ChronosCat

1. I'd be shocked if he did. This does not feel like a story-ending comic, particularly with Elliot there in the last panel looking like he's just about to vent his anger one way or another. Elliot and Magus are currently in a position of conflict, and that conflict needs to be resolved (or interrupted by bigger events) before the story can end. Furthermore, it seems to me that before the story ends we ought to see Magus leaving the facility (either under his own power or being taken captive) and see Ashley and this world's Dunkles get to a point where we can assume they'll get home safely. 2. Unless the next chapter is going to be the Epilogue, unlikely. In the commentary at the end of the previous chapter he said this one would likely be the final non-epilogue chapter of Sister 3. 3. Another reason I don't expect the story to end just yet. 4. If it occurs to them there might be anyone there. But before they can do that I think Ashley and Elliot need to decide whether Magus is friend or foe, and if foe deal with him somehow.

Bah, acronyms FTW.

While alternates certainly can have different names (Terra is probably Terra's real name, Nioi and SL Kaoli are alternates, and then of course there's Elliot/Beta!Ellen/SL!Ellen and Tedd/various Tesses), it wouldn't surprise me if Magus' real name is Elliot. Or maybe Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs?

Well, the good news is that the exploding crates have not caused any obvious immediate reaction from the artifacts within. Furthermore, the fact that we don't see them lying around suggests they're not important to the plot - well, the ones in those particular crates, anyway. I do wonder what happened to them, though. Were they blown out the window with most of the debris? Were they destroyed by the burst of flame from Sirleck dying? Meanwhile, Elliot looks ready for a fight. Will Magus or Ashley talk him down? Will Magus make his escape before Elliot can throw a punch? Or will the fight I've been expecting that leads to multiple artifacts activating and adding further complications to the plot (or at least letting Ashley experience a transformation in canon) be not between Magus and the Security/DGB (or as I was thinking until a few comics ago, Sirleck) but between Magus and Elliot? ...Oh, and incomplete-face Ashley is really cute.

If he can't get home easily, he may have no choice but to wait around in the main universe long enough for Pandora to show up again. ...Another possibility is that he might return home for now, then come back later to deal with Pandora. As for what's going to happen next, I really expect something involving the reactivated artifacts (and possibly the security guard and or a DGB taskforce). If Elliot and Ellen are still out when that's over (or if nothing happens after all), I could see him helping Ashley get the two down to the car. But beyond that I expect him to bail (one way or another) as soon possible; the fact that he wanted Ashely around to pass on his story to Elliot and Ellen indicates he never had any intention of hanging around long enough to tell them himself.

I'm looking forward to Goonmanji 3, so long as we have a nice long break before that with a number of unrelated NP stories in it. (I'm thinking roughly a year from when Goonmanji 2 ends, give or take a few months.) As for Goonmanji 2, I want to see what forms the girls choose, but beyond that I've had more than enough for now and I'm getting impatient for it to end. I would normally find the info Hanma is imparting here interesting, but it's not exactly essential to the story, and at the moment I can't help but feel a little annoyed that we're interrupting the plot for it. ...On the bright side, Policewoman Justin and Catboy Elliot are cute (though Catboy Elliot is a little broad in the chest for my tastes).

Magus stated he was going to "end" Pandora. If that is important enough to him (either because he's holding a grudge or because he still thinks she's dangerous/evil and refuses to believe claims otherwise) he might delay his return home long enough to try attempt to kill her - which would put him in conflict with the main eight now that Sarah and Tedd are friends with her and they know Susan is related to her. Alternately, getting home might be his top priority but he might not have an easy way of doing so, and while he's trying to find a way home he might take some time out to go after Pandora or do something else that causes trouble. (Or maybe his attempts to get home might cause trouble?) And just because everything we've seen that's been from his POV has painted him as a good guy doesn't mean that he is - many villains think that they're doing the right thing. ...Also, it's not exactly proof of anything, but he does have bad habit of smiling in an evil-looking way.

http://www.egscomics.com/egsnp.php?id=745 So much for my idea they'd all keep their forms. At least this implies the final form will last more than a few moments - but how long? I'm still thinking somewhere between an hour and a day. As for the crown and scepter, my current best guess is (as others have suggested) that they allows Catalina to change the others (and maybe herself) to different forms from the game (perhaps as a precaution in case the winner wasn't happy with having the final form applied to all).

The Hawk has hatched. Little mice better beware. (Wait, Pandora says he's going to "grow". This being EGS we can't rule it out, but I doubt she meant the "grow" literally. So does that mean he's going to get even more powerful? Was she referring to something else besides returning to the physical plane when she talked about him "hatching"? Or did she over-complicate her analogy for the sake of drama?) Also, I knew Sirleck wasn't boss material (at least from a combat perspective). Ding dong the witch vampire is dead! Sirleck is creepy, and she wasn't expecting him to suddenly appear. I'm sure if the battle had lasted long enough for her to help, she would have. Or at least a red flag that Magus knew Sirleck was planning on possessing him, and was prepared. Incidentally, this more-or-less confirms the theory that when Magus seemingly-accidentally hinted to Sirleck that he'd be a good host, he knew exactly what he was doing. This guy is crafty (which, actually, is a little surprising for an Elliot).

