Drasvin

Do we know if Aberrations require beheading to die. Seems like the three times we have seen an Aberration killed, they have been beheaded or, in the case of the Spider-guy, was split down the middle. I ask because I wonder if a stab to a vital organ would be sufficient to kill one? Even if a stab to a vital organ isn't fatal for an aberration, I imagine it would be unpleasant. A stab to the lung would make breathing more difficult, a stab to the stomach would make digesting things problematic. The problem with stabbing aberrations is that they might not necessarily have the same internal organs any more. For instance, I'm not sure Sirleck would have functional lungs. Aberrations sustain themselves on life energies so might not need those organs for their life sustaining reasons, though that would certainly vary from vampire to vampire.

She got the drop on the bearded snake vampire and stunned it with Nase, winning with a combination of luck and decent tactics. But looking at how she's standing after beheading the snake, it looks like she did a wide, heavy backhanded swing. Gives a good amount of momentum to the swing, letting it do a significant amount of harm if it connects (and it's really impressive and flashy looking), but it leaves her open (honestly, if she hadn't killed the bearded snake, she wouldn't be able to bring the sword around to guard before it did her serious harm) and can risk overextending, causing her to lose balance. With the Koala vampire, she attempted another wide, heavy swing. Unfortunately, that time she gave him too much time to recover from the stun, so she missed, overextended, and fell. The only scene of her fight against the French vampire was an overhead chop with an axe (To be fair, the vampire was on the ground in front of her, but an overhead swing is rather slow) As for the "Hammer Queen," that might be why she's using the heavy swings like she is. She's more used to swinging a hammer, which lends itself very well to heavy swings. She's also more used to using them on people that are being offensive or insensitive, not actual combatants. Taking all that into account, I wonder just what Susan hoped to accomplish with that sword in the Goo incident. Maybe she should invest in a warhammer or a sledgehammer.

She probably can use her Chaos form on the physical plane, as it's simply an extreme expression of her shapeshifting ability and she can do that on the physical plane, but then she would have to deal with physical plane things like bumping into objects, air pressure, and gravity (somewhat, as she can float, but the large, oddly-shaped, roiling form might make floating less balanced and more unwieldy in the presence of gravity)Also her Chaos form with rather frightening and monstrous looking, which isn't too helpful for the situations in which she's appeared on the physical plane.

Susan likely hasn't had sword training (or any formal martial training for that matter) due to the pain of the trauma she experienced in France. As Scotty pointed out, Susan didn't even want to look at her spellbook after awakening due to the pain and memories. She probably kept the swords and other weapons as a "better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it" type of precaution, but actually seeking out someone to teach her how to fight would have been more than she would be comfortable with. She might have been hoping powerful abilities and innate human instinct to be enough. It doesn't take a lot of skill to use a sword, it just takes a lot of skill to use a sword well. While I agree that Immortals likely can't physically restrain humans, Voltaire might have also done that to try to psyche Ashley out for his own amusement and to slow her down. He probably didn't bring his sword cane to the mall (He wasn't expecting to have to fight at the mall, much less to fight vampires), and while he certainly has more spells, the only offensive spell we've seen him cast is murder shroud, which would risk hitting Susan if he attacked the Koala Vampire with it.

Self preservation against dangerous foes? For self preservation, they might pull back and let the more gun-ho aberrations wear the hunters and target down. Or simply not care about the well-being of other aberrations to pay attention to when they need help, so they don't know the others are in trouble until the hunters have downed them..

Communication is quite important area of research. If there would be considerable limits or problems in using magic for communication, there would be no reason to stun technological growth in the area. Unless, of course, the reason would basically be that magic users are trying to keep monopoly through preventing ANY research and are very successful in it. Communication more sophisticated than courier mail typically needs a significant amount of infrastructure (Radio transmission can be done with little to no infrastructure, but it still needs a base station for a clear long range signal) that takes time and money to set up and can be vulnerable to attack. That said, such suppression would require multinational cooperation, because if any nation didn't cooperate with suppressing technological research, it could gain a significant upper-hand against the nations that did suppress their technology. And going by history, nations with a significant advantage towards their neighbors typically will seek to conquer and/or exploit their neighbors, which means the other nations that suppressed their technology would either have to abandon the magic users' monopoly or suffer on the receiving end of conquest/exploitation.

