ChronosCat

There are multiple valid answers to that. Magus was the one who got the Sirleck/Vampire balls rolling, so he could be considered the primary antagonist of that plot-line (or the protagonist, by the older definition where they were the one who caused changes and drove the plot), even if he wasn't even close to 100% evil and got away in the end. Meanwhile, Voltaire manipulated Sirleck (and in so doing orchestrated Pandora's reset) and was trying to influence the outcome of the Magic change, so he's also a good candidate for the primary "villain" of Sister III. The Old Hack's view that the primary obstacle was the change in magic itself also holds some merit. ...Actually, though, this doesn't really feel like the end of an era to me. Sure, it's a major turning point, but Pandora will be back, the masquerade isn't going to be dropped immediately, and the change in magic didn't result in anyone loosing any magic. Pretty much the only things that ended were Pandora's instability, Magus' time as an incorporeal entity, and Sirleck's life, none of which I expect to have a major impact on the main cast's lives (at least once they get past the worst of the pain of Pandora's reset and until Magus launches his next plot, whatever that might be). The magic clog is supposed to end too, and that might actually have a big impact on the cast, but we haven't seen that yet. I think what will really serve as the biggest ends-of-eras in EGS will be the cast getting out of High School, and (assuming the comic gets that far) their getting out of College. I suppose it would be quite the coincidence to have the gang have to deal with Lord Tedd right around one of those times, but that's the sort of thing I was thinking of. And a love triangle.

There's just one more section left to my quote collection: EGS quotes. (I apparently haven't significantly updated my EGS quote collection since Sister II... So look forward to Chronos' Favorite EGS Quotes, Part II at some future date...) Sister Chapter Titles "Open The Box" "Read The Rules" "Set up the Pieces" "Play the Game" “Knock the Board Over” “Scattered Pieces” “Fist Fight” “Clean Up” Selected Sister Comic Titles “If you were to ask, she would say you already know her.” “This wouldn't be true, but she would not be lying.” “She is someone who should not exist, and yet she now does.” “She never had anything, and yet she's lost everything.” "You look in the mirror, but someone else looks back. You remember a life you never had, one that cannot be yours. You are the piece that does not fit, you don't belong in this game. The board has been knocked over, you shall be swept away..." Other Comic Titles of Note: “When in Doubt, Swat Ponytail.” "Sarah's Gonna be the Best Darned Boyfriend She can be!" Character Quotes: “Today I am a man! You know, as opposed to other days...” - Dan, on his 21st birthday. “Sorry, but it's kinda hard to frighten the dead.” - Ellen “Oh dear God... I'm thinking like a Tedd!” - Ellen EDIT: I don't know what I did, but somehow when I was in the middle of working on the post, it posted itself... Anyway, here's more: "Magnet!" - Ellen "Elliot? Are you a girl in there? I could've sworn I heard myself yell." - Ellen “Ok, I need an aspirin, a ball of yarn, and thirty-seven pounds of catnip, stat!” - Elliot as a Cat-boy “Meow! I mean, um, hello?” - Elliot as a Cat-boy “Sense has no place within these walls.” - Elliot “I'M TOO YOUNG AND TOO MALE TO BE THE MOTHER OF A SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD FEMALE ME!!!” - Elliot "Oh, wait... I'm the boyfriend tonight... My bad." - Grace “What I want to know is what is so wrong with my body that nobody wants to see it?” - Grace “When in doubt, go squirrel...” - Grace “If you get to be naked, I get to be naked. It's only fair!” - Grace "And so these nine would form the Fellowship, who would be charged with the task of destroying the One Ring. Along the way they will face peril, and meet many, many handsome Elves." - Justin Justin, on Nirvana (the spiritual state, not the band): "I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but how can I reach a state free of desire when the state itself is something that I desire?" “That is not true! I do not rant wildly! If I rant, I do so with good reason! Like that time after I skipped lunch when they showed that movie on igneous rocks in chemistry class? I had every reason to rant! Why would you schedule such a boring movie right after a lunch period, and why would you show a movie about rocks in a chemistry class?! Maybe it had a point. I don’t know. I fell asleep. But still, it seemed really out of place to me. I think…” - Nanase “Oh, don't mind me. Didn't get enough sleep last night. Low blood sugar. Bit my tongue. Cut off in traffic. You know how it is.” - Adrian Raven “So the spoiled princess wants to be saved by the noble plumber. How can I resist her charms?” - Pandora Chaos Raven "Well, you know how it is; sometimes you just have to have an ice cream sundae." - Sarah “NO! I WILL NOT BE STOPPED BY RANDOM NUDITY!” - Sarah "Well, I've never been a boyfriend before! I don't know what kind I would be!" - Sarah “I stand by my ridiculous claim.” - Susan “This techno-babble-infested novel will serve me well.” - Susan “No fair! I have a handicat!” - Susan "Um Teach? Our goo kinda came to life and slithered away... Is that bad?" - Tedd “...And that, my friend, is how I saved Christmas.” - Tedd “Why father, I have been in this bathroom all along and not sleeping with the squirrel girl as previously suggested.” - Tedd “I have bows in my hair and nobody objects!” - Tedd “So you see, my lad, the true moral behind the battle of Trenton is that if you party too hearty, George Washington will kick your ass. Any questions?” - Mr. Verres “I hope the answer is no, but are you Tedd?” - Mr. Verres "I am an endless barrel of exposition!" - Mr. Verres “EVERYBODY RUN AROUND IN A DANGEROUS PANIC, QUICK!!!” - Unnamed schoolgirl “Who is 'Timmy' and how did he wind up down a well?” - Hedge “Stupid me-made technology!” - Helena “You will stop being creepy and weird this instant! Do you hear me?!” - Principal Washington Sarah: "Don't you remember what it was like being a teenage guy?" Susan: "I try not to."

