And now that I've said that, on with the notes!

I actually came up with the story idea for this about a year ago (right now, it's June 27, 1999). And through all that time, it evolved quite a bit to get to where the story stands now. Maybe you're curious about what prompted a few of the things in this. Or maybe you're not, but I'll tell them anyway.

Sonjia

--She's always been named Sonjia. That's the one thing that never changed about her through the evolution of the character.

--She was originally going to be a powerful figurehead in a local town, a countess, I think. Except the Mazoku attacked because she had something they wanted (further explained in the evolution of the ML).

--After that, I decided to make her a goddess, and one of seven sisters (yup. Jadarin was originally a sister ^_^*). But unable to come up with enough relevant things for seven siblings to do, I cut it down to three, and made one of them a boy.

--I liked the goddess idea, so dropped the prominent figurehead concept altogether.

--Once that had been decided, I needed to give her some character. So, I modeled her after myself... sort of. I took one quality of myself, exaggerated it, and made a character out of it. Sonjia is the sociopath extreme.

Jadarin

--He's always been a humanoid cat. That's all that never changed about his concept.

--As you read in the explanation of Sonjia, he was originally a girl. However, when I did the first rough character design, she looked rather masculine, so the gender was changed.

--His name. ...Gods, that was the single most annoying thing about him. I could NOT think of a name for this guy! I thought of one several months before writing the story, but promptly forgot it the next day. One of my friends suggested calling him "Noname", but pronouncing it "Noh-na-meh". And that's what he was referred to until the old one I thought of months before suddenly decided to resurface.

--Speaking of which, I wrote the entire first part without knowing his name (luckily, I didn't need it).

--So as not to forget again, I wrote half the story with a little note to myself right in the text that read, "Jadarin! His name is Jadarin, dangit!" I deleted it whenever I posted a piece of the story, though.

Magic Lock

--Umm... it's always been at least tied to white magic. Other than that, everything eventually changed about this spell.

--Believe it or not, it was originally going to be a sword called the Hoshi no Ken (Sword of Stars). It had a blade constructed of white energy, and was the closest thing to offensive white magic. Sonjia's family had been the keepers of it for thousands of years.

--Originally, Sonjia's older sister secretly gave Sonjia the sword, and also a special silver armband so that the Mazoku couldn't track her (this sound familiar?).

--I spent so much time wondering how exactly the stupid armband worked that I completely forgot about the sword ^_^*.

--The armband was changed into something simpler: a ribbon. And I decided that instead of the ribbon itself cloaking her, it was simply a spell cast on the ribbon that provided the shield.

--I finally decided that the spell worked by absorbing magic. Simple enough, right? Well, then I decided to go through all the effects that would have... and the list was a mile long. I was up to the challenge, though, and kept the spell as it was.

--First and foremost: Sonjia has absolutely nothing to do with Xellos! I know the story seems to hint at that from the beginning, but it isn't true! The fact that she stole his line was simply a joke.

--The story was originally going to be rather serious. My being on a sugar buzz when writing the first part drowned all hopes of that ^_^*.

--This is the third fic I've written so far that has made a reference to the "mostly dead" joke from "The Princess Bride", and the second with a reference to "Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail". Can you find those two references in this story (they're both in part 14)? And can you find the others I've written from my other fics (one of the other "Princess Bride" reference fics should be dead obvious)?

--Actually, very little of this story was pre-planned. It just sort of fell together as I wrote it. Heck, I didn't even know how they were going to defeat Jadarin until I actually wrote that part.

--Am I going to sequel this? Hm, maybe. The second part would bring Sonjia's older sister into the picture. But if I ever do write that, I'm going to take a rather long break beforehand, since these first 14 parts were a long haul on their own. Phew!

Part 1

--I consider Sairaag a very disaster-prone city. It was destroyed by Zanaffar, then by Kopii Rezo, then by Kopii Rezo and Zanaffar, then used as Phibrizzo's little plaything.

