Tom Sewell

If Sirleck is in the spirit plane, Immortals aren't restricted to guiding and empowering; they can attack him freely and directly, as Helena, Demetrius, Pandora, and Voltaire all attacked Magus. But to possess someone, I think Sirleck must be partially on the mortal plane. This may be his biggest protection; Immortals may be reluctant or even restricted from attacking him directly at all when he's not possessing a host. I think Dan will go with Sirleck just being out in the boonies and out of range of the nearest Immortal when the vampire apocalypse it. BTW, remember someone saying they were going to make the world a better place? Isn't a world rid of most of its Aberrations better? BTW, if my "out of range" assumption is correct, Helen and Demetrius can't be shadowing Elliot. So maybe the spirit plane get-out-of-hell-free card is playable by Sirleck. Much good it will do him not too much later, though, because he is visible when he's not using a host, and, therefore, probably fully on the mortal plane. And anyone who was lucky enough to learn Pandora's spell (Tedd can't be the only one) should be able to fry the body-thief.

Or maybe something else, like Tedd, a Seer who has an exceptional ability to learn and then modify spells and who lives pretty close to the mall, just learned Pandora's last spell! Care to guess who he's going to use it on first? Wait, how is he going to cast the spell? Maybe with the wand Pandora gave to him that he's holding in his hand as he rubs his head? Tedd might also have picked up how to connect with every Immortal on Earth, and maybe even how to locate aberrations, which is kind of implied as part of the "cure" in the spell.

Especially not Voltaire.

Agreed, unless Dan throws us a Major League curve ball. If Zeus, basically a toddler in Immortal terms, figured out that they must be hired, Pandora certainly would have. I think Dan just didn't want to make Pandora repeat that after Zeus told Diane. So the Will of Magic is really the Will of Human Magic which Humans have no control over? I don't buy it. It smells more like another agreement the Immortals made among themselves, maybe even part of whatever magical mechanism they set up to enforce their "Only empower and guide" restriction. If the Immortals don't ultimately control it, then it's likely that the Will of Magic controls them, and if it can control them, it should be able to control any aliens whether or not they have inherent magic.

Maybe I should put this question in General Discussion, but here it is: Why wouldn't The Change affect Uryuoms? DGB seems to spend as much or more effort suppressing general knowledge of extraterrestrial presence on Earth as it does Earth-native magic. So is the Will of Magic just for humans? If it is, it sounds like something that was set up by immortal magical beings native to Earth (not necessarily just capital-I Immortals (formerly known as Fairies) but possibly just them. Heka, after all, is an immortal magical being but not an Immortal like Pandora and her ilk. So, what prevents the Uryuom from using their magi-tech and inborn magical-energy-using powers freely? Because they're too nice to do it? Well, maybe, But I think it's in canon somewhere that they're not the only magical-energy-using extraterrestrials visiting, invading, or just settling down on Earth. Is the DGB just that good at its job? Wouldn't it have to cover the whole planet to do that?

Neither would I if their not-date was on Saturday instead of tonight Maybe the most obvious way they could get involved in the plot is for them to get word of what's going on at the mall through media, social networks, and in the case of Grace and Justin. This would fit the apocalypse at the mall attracting enough media attention to trigger The Change. I'd bet against Dan having The Change actually happen. Unless he's done a lot of planning exactly what this would mean for the ongoing story, it sounds like it would basically end EGS except maybe for some loose-end tying like maybe all the teenagers going off to college.

How many of Raven's descendants do we know about? Your assertion that they don't all look like Adrian has no proof. Pandora said that Susan was a "distant descendant." Since she was sure of it, she knew how distant, but didn't take time to explain more because she didn't have much time. But she could have said "granddaughter" almost as quickly, so there has to be at least one "great" behind that. Magic might be involved in another way. We don't know how much magic power either Susan or Diane inherited from their mothers. More magic power inherited from their mothers may have triggered more resemblance to Adrian. And while I'm thinking of Diane, will we get to see how Diane will take the revelation that Adrian is her father soon? Dan didn't say this the end of Part 22 Apocalypse, but it has been an apocalypse for Susan, Diane and Adrian by definition, hasn't it? And even if magic does change, it should take some time. Time enough to go back to Magus, Sirleck, Elliot, Ellen, and Ashley, perhaps. Or Sarah's date with Sam. Or to check in with Justin and Grace at Salty Crackers. Or find out what Rhoda and Catalina are up to, particularly when Dan took so much trouble to give Rhoda really formidable power while he was working on Sister III. Guess we'll know Monday.

