After the Fall: Author's Notes
The bulk of this story, is of course, based on Tokyo Underground by Akinobu Uraku. This story starts immediately after the end of big fight that spans episode 10, "Counter Attack – The Revenge of the Water User" and episode 11, "Fight to the Death – Beyond the Hatred". Other references follow for your amusement.
The title of the story is "borrowed" from a play by Arthur Miller, but this story has nothing to do with his story.
"Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n" is from Book I of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. The line quoted is spoken by Satan – doesn't it just figure that's who Rat-Tail would quote?
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea." Is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. Supposedly Coleridge was stoned out of his mind on opium when he wrote this.
The guy on the raft is, of course, Gollum from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. When Bilbo Baggins first encounters him, he was living on an island on an underground lake underneath the Misty Mountains. He often left the One Ring on the island when he was out hunting for food (usually orc or fish).
The guy in the gray robes is, of course, Gandalf the Gray, and the thing he is fighting is the Balrog known as Durin's Bane. "We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels." Who knew that the Underground was beneath the Mines of Moria?
The A and S carved in the wall refer to Arne Saknussemm from Jules Verne's A Voyage to the Center of the Earth. He was always leaving graffiti like this around.
The big cavern is from H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, the dim gray mountain peaks are the awful and sinister Peaks of Throk, deep beneath Dreamland. The things moving unpleasantly in the valleys are Dholes. The faceless winged monkeys made out of black rubber, are, as any child knows, Night-gaunts, and Nyarlethotep is one of Lovecraft's ominous Elder Gods.
The guy sitting weeping on the rock is Orpheus, who according to legend went down to the afterworld and played the lyre so sweetly that Hades returned to him his dead wife Eurydice, but on the condition that he not look back before they returned to the surface. He looked back. The exact words he's speaking when Teil shows up are, just for fun, from Huey Lewis and The News' song Don't Look Back, which as far as I know has nothing to do with the Orpheus legend.
The poem inscribed over the adamantine gates is from Canto III of Dante Alighieri's epic poem Inferno (first book of the Divine Comedy), where they are written above the gates of Hell.
XYZZY and the axe-throwing dwarf are from the very early computer game, ADVENT (or Adventure), which inspired the Zork family of games. The original version of ADVENAT was written by William Crowther.
Alchera is the word for the dreamtime – the era before the Earth was created, and a time when everything was spirit and not physical – in the Arrernte languages of the indigenous Austrailians.
The collective unconscious is a term coined by the psychological pioneer Karl Jung. It refers to the shared portion of each person's unconscious common to all people, and is invoked to explain why the same symbols seem to pop up over and over again in many different people's dreams. Whether these are common elements are shared via culture or more mystical means depends on who you ask.