Guardian is that of
communication, so that he can speak with any soul. He doesn't like
his true voice, though, and communication is a lesser Power,
meaning that he can access it without assuming his true form.
    I've decided what Toshin really is. The "+" for Toshin's voice
imply that it has been reprogrammed/sickened/corrupted from what
it used to be... (and if I want to stay consistent with Namco's
limited storyline, I can say that aliens reprogrammed it. Maybe they
were even aliens from Outworld... :)

Okay, fight scene! Jin starts off with the high punch-screw punch-
front kick string he learned from Jun (1~1~3 in TK2). No, he
doesn't have it in TK3; I think that's because he prefers the greater
speed/power of the Kazuya-style lunging body blows & axe kicks
(certainly, they're a lot more useful than this Jun string was in
TK2). But most of all, I want Jun to go out fighting (even if it's not
her original intent!) so she does what any Tekken char does when
they beat the #$%* out of another char - a 10-hit string!
(WS)+2,1,1,1,2,1,4,3,3+4, to be exact, though in this case her WS
is actually more of a small jump 'cause Toshin is so tall. Best of all,
I get to show off her cartwheel, which I never got to do in "Ashes,"
which was always my favorite Jun move in TK2 (*why* doesn't
Jin have it in TK3!? Did Namco think it was too feminine, or
what? They gave Chun Li's spinning bird kick to Eddy, didn't
they!?) 

-carry a jagged black burn-scar on my left biceps and lower
shoulder, here, and similar fire-blisters all over my right leg from
shin to thigh. 
    I know, the black mark on Jin's arm (visible in his bare-chested
outfit) looks like a tattoo, but I say it's a scar. He may have
incorporated it into a more stylized tattoo by the time of TK3, in
memory of his mother. None of his outfits show his bare legs, but I
figure in the "let's make Jin suffer" vein, he should have some
literal fire-scars matching the markings on his "fire-leg" drawstring
pants outfit.

I'm making Toshin's true form even more of a flamethrower than
he is in the game. Nice and horrendous. It smacks Jin with the
"Owl's Hunt" (3+4 when lying on the ground, but I figure it can
just as easily do it when flying in the air - and it had to fly after Jun
& Jin; it's too big to properly navigate down the trail from the
shrine on foot). The Owl's Hunt is, I believe, unblockable, although
you can duck it - then Toshin will either fly right over you, or
better yet, land helpless in front of you for a second or two. Oh,
and it does the Kuma-style bear hug, too.

(I love you, Jin. Oboete-nasai.)
   -In this context, oboete-nasai roughly translates to "remember
that." I really, really wanted these to be Jun's last words to both her
husband and her son. Overall, though, I think "Phoenix" will have
much fewer foreign-language phrases than "Ashes" - too much
agony about the grammar.

starting with where it slew King in Mexico City to where it
absorbed a female Manji renegade in Japan. 
    -that's Kunimitsu, but since she isn't in this story, I don't feel
justified in mentioning her name. I'm not even sure it is a "name"
per se; it might translate to "traitor" (which would be why there
were a male & female Kunimitsu in TK1 and TK2). Heihachi
doesn't care anyway. 
    Toshin (eventually) has Jun's, Kunimitsu's, and Lee's moves
because it absorbed all of them, and even if souls escape it, it still
retains the skills & memories of those who it absorbs. But in my
storyline, it hasn't necessarily absorbed all the other chars whose
moves it has (Bruce, Baek, Kazuya, & Anna especially) - it just has
their moves because it absorbed other strong fighters who practiced
their respective styles. In Namco's storyline, this would explain
why it has Kazuya's moves when we know how Kazuya died, and
Anna's moves when we know Anna is alive.

-Good help is so hard to find.
   Hehheh... these are a kinder, gentler Ishida and Kimura. They'll
still obey orders, and they'll definitely use lethal force against
anyone who would try to harm their revered master Mishima-sama,
but it was they who kept Lei from getting a much worse beating
than he did, once he was subdued (the Tekkenshu wanted to break
both Lei's legs, above & below the knee...)
    Because they are so loyal, though, they couldn't just leave
Heihachi's side (it is their duty to protect him, after all) and tend to
Jin the instant they saw he was still alive; they had to get their
master's implied permission first. Specifically, they ask for more
orders, and when Heihachi points to Jin, they see it as enough of a
license to give the poor kid some first aid...
   BTW, "deindividuation" is a word I learned in my Psychology
class. ^_^

The Tekkenshu medic injected a stimulant in the youth's neck. 
   -I keep thinking of the neck-hypospray injections in Star Trek.
Well, some of your biggest veins are in your neck, you know...

-this was my dead son!
   Hehheh. One of the running gags (sort of) in this story is how
whenever anyone who used to know Kazuya takes their first look
at Jin, they always react along the lines of "Oh my god, HE'S
BACK FROM THE DEAD!" (never those literal words, of course,
but...) Figure I might as well play up the stringent family
resemblance for all it's worth...

-His voice was milder and significantly more mellifluous.
   Jin has inherited some singing talent from his mother. The
difference in his hair is something you can see in Namco's rendered
art. Of course, the mixed-blood ancestry of his mother is something
I wrote in because I felt like it (in "Ashes," it was a clue to the
minor secret that her fiance was Lee and not Kazuya).

-The last thing he did before he tried to kill me was pry apart the
pieces of my mind, and send me into a state of senseless insanity
   When Heihachi climbed out of the pit Kazuya threw him in, he
was not anything close to sane (and I think you can see it in the
home system TK2 intro animation). It was partly a lingering
fear/aftereffect of this horrendous shock that caused Heihachi to
just hang back and watch, and let other people fight Kazuya in the
Great Invasion rather than go after his son himself. Heihachi has
projected his anger at himself for sitting on the sidelines to Lei, for
the perceived murder of Kazuya (Heihachi did not see what
happened - Kazuya's cloak screened out Shang Tsung's scrying
sorcery - but Heihachi is absolutely convinced that Lei murdered
Kazuya).

-Jun's note contained basically everything she told Jin at the shrine,
including everything she knew about the Toshin (from her dream),
and why she had to sacrifice herself to it & send her family away.
She originally expected Lei and Jin to find it after they returned
from their trip. It is not included in this chapter because Heihachi
burned it, of course; the interviewer has no direct copy to
transcribe (unlike the newspaper artice, which he dug out of a
Hong Kong library).

One thing I've come to understand about Heihachi's character. The
one way to get on his bad side REAL fast, more than ANYTHING
else, it to steal/mess with something he considers his. And he
intends to make the whole world his...

Wulong had not been able to kill a single one of them.
   Lei wasn't carrying his gun, and he wasn't trying to kill the
Tekkenshu. He knew that something was wrong when he saw fire
and smoke from where his house was, but he didn't know more
than that, and he read from Ishida's & Kimura's attempt to reason
with him (in fact, they reassured him that they had found a
surviving youth in stable condition) that not all of these people
were necessarily evil monsters (if he were to hate everyone who
worked for Heihachi, he'd have to hate a third of the world!). The
encounter turned violent because Heihachi's men tried to restrain
him. But he's still Lei Wulong, Super Police, not the frenzied
slaughterhouse demon-Lei afflicted by a curse in "Ashes."
Heihachi, however, can't tell the difference between weakness and
value for human life.

Regarding Jin's outburst... I wasn't sure exactly how I'd phrase
Heihachi's convincing arguements; then I realized it made much
more sense just to gloss over them and let Jin throw them out in all
their raw force, rather than go to the trouble of repeating them
twice.

 "I can feel your guilt - so entrenched and overpowering, gods, it's a
shame you've kept secret for sixteen years! A shame you never
even told my mother!"
   Lei's secret shame will be explicitly spelled out in a later chapter,
of course. Anyone who's read "Ashes" (and who knows that Lei
really didn't murder Kazuya) will probably be able to guess what it
is anyway...

"You KILLED my father! You let my mother DIE!"
   -one of the first, and strongest Jin lines ever entrenched in my
mind, to explain how, in my continuity, Jin turned against Lei and
went to live with his grandfather in preparation for the TK3
tournament.

Well, here's my favorite section of the chapter - Lee! He's changed
a bit in sixteen years (of being dead). For one thing, his speech
patterns have become a little more formal - not too much, and he'll
still often talk in vernacular. However, he never says "yeah"
anymore; he says "yes."
   I was looking through my TK2 sources on Lee yesterday, and I
saw that one of them - the issue of "Megafan" - paints a really,
despicably evil picture of him. It says that a mysterious old man
nursed him back to health after Kazuya beat him up in TK1, &
taught him some new karate moves (same as my other sources).
But it also says that Lee *executed* his teacher before returning to
the TK2 Tournament! :-P what a bastard - even Namco's Baek
wasn't so horrible (he killed his father by accident, not deliberate
murder). And then presumably, Heihachi beat Lee up, Lee went
back to work for Heihachi, Lee was with the Toshin expedition,
and Lee got absorbed.
   Ffft. I like my Lee storyline better. In Namco's Lee's defense,
though, Megafan could have slandered him - none of my other
sources say that Namco's Lee murdered his teacher, and Megafan
seems intent on making everyone in TK2 (except maybe Jun) a
bloodthirsty fiend. For one thing, it says that Bruce deliberately
tortured and executed Lei's partner, instead of the more widespread
line that Lei's partner was fighting with Bruce & the battle caused a
plane crash. They play around with other details, too, making up
this idea that Wang used to hang around at Michelle's reservation
and teach Chinese kempo.
   Well, okay. So my Lee also killed the man who saved him after
his TK1 beating. But it wasn't a cold-blooded execution, dammit -
Jun's life was at stake. My Lee still feels shame for it, though; he
believes that if he had switched allegiance to the good guys sooner,
things wouldn't have worsened to the point where he had to kill his
best friend...
    You could argue that my Lee, when he was alive, was worse
than the worst of Namco's player chars/sub-bosses, because he was
a high-ranking accomplice to massive genocide, similar to the Nazi
Erlich Eichmann(sp?). My Lee would not argue with this
interpretation, either...

I touched her forehead and whispered, *Jun-chan. Oki-nasai.*
   -Lee has the ability to cast simple wakening & sleep spells. He
doesn't need to be in his true form to do it, either (sleep spells are
not all that powerful anyway; they're easily resisted unless the
target is already fatigued or taken unawares). He was just so caught
up in memories of the past that he reverted to the default self-
perception that the Lords of the Grey Kingdom instilled within his
psyche (i.e. his "true form"). "Oki-nasai" = "wake up," of course.

I always did like Lee's TK1 dress tuxedo, and I never had the
chance to show it off in "Ashes" (he was probably wearing it the
night Jun ran away from him, but that scene necessarily had to lack
detail - I couldn't describe him, and therefore it would have been
rather silly to describe his clothes). Hate the damn purple shirt -
they should have thrown it out instead of the tuxedo for TK2, or
else given Lee his tuxedo as a third outfit so he could match
Kazuya. Oh, well. You'll also see Lee in his unicorn jacket again
(minus the key on a chain, since he lost it before he died, and he
was nearly strangled with it anyway). And I can't wait until I finally
get the chance to describe his true form...

BTW, Lee as a Guardian is somewhat inspired, I think, by
Scorpion's MK2 ending, in which he becomes the
Guardian/protector of the new Sub-Zero... I always did think that
was rather touching, and I liked it better than the Scorpion-as-evil-
hellfiend that MKA and various other takes have cast him as.

