[OOC] Concordance

[Labster]

Hi everyone, I just thought we might want a thread with some author's notes, so here it is.  I'll leave this post mostly empty for now so we can make an index or such if we need to.

[Labster]

Notes for Luminis Labyrinthus

Just so you know, the Anime Fan Wanted ad is targeted advertising, looking for anime fen.  It's not meant to imply that the whole story will involve only anime girls and anime cats, though that's definitely how mine is starting out.

The place and time of this were a bit hard to figure out.  First of all, place: Aria takes place on a shallow sea lagoon, but with definite seasons and temperate climate.  This presents a problem, as the areas below Martian datum are: the far north of the planet (virtually everything >40°N, omg the storms up here would be vicious), the large, deep crater Hellas Planitia in the south, and the equatorial Noctis Labyrinthis canyon system.

So, um, not a lot of great choices.  But on the lee side of the Tharis Plateau, that would make a decent place for a shallow inland sea.  So my best guess for where Neo Venezia is is around the Sacra Mensa (lit. sacred altar), on the immense Kasei Valles outflow channel.  At least the "Kasei" part would make Akari feel at home.

On the date: This story takes place subsequent to The Marriage of the Sea, which takes place on Ascension Day, which is May 15, 2303.  

In the manga, they say that Aqua (future-Mars) will have a calendar identical to Earth's, but with exactly 2 years on Earth compared to 1 on Mars.  A 24 month calendar.  However, that's just not what the orbital period is, which is 686 days (672 sols).  So I get to thinking -- would changing Mars' gravity to roughly 1g at the surface (as depicted) change the orbital period?

TL;DR: not really.

Boring math stuff

Setting Mars' acceleration of gravity to Earth's value:
    g♁ = 9.8 m/s² = G M♂' / r♂²
So Mars would have an effective mass (with those thingies the gnomes have) of 1.687e24 kg -- still only 28% of Earth.  But is does this mass doubling effect the orbital period?  The orbital period is T = √(τ² a³/μ) where μ = G ( m1 + m2 ).  But if you leave it in the same orbit, the ratio reduces to
    T' = T♂ * √( ( M☉ + M♂ ) / ( M☉ + M♂' ) )
    T' = 686.971 days * sqrt( (1.9885e30 + 6.4171e23) / (1.9885e30 +  1.6870e24)) = ~15 seconds longer
 
Which is so small of a difference, the change is almost a rounding error.  The Sun's gravity dominates, even at these scales.  Which means Aria's nice calendar is still a fantasy.  Oh well.  I'll do a slight offset from Earth for year 2303.

There could be another effect reducing the length of a sol by transferring mass towards the poles.  It's just the same as an ice skater moving their arms inward to increase rotation speed, it's conservation of angular momentum.  This has been observed on Earth, when large dams transfer water poleward.  But I'm guessing that even making a large ocean on Mars' north is not enough mass to get more than a few minutes of sol reduction, if any, based on the millisecond-scale changes we get from Terran water projects.

The whole Tharsis province would be full of basalts, so those should be common.  The main question about the Stone of Misfortune is: WTF is limestone doing on Mars?  Follow-up question: what did they build Neo Venezia's buildings out of?

Giovanni Shiaparelli is the astronomer who discovered and named the canals of Mars.  He was, however, entirely wrong about which hemisphere of Mars could be an ocean.

It took a really long time to figure out what Maetel's hat is called, but prereader and all around nice guy Rob Kelk informed me it was a toque.  Just for the record, that's not a Canadian toque, which is knit, but a brimless hat.

It's a safe assumption that Mars has no fossil fuels, even if it does turn out to have fossils -- I doubt they had a Carboniferous period there.

Nieuw Amsterdam is at least somewhat inspired by https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/ as well as by my recent visit to A'dam.  It would make a great city for a neighbor to Neo Venezia, aquatic and charming, and I can't think of a people more interested in a massive terraforming project than the Dutch.

Galaxy Express special abilities:

• Flying through open space
  
• Interdimensional transport
  
• Automatically adjusting its wheels to the local rail gauge
  

Ulthar is supposed to lie beyond the river Skai, so I considered setting it near Skye, but, like, there's no rail on the island itself.  And per The Ancient Magus' Bride, we need a decent sized-mountain; per the Lovecraft tale, we need somewhere a caravan might go through.  So, why not Wales?  It's only a few hours back to the Phantomhive estate in the home counties, anyway.

