Scotty

They're technically not vampires in the sense that media has portrayed them, they're aberrations, vampire is just easy to understand because they're feeding habits are vampiric. And they've basically given up their humanity for near immortality. I wouldn't consider Abraham a true villain though, he was misguided by his guilt over failing to remove the noble's curse properly (he was supposed to use the diamond as payment for a more skilled wizard to remove the curse, but he thought he could do it himself) and had convinced himself that anything created by the diamond must be monsters and it was his duty to kill them before they killed others. He did have a moment of doubt when he learn of the nature of Elliot's curse as well, it's just that he only saw black and white when Ellen was a complete grey area which was a foreign concept to him, Nanase showed him the error of his ways. I still think that if we do see him again, he won't jump into "must kill the monster" mode and consider the situation first. Actually, going to revise my statement a bit: Anytime a death would be considered tragic, Dan would have difficulty with. Blaike was someone good natured and pure so it was particularly hard to have him die the way he did. People who have the potential for redemption, like Bad Tom and Larry would be hard to do as well because, hey they were just becoming likeable in the case of Larry at least, Bad Tom still has some soul searching to do and only time will tell if anything good comes of it. Susan is in a different tragedy in that she killed a vampire at a young age and it affected her deeply and I wonder if it affected Nanase as well and was why she didn't choose to kill Abraham or Not_Tengu despite the fact that they had intentions of killing her or ones she cared about. I can see potential issues arising when we see Magus again, cus he's in a position where he could get killed by either someone from the Main Eight, or by Sirleck, or Voltaire and it would be tragic all around because Magus never asked to be in the situation he found himself in and just wanted to get out of it.

Justin never did confirm if he had awakened or not after the fire golem fight, he just assumed that it was the ASMA training that did it.

Maybe personality based isn't term I'm looking for, not entirely sure though. We know having magic can affect someone physically, making them taller, magic boobs, and abs. Maybe affinities could also do this, and is responsible for Rhoda being short. Rhoda would then develop her distorted perception of scale from that and her insecurity over it would easily be mistaken as a yearning to be able to make herself bigger. Rhoda's affinity could have been as hard to detect as Sarah's and Pandora might not have been looking that deep when she marked Rhoda. That realization of hard to detect affinities could have contributed to Pandora marking Sarah later on. Heck with Sarah's spell, before the revelation that she had an affinity for it, we thought she yearned for something like it based on her behaviour during the deck building phase of the card tournament. The affinity could have given Sarah that behaviour. Catalina Bobcat got a name based affinity, not exactly sure how that would work, would Magic have predicted it before Catalina was born, or when her parents filled out the birth certificate? Either way that affinity also seemed to affect how she behaved, being all energetic and catty. For Susan and Diane though, it's really hard to tell if their affinities are responsible for their behaviors, or their upbringings. It's possible that affinities don't have to do anything if the person already has enough drama around them, eg; a cheating cheater of a father.

Technically, Damien wasn't killed, he committed suicide, which granted is a pretty strong topic. Dan has had a tough time dealing with how he shows death in EGS, Blaike is a perfect example of it. Mind you it's easier when it's dealing with monsters that are truly evil, like vampires and goo monsters. But for humans, it's more difficult. Damien was special because he was created to fulfill a prophecy which had evil intentions, but Grace still tried to get him to surrender and in the end, he chose death over captivity.

Maybe there's personality based affinities? Like Rhoda had an affinity for size manipulation magic which contributed to her distorted perception of scale? I can see that being confused for yearning. That's why I view the ranking system as based on a person's magic level, not potential, which would mean that Sarah has the potential of becoming an S rank talent because she has an affinity for an S rank spell, but without the help of the ambient energy from the clog, she's only a D rank in power and would need to use other D rank equivalent spells to exercise to higher ranks. Of course there may be other factors that contributed to Rhoda awakening so quickly and Pando Yeah, I not sure how that would apply to Rhoda though. I guess it depends on what, if anything, happened to Rhoda just prior to her noticing that she could do something different. As we found with Justin, one could be awakened without knowing it, mind you that was done by an Immortal and so would be very subtle, but I wouldn't be surprised if natural awakening via meeting the energy requirements for it is hardly noticeable too. She doesn't have to steal games, she could just go into someone's game room in the middle of the night, set up a few wards to keep the residents from hearing or noticing her, and then play their games for a bit. But the main reason for her keeping up with the culture is to understand the people she would be "guiding" whether it's making them jump through hoops for some reward, or looking for people to potentially be giving marks to.