Susan isn't in the mood to just let Mr. Koala run away. I would think Mjolnir would be more than a simple stun hammer, though it would be quite stunning to get hit by it. He told Big Mouth he had magic. Apparently he thinks he has enough. Of course, he might not know he's taking on an elf wizard with at least three centuries of experience, trained by an Immortal mother for who knows how long. I think Mr. Scarf is less focused on raw power than on skill and subterfuge. He made it sound like he doesn't have a lot of magic (and all the aberrations should have magic as they need magic to become an aberration) and was called weakling by Big Mouth. Mr. Scarf could be hiding his magical potential, but that feeds into the subterfuge angle.

Hmm, does that mean they can start turning on each other right away? Yeah, though once they see the level of challenge they're up against (two capable hunters + another potential hunter + Immortal support) some of them might try to work together in some fashion just to survive (though they might try to backstab each other if doing so would increase their chances of survival) magic does seem willing to upgrade spells. Nanase's fairydoll spell did not start with its "fae punch" sub-spell but added it later. I didn't have your reaction but I wouldn't want you to feel like "it's just you." in any bad way. Nanase's fairydoll spell also upgraded so she can have different outfits. And while I didn't have a reaction like that either, it's certainly a reasonable reaction.

So, Susan's hair become a reservoir of magic. I wonder if the capacity of that reservoir is dependent on the length of her hair. That would give her a good, logical reason not to cut it.

Based on their names, I am amused that Zeus is worried that Pandora is going to kill him. An example of the interesting oddities that can happen when entities take names from mythology without necessarily having the relative level of power of the namesake. Zeus has the same basic nature as Jerry, but when we saw Jerry, he had a lifetime of experience to give him wisdom and shape his personality. The core of who Jerry is appears to be someone who loves to party and enjoy life (which we got a glimpse of with the story about the hammers). As for the name, it was a name that his past life was thinking about near his death. Emotional connections don't (normally) persist over the reset, but maybe the name ended up in Jerry's memoirs and the newly reborn immortal thought it sounded cool. Seems that Susan's hair is still blonde, it's just permanently dyed after her awakening, with the exception of the dye doing something fancy when Susan is about to face aberrations (or maybe it's linked to her emotions in some way? Though fighting aberrations is certainly going to bring up painful memories).

It makes sense though, if Sirleck wants to possess Magus, he'd have to be close enough to make the jump when Magus got a physical body again, so Sirleck possesses Ellen, zaps Elliot which allows Magus to possess him, then the two of them go to the Diamond together. Makes sense, but it raises the question of what was planned if Sirleck hadn't found out about Adrian.

Ok, so while we didn't see it happen, it's quite possible that Sirleck had jumped from the butler to Francine the janitor, then followed Ellen into the bathroom at school and jumped to her there, leaving Francine unconscious (but alive so there's hope for Ellen to survive this). Ellen, under possession of Sirleck lies to Nanase about the "inhuman voyeur at the college", Nanase is currently waiting for Ellen to get dropped off, but I'm betting Elliot hadn't seen Ellen since the morning so has no clue that he should be driving Ellen anywhere, he might have even assumed that Ellen went straight to Nanase's after school or something. Possible, though really creepy. Though Sirleck only came to Mopeville because of Adrian, giving the impression that he was going to deal with the half-immortal personally (after his mercenaries wear him down that is.)

As a game designer for table top games that explicitly have a human referee / Game Master, I'm just going to say that have player rules lawyers is bad enough, much less with the game it self being in the loop. True, though ideally a sentient table top game would function as it's own Game Master (or a Game Master's assistant if it's not advanced enough to run itself).

