The Hero's Companion (The Hunter Legacy) (5 page)

Cat slang for forcing a person to pat you
with excessive smooging of the legs. Making it more desirable or an easier
option for the human to pat the cat, than ignoring it.

The answer expected when a Magician on the
planet Kelawan gives you an order. From the books by Raymond E Feist, beginning
with the Rift War trilogy starting with Magician, and especially the trilogy with
Janny Wurts, starting with Daughter of the Empire.

An amalgam of two names, both grounds
keepers.

Margaret Newmar is the grounds keeper of
the Officer Academy on the planet Port Newmar, in the
Golden
Age of the Solar Clipper series, by Nathan Lowell.

Boothby was the grounds keeper at Starfleet
Academy, in Star Trek The Next Generation.

Kind of like the Ellen Ripley look from
Aliens. Or the female version of the John Rambo look, in the square screen
movie series, beginning with First Blood.

Star Trek The Next Generation, season 5. One
of the better episodes, which teaches you never to let a know-it-all ensign
mess with your warp core console.

Star Trek The Next Generation. Teenager,
Ensign, Lieutenant. Generally considered an insufferable know it all, and
largely not liked. Originally played by Will Wheaton, who is/was largely liked.

617 Squadron, RAF, were popularly called
the Dam Buster Squadron. It was a Lancaster Bomber squadron in World War 2,
most noted for destroying Germany's dams with bouncing bombs, later going on to
be the squadron who dropped the largest bombs dropped on Europe during the war.

666 was the squadron Biggles flew in during
World War 2, in the Biggles books by W E Johns.

287 was a rival squadron to the one Biggles
flew with in World War One, in the Biggles books by W E Johns.

Yoda – The Empire Strikes Back, flat screen
movie. Slightly paraphrased. Yoda actually said, "Do or Do Not, there is
no try."

Anything to do with Wars is a copyright
minefield, hence paraphrasing.

The Matrix Trilogy of flat screen movies.
The main character, Neo, was referred to as 'The One'.

Babylon 5 also had "The One". In
this case it was three people. The one who was, the one who is, and the one who
will be; who all lived at the same time and knew each other, but were also
separated by more than 1000 years. Two of the three were Human, two of the
three were Minbari. Two of the three changed species.

Star Trek Enterprise, flat screen tv series
– the crew are captured on their own ship, and convert the door mechanism into
an intercom in order to communicate with each other, and organize an escape.

Twentieth century Sci-Fi dramas were full
of people doing amazing things with nothing, in order to escape and win the
day, after being captured during a moment of stupidity. It's almost a
requirement for good drama.

The author tries very hard not to do
stupidity, and thus not need to convert door mechanisms into anything.

World War One novel series called The Bandy
Papers, by
Donald Jack. The first novel is called Three Cheers for Me,
and is about a Canadian in the trenches of WWI, and the Royal Flying Corps.

This series is very funny, and is noted by such opening
sentences as 'On my way back to the front, I ran over a General.'

The main character of the square screen
series Kung Fu, was called Grasshopper by his Master during training.

Trainee Jedi were referred to as Padawan,
in the series of square screen and flat screen movies called Star Wars.

Jedi was the name given to those who could
perform what others call magic.

Mary Celeste was an American two masted Brigantine found
adrift and deserted off the Azores Islands, in 1872. There has never been an explanation
for what happened to her crew.

The Flying Dutchman is an urban legend, of
a 17
^th
century sailing ship, doomed to sail the seas of Earth
forever. It is said sightings of this ghost ship are omens of doom to come,
often seen before a hurricane.

Group affirmation from the first remake of
Battlestar Galactica, flat screen tv show.

Both were senior officers of the Third Reich.
Goring controlled the air force, and Donitz the submarine service. Both of
which played a major part in World War Two.

Adolf Hitler was a corporal in World War
One, who rose to lead Nazi Germany into World War Two. He's the exception to
the rule, which proves that standard military doctrine never finds the warfare
genius, or the born leader.

As a result of his life, much science
fiction and war fiction puts the main character starting out as a corporal,
before discovering they can lead.

The Knights Cross was the highest award a
military officer could receive in Nazi Germany. It hangs around the neck, and
was worn with the normal uniform.

From the square screen series Hogan's
Heroes.

The most gratuitous use of the word fuck in
a serious screenplay, was a Rory award given to screen writers, looking like a
silver bail from the top of a cricket wicket, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy trilogy in five parts, by Douglas Adams.

However, it was soon after determined that
it wasn’t a Rory award for the most gratuitous use of the word fuck in a
serious screenplay at all, but part of the slow time key to the Wicket Gate,
thought lost permanently in time, but now being found to not have been lost at
all, but temporarily misplaced.