The whole rank system that Pandora uses is in reference to many video games from Japan that have achievement systems that go by rank, low to high being E-D-C-B-A and then S rank being the absolute best. Basically Pandora's making it clear that despite her age, she's hip with the pop culture of today's youth. Also Sarah is still considered a D rank talent, at least until she awakens. Diane's probably an E considering she doesn't have any magic yet but she could potentially be a higher rank. Whether Susan is considered an S rank remains to be seen, she might be an A rank which would still be pretty good, we'd have to see how many spells she's recieved since awakening, and if she's been using Nase as much as Rhoda's been using her spells, Susan should have more spells than she thought when Tedd mentioned it. Still this is all based on Pandora's perception of talent ranks. Edward probably has a different ranking system, complete with detailed charts.

To be perfectly honest, I don't believe that Bad Tom has been killed by vampires or anyone. We may call him Bad Tom, but he ranks under misguided fool like Rich and Larry. Larry's already on the path to redeeming himself and when we last saw Bad Tom, he was rethinking his situation as well, whether he too attempts to redeem himself or not is another story, I don't think Dan would have him killed. If we never see him again, well, I guess we can draw whatever conclusions we want, but that would be fan fiction material.

Voltaire comes to mind as someone that might do that, though he didn't try to manipulate her like he did with Dex, and Dex wasn't awakened at the time of the dragon fight, so I dunno for sure if Voltaire would. Nanase went through a period where she was using magic whenever she could and getting new spells pretty frequently because of it, I think she got 6 new spells over the course of a few days, the detect visibility spell, the clothing exchange, Fox summon, the hair change, the fae punch and the guardian form. Mind you Nanase is probably even higher than S rank if that's possible. But I wouldn't be surprised if S ranks could get a new spell every week or so with frequent practice.

Seems at least 3 spells so far, all related to size changing and the 2 newer ones are more like specialized upgrades. The first one seemed to only do scale changes and could only work on singular targets (clothing on people being separate targets). The second one was more focused and allowed for the target and their clothes to be included, maybe the size change would be greater ratio than the original. And the third was more precision not scale so she could she could either adjust height only like we saw, or width. maybe even fine tune specific parts (like boobs). As for whether this is affinity or yearning, I would have expected Pandora to have known what it would have been prior to marking, but considering she thought Rhoda was a D rank talent....I'm wondering if Pandora at the time was just "Hey, she's got size issues, here's a spell for her" and didn't really get a good look at her potential. Pandora did admit as much when she said she might not have paid enough attention to Rhoda. I certainly doesn't have to do with Pandora not being powerful enough to see it, if Pandora could detect Sarah's affinity when Jerry couldn't, she should have been able to detect Rhoda's potential. Pandora was either being lazy just did a quick glance to she what Rhoda yearned, or maybe a person's true potential doesn't show until after awakening. Though, still surprising that it didn't take long for Rhoda to awaken, it's been 5 months since the boar, and I gave her about a month before figuring out she had the spell, so that'd be 4 months till the current moment in the NP, and it seems like she's done what she just did before so 3 and a half months of casting the original spell frequently enough to exercise her magic and awaken?

Ha! Totally forgot that the comic itself was released on a Thursday as well hehe. If it was a Thursday evening, there probably would have been mention of him not attending classes on Friday, though if it happened Friday, they wouldn't likely find out until Monday. And Susan would likely be questioned about it considering she was witnessed having a confrontation with Tom before his disappearance. I always thought that them watching the review show episode happened Monday after school, and then it was Tuesday-Thursday for the rest of it. Edit: Oh wait, nevermind, I just went through it again, the review show bit was 1 day, then the next day had Bad Tom approaching Susan, then the day after that was Susan shutting down Bad Tom. So yeah, 3 days.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2270 Ok, the energy is basically used in the creation of the simulated space, and nothing Sarah does in that space uses any other energy. Not sure what to make of the last panel though, I don't get anything ominous about what Tedd said.

I think Bad Tom's last appearance was on Thursday, the day before the card tournament. So roughly 3 days.

