hkmaly

If the drains had some sort of pull on magic, like a gravity well but strictly affecting magic, it would explain why magic continued to collect in Moperville despite the clog. Actually, even just that WOULD make the area having more magic than average after unclogging. Even if the drain is really highspeed and ambient magic is basically unusable when on it because it drains it so fast, there will be natural area around the drain where the "gravity" would compress magic to maximal level and the flow from that to the drain will be slowed by magic from other directions getting in the way. (This is not visible on water because water flows very fast, able to create flat surface in whole bathtub under one second if you don't count waves. Magic doesn't flow that fast, as proved by Nanase and Ellen.) Maybe not all of France, but Paris or whatever city Nanase and Susan went too, the reason I kept saying France was because Dan never stated exactly where they went. I suspect it was Paris, I'm from Europe and can't remember anything in France worth visiting which is not in or near Paris (Chartres Cathedral is like 50km from Paris, Palace of Versailles is even closer, Eiffel Tower is IN Paris ... and Disneyland is roughly as far as Versailles.) But I was saying that there is no reason to assume that the place where Susan killed the Vampire had above average levels of magic. Except, of course, if you want argument for the "just marked people shouldn't be able to cast their spell outside Moperville" idea which is absurd. Hey, Sarah would presumably be able to turn to man in that cave with Jerry, which is unlikely to have above average magic either. If her rationality didn't prevent her from being marked, of course.

Pitch. It's called pitchfork, not large fork. Unless you mean forklift. Or did I miss some reference?

I think Abraham is a good example of a petrification spell with a release condition added to it. Oh. Right. Forgot about this. So, as long as Abraham was chemically convincing stone, then we KNOW magic doesn't really care about organic molecules or chemical base of life. The stone statue still counted as transformed Abraham despite not being alive in physical/chemical sense. Explanation? Aura, soul or something similar.

I would think that if there was a natural area around the nexus where the energy is higher, there's have been some mention of it, like Pandora might have understandably failed to mention it on the first visit, but the second visit she wasn't like "don't worry, even if this works, there'd still be plenty of magic where the clog was to exercise with." Sorry, I forgot to add that Sarah would be only able to cast her spell in non-empowered Moperville AFTER some training. Like, she will need to cast the spell 100x to be able to cast in in non-empowered Moperville and 200x to be able to cast it 10 miles west from it. Hmmm ... if it would be like flat land with fountains and drains, then magic would be basically same everywhere except the fountains. What I was imagining was some more complicated terrain, with rivers of magic flowing between fountains and drains in some natural "riverbeds" between some "hills", areas naturally low on magic. That would leave area around drain naturally higher than those "hills". Of course, we don't know which of those is closer to truth. The flat land idea seem simpler ... and would explain that nobody is really paying attention to the level of magic if it's usually same ... Mr. Verres said It is easier to use magic in some key places on the planet, that seem to describe more something like the fountains than more complicated terrain ... ... ok, seems that I my version is less likely. There is exactly ZERO reason to suspect that France or any specific area of France might be one of the fountains. Wait. Actually, it's NEGATIVE of WHOLE France being fountain - the area with more ambient magic around fountain must be SMALLER than the Moperville anomaly.

Actually chemists are a bit vague on "has carbon" - there are things that have carbon but aren't organic (carbonates for example) and a few things that lack it that are sometimes allowed in the club (siloxanes, sulfur chains and the like). I suspect diamond is not considered organic, but carbon nanotubes likely are ... It also used to be legitimate science to debate how many angels can dance on head of a pin. Nowadays, such question would be rejected as unscientific, although you can get pretty far with question if two intelligences can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously or if, similarly to fermions, they can't, before they catch up. Does it? IMHO magic cares about souls, auras and stuff like that, not about biology. (Although until someone in EGS will get turned to stone and then get better, we wouldn't know for sure.) No, I never noticed you are EX military. I though military have Internet access nowadays. "... but these fokkers were flying Messerschmidts."

Several months isn't that long for someone who's been around as long as she has. That said Tedd's transformation, the magic being a cheat thing, Voltaire's interference... True. It's definitely recently from Pandora's point of view. But even if it feels that way, someone getting hurt (or dead) doesn't negate the fact that hijinks were happening before that ...

Well, yes. And I would say that "above". I still think as a sink, it was near the natural maximum even BEFORE the clog. This is actually important, as it's perfectly possible that at some point AFTER removing the clog, Sarah will be able to cast her spell in Moperville, but NOT in some other location, because she would still need at least little help from outside. It will also affect watches 2.0. Could be. Or not. We don't know how quickly can magic level drop. The area where magic is enhanced by clog when compared to pre-clog situation will be likely considerably bigger than the area where magic is enhanced to levels bigger than natural.