Square screen movie of the same name, based
on comics. Sports jock becomes space hero.

This was one of those things which happens
to authors as they write books. When Melissa Gordon was first used as a name,
there was no intention to put her in a super-fast ship, and have a comparison
to Flash Gordon be made later on.

It just happened.

Believe it or not.

Comes from the series of Star Wars novels,
especially the Xwing sub-series. It refers to (mainly) fighters, cobbled
together from the parts of different ships, to form something unique. Mainly
used by pirates and others who couldn’t afford to buy a decent ship, or weren't
capable of stealing one. All of these were lethal. A few to the target, but
most to the pilot. The word deathtrap comes to mind.

Amanda Tapping played the roles of Sam
Carter in the flat screen series Stargate SG1, and Helen Magnus in Sanctuary,
and is an author favourite actor. Why use a person's name once, where twice
will suffice?

Grace was the first name of the lead
scientist in the flat screen movie Avatar, played by Sigourney Weaver.

Six White Boomers – six white old man
kangaroos, said to pull Father Christmas around in his sleigh over Australia on
Christmas Eve, in order the reindeer didn’t suffer from heatstroke. Christmas
time in Australia quite often has 100 degree Fahrenheit (38 degree Celcius)
heatwaves.

From the song Six White Boomers, by Rolf
Harris.

In the beginning, a German games company
called Egosoft released a computer game called X: Beyond the Frontier. It was
followed by X-Tension, and X2: The Threat.

X3:Reunion was followed by X3: Terran
Conflict.

The five games were then released as the X
Superbox, with the X: Encyclopedia, which was also on disc. It included links
to fan fiction, mods, and modding tools.

X3: Albion Prelude followed.

X3AP was released through Steam, one of the
emerging digital distributors of computer games, with X3TC included.

This was followed by X Rebirth, which
continues the story way into the future, but returns the player to the
conditions of the original game. Hence a lot of diehard X3 players, not liking
the new game, went back to continue playing either TC or AP.

The entire X-series is a 4X sandbox, with
plot. Sandbox games allow the player to do anything in any order, and play the
game however they want to. In the later games, the Sandbox became more
important than the plot.

The games are unique in so far as most
computer games are designed to take forty eight hours to a week to complete all
the play, while the X games were designed to take six months to play. Indeed,
it can take four to six months to progress to the level where you can begin to
buy the largest ships. Many of the diehards continued a single game for more
than eighteen months.

The author has two eBooks on Amazon for the
X3 Trilogy. The X3 Handbook, and the X3 Handbook for Albion Prelude. The
Handbook is a compilation of all the main guides for the three games, including
some for X2, with descriptions and links to all the major Mods, and modding
resources.

A lot of the combat scenes in the early
Hunter Legacy novels come from his flying experiences in these computer games.

Wing Commander was a space combat game for
the 386 chip computer, running MS-DOS. It was released in 1990, and required a
special memory manager program to enable it to have enough memory to run.

It was followed by two add-ons, and Wing
Commander 2, which also had two add-ons.

By the time Windows 95 was on computers and
the Pentium chip was released, Wing Commander 3 The Heart of the Tiger was
released in 1994. It was the first ever attempt to combine a computer game with
Movie like cut-scenes using real actors, staring Mark Hamill, of Star Wars
fame.

Wing Commander 4 The Price of Freedom
followed in 1996

Wing Commander Prophesy followed in 1997.

There were also two off-shoot games called
Privateer and Privateer 2 The Darkening. Also Wing Commander Armada, which was
more of a 4X game than space combat game.

There was also Wing Commander Academy, a 13
episode animated tv show.

In 2007, Wing Commander Arena was released
for Xbox.

Wing
Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn was released for PC in 2012.

The Wing Commander 1-5 games, and the 2
Privateers, kept the author sane through several of the dark periods of his
life. A lot of the combat scenes in the early Hunter Legacy novels come from
his flying experiences in these early computer games.

Me. Pronounced Mwu, with a hard u, or Mwah
with a silent h. From the square screen series The Muppets, being how Miss
Piggy refers to herself.

Pronounced with a hard a. The weapon of
choice for the Jaffa warrior. From Stargate SG1. Basically a long thick broom
handle with a paddle on one end and a laser on the other. As proved, a weapon
of terror, rather than a weapon of war.

A miniature sun exploded, sending yellow
light from the center of the ball outward, where it vanished.

From the flat screen movie Star Trek
Generations.

Significance to Jon? Not yet known.