It could be, thankfully there were a number to tricks we could do when dealing with groups like that. Weapons with Rate of Fire 2 and higher can be used to "Walk Fire" across multiple targets in range, there's also stacking attacker penalties which the more of us that attack the same targets, the targets will get penalties to their dodge rolls. Also we usually had our best gunners with the x20 damage weapons hang back and stationary to get an attack bonus while the rest of use walk fire multiple targets with x7 damage weapons. Another thing, when rolling intiative, the commander can also roll leadership against the enemy commander, and gets command points based on the margin of success on the roll (eg, our commander rolls an 8, enemy commander rolls a 6, we get 2 command points) those command points can be used have a unit attack a second time during the attack phase. So usually if we know a high threat target is close to going down, or if there's a straggler still on field and we don't want it getting away, we'll use the point to get the kill. It made for some fun moments too.

He was an example of not needing to be an Immortal to determine what a person is like without actually going up and asking them. Specifically in reference to Pandora's analysis of Ashley and why she couldn't giver her any transformation spells.

Ronin will then attempt to adjust his reasoning to why Elliot and Sarah broke up to include this.

Seriously, that way I've been hearing about congress' refusal to do anything the President wants just because it's not the president they wanted, it's like a kindergarten sandbox and the President is that one kid that everyone's singled out as someone different.

Elliot's also gone to school as a girl, the principle and most of the teaching staff might not even bat an eyelash at him being cheerleadra. Many of the students are are also used to weird stuff happening in school that it wouldn't take long for this to die down naturally, Edward's plan might work, but it also might have some be like "Wait, I'm certain that Elliot is Cheerleadra" and go out of their way to prove it instead of "Eh, so he's Cheerleadra, that's cool" and leave it at that. If you've noticed, Justin hasn't been getting many students at MSHS still asking him about him fighting along side Cheerleadra, Luke was the first in a long time to ask about it, and now I wonder what Luke's friends are thinking after hearing who Cheerleadra is.

Yay for Grace remembering her dreams. Also I wasn't sure how much Sarah told them about "Box's" promise, this confirms she's told them everything. Hmm, I wonder if Grace's "Tedd..." thought here was because she was she was remembering the magic change stuff and felt Tedd was jumping the gun in saying "Box" was lying. Dang, the 3 of us posting simultaneously, I think that's a record. Moved my comment here and awaiting thread deletion.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2272 Yay for Grace remembering her dreams. Also I wasn't sure how much Sarah told them about "Box's" promise, this confirms she's told them everything. Hmm, I wonder if Grace's "Tedd..." thought here was because she was she was remembering the magic change stuff and felt Tedd was jumping the gun in saying "Box" was lying.

Maybe not, but Sarah does need to use the spell frequently, I can't see her not trying it to see what happens.

hmm, I wonder if Sarah will use the spell again, this time with Grace and Tedd bracing for it. I'm curious to see what happens. For Grace, I kinda don't expect her to be able to guard against it, mainly because her energy is different and spells seems to affect her differently (eg, Ellen's beam will transform Grace, but it doesn't enchant her), at the same time though, I wonder if her telekinetic shield can guard her against the spell's ping. For Tedd, he didn't believe he should be able to resist anything, but with all that's happened that says otherwise, maybe he's got some funky high end resistance that can't be measured by normal means, the magic analysis wand wouldn't detect any potential from Tedd because his potential is just so different that the wand isn't compatible with, just like how the wand gives a false awakened status to Grace, this is a false zero potential for Tedd.

I've been drinking lots of water too, but yeah it has been on the neon brightness side in the past because of that. It's just a head cold, it's pretty much all I ever get, and no more than once or twice a year.

I like bacon with a little chew to it as well, unfortunately my parents prefer crispy and their idea of crispy is borderline carbon as you mentioned, you don't have the smoky bacon flavour anymore and it seems to turn to powder when you chew. Right now though, I'm loading up on vitamin C however I can get it, Halls Defence cough drops, orange juice, redoxon 1000mg effervescent tablets. Also took a Cold-FX pill and a Tylenol sinus pill earlier too, the left side of my face has a good deal of pressure pain at the moment....

https://www.patreon.com/posts/single-rental-7170462 It's not over the top, unless you count the fact that this is set in the video store and not the beach or pool. It's not really subdued either by having a goofy reaction, unless you count the reuse of the convention pinup in the background. Susan herself looks sexy and confident, whether or not it's actually Susan daydreaming about this as Dan commented is irrelevant. I like it.

Whatever it is, it's apparently coming for your dishwasher.