On Thu, 6 May 1999, Christopher D. Nichols wrote:

	"The gems are all laid out where various stars are,"
Hino said.  "It's a star chart."  She took Anderson's lamp.
"There's Polaris.  Algol.  Aldeberaan.  Betelgeuse.  Sirius.
Fomalhaut."  The light jerked about, illuminating various
'stars'.  "There's the big dipper, Orion, Gemini...I'd guess
this shows the sky in a few months; some of these stars
won't be visible much at night until fall.  Especially
Fomalhaut.  I'm gonna take some photos...now I'm curious.
Gimme the camera, Johnson."

Interesting collection there.  Let's see...  Well, Polaris is Lovecraft's 
favorite, associated with Hypnos and the Dreamlands.  I can't place 
Algol...in Arabic it means "The Demon's Head."  It might be connected with 

It's from one of Lovecraft's more obscure stories, whose exact title
escapes me.

Nyarlathotep, but I don't think that's quite correct.  What you list as 
"Aldeberaan" is normally spelled Aldebaran, and is a star in the Hyades in 

D'oh!
Hulk no can spell.

I can't recall the Mythos connections of Sirius, Orion, and Gemini.

Sometimes a star is just a star :)  It's a full night sky, so a fair # of
the stars are just there to help the worshippers recognize it as a night
sky.

	Asuka zoomed over to Kaji.  "You'll be my diving
buddy, won't you?"

Hey, it's like having his own personal Ataru Moroboshi.

Yep!
 

	He turned to her questioningly, and she stared at
him.  Her right hand rested on the sigil, her left drifted
freely.  Then it came around, and pulled his right hand over
to touch it.  For a moment, he felt a strange thrill, as if
the wall had tried to jolt him.  She guided his hand along
the contours of the sign.  The wall was pitted and eroded,
but the sign remained vibrant, and seemed even brighter,
somehow, where they had touched it.

Heh.  The Elder Sign drained some of their MPs to power its protective 
nature.

Yep. :)
 

	"Aoba brought it.  I think he planned to make some
okonomiyaki with it, but Asuka had other ideas.  Now, how
she knew he would bring a grill...don't ask me."  Ritsuko
shrugged.  "I won't complain."

Since you are calling Maya Ibuki and Makoto Hyuga by their first names, you 
should also call Shigeru Aoba by his first name.

D'oh!
 

	Hmm, he thought.  Secret Admirer...I need to find
out what kind of flowers she likes.  Although I probably
should send flowers and beer instead of chocolate...

	He laughed and started making plans.

Actually, this is actually an idea I like.  I detest Kaji.  And, I haven't 
found any Evangelion fan fiction that makes any attempt at developing the 
potential in a Makoto and Misato relationship.

Time will tell :)

	"WHAT?"  He stared in surprise.  "In Antarctica?"

	"I was the only survivor.

Misato: Except for all those Elder Things and shoggoths and such...

They don't hang out in public, though.
 

	As they walked, Shinji began to feel curious as to
what exactly he had glimpsed.  I suppose I could ask her, he
thought.  Somehow, he just couldn't quite do that, though.
He tried to think of something to talk about.  "How many
more Angels do you think there will be?"

	"Ten."

That meshes with the list on the CoaEG page (which needs updating, BTW).  
Hastur, Yig, Tsathoggua, Y'golonac, Shudde-M'ell, Cthugha, Daoloth, 
Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, Azathoth.

Where'd you get Azathtoth from?  We're not crazy enough to have Shinji try
to go toe to toe with the Daemon Sultan :)
 

	The Red Knight threw a few more logs on her fire,
then got back up to finish brushing her horse, which was
tethered to a nearby tree.  She was passing through a light
forest which ran up and down the thinly occupied hills
between Zakarion (her destination) and Thorabon (her
starting point).  Thorabon was a dying sea port along the
coast of the Southern Sea, east of Dylath- Leen, where she
had recently made herself not welcome by burning all the
slave traders' ships in the harbor.

If I had my Dreamlands book with me I could check this for geographic 
correctness, but I don't, so I can't.  Is Thorabon a canon location?

It's from the Dreamlands book; I don't know what story it is from.

