Scotty

So, the dialog coming from the shadowy figure doesn't seem very Noah-like, I mean having a fixation on Grace probably is (because he canonically sees her as a hero), but I don't see Noah referring to Rhoda as "Shorty-McPuppy-Girl", Tedd wouldn't treat Susan like that either (unless this game was modded by Tedd before they became friends). My only guess now is that this is another take "Grace the Goddess" and Susan is actually dreaming about being in a game world, and her subconscious is filling things in as she goes. Would explain why NPCs can look like people she knows, and why there's soo much meta knowledge being flung around.

The way she hesitates and then trails trails off when she says "I'd...miss my fairies..." could be taken as "I'm getting into territory in which she'll be talking about her feelings, and Sarah mentioned that she was having a hard time dealing with feelings, so maybe I should back off?"

Elliot knows there's something that happened to Susan that she hasn't been willing to talk about yet, her tone could be enough to give Elliot a reason to think the conversation is getting to close to.

Even if Elliot never told Susan about the magic "not change" before, Susan's already heard it mention in regards to Grace being able to do new things earlier in this party. But all that basically amounts to is "magic kinda changed, but as far as we can tell it's made it easier for Grace to use magic"

Elliot's reaction could also be in regard's to Susan's comment about trying to not think about magic changing, reminding Elliot that Susan originally didn't want to come to the party because she might feel forced to talk about what happened to her. Elliot might be like "Oh no, is talking about my feelings making her feel obligated to talk about hers before she's ready to?" Like how Grace had to quickly change the subject when talking to Sarah before. I think she was aware of the possibility, I'm pretty sure they all talked about it in the week leading up to the incident, Sarah told Susan about her spell, is there any reason to think that she didn't also tell Susan that she was asked to use it frequently and why? OH, I just found confirmation, it was mentioned when Justin and Susan were talking about her upcoming meeting with Diane.

Might still not be a bad guy, maybe they are the Hero of Magic or Skill (ranged), but maybe they're jealous that Susan's basically been given the title of "Main Hero" or whatever. Even Susan complained earlier that hammers were her thing when she was told that she would recruit a hammer wielding hero, this character could be of the type that believes they should be greater than the role they were given. I guess that kind of thinking could lead to villainous behaviour, but from a storytelling perspective, the idea of a character with an attitude that softens over time isn't a new even in EGS.

Yeah this is another strong clue towards this character being Noah. Dan's hasn't been afraid of throwing fish at us before. I'd have figured Grace would have gotten past the "corn that isn't corn" stage by now, but it's possible.

I took a business math course in high school, it was basically just creating spreadsheets. Mind you something like that is quite useful if you get a career in Eve Online

I've seen people use Tabletop Simulator for D&D (or other) games. You're probably thinking of Fantasy Grounds though, and hoooooooooooly crap that's a lot of money for all the DLC...

That's why I don't think it's an actual translator deal, but more of a tone the Ferengi use when referring to humans, like they feel humans are inferior to them so they intentionally say it like that. There was a few cases where Quark said human normally but those cases were either when talking about humans in general conversation or in the rare occasion where he's showing actual respect. The "Hu-mon" way usually comes out when expressing more negative opinions.

I only remember Hu-mon being a Ferengi thing. This isn't the first time for Grace either, back when Justin suggested that Grace apply for a job at Salty Crackers she asked if being a "Wo-man" would be a problem.

I know, and it was more fiddly in Oblivion because it was very easy to fall behind, at least in FF8 if you happened to level to 50 or so, sure the battles may be tougher, but you can still go and stack your junctions to max stats and you'd also be able to slot abilities that either reduced, nullified or absorbed damage. With Oblivion, since you leveled as your primary skills leveled, if you only used those primary skills then chances are you'd only be able to increase stats by the minimum amount per level, which sadly meant that enemies would outclass you pretty quick (and as I had found out my first playthrough, left me with no way of doing any significant damage to the final boss). In order to make an effective character, it was ideal to have the stats you were most likely to use often as your secondary skills, and least likely to use skills as your primary, and then you grind out your secondary skills for a bit. Since skills were tied to attributes, like heavy armor and 2-handed weapons to Constitution and Strength, magic schools to Intellect and Wisdom, etc, you'd want to put up to 5 levels towards those skills so that when you do level up you can put the max amount of points into the attributes of your choosing (I can't remember if it's 2 attributes or 3 per level). The grinding though was very tedious and armor and shield skills amounted to just letting enemies beat on you for a while. Skyrim at least got rid of the attribute scaling system, but the skill leveling is still tedious as Grace shows here.