 "I've been told that necromancers and other evil creatures find it
almost impossible to keep a 'pure' soul. This is why, isn't it?"
   -this isn't the first time I've made up a rule, and much, much later,
eventually realized the reason why the rule is so. BTW, there is a
catch to the wish of a pure soul - it cannot undo a contract made by
free will. You sign your soul over to someone, and it'll take more
than a wish to save you...

"No one can see or hear you unless they are also dead, or very close
to it, or unless necromancy is involved."
   -if Jun did see her father's ghost, as Namco's storyline states, then
I figure it was in a prophetic dream or near-death experience. And
of course, Kazuya's necromancy was why people such as Lee could
see/hear the souls trapped in the Mishima syndicate...

The Tsathoggua are more Lovecraftian critters - I can't help it,
Lovecraft really made up all the best creepy and exotic monsters
first. Lovecraft actually calls them Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua
(Tsathoggua is the Great Old One whom they worship), but I
wanted a nice, short, exotic name. I originally thought I'd use "*"
for their voice, but that's too easily confused with Lee - the "%" is
much more alien. I haven't used it since describing Shang Tsung's
fireworm voice in "The Coming of Winter" (the fireworm is
another Lovecraftian critter, BTW). 

This whole Kazuya/Lee/Tsathoggua scene came vividly into my
mind while I was studying in the college library (well,
daydreaming in between fitful bursts of studying - I'm supposed to
read history books, and all I can think of is TK3...) It was so clear,
like a movie instead of just dialogue or written description. I could
really see Lee in his true form, thrashing against the Tsathoggua's
hold... while Kazuya pursues his inevitable conclusion of "justice,"
and his last words are to finally acknowledge Lee as his brother.

I wasn't sure exactly what Lee's phone call would be about, at first,
but then I learned about India's current problems with child labor in
history class. It's an issue that would go straight to Lee's heart.
BTW, in addition to being the current vice-president of the
syndicate, Lee has also become Xiaoyu's legal guardian, at least
until she reaches the age of majority.

Chapter 3: Toll of the Bell notes
January 10, 1998

Uh-oh. This is beginning to run long. Beginning to run really long.
I originally thought I'd get through Mitsurugi's first appearance and
Jin's fight with Hwoarang, but Lei's story took on a life of its own,
and Bryan demanded equal time ("you're not gonna give ME fewer
pages than that #$%* alcoholic!!!"), the interviewer told me that he
wanted to dig up the psionic verification session transcript too, and
here I am at 29 pages. One more section and it would be over the
maximum I'm allotting for a chapter (32-33 pages, because I don't
want to have to chop it up into more than 4 pieces when I post it).
Besides, all its events fit into a coherent unit of time, leading from
where last chapter left off (Jun's death) up through Bryan's
shootout in September of 2017. Next chapter will take place right
around early December of 2017, as Heihachi is extending TK3
invitations to various fighters all over the world...

The title is based on the Ernest Hemingway book which is based
on some other poem... to paraphrase, "ask not for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee." Appropriate enough, I figure, since in a way
this chapter is largely about death and dying. And of course, it is
the Angel's one appearance...

The epigraph is, in fact, also spoken by Death, as represented by
the astrological sign of the Scorpion in a juvenile fantasy book
about a Barvarian boy who travels through in "star-country" to help
his old horse become one of the horses that pulls the chariot of the
Sun. It has a sort of double context that I like better than the first
epigraph I picked (which I may still use; I don't know yet. I already
have some epigraphs firmly in mind, especially my obligatory
Steven Brust epigraph, which will begin the last chapter).

List of details taken directly out of the official TK3 storyline:
-no body found for Jun
-Bryan's alias, "Snake Eye"
-Bryan's connection to the drug trade, and rivalry with Lei Wulong
-Bryan's personal dislike of bright sunlight
-of course, Bryan's death in a Hong Kong shootout...
-The name of Bryan's organization (IPO)
-Lei's appearance in Sony commercials

You can thank two of said goons for that; not the Tekkenshu rank-
and-file, but the pair of lookalikes in business suits who were with
'em.
   -Ishida and Kimura, but Lei doesn't know their names because it's
harder than ever to get any info on the Mishima syndicate these
days. The HKP has tried to infiltrate it more than once, with almost
no success. Particularly not its Tokyo headquarters. What Heihachi
doesn't find out, Jin does (it's pretty hard to pose as a double agent
around a telepath, and Jin's in the habit of making at least an
acquaintanceship with all the Tokyo headquarters employees).
When Jin finds out you're an outside agent, he fires you (or refuses
to hire you in the first place). When Heihachi finds out that you're
an outside agent, um, better see if you can run to Sanctuary before
he kills you... (you might have a chance, too, since Heihachi has to
be extremely careful when arranging assassinations - he can't let
his grandson find out what he's up to, which means he can't keep
any cold-minded assassins on the Tokyo headquarters premises,
nor does he dare to give orders to such by telephone, radio, e-mail,
or any other easily monitored form of communication.)
    BTW, as acting vice-president of the syndicate, Jin has more
power on paper that he actually exercises. He concentrates mostly
on his schoolwork and his fighting, and preparing for the day when
he must confront the Toshin. Jin knows his way around the
legitimate part of the syndicate mostly by computer/e-mail/etc.,
while Heihachi keeps the true nature of the syndicate's dealings
well away from anything electronic...

-found the severed head of a red-haired woman I didn't know
  I added this for the final draft when I realized that if Lei is doing a
thorough search, he'll definitely come across the head Toshin
carries in its TK3 intro animation. Kunimitsu wasn't wearing her
Manji mask when the Toshin decapitated her, and Lei had never
seen Kunimitsu's face before, so he wouldn't have recognized her
from when Lee busted her out of cryogenic suspension along with
(almost) all the other TK2 chars sixteen years ago (Lei never knew
Kunimitsu personally anyway). BTW, I think that Yoshimitsu is
the space alien ninja; it's Kunimitsu who is of human lineage (her
storyline has something about how her father gave her the dagger,
or whatever).

-But when you're dealing with a transcosmic personality brimming
with enough raw, elemental Power to potentially blast apart the
entire world, even I have to admit that really, a good way to
describe it probably is as a "god."
   This sentiment is strongly based on the Dragaeran POV of "gods"
in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series: a god is simply an
uncontrollable force with a personality. If the god were to become
controlled, then it would no longer qualify as a "god," and
Dragaerans would start referring to the god as a "demon" instead.
Both Sub-Zero's also held this general belief.
    Lei did not believe in even the Dragaeran definition of "gods"
during "Ashes," but in the final weeks of the Great Invasion (after
he defeated Kazuya), he did have the chance to meet Raiden as a
mortal, and he was there when Raiden regained godhood, and the
evidence of his own senses convinced him of the existence of
"gods." He still sees them more as alien beings from another
dimension than as anything that should be worshiped.

-_Muslims_ have offered me drinks.
   Ripped off an old sitcom starring John Larroquette (he used to
play Dan the sleazy defense attorney in "Night Court") where he
played an alcoholic char. It had to go in. It had to. :)
   BTW, although generally speaking adherents of Islam are not
supposed to drink, you can still go to various Islamic countries and
still buy alcohol... depending on how fundamentalist the local
government is (I have "From Beirut to Jerusalem" backing me up
on this). Sometimes true fundamentalists get so irritated about this
that they'll go to the (often illegal) bars, search for hidden stores of
liquor, and smash 'em all open a la prohibition. 
   Anna does not drink, but she is a connoisseur of non-alcoholic
champagnes.

-when Heihachi's syndicate owns a third of the world on a silver
platter
   The Mishima syndicate owned a third of the world four years
ago, and it owns a third of the world as of the TK3 tournament -
but no more than that. The reason for the four-year stagnation in its
growth is, of course, Jin, without whose influence it would
probably own at least half the world by now. But Heihachi's back-
dealing/assassination/dictatorships/drug-running are all crippled by
the fact that he has to be VERY careful to hide what he's doing
from his grandson the telepath, which means that he has to delegate
a lot, and he doesn't want to put too much power in the hands of his
delegates, either (he won't repeat Kazuya's mistake with Lee)...

-I was groggy from tranquilizer drugs. I was about to dive into a
drinking binge. These two situations do not mix.
   Alcohol + barbiturates or any other depressant (even a sleep
spell) can easily kill you very dead (you go into a coma and/or stop
breathing). I'd wanted to mention this potential situation in "Ashes"
somewhere, but never got around to it...

I had to double back to my old fanfics (particularly "The Dragon's
Jaws") and my Tobias MK1 komic for a description of the Temple
of Light. Note that they did add a ramp to become handicapped-
accessible. :) And I wanted to put in a statue to Kung Lao since I
first began to think of a sequel; so many other takes on the MK
mythos, particularly the kartoons and the MK: Annihilation movie,
were too quick to forget about him completely, and I *liked* him
dammit. I still feel that the spirit of Kung Lao helped me pass my
driver's license test. Here, the statue also serves as a gateway to
reprise just how our heroes won the Great Invasion (the Shao
Kahn's queen banished him), in case anybody hasn't read "Ashes"
or has but forgot everything before they started this. ^_^

Whee! First chance to describe Xiaoyu, the pixie girl! She's in her
Chun Li style fighting dress here. Next chapter, she'll show up in
her pink tied-with-a-bow outfit (I really like the fighting dress
better, but there's a good line or two in reference to the bow that I
can't pass up), and pretty much the rest of the story will haver her
in her Japanese school uniform. :) Lei was pretty overwhelmed
when he first met Xiaoyu, but he became a little fond of her (in a
paternal way) while he stayed at the Temple of Light for six
months. He was the one person in the Temple other than Wang
who could actually get the better of her in most sparring matches
(keeping in mind that this was when Xiaoyu was only twelve, and
had been studying martial arts in earnest for just three years). Lei
wasn't too keen on fighting this little pixie girl half his size, but she
pestered him relentlessly for challenges (especially since she
couldn't train against Uncle Wang as often as she used to, due to
Seung Mina's instructions). 

No, I didn't kill off Seung Mina. Namco did enough #%*& killing
off of women who were too old for them. :-P Hwoarang's battle
with Seung Mina did take its toll, however; even Wang could not
restore her ability to walk. This is why Xiaoyu feels guilt/sorrow
over Seung Mina's battle with Hwoarang, as is mentioned in the
close of her interview (which I rewrote for the final draft of chapter
1).

"Wang," I said, "there is a special, walled-off chamber at the back
of your temple; it has an altar, a stained glass window, and many
thick candles. I would like to make use of that chamber tonight."
   The general tone of this line is reminiscent of when Vlad wants
to use Morrolan's devotional chamber to Verra in "Phoenix." The
actual description happens is partly out of the mountainside shrine
Raiden uses to contact the elder gods in MK:Annihilation.