<random>What if NERV had accidentally hired some Tcho-Tchos?</random>

What if it wasn't an accident? :)
 

Churchward claimed to have deciphered a set of tablets which
told the story of a continent named Mu in the Pacific Ocean,
which had once held a great civilization, then sank into the
ocean.  He was generally laughed at because of two reasons.
First, his method of translating them basically involved a
lot of mysticism since it was a supposedly dead language,
and secondly, he couldn't produce the tablets."

Why would Shinji know this?  He has no interest in the occult or paranormal, 
and is not noted for a particular interest in reading, and certainly not 
reading sci-fi, fantasy, horror, history, or Forteana, the topics likely to 
contain this trivia.

Standard Shinji, no.  But as noted in the first episode, this Shinji has
been studying to try to impress his father during his exile.  While not a
bookworm, he is less out in space than Canon Shinji.

I'll also note that I learned this at age 10 from reading a silly
children's book :)
 

	The ceiling was low, which bothered her; it was
going to be hard to move in here without whacking her EVA's
head into the ceiling frequently.  To make matters worse,
she could make out a huge shape on her Hypersonar which
occupied the far end of the cavern.  Hypersonar couldn't
handle it well; it was too complex, a tangle of tubes and
arms and legs and spheres and bulbous malformed hunks of
seemingly pointless flesh, all mounted around a large sphere
which might have been an eye, but which was featureless to
hypersonar.  It had no infrared signature at all.

The description here of Ghathanothoa is slightly off.  First, the use of 
"arms and legs" implies appendages with internal or external skeletal 
structures.  Also, you seem to be describing Ghathanothoa as having a 
central eye.  Ghathanothoa has neither (the only GOO with a central eye that 
I recall is Cyaegha).

>From the CoC rulebook:
"Ghatanothoa is known to be exceedingly horrible, with myriad tentacles, 
maws, and sensory organs, with a definite dreadful outline."

Having seen too many tentacular horrors in my time, I altered his
appearance slightly, deliberately, since the descriptions of him are
rather vague anyway.  

I'm bored of tentacles :)

[Snip description from CoC rulebook I've already read as I own it myself]

So, based on that, why are the Evas effected by the curse, but not the 
children?  I mean, obviously, the Eva have a far higher CON than humans, so 
why don't the Children get paralysed?

Because 
1.  The EVAs have an AT-Field.  The Children only see Ghat through EVA's
eyes.  This helps to protect them.
2.  The Children are not entirely normal humans, as shall be seen.
3.  Sychronization goes both ways; they each gain a certain amount of
benefit from each other.  This is not always good, as shall be seen.

	She howled; these were not her memories, not her
senses, not her, but she could not resist them, could not
fight them off.  Much of it was utterly alien to her and
incomprehensible.  Angled time.  The smell of a dying world.
Twelfth dimensional spheres.  A music which permeated the
universe.  A universe dying as the atom which contained it
was crushed in a cyclotron.  An ever surging, constantly
changing blasphemous mass surrounded by a court of idiot
gods and mindless flautists playing a tuneless symphony.

Whoa.  That's so cool...

Thanks!
 

	Her brain swam with names.  Ythogtha, Illisia,
Toriak, Knn- Yrr, T'yui'oik-H'al'sha, Yuggoth, T'yog,
Zanthu, Idh-yaa, Tlaloc, Ghatanathoa, Ghadamon.  They might
have been people or places or names, she could not remember.
She did not want to remember.  They were not her memories!
They were not!

I'll try to identify these names for the less Mythos literate (although some 
of these have me stumped).  Let me know about the ones I don�t know and/or  
get incorrect.

Some of them are completely made up. :) 
Others are simply stolen out of the Encyclopedia Cthuliana just as a quick
throwaway reference to sound cool.
 

Illisia - Somewhere in the Dreamlands (???)

Made up, actually, although it may correspond to a placename someone else
made up.
 

Toriak - I have no idea.

Made up.
 

T'yui'oik-H'al'sha - I have no idea.

Made up.
 

	"It's a pity we can't FIND the next one," Gendo
said.  "They could turn him loose almost anywhere."

	"Anywhere that people won't notice a few monoliths."

Actually, monoliths are not necessary to summon Hastur.  Set and costumes 
for 'The King in Yellow' are all that's require if one has a copy of the 
play.

There is more than one way to skin a Hastur...:)

Thanks for the comments!

John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

"The candy beneath you is disgraceful."
--Don't ask.