There probably needs to be intent on leaving when removing a piece, so that accidental removal doesn't count, also it there could be a time limit for how long a piece if off the board, because contact between the piece and the board wouldn't be broken for long when moving the piece from space to space (players could also slide the pieces along to maintain contact). Also like I said before, it'd be conditional, like when leaving the game it's not just taking the piece off the board, but letting it go with the intent of not playing anymore, this would have the added bonus of if 1 person had to quit (for whatever reason), the other players could continue without having to restart. Reading intent could potentially run into parsing troubles as well, especially if the player needs to leave for a reason unrelated to the game itself, as the player's thoughts might not be clear enough on leaving the game, leading to parsing error. A time limit might work, but induces a delay on deciding to leave the game and the leaving taking affect (it also imposes a time limit on fixing mistakes if the board gets bumped or a cat decides to board looks like a good place for a nap). And while sliding the game pieces is a possible rule, it's simply a work around that doesn't add much depth to the game and can still result in unwanted mistakes if a player that typically picks up game pieces to move them forgets about the rule and tries to move their piece in a comfortable manner. Ultimately it would depend on which is the simplest, least costly to implement, and best of the enjoyment of the players, a dense complicated set of conditionals to catch variation, or a sentience that is designed/trained to value player enjoyment and wellbeing. And since magic is a big part of this, I'm not sure which one would have the better balance of those traits. Hmm...maybe. My concern there is cases where the player needs to leave immediately and doesn't think to put their piece in the box. It might be an edge case, but in a game largely about pushing consenting adults out of their comfort zones in fun and enjoyable ways(it's a game about transformation that is inspired by anime, which typically uses such mechanics to push people out of comfort zones and foster character growth and/or set up some comedy), edge cases not being accounted for can lead to bad feelings. Depending on how the sentience/sapience is designed/taught and what kind of game it is, I think it could make for a good game. In a game with large variable input, like games dependent on text parsers, it could help prevent frustrations (like the "you can't get ye flask" problem that I linked about earlier) and maybe even allow for deeper, richer gameplay. In games that are largely systematic with limited, concise inputs, a sentience/sapience would be rather excessive (maybe if one wanted the ultimate multiplayer bot AI?) Though the developer of a sentient/sapient game would need to make sure it's values aren't destructive (or counter enough to the player/people that it becomes destructive) and that it can't extend it's influence beyond the game.

That could run into issues during play, with players picking up pieces to move them, the board or surface the board is sitting on getting knocked around by accident, dice knocking over pieces, pets jumping onto the board and knocking pieces about, someone getting angry enough to literally flip the table/board when the other players wish to continue playing, and probably more situations I can't think of at the moment. The game needs to be able to reliably determine when a player wishes to leave the game without mistaking other actions or accidents, and the way to leave needs to be simple, so that a player that has been pushed too far out of their comfort zone can leave the game quickly and easily. If the game mistakes another action as intent to leave the game, then that ruins fun by dropping out players for playing in a way that the game didn't expect. If the way to leave the game is too complex, then it would very likely run into the same issues as the game being unreliable at detecting intent to leave. Ideally, leaving the game should be as simple as getting up and walking away from the game board (or declare you don't want to play anymore), though if the game doesn't have some degree of sentience, then leaving to get a snack or use the restroom would count as dropping out (and if you could leave by stating intent, you could run into issues of the game having trouble parsing the statement correctly)

While the attack is likely to bring Ellen and Elliot and most of the rest of the main cast to the site of the attack, that would only be once they hear about it. Adrian, Susan, and Diane are likely going to be too busy fighting and trying to survive to get word directly to the rest of the group. On top of that, Elliot and Ellen both have a bad history of not checking messages until after the fact. Though once they hear about the attack, Ellen and Elliot's transit time to the attack site is likely to be much more than Helena and Demetrius's transit time, giving Magus his window of opportunity. He just has to make sure they don't take separate transportation to the attack site. And hearing that one of their friends is in the middle of the attack could actually help Magus, as it would cause emotions to run high, giving him more to work with. Yeah, but vampires already have a high incentive to kill Slayers, given that Slayers are the most capable at killing vampires. Voltaire seem to hate Pandora. Also, he might count on her doing something which would bring magic reset if Adrian is hurt. I wonder if Voltaire is manipulating the attack to try to throw Pandora of his trail. If Adrian is attacked (or worse, killed), then Pandora will freak out and go hunting for whoever caused it, with the obvious trail leading to Sirleck and Magus. She might be able to follow the trail to the detective, as Voltaire impersonated him to give Sirleck the information about Adrian, assuming either Sirleck or Magus is alive to question. She could then question the detective and learn about Voltaire, but that would take time and again requires nothing to have happened to the detective. Adrian lost to Abraham when he let his guard down slightly to do the moral thing and let Abraham have a chance to surrender. He would know that aberrations are irredeemable and he shouldn't hold back, except maybe to conserve strength for an extended battle. He'll likely need help surviving the initial engagement, but he should be fine against the aberrations if he can get past that. And setting up a scenario that gives him a few moments of forewarning, without having giving him information that the audience hasn't seen him receive, wouldn't be hard. For instance, the aberrations could decide to try to eliminate Susan and Diane first, since hunters are a more significant threat, at least psychologically. Or maybe one of the less careful vampires does something that gives the game away. On top of that, the vampires might not coordinate well, as Sirleck needed to add a strict monetary incentive to try to get them to work together. And once one vampire dies, that incentive to work together goes away, so their going to lose most to all of whatever group cohesion they have. And I doubt we have to worry about Voltaire stepping in to kill Adrian personally. Too risky. Adrian might get a lucky hit in and cause him serious injury or he might draw Pandora's immediate attention, which would go very poorly for him.