Well, at least in the America where I live in, white infants are the gold standard for adoption. White couples would rather adopt unwanted Chinese girls than American-born black or Mexican babies, and are generally willing to pay for the privilege. If Diane was born in Illinois and would up a ward of the State, she could have been adopted anywhere in Illinois. If Moperville is like Naperville, it's a fairly affluent community and most adoptions are by more affluent people. In fact, that's a big reason why I was pretty sure Susan was adopted because her mom is filthy rich and otherwise childless. She'd have the money to bribe people into changing the records so that Susan would be her official biological child. But Moperville/Naperville isn't the only affluent town in Illinois. Moperville seems to have around 100,000 people; Illinois has 12.6 million, about a third of them in Chicago. Ignoring the bias for affluence, the odds are more than 100 to 1 that Diane would have been adopted by someone who lives in Moperville. Or 200 to 1 living in the Moperville South High School District.

I'm not sure what you meant to say here. If you're speaking of the parents who are raising Diane, that would mean Noriko is still living in Moperville and she and Edward have been lying to Tedd. If you're talking about Diane's biomom being married to Noriko when Diane was concieved, that's not possible because Noriko was still married to Edware, Tedd's dad (at least Tedd thinks Edward is his dad.) If Noriko really is in Europe and married to Diane's biomom, wouldn't they be raising Diane? There's another mystery: What are the odds of Diane being adopted as an infant by a family living in Moperville? Or if living somewhere else at the time, of them moving to Moperville? Remember, Raven has been teaching at Moperville South so long he taught Edward, Noriko, and Nanase's mom, so he was already living in Moperville before Diane was born and before she would have been adopted. Hey, my theory that Diane wasn't really adopted is sounding more plausible now, isn't it?

If he knew, he assumed someone else was the father. Diane's biomom could have been married to someone else, after all. No, not Noriko because Diane obviously is not half-Japanese--unless the Will of Magic decrees that all of Adrian's descendants will have an incredible resemblance to him. Come to think of it, something like that should be true if Susan is a distant descendant, but because Diane and Tedd are less than a year apart in age, it's still unlikely that Diane is Nanase's first cousin and Tedd's half-sister. I can see a one-night stand happening. Even though he believed until today that he couldn't father a child, Raven probably wouldn't be comfortable with marriage or similar permanent arrangements because even if he can fake aging, his partners will still age for real, and die. Even if he is willing to be honest with a permanent partner about his true nature, they still most likely will outlive him. In fact, this is probably why he doesn't show his real love for Noah to Noah. Noah is his "ward" and I suspect Raven would call him that even if he has formally adopted Noah. Another possibility is that Diane's biomom lied to Raven and told him Diane had another father. If Diane's "adoptive" mom is actually the woman who gave birth to her, and since they all live in Moperville, this would almost certainly be the case. There's still the mystery of why Raven felt a connection with Susan the first time he met her, but doesn't seem to have felt that connection with Diane even though Diane was one of his students last year and maybe in other classes. Diane is his daughter, after all. Just the blond hair?

Tedd has purple hair, Liz has green hair, and neither one has been tagged as a freak by anyone else in the Moperverse for their hair color. And thanks to DGB, sudden hair- and eye-color changes have been officially recognized as a natural phenomenon. And there are people in the boring universe we are living in with white hair. And even people whose eye-color can change. I was married to one of them. I've already speculated that Sirleck without a host touching the Dewitchery Diamond would kill him. Perhaps that would have something to do with the nature of souls in the Moperverse. Ellen was issued a new soul upon being created, at least according to Nioi. But do Aberrations have souls? Trading humanity for a reward sounds very close to the old trope of selling one's soul--and that old trope is arguably in canon.

