On Fri, 19 Sep 1997, Sean Connor wrote:

If I have to read through _yet another_ alternaverse variant of the Golden
Pair match, I'm going to SCREAM!!!!

Yeah.  When I wrote Tendou 2/3 (of which a new story should be coming Real
Soon Now, once I get my PC working and finish playing Might and Magic trilogy)
I felt I _had_ to include it.  But the Golden Pair are one-shot characters, the
first real one-shots in the series.  I ended up including them after all, but
shortening the story a lot.

Oh, it is somewhat possible to introduce characters out of order.  Whether
someone meets someone else can depend on _exactly_ where they happen to be on
some particular day at some particular time.  Unless characters in the new
continuity completely retrace their steps from the original, it's easy to have
some meetings not take place when they "should".  (My next Tendou 2/3 is
probably going to have Kinnosuke, and that's my reasoning behind using him.  I
can also get rid of some of the silliness of the original Kinnosuke story
just by saying some things haven't happened yet--he didn't yet get the puppet,
for instance.)

Of course, this won't work for every character--Shampoo isn't going to just
never show up because someone took a right turn instead of a left turn.