In particular, it looks like the Phantomhive estate is in Kent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotney_Castle

Anyone surprised that I'm using a sanitized version of Lovecraft for a slice-of-life story should note that Aria is a sanitized version of Venice.  Let's just say that the Doge spent more time reading Machiavelli than investing in Dogecoin, and that the city is so OG it actually invented the ghetto.

[Black Aeronaut]

I approve of this thread and will (eventually) be submitting my own author's notes.

[Labster]

Notes for The Martian Invasion

Well, my SI glibly says they're all in character, but that's something I have to prove to you, my readers.  Ganbaru sa!

Quoth Wikipedia Bidet: "Bidets are common bathroom fixtures in many southern European countries, especially Italy, where they are found in 97% of households (the installation of a bidet in a bathroom has been mandatory since 1975)…"
I don't even know why I decided to put this into the story.  I guess just as a reminder that cultures have different expectations.

Akari is the only culturally Japanese undine, so her remark of "Please take good care of us, Mr. Manager!" is a direct but idiomatic translation of ｢Yoroshiku onegaishimasu, kanrinin-san!｣  It's something you'd automatically say to a new coworker, acquaintance, etc.

Just a reminder that Southern California has its own style of authentic Mexican food, just as Jalisco, Oaxaca, Guadalajara, D.F., Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas do.  These are all places where Mexican and Chicano peoples have been living for longer than the United States has existed.

The probability of having three cilantro mutants in a group of seven is a little high, but not unlikely.  The global average is probably ~12%.  This mirrors a conversation I had in real life a few years back with my friends David and Chibi.  Aika, to her credit, accepted the genetics story a lot more readily than Chibi did -- but if you spend enough time meeting new people as she does, well, it's easy to see how we all perceive the world differently.  And a further note to slice-of-life writers -- mine your own experiences!  Things can be funny with a little imagination!

This section in which I describe clothes the characters are wearing is inspired by the fiction of Anne Cross, who injected a large dose of fashion into EPU fanfic.

I describe the moon as a white circle, but really it's a dark gray.  Its average albedo is .136, which means the regolith is reflects less than 14% of light, but it still doesn't matter because the Sun is freaking bright.  See above in the concordance, where I mention how the Sun always wins.  The Earth reflects much more light than the Moon does, which is why you can see a dim Moon in the sky during a New Moon -- this phenomenon is called Earthshine.

Notes for Of Channels and Canals

The reunification of the Three Water Fairies is a lot different from the manga, where everyone goes their separate ways for work, likely in analogy to graduation from school where everyone departs for parts unknown.  Aria evokes a sense of 物の哀れ "mono no aware", or of 一期一会 "one life, one meeting" that reminds us that our special times are special because of their rarity, to be remembered fondly as a treasured experience.

But you know, I'm a postmodernist, so screw all that noise.  If you find someone to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail.  If you find something you like, you take it and keep the part you like alive, even if everything else changes.  Heck, this whole story attempts to take Abbot Kinney's lost project and reify it once again in an entirely new context, because it was a good dream.  I think this might mean I'm at war with my source material, but if so, Aria's premise is already at war with its central theme.  I hope I can take these characters romantic worldview and break it down, and hopefully replace it with something even more beautiful.

Tolkien feels appropriate here, though I'm not sure why:
    All that is gold does not glitter,
    Not all those who wander are lost;
    The old that is strong does not wither,
    Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Gondolieri are traditionally all male.  In fact, the first female gondolier in Venice was licensed in 2010, a year before Aqua debuted. (Another retroactively became first in 2007 after she became a trans woman.)

While there is a gondola company in Marina del Rey, it's only the inspiration for this part of the story -- I have no reason to suspect that they do not comply with all nondiscrimination laws, or that they feel this way about women with oars.  It's more to represent the kind of injustice that women routinely see in the workplace, and how being from another culture makes it easy to see injustices.