Way back when Nixon was President, a friend of mine in exasperation once said to me, "All right, I agree with you. Now are you going to go on arguing?" Yes, I did, countering the arguments I'd just made. I have all the cred of a lifetime of annoying arguments. And now I'm going to argue with myself about my "Maybe Helen and Demetrius are actually Pandora's chilcren" speculation. While it could be true for all we know and especially all we don't know, and it would still be kind of neat if it were true, and it could support my more serious theory that Pandora got Helen and Demetrius to co-operate with her plans, here are some problems: If they are responsible, normal (I hope) Immortals, they should have reset at least once besides their presumable forced reset I've been assuming happened after they did their thing with Susan and Nanase. That's one more reason for them to not remember who mom was, assuming they were born before Adrian Raven. If they came into first existence after Adrian Raven, that would mean Pandora should have had another man in her life, which seems out of character, if she needed to have a man to produce an Immortal child. I don't think this fits the character we've seen developed so richly in this long arc. Given how powerful Pandora is, parthenogenesis is hardly off the table. In fact, since Pandora is totally inhuman while taking her naps, it seems likely that this is the normal way for Immortals to make more Immortals if they so wish. Why would Pandora so wish? Well, given that H & D are obsessed with destroying Aberrations, and Pandora's destruction of the Werewolves, that could have been the reason. But that makes the Wonder Twins seem more like tools than kids, and from the ways they've been acting, I think they'd resent that a lot when they learned the truth. Hmmm. Am I stepping on my own counter-argument? Well, sort of. But until I saw them attacking Magus, I saw them mostly as goofy, misguided but well-meaning. I'm not sure I want them to be purpose-built assassins. But, stepping on my counter-counter argument, Grace, because she is Nice to the nth degree, and is a purpose-bred assassin. It's not really necessary for Helen and Demetrius to be Pandora's children to make them part of Pandora's plan to give Magus her body back. Oops, Freudian slip. I kind of suspect Magus will get a girl body because, well, it's El Goonish Shive, it would be funny, and it would fit not one but two of the titles Dan made for this arc and maybe even the title page Dan created a year and a half of real-world time ago. The previous Part, #19, was The Other Dunkel, and the whole arc is Sister III. on the title page, Elliot, Ellen, and Magus--all indisputable Dunkels--are grouped together. And now we know that Susan and Diane--shown on opposite sides of the title page--are not sisters, then the only sisters can only be Ellen, Elliot (remember that he's a she almost as much as Tedd for most of the series)--and Magus, who would then be (ta-da) the third Dunkel sister. And that's been quite a fascinating journey round Robin Hood's barn which has very little to do with the point I started out with. And that point was and is that Pandora has two strings to her bow here: She has gawdawful power that any other Immortal should be wary of, and she's very good at persuasive argument. Put the two together and getting Helen and Demetrius to co-operate with her doesn't really need any familial connection to happen. Wake up! If you can't plow through long-winded blather, why are you on this forum? Going briefly off-topic again, I think Immortals aren't really male or female intrinsically any more than they are human. For all we know, the Demonic Duck is just another Immortal who happens to like duck form.

It's a plot device that could work. According to Dame Tara, Helen and Demetrius look like they might be brother and sister, and Lady Andrea agreed. Ever wonder who their mom was?

This is another reason for me to think that maybe Pandora had a little talk with her much younger colleagues (they might not have been able to conceal themselves from Pandora once she had a good reason to go looking for them.) If they aren't with the vampires, they should be with Elliot. So how did Magus and Sirleck get so far? Possibly because Pandora wants Magus to regain a body of his own and persuaded Helena and Demetrius to let him do that. I said it before, it's a loose end and something she has felt she should make right eventually. Well, eventually is pretty much now or never unless Pandora hasn't really reset.

No, but he had a code of honor of sorts. After all, he allowed the Silver Surfer to warn planets he was about to consume so that at least some of the inhabitants could escape.

Yes, those are the correct instructions. Not proven as yet. There's no property damage shown except for one trash can, and not even any off-panel noises that could be from property damage. Only one bystander screamed, and it could have been the same girl running away from Snake-with-a-Bow-Tie, and since she was seen running away and not looking back, there's no evidence she saw Susan kill the vampire in the next three panels. The only other places were possible eyewitnesses to fighting are shown are both in Koalas and Gators, first and last panels. None of them are rendered with enough detail to show they are looking at Susan and her flaming sword. Dan may not have shown any unmistakable witnesses for the kills simply because it was extra trouble. But as of this Friday's comic, there aren't any credible witnesses we can identify and no phones or cameras have been shown. Tactically, there's an excuse for the vampires not to call too much attention to themselves. Two excuses, really. Remember, Koala found out there were at least two hunters nearby besides Raven. If you've gone to the trouble of giving up humanity for unaging life, you shouldn't be too anxious to risk dying anyway.

