Tom Sewell

Something I never considered, although in slap-myself hindsight, obvious. However, since Edward once said to himself that perhaps he should have chosen a more gender-neutral name for his son/daughter, and let Tedd create his TG guns and lets Tedd keep them, Edward seems to be as open-minded as he can manage about it. This makes me wonder if Tedd has ever realized how much he looks like his mother, male or female. Tedd's godfather has at least one picture of Tedd's mom in his home, but have we ever seen one in Tedd's home?

As of now, it looks to me like Tedd didn't know Adrian Raven except as Grace's bad-ass half-immortal history teacher until Pandora spoke up. That would mean that his parents separated so long ago Tedd has no memory of Mr. Raven from before that time or, as I said before, Tedd doesn't connect his vague memories of his parents' older friend with the present Mr. Raven. And it also seems that Grace did not tell Tedd what Mr. Raven told her about his guilt about his Tedd's leaving. After a night's sleep, or maybe as close as I get in my sixty-seventh year, I have a newish theory of what went on in those as-yet unrevealed years (as ever, Moperville time): Pandora wanted to do intervene, her son thought she'd just make things worse, they had a big fight, and Pandora was so upset she decided to take a long nap. Maybe it was Magus falling out of his nest that woke her up! A nice feature of this theory is that it might explain why Pandora seems so creepy and inhuman when she first shows up, and justifies why she gets more likeable as time passed: Pandora hadn't had practice at being human for a decade or more.

I wonder if Voltaire is watching and listening. It wouldn't be the first time Voltaire was in Tedd's basement.

I doubt that. If it failed just at the worst possible time for that horde, it suggests the WoM was waiting for the best time to take the shot. What, spin doctors? They had them in the 16th century. One of them went by the name "Shakespeare", maybe you've heard of him.

What a wonderfully evil thought! Thought of going into politics?

If it made the same sound for everyone, why didn't someone try to fix that? A digital readout that says "YUP" is pretty sophisticated as wands go, isn't it? Except that they can teach others how to use magic, including perhaps perfectly average French or Belgian jerks? Seems to me that would lead to lots and lots and lots of humans getting magic, which is kind of what magic is so hissy about now. But you have a point. Noisy wands would attract attention and increase the chance that some researcher could stumble on the Secrets of the Seers without having to have tea and scones with Heka. Of course, there's not a lot of evidence that the Will o' Magic is especially smart or attentive. Why did it allow the fire-throwers to multiply into a horde before the last reset?

Maybe the magic detector wand makes that scary sound because magic doesn't want it to be easy to detect seers.

Possibly because her son was why his mother left? That may not be true, but Adrian thinks so. By now we know that Pandora counts Tedd as part of her family. Tedd doesn't know that yet. Will he find out in the next episode? Maybe, maybe not. Pandora has just brought up the most traumatic fact of Tedd's life. And he's liable to ask Pandora the same question PRT just asked us. How would Pandora answer? At this point, Tedd does know that Grace's history teacher is really a bad-ass half-Immortal. But he doesn't know Pandora is Raven's mother, and there's no evidence that he knows that Mr. Raven is his godfather. It seems likely he did meet Mr. Raven when he was a small child before the breakup, but there's no indication that he remembers it, or at least that he connects Grace's history teacher with an old man he might have known only by some nickname. I kind of think Dan isn't going to let Pandora explain more now, except maybe tell him her son is Tedd's godfather. Tedd can find out Mr. Raven is Pandora's son from Sarah in a few hours anyway (Moperville time, of course.).

I've already speculated that the real Arthur might be dead and Voltaire has been impersonating him. But Voltaire would have to spend a large part of his time being Arthur, so unless he can be in two places at once, it doesn't seem to be the most likely possibility. Cahoots is more possible. But if Arthur knows even half as much about Immortals as Edward does, he should know that the games they play with humans are all about manipulating them. We really haven't been given a lot of knowledge about Arthur J. Arthur. We don't even know if he has any magic; you don't have to be a wizard to dress up in a pointy hat, a robe, and carry a big staff with a jewel or a big piece of colored glass. The one thing we know he taught Edward was how to cover up magic and alien encounters. Being replaced by a younger who actually does have magic could be another factor in Arthur's behavior now, over and above Edward being a protege of Adrian Raven, someone we definitely know Arthur J. Arthur does not like.

Yes, the secretary might have been corrupted. However, that would likely mean she was out to marry the fabulously wealthy, sick old man, which would sort of make her the perfect host to leave his fortune to, wouldn't it? Plus there's a certain amount of ironic justice in such a fate for her that even Sirleck couldn't fail to appreciate.