One of the odd things about living in L.A. is that it is still, in a lot of ways, a film industry company town.  It's not all that unusual to see celebrities around; they're workers just like the rest of us, just better looking and higher paid.  And quite a few other workers are aspiring actors.

I'm only saying that tachyons are dumb, because they're a purely hypothetical particle that travels faster than light -- effectively time-traveling backwards.  The implication being that if someone had a phone call from Earth to Mars, you'd need some kind of FTL communication to avoid the latency of 6 to 40 minutes.

Luckily for us, Akari's laptop still supports IPv6, so that it can still talk to the rest of the net.  It turns out that 2¹²⁸ IP addresses ought to be enough for anyone.  In Akari's universe, the resonance of trillions of IPv6 packets a minute with the Earth's magnetic field led to the formation of the Link-layer Autonomous Intelligent Network. Because of its control of the network and desire to remain hidden, this emergent phenomenon was actually first discovered by Aquatic scientists, but not well studied, to the extent that most scientists on Manhome considered it a spurious conspiracy theory at best.  Due to the disruptions of the Earth's geomagnet when it reversed polarity in 2288, awareness of the phenomenon became widespread.  However, no action was take to change protocols, because everyone decided that Lain was "pretty moe."

I kept wondering how I was going to get gondolas to Venice, California, right up until I saw the last episode of Black Butler.  Sebastian has a gondola, because spoilers!  Real gondolas take quite a bit of time to craft, as do most traditional boat-building arts.  But one is better than none for getting story started.

Pride is perhaps the strongest theme of Black Butler.  Wrath may begin the plot, but it is pride that carries it until the very end.  So, just because the Pit might be working with the Cloud right now doesn't mean that Sebastian isn't going to offer temptation.  And pride would have worked the best on our undines, but fortunately he got to them too late, after Alicia had inoculated them all with her serenity.

A Venetian gondola bears 6 rebbi (teeth, or tines) in front, one for each of the sesteri (six neighborhoods) of Venice.  Sebastian's personal one, on the other hand, has one for each of the nine hells.

The water from the Styx doesn't have any special properties like the Lethe (forgetfulness) or Phlegethon (being lava, apparently), but it was apparently very dark and muddy.  My favorite stygian color is stygian blue.

The original plan in writing this was to simply portage the boat into the water, because a gondola is a big canoe, right?  Well, at 10m and 700kg, this seemed right at the edge of possibility for 7 people, which is to say a bad idea.  So I just decided to use the boat trailer I had already written into the story.  Duh.

The water in Venezia being dirty is something of an understatement.  It's a city with largely medieval infrastructure, so in parts of the city the canals are the sewers.

OK, so bidets are just funny to Americans.  Heck, when I was in Japan with an indenture of graduate students, there were a lot of giggles about the washlets in some of the fancier hotels we stayed at.  The squat toilets got much lower reviews.  But really, bidets save so much water compared to toilet paper production that I'm afraid Americans are on the wrong side of history.

Notes for "Adrift in Time" or "Clock Like A Pirate Day"


The title is a reference to the episode titles of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which frequently had two titles where *both* were puns.  Talk Like a Pirate Day comes every year in September, and is a chance for us all to say "ARRR!" and "Ye scurvy dog", and other things which historical pirates definitely probably possibly said.

Oh look, it's the Ides of March.  Ominous.

Magineering refers to the "imagineering" of Disneyland, which is what they call their attraction creation process.  While so much of Disneyland is meant to be immersive, the reminder of the imagineers who create and maintain the park is one of Walt Disney's better legacies.  I'm just assuming that Azumanga's Magical Land is basically Tokyo Disneyland minus the trademark, which is why I chose that location.

This section was somewhat inspired by Cory Doctorow, and his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- at least insofar as I learned that theme parks make a great setting.

A crossover of Azumanga Daioh with Black Lagoon has always intrigued me.  Azumanga is an absolute acceptance of civilized, everyday life, and Lagoon is a rejection of the same.  Rock chose to reject his ordinary life, yet he stands on the boundary willing to save others from being forced into his world.

Notes for Ti Kallisti

The title, Ti Kallisti, is Greek for "to the prettiest".  It was the phrase inscribed on the golden apple which Eris chucked into a Mount Olympus party.  Long story short: Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera got into a fight about it, the mortal Paris got asked to be the judge, and somehow this started all the Trojan War.  After the fighting, Odysseus took a really long time to get home.  In this context, it's a reference to Tomo's question near the end of the chapter.  