That I don't know as I haven't played any of the Fable games. But yeah there are games like Final Fantasy 8 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion where enemies scale with your level, but with those two examples, you can also do things to make your character(s) very powerful while keeping their levels low. Like FF8 has a junction system that lets you slot spells into stats to boost them, and there's summons, called Guardian Forces that you can assign to characters that as you level them, they learn abilities. One such Guardian Force, Quezacotl, you can get fairly early in game and has an ability called "Card" that turns enemies into cards that either be used in the Triple Triad minigame or they can be converted into materials by other GF abilities that can then be used to upgrade weapons or further refined into spells. The thing about "Card" though is you can use it multiple times in battle so you can turn all enemies (except bosses) into cards and doing so doesn't earn character experience so your characters won't level, but you do get Ability Points which go towards leveling GFs and unlocking their abilities so you can effectively grind out all your GF abilities while keeping your levels low and also turn the cards you get into powerful spells that can be junctioned into your stats, so you could potentially have 9999 hp and do max attack and spell damage at level 20, and one shot most enemies.

Of course, there are many games where a boss fight (or even many enemies) is too much for just 1 character, and thus you'd need to put together a party to take on, the case of Parable, Susan is supposed to be gathering other heroes so it can be safely assumed that the big bad would be too much for just Susan no matter how badass she is.

Fable 2 had guns, Susan's seen using them to blast the bugs in the first cave she went through.

I think I hit the quote button instead of the edit button... Also I dunno if the site is acting up or if tampermonkey is doing something funny to the forum interface restoration script.

Yeah, but she did so through potions and the only gear we've seen her buy so far has been clothes. Maybe this will be the time she shows off the new gun to show that she wasn't just buying clothes.

Ok, still don't know who this character is and probably won't until they're caught or they choose to reveal themself later, but judging from them not being affected by the slow time spell, they're either immune to such effects, which is usually reserved for special encounters and bosses, or they're also a max level magic user which might give them resistances? The question of if they're the hero of magic is more uncertain now though as the look they give in the third panel doesn't really look heroic-like, there could still be the possibility that they are one of the other heroes, but like Rhoda, they don't know it yet and so they're just living their life as they would until something happens that awakens their heroic nature. She seemed pretty capable using fire spells earlier, though if this character is also a max level magic user, they might still be a challenge.

I was basing on what Grace told Charlotte.

That's why I said I agreed with you. I think the only character capable of lifting at least 4 times her weight would be Grace and she's stated she could lift a car, granted she has to morph into her omega form and buff herself up, but I wouldn't be surprised if she could use her telekinesis to assist.

When she was burnt out, Nanase was upset that she could just bench 160lbs in comparison to 200lbs before. At her size, I wouldn't be surprised if she weighed roughly 100lbs so at best, her magic was allowing her to lift twice her weight. So I'm inclined to agree that Ellen might have been referring to Nanase in fairy form. The commentary Dan later added to the comic where the fairy doll is introduced states that the fairy should be 1:6 scale or 10.67 inches tall so I wanna say she'd a pound maybe less, I dunno the actual math and searching google kept giving me BMI charts and a headache. Anyway, it probably wouldn't be too hard to believe her fairy avatar could lift about 4lbs. Though we do know that her Fae punch spell hits as if Nanase was in her own body throwing the punch. Any guesses where Nanase might hit on this scale? I'd probably say somewhere in Bear, but then she did destroy a punching bag, so maybe Bull.

Actually Ellen is also 5'4" and Sarah is 5'3.5". Grace's half-squirrel form is 4'10" incidentally, normally she's also 5'4", I think someone once asked Dan what the deal was with most of the female cast being around 5'4"

I never really thought Nanase had a ego problem, throughout the comic she'd shown a lot of selflessness and I never got the impression that she tried to flaunt her abilities for attention, even when she wasn't being discreet about using magic I don't think she was intentionally showing off. Any kind of attention she got, she probably enjoyed, but I doubt any of it was forced. I'd say an unhealthy ego would be going out of one's way to make someone notice you which I'd have to say was what Nanase was doing with Ashley earlier, but at least now Nanase's realized that before it got worse.

That was one of the links I used in my post.

So now that we have a better look at the cloaked figure, I'm thinking it's Noah. Why? because the figure strongly resembles three other instances of Noah that we've seen: https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2004-10-18 https://www.egscomics.com/egsnp/2005-07-22 https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2011-04-27 Mind you, in the New and Old Flames instance, Noah's antennae go through the cloak, but the older examples have them hidden. This shadowy figure would be a good callback to those. Now the question would be, is this character a bad guy? I mean, they're apparently stalking Rhoda, but for all we know, Arthur sent them after Susan got sidetracked by the tavern minigames. Maybe Noah is the Hero of Magic?