Tom Sewell

No, it's two fingers and two fingers. When Leonard Nimoy was asked to come up with a Vulcan salute for Journey to Babel, he used the gesture cohens use to bless the congregation at services. It's the shape of the Hebrew letter Shin, the first letter of the name of Shaddai, the name God used when he had that first chat with Abraham.

Hoisted on the petard of my own laziness once again. However, that is the popular legend about Fermat, appropriate to the trope I'm describing. What this scene could be setting up is Sarah talking to Adrian in the aftermath about his mother talking to her the night before.

Fighting on the astral plane? I don't think that would happen very often, since there seem to be many such planes and it is canon that most Immortals are invisible to each other most of the time. Pandora is likely to have enough power and knowledge to find any other immortal if she knows to look for them, though, and I think in that situation Voltaire would deliberately stay on the physical plane near Adrian, in the expectation that Pandora will be worried about resetting, and that she would be afraid of harming her son.

Either Pandora doesn't know anything about the big vampire jamboree on for Friday, or doesn't consider it to be a big problem. I'd lay my cookies on the first proposition. Dan has built up expectations that Friday Night is going to be at least as big a battle as the one with the bulldog dragon.If Pandora and Voltaire fight each other directly, the collateral damage could level the mall, and maybe more than the mall, at least according to Old Jerry and Voltaire. Or maybe not. Pandora is likely the oldest and therefore the most powerful Immortal, and Voltaire might fine out he is the little mouse to Pandora's hawk. Anyway, postponing that talk with Adrian strikes me as a sort of Fermat's Last Theorem plot point. That is, Pandora may never be able to give that talk on Saturday because of what happens on Friday. Fermat was a 17th century mathematician who made a notation that he'd discovered a theorem and a proof for it but didn't have room for the proof in the margin of the book he was writing in. Also, he had an appointment: A duel, which he lost. That is, he was killed.

Cushioned chairs are one of our legacies from Ancient Egypt. We're not sure where beer appeared first, but it was one of the things the pyramid builders were paid with, and there's a myth that one of the gods made the Nile flow with beer once.

I guess you didn't get the Cartoon Network back in the 1990s. The first two series were done (horribly) by DIC, (Negaverse and the Tenth Planet) but someone else did three and four (Witches 5 and the Dead Moon Circus) for the Cartoon Network. The fifth series Sailor Moon series hasn't been dubbed as far as I know. Why not? It has Senshi who change from men into women! Yup, still considered to be something we can never expose tender young minds to. I haven't checked Kinokuniya, though; it's possible there's a version with English subtitles. If you haven't heard of Kinokuniya, it is the go-to brick-and-mortar chain for anime and manga in America, and we have two of them around the bay, one in San Francisco and one right here in San Jose. It's where I got all my now-lost tankouban for The School of Water Business, Negima, Gunnm, etc. Also DVDs of Porco Rosso and Ponyo--also lost.

Actually, that was the original ending to Sailor Moon. There wasn't anything planned after the first series. All the Sailor Senshi (I will not call them "scouts") went back to the way they were, as if it had never happened. Kind of a Wizard of Oz ending. It's a logical way for a fantastic story to end if you really want to end for good. Of course, neither Sailor Moon nor the Oz books ended with the first. I read quite a few Oz books soon after I learned to read, and I didn't read all of them. I don't see Pandora resetting herself because of this, at least until she's sure her family is safe enough and that magic won't reset. What I mean when I say I suspect this arc will end with Pandora resetting is that Pandora will do something to save her family that she knows breaks the rules, probably in the final confrontation with Sirleck and/or Voltaire. It's also possible and consistent with the setup that Pandora and Voltaire will destroy each other, but I hope Pandora will be reborn, preferably as a small child or even an infant. Again, I evoke Sailor Moon for a precedent: What I think is the very best moment in the 1990s anime is the end of the third series when Sailor Moon returns from the final battle with the infant Sailor Saturn in her arms.

Or maybe tear holes in the continuum and open up gates to universes we'd rather not have immigration from. At this point I'm wondering if Dan is thinking of ending the comic. A reset for everybody is a logical way to close. But at least Dan doesn't seem to have a cherished, mistaken notion that he should really be moving on. Examples: James Cameron postponing Avatar 2 endlessly, after postponing his promised Battle Angel Alita movie to death. CD Rudd planning on ending Sailormoon.org for Wolfpac, a comic that he's been telling himself he's going to do for approximately forever. (Also his "final story" has been going on for years now.) JK Rowling's post-Harry Potter work. Wayne Rogers and MacClean Stevenson leaving M*A*S*H after three seasons go straight to obscurity. Everything Naoko Takeuchi did after Sailor Moon. So is this the end of BFFs? Today's comic doesn't seem to have a cliff to hang anything from. Despite her desperate curiosity, Sarah is giving Box a pass on telling her more, choosing instead to comfort and re-assure. Very Sarah-like, but not pointing to any more plot development in this sequence.

Don't be so sure. Before he started his fantasy series, Martin created a universe of superheroes starting with Wild Cards Hey, do you see Elliot finding any other career besides being a superhero?

I'm wondering how many Presidents we'll go through before we find out exactly how Susan and Diane are related.

Before tomorrow when we might have canon answers to the is he-or-isn't-he questions, let me add yet another possibility about Susan's paternity: Are we sure her mom didn't cheat on her husband? Or that she got pregnant before she met her husband? Excuse me, I have to change the writer's sphere's litter box.