I wonder if Hanma is genre savvy enough to know that uttering such a sentence typically leads to one's sudden demise at the hands of their creation. Magical sentience can make for interesting NPC interaction in the game. Need to be careful with the values and ethics instilled into such a sentience, but if done properly it can enrich the game. Probably excessive on a game without NPCs though. EDIT: I just realized that Hanma's game might need some form of sentience to reliably determine when a player wishes to leave the game, so it can undo the transformations and let the player go on their way. Otherwise you risk running into "You can't get ye flask"(Warning: Tvtropes link) type situations.

It's a good idea to recon the area and get a good idea about angles of attack (and escape, if things go pear-shaped) before the actual attack starts. While some vampires might relish the opportunity to cut loose and rampage, most are going to look for ways to maximize their chances of survival(at least as much as their ego and arrogance will allow). And camouflage wouldn't necessarily be needed beyond a human form. Adrian has to use effort to detect magic while in his aged form. I doubt he would try to use Susan or Diane as hostages. He sensed that they have the talent to summon magic weapons. Better to just kill them than hold them close where they have the best shot at harming him. If he uses one or more hostages, then random mall civilians would be the better option (Though I'm not sure if using hostages would occur to the average vampire. Sirleck had trouble understanding Magus's empathy-based reasoning behind feeling responsible for those that the mercenaries kill during the operation. Most vampires probably would not readily understand others being reluctant to attack through hostages) If one doesn't have a lot of empathy to begin with, then losing empathy isn't that big of a cost. Does first require Awakening, which just means being lucky and/or determined enough to stumble over a path to power. He's likely waiting for the signal. The job isn't to just kill the half-immortal, but to also make a lot of noise and destruction. A smart individual would likely realize that they're a distraction for something else (if it wasn't spelled out in their contract, which I doubt it was) If Scarf attacks before the signal, he risks invalidating the contract. Sirleck wants an attention-drawing riot, not a quiet assassination.

Depending on how inheriting magical talents and wizardry works, whether by genetics or by some nebulous magical bloodline thing, it might be able to avoid the problem. If by genetics, then the talents/wizardry could be dependent on long-ish sequences that can be shut off if not all of the relevant genes in the sequence are passed on. For a simple example, being a wizard requires have the sequence A_B_C_D_ (Just assuming the 'wizardry on' genes are dominant for simplicity), and a child's parents have AaBbCcDd and aabbccdd, the child could end up with the sequence AabbccDd and no wizardry as a result. Applying the exponential to this, it's certainly possible for many people to have pieces of the sequence, but lack enough of the sequence to actually express wizardry (I'm not sure how probable such a scenario is, as figuring that out would require determining both the length of the sequence. If by nebulous magical bloodline, in many fantasy stories, the potency of a magical bloodline decreases as more non-magical bloodlines are added, until the point that the magic is diluted out of the bloodline after many generations. So that even if Genghis Khan had a magical talent, most modern people descended from him wouldn't have such a talent due to the magic being diluted out of their lineage. Though that would raise the question of how many generations does it take to make a magical bloodline irrelevant. They're Lesser Seyunolu, sure, but they wouldn't have Uryuom DNA so how would they have Uryuom Power? It's possible that the reason Hedge and Guineas could morph was because they had DNA from 2 species that would normally be incompatible with each other, but the egg compensated somehow to make it work. If the DNA was from 2 or more compatible sources, the egg wouldn't likely need to do any extra work. Also the egg may function much like a womb, maybe nutrients need to be injected on a regular basis for several months before it hatches. If uryuoum eggs are anything like most eggs on earth, they're packed with nutrients and stuff for the baby creature to grow and be born.(That's what the yolk of the egg is. It's embryo food!) The only question how to get the nutrients into the growing embryo. The uryuom egg might alter the embryo (or more simply force it develop in given manner) to ensure it can receive nutrients from the egg.

