Drasvin

It makes a degree of sense, given Edward's occupation (maintaining a large scale secret like magic AND aliens means he has to regularly consider the wider scope impact of various actions and events), though it doesn't mean he's not being transphobic. Just means to root of why he's being transphobic is shifted from lack of understanding to concern about wider impact of Tedd's choices. Though I do wonder why he hasn't tried talking to Tedd about it before. He's normally open to discussing things with his son (or he'll fake a seizure when asked), so to not talk about such an important topic is odd. Maybe he's worried that the weight of the things that trouble him would undo some to all of the good growth Tedd has gotten from the TFG and his friends. He was certainly worried that finding out about Noriko being a monster hunter would have undone all that good.

I doubt it. And even if he could, it certainly would trigger the self-defense clause of Immortal Law, allowing the would-be victim to unleash destructive force. Or run away to another layer of reality. Either option likely doesn't take very long to pull off, so even a moment of realization could pull the Immortal out of danger, and they tend to be observant. I think it's less the fairies don't have any real enemies and more that they can escape to other layers of reality and are nigh-impossible to track. They can run and hide from anything that is a significant threat, where they can plot said threat's demise from safety. That said, I think one of the reasons for the Laws of the Fairies is to avoid making humanity, and possibly other mortals, overly angry at them. Humans can reach levels of power rivaling that of the fairies (at least in the physical plane), and humans are numerous. While the secrecy of magical affairs would limit how much could be actively leveraged against them, open hostilities against humans would end very badly for the fairies. Especially if human ingenuity leads to the discovery of a way to track fairies (Finding them on the physical plane wouldn't be too hard. You just need the means to detect the magical potency of your average human/mortal creature. Then everyone that doesn't detect is a potential fairy in disguise, though you would have to be careful as such a method would get false positives on the severely magically impaired and anyone who resisted the detection method) and/or drag the fairies to the physical plane to make them stand and fight.

I know it says the learning curve of popular MMOs, but I wonder how Dwarf Fortress matches up.

Possibly that, but also the simple fact that body snatchers don't just kill and steal life from others. They steal autonomy. They suppress the free will of the host, trapping them in their own bodies as an amoral, uncaring, and unseen monstrosity controls them like a puppet. EDIT: Also, the body snatcher exists on the spiritual plane. Immortals are stronger there, but it is kinda their home turf. Some might take offense to that home turf being encroached upon. I don't think he plans to take control of Adrian. For one, Adrian already has public ties and connections AND has ties and connections into the magical community. If he starts acting strangely, then people are going to get suspicious. While Magus is a powerful wizard, he also has the massive draw that no one in the main EGS-verse knows him, outside of Pandora. He has no ties or connections. No one would know he exists, much less care if something happened to him. With the exception of Pandora, no one would notice Magus acting out of character, because no one would know what would be in character for him. For a life-sucking parasite that wants to remain in secret, but also in control of the host, that's a very tempting prospect. And even if Adrian's long-lifespan is a greater draw than the secretiveness of Magus, there are other potential dangers to consider. For one, an elf's immortal parents might have a strong emotional connection to their offspring, or a vow to watch over and protect said off-spring from a previous life, meaning that taking control of said elf is going to paint a target on Sirleck's back. Also I'm not sure if an elf would count as a mortal for purposes of Immortal law. If not, then an Immortal would not be restricted to the 'Empower and Guide' rules when dealing with elves. I don't know how that would work with a body snatcher controlling an elf though. Immortals seem to be prohibited from directly killing a vampire themselves, or at least are highly unwilling to directly engage them(It has been said that human wizards can defeat Immortals, assuming the Immortal is fighting fair, and vampires were human magic users that were able to 'transcend mortality' via predatory and/or parasitic means).

Maybe he can get the molotov lit before he dies and mutually destroy the vampire? I doubt it, as the vampire looks like it might be a neat minor(in relative terms) enemy for the main cast to fight, but it's not entirely out of the question that CEG could get somewhat lucky in taking the literal monster down with him.

There's too much narrative build-up around Lord Tedd for him to be killed off-panel. It just wouldn't make good narrative. Though it is certainly possible that Edward believes Lord Tedd to be dead.

I doubt she knows he went back to Sirleck. She knows he's still around and likely looking for an opportunity, but she doesn't seem to have put a lot of thought into him. I'm honestly wondering if Pandora steered Magus onto the Dewitchery path just to awaken Abraham for a chance to kill him for worsening the werewolf problem. I wouldn't be surprised if she lied to him about that being his only chance in order to manipulate events to give herself a chance at revenge. Sirleck and Voltaire are the only major threats in play at the moment, that I can think of anyway. Pandora might consider Magus a threat, and therefore an enemy, but he's a fairly minor one if he doesn't have someone to help him. And I'm not sure Pandora can kill him if she wanted to, as she tore him up pretty badly before and he survived. While Lord Tedd is a very major threat, he's not in play at the moment(by which I mean he isn't taking significant actions in the current story). There are much more pressing and immediate concerns to deal with.