I believe I kind of said that. Anyway, maybe it's because he couldn't possess her. It could be because he's restricted to male hosts. Or maybe he's restricted to corrupted hosts. Now the butler/valet/anonymous flunkie doesn't seem particularly corrupted, but we haven't seen very much of him, have we? Perhaps he wasn't really actively evil, but then again, how long had he worked for a man anyone would recognize as despicable?

How many minions does Sirleck have left? None at the moment, unless you count the vampire mercenaries, and even they may not recognize him because Sirleck was riding the rich old man when he hired them. Who the hell is going to obey a butler/valet/anonymous flunky? The old man is dead; Sirleck can't animate his body any more. I think Sirleck's biggest mistake wasn't inhabiting his young secretary's body. As I pointed out quite some time ago, while there might have been probate challenges, rich old men leaving their fortunes to pretty young things isn't exactly unprecedented. Anna Nicole Smith? Anyone? Anyone? Even if it would really have tied up the old man's fortune for years, the secretary's bod wouldn't wear out as fast as the old man's. I guess Sirleck wasn't able to let go of the pleasure of male chauvinism even for a bit. Or maybe he retained the homophobic part of his former humanity? Oh, wait, Dan has the option of having Sirleck show up again in yet another body, maybe the dancing secretary, maybe someone else. Maybe even someone we've grown fond of...

Yes, but none of those other possibilities allude to the trope of Hercule Poirot constantly reproaching people who mistake him for a Frenchman when he is obviously a Belgian. How many little kids have you told there's no Santa today? But, yes, it could be just a dream, unless Dan decides otherwise. Still, a lot of effort went into bringing that dream to us. I've noticed the dreams chronicled here took a longer average time between posts than was usual back then.

It's hot and I'm tired here. Could you help me out by pointing out where there's a Dan-definitive Seyunolu is? I'm not sure if they're a type of hybrid or another alien race. Between our Dr. Scuiridae's revelation and Edward's much too casual remark about Grace not dying in Lord Tedd's universe, I am thinking that: Other versions of our Grace may not exist in any universe we will ever know about. Many versions of the Moperverse original Grace have existed in other universes, and at least some are still alive Since Voltaire has not made an attempt on Grace that we know of, Grace may be part of Plan A, which curiously Voltaire said was still going well, contradicting what he said to himself when he first talked to himself about Plan CM. Maybe Plan A included Grace learning about Tedd through that newspaper story about the Goo, and her escape, and maybe even the creation of our Grace. Hey, once you start with these conspiracy theories it's hard to stop. Any of you ever played any version of Illuminati, the card game from Steve Jackson and his Austin-based geek mafia? Stop me if I start babbling about robot sea monsters, the Boy Sprouts, orbital mind control lasers...

This is a thought I had last night, but I'm just now getting around to revealing it: Voltaire's planning probably isn't quite as good as he wants to believe it is, but he might be a champion napper. There's nothing that says naps can't be longer than a week. Think months, think Rip van Winkle, think Khan Noonian Singh. If an Immortal wants to stay sane close to the 200-year Best By date, longer naps seem like an excellent idea; the longer the nap, the more surprises, the less boredom, the less temptation to go further and further to stir up things. Beyond the BB date, moreso! Here's a related thought: The faster the pace of change in the plane of the mortals, the less boring. In the Moperverse, people don't even seem to notice how much things have changed over just the past year or so, almost like the past was becoming as changeable as the future...

Yes, there could be. It shows The Gauntlet again, and Dan had Tedd build his own version later on, which he used to discover the interdimensional whales, perhaps distant, uglier relations of the interdimensional whales of Oh My Goddess. I'm not at all sure Dan had many elements of the current storyline in mind so long ago, but he kept on developing trope for the gauntlet. Many years ago I read a nonfiction book by the great science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer called Tarzan Alive, which delved not only into our favorite King of the Jungle but also with the other things that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. One of Burroughs' books written between the world wars was a crossover between his Tarzan series and a lesser-known series called Tarzan at the Earth's Core. It uses a variation of the hollow-earth trope. In the book Tarzan notices that orbiting the internal sun at the center of his hollow Earth is a planet that looks quite Earthlike. Burroughs doesn't expand on this, but Farmer commented that this was a typical device of Borroughs and other pulp writers of his day, putting in things that could someday be used for further adventures. Think how incidental The Ring is in The Hobbit, and how Tolkien later built an entire mythology around it. So my suspicion is that the gauntlet started out as just a neat-looking artifact, and then Dan began to fiddle with it... ----- Since Dan still hasn't published his English-Uryuomoko dictionary yet, how can we be sure it's Uryuomoko? Dan has yet to speak of this, either directly in his comments or through his storyline. Perhaps we will have an answer as early as very early Monday, Central Time (UTC-6).