--The "Entity" is not a character. It's not the Lord of Nightmares or Sonjia's sister or anything else. It's just a term.

--I'm using the spelling of everything as it appears in the Software Sculptors version, as I am assuming these are the spellings the majority of people reading this are familiar with. The exceptions are the honorifics and "Mazoku", since I prefer those terms over their translations.

Part 2

--At this point, I needed to write the other characters in. Amelia was easy. I had to get a little more creative with Zel...

--Before you ask, yes I do have a Zel/Lina bias. I tried not to show it, but wasn't always entirely successful ^_^*

--The seal on the lab door doesn't mean anything.

Part 3

--The letter Sonjia's sister left her was instructions on how to cast Magic Lock.

--I'm rather vague about it, but the wards around the lab are gone because Sonjia's sister is dead, and her power is no longer there to sustain them.

--Sonjia's sister has a name, but it is never mentioned anywhere in the story.

--I don't really explain the Mazoku eyes, either. It's because gods and Mazoku are practically the same race, and an untrained eye can't tell the difference between them. There's some mention of this in part 14.

--Xellos wasn't originally going to be the foreman. The foreman was originally going to try and put Xellos to work too. But then I had another idea.... ^_^

Part 4

--Even though she has the ribbon off, Sonjia's too absorbed in swatting at Xellos to notice that Zel is a chimera.

--Sonjia's last name doesn't mean anything, either. I just made it up.

Part 5

--I really have no idea where Lina's group is going once they leave town ^_^*

Part 6

--Sonjia has double-vision because the spell is coming off the ribbon, so she sees two different things at once when looking at anything affected by magic.

Part 7

--This is the first and only time Sonjia ever used Magic Lock herself.

Part 8

--I wrote this part before the release of the fourth tape of Next, which is why the spell is still "Laguna Blade" instead of "Ragna Blade". No offense to Neil-san (the translator), since he's a great guy, but I still like "Laguna Blade" better ^_^*

Part 9

--The comments about "having an operation" and "trips to Sweden" are quotes from my Latin teacher. He often says such things if someone messes up the gender of a word ^_^*.

--Okay, for a really brief, general explanation of Magic Lock, it's a spell that locks whatever it's cast on in whatever state it was in. Meaning it stops all movement (molecular as well). And the scientific name for stopping all molecular movement is Absolute Zero, which is where I got the term from.

Part 10

--Lina's comment on why Gourry should give her the Sword of Light is a slight allusion to what really happened to the power for Magic Lock. My English teacher would be proud ^_^

--By the time she got to part 10, one of my friends wondered if I had every single spell in Slayers memorized. No, I don't. Just most of them ^_^*

--I follow my warning at the top of the main page to the letter. So, anyone who read that should know that Lina's not really dead.

--This is the first time someone has actually flat-out lied in this story.

Part 11

--Oy. Metaphors galore...

--Sonjia's world ended 8,904 years before the end of this story. I won't tell right here where I got that number from. Maybe in the sequel (if I write it). It's not really important, though.

Part 12

--Uhh.... I can't think of anything that needs extra explaining.

Part 13

--Hey, I'm trying to keep people in character, so I wrote Zel out of this part. Why would he care what happened to Sonjia?

--I honestly completely forgot about Xellos in this part, and only remembered that I'd written him in and "killed" him when I went back to proofread, so had to come up with some way to write him back in. Please don't kill me for that ^_^*

--Sonjia actually is a very powerful healer. But that's about all she can do.

Part 14

--I wrote this very late at night, so got a little weird.

--Fine, so I lied in Part 7. She casts the ML here too (forgot about that ^_^*)

--Okay, fine, so I never explained why Xellos didn't die. He's a Mazoku, so there's no moving parts, and his consciousness is on the Astral Side, which the spell can't get at. So, he was basically just put in stasis. But he would have eventually died of sensory deprivation ("I feel a little drained, like I haven't gotten a good dose of negative energy in a while") if they hadn't gotten the spell off.