I think "trickster" primarily. In that mode she wasn't "bad" per se.... But humor, especially practical joke sort of humor is hard to pull off without some cruelty. Which in turn often requires some indifference to the object of the prank. I'd like to credit Blaike with putting Pandora in touch with her empathy. Maybe Pandora's experience with Blaike was enough to bring about a change to basic nature. I expect we'll find out eventually. Even before she really got to know Blaike and learn the lessons he had to give, She had enough empathy for challenge to turn into concern. And she even helped to save his life once he encountered the giant magic lion bear. Her empathy may have grown after getting to know Blaike, but she had some before hand. While practical jokes might require a degree of cruelty to pull off, a good-hearted trickster will try to prevent the cruelty from going to far and exceeding the good that comes from the humor. They might not always succeed in that though.

Well her basic nature would have been the same. Extrapolating from what we know of her, her basic nature seems to be an emotionally driven, but good-hearted trickster.

Good thing Akane Hanma Chan is self-aware enough to know she's not good at moral judgements (Though that does make me wonder how she decided Susan would be good at moral judgements. She generally is, but I'm wondering how Hanma figured that out), we don't need another mortal that is causing suffering in the name of a better world (though at least her intent would be more sincere)

I honestly never put a lot of that into it before. But thinking on it now...it depends on a few factors. For text-books, technical guides, and tabletop RPG books like a Player's Handbook, I prefer two-columns. For novels, or for electronic reading that I can scroll from top to bottom, I prefer single column per page. Though, other than the vertical scrolling, I wouldn't be able to tell you way I prefer them that way outside of general familiarity. My guess would be that it has something to do with the ratio of font size and page size. Technical books often have a lot of information and typically have a limit on the page count (more an issue for dead-tree format than electronic, but old standards tend to get carried over if there is not a strong enough reason to abandon the standard, and some books do get produced in both formats), so they shrink the font size and use multiple columns to fit more information per page. Novels, on the other hand, tend to be less information dense and so are less likely to strain under a page limit, and can more easily have content cut or altered to better fit if it is straining to meet the page limit. Personally, if you can do both without serious problem, I say you should do both.

Passing on emotional attachments likely aren't done because of the risks it would present (there might also an argument about forcing emotional attachments on a new incarnation, but that gets muddled with technicalities, contexts, obligations, and stuff). Most of the problems that Pandora has caused are, in one way or another, tied to her emotional attachments. Namely, she put off resetting for so long because of her strong emotional attachments. Though, on the other hand, her strong emotional attachments, along with Blake's advise about not knowing the path ahead, helped her stay grounded at times. If she didn't have Blake's advise, or the emotional attachment to make that advise relevant, then she would likely ended up much worse. To be clear, I think Pandora passing on at least some (likely most) of her emotional attachments will be a good thing, or at least better than passing on none of them. There's too much going on at the moment, too many points of connection that need her to retain the emotional attachment to keep her invested in a positive manner (whereas new-Jerry appears to resent Jerry's vow to Susan and the group to some extent).

The simple fact that Immortals can lie to their future incarnations through these memoirs would imply they have some degree of control over what they pass on. If everything was automatically passed on in a proper death, then the lie would have been nigh-impossible to pull off(all it would have taken to break the lie is for an Immortal to check the memories after their elf child had a child) If an Immortal can choose what to pass on when they die, then they can leave out or generalize the more personal parts of their history if they so wish. Similar to how a human writing their memoirs can omit or alter details to be passed on to future generations. Also, we've seen that an Immortal has to actively reference the memoirs to get the information from them. They don't automatically know the contents. Though likely some information is automatically known after a proper death, otherwise the new Immortal wouldn't know how to reference the memoirs, as we saw when H&D didn't know how to reference their ancestral memories after an improper death.

Snoring comes from vibration of soft tissues within the airway. Dessicated throats aren't soft any more. They might rattle, I suppose.... Do mummies need to sleep? Though if they did, the thought of sleeping next to a mummy who is making a rattling noise... ugh! Why do you think mummies spend so much time in their sarcophagi? They're just trying to get some nice rest when dumb adventurers stumble in and start stealing things and messing up the decor.

I'm kinda sad Tedd didn't try the beam on Pandora. I understand there are numerous reasons not to, not least of which is that it's rude to zap someone without their permission. I just figure it would make for an amusing(ly awkward) scene. I don't think Pandora would mind, at least if Tedd asks first that is.