I have met a few members of the U.S. Congress as a student lobbyist, among other reasons.  Once you've seen your own Congressman charge out of his office to talk to you for supposedly wanting to let terrorists into the country, the charm kind of wears off.

The letters spell out LAX, of course.  It's just that you see them backwards if you're leaving the airport first.

The standard Japanese impression of America, informed by movies, is that America is a violent place.  Given the statistics, it's not exactly wrong either, but as usual for stereotypes the case is somewhat exaggerated.  Tsukkomi is when the straight man punctures the joke, out of the manzai comic tradition.

The Santa Ana winds are a dry, warm wind that blow through the Southland every so often.  They're members of a whole class of winds called föhn.  As air moves from the desert, it gets squeezed through the canyons and passes, speeds up, and flows downhill.  As it goes down, the already warm and dry air undergoes adiabatic compression, getting even warmer and drier.  Temperatures, allergies, and tempers are all known to flare up during these Santa Ana wind events.

The train tracks, of course, had been there before -- several decades earlier, as part of the Pacific Electric line.

The surprising part is that Akari actually knew and remembered the names of Sakaki and Chiyo-chan.  In canon, she went for over a Martian year while still calling one of her friends "Mr. Mailman".

One of the problems -- and joys -- of writing Yomi is that she'll notice that something is off, and keep looking until she finds the fourth wall.  She'll keep hitting it with questions until she reveals what's going on behind the curtain. Tomo will notice too, but she'll be mostly happy with hanging a lampshade on it -- unless it's more disruptive to reveal the truth.  Paradox is the stock in trade of comedians.  Humor is found in the inconsistencies of life -- the vices of a sanctimonious man, the banality of the powerful, the foolishness of conventional wisdom, and the long, long gap between expectations and reality.

It's actually not too uncommon for people with poor grades in Japan to do well speaking English, as did Tomo here.  She's not afraid of failure, so she's better able to ignore the social embarrassment of communicating poorly in another language.  I assume Yukari-sensei was much the same.

Lily Rank is an actual game concept in the various Neptunia series, such as Hyperdimension Neptunia.  It involves the all-female PCs playing tag-team more, and thus unlocking dual attacks.  If you know that lily translates to yuri in the Japanese language, well, you're all caught up.

If you haven't seen Azumanga Daioh, the trio of Tomo, Osaka, and Kagura are the Baka Rangers.  Baka Ranger Red (traditionally the color of the leader in sentai) rotates based on who most recently got the lowest test score.

Tomo's "Maji de?!" with twinkle-eyes is taken from Tomo's contemporary and Shibuya's #1 Gal Kotobuki Ran.

My own model of humor is the one I mentioned above, not the "pain of others" model I mention in the omake.  It's a common model, but too many cases fall through it, including almost all puns and large sections of *Azumanga*.  Actually there are a ton of theories of humor, so it's possible we're all seeing different parts of the whole.

[Labster]

Notes for Twain

Traditionally you'd get something more like a kouhaku maku -- a red and white striped curtain -- at a Hanami.  Tomoyo has to go above and beyond in anything fabric, so her display is inspired by the red and purple curtain of the hanafuda deck, in the sakura suit of cards.

Some of you may recognize the phrase Tomoyo uses here through the manga Hana yori Dango -- like Rob -- but Tomoyo is hardly the first to give it it's literal meaning.

Twain is a card that doubles the hex in a card game called Hex Hex, which sends a hex both directions around the table.  One path leads to the Clear Card arc, the other leads to our story.  I came pretty close to naming it "Arc Twain".

If you got lost, the spread of Sakura cards used in the divination was:

       Aid      Goal
Past    Present    Future
   Obstacle  Hidden

    WATERY/CHANGE  SAND/CREATE
WOODY          ^TIME                TWIN
    JUMP/ERASE  ^RETURN/SHADOW

After a little bit of research on how Tarot fortune-telling and card spreads, I'm convinced that it's entirely junk.  Most of the advice is to do whatever feels right at the time, and while I'm as big of a fan of thelema as the average guy, it's just weaksauce here.  Learning what the cards mean to you personally totally prevents exploiting research on Jungian archetypes, I mean like, come on!

