Scarlett

A Few Final Notes

This story attempts to tie together many oddball elements in the Dariaverse as we know it to form a coherent (more or less) whole, adding in background characters who never had names or personalities that we know of. The background character known here as Scarlett appeared on Daria in the very first episode, “Esteemsters,” and was last seen at Daria and Jane’s graduation in the movie Is It College Yet? She had no known name in the show. As mentioned in “Author’s Notes,” the IUF and other Daria fans provided names for many characters here. Many minor characters from the series were freely borrowed (Ms. Morris, Brian Taylor, Rita Barksdale, Chris Griffin, Fluffy, etc.); they are fairly well known, but the origins for characters perhaps less known are given below.

The Lawndale Leopards are my own invention, though the high school does have a field hockey team for girls, and there is a muscular girl named Heidi on it, per The Daria Diaries. I connected them to the bandit girl scouts of The Daria Diaries, in the Sick, Sad World section.

The white mouse is the same one Daria had in “The Lab Brat.” Rita’s (dead) ex-boyfriend Roger was mentioned in “I Don’t.” Rita’s ex-boyfriend Bruno was mentioned in the same episode. (“She sure knows how to pick ‘em.”) Big Jen is actually the background character named Jennifer, per a seating chart used by Mr. O’Neill in the episode “Café Disaffecto.” (See discussion of the names of background characters on The Paperpusher’s Message Board.) Roll-and-Roll Randy is a DJ who appeared on “The Big House.” Axl is from “Pierced.” Max Lane is Jane Lane’s paternal uncle from “The Teachings of Don Jake,” which is also where Sloatstown appeared. Farkas, Bruno Nagy’s “real” first name, is Hungarian for “wolf.”

Various Lawndale sites (such as in Chapter Seven) were borrowed from the map of Lawndale in The Daria Diaries and the Virtual Lawndale webpage on the MTV website. The infamous Good Time Chinese Restaurant and its interdimensional wormhole appeared in “Depth Takes a Holiday.” The Lawndale Mall is the same one called Cranberry Commons in The Daria Diaries; the name was changed on Virtual Lawndale. The Dutchman Inn was mentioned in “Fire!” Cedars of Lawndale hospital appeared in “Ill” and “Jake of Hearts.”

Some characters’ last names are actually animal names in foreign languages, but the reader is left to discover which ones are so encoded, and why they are so named. The name of Phil, the Pizza Forest Squirrel, came from a webpage on the MTV.com Daria website. At the story’s end, Phil is of course tormenting Daria’s father, Jake Morgendorffer. Marcello, later Hermione, was the imaginary future Significant Other of Daria Morgendorffer, per her story in “Write Where It Hurts.” Middleton College was where Daria’s parents met when they were undergraduates.

“Groped by an Angel” had the only mention of black helicopters in the show, and one therefore appears in Chapter Fifteen. The Men in Black (actually, the special agents in gray) are from “The Lawndale File.” I borrowed some of the dialogue for the two special agents from the same episode. The blue M&M was chosen as the tracer for Scarlett because Jane didn’t like blue M&Ms in “Antisocial Climbers.” Plutonium-186 is the “impossible” isotope used by Isaac Asimov in his novel, The Gods Themselves. Pander Magazine was taken from an old National Lampoon comic strip: “The Aesop Brothers, Siamese Twins” by Rodrigues. Miss Noe Vember (dreadful pun, so sorry) is from The Daria Diaries. Rhonda of course is from The Daria Database. Jordana appeared in “The Daria Hunter” and also shows up on a webpage at MTV’s Daria website. Jim and Jim's Paintballing Jungle also appeared in “The Daria Hunter.”

The letter from Sick, Sad World follows the style of a similar letter that appears in The Daria Database. The SSW bit with Adolf Hitler as a leggy blonde (Adele Wolff) was in “Fat Like Me”; the flying steak knife (Excalibur) was in “A Tree Grows in Lawndale”; the rats on Ritalin were in Is It Fall Yet? The House of Bad Grades was in “Legends of the Mall.” Delinquent quintuplets (Adele’s clone army) were from “Sappy Anniversary.”

As far as Arthurian legend goes, Elaine Garlot (Caer-lot), Scarlett’s aunt, was indeed King Arthur Pendragon’s eldest half-sibling, sister to the notorious Morgan le Fay and Morgause. She was married to a king named Nentres and her son was a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. Excalibur’s story is more than adequately covered in Wikipedia, as are the details about the sword Tyrfing. “Merthin” is how Merlin is pronounced in Welsh. The Lady of the Lake (Viviane) could indeed catch a thrown sword with her bare hand, and while underwater.

Several people have asked what the original plot of the story was, before I dumped it because of Marvel Comics’ 1602 story line. Here it is, for whatever it’s worth.

The second Roanoake Colony in a nearby alternate universe was actually composed of members of a secret society of magic-using humans, who followed a tradition laid down by Roger Bacon in volumes of secret writings on alchemy. This secret society was in danger of being discovered and killed off, so Sir Walter Raleigh, with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth I and several prominent (but secret) wizards in her court, gathered up the remaining society members and had them try to establish a colony in the New World. The society members fought with the natives and all died of disease, starvation, exposure, and fighting, except for a few survivors who were taken to the island known as Croatoan. The next expedition to Roanoke some years later (after the defeat of the Spanish Armada) found no one there, but they did go to Croatoan and there found Virginia Dare, living by herself. She was taken to England where it was discovered that the use of alchemical substances had turned her into a super-wizard, someone capable of changing the nature of reality itself, and she was adopted into Elizabeth's court.

Soon, though, she became more powerful than any other being and assumed control of England after Elizabeth's death. She then attacked Europe and won, and eventually gained control over most of the Earth through her magic and armies. Then, about two hundred years after her birth, an enemy of surpassing evil appeared to challenge her and plunged the entire world into magical-technological warfare, culminating in a long thermonuclear war in that Earth's twentieth century. As black-hole bombs were being fired off to unravel the entire thread of reality in that universe, the clone-daughter of the immortal Empress Virginia—named Scarlett Dare—was sent to an alternate universe through a peculiar wormhole that came out at a Chinese restaurant in Lawndale, and the infant Scarlett and her one protector, an "aunt" (a secret agent of the Empress Virginia) settled into life in the USA.

And then someone came through the wormhole and found them. The “enemy of surpassing evil” was the monster created by Victor von Frankenstein, who in the original novel by Mary Shelley was a superintelligent, superpowerful creature. Here, he survived his suicide attempt at the North Pole and began a career of conquest. He ruled most of Asia and Africa and managed to escape the destruction of his Earth. And Lawndale's earth was his next target for conquest.

So.... so much for the original idea.

Hope you enjoyed the story!

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Last updated 2/6/07