Cheating is about as rare as dogs who lick their butts. However, the Genghis Khan study was cross-checking for common markers in the Y-chromosome which is only passed down through the male line. As I said before, the study didn't really come out and say "Yes, there is a 100% chance all these men are direct descendant of Genghis Khan", only that there was a common male ancestor that should have lived around the same time Genghis Khan was alive and active. But as the conqueror of the largest empire that's ever been who's known to have had a large harem, he's a likely suspect. Oh, he also killed more people than most other men, starting with one of his own brothers when he was still a child, and working up to at least one entire nation, so it seems likely there was somewhat less cheating than average going on by and with his women and the other men with any access to them.

I hope Dan has actually figured out the plot twist. Anyway, if Adrian has kids, there are only four Moperville humans on the cover page of Sister III, and Ellen and Elliot definitely aren't Adrian's kids.

Really? I kind of think after this encounter with Jerry Pandora knows everything about the Susan and Diane that Jerry knows. Welcome to the forum, BTW.

There had to be something magical about that mirror. Mirrors, at least mirrors that are not magical, do not perceive anything, only reflect. An ordinary mirror should have shown Grace's own true face at the time. Remember, the spell is supposed to affect anyone except Grace and Adrian. So, Grace should have been able to see her own image without the illusion in an ordinary mirror.

Ever considered that the magic mirror may be showing exactly what Raven thinks his "niece" should look like? Especially since Adrian was probably the one who enchanted it. And those sidelocks...Have you noticed that the adult form of Pandora wears sidelocks? Of course, Grace wears sidelocks too, and bangs when she isn't deploying her antennae, so the image she sees could be an image based on her own idea of herself as Mr. Raven's niece would look like. Gee, I just might have just given Dan a free retcon if he decides Adrian shouldn't be the daddy after all.

And maybe Nanase is a descendant of Ghengis Khan. According to a 14th century chronicler, the Great Khan had red hair and green eyes.

Yes to Noriko's attitude, but no to her sister's. Mama Kitsune has made exactly the opposite commitment: Family comes before everything, including any tradition that could break up family. Tedd and Nanase are the same age. Probably Nanase was tested for magic potential with the same wand that scares Tedd at about the same time. Noriko's sister having a child showing high magical potential would have been an embarrassment for Noriko, especially if Nanase's father doesn't have any magic, or at least strong magic. In fact, I now wonder why Nanase's mother seems to be okay with Nanase going to the school where Adrian teaches; she must know the role Adrian played in the breakup of Noriko's marriage and her desertion of Tedd.

Possible in theory. Current guesstimates based on genetic studies suggest that about 1% of the men living today have a marker in their Y-chromosome that came from a man who lived around Genghis Khan's time, and it seems likely that a more or less equal percentage of women are many-times-great-granddaughters of this man who may have been the greatest conqueror so far. Adrian would have to have been very busy and/or fertile to best that record.

Actually Oriental Exclusion Acts were passed in the 19th century, aimed at Chinese. Japanese came over until they got completely excluded by immigration quotas in the early 1920s. However, those white-favoring quotas were repealed in the mid 1960s, so the Kitsunes could have come over afterward in time for Nanase, Akiko, and even their parents to have been born in the United States. Or they could have been brought in as part of the same black operation that Edward Verres is a part of. Magic would have been part of the Moperverse's WWII and Cold War, of course, along with the suppression of knowledge that there really were space aliens visiting and even living on Earth.

I like this possibility. BTW, it brings to mind the fourteen-year absence of Pandora in her son's life before Sister II. Could Adrian's involvement in the breakup of Edward and Noriko have something to do with that? Tedd would have been just old enough to remember his mother... That I don't buy. To father enough children to have that many descendants Adrian would have to have been a polygynous monarch like Genghis Khan or King Ibrahim of Morocco, or to have had the ability multiply himself 100 times for 100 women at a time like Krishna. Or both. Ever thought that Helena and Demetrius could have followed Nanase and/or Susan from Moperville? It could be another thing forgotten by their reset. If you're talking about the Titania in the Sailor Moon fanfic I posted over a decade ago, the timing is wrong. (Haruka's oldest daughter.) She is NOW. Magic is perfectly natural. One of the very-long anime conventions in EGS is a broader spectrum of natural hair colors. Edward's hair is blue; Liz's is green. As for the NOW, a fuller explanation of why sudden hair-and-eye-color-change is accepted as natural among the muggles of the Mopervers was provided by Agent Cranium in Family Ties. Since Adrian and all other half-immortals have one parent with natural transformation abilities, I don't think it would be unexpected for some or all of them to have transformation abilities. It hasn't been proven or disproven. Adrian is the only half-Immortal we've been shown in the series, and now even his own beliefs of what's possible for himself and others of his kind has just been proven imperfect. Maybe Dan could do some Q&A on this when Sister III is finished? I can only hope to live so long...

I don't see Adrian breaking up with a woman for having children with another man if he believes he can't have children, even the horndog version. Look at how he cares for Noah. But Adrian has been around for a long time, long enough to have taken a series of wives, faithful or unfaithful, so he might have actually fathered and raised a number of children not believing they could have been his own. Maybe everyone that Pandora has been marking in Moperville is a descendant of Adrian. Why in Moperville? It's almost as something or someone drew them there, isn't it?

Putting aside the "who's their daddy?" question, the way I see this going is that Pandora is going to say she can't talk to Adrian now because he's the one who's going to take down the dam. And I think she won't get the chance later because she's going to get a forced reset in the climax of Sister III.

No, Noriko talked about her and Edward's bloodlines when she talked with Adrian about Tedd's apparent lack of magic. Since we know that Noriko has at least one other child, Adrian might be the father, but not Tedd's father. Anybody thought that Adrian might be Edward's father? My cookies are still on Susan (and Diane), though.

Compare with the face in this mirror. Notice that both images have sidelocks which Susan doesn't wear.