Lei uses a jumping crescent kick to break apart Raiden's altar - it's
actually the same motion as his unblockable Phoenix kick, but the
Phoenix kick takes a certain amount of forethought/concentration
to properly set up, and Lei's in no mood for that. The shattering
glass into pure white followed by the Angel's appearance is lifted, a
little bit, from the Angel's TK2 ending. BTW, when I described the
Angel in "Ashes," I was working off a piece of rendered art in
various TK2 strategy guides - art that did not include her olive
garland. It's included here. What can I say, Lei's a detective, and he
has a better eye for detail than Raiden. ^_^

-Three requests? Since when did I walk into a fairy tale?
   It was seven requests in the first draft, but then I was counting
any question as a "request," and it just didn't work right. The Angel
does not speak often with mortals - the last time she tried to contact
one of her Chosen directly, it was Kazuya Mishima, and he
betrayed her. So, she chooses to find out Lei's greatest desires;
even if she has not the Power to grant them, she will at least have a
better idea of whether history will repeat itself...

Jin's training chamber is, of course, the Heihachi/Julia TK3 stage.
And I get my chance to properly describe the Mokujin; I'll probably
have both of them attacking Jin in some future scene. Lei isn't
going to describe Heihachi very much because this isn't the first
time he's seen Heihachi; when I do get to describe Heihachi in
detail, it'll probably be through Julia's eyes. 
    Jin selects the "male" Mokujin, because he (unconsciously) is
reluctant to fight or hurt anything female, so soon after losing his
mother. For now, the male Mokujin has adopted Kuma's style
(since the bear probably won't personally appear in this story.
Neither will Gun Jack, I think. There will definitely be another
reference or two to Panda, though. :) I don't suppose any of you
know what the writing on the Mokujin's back actually says, do
you...?

"Harden yourself into a weapon that can wound even a god, and
then you will have no further need for sorcery!"
   in Heihachi's plans, once Jin has served his purpose by wounding
Toshin, Jin won't have any need for anything else, ever again...
hehheh. BTW, Heihachi is not keen on Jin studying any sorcery at
all; Heihachi is mistrustful of Jin's Power (and he remembers all
too well how Kazuya used his Power to call the Devil... Heihachi
doesn't give a damn about Jin's soul, but the last thing he'd ever
want to deal with is Devil Kazama!)

Fight scene! The Mokujin starts off with Kuma's ready stance, and
does a basic WS 2 uppercut. Jin tries his sorcery (which he will
eventually modify into his Force defense, b+1+2, although right
now he does it like Jun used to). Heihachi's interruption is akin to
hitting the "pause" button on a home game, so the Mokujin doesn't
switch styles as it would between rounds. Jin attacks with the can-
can kicks (d+3+4), and the Mokujin tries its windmill punches (d,
df, 1, 2, 1, 2). Jin tries to do Lei's play dead, and the Mokujin nails
him with its flying sit-stomp (uf+3+4). And then we find out why
Jin doesn't fight with any of Lei's moves in TK3 (well, I had to
make something up...) Then the Mokujin tries to throw Jin, who
ducks and does his WS(4, 4) axe kick, one of my favorite TK3
moves to use against the CPU, particularly when I'm getting up
from a knockdown.

"a kick that Kazuya Mishima had once used to beat the crap out of
me."
   an axe kick is part of the ten-hit string that Devil Kazuya used to
brutalize Lei in their final battle in "Ashes."

"Is there any way in which you'll help me?"
    It worked for Morrolan and Aliera in "Taltos," when they needed
help from Kelchor, goddess of the cat-centaurs...

*My extended presence upon your world would risk its end.*
   Fortunately for us, our world can withstand the Angel's presence
for brief periods of time - such as in her TK2 ending, or when she
zapped the Shao Kahn in "Ashes." You don't want to push your
luck with her, though. Not ever.

*_I_ can help you no further. But one of my servants may come to
your aid, at the right place and time.*
   While the Angel could theoretically be referring to any of her
surviving Chosen from TK2 (Paul, Heihachi, Yoshimitsu, Gun
Jack, Nina, Marshall Law), it's probably pretty obvious who she
really means... it's just not obvious to Lei. Yet. ^_^

*It is only because you live that you are incapable of knowing my
compassion.*
   I added this line for the final draft. I think it's my favorite line in
the whole chapter.

I elaborated on Xiaoyu's training scene for the final draft,
describing her Phoenix stance into a roll + throw (d+1+2, 1+3).
There's kind of a little duplication here, because I've also called
Lei's b+1+4 (into the hopping side kicks or unblockable Phoenix
kick) his Phoenix stance. Assorted strategy guides now call it his
Phoenix Illusion, which I almost like better as a name, but I'm not
gonna go back and switch it now. Besides, I figure both stances can
be kind of Phoenixy, can't they? A Phoenix would probably get
kind of stiff if it had to stay in the same posture all the time,
wouldn't it?

The interviewer is in the habit of (usually) showing up fifteen
minutes before the hour - you may have noticed that all his
interview times are :45 on the clock. He gets nervous about being
late. BTW, you're not really supposed to know that the interviewer
is a "he"; I let it slip in my last notes, but I believe the actual
chapters have not mentioned that to the rest of my readers yet (nor
will they, explicitly, until the very end).

"Hell, I saved EVERYONE'S ass!"
   -a slight exaggeration perhaps (and Bryan himself admits that he
didn't act alone), but it is true that if he hadn't been involved, Lee
probably would have had to escort all four of the other
interviewees to the Grey Kingdom by now...

"Do you expect me to lie on a couch and talk about my mother?"
   -you will, in fact, learn about Bryan's mother in a future chapter.
She was unmarried, used to take him to a Protestant church (she
stopped after the Great Invasion, and nowadays just about the only
faith Bryan has left is a tendency to take the Lord's name in vain),
and she died when he was fourteen. He doesn't like to talk about it.

I busted more high-level kingpins in the ten years of my career than
even that overglorified alcoholic, Lei Wulong. 
   -Lei's career as a policeman was over twenty-five years compared
to Bryan's ten, but it was only in the last twenty years (i.e. after the
Great Invasion) that Lei really started to earn legendary recognition
as Super Police. Because of Lei's high-profile status as a policeman
and war hero, he couldn't really do as much undercover work
(except in disguise, but that carries its own risks). He was aware of
his reputation, and so he generally preferred to give the collar
credits to his partners/associates/undercover cops who were in the
worst danger, especially credit for nailing the most high-profile
criminals. Bryan's attitude was almost the exact opposite. This is
why Bryan's straight on-paper record is just a little more decorated
than Lei's, even though Lei was Super Police for twice as long.

They were saying stuff like he was fucking bulletproof, he could
fly, he could see in total darkness, he slept with every female cop
on the force, he channeled the soul of Jackie Chan - you do know
who Jackie Chan was, don't you? The movie actor who was
mysteriously murdered ten minutes before midnight on May 19,
2013?
    -Some of the rumors about Lei do have a basis in truth. He still
retains infrared and ultraviolet vision from when Kazuya made him
into a demon, so he really can see in situations where it would be
too dark for a normal person to make out anything. He also retains
the extra toughness & healing rate that Kazuya gave him (he heals
as fast as everyone healed while in the shadow of Shao Kahn's aura
in "Ashes" - which is to say, most injuries less than a broken bone
will mend within 24 hours). This does not make him bulletproof by
any means, however, and if Bryan hadn't intercepted those Glaser
Safety Slugs, Lei probably would have been dead on the floor.
BTW, Lei's healing rate is a hell of a disadvantage for him given
his cancer - his malignant cells are equally tough to kill, and
chemotherapy doesn't work so well against them.
    -Oh yeah, and the Toshin murdered Jackie Chan (hey, it was
going after strong souls en route to Japan...) And here you thought
he'd die in the middle of a stunt one day. It happed the night Lei
returned home by plane, so that Lei didn't hear about it until after
he lost his wife.

The Ivory Claw is a Chinese gang from one of my previous fanfics,
"The Coming of Winter" (MK1 Sub-Zero once assassinated the
Triple Razors, who worked for them). Various other gangs from
my fanfics no longer exist by now... Jax, Sonya & Kabal put away
Kano's Black Dragons (in MK4, Jarek is said to be the last of the
Black Dragons, and that was around eighteen years ago). The Lin
Kuei were taken over by Ultratech; those few that weren't turned
into cyborg slaves or assassinated by Noob Saibot were driven
apart and permanently scattered. And in Killer Instinct 2,
Ultratech's main building was transported 1000 years into the past;
the Mishima syndicate took advantage of the chaos this caused to
absorb the rest of Ultratech in a big-time hostile takeover.
Unfortunately, between sabotage and errant time-travel, a great
deal of Ultratech's incredible technological secrets (such as, say,
the ability to dimension travel to places like Limbo) were lost in
the merger...

Besides, Taki only ferried written messages - higher-up syndicate
mucky-mucks did talk with me directly sometimes, just not very
often.
   -Taki wasn't always Bryan's syndicate contact; she took over the
job about a year and a half ago, after Bryan's last contact suffered
an "accident."

The syndicate would not say words like "heroin" over the phone.
   -I realize there are some slang words for heroin, such as "smack,"
or "horse," but the all sound so... ugh, that I'm reluctant to write
these terms in (the slang has probably changed by the future,
anyway).

Detective Lei Wulong, and a half-dozen of his HKP cronies had
the drop on both me and phone-man, who looked for all the world
like a deer caught in headlights.
   -Bryan actually hit a deer with his car once - annoyed the hell out
of him, too, because he had to cough up quite a bit of change to fix
his car's bodywork.

I've been watching a lot of "NYPD Blue" lately. I wonder if it
shows. The question "You a junkie, <name>?" is in fact straight
out of an episode...

...anyway, here I am saying that Tracy isn't going to have any real
role, and suddenly bingo, she demands an entire dialogue scene
with Bryan! Sometimes I think my opinion doesn't count for
anything when I'm writing this stuff. :) Anyway, Bryan isn't going
to give a detailed description of either Lei or Tracy because he's
usually (not always) more inclined to talk about himself.
    Tracy of Toh Shin Den 2 is the most scantily-clad policewoman
I've ever seen, in a bikini top (with badge), shorts, and some
sparring gear on her hands/feet/elbows/knees. She's older now
though, married, and she's doing regular police duty instead of
participating in some cutthroat fighting tournament, so she tends to
dress like any plainclothes detective these days. BTW one thing I
did want to mention about Tracy - in the game, she has light brown
(well, maybe more golden-brown) hair and green eyes, or at least
she does in her alternate color outfit (her default outfit has blue hair
& blue eyes). Ever notice that absolutely no one in Tekken has
either brown hair or green eyes? Everyone is either
blond/black/red-haired, and has blue/brown/red eyes. So Bryan
refers to Tracy's brown hair & green eyes, just to set her apart from
the TK3 cast. ^_^
     Tracy is Lei's partner in the Hong Kong Police Force (even
though Lei's been promoted to chief, it's more of an honorary
title/pay raise than a bureaucratic commission - he still goes out in
the field a lot, and the HKP like it that way). Her relationship with
Lei is strictly professional; Lei became a seven-day-a-week
workaholic after his wife died, and he hasn't had a romantic
relationship with anyone since. But James Bond-style rumors fly
around about our favorite Super Police, equating his crimefighting
prowess with sexual promiscuity (there's a grain of truth to the
rumors, in that Lei used to be promiscuous a long time ago, before
the Great Invasion). This isn't the first time Tracy has had false
aspersions cast at her, and she's getting rather sick of it. Lei has
offered to put in a good word and a transfer for her, if she'd rather
not put up with the rumors, but she's damned if she's going to let
some #@%* gossip determine who her partner will or will not be.

Phone-man turned three-quarters away from Wulong, extending his
index and middle fingers on level with his face. He brought his
hand down in a swift, chopping motion.
   -this gesture is from the first MK movie; Shang Tsung used it to
sic his guards on our heroes.