Well, in terms of attack power and HP, Voltaire is probably more powerful - but EGS isn't a battle-heavy series so I don't see that as the deciding factor. Plot-wise, Voltaire is likely going to be the "Big Bad" of the next major set of story arcs, but his threat is likely to not be as personal as LT/GST. Furthermore, as the second major villain revealed (following Damien) and as the first one to strike (via retcon, in the original Goo arc), Lord Tedd has seniority over all other EGS villains. As a result I think that if EGS ends within the next decade or two in real life, and within the next few years in-comic, it will be the most satisfying if Lord Tedd & GST are the final antagonists. If the comic continues after the main characters get out of College, and for as long as Dan can make the comic, it probably would be better to get around to Lord Tedd sooner or later rather than constantly holding him in reserve, but with the build up he's already had, plus the anticipation of waiting this long for him, I would at least hope that his arc served as a major end of an era. I had a period where I would usually have the basic plot for a story figured out, then wing it on the details, but almost every time I would eventually get to a point where I couldn't figure out how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. Since then I usually put together a fairly detailed outline first - though I'm always prepared to change things if I think of something better. That said, I do have one story I've been writing for a while where I basically decided on the characters and setting and have been just letting things flow from there, and it's been working fairly well too.

You have a point; I was just assuming since Dan was talking about Lord Tedd, and everything so far has made it seem to me like he (and/or General Shade Tail) was going to be the "Final Boss".

It seems to me that what Dan's saying is that he doesn't currently have any stories where revealing the deal with the Dunkels would be important to the plot, and he's waiting until he either comes up with such a story or is getting close to ending the comic before he does so. What I find interesting is he implies there's more to this than just a running gag, and he already knows why the Dunkels are the way they are even if he doesn't know what to do with that information. Hmm... I've been reading since 2006, so 12 years... which would be about 32% of my life. ...How much of my life I've been following EGS doesn't really surprise me all that much, but it is strange to think that 3/4ths of the comic's run has occurred since I started reading.