There's also the effect that nothing in the simulation continues to move (on its own, at least), which makes it seem like a time stop ability (and thus time-related) to someone who uses it but who doesn't know what it actually did (which includes Sarah the first time she used it—and of course the reader was seeing things from Sarah's perspective at first and therefore didn't know what it did either). I like the term "snapshot". Didn't Dan almost celebrated when someone on twitter used some term which described it better that he originally did? Hmmmm ... I can't find any trace of it in commentary ... maybe not.

Not a SINGLE one, mind you. Lot of them. And, yeah, technically, you are ALWAYS in some gravitation field, or at least until we manage to develop quantum theory of gravitation and prove that the gravitation somewhere in middle of nothing between galaxy clusters is lower than one quantum of it so effectively zero ...

Considering this is flashback several months back, for SOME definition of "recently" ...

Wikipedia lists more entries but I don't see anything about the intergal (or integral) part of a whole there. Except that military bit. Regarding 1, yes, that's the chemists point of view. Regarding 3, that was what I was poking fun of with that note about anything from crude oil being organic due to crude oil being from prehistoric organisms. (It's even more fun when something is "natural". Opposite of "natural" isn't "human-made", opposite of "natural" is "made by Cthulhu, archangel Lucifer or similar entity". Humans are part of nature, their opinions and behaviour notwithstanding.)

Actually, no. The simulation only goes out of sync with reality when she actively tries to change it. Although, if she would for example use "reality warping" to find the correct page of book, that would certainly add the section even if it wasn't there before. As I said: if the simulation spell have some way to grant her other people abilities, it would take precedence. But if it doesn't (and we really don't know that yet), then she can "simulate" those abilities with "reality warping", and then it will be just approximation. And, of course, without Tedd confirming how it works - or without her comparing her experience with Grace and finding it doesn't match some new information Grace tell her - she would have no way to find out which of those two happened.

Actually, after reading the note about "few square miles" I'm not sure it really covered ALL of that before timeskip. Considering she was out of town for few days, I would assume it happened during summer holiday, yes. Although, technically, it might've been just some longer weekend ... I said I'm rounding. Even if it happened at end of August, if would be still closer to Whale than to now. The way she is talking suggests it's not first time she mentioned it. And, we don't know: depending on what part of town they live in and which direction she was going for that investigation (as already mentioned), and also depending on where the centre of ambient magic is (although that's not so important considering it can't be that far from Tedd's basement), "couple of miles out ot town" can be anything between 4 and 20 miles from the centre of magic, maybe even more because as American (unlike European) she can call 30 miles "couple". The way he talks about it suggest that he didn't tried even single mile. You may believe it, but there is nothing directly confirming it in canon (nor contraindicating it, mind you). As I said, the spell itself is probably easy, but the size difference suggests she didn't cast it at "minimal" settings, so I wouldn't be surprised if it would be over what can D talent cast without help. On the other hand, despite Sarah's experience with magic in Tedd's basement, we can't rule out Rhoda have more magic than Sarah - like, either from something Rhoda does not knowing it can raise magic, or because she has some talent "in blood" (genes). Also, it was dramatic moment, lot of emotions, it might've even saved her life ... So, we really don't know. It can go both ways. And it's possible that Dan is also bad at estimating area or is not really thinking about map, which would make estimates based on distance even more useless. Personally, I would consider the park apparent distance argument against the ambient magic helping her, but very, very weak and only worth mentioning because we have hardly anything to go by.

The said immortal only vowed AFTER giving her that spell ... Yes. We have big advantage of someone certainly more reliable than Pandora explaining it to us ... If the simulation is anything like lucid dreaming, everything she tries to do, may just be an approximation based on what Sarah has seen. Grace's transformation looks the same as Elliot's transformations which looks and Sarah assumes feels like her transformations with the watches. She's seen Grace use telekinesis so she could probably do that in her simulation too. Sarah could very well do all of that without having to swap bodies. It isn't exactly like lucid dreaming, as it keeps state ; in lucid dreaming, anything you don't remember and sometimes even thing you do remember disappears when you stop paying attention to it. (Also, it's hard enough to read in lucid dream at all, and completely impossible to read something you didn't read before.) I see it like "she can certainly do it lucid-dreaming style but MAYBE she can do it in other way as well".