Fight scene! Lei uses his brand-new Dragon Fall throw on phone-
man (he learned the throw, as well as all his new moves & stances
at the Temple of Light, and he's been practicing them ever since).
Then he shoots his enemies from the ground with the unbelievable
accuracy of Lei Wulong, Super Police, aided by his night vision
and the fact that most of the bad guys were above our heroes. 
   Bryan rushes the bad guy with is dropping ankle kick (b, b+4),
which leaves them both on the ground. Then he gets up & uses a
hammerlock punch a la Gun Jack, but only because his cuffs
interfere with his usual Muay Thai punches (Bryan prefers the
faster speed of his Muay Thai attacks; this relative slowness of this
move was partly why he couldn't finish it until the knife gashed his
face). When phone-man does an axis shift, Bryan can't compensate
in time, and his usual 4 kick doesn't do him much good. His knee
kick (WS + 3, stuns on counter-hit, though here he doesn't have to
duck & stand to do it) is more helpful. I changed the final draft to a
lethal attack that made more sense - using phone-man's own
weapon against him.

In describing Bryan's wounds, I basically looked at his scars and
extrapolated from there. Hence the facial gash with the knife
(Bryan's left eye is now artificial; Dr. Abel created it), the second
gash from left inner clavicle to waist, and the various gunshot
wounds. Rendered art shows him with 5-6 bullet scars, while I
think in the game he has more like 7. The info on Teflon-coated
ammunition vs stuff like Glaser Safety Slugs is from my Cthullu
Mythos 1990s handbook. Lei was lucky that Bryan was hit with
Glaser Safety Slugs, 'cause if they had been Teflon-coated bullets
then Bryan's body wouldn't have made such good kelvar... >;-)

-Haw and Wa-duck are two names from my Cantonese textbook.

-when Bryan activated the Tekkenshu hotline, they immediately
deduced from what they overheard that he'd been in a lethal
situation. They knew of Bryan's contract (he wasn't the only one
who had signed such, but there weren't too many other people in
prime physical condition who had, and he was the first such person
to die). The Tekkenshu were under standing orders to immediately
place the remains of any under-contract person into cryogenic
suspension, and take them back to the syndicate. And since the
syndicate owns half of the Hong Kong government (and since Lei
was rather caught up in tending to his own wounded), there was
not much Lei could do about it. The Tekkenshu swooped on Bryan
and shunted him into a portable cryogenic chamber seconds after
he lost consciousness (Bryan's heart and lungs had already stopped
about a minute prior to then).

-I originally didn't plan to include a psionic verification session
transcript, although I did know that Jin had arranged for a thorough
investigation of Bryan Fury's death. This is because Jin knows that
Heihachi & Dr. Abel want to use Bryan's remains to create the
prototype for their Cyborg Army. Heihachi has talked Jin into the
"merits" of the Cyborg Army project with the following rationale:
better to have dead soldiers fight than living soldiers who can be
killed in combat, yes? Does this not save lives? Jin is still very
uneasy about the whole thing - he is particularly upset about the
disrespect of reanimating a dead person's body - but he has no
counterarguement to his grandfather's reasoning (yet). He'd never
allow the practice on anyone unless they had signed a notarized
contract of their own free will (and Jin has held psionic verification
sessions with the notarizees, to ensure that Bryan really did sign
that contract freely). 
    However, Jin was *especially* uneasy about using Bryan's
remains in this manner given the suspicious timing of Bryan's
death (which was, in fact, coincidence). Hence the investigation -
Jin deliberately chose Taki because he knew from her emotions
that she wouldn't just gloss over such a thing - and psionic
verification session. Heihachi suspected all along that Jin would
probably do such a thing, which is why Heihachi didn't just order
Bryan (or anyone else who had signed a mortal-remains contract
with the syndicate) assassinated.
    The entire contract idea is from a Babylon 5 episode where
Bester (the Psi-Corps mastermind) persuaded Lyta Alexander (red-
haired telepath) to sign a contract willing her dead body to the Psi-
Corps for study (because the Vorlons had enhanced Lyta's
telepathy), in exchange for name-only membership in the Psi-
Corps (which is critical if one's going to earn a living as a
commercial telepath). Bester did this through contract "because
[Captain] Sheridan would never agree to it otherwise."

The concept of "surface thoughts" is also from Babylon 5. Jin is
not doing anything like a direct mind-probe here - he's just
lowering the barriers he usually keeps to block out other people's
emotions, which is all he needs to know exactly whether someone
is telling the literal truth. He can sometimes pick up on whether
they're telling the whole truth (instead of just part of the truth), but
not always, which is why it is important for him to properly choose
and word his questions, then listen to the responses.

Next chapter: depends on how much I can squeeze in my 28-33
pages, but Mitsurugi will definitely show up, as will Hwoarang in
demonic black leather with raptor hair, and hopefully Xiaoyu in a
big yellow bow!

Chapter 4: Challenges notes
March 5, 1998

Another chapter consisting of only two sections. It's beginning to
look like this whole novel will stretch as long as "Ashes of the
Phoenix". It took a long time to finish this chapter too; I had
college to worry about, and Mitsurugi proved very difficult to
write... perhaps because he's probably the single most sane guy in
the story.

The title is, in fact, the name of the video arcade where I go to play
Tekken 3 (and watch other people play King of Fighters '97). I
know one or two people there who follow my stuff, so they just
might get the in-joke, too. I was playing heavy TK3 the whole
week that I wrapped this chapter up. I've managed to beat the game
on one credit with every char now, just like I did with TK2 when I
wrote "Ashes." :)

The epigraph is from a singularly excellent book about a guy and
his unicorn familiar, in a world where science doesn't work
anymore. How excellent is it? Well, Steven Brust endorsed it in a
cover blurb. OK, so Steven Brust has also endorsed some stuff by
this female author whose work is so dry and blah and blagh that it
was sheer torture to read the first chapter, but hey... anyway, since
both halves of this chapter are about testing power, I figured it was
appropriate. When selecting epigraphs, I try to find something that
will apply to the chapter as a whole instead of one specific
interview/journal entry.

The Tokyo Sunrise is, of course, a newspaper I made up. It was
founded after the Great Invasion; it's one of many businesses
started, controlled, or bought out by the Mishima syndicate,
especially when the syndicate extended itself so "generously" to
help the economic community rebuild after the Great Invasion (a
lot of CEOs all over the world lost their lives to the Shao Kahn!)
Japan also has more widespread newspapers as the commonly-read
Asahi and Mainichi (these are real names) but as far as I know they
don't concentrate specifically on Tokyo. The Mishima syndicate
has powerfully strong influence over them, too, but it doesn't own
them outright - yet. 

Ikebukuro is a western section of Tokyo near Shinjuku. Both
sections are well-know for their tall skyscrapers. I got the names
out of my Compton's encyclopedia on CD-ROM (it's a very helpful
device whenever I want to do any research that's not too specific).

No deaths have been reported, most likely because the business
offices had been closed for the night.
  -from "Sohryuden: Legend of the Dragon Kings" anime, where
one of the heroes turns into a Fire Dragon and burns down a
skyscraper or two. TV news reports no deaths because the area had
been shut down for the night. What works for the Dragon Kings...

Fujisawa, who has a previous conviction for armed robbery and
served six years in prison, was initially taken into custody on
suspicion of arson, but the charge was dropped within two hours of
being made. Police cite lack of evidence.
   -There will be more details mentioned about this incident, and
what happened to Fujisawa, later in the story, but the short version
is: Jin snuck out of the syndicate, alone. Fujisawa tried to rob him.
Jin fought back. *BOOM*. Heihachi's first desire was to have
Fujisawa framed for arson, but Jin said that if that happened, he'd
have to turn himself in. Jin could never let a man suffer a penalty
for a crime he did not commit, not even if he was guilty of a
different crime. Heihachi could not let his family reputation be
tarnished, so he settled for planting bogus line about "faulty
wiring" instead (and grounded Jin for a month. :)

No, no, that's not right. This isn't a diary anymore. This is a
_journal_. Kids keep diaries; adults keep journals!
  -from the comic book "Fish Police." I enjoyed that entire series. It
was really one long, comic novel, with plot twists and secrets kept
secure until close to the end. But when it was over, the writer/artist
(Steve Moncuse) sort of shriveled up and disappeared from comics.
He tried another black and white series that died with the 80s glut,
or was it the 90s glut?

I think at least part of Mitsurugi's character is based partly on
Godai, the struggling underachiever/ "ronin" from Rumiko
Takahashi's "Maison Ikkoku." Difference is, even at the worst
times Godai would never expect his neighbors-from-hell to kill
him, and Mitsurugi has no such security...

Mishima University has got to be the most prestigious college in
all Japan, better than even the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto - in
terms of forming connections, that is. Networking. Business
contacts. Almost all the top corporate CEOs in the country have a
Mishima U degree - well, maybe more like three-fourths, I think I
read that in a magazine somewhere.
   -The universities of Tokyo & Kyoto used to be #1 for business
contacts, but the Mishima syndicate has *really* taken over a huge
part of Japan's business world since the Great Invasion. A little
disaster was exactly what Heihachi needed to tip various balances
of power, buy up/ally/merge with/hostile takeover all sorts of
business, and replace their CEOs with his own people. Anyway,
I'm told that in Japan the hardest part about college is getting into
it. Once you're in, the atmosphere is more relaxed, and networking
is seen as more important than the actual classes. (It's Japanese
high schools that are frantically and fiercely GPA-obsessed.)

Staring at the windows, I noticed that they were all covered with
some kind of black paint; I couldn't see through any of them. 
   -For Jin's benefit. It helps keep him a little more shut off from the
outside world. Hey, it could be worse. They could have
CUBICLES...

"I can show you my IdentiCard. It's in my right front pock-"
  -IdentiCards (an idea I've seen on Babylon 5, in addition to
carrying my student ID around at college) are more widely used
than ever twenty years in the future. You usually have to show
them for any kind of credit card purchase, or any purchase over a
certain dollar amount. Heihachi likes to have ways of keeping track
of/controlling people...

Do you know, I forgot to have Taki introduce herself (i.e. say her
name to Mitsurugi) in the rough draft? Whoops. Gotta keep better
track of who does or doesn't know whose names yet. Taki is
wearing a black version of her blue Kitiara-style outfit, with mask.
She doesn't usually go out in public like this, but she's comfortable
training in this clothing, and she planned to run poor Mitsurugi
ragged from the start. Oh, and Taki always wears a mask. Always.
She only takes it off to eat, and she never eats around other
people... meaning that she usually fasts during the 8-16+ hours a
day she spends on the job. She does have an apartment of her own
outside the syndicate - it's rented under an assumed name, and she's
even managed to keep its existence a secret - where she can dine in
relative peace.

Even though the fabric almost completely covered her, it clung so
tightly that I could see every curve of her muscular thighs, smooth
waist, and especially her bosom

-I always thought Taki's outfits (all of 'em) were so clingy she
might as well be wearing Claudia Silva's bikini... 

