Vorlonagent

Solar is also a very diffuse power source. You don't get a lot of power generation per square unit of measure. A civilization built on pure solar needs either huge amounts of collection area or, as you suggest, lifestyle changes. Not "rationing" in the "I cast spells on even numbered Tuesdays" sense, so much as nobody gets powerful spells anymore. magic becomes more like parlor tricks. Probably not a palatable solution considering magic has a flair for the dramatic....

Ed Verres' magic potential wand is probably DGB issue built by Arthur Arthur simply because it's technological-looking and so few people besides Arthur are capable of making wands. It's unlikely for a british magic user to have a DGB-issue wand, though I admit it is still definitely possible, depending on how tight-knit the paranormal community is. It's not impossible for Arthur to have been the only source of new wands and similar implements anywhere in the world for a while there. We don't know who the two other Seers-who-have-used-magic-but-found-out-the-second-purpose-for-Seers out there are, how old they are or how connected to the rest of Earth's paranormal community they are.

Tedd's bust size as a girl has varied a lot, which suggests Dan is trying out different sizes. Tedd's feminine form at the comics shop in Squirrel Prophet Part 2 was a lot more subdued.

That's before we talk about Van's father, who is very likely a powerful magic user, if not wizard, in his own right.

"isn't even". Doh. Blew the punchline.

...And Catalina is even wearing a poodle skirt.

I'm good with that. Van is a Seer. By everything we know about Seers, Van should have tested exactly like Tedd, unless there's grades of Seer-ness, and EGS doesn't seem to support that. EXCEPT, Arthur Arthur's comment about just thinking he was a Wizard with a quirk suggest there might be Seers who also spellcast? I dunno... Anyway, the point is, Van's lack of spellcasting should be identical to Tedd's lack of spellcasting. If Norko realizes Van is special, not damaged, she must then realize that Tedd could the same thing. But living in the EU, even the UK, is more than enough reason to become multilingual. THIS is a good point I forgot about. If Van was subjected to a magical potential detection process that wasn't frightening (and therefore reflexively resisted) then Noriko would have a reason to think Van is different from Tedd.

That's enough to cast reasonable doubt on the idea that TEdd's watches must be of sufficiently low quality (and thus bad efficiency) as to be unusuable apart from Moperville's high magical energy. That's all I'm after. Since there's no canon on this, we're all merely speculating anyway.

The question then is what Ted did with them. Did he use them as-is? I can't find the comic but back in the early days there was a badly-written memo from Ed Verres to Tedd that everybody who read it saw as commentary on their lives. Ed Verres tells us that the note said hewas bringing home enough of the "hard-to-get materials" that Tedd could build a TF Gun 10 times over. It seems reasonable to assume that Tedd has used those hard-to-get materials in his watches, so while the outside is most definitely "cheap toy watch" the inside could be much better quality work.

All Van needs is to have been told his mother can't be around because she's a big important monster hunter. Van's obviously a bit panicked in the comic so naturally he's going to try to defend himself against these people he doesn't know with the most powerful threat he can think of: Mom. Which would be independent of her involvement in Van's life. If Noriko understands that there's more to Van than a 0 spell-acquisition potential, she also has to understand the same could be true of Tedd. That means she owes Tedd an apology at the very least. But this hasn't happened. So either Norko either hasn't cared to reconnect or she's been blocked by someone or some circumstances or some combination of those. Fanfic requires more words.

Norko's monster hunting is kept from Tedd because Tedd is seen as emotionally fragile where his mother is concerned. Van not having this problem doesn't mean his mom is around much or at all. It just means he wasn't kept in the dark as Tedd was.. Van's presence also means that someone recognized that Van wasn't the dead-end Tedd was thought to be. If Norko understood that Van had potential and didn't make any effort to make amends to Tedd, well that's another sin on the list she needs to answer for. It's possible the Ed Verres interfered here, to keep Tedd from being further traumatized.

I thought about that. It would mean Tedd crafted all his watches especially poorly. That's possible too but theree's no canon either way and I like to think Tedd knows enough about what he's doing to produce average gear. That's how I want to interpret what the whale was saying too. That Tedd as he is now would not have the energy to use the watches. But that's not what the whale said. Scotty is entirely correct about that part. I just don't like the implications of taking the whale literally and choose not to accept them, even though Scotty has canon evidence on his side that I don't.

Then we can agree to disagree. I don't buy the watch energy costs as being that hgih, but I don't have any canon to support my opinion.

I thought about this. there's a nice explanation and a not-nice one. Both explanations assume Van's father is British and Van is being raised by his father. The nice explanation is Van is being raised well away from Noriko's monster-hunting activities to prevent Van from being used in revenge attempts such as not-Tengue's in Moperville. The less-nice explanation is Van showed no more magical ability at birth than Tedd and Norko abandoned Van the same way she did Tedd.