I've been wondering why Voltaire would get Sirleck to attack Adrian. From what I can gather, Voltaire's end goal is to change Immortal law to give them more freedom to act. This will likely need a majority of Immortals to agree, if not a unanimous agreement. Sirleck attacking Adrian might be a bid to get Pandora's 'vote.' If the law prohibits her from acting directly, even if an aberration is attacking her child, she might be anguished and frustrated enough to agree to a change in the law, assuming she doesn't decide to act directly anyway, consequences and all. Though if she does choose to accept the consequences and act directly, a forced-reset Pandora would likely be considerably easier to manipulate than an extremely old Pandora. Though a likely wrench in Voltaire's plan will be the Main 8, whom Pandora is on roughly good terms with(and getting increasingly better terms thanks to her helping Tedd) and she can Guide and Empower to protect Adrian.

Hmm. If Magus's crazy plan with Mr. Body snatcher (can't remember how it's spelt and don't feel like looking it up at the moment) doesn't work, how likely is it that he finds out about Tedd opening up a new avenue to get his body back.

Thanks to dramatic convergence of storylines, she likely has until the afternoon into the evening, unless Friday isn't a school day for some reason. Admittedly it wouldn't be a lot of time, but it's certainly enough to try to patch things up with Magus if she wanted to (and hasn't forgotten the poor wizard from all of the things that have been on her mind and the tiredness from keeping herself composed for so long.)

I think it's less that the energy concentrations don't matter (the ambient energy levels affect a lot of things like the rate of personal energy recovery and the power range an individual can use. The high excess takes the differences to dangerous levels, but that doesn't mean that normal variations in ambient magic don't cause significant differences) and more that the layers of secrecy have significantly impacted research into such topics. Noone noticed the changes in Moperville because the most of the magical community is going to be more interested in securing secrets than cooperating in a way that promotes greater understanding. Pandora mentioned that magic users are secretive enough to miss a recurring type of wizard. While Seers are rare, a cooperative research intiative should have picked up something. But a cooperative research intiative would entail a large number of researchers, which could be detrimental to the masquerade. Especially if one wishes to use the secrecy within secrecy for some sort of advantage. Though that does mean such a tactic still wouldn't get distributed, just for different reasons.

Once Tedd adds the FV5 beam to the wand, she's going to need to test it, to demonstrate how multiple spells in one wand works, right? So I wonder who is getting zapped, herself or Pandora? I think it's likely a little of both. He gets the drive to help people from his father, but due to him being half-immortal, he can't act directly in most situations, so he instead seeks others to train to act in his stead.

Ellen can possibly use ambient energy on the spell(doing so is subconscious in most cases anyway), just the spreading part of spell explicitly doesn't continue to draw from the environment after she casts it. I'm not even sure if Ellen can continue to pump energy into the AoE after she casts it. She might have to package all the energy she wants it to use into the spell as she casts it (making it a lot like a tf bomb than some kind of channeled effect)

Breaking down what we know of their motivations, I would say Voltaire is worse. Both actions are bad, but Voltaire is worse. Pandora attempted an unethical act in order to right a perceived wrong against her family. Simple anger and vengeance. Not an acceptable course of action and one that seeks reparations out of proportion to the crime, but a course of action that people can sympathize with and even takes a special place in our pop culture (the likes of Batman and the Punisher have a strong thread about vengeance) Voltaire, on the other hand, attempted an unethical act to setup his plan to allow him to do more unethical acts (why does he want the heavy restrictions gone? I seriously doubt it's to help the poor and unfortunate). Especially considering the purpose of his unethical act was to deliberately cause pain and suffering in others (Pandora's act would have caused pain and suffering in others, but that would have been collateral instead of intent) He wasn't just willing to accept that his actions would lead to sorrow and suffering, he acted with the intent to cause it.

To be fair to Dr Van Helsing, I believe medical knowledge of his time knew that blood transfusions could save lives but didn't know how to make them safe and reliable. Basically a situation of "this could save her life, or it could lead to a painful death, but if we don't do this then she's definitely going to die a painful death." And blaming the death on a vampire would be building off of the earlier diagnosis of a vampire attack. A more modern cause of death might be "complications from treatment of a vampire attack," pending autopsy findings of course.

I imagine maintaining her composure and coherence for an extended period of time would be tiring (it might just be me, but Pandora looks tired in that last panel), which would give her another reason for taking frequent and/or long naps.

Elves likely don't have ever expanding magical and cognative abilities like their parents, which would help curb the boredom that causes instability in Immortals. Also while elves are restricted in what they can do, they are less restricted than their parents. Immortals are limited to (broadly) "empower and guide," while elves are just restricted to when magic and magical things are involved. (Adrian is allowed to directly engage and attempt to kill Abraham, while Pandora has to rely on other individuals to try to kill the wizard that hurt her son.) This gives elves more ways to keep themselves grounded and preoccupied.