Mitsurugi's ancestor's background is straight out of the Soul Edge
storyline (SE Mitsurugi refused to serve any lord, fighting mainly
because he enjoyed it. Modern-day Mitsurugi is much more sane
than his ancestor ever was. :)

The scenes of Mitsurugi's training with Taki are loosely based on
the sword training of the main hero of "Ariel" (the fantasy novel I
took the epigraph from). Mitsurugi's currently wearing a version of
his armored outfit (the "Duncan MacLeod" costume), although his
hair isn't cut the same way, he isn't given to such stern facial
expressions, and he shows his youthful age more than his ancestor
did (SE Mitsurugi was 22, our modern hero is 20). Anyway, sooner
or later I'm sure I'll get a chance to describe Mitsurugi's outfit from
an external point of view, perhaps Julia's.

Then I took a bite of the rock-hard, tasteless stuff, and decided that
this must not count as "eating."
   -in fact, Taki never said that Mitsurugi wouldn't get to eat if he
couldn't get past her, and he was eventually showing some
improvement. Taki's not completely merciless.

details taken directly from Namco's TK3 storyline:
  -Jin Kazama's nickname, "Fatal Lightning" (Jin's actually far too
nice a guy to go around performing fatalities, but other people are
_really scared_ of his powers)
  -Hwoarang's nickname, "Blood Talon" (added into the final draft)
  -the gambling scams Hwoarang ran
  -that Hwoarang's first fight with Jin ended in a humiliating draw
  -that Hwoarang hates Jin's guts

A big computer terminal rested in one corner; its monitor displayed
a screen-saver program that constantly diagramed different
anatomical cross-sections of the human body. 
  -in fact, it's tracing transverse, sagittal, and medial cross-sections,
but Mitsurugi wouldn't know the terminology.

Doctor Abel is in fact 88, according to Namco's official storyline. I
made him Jewish (and an Israeli citizen) 'cause "Abel" is a name
out of the Old Testament. Heihachi permanently secured Abel's
services as part of the alliance he made with the Yad Vashem Self-
Defense Force. As for Abel's personality, well... think Sub-Zero II
without a soul. Namco lists him as having a bitter rivalry with
Doctor Vasconovich, needing brain data from Vasconovich to
complete his Cyborg Army project, and so he sics Bryan Fury on
Yoshimitsu because of Yoshi's ties to Vasconovich. I really don't
have space for all that though, and Bryan Fury's got his own story
to unfold, so I'm not using all those ideas... but Abel and
Vasconovich are definitely rivals. And I gave him olive eyes
because of Tekken's extreme shortage of green-eyed characters.

I can do written translations all right, because I've paid attention in
school and even studied a little on my own, but actually speaking
the stuff is a completely different story. You have to think so much
faster with your mouth than with your fingers, and you can't just
erase muffed syllables, and the natural order of the words is all
screwed up. 
  -this is, in fact, me complaining about learning how to speak
Spanish or Japanese (especially Japanese. :)

well, the last time I saw that look, it was in the eyes of a wild baby
rabbit that my cat had caught. I made Kitty drop the poor thing, but
the baby rabbit didn't try to run away; it just crouched there,
motionless and afraid, and it died within the hour. Infected by the
bacteria that live inside a cat's mouth, or so I was told.
  -our cats are killers. The girl kitty especially. Sometimes they'll
bring home little baby rabbits with scarcely a single wound, and the
little critters will die anyway. I was told about the virulent and
lethal (to little animals) kitty mouth bacteria. Cat scratches are
known to be prone to infection, too.

Well, here's my chance to describe Bryan in his shirtless outfit. I
vastly prefer his vest outfit, but Abel finds it easier to monitor the
respiration, etc. of his prototype without too many layers of cloth
getting in the way. Bryan will get his cool vest outfit later.
Anyway, right now Bryan is under the complete and absolute
control of the Mishima syndicate. Can't even blink or focus his
eyes unless Abel commands/programs him to.

Several animations are taken straight from the game here,
including all the times when Bryan voices his evil laugh. He starts
with his taunting/laughter pose (button 4 when you win), and then
does his "practice swings" intro animation.

"You are not very bright, are you?" Abel snorted.
  -an opponent told me this at one of the Pro-Tour Magic: the
Gathering qualifiers I participated in. :-P

Fight scene! Bryan starts off with his brutal Chains of Misery
throw complete with horrible laugh (d, d/f, d, d/f, 1+2), followed
by his overhead-strike hammer driver (d+1+2). When Mitsurugi
manages to get back up, Bryan tries his so-called "Cheap Trick"
(sidestep, 1~2), but Mitsurugi manages to sidestep *that*. Finally
Mitsurugi starts fighting back, with his d+K, B hitting under
Bryan's F+3 kick. Mitsurugi tries to pounce but Bryan rolls away,
then returns with the Hands of Doom (b+2, 1, 2), which Mitsurugi
blocks. Mitsurugi attacks with his Phoenix Tail overhand sword
swipe (f, f+A+B), but at the same time Bryan connects with his
uppercut linked into the Fisherman's Slam (WS+2, f+2), and since
Mitsurugi's sword is just wood it isn't very effective. Abel
artificially reinforced Bryan's bones when he restored Bryan with
mechanical parts.

Bryan can juggle opponents when they bounce up after the
Fisherman's Slam, but I have to admit that bouncing people is
really weird for a 3D fighting game (more weird than the floating
people of Virtua Fighter? I don't know, at least that can be
explained if VF takes place on the moon...) So in my version, you
don't bounce like a tennis ball after he slams you; you're just so
badly hurt that you have to take whatever he pummels you with.

"You are not my property to kill; you belong to Mishima-sama and
the young master."
  -my favorite line of this chapter. It's been in my head for months.

Is it even possible for a person to be that strong on the outside and
not be strong on the inside, too?
   -here, I think of Mitsurugi and Taki as two characters in Steven
Brust's Brokedown Palace. "She looked at the Countess and saw,
despite her frailty, that there was a core of strength within her. She
looked at Brigitta and wondered if there were a corresponding
weakness."

"Y-you don't mean-? I-I read about the Ikebukuro disaster in the
Tokyo Sunrise, but it said that faulty wiring-"
  -Mitsurugi wasn't living in Tokyo at the time of the disaster (he's
from a small town some fifty miles away) but his father was raised
in Tokyo, and he still subscribes to the Tokyo Sunrise.

Julia's researching her latest paper on, um, I think it's the ancient
Harappan civilization.
  -That's India's earliest known civilization, at least that we have
any artifacts of. They had a water system and houses built on
regular, orderly grids, but very little is known of them for absolute
certain.

That's about two months ago, hm... let me see... no, it isn't that I
don't remember; I'm just trying to match the events to the date.
What day of the week would it have been?
  -I finally got a little pocket reference guide with calenders for
lotsa years, past and future, well past 2018. So I can finally look up
whether a given date is a Monday or what.

Ginza is the so-called "Fifth Avenue" of Japan, very famous
shopping district. (This is also out of my encyclopedia). As for the
Christmas gift, well, it's one of the few things that would get Jin
out of the syndicate and among a crowd of people...

I wasn't sure originally how Jin would wind up separated from his
bodyguards and in a fight with Hwoarang. I thought maybe he'd
sneak out on his own, but realized that after the Ikebukuro disaster,
he'd be much more reluctant to do such a thing. The setup that
resulted served several purposes; plus, I realized that Lei would
want to try to contact Jin ASAP after he arrived in Japan for the
Iron Fist Tournament.

Re: Amaterasu the Sun Goddess
-Jun was not fanatically Shinto, but she did teach Jin about the
religion, as well as plenty of Japanese history & mythology. Jin
regularly practices several Shinto customs, including/especially
rites for honoring the dead.

I still had my wallet in the right side pocket of my pants
  -I know that Japanese school uniforms have pants pockets (or
some of them do) because the uniform-clad chars of "Persona"
have their hands in their pockets from time to time. Well, the
uniforms for boys have pockets, anyway. Dunno about the
uniforms for girls.

When I needed some Japanese names, I took them all from Rumiko
Takahashi's "Mermaid" manga stories. Eijiro is from "Mermaid's
Promise," Nanao is from "Mermaid's Mask," and Yukie is from
"Mermaid's Scar." I want to avoid picking any Japanese names that
happen to be the same as, say, someone from King of Fighters to
avoid possible confusion (hence "Shingo" is straight out).

Yukie's shrill scream sliced through my barriers. I felt a sharp surge
of - no, not quite fear or pain, it was loathing and disgust at being
touched that made her cry out as her opponent firmly grappled her
waist.
  -Yukie is a runaway. She suffered such abuse from her family that
she took to the streets when she was thirteen. She was starving to
death when Hwoarang let her in his gang. She does not have a
romantic relationship with Hwoarang (he's no longer human
enough to feel "love", or even "lust", and she can't bear to be
touched), but she pretends as though she does so that the rest of
Hwoarang's gang will leave her alone, out of deference to their
boss. Hwoarang allows the cherade because Yukie catches rats for
him. 

Jin's problems with getting a pay phone to work are, um, actually
pretty much based on my own experience the first time *I* had to
try a pay phone... damn things refuse to eat my money.

The discourse of treating a ruptured pleural cavity is straight out of
my anatomy textbook, although probably a more creative treatment
of it is in Steven Brust's "Athyra" - he doesn't just say "healing
sorcery," either.

 They sounded like they could be Korean - I know a little of the
language, and I thought I recognized the tones - but it was a dialect
that I had trouble understanding.
 -Jin has trouble recognizing Hwoarang's words because Hwoarang
is actually speaking an ancient version of Korean. (Modern Korean
really doesn't have mutually unintelligible dialects a la Chinese; I
think I read that on a Korean History web site.)

Okay, here's my big chance to describe Hwoarang's cool black
leather outfit with raptor hair! Namco's video game screen really
does give him deathly pale skin, especially for a Korean; in my
storyline, there's a reason for this...

Fight scene approaches... Hwoarang warms up with his high kick
intro animation. Jin has too much of a headache to do either of his
intro animations, though.

 "Your hold on me died with my master, I WON'T BE YOUR
SLAVE!"
 -Hwoarang was Baek's slave. Kazuya controlled Hwoarang
through his control of Baek, but Hwoarang ranked too low as
syndicate soldiers go to show up personally in "Ashes." Lee was so
high in the chain of command that he never spoke directly with
Hwoarang, and probably wouldn't recognize him on sight.

Anyway, fight scene starts! Jin holds off a lot of Hwoarang's
attacks (including the hunting hawk) with his b+1+2 Force. Then...

"Do you know what it is to have a cairn of boulders pressing on
your chest, trapping you for months in the earth and the maggots
and the dark!? _Do you_!?"
-Hwoarang didn't get out until months after the Great Invasion
ended, when the US army exhumed the Mishima syndicate
battleground in order to transport and rebury its own dead. This
will probably be explained in a later chapter.

"Certainly, the rest of his gang looked leery of him as he ranted his
gruesome tirade..."
-Out of Hwoarang's entire gang, only Yukie knows about
Hwoarang's curse, and even she doesn't have all the details. She
just gets him rats...