Do you mean breaking Immortal law? Or breaking the system, as I speculated she might be doing? Voltaire's goal seems to be not just destroying Raven or Pandora destroying the restrictions on Immortal behavior, thus creating that better world he spoke of to Abner the detective. Better for him, at least. Unless Pandora is wrong, or her final plan requires deception at this point, it appears she really will be out of the picture as all Immortals seem to be after a reset, forced or voluntary. She seemed completely sincere with her last words as the Pandora we know to Raven, Diane, and Susan. Now even if she hasn't identified Voltaire yet, she does know there's another Immortal pulling strings, and if she is faking her reset, it has to be for the "benefit" of that Immortal. It's kind of a thin premise, but maybe not for Dan. The more plausible alternative is that what we saw in today's comic was what it seemed to be. If so, and if Pandora hasn't set up a way to deal with Voltaire in the hiatus between her old self and her next Self, then it has to be up to (ta-da) our familiar group of mostly teenage heroes. This isn't just David vs. Goliath; it's Spiderman vs. Galactus! But... Spiderman won. He found a way to save the whole Earth from a being that pretty much eats planets as a regular diet. I've forgotten exactly how Spidey pulled that off, but he must have or we wouldn't have all these Spiderman reboots and re-reboots and re-re-reboots, ad infinitum. That was all the way back in the Silver Age when Jack Kirby breathed life back into the bland American mainstream comic book scene after the blandness produced by the Comics Code. Uncomfortably long ago for me; well before most of you were born. So there's precedence here. And, no, I didn't just drop the term "Silver Age" here just because Dan used it back in New and Old Flames, although that does kind of prove that Dan knows, loves, and respects that part of the culture of comics.

Maybe it was the raccoon that saved Sirleck. That and Ellen's muscle memory, making it seem as if he had empathy for a moment.

The way Pandora explained it to herself is that the more powerful and more intelligent she becomes, the less empathy she has. She could be wrong about that, but of the five Immortals we've seen, four have done very bad things. Pandora was very mean to Magus, and tried to get Edward to commit murder. Helen and Demetrius guided and empowered Nanase and Susan into fighting a vampire when they were too young and there were better alternatives, and they also attacked Magus. Voltaire--do I really have to tell you anything more? Dan has put more dark stuff in EGS than you think. Re-read Painted Black and tell me it's all a fairy tale, and I don't mean the Disney version. He's lightened up since then, but despite all the laughs, this is the darkest story arc since Damien blew himself up.

Perhaps you are assuming too much. There are other immortal beings besides the Immortals (formerly known as Fairies), including Heka. The fact that Pandora showed great respect (for Pandora) to Heka kind of indicates that's she thought he was powerful enough to be a threat. I think it more likely that Heka or a group of non-Immortals of immense powers imposed the rules on the Immortals, or at least nagged them into what may be the only agreement they ever reached. And maybe the Will of Magic is the power that got the Immortals to make their laws.

If he could do that, his sword cane probably has that enchantment. But where's the evidence? All the vampires are piles of ash, and as far as we know, they didn't actually attack anyone else or even do any damage. And no witnesses to the actual killing were shown other than Susan, Diane, Zeus, Raven, and Pandora. The girl who was fleeing from Flying Furry Snake With a Bow Tie wasn't looking at it in the one panel she was shown in, and that wasn't the panels where Susan killed it. Pandora isn't going to be available for questioning; Raven can go back to looking like an old man; Diane didn't do anything magical. No, what happened at the mall this time isn't very likely to be the incident Arthur Arthur is hoping for. Not yet, at least. A council of Immortals? Where is that in canon? If Pandora knows that Voltaire was behind the attack, and she surely must have put a great deal of effort into finding out who tried to kill Elliot, Voltaire could be the one last thing Pandora did. Or maybe she already did it. To paraphrase Stalin, with Voltaire, you have problems. No Voltaire, no problem.

Dan hasn't done much with the witnesses so far. There's no indication any bystander has taken notice of Zeus, and no remarks from the three people who saw Pandora appear floating in air. And no Carol Brown. Isn't it funny that there's no Carol Brown? Maybe that will change soon. Keep in mind that Diane isn't famous like Susan, and Susan turned blond while she was fighting the vampires. People who don't really know her well may not recognize her. And Pandora wasn't floating high in the atrium like Voltaire. Plus, the vampires didn't last very long at all. If Dan doesn't want this incident to get big publicity, so far he's set up things so there might not be. Which would mean Magic wouldn't have an excuse to change...yet. Say, anyone remember Pandora telling her son exactly how he's supposed to remove the magical energy dam she set up?

Possibly it has something to do with the lights in the sky Sirleck and Magus were talking about--or maybe will be talking about soon.

You reminded me of what Mr. Verres told Nanase about Susan's dad being a cheating cheater who cheated. That was a very passionate statement. I now wonder if Noriko cheating on him had something to do with that passion.

I think her body provided a rather compelling counter-protest, if Susan's memory hasn't enhanced it. Up to Dan, of course. She didn't look quite as luscious in the mirror as she did in Sleep Time.