Today's set of quotes were all said by EGS Bunnies. (Disclaimer: I can't be 100% certain these Bunnies were first to say all these things, though in most cases they probably were.) Note that some of them come from the "bad old days" and may bring back unpleasant memories to those who were around for the old arguments. "You know if only this where a universe where Elliot could turn herself into a guy, that would cure all these confusing Ellen-Elliot are the same person conversations." - Marcus Rizzo "So, at the end of the day, all I can say is that some people have too much time on their hands and others just like to jump on the train wreck and dance." - Psirrow "Just because people are drilling holes in the boat doesn't mean you're not heading towards an ice berg." - Psirrow "It feels like you're making mountains out of molehills. Then complaining about there being too many mountains and not enough molehills." - sci-fi guy "So my memory is off from the year and a half it's been since yesterday." - Tricia "Little-known fact: Ranma 1/2 is really a spinoff of EGS, jostled backwards in time following the Great Temporal War of 2012-1985." - Mewtarthio "My brain is starting to hurt. Can we get back to things that make sense, like magic exploding crows?" - mem "If stories only contained elements that were absolutely necessary to the plot they'd be boring." - Indrid Cold During a discussion which had drifted to ways of guessing the size of a certain part of male anatomy... Yogthulhu2: "Well, you can always go by weapons, cars and swords. I've heard that men with taste for big cars, big guns, and big swords are usually... "compensating". This is not always true." Ankhareon: "Big swords are impractical and unwieldy - An ordinary katana on the other hand is a finely tuned instrument of death." Illusionist: "Yes, but he who lives by the sword, dies by the gun." B.T. Isaac: "And he who lives by the gun, dies by the ligthsaber." Illusionist: "And he who lives by the lightsaber, dies by 20 clone troopers." Ankhareon: "And he who lives by 20 clone troopers should really get out of there." Doesn't surprise me, it sounded familiar to me too. However a quick search didn't find any matches, and they said it in the middle of a conversation without any indication they were quoting anyone.

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." - attributed to Steve Wozniak "There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't." - Unknown "When Schrodinger's cat's away, the mice may or may not play, no one can tell." - Francis Heaney "Physics is like sex. Sure, it may have some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - attributed to Richard Feynman "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll, Usenet article <1990May15.155309.8892@watdragon.waterloo.edu> (1990), updated in Usenet article <bi5d3u$hjl$1@panix1.panix.com> (2003) "Let's see, if I recall, English was conseaved under a cursed full moon on Friday the 13th from a illegitimate pairing of Latin and Germanic. It follows whichever set of phonics rules it pheals like at the time. It uses an out dated spelling system that is often arbitrary. As you would expect from a child of darkness, it chases other languages into dark alleys, clubs them over the head and runs off with bits of their vocabulary." - DeaExMachina ( http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?p=2146747#p2146747 ) “A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.” - H. L. Mencken "Evolutionary theory doesn't imply that we "should" do anything, any more than the theory of gravity implies that we should push people down stairwells." - David Simon "If you want to find a needle in a haystack, the first thing you do is burn down the haystack." - John Valley "Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, when here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life." - Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling, (1965) "Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins." in Evolving Genes and Proteins, p. 101. "Satire is a dying art form because reality is becoming too stupid." - MrNumbers “If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research.” - Wallace Notestein A dog says, "These people feed me, love me, and provide me with a home. They must be gods." A cat says, "These people feed me, love me, and provide me with a home. I must be a god." - Jbenant, ( http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?p=2715150#p2715150) (Possibly not originator of the quote.)

Ah, a simple featureless battle background. How nostalgic! Frankly I think I like the battle background more than the starburst. However, I have a tradition to uphold! So, yay for starburst background in panel one!

Oh yeah, so what I couldn't figure out how to put into words back when the strip was posted is that knowing how things normally go in Pokemon I do find this strip amusing, but it still doesn't really feel like it has a proper punchline. It also didn't make me laugh, but then it takes a lot to make me laugh, so that's nothing new.

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, revitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." - Cicero, a Roman philosopher, in his oration "De Oratore" in 55 BC. "There is nothing as annoying as someone for whom the world is new. At least to those for whom the world is old." - Jennifer Finney Boylan "The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're alive." - O.A. Battista "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him." - Booker T Washington "I do the very best I know how - the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference." - Abraham Lincoln "The point is not to live forever. The point is to live so forever knows you were once here." - Unknown "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind." - Marston Bates "In mathematics we don't understand things, we just get used to them." — John Von Neumann "Belief without doubt is merely opinion." - Unknown "The more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded." - Marcello Truzzi "Death had to take [Theodore Roosevelt] sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight." - Woodrow Wilson "Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either thought is frightening." - Arthur C. Clarke "A paradox is truth standing on its head to attract attention." - Nicholas Falletta "Unless you change direction, you're apt to end up where you're headed." - Chinese Proverb "The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate." - Edward O. Wilson "A principle difference between human beings and ants is that whereas we send our young men to war, they send their old ladies." - Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson "It is not every day that someone calls to offer you a free spacecraft." - Peter H. Smith (Professor of Planetary Science at University of Arizona) "You are yourself. There's no one else you could be." - Yoko Belnades, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow "Before you go saying how absurd someone else is, remember, you live in a society where girls are encouraged to poke holes in their ears and dangle metal and rocks from them." - CPUX "Flaming eyes! I want flaming eyes. Or maybe I don't, I would probably burn myself with them." - DeaExMachina "In a democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes." - Mogens Jallberg "Nobody ever told Picard that 'Ye cannae change the laws of Physics!'. They just DID it." - Vampiress Kat "I sometimes suffer from ADHLAS - Attention Deficit... HEY LOOK, A SQUIRREL!" - Overlord 808 "Interested in time travel? Meet here last Tuesday." - Unknown "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