Back to fight scene! Jin attacks with his Demon's Paw (f, f+2),
Hwoarang blocks and retaliates with his left flamingo stance
Rocket Launcher (f+3, 3 and the flamingo stance is smoothly
incorporated into part of the kick), which is a very useful
retaliation after you block almost any CPU attack. While Jin is
down, Hwoarang gets a ground hit with his Crippler (d/b+4). Jin
tries his hell sweep (f, N, d, d/f+4) but Hwoarang stops it with his
reversal, which works only against low attacks (d+1+2). Then
Hwoarang traps Jin in one of his basic throws, the Pick Pocket
(1+3), and tries to get another ground hit with the hammer heel
(can't remember how it's done right now, but it's a move Baek used
to have). Jin performs a reversal from the ground (not in the game,
like that's gonna stop me :), then does the equivalent of his
Ultimate Tackle followed by three punches and an arm bar (2, 1, 2,
1+2 when they're tackled, I think). Finally, they both connect at the
same time: Jin with his heavy body blow (b, f+2, the equivalent of
Kazuya's WS+2 because it stuns on a counter-hit) and Hwoarang
with his right flamingo stance kick (staggers on counter hit).
Double KO.

Namco's original storyline for Jin's & Hwoarang's first meeting
goes something like this: Jin & the Mishima syndicate were touring
Korea when they ran across Hwoarang's gang and their gambling
scam. Jin accepted Hwoarang's challenge, and after fifteen minutes
their match was declared a draw and they were separated (a time
over draw). Hwoarang was furious for not winning, complained
bitterly to his teacher Baek, and hated Jin & Mishima-style karate
ever since. Then the War God murdered Baek, giving Hwoarang a
second reason to enter the TK3 tournament (the first one being to
kick Jin's ass. :)

Anyway, part of why I take the most creative liberties with
Hwoarang is in order to keep continuity with "Ashes," in which
Seung Mina killed Baek in single combat, twenty years ago. In
Namco's official storyline, Marshall Law was so ticked off at Baek
for beating up his students that Law beat the #$%* out of Baek and
damn near killed him. But at the last second, Paul stopped Law
(Paul really is a good guy at heart), and so Baek got to live another
twenty years.

I'm also taking more liberties with Namco's storyline, though,
because I am simply unthrilled by it. A fifteen-minute time-over
draw? Ffft. Boring. Plus, it's damn rare for a real knock-down drag-
out fight between two people to last that long, unless they're both
adhering to some kind of careful rules (which was the case in
Namco's storyline, I think - Jin's & Hwoarang's fight may have
been in Baek's dojo - but fft). Double KO is much more vicious. In
fact, my Hwoarang is probably much more vicious all around.
Simple plot logistics lead me to color the exact setting and fight
setup as I did, putting it in Japan instead of Korea (Hwoarang
drifted to Japan following rumors that the Mishima syndicate
might restart its Iron Fist Tournament). Also, I needed a reason to
get Jin alone on the streets; at first I thought he might sneak out by
himself, but he's recently gotten into some major trouble and so is
trying to curb his restless side. Lei's first attempt to contact proved
to be a workable distraction.

Oh, are you wondering where Heihachi went to? Well, he officially
renewed the Iron Fist Tournament on December 1, and now he's
off recruiting for it...

Next chapter: Nina/Anna in the syndicate's cryogenic freezers, and
Kazuya & Lee in a flashback...

Chapter 5: Winter Night Sky notes
May 11, 1998

Aieee! This novel was supposed to be _shorter_ than the last one!
Shorter! But now Nina/Anna's story is sucking up a whole chapter
to itself, the maximum 33 pages!!! And it took me over two
months to finish 'cause of college studies and general laziness. I'm
gonna have my work cut out for me this summer. Maybe it says
something about Anna's character, she's so strong and fiercely
vibrant that she holds out for no less than an entire chapter about
her, no space for interviews with anyone else. On the other hand, if
*all* my characters insist for this much page time I'm never gonna
get this novel done... aieee!

The title is from the music lyrics of Nina's Tekken 2 ending, where
both sisters meet at the cemetery: "Winter night sky / nothing can
give you / that sense of harmony." It is beautiful music and, in my
opinion, the most emotionally moving ending of TK2. I've never
particularly liked Nina, but the sadness of her TK2 ending, and the
its hope for reconciliation, always touches something in me no
matter how many times I see it (and I rewatched it many times
while working on this chapter). I feel the winter night sky has a
symbolic meaning for Anna, too. 

In keeping with the pattern of inserting one non-narrative, off-
format piece of text per chapter (Toshin Expedition log in Ch. 1,
newspaper articles in Ch 2 & 4, and a psionic verification session
transcript in Ch. 3), I wanted to add something unusual to this
chapter as well. But there wasn't room. Anna's interview took
almost the whole 33 pages; any more than that, and I won't be able
to post the chapter in 4 or fewer section on the net, so it's sort of
my default maximum size. So to make room, I decided to replace
the usual epigraph with an excerpt from "Rise and Fall of the
Devils" - yes, the very book that Lee loaned to the interviewer in
Ch. 2. It's the first "epigraph" I ever made up. 

I realized it made an ideal introduction because it pointed out
something curious that was never fully explained in "Ashes,"
namely: just *why* was Kazuya such a recluse that he spent almost
every page of the story hiding in his inner sanctum? Answer:
because he was paranoid. Nina DAMN near killed him. The only
reason she didn't break his power was because she didn't challenge
him first, meaning that her attack on him wasn't single combat (it
was just an assassination attempt). Kazuya did not ever, EVER
want to risk an assassin getting that close again (especially after he
made a deal with the Kahn that put his soul at stake!) His inner
sanctum was the one place in the Universe where he felt
completely safe, because no one else could enter it without being
invited in. The small good piece of Kazuya, the part of him that
resisted the Devil, might also have encouraged him to delegate
power to Lee, in hope that Lee would one day turn on him. But by
far the most overpowering motive was fear.

You might note that Doctor Boskonovitch is the author of "Rise
and Fall of the Devils." I figured that if it were that good a
biography, it might well have been written by someone who was
actually part of the syndicate in the Great Invasion. Anyway, the
doctor published it because he needed to raise money for the
research to cure his cryo-frozen daughter. 

Speaking of the Doctor, his name has twenty different spellings if
it has one, and IT'S ALL NAMCO'S FAULT! I spelled it
Vasconovich in "Ashes" because THAT WAS THE SPELLING IN
THE TEKKEN 2 INSTRUCTION MANUAL! WOULD YOU
_IDIOTS_ AT NAMCO KNOW CONTINUITY IF IT _BIT_
YOU!!??
     Rant off. I'm changing the spelling to what it is now that
he's a secret char in Tekken 3, so that game players will recognize
it. But I'm giving him the first initial of "V." just as a subtle
reminder of Namco's idiocy. The good doctor still isn't slated to
show up personally in "Phoenix," although I suppose that could
change. Problem is, he's just not working for the syndicate anymore
(Yoshi's protecting him from that) so there's no immediate way for
him to meet Jin, et. al. There wasn't really room for him to
personally show up in this chapter either. At the time of this
chapter, the doctor's mostly busy slaving on the cryo units and the
Jack-2 armada, although Lee rarely summons him as a healer
because Lee trusts his skill (and adherence to the Hippocratic Oath)
more than any other syndicate employee, medical or otherwise.

List of things/scenes taken directly from Namco's storyline:
  -Nina's title: Silent Assassin
  -Anna's title: Lightning Scarlet (also that she's a college student)
  -four Tekken endings (Nina TK1 & TK2, Anna TK2, Lee TK2)
  -Nina's love of Scotch whisky, tea with milk, Tom from "Tom
and Jerry." 
  -Anna's liking for espresso, and Jerry from "Tom and Jerry"
  -Nina/Anna's fighting style (Aikido)
  -that Nina is the daughter of Irishman Richard Williams & a
British Aikido champion
  -that Anna blew up Nina's car, while Nina machine-gunned
Anna's car

About my interpretation of Anna's background: Namco's storyline
tells us a little about Nina's history, but not very much about Anna.
We know she's Richard Williams' daughter, and Nina's half-sister,
and that Nina/Anna have a violently dysfunctional relationship. But
there's no background on Anna's mother at all. So, I get to fill in
the gaps. I first got the idea of making Anna half Arabian on her
mother's side 'cause Anna's TK2 background featured the Taj
Mahal. (The Taj Mahal is in East India, and the majority of India's
population is Hindu, but over a tenth of 'em are Muslim, and India
as a whole has more Muslim citizens than some Islamic countries).
Anna's lascivious, extravagant, exhibitionist personality (I mean,
she fights blood-sport matches in a *cocktail dress*, and wiggles
her butt when she wins!) has its roots in culture shock, and a lonely
early childhood. The one thing in my picture of Anna that might
directly conflict with a bit of Namco information is that Namco
says Anna likes red wine, and Muslims don't drink. To which I
figure, Anna has a taste for non-alcoholic wines. ^_^
     Other bio summaries of Nina/Anna in various TK1 & TK2
strategy guides suggest that Anna is the more bitter aggressor. One
of my TK2 strategy guide implies that Nina wanted to fight Anna
in the hope that a decisive victory either way would finally settle
their rivalry once and for all. But I can't buy that. Even forgetting
that Nina is the *assassin*, she's the one who *murders people for
money*, I can't help but note that Nina is a *bitch* to her sister in
EVERY Tekken ending where they both show up! Five out of five,
Nina is either smacking Anna around, humiliating her, or pointing
a gun at her! This tells me that Nina is definitely the more screwed
up of the two (although Anna is far from perfect herself...)

 Mama used to cook me alu chole.
  -alu chole is an East Indian vegetarian dish. We had a box of it in
our kitchen; that's where I got the name.

...What if I slip up? What if I accidentally call you by name?
     Mm, so you are editing this. Well, I trust your discretion.
  -the interviewer is deliberately keeping his name out of the
interviews. He feels that having the people he talks to pretend that
he's someone else will help his account stay objective. So even if
someone he interviews were to address him by name, he'd simply
replace that with "you." And if the people he talks to were to speak
about previous encounters with him (encounters from before he
first started this interview project, that is), he'd edit it to read as if
the encounters were with someone else (i.e. have them refer to him
in third person instead of second person).
     Of course, this all has the side effect of letting the readers
wonder who he really is. It'll be revealed at the very end, of course,
though I have no doubt that lots of people will correctly guess the
answer long before then. Anna's flirting with him would suggest
that he's a guy (unless you think Anna is bisexual, and it wouldn't
surprise me if there's a fanfic or two out there that's written her that
way :), even though the interviewer's gender hasn't been explicitly
stated yet (and probably won't be, until the end).

on the fifth day of Raby` al-THaany, 1396 Anno Hegirae, in the
city of Agra - mm? - oh, sorry, that's April 5, 1976 by your
calendar
  -I found a web site, http://bert.cs.pitt.edu/~tawfig/convert/ where
you can learn all about the Islamic calendar. You can also convert
any date back and forth between the two. The Islamic calendar is
lunar (i.e. based on phases of the moon, not the Earth's orbit around
the sun), not solar, and therefore neither tied into the seasons nor
correlational to our Gregorian calendar.

The story of Anna's mother becoming an outcast is strongly
influenced by "The Woman Warrior", a novel of a young woman's
Chinese-American adolescence that we studied in English class.

Isn't that all any of us has ever wanted? To be loved...?
  -What can I say, Anna is a romantic at heart.

Scheherezade was my idol.
  -This is, of course, the woman who told 1001 stories to keep her
husband from murdering her (if he killed her, he wouldn't know the
story's end, now would he?) In the end she lifted the curse that had
made him murder all his other wives (too late for them,
unfortunately) and he let her go home to her family, which is a
happier ending than a lot of Arabian legends have. I had to cruise
half a dozen websites just to find out how to spell her name.