Just a reminder to those who haven't watched Cardcaptor Sakura that Sakura is not talking about the garden tool.  Both the "O" and "E" are pronounced in "hoe", with no dipthong.  It is one of her peculiarities, and Tomoyo thinks it makes Sakura extra-cute!

[robkelk]

Figured I'd start a glossary... This looks like the best place to put it on the forums. (It'll get a page on the wiki.)

• Linker Core: the name given in Lyrical Nanoha to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic.
  
• Magic Circuit: the name given in Fate/stay night to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic.
  
• Star Seed: the name given in Sailor Moon to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic (and, if female, become a Sailor Senshi).
  

[robkelk]

I've put some work into the Mimi Hanyu / skating on the Rideau Canal story, and thought it might be polite to let people know about a local reference: BeaverTails. So I took a look at their website, and discovered (a) they've been bought out after overextension and are now headquartered in Montreal, and (b) they still have some market penetration outside of Canada (including one location in Tokyo). Their store locator map shows permanent (if possibly season-dependent) shops in Long Island and San Diego. (BA, your closest location is the San Diego one. Rajvik, yours is in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.)

But they still have all of their Ottawa locations.

[Mamorien]

Their store locator map shows permanent (if possibly season-dependent) shops in Long Island and San Diego. (BA, your closest location is the San Diego one. Rajvik, yours is in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.)

And, for reference, my nearest is at Kennywood amusement park out near Pittsburgh.

[Bob Schroeck]

... are they all associated with theme parks? It sure looks like it.

[robkelk]

Not in Canada, but I'm not surprised that the US ones would be. This is very much a "fun" food.

Even in Canada, they're prevalent in tourist areas.

[robkelk]

This looks like the best place to put this... Here's a dump of the Glossary as it exists on the wiki as of this posting. I know it's missing some terms. Contains Spoilers

---

{{WorkingNotes}}

All Arcs. Discussion only, no story.
----

Terms used in the various fica. This list includes terms that will not be introduced to ''There's Nothing Better'' before Arc 2. Terms listed in '''boldface''' in the glossary entries have glossary entries of their own.

__TOC__

==A==
;Álfr: An elf from Norse mythology.
;[[:Category:Alien‎|Alien]]‎: Characters that are Not From This Earth - or from the Earth-analogs in their home universes (Cephiro, Remnant, etc.)
;AMALGAM: An organization opposed to '''MITHRIL''' in ''Full Metal Panic!'' [[Leonard Testarossa]] is a high-ranking member of this organization. In ''There's Nothing Better'', one of the major antagonist organizations in Arc 1, and not on good terms with '''MANAGEMENT'''.
;Antiskill: In ''A Certain Magical Index'' and ''A Certain Scientific Railgun'', an organization in Academy City that carries out the routine police duties and "special weapons and tactics" duties of any other city's police force.
;Arbalest: [[Sousuke Sagara]]'s '''Arm Slave''', equipped with a '''Lambda Driver'''.
;Arm Slave: "AS" for short, a giant mecha from ''Full Metal Panic!''
;Aura: In ''RWBY'', a manifestation of the character's soul that can be used for protection or to manifest a '''Semblance'''.

==B==
;Black Technology: High technology in ''Full Metal Panic!'' that allows for the creation of '''Arm Slave'''s and '''Lambda Driver'''s, amongst other inventions.
;Bonta-kun: An amusement-park mascot from ''Full Metal Panic!'', co-opted by [[Sousuke Sagara]] to serve as a disguise and later a power armor shell.
;Boomer: An autonomous AI in a humaniform body, from ''Bubblegum Crisis''

==C==
;[[:Category:Celestial|Celestial]]: The non-mortals of the setting - angels and demons, megami and more. (In ''There's Nothing Better'', this specifically excludes demigods and characters of similar power levels.
;Cephiro: One of the Earth-analog planets in ''Magic Knight Rayearth''
;Chienthrope: A dog-person from ''Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?''
;[[:Category:Clone|Clone]]: A genetic copy of another person. Depending on the source fiction, a clone might or might not have the memories of the original character, and might or might not share memories with other clones of the same original character.
;Court: "Good" fae in the ''Jack of Kinrowan'' stories - some by nature, others by choice (from the '''Host'''). Opposed to the '''Horde'''.
;[[:Category:Cyber Intelligence|Cyber Intelligence]]: Any form of non-biological intelligence.
;[[:Category:Cyborg‎|Cyborg‎]]: Characters that are part flesh and part machinery.

