Douglas

From the third link in the commentary: I am known to our friend Sarah as "Box".

Dan seems to be a fan of that show, it might be deliberate.

I'd guess it's mostly because there are no incredible long shot odds, you always get something at least halfway decent, and there are ways to bypass the randomness - trading with other people, or just buying the exact card you want from a store that sells individual cards. Also, there are play formats specifically designed to level the playing field for everyone no matter how many or few cards you've bought before.

What, were you browsing dumblaws.com or something? I did a report on that for an essay back in high school once. As I recall, one I found particularly amusing was some city that had a $500 fine for detonating a nuclear device within the city limits. Would enough of the city even be left after such an event to be able to collect the fine?

WoM perceives the world through magic, meaning that it knows about every use of magic. If anyone has a spell for rapidly scanning a book to skip needing to read it, which seems pretty likely to me, then wouldn't WoM know the contents of every book that spell has ever been used to scan?

Movie producers, if they care enough to try, know or can find out enough to portray something that seems plausible to most of their audience. I'd expect that usually there are some important details either omitted or actually wrong. For EGS, how it was done isn't particularly relevant to the story. I'm guessing it'll be left at "Sirleck knew how, and it worked", with few or no details revealed. Magus may be able to make up for a lot of that with magic. He specialized in battle magic, true, but he's also a wizard who received a systematic education that likely covered a lot of different stuff. Also, Sirleck set up the transfer in ways that assumed the receiver of wealth would have Magus' body. That factor is one that Magus does, in fact, genuinely have. I'd also expect him to have set it up with the money split among several different transfer mechanisms, so that any one of them being stopped by discovery or betrayal wouldn't leave him poor. There would inevitably be variation in how much knowledge and lack of scruples each one required, and Magus could just be grabbing some portion of them. Sirleck was rich enough that even a quarter of his wealth would probably be more than enough for anything Magus needs.

I'm willing to cut Dan some slack on this. How to truly tracelessly transfer large amounts of money is specialized knowledge that is mostly of interest to criminals and police investigators, and Dan is in neither category. In-setting, Sirleck has transferred his wealth from one host to another several times, has no scruples whatsoever, and presumably has lots of criminal contacts. I would expect him to be an expert at it, and Magus is now the beneficiary of that expertise.

He couldn't talk before, and outright "didn't work". He was stuffed in a crate because he was just a slightly fancy stick with a magical aura that did nothing functional. He might have been able to see, hear, and think - he knew his purpose and creator somehow - but there were no external indications of it.

Before he knew Seers were a thing, he thought he was a "wizard with a quirk". I think it's safe to say that he long ago decked himself out in all sorts of wand-like devices to enable him to cast an arsenal of spells. I don't think what Arthur can do is of any meaningful use in assessing what Magus might be able to do. Arthur is a seer. One established trait of seers is that they have enormous amounts of magic energy that they can put into the spells they cast (via wands), to the point that it had Pandora going on about Tedd having the power to bend worlds - plural - to his will. A seer being able to overwhelm someone's magic resistance doesn't really say anything about how anyone other than a seer might do.

I'm sure this yelled admonishment won't be misinterpreted at all. There is zero chance that Magus will think Ellen is angry about him not turning her back into a man.

Yeah, the situation has just changed from "I don't have much time" to "I have NO time." DGB agents equipped and ready for serious magical trouble will be stepping through those doors literally any second now, if Magus is still in line of sight when they do he's risking capture. Yes again, if Magus gets even the most cursory of conversations with Ellen he'd immediately bring up the zapping and Ellen would immediately and very emphatically refuse, and Magus would accept that. If Magus not getting the chance to talk would result in Magus doing the zapping, then this choice of DGB response time is changing whether Magus zaps Ellen or not, and that seems a drastic change and doesn't fit Magus' characterization or how Dan phrased the commentary. Dan could be going for Ellen getting zapped, to be followed by Tedd promptly giving her a watch to set her base form back to the Ellen clone form he's got on file, and Magus being surprised by it the next time he sees Ellen, but I'd be surprised if that's it. My guess is that the mentioned long term character consequences will be Magus feeling guilt over having failed to fix even that much of his wrongdoings.

The Genie outfit grants her the ability to transform anyone who asks for it, as discussed here.

Her waist looks about normal to me. Are you sure the line you're looking at isn't the edge of her jacket's pocket?

That's not what I meant. Think of it this way: Magic operates kind of like a computer, and "taken at its most technical" how magic works is the operating system, like Windows. A specific magic system is then a program, let's say a word processor, that runs on the computer. The current system is Microsoft Word, and an older one (which is now forcibly prevented from running) is OpenOffice. The researcher discovers that Microsoft Word uses a particular Windows system call to display text. He tries to do something else (or rather, make something that does something else) with that Windows system call, but what he tries coincidentally happens to be something that OpenOffice did (and Microsoft Word does not), so Windows rejects the call even though it's technically valid.