One morning she found a lump in her breast, and then she became
so weak. So sick.
   -this is reworked from "Body Bags", a singularly bloody comic
book about the hit man and the daughter he got stuck with when
her mother passed away. Breast cancer is simply a very common
way for women to die...

I figured that Nina's mother also had to be out of the picture,
although Namco's storyline doesn't say how she died (or even if
she's dead). Since Nina's mother was a champion fighter, I figure
her fate should be an example of what HAPPENS to people who
fight too many blood-sport matches in competitions like the Iron
Fist Tournament! My encyclopedia sez that no one knew how to
screen donated blood for hepatitis C until the mid-80s, so there you
go. Yes, I could have referred to HIV instead, but I don't think it
was as common as hepatitis C in the early 80s... 

     Papa was a rich man.
     Immensely rich...
  -Namco's storyline doesn't say anything about Richard Williams
being, well, rich, but I figure creative license. It definitely gives
Anna a *very* good reason to be resentful of him (over the death
of her mother), IMHO potentially much more powerful than "you
always liked Nina best."

     Do you know, that school had a law against wearing certain
types of religious clothing? They wouldn't let me cover my face
with a veil.
  -I read a newspaper article about a French school that had a
controversy over this, and I figure, hey, that's practically next door
to Ireland. Personally, I think it's wrong to prohibit someone from
wearing the clothing of their religion - it's one thing to say "no, that
T-shirt is too distracting, put on a uniform instead" but it's another
to block a person from expressing their faith. The worst thing is,
such a law might make parents pull their kids from the school
rather than allow them to show up in nonreligious dress, and that
deprives the kids.
  BTW, I'm certain that many other Islamic women in Anna's place
wouldn't have changed so completely in response to culture shock,
but Anna had an extremely lonely childhood, and that contributed a
lot to her love of attention. Even Jin had both parents and critter
friends to keep him company (when he wasn't being overwhelmed
by other people's thoughts, of course).

She stole one of my red high heels. When I confronted her about it,
she slapped me in the face
  -Nina's TK1 ending looks more like sixteen-year-old prank than
an adult one, so instead of having it take place after the TK1
Tournament, I moved it to when the sisters were both younger.

I broke into her room - she had put a lock on the door by then, so I
got in by crawling across the roof and cutting the glass on the
window - and destroyed her entire collection of Tom and Jerry
cartoons. 
  -Before her mother died, Nina used to tape and collect cartoons
off daily TV, just like I once did. Like me, she eventually grew out
of it (i.e. started devoting herself to more lethal pursuits. Well, my
personal pursuits aren't lethal. Except to my poor fanfic chars. :).
Nowadays, though, I'm too lazy to even tape the Mortal
Kombat/Street Fighter cartoons each Saturday. I just buy the MK
cartoons as they come out on video instead.

We all know now that the rumors were greatly exaggerated, but at
the time Heihachi wasn't around to personally disprove them.
  -In fact, Heihachi hid on a mountaintop and didn't come down
until after the Great Invasion was over and his son was safely dead.
>;-)

The next time I saw her, I was just stepping out of the shower. She
surprised me with a camera
  -Again, I'm rearranging timelines a little, setting Anna's TK2
ending just after the TK1 tournament. But Anna got stuck in cryo
during the TK2 tournament anyway, so she wouldn't have had time
to be photographed after it.

I let you and your mother languish in poverty, because she was like
a dream to me - a picture in a book I read a lifetime ago.
   -Also from "The Woman Warrior."

Is there any person in the world who can look Death in the face and
lie?
  -it's an old myth that no one can lie on their deathbed. I reread that
myth in "Black Boy" by Richard Wright, another novel for English
class.

Namco's storyline implied that Richard Williams begged both his
daughters to reconcile their differences when he was on his
deathbed, but Anna was still vengeful, and Nina just figured that a
bone-crunching victory either way would settle the matter. I invoke
creative licence. In my version, even though Richard Williams has
a shady side (i.e. it was his business contacts that helped connect
Nina as an assassin in the first place), he's not really a mafia boss.
At first he didn't know about his daughter's murderous hobby; then
he wasn't sure what to do about it. Now he wants her to stop for the
sake of her soul (when for all I know, Namco's Richard Williams
might have subcontracted Nina to kill people for a piece of the
take).
   In my version, though, I just didn't have room for Richard
Williams to address a plea to Nina on his deathbed. Besides, Nina
had disappeared into a secret match in the Iron Fist Tournament (in
fact, she was busy kicking Paul's butt - Lei has referred to seeing
Nina fight Paul in "Ashes" Ch. 5) and no one could find/notify her
until after he passed away.

The Williams estate includes a small cemetery.
  -Now to write in Nina's TK2 ending - again, it has to take place
during the TK2 Tournament because Nina got stuck in cryo before
the Great Invasion brought the Tournament to an early end. I think
I watched the whole thing fifty times if I did once. Of course, I had
to sort of gloss over how Richard Williams' grave was so humble if
he was really wealthy as all heck...

But this time, I did more than simply sign up and pay the entrance
fee.
  -in order to enter the Iron Fist Tournament, you usually have to
pay an insurance fee to help offset the possible cost of first aid,
hospital care, disposing of your corpse, notifying your next of kin,
etc. This fee can be reduced or negated if you waive your privilege
to medical care, or if you agree to donate your cadaver to the
Mishima University College of Medical Science in the event of
your untimely death (well, officially it's to the college -
unofficially, your vital organs just might get sold on the black
market.) That's how King got in when he was dirt poor.
  You also usually have to qualify in a short match, and the initial
qualification round alone has a nastily high rate of injury/fatality
(Lei referred to this in "Ashes" Ch. 1). The good news is that you
only have to pass the qualification match once. Anna passed her
qualification round in the TK1 Tournament, so she didn't have to
go through another such for the TK2 Tournament. She just had to
renew the entrance fee.

I broke a few arms - simple, clean breaks, the kind that heal easily,
not messy compound fractures.
  -the idea is borrowed from Robert Aspirin's _M.Y.T.H. Inc. in
Action_; the ex-Mob bodyguard Guido talks about his job...

"The young master will give you five minutes,"
  -this is, of course, Lee's TK2 ending written into the story, which
is something I never had the chance to do in "Ashes." A couple
changes, though: naturally Kazuya & Heihachi aren't in jail, the
outside signs/blimps/etc. don't honor Lee, Lee's cutthroat gesture is
transplanted to the very end of the chapter (where he uses it to refer
to Nina), and Lee doesn't smile because he is enslaved & tortured
& miserable. Even so, I made a very strong effort to write the
background description & Lee's appearance accurately. I know, I
know, I swore I wouldn't write Lee in the purple shirt again, but the
actual video game source material has to come first; besides,
Anna's perspective gives me an excuse to rant about how ugly it is.
^_^ 
  BTW, if you look closely at Lee's ending he really does cross his
right leg over his left as he turns. As for the billboards that flicker
in the night sky - be it odd coincidence or subliminal conditioning,
they just *happen* to show five characters who, in my fanfic, have
destinies are critically intertwined with Lee's: Kazuya, Michelle,
Nina, Anna, & the Angel.

I vacillated over trusting him. I think what swayed me was his
looks. I've always been somewhat more inclined to give the benefit
of the doubt to an attractive person of the opposite sex.
  -this is actually *my* personal bias... I don't think of myself as
meaner to plain people, just nicer to attractive people. ^_^

Last Tournament, someone hired her to take out old man Heihachi,
but Kazuya beat her to it.
  -Namco's storyline never explains who hired Nina to assassinate
Heihachi, or Kazuya, although it's easy to believe that they had
enemies. I figure it was Ultratech that had the evil eye on 'em both
(just as Ultratech tried to hire MK1 Sub-Zero to take out Shang
Tsung in "The Coming of Winter.")

I found the place where he most often spent his extended nights: a
dreary little recordkeeping cell
  -this is the same room where Lee fought Liu Kang in "Ashes."
BTW, Lee doesn't have the syndicate's master key on a chain
around his neck because Kazuya hasn't bestowed it on him yet;
Kazuya didn't give Lee complete run of the syndicate until after
Nina's assassination attempt.

Anna gets to show off her blue cocktail dress here; she's wearing
her red one most of the rest of the time. I think a later chapter of
"Phoenix" might well depict her in her new PSX TK3 outfit (the
crazy zebra stripes thing), even though IMHO it does not suit her at
all. Another thing I'm tempted to do is show Anna in the sleeveless
casual jersey she's wearing for Nina's TK1 ending. So many outfits
to show, so few pages to show them in...

"It's... your hair. It's the same color - you cut it short in the same
style - as my wife."
  -Hey, take a look - Anna's short haircut is indeed quite similar to
Jun's. However, Anna dyes her hair black. How do I know this?
Well, if you look at TK1/TK2 Anna, or Nina's TK1 ending, Anna
has black hair, but in the TK3 game and assorted other TK endings
Anna has brown hair. I figure all that time immersed in cryogenic
suspension washed the black dye out of Anna's hair (and Nina's
hair, too - so that Nina's disguise is gone & she's back to being a
blond femme fatale when she wakes up. :)

"Maybe you talked about other women too much?" I suggested,
dryly.
     "No, never..." He shook his head, oblivious to my
innuendo. 
  -ripped off the punchline of a Doonesbury strip. It was too
amusing & subtle a joke not to recycle.

"Five and a half years."
  -Nina/Anna's entanglement with the syndicate actually happened
only a few weeks before the Great Invasion. But the main story of
"Ashes" doesn't get going until six months after the Great Invasion
began, at which point Jun & Lee have been separated for six whole
years. Simple subtraction.

I certainly couldn't read all those little chicken scratches.
  -calling kanji "chicken scratches" is something I lifted out of an
English translation of "Oh, My Goddess!" - personally, I think
kanji is quite beautiful, but a complete HEADACHE to memorize.

My advances had never been rebuffed by a man before. Never.
  -Anna is not exaggerating here (and she can be prone to
exaggeration sometimes - I leave it up to the reader to decide how
popular she *really* was, etc.) But this is partly because Anna has
rarely been the first to make advances on men before - usually, it's
the men who hit on her first (a la her TK3 ending) and she rather
enjoys it, most of the time.

It wasn't until very late in "Ashes" that Lee could hear the trapped
souls during the day. But his sensitivity to them at night increased
exponentially after he personally killed one of them (Michelle).

You've been kind to me, listening to things I couldn't confess to my
closest friend.
  -Lee's closest (only, really) friend is of course Ganryu, who by the
time of "Ashes" has been promoted to replace Tagami as Kazuya's
chief bodyguard. But there's really neither any reason or room for
Ganryu to show up personally in "Phoenix," so I don't see much
point in mentioning his name.

Of course they meant Kazuya Mishima. I've been told that in your
country, "-sama" roughly translates to "Lord" or "Master"
  -I have gotten so many e-mails asking me to clarify what "-sama"
means that I'm tempted to write it in an updated version of the
"Phoenix Reborn" FAQ...

He looked awful. Just awful!
  -Kazuya had servants beat Lee. Kazuya didn't do it himself
because he might have broken Lee's bones all over again, which
would have impinged on Lee's usefulness.