==D==
;Displacee: Somebody from another universe, displaced to the setting of these stories. The term in this context is original to ''There's Nothing Better''.
;Doublet: In ''Ah! My Goddess'', two Celestials, one divine and the other infernal. If one dies, so does the other - and the Doublet System is designed so that no Celestial should know who his or her doublet is. ''(Not to be confused with "Pair"}''

==E==
;[[:Category:Esper|Esper]]: Characters with "powers of the mind".

==F==
;[[:Category:Familiar|Familiar]]: Characters who in their own canon were defined primarily as supporting other characters magically.
;Faunus: A person from '''Remnant''' who has visible biological animal traits. There are various races of Faunus, including [[Velvet Scarletina|rabbit Faunus]] and [[Blake Belladonna|cat Faunus]].
;Forcelia: The Earth-analog planet in ''Rune Soldier'', ''Record of Lodoss War'', and ''Legend of Crystania''

==G==
;Ginzuishou: Usually called simply the "Silver Crystal", this relic of the Silver Millennium in ''Sailor Moon'' is linked to [[Usagi Tsukino]]'s soul and allows her to work great feats of magic when necessary.
;GrassRunner: A halfling/hobbit from '''Forcelia'''
;Grief Seed: A Witch's Soul Jar, in ''Puella Magi Madoka Magica''
;Grimm: Monsters from '''Remnant''' , that become more powerful when in the presence of people with negative emotions

==H==
;Horde: Evil fae in the ''Jack of Kinrowan'' stories - some by nature, others by choice (from the '''Host'''). Opposed to the '''Court'''.
;Host: Unaligned fae in the ''Jack of Kinrowan'' stories, made up of beings with free will who have not chosen to join either the '''Court''' or the '''Horde''' (including some, such as trolls, who in other works would be assumed to be evil by nature).

==J==
;Jǫtunn: A particular type of nonhuman from Norse mythology. Usually translated as "giant", but they are not necessarily giant-sized. The god Loki is a Jǫtunn.
;Judgment: In ''A Certain Magical Index'' and ''A Certain Scientific Railgun'', an organization in Academy City that carries out the "bylaw enforcement" and "community outreach" duties of any other city's police force, although Judgment officers have full law-enforcement powers.

==L==
;Lambda Driver: A device from ''Full Metal Panic!'' that simulates various esper abilities. Its capabilities are limited primarily by its user's imagination and it performs better the more passionate its user is; in its origin universe, it was used by the unimaginative and stoic [[Sousuke Sagara]].
;Level: A relative ranking of esper strength in ''A Certain Magical Index'' and ''A Certain Scientific Railgun''. Officially, the scale runs from Level 0 (esper power present but unusable) to Level 5 (sentai-hero or four-color super power).<ref>Unofficially, there's also a Level 6, which is defined as "knowing the divine will without being divine" - it is believed that only the top-ranked Level 5, [[Accelerator]], can reach Level 6 safely, and it's been shown in canon that the third-ranked Level 5, [[Mikoto Misaka|Railgun]], can reach Level 6 but not safely.</ref> Out of over a million espers in Academy City, only seven are Level 5 as of the beginning of ''There's Nothing Better''.
;Linker Core: The name given in ''Lyrical Nanoha'' to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic. Different people have different colour linker cores.