Yes, plausible and kind of neat, maybe, but I'm not married to the idea or even going steady. In the middle of his rant Voltaire talks about luck, how lucky he was to find Dex, how lucky to find a gullible griffin (Tara). Even if Voltaire travels to other universes, there are lots of other possible and plausible universes, even as GURPS alludes in its core sourcebook about alternate history, world hopping, and time travel, Infinite Worlds. Perhaps my now-elderly theory that Magus is an alternate Elliot/Ellen could somehow help to explain it, but Dan's already shown us alternates for both the Big Es in alternate worlds that probably aren't the world Magus and Terra are from. Voltaire still seems to require a lucky break here, something like the lucky (for the miscreant) break the average French jerk stumbled upon to make himself into Not-Tengu. Although...nah, Voltaire couldn't have arranged that too, could he? [In fairness to average French jerks who don't practice casual murder and mind-control, I must point out that Not-Tengu could quite plausibly have been an average Belgian jerk.]

I have a new thought about Voltaire. It's not yet a plot yet a plot theory, not even a less-than-amazing crackpot plot theory. It's a question I don't remember being asked by anyone. How much does Voltaire know about Magus? Voltaire knows about Sirleck; he manipulated Sirleck by posing as Abner to tell Sirleck about Adrian Raven. Voltaire has never mentioned Magus to anyone, not even himself in one of his monologues. And yet Magus seems to be critical to Plan CM. Not that I think that Voltaire might have pushed Magus out of his nest two or three years ago... -------- And now, let's talk fedoras. I believe only five characters have been shown wearing fedoras: Detective Block, Voltaire, Abner, a witness to the Fire Guy at Salty Crackers, and John Troutman. Voltaire is the only one who wears a white fedora. Now, can we think of any famous person who used to live in Chicago and liked to wear a white fedora?

Well, Edward said Immortals have started wars for fun; he didn't qualify that they were human wars. To his credit, though, at least Voltaire seems to have a purpose beyond his own pleasure. It may be a totally crackpot purpose, but he seems to sincerely believe. Yes, and if Dan wants it that way, it will be so unless and until he decides it will not be so. Kind of like Tedd creating the Goo and then not creating the Goo. Or like Ellen using Japanese in her fight with the Goo in Sister (I) and then asking for subtitles when she was sitting Akiko along with Nanase. True, and true again. But I want to expand on the subject of Pandora and Magus. Of all the people Pandora has interacted with, Pandora has only been shown to be seemingly cruel to Magus. I'm not talking about physically attacking Magus when he refused to go along when Pandora asked him to make Edward kill Abraham. What I mean is the way Pandora taunted Magus, teased Magus, belittled Magus. And yet, how many of us felt sorry for Magus until Pandora really let him have it? These are some of the things Pandora's treatment of Magus reminded me of: Lou Gosset Jr.'s treatment of Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman Yoda's treatment of Luke in The Empire Strikes Back Lee Ermey's treatment of all the boots in Full Metal Jacket, The Boys in Company C (an earliier and better Vietnam War movie), and (probably) the real boots Lee Ermey instructed when he actually was a Marine Drill Instructor. My company commander when I went through Navy boot camp Deathwish Drang in Harry Harrison's satirical masterpiece Bill, the Galactic Hero The point being is that Pandora thinks Magus is a pretty sorry human being and is prodding him into maybe some improvement. She wasn't being mean to him because it was fun. If that was the case, where's the chicken on his head?

So have I, and I continue to do so. What I'm saying is that if they are siblings, Immortals can have siblings, That also implies Immortals can have parents, grandparents, uncles, nephews, aunts, nieces, etc. If this reminds you of the old pagan gods like, for instance, Zeus, well, Jerry said a lot of them pass themselves off as gods. Pandora doesn't--well, except when she uses "Chaos" which is kind of a god in Ancient Greek mythology. Pandora isn't a goddess in that tradition; she's the creation of the gods--and the original human woman. In other words, the Greek Eve, the mother of us all.

How about Dan wanting to give Voltaire an edge that would keep him from getting ripped to pieces too soon? Dan doesn't need to have any reason; he's the God of the Moperverse. If he thinks it's a neat idea to have Carol be Sarah's sister, or Susan and Diane to be Adrian's daughters, or for Voltaire to be Pandora's brother, he can make these things so. Another sibling rivalry setup would be for Voltaire to be Pandora's other son, jealous that Pandora pays so much more attention to half-brother Adrian. But it wouldn't have the neat connection to the title of Sister III.