Several details of Anna's meeting with Kazuya are a reprise from
"Ashes," including but not limited to descriptions of Kazuya's
carpeted chamber, inner sanctum, and the portal between them;
Kazuya's invisible throne of sorcerous force; and of course Kazuya
has to invite Anna in before she can enter.

I think I caught a glimpse of him in the previous Iron Fist
Tournament - he'd looked like a vagabond at the time, in his sweat-
stained white jersey, scruffy old blue jeans, and worn red sneakers.
  -This was Kazuya's "street clothes" outfit from TK1, which I
never had the opportunity to work into "Ashes" (as opposed to his
"Ryu without a shirt" look). Although by the time Kazuya faced
Lee in single combat, he had changed into his devil-jacket
flyscreen shirt from TK2 (that was a secret match in another place).

     Mm, here was a man who knew how to dress.
  -To this day, I think there is no classier fighting game character
that TK2 dress suit Kazuya. However, I went to extreme lengths to
describe his dress suit in "Ashes," and I'm kind of reluctant to do it
all over again (I did describe Lee's purple shirt outfit, but it was
just a quick gloss-over without any emotion, so I figured I may as
well write an expanded version here). Besides, it's a real bitch to
explain how he has this orange triangle undershirt under his white
shirt under his dress suit blah blah blah, so instead I skip most of it
in favor of Anna's teasing. (The interviewer really did mumble
something along the lines of whether it was really necessary to give
another at length fashion show of Kazuya's looks. :) I neglected to
mention Kazuya's French cuffs before, though - tsk.
  BTW, when I was writing "Ashes" I called Kazuya's dress suit
navy blue instead of purple because that's the color it appeared to
me in the arcades - probably something to do with the monitor
tinting at various video game machines. And I don't want to go
back and change it now, even if it really does look more purple on
the home version - Lee's the one who wears purple in this chapter
anyway. Though I get work in a bit about purple "dye" later on... :)

"I have summoned you because your half-sister is my enemy."
  -Anna always calls Nina her "sister" because to Anna, ties of
blood and bone are so strong they do not leave Nina half of
anything. Kazuya is more exactingly precise about such matters
though, so he explicitly refers to Nina as Anna's "half-sister."

every once in a while, he would stop me with a reprimand like
"That is _not_ true."
  -Kazuya is not as sensitive a telepath as Jin; his Power has a
lesser range, and he's not usually bombarded by other people's
thoughts unless he attunes himself to listen. But when he does
attune himself, he can tell when someone nearby is lying (a la Jin's
psionic verification sessions).

Although I made some of them up, a lot of the personal details of
Nina are taken out of the game's profile of her. You can see the
color of her eye shadow/lipstick in her TK2 ending. Of course the
racy purple leotard is one of her TK1 costumes, which became
modified into a sexy garter for TK2 and back to a leotard for TK3.
I don't think I'll ever have the chance to show her TK1 fenestrated-
slacks outfit or her TK2 commando outfit, though. I rather like her
vest look in TK3; she'll probably wear that when she shows up
again.

BTW, _Dracula_ is supposed to be written in a similar off-style to
what I'm trying to do here, so I've been meaning to read it. Maybe
over the summer...

     I couldn't read his eyes. He was so much more of a mystery
than Lee; reserved and hidden beneath a cloak of shadows. Did he
feel angry? Threatened? Or did he also desire me?
   -Actually, Kazuya is thinking (It is good that I chose to hold this
audience in private. If this woman were to so openly question my
mental stability in front of my underlings, I would have to destroy
her. And that would be a waste; she truly does desire to protect my
life.)

I sat bolt upright and tried to scream. My voice wouldn't answer. It
shut itself down, <click>, not allowed, no crying allowed.
  -this entire section, up through when Anna remembers what
Kazuya did to her, is very heavily influenced by Margaret
Atwood's _Surfacing_, a book about a woman coming to terms
with her repressed and distorted memories. It is my absolute
favorite of all the books we studied for English 208 (20th Century
literature).

A note about Kazuya's mind control. It worked pretty well on Anna
partly because she was already predisposed to protect his life;
however, sorcery that screws with a person's head tends to have
some nasty side effects. For one thing, it interferes with the ability
to think or reason beyond the narrow logic of the directive. So
overall, Kazuya feels he is better off controlling his troops through
fear than through sorcery (and Kazuya can't create too many death-
links either; they're a serious, lasting drain on his Power.) Also,
sufficient trauma or betrayal can unravel the mind-control
completely - unless you burn out so much of the personality that all
you've got left is a mindless semi-zombie (i.e. Ganryu in "Ashes").
Kazuya wasn't quite as brutal with Anna because he wanted to
leave enough of her intact to serve him, but he put the mind-control
directive in her because he wanted her to be more obedient - no
more flirting with syndicate employees, questioning the sanity of
her superiors, spreading gossip, etc. (c.f. Kazuya's thoughts above).

It took me a while to figure nice, devious circumstances for Nina's
assassination attempt. Namco's storyline just says that when Nina
tried to kill Kazuya, she got sidetracked into a fight with Anna and
then captured/frozen. I figure that since last Tournament, Heihachi
got taken out of the picture before Nina could fight her way up to
him, this time around she's determined to approach Kazuya
differently - she won't wait to earn a match against him before she
makes her move. Which was in fact a wise decision, because
Kazuya eventually did suspend the TK2 Tournament for the Great
Invasion (the only TK2 fighters who got to challenge him before it
were Wang Jinrey and Lei Wulong - and neither one because they
fought their way through the Tournament ranks. Wang just
confronted Kazuya, and Lei was trying to arrest Kazuya).
  Anyway, if Nina's that good an assassin then why shouldn't she be
a master of disguise? Ultratech grew a bio-mimetic clone of her to
use as a distraction, but a newly created clone doesn't have the
fighting experience of the real Nina. Which is why Lei Wulong had
a much easier time of his fight than he should have. Lei's match
with Nina has been referred to in "Ashes." I figure there has to be a
reason why Lei never knew he was fighting a clone (or anything
else of Nina's assassination attempt), and that reason was because
he was too drunk to tell.
  Kazuya wanted to watch this match in person because he has
begun to take an interest in Lei, suspecting that there is more to
Lei's potential than the disparaging reports he has heard. Kazuya
can't read a person's mind from very far away, though, so he wants
to be just close enough to pick up some surface thoughts during
Lei's fight. Kazuya also is preparing himself to capture Nina and
mind-probe the truth about his enemies (kill two birds with one
stone.)

Kazuya's telepathy wasn't enough to warn him about the false
Tagami, though - if not for Anna's outcry, Nina's sword would have
taken off his head instead of just slashing his throat. Nina is a
professional; she knows how to wear a disguise first from the
inside, and keep strong emotions of any kind out her thoughts
(except when she gets mixed up in a fight with Anna, that is). Plus
Kazuya never had any suspicions of Tagami in the first place; he
tends to ignore his servants.

OK, now here's the first *real* fight scene (if you don't count
pseudo-Nina's battle with Lei - pseudo-Nina tried her Twisted
Mind d+3+4 on Lei, who later returned with his WS 4 front kick,
when Anna wasn't too out of it to watch them). Unfortunately,
Anna is severely hampered by Kazuya's mind control, so she can't
be as effective as usual.
  Anna reverses Nina's sword strike (b+1+4), and when Nina tries
another Sophitia-style B slash, Anna sidesteps around it and attacks
with her Cross Cut Saw (B+1, 1, 1) but before the first hit can
connect Nina thwacks her. That stuns Anna long enough for Nina
to snatch her in the Embracing Elbow Strike (d/f, d/f+1). The knife
that Anna produces is something you can see her carry in a certain
piece of rendered TK3 art; but Nina's already prepared herself with
the antidote to the syndicate's tranq drug, so now Anna is really in
for it when Nina does a multithrow! Specifically, she does her Crab
Claw (QCF+3+4) to Achilles Tendon Lock (3+4, 4, 2, 1+2) to
Knee Cross Lock (3, 1, 4, 2+4). This sequence is hard to do in the
game because you have to hit the buttons VERY fast, before I
wrote it up I got it to work once in practice mode after dozens of
tries. This is *not* the last time you'll see Nina perform an
excruciatingly brutal multi, either; I think her next one will be the
four-part ending in double neck snap, hehheh...

His grotesque free hand dug into her mouth, clenched on
something, ripped it out and threw it away, I saw it bounce in the
far corner amidst a dribble of oral blood. It was a single tooth.
  -Devil Kazuya ripped out Nina's cyanide capsule before she could
kill herself. In my fanfic, the Devil's laser is *so* powerful that
when it hits you *you lose*, you can't do anything, you can't even
bite down on your jaw until you've had time to recover.

Bile gathered in my mouth, as if I were watching something
reprehensible, perverted, obscene, even though the only physical
contact between the Devil and his victim was that of his hands on
her face and hair-
  -this general concept is from _Dragonsbane_ by Barbara Hambly,
although that novel described a scene where a female energy
vampire drained the life force of an unfortunate male slave.

"You BEAST!" I spat, over the satisfying <whack> of the impact.
   -Anna does a new TK3 move called Shut Up (b, d/b, d, d/f+2),
which looks sort of like a woman's anime-style vengeance slap to
the second power. Sends the victim flying, too. :)

Cool water splashed on my face.
  -I looked at the film fragment of Nina being revived from cryo in
the TK3 intro movie before I wrote this, but there wasn't much
space for or point in going through an elaborate description of the
apparatus.

"You also smacked him in the face. In front of his guards. My
brother heals quickly, but he never forgives an insult."
  -Lee knows that Kazuya regenerates quickly from injuries (if they
don't kill him first) but he doesn't yet know of Kazuya's ability to
heal other people as well - it's a Power that Kazuya never used on
or around Lee until late in the Great Invasion.

"I've fixed the controls so that nothing can override them, not even
my own command."
  -the controls for Anna's (and Nina's) capsules, that is; the Lazarus
procedure would affect the rest of cryogenic unit Alpha normally.
Well, there has to be an explanation why Nina/Anna didn't wake up
with everyone else at the end of "Ashes."

"I don't know exactly what my brother arranged to do to Ultratech,
but I can tell you one thing: their central headquarters is gone."
  -In keeping with the Killer Instinct 2 storyline, Ultratech's
headquarters has in fact been ripped off its foundation and hurled
2000 years in the past, where surviving and new KI chars battled
the demon overlord Gargos. And what was Kazuya's role in all
this? Well, for one thing he can teleport people without touching
them... people such as a certain beautiful but deadly B. Orchid,
who just needed to get close enough to the heart of Ultratech in
order to wreak havoc upon their evil plans...

"Either you put her to sleep for a hundred years too, or kill us both
now and get it over with!"
  -Namco's storyline originally was that Nina was put to sleep, and
Anna begged Kazuya to be put to sleep next to her rather than grow
old while Nina remained young. I think that's a little iffy, though.
Kazuya pitched his own father off cliff; he'd be more likely to want
Nina dead. And Lee would definitely sooner save Anna than Nina.
I like my version better. ^_^

"Her voice does resemble yours."
  -heck, in the arcade Nina/Anna's voice is exactly the same, even if
they're different in the home version of TK3. 

I mean, of course it hasn't stayed the same - I can't believe platform
shoes are back, they are the most ridiculously clunky things I have
ever seen
  -and living heck, does Tiger ever look dorky in them. :-P

Next chapter: Xiaoyu kicks ass! No, really this time! Do I get to
write a section that doesn't run long yet...?