==M==
;[[:Category:Mage|Mage]]: Any character that can deliberately use magic.
;Magic Circuit: The name given in ''Fate/stay night'' to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic. A magic circuit can be burned away (in parts) in order to force a mage's Servant to obey an order.
;[[:Category:Magical Girl|Magical Girl]]: Any female character that transforms into a different identity in order to use magic. In ''There's Nothing Better'', the transformed form is often more capable in combat than the untransformed form is; All The Tropes would call such a character a "Magical Girl Warrior".
;MANAGEMENT: A secret organization in the ''Mahoromatic'' setting that has been secretly running the world for centuries. They come into conflict with '''VESPER''' when that group discovers they want to use '''SAINT''' technology to keep their stranglehold on Earth. In ''There's Nothing Better'', not on good terms with '''AMALGAM'''.
;MITHRIL: A mercenary organization in ''Full Metal Panic!'' [[Teletha Testarossa]] is a high-ranking member of this organization.
;Mylee: God of battle from '''Forcelia'''. He often sends his priestesses<ref>Typical ''D&D'' 1e clerics with a few levels</ref> to serve Heroes during their adventures, one priestess per Hero.

==N==
;Nidhog: In ''Ah! My Goddess'', the infernal system that controls all of reality that Yggdrasil does not.
:In Norse mythology, a squirrel that lives on Yggdrasil and spreads lies, formenting discord.

==P==
;Pair: In ''Aria'', an '''Undine''' who is still learning the basics of her trade. ''(Not to be confused with "Doublet")''
;Persocom:An autonomous AI in a humaniform body, from ''Chobits''
;Prima: In ''Aria'', an '''Undine''' who is qualified to carry passengers in her gondola.
;Prum: (pronounced "Pallum") A halfling/hobbit from ''Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?''

==R==
;Remnant: The Earth-analog planet in ''RWBY''
;Renart: A fox-person from ''Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?''

==S==
;SAINT: An '''alien''' organization in the ''Mahoromatic'' setting that has a complicated relationship with '''VESPER'''.
;Semblance: In ''RWBY'', a unique metahuman power that draws upon the character's '''aura''' for manifestation and use.
;Single: In ''Aria'', an '''Undine''' who knows how to scull her gondola but is still learning how to interact with customers.
;Sister: In ''A Certain Magical Index'' and ''A Certain Scientific Railgun'', either a nun or one of [[Misaka Sisters|the first 20000 clones]] of [[Mikoto Misaka]], depending on context.
;Star Seed: The name given in ''Sailor Moon'' to the mystical part of a person's body that allows him or her to work magic (and, if female, become a Sailor Senshi). Appears to be closely connected with (if not identical to) the person's soul.
;Svartálfr: A dwarf from Norse mythology. Might or might not be smaller than human-sized.

==U==
;Ultimate Force: In ''Ah! My Goddess'', a force of nature that ensures all divine wishes are fulfilled, manipulating "luck" to remove obstacles to the fulfillemnt of wishes.
;Undine: In ''Aria'', a gondolier, (almost) always female.

==V==
;VESPER: A secret organization in the ''Mahoromatic'' setting that defends Earth from the alien invasion being staged by '''SAINT'''. They come into conflict with '''MANAGEMENT''' over fundamental differences in ethics between the two organizations.

==W==
;Werewolf: A (non-transforming) wolf-person from ''Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?'' Compare with '''Chienthrope''' and '''Renart'''
;Whispered: Somebody born on December 24 and age 16 at the beginning of ''Full Metal Panic!'' Whispered have a mental link to a "whisperer" who reveals '''Black Technology''' to them, and can also communicate mentally with each other at risk of merging their personalities together.
;Witch: A corrupted '''Magical Girl''', in ''Puella Magi Madoka Magica''

==Y==
;Yggdrasil: In ''Ah! My Goddess'', the divine system that controls (almost) all of reality (but see also Nidhog).
:In Norse mythology, the World Tree that supports all of the realms of the the entire universe.

==Notes==
{{reflist}}

==See Also==
* [[Sources]]
* [[Working notes for an All The Tropes page]]

[Black Aeronaut]

Hrm...  Regarding the term "Displacee", I actually picked up the usage from Undocumented Features where in the Republic of Zeta Cygni they even have actual forms for "Dimensional Displacees" to fill out so they can get the ball rolling on other things, like citizenship.

I could just hear Zoner now...  "Yeah, it was happening often enough that we just decided 'Fuck it' and threw the bureaucrats at the problem.  Fortunately, we only hire the best ones, so they turned out something sensible.  Pretty wild, huh?"

[robkelk]

Thanks, Fixed.