Or Dumbledore. Or Tommy... The Pinball Wizard A Merlin/Gandalf/Dumbledore also needs to be wise, or good at faking it. (Ideally they should have a long white beard, too, but for many with a masculine body type that doesn't even require magic.) To be The Pinball Wizard on the other hand requires that you're deaf, dumb, and blind (at least according to the song). ...Incidentally, when Scotty said "Tommy" my first thought was "What? Tommy may be the coolest of the Power Rangers, but last I knew he was no wizard."

"I once thought I made a mistake, but I was wrong." - Unknown "I am allowed to be a hypocrite, you are not!" - Unknown "What happens when an ultimately omniscient and omnipotent being attempts to make a random-number generator with an output they can't predict?" - Krid "Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before..." - Attributed to Steven Wright "War does not determine who is right, it just determines who is left." - Unknown "The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West - instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people." - Terry Pratchett "Films are not released; they escape." - Ben Burt "It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs." - Principia Discordia, by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst) "We should start the Society to Prevent the Overuse of Acronyms except you know everyone would just shorten it to SPOA and that would really defeat the purpose." - Antoine Bruce "The less one knows about a mystery, the better story one can tell about that mystery." - Unknown "Ignorance killed the cat, curiosity was framed." - Mike Bruner "I don't want to be quoted, and don't quote that I don't want to be quoted." - Winston Burdett "So in conclusion, this thread's gotta have more cowbell or it can't get over 9000. And we can't have that, or Chuck Norris will roundhouse kick our faces. In the end, is this madness? This is Sparta! And when in Rome, all your base are belong to us. Ya rly! Srsly." - Kyrio

Too tired to put my thoughts on this strip into words, but I did want to say: Yay for double-starburst background in panel one!

Warning: I'm leading with a quote from a Nazi today... "Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship or a communist dictatorship. [..] Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Herman Goering to Gustave Gilbert during the Nuremberg Trials, as recounted by Gilbert in "Nuremberg Diary". ...And now back to more lighthearted fare... “Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.” - attributed to Hans Christian Anderson. "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron; often miss-attributed to Einstein. "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Unknown, possibly a paraphrase of a statement by C.E.M. Joad; often miss-attributed to Einstein. '"Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint." - attributed to Markus Herz by Ernst von Feuchtersleben; often miss-attributed to Twain. "Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. " - David Wong "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick "Viruses are well supported by their authors, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature. So, Windows is not a virus." - Unknown (the earliest use of it I can find is by "SamSim" on slashdot.org, in 2004). "A high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" - Unknown "Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact." - George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such "Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something." - Unknown, often attributed to Plato "If someone tells [Pac-man] guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns." - Tohru Iwatani "Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music." - Marcus Brigstock "Halloween! I love any holiday that successfully combines ancient druidic rituals with teeny tiny snicker-bars." - Sam, in a Sam & Max comic

Immortals can have beards too; Jerry and Old Demetrius both had them.

Meh, the original version was snappier. (And more widely applicable, for that matter.)

Comic creator edition: "Your problems are utterly alien to me. It's like a bear complaining to a shark that its' knees hurt." - Questionable Content, by J. Jacques "You haven't seen true geekdom until you've watched Snape and Sephiroth face off in a duel to the death in front of a crowd of bewildered mall patrons." - Questionable Content, by J. Jacques "In short: there are no rules. And here they are." - Scott McCloud, Making Comics "The slightest opening for confusion will inevitably let in a breeze. " - Dan Shive "I'm aware this is a comic with weresquirrels and magic, but that would have made no sense whatsoever. " - Dan Shive A - "I have an opinion and I am expressing it." B - "My opinion is different and I too am expressing it." A - "I must now defend my opinion for someone else's opinion differs." B - "I must now defend against the defense of the first opinion." A & B - "INFINITE LOOP POWERS, ACTIVATE!" - Dan Shive, responding to a forum argument back in the keenspot days. "Being afraid doesn't run my life -- it just offers valuable guidelines." - Mr. Pip, "Bone: Tall Tales" by Jeff Smith and Tom Sniegoski "Verbing weirds language." - "Calvin & Hobbes" by Bill Waterson "Sometimes I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." - "Calvin and Hobbes" by Bill Waterson "The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about science is it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes." - xkcd, by Randall Munroe