They said that they came to the general area often to feed, but then noticed that Tedd could somehow sense them, so the one continued to stick around in the hopes that Tedd would be able to make contact. Yes. General area. He didn't do anything Nor did Elliot or Nanase. In teens at maximum. And I would expect the levels to be already pretty high ... like, the whale said "we used to minimize it's effect", but also "far more than there should be" ... It's definitely not hard boundary, but hard to say how quickly it drops (Whales might make it drop quicker ...). Remember that radius 5 miles is 78 square miles, 15 miles is 707 square miles ... meanwhile, radius 2 miles is 12 square miles. So: When whale said "few square miles" and it included Tedd's basement, it means the centre can't be more that 2 miles from the basement, likely less. Both boar incident and end of Ellen's magic buildups happened BEFORE timeskip, so in time when the area was just few square miles ... no wonder that "couple miles out of town" was enough to get outside the area. And how near might the park with boar be?

Will not. Too late for that. From her perspective, she switched with Grace from the frozen moment, while Grace already spend several seconds being Grace since that. I think that the more experience she will have, the more will intent matter. For now, the spell is new and ... ... and magic is trolling her with this effect, or perhaps she activates it because she's thinking about it because she fears it or something like that. Or, maybe the thing she has talent for is the simulated body swap and the rest of simulation is just for supporting it? She certainly will be able to transform, but will it be (and feel like) Grace abilities or will it be her making changes in simulation? Will she have the abilities Grace has or the abilities she THINKS Grace has?

Sure. But not only inertial and non-inertial frames of references are not equivalent, but it also can be said that inertial frame of reference is "better" than non-inertial - in the "more special" sense. Therefore, non-inertial frame of reference makes bad "centre of universe". (Note that technically, the acceleration can be any vector, not value. Direction matters.)

Wait, what? Did she said "yes" to the shrinking or to the search for mark? ... oh. They didn't wanted to search for mark INSTEAD of shrinking, but AFTER shrinking Catalina out of her clothes. Although I don't think finding the mark on shrunk Catalina would be easy ...

Good luck finding inorganic clothes. The most common materials for clothes are cotton (which is definitely organic) and polyester (which counts as organic for chemists and is technically manufactured from zooplankton and algae which died several billions years ago). Sure, clothes may does contain inorganic parts: zipper, buttons ... although even those are often plastics nowadays.

I've assumed they sorta hanged around deliberately to warn Tedd - sure, they were in the general area, but even if the field get smaller they may not go directly to Tedd's basement. Unless they would want to talk to him again I guess. BTW, just noticed that the whale specifically said the affected area is few square miles. Well, the "peak", at least. IMHO 40 square miles is not "few", so not whole Moperville.

But a thing can't just accelerate. It has to accelerate its motion relative to something else. And it's equally valid to say that the something else is accelerating its motion relative to the thing. Yes it can. Under special theory of relativity, you can recognize that you are accelerating by measuring the force affecting you. In non-intertial frames of reference, there are nonzero fictitious forces affecting you. You don't need to SEE any other frame of reference to recognize that there must be some where the fictitious ARE zero. (Note that it's VECTOR zero, meaning vector with zero length ; negative numbers can appear there in sane spaces.) Under general theory of relativity, the gravitation is indistinguishable from such fictitious force, but that doesn't matter, as both gravitation and fictitious forces would confirm you are NOT in inertial frame of reference. Again, only if you measure zero force, you are in inertial frame of reference. (Read the wikipedia, or better, an actual physic book.)

I hope someone will remember this when Dan starts collecting questions for next Q&A.

Possibly, but that was a matter of minutes. Box suggested casting it at a rate of two or three times an hour. Possibly one hour is all that is needed for the pressure to reassert itself. *scratches head* Really, all I can think of is that Sarah probably heard the story of Not-Tengu and therefore can reason all this out on her own, or that Box believes either that it will not be a factor or that Sarah is smart enough to be able to work it out. Which last is not a completely bad assumption. I already suggested that the "chomp" Sarah takes likely take 15-20 minutes to refill. Which I would consider slower than both air and water. The question is if the "chomp" will still refill itself around the end of week AND if moving elsewhere wouldn't make it refill faster ... and why Pandora didn't recommended which direction to move to. ... although ... Sarah can test by moving 10 meters in any direction and try ... Another possibility is that Pandora doesn't really require to dry the area completely, that even at the point where it's safe to unclog the area will be spread enough to not matter where exactly Sarah is.

Can you find something on this page supporting your theory? As I read it, in special theory of relativity, acceleration makes your frame of reference "worse" (non-inertial). In general theory of relativity, so can gravitation. Both are present on Earth. You are not first with such theory. Note that the other person I heard this about got wikipedia editors agree with him: they declared he's made up.

It would make sense. Except Pandora failed to tell her that.