I probably should have been more clear. I figured he could get through the barrier, but unless he has a magical source of fire resistance, he would be incinerated, or at least very badly burned. Assuming he didn't try some kind of ranged attack, which I would hope Adrian taught him some sort of ranged technique. Those come in handy when you can't get close to your target. Adrian and Edward aren't exactly on speaking terms. Also the TF Gun isn't Edward's. It belongs to Tedd. Sure, Edward would able to ask Tedd if Adrian could borrow it for a bit, but before the events of the comic, I'm not sure Tedd would have been comfortable letting someone he barely knows borrow the TFG. Well they WERE able to speak when it mattered. However it's likely true Edward was Adrian's only connection in DGB - otherwise he would contact his other contact and not Edward. There are likely formal ways to contact the Paranormal Division, other than going through personal contacts. Adrian mentioned he didn't want to speak with Arthur about the boar incident. Possibly, the head of the Paranormal Division handles the formal requests and inquiries, likely for security reasons (Edward knows about extraterrestrials and even has a Uryuom secretary, but his two top agents aren't in the know) "Can a greater chimera assume a uryuom form without the use of a CMD?"

Where's the proof for that? She can float and move slowly. She did not fly when she was fighting Vlad, who was flying. Fox was flying when fighting against Abraham (starting here). Fox is a 'decoy' summon that can use any magic that Nanase can (assuming Fox has enough energy remaining), and Nanase didn't mention Fox having any additional abilities that she doesn't have(I figure that would have been worth mentioning as she was showing off her new spells to Ellen). I imagine he probably could have penetrated the flame barrier. Based on Greg sticking his finger into it, I don't think the barrier projected any force, it just contained enough heat to incinerate just about anything that tried to enter it. Grace was able to withstand that because her fur is fireproof, which was a quality she was specifically engineered with (Because she was made to fight the 'Lord of Fire') instead of being a result of her Uryuom Power. Yes, that may be the issue as well - Grace trained her Uryuom power, Noah possibly started training Earth magic before Uryuom power. (Still, it's possible his flight is Uryuom power.) On top of that, I'm not sure what Noah could get out of his Uryuom power without a CMD. It has been hinted at that Uryuom have some shapeshifting abilities without a CMD, but it hasn't been elaborated on how much. And Noah is a chimera, which have flawed transformation abilities until corrected by use of a CMD. Adrian might be able to get a CMD for Noah if Noah really wanted one (though not one with as extensive abilities as the TFG, due to Uryuom laws that makes getting one like that tricky), but Adrian has much greater access to magical knowledge and resources.

Individuals of uryuom decent can use human magic as long as they also have some human heritage. I doubt Noah would have much Uryuom power, and he definitely had the incentive to become stronger (and someone to teach him how to get stronger)

This game seems really interesting. Simple, easy to learn, and the transformations provide an enticing gimmick. I wonder how fun the game would be to play IRL, as real life lacks the easy magical transformations that would drive a lot of the zaniness. Probably depends on the group that it's played with and how imaginative and/or good at acting 'in-character' they are.

People are complicated. The human brain desires categorization and labels as it simplifies data processing, which in a survival situation can improve the odds of surviving, but the more one tries to fit people into categories, the more outliers become apparent. So to properly and fairly categorize the outliers, one would either need to blur the lines of the categories or create new categories to place the outliers into, both options reduce the effectiveness of the categories as processing shortcuts. And that's even before one gets into the complexities that come with dealing with transformations and other aspects of magic and/or super-science that one finds in EGS. If transformations and such weren't a factor, Elliot probably would fit in the straight category, but then again, maybe not going by this page (He certainly wouldn't have had that revelation without transformations though, given he's adverse to introspection). Though he probably is the closest to straight out of the main cast. There are possibly straight people in the secondary cast, but there is insufficient data to be certain. My best guesses would be Melissa is straight. Noah might be as well, though there's also the possibility that he has more of a Uryuom style attraction, like Grace does.

Mama Kitsune is a lot more knowledgeable and observant than she lets on and Nanase hasn't exactly been the most discreet with her powers. She tried to hide them from her mother, but she did stuff like float around school. If Mama Kitsune has any connections at the school that she keeps up with, then she might have known pretty early that Nanase was Awakened. And while Mrs. Kitsune might hate Adrian, he is an excellent teacher, well versed in history, magic, and combat. Mama Kitsune certainly wants the best for her daughter. Between the ASMA, going to the school that Mr. Raven teaches at, and their family heritage, I think Mrs. Kitsune likely expected Nanase to Awaken at some point and wanted to make sure she was as prepared for it as feasible.