I watched Voltron loyally until it was no longer available to me (I forget if the local station stopped playing it or if the channels available to me changed; my family moved a couple times during that period), at which point I switched to Transformers and soon came to love it just as much. I was pretty upset when they canceled Transformers, but a couple years later I was given a new cartoon to obsess over, TMNT. ...And all that before I turned 10 (not that I ever let growing older stop me from watching cartoons).

Well, at least there were occasionally episodes where there was a plot-related reason why they didn't form Voltron right away (usually the villains temporarily being genre savvy enough to actually try and separate or disable some of the lions or pilots before they could form Voltron).

Often times quotes are attributed to famous people who never said them, or the version of the quote that most people know is not exactly what they said. Not wanting to perpetuate such mistakes if I can avoid it, I've tried to do a little research on the following quotes. Where I couldn't find any info, or it's not sure whether they actually said it, I say below that it's "attributed to" them. (Mind you, my research was far from thorough, so I do not promise 100% accuracy.) "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless" "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress." - Niels Bohr "Anyone who has not been shocked by Quantum physics has not understood it." - Niels Bohr "Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill (often mis-quoted to refer to "men" or mankind in general) "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the former." - Attributed to Albert Einstein by Fredercik S. Perls "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein, "Sidelights of Relativity" "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible." - Albert Einstein, "Physics and Reality" "If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it." - Attributed to Albert Einstein Albert Einstein in response to a book entitled "100 Authors against Einstein": "Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough." "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves the world blind and toothless" - Attributed to Mohandas Gandhi "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Attributed to Groucho Marx "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." - Mark Twain (Appears in "More Maxims of Mark" by Merle Johnson; Twain scholars consider the book likely accurate.) "Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain, "Mark Twain's Notebook" "In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." - Mark Twain, "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow." - Mark Twain (in an article in "The Galaxy", July 1870) "One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives." - Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson" "If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat." - Mark Twain, "Mark Twain's Notebook"

I wonder if that's an old fire-wand, a candle the Uryuom is lighting and putting out with his own new fire spell, or what?

Oh yeah, I was going to post some of my favorite quotes here. I actually have a long list - so long this post would be huge if I did them all at once. So I suppose I'll do it a few at a time. "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." --Roger Sessions, paraphrasing Albert Einstein "Inspiration is like the tide. First it floods your mind, then it quickly disappears leaving you with nothing but mud and a stranded boat." -- Unknown "Remember! Always listen to random intuition! It just might be the convenient plot device that saves your butt!" -- Sensei Greg "In the underground labyrinths, Link will come across some doors that will close behind him once he's passed through them. Yet, there's always a way of opening them and escaping. Even if Link's closed in on all sides he's not allowed to give up. Try anything to get out!" -- The Legend of Zelda Instruction Booklet "All Life begins with Nu and ends with Nu. This is the Truth! This is my belief! ...at least for now." -- The Mystery of Life, Volume 841, Ch 26 (Chrono Trigger)

Just like cats, really.

I don't know, I always assumed the Will of Magic only applied to Earth-style magic on Earth (or something like that) and that Uryuoms developed the Worker Suits on the Uryuom home-world for use in hazardous jobs, for the same reasons humans invented clothing - it just took Uryuoms a bit of science to develop clothing that would play well with their shape-shifting, and they never developed a nudity taboo (well except for the Uryuoms who integrated into Human cultures).

I figured that she had last checked her spellbook within the last few days, but the spell changed between that point and when she started casting spells at Tedd's. So it was just a quirk of timing that it seemed like she wasn't keeping up. No experience with tabletop RPGs, just video game ones, but I have played several games where when you gain a new level, you have a choice of skill/spell to learn, as part of a tree of skill development (Diablo II and Final Fantasy X come to mind). On the other hand, in most JRPGs I've played (particularly from the NES and SNES eras), each character had a specific list of spells that they always gained in order, so I can see where hkmaly is coming from.