With how the Will of Magic described the minimal changes as none, and many, my guess is that someone had figured out some of the more fundamental system-independent principles underlying magic, used those to design Kevin, and ran into a system-specific block that was part of keeping another system inaccessible.

If Ashley were a Seer, awakened or not, she would have insanely high magic resistance and probably would have shrugged off Magus' spells without even noticing. Even if Magus has enough power to overwhelm a Seer's resistance, he would have noticed that it was exceptionally difficult to affect her and probably commented on it. Another Seer ability is having a huge amount of magical energy. Tara the griffon should have noticed and commented on that along with mentioning that Nanase's aura radiates royalty, Ellen is Elliot's twin, and Diane is a potential vampire slayer. Also, it doesn't fit with Kevin saying she's weak. Plus, having another Seer just randomly show up for no reason would be stretching plausibility with how rare they are. In short, Ashley is almost certainly not a Seer.

He's dodging Elliot's punches by moving around in midair. That involves skill with precise rapid flight-based movement, and so do Elliot's attempts to punch him without standing on the ground. Also, for all we know Magus could be using any number of non-visible self-enhancement spells to boost his strength and reflexes, give him combat precognition, and/or all sorts of other stuff. I'd expect that sort of thing to be standard issue in battle mage school, and Magus mentioned "magic strength boosts" on Friday (even if only to say that they're relative to base form strength) so such things definitely do exist in his universe.

Elliot was trained by someone who stumbled into magic with no idea what he was doing, got one custom personalized spell because it happens to match his nature, and has never really practiced fighting while flying. Magus was trained by an institution with centuries of experience behind it where his teachers knew exactly what they were doing, got a bunch of spells taught to him by said institution which specifically selected them for being the ones that centuries of experience proved the most effective, and has practiced all kinds of combat-by-magic (including combat while flying) as part of his regular school curriculum. Of course Magus completely outclasses Elliot in this kind of fight.

Ground, not floor. Elliot knocked Magus out the window and then flew after him. They're both outside now, probably in the parking lot.

For anyone who missed it, look at the word that was interrupted by Elliot hitting Magus in panel 4. With that and the commentary, I think Magus was saying "I'm going to try to wake him up." Elliot just jumped to a conclusion a little too soon, partly because Magus did a poor job of leading up to that statement. This might be for the best, though. The vehemence of Elliot's attitude, plus him her taking a female form so quickly, easily, and above all willingly, could make more of an impression on Magus than any reasoned argument.

> "Having to be transformed regularly if he wanted to be consistently male" Does Magus not know about enchantment duration being indefinite if the enchanted person wants it? It could still be dispelled, but how common would that really be? I don't think we've actually seen an enchantment get dispelled ever in all of EGS (not counting consensual "zap back to normal" transformations). And that's not counting the recent change allowing temporary transformations to become permanent just by maintaining them long enough.

Well, ummmmmm... His intentions are good? That is, he believes that what he intends to do is good. Whether that belief is correct is quite another matter, and depends on whether he intends to ask for Ellen's opinion and consent before doing it.

I think 'an oppressive government' was intended to be the analogue for the unfortunate circumstance of being stuck on a non-physical plane without a body. The victims, in the analogy, are represented by the people who were lied to, stolen from, and cheated on the escapee's path to freedom. In any case, Magus unquestionably did several things that were wrong. His circumstances only speak to his motivations for why he did them, which at best might garner some sympathy and a reduction in punishment. Far more important, however, is that he recognizes that his deeds were wrong and intends to atone for them, and (provided nothing interrupts things) he is now in a position to directly apologize to and ask forgiveness from those most severely wronged. Pandora might arguably be the actually most wronged party, but I think the blame for that one lies more (but not entirely) with Sirleck for augmenting the hit squad beyond what Adrian could handle and Voltaire for being the only one with any intent of bringing Pandora into the mess at all. I do find Magus sympathetic, but a large part of that is based on the expectation that he will promptly begin his efforts to atone.

The second half of the commentary makes it clear that it is indeed Ellen holding Sirleck in the last panel, and also that it's a metaphorical visualization rather than what's literally happening.

Yes, that's been obvious to me since the moment Magus convinced Sirleck to help. Right after stating that he needed to find a low-profile new host, Magus stated with considerable emphasis that Magus himself was the ultimate in "low-profile". Combine that with him being young and a powerful wizard, and that's pretty much the ultimate windfall for Sirleck. Raven might have been even better, with being an elf in addition to a powerful wizard, but he's very much not low-profile and taking him could be much trickier.