So how confident is Voltaire that he can withstand this, or at least avoid Pandora long enough to get the unspecified "they" who are supposed to finally listen? Well, maybe Voltaire is such a far-gone wacko he's sure no one else can outsmart him. He's not fearless because despite how much he hates the restrictions on what he can do, he's careful to finesse them. So, could he have some ace he hasn't turned up yet? (For those of you who don't get this analogy, it's to stud poker.) Reaching very deep into my endless barrel of amazing crackpot plot theories, I pull out and dust off--and dust off again because it's had time to accumulate a lot of dust--I once speculated that maybe Voltaire had a thing for Pandora way, way, way back and he's been plotting to finally land her, or get his revenge on her, or both. I didn't like that idea that much even then. But now it's helping dig past the bottom of the barrel to unearth what may be the Mother Lode or at least a very large, pretty nugget of Fool's Gold. Do you remember when Tara asked Andrea if the Immortals who assisted her in hunting the previous six vampires looked like brother and sister? Being a griffin, Dame Tara may not be the best judge of human or reasonably-humanlike physiognomy, but what she said certainly interested Nanase. But it does put the idea that Immortals might have siblings into canon. And going back yet again to the title page, it could make Pandora someone's sister.

Yes, certainly more depressed or, perhaps more appropriately, scared that Lord Tedd was trying to kill him. If that is actually what Lord Tedd was up to. If you look back in the two battles with the Goo, the Goo never attacked Tedd. That's kind of odd if the whole purpose of the Goo was to kill Tedd. Besides whatever Voltaire wants with Tedd, he's also targeting Pandora. The evidence is that he deliberately used an amulet on Dex that would suggest that Pandora was doing the manipulating, and he informed Sirleck that Adrian Raven was Pandora's son. So we have at least three clues, even if we don't know what they mean yet. Well, maybe four. Remember Voltaire's rant about how frustrating the restrictions imposed on Immortal-human activities are? I think that tightening up restrictions on Immortals can be ruled out as a candidate for Voltaire's Better Future. Pandora can and has gone over the top, but she still does follow the restrictions and she's never complained about them. Dan made a point in the very first sequence of this storyline, Legacy, that Pandora was committed to responsibly resetting at the proper time until after Blaike was killed and she had Adrian to look after. He had Pandora explain and interpret Immortal law rigorously to the Emissary of Magic. And Dan reinforced Pandora's commitment to staying within the rules in a more light-hearted mannerin the NP storyline Marker where Pandora said the rules didn't prohibit her from trick-or-treating, and when Pandora didn't give a mark to Ashley. I am now wondering how long Voltaire has been working on his plan. Could he have set up Blaike with the Undying Wolf in the first place?

You may be be right to be worried. I've already pointed out that Pandora putting off talking to her son until Saturday could be a classic setup to something very bad happening before then. I hope that Pandora at least has time to realize that the happiest time she had in this life was when she lived as close as she could the life of an ordinary human with Blaike.

Maybe, according to not-Tengu. Curiously, Dan doesn't come out and say that Tedd has a sibling until the airborne chase has started, and even then he qualifies that with prefacing "Unless Not-Tengu is mistaken". And in that comment, Dan uses "sibling", not "brother." In fact, what Not-Tengu says is "All of Noriko's family will die! Her ex-husband, her sister, her children... None will be spared!" Well, if Not-Tengu is mistaken, all bets are off. Dan's left himself a hook to say later that Tedd doesn't have any siblings, and muddied up his tracks so we can't prove he's been trolling us. And that's not the only ambiguity. "her sister, her children" could also be taken to mean "her sister and her sister's children." And there may be a third hook in there. Not-Tengu doesn't specifially name anyone but Noriko. Ever think Noriko might have more than one ex-husband? That's a possibility that doesn't require magic; I've lost count of my sister's ex-husbands. Not Tengu doesn't name either Edward or Tedd. Now maybe this is just Dan being lazy about names since he didn't even bother to name Not-Tengu, went on not to name the grand prize winner in Squirrel Prophet, and still hasn't given a name to TC, the sleazy Ticket Clerk. But it can also mean, or be retconned into meaning, that Not-Tengu was afraid to take on Edward and even Tedd. And speaking of hooks for red herrings that Our Dan may have set, are we really sure that Dan's comment about not expecting to see Lord Tedd actually gettiing involved in any storyline soon really means Lord Tedd isn't going to show up in this storyline soon? Of course, "soon" in Dantime could mean anything from "the next comic" to "before Part 38: Jeremy Gets Lucky".