But nobody is ever quoted as saying Ed Verres couldn't use the watches. They skip straight to the conclusion (Mopervill has super high magic energy") without telling us how it was confirmed. You could be right and Verres couldn't use the watches. But QA #6 tells us Verres could fuel the watch with his own energy. If Verres couldn't use the watch, the only possible reason would be that the spell in the watch had such an astronomically high energy cost that Verres couldn't cast it with the entirety of his own energy. That's where I have a problem. The implication that watch spells are too energy intensive for a seasoned magic user to cast outside Moperville's super-high magical energy. If you're OK with that, we can agree to disagree. If not, then the whale's assertion, "the watches wouldn't work anywhere else" has to be qualified in some way.

We don't know if the watches did or didn't work for him. We only know that Moperville's high magical energy was confirmed.

I'm not sure where in the whale's conversation Tedd's theory was negated. Everybody does indeed have some magical energy. The question is where the energy to fuel the spell is coming from. QA# 6 has this to say about Tedd's watches and such. It confirms that users can power a magical implement (including a watch) with their own energy and tells us that Tedd's watches simply have no reserve of energy to draw on. While I don't have any EGS canon to directly contradict, I have a hard time thinking Tedd's watches would be totally unusable by anybody outside Moperville's magic buildup. The whale did speak in absolute terms and the most straightforward interpretation would be "without Moperville's magic buildup, nobody could use Tedd's watches anywhere else in the world, not even competent magic users". But that leads directly to the idea that the spells contained in a Tedd watch have such an astronomically high energy cost they couldn't be cast, even by said competent magic users. I have a really hard time accepting that last part, which means I have a hard time accepting the first part.

I read that comic and acknowledged the possibility. But as the rest of the comic makes clear it comes down to energy input, not some other intrinsic limit. Maybe magical implements can only use their own internal magic supply and cannot draw off the user's energy. Tedd's watches would have such a vanishingly small supply due to size that they wouldn't operate anywhere else. In that case, if you could give the watch a magical jumpstart with the users energy, they'd probably work fine.

The only thing confirmed in the second comic is Moperville has a crazy high level of magic energy. The comic does not say either way that Ed Verres could/couldn't use Tedd's watches outside Moperville's ambient magic. And the whale pretty much says the question is one of available energy. It does imply that a Tedd watch has an energy draw that puts it out of most magic users' reach, however. But your second comic does confirm one thing for another conversation. Ed Verres definitely knows Tedd is working with earth-magic and ought to have a good idea of where Tedd is at..

The biggest commality all three share, regardless of whether Van is Norko's son, is they're all a part of the same underground of magicians and the paranormally-connected. Tedd and Arthur are cirectly connected to the DGB and Van is the son of wizards, at least one of which taught him a few things about magic.

Watches are more fun? Also Watches wouldn't work for Tedd outside Moperville's high magic. A proper magic user ought to be able to power a Tedd watch anywhere. Also also right tool for the right job. Larger implements like wands and staves have larger energy storage and require less of the user's personal energy, but they're also recognizable and harder to hide. A watch would require the wearer power any spells in its spell list but it would be less recognizable as a magical implement and/or be easier to hide.

As i said in the prior reply, Ed Verres is sneaky. he tends to know more than he lets on. In some ways yes Tedd's research would be more groundbreaking. Uryouom energy tends to work only with living things and Tedd was morphing clothes. It's easily possible that the Verres house is being watched and Verres knows but hasn't said anything. See above. Much depends on if agents were actually able to enter the Verres house. Ed Verres likely has defenses in place that we have not seen. Agent Cranium would be a logical choice for occational drive-by spying. Given that we now know that Arthur Arthur is also a Seer, Cranium's ability might have been turned into a wand. We also know from what Tedd has said about his glasses that they have technology that can penetrate at least some layers of matter such as clothing as well.

Good job, Van. Hide behind your older sibling... If Van is a half-brother to Tedd which I also think is likely (the primary reason he might not be is that Dan's fairly screaming that he is and Dan is occasionally sadistic), I'm a little confused how he ended up a Seer. Did Noriko leave behind a trail of abandoned children looking for a proper heir, all of which (at least two of which) are Seers? The women's cruelty knows no bounds. Are there grades of "Seer"? If Arthur Arthur just thought he was a "wizard with a quirk", can he cast spells? I thought that wasn't possible for Seers. Of course, Arthur could be indulging in understatement with the word "quirk", which I also suspect is the case.

IIRC, wand-makers aren't necessarily Seers but if they aren't they are usually following recipes handed down from a Seer. It's the whole point of being a Seer. You see how spells work, which confers the ability to encode them into things. With nothing outside the ability of Magic besides time-travel, EGS could theoretically have an "artificer" special ability that conferred the ability to encode a personal spell into a wand/stave, what-have-you, but unless the person also had the "wizard" keyword, they wouldn't be able to encode a non-personal spell. How does Ed Verres react to Tedd as female? Probably not much most of the time. But the few negative comments would loom large in Tedd's memory because Verres is the only parent he has left. Tedd has thought nothing of being in GRace's form for the better part of a day. Ed Verres is also pretty sneaky. I would expect he knows more about Tedd's reseach than Tedd thinks he knows. I'd expect Verres to know more about anything Tedd is trying to hide than tedd thinks he knows. Old age and treachery defeating youth and strength.

I am proud to say that was entirely deliberate.