I don't know, in most of the JRPGs I've played the bosses are usually big and imposing. Admittedly that was sometimes obviously artistic license (I don't think Garland or the Pirates were really twice the size of the heroes in the original Final Fantasy) but my point was as Sirleck is drawn here (particularly in the final panel) he doesn't really look like boss material.

Hmm... That might also explain how Sirleck is able to spend most of his time on another plane without being constantly attacked by Immortals: his plane is one that few if any Immortals use. Though that does raise the question of how Magus was able to find him so easily - as well as how Magus was able to interact with both Panrora and Helen & Demetrius. If Magus had the ability to shift between different planes (but not the physical one for some reason) I would have expected that ability to come up.

It's confirmed, Ellen was able to fight back because she's just that awesome. Er, I mean because she was born from magic. (And yes technically it's just speculation in-comic, but the commentary implies she's right about the "born from magic" idea.) Meanwhile, Sirleck looks even more creepy than usual in the last two panels, but a lot less imposing. Seen from that angle, he looks like the sort of JRPG monster you can beat in two or three turns at most if you're the proper level for the area. ...Which is rather appropriate since I expect Magus is about to trounce him.

When Ellen zapped the Goo it merely stunned it, and I'm pretty sure it was said somewhere that the same thing would happen with anything not humanoid enough. I suspect that Sirleck's form is too inhuman, and the beam would just stun him. Even if he was transformed, the FV5 beam does not alter base forms, it just temporarily enchants humans (Vladia didn't turn back because she's a Seyunolu), so I would assume he'd still be an aberration, he'd just temporarily look human. (At least I hope he would look human; if it just gave him arms, legs, and the FV5 hair and proportions, he would probably look even more disturbing than he does in his normal state.)

While it would be nice, last names are not required to be an EGS main character. After all, it was many years before we learned Sarah's last name.

http://www.egscomics.com/egsnp.php?id=746 This comic raises more questions than it answers. Like, does Catalina have access to the entire deck, or just certain cards (and if so which ones)? And does the crown actually have some sort of magical affect on others (probably making people more likely to obey Catalina without forcing them to), or is Hanma just that confused about crowns and royalty? I mean, you've got it almost backwards, Hanma. Royalty don't wear crowns because the power crowns give them, Royalty wear crowns because the power of being royal means no one is going to tell them not to wear their fancy jeweled headgear. ...Meanwhile, the question of how long the others are stuck with the lifeguard forms is put off for another day.

That depends on if it has fur on it.

So I wasn't entirely convinced that the wand could cause any transformation from the game, but there's a poll up now on Patreon about the upcoming strip(s), and in the description Dan says outright, "If a form was possible in the game, she can now make it happen using that wand." I guess that answers the last of my questions about this strip (other than "How exactly did Hanma manage to get so confused about human culture?", but that's more of a rhetorical question).

That is the impression I had immediately after reading the comic, but then in the Patreon commentary Dan was talking about clothing with Charisma boosts, and I started to wonder if maybe the crown gave the wearer a magical charisma boost without being so powerful as to interfere with free will. One of these days I have to start following EGS on Reddit.

Wild theory: Body snatching monsters (not necessarily Aberrations) are a common enough danger in the Second Life universe that children are taught some sort of mental discipline that allows them to fight back. The jacket is the same shape as far as I can tell. The shades of gray are a bit different, but I think different lighting in the mental battlefield and/or artistic license could account for that. (As an argument for artistic license, note that SirleckEllen's jacket is yet another shade of gray.) Back in Squirrel Prophet, Disco Wizard speaking on behalf of Will of Magic that "Species with magic woven into their very nature, such as Uryuoms, aren't at risk of suddenly not being able to change forms." Granted this was in reference to the full Magic Change rather than the minimal one we got, but I don't see why the minimal change would have more of an effect on Uryuoms and Seyunolus than the full change. I thought there was a more definitive statement somewhere that Uryuoms wouldn't be affected period, but I can't find it, so I could have just been mis-remembering Disco Wizard's statement. At any rate, I guess Immortals (and possibly transforming Aberrations, depending on how much magic is a part of them) will still be able to transform, but whether magic works exactly the same for them is still up in the air. Finally, unless it was stated somewhere outright that human magical potential cannot be passed down through part-Uryuom lines, I would assume they would be (even without the change in magic). After all, while the Q&A7 said that it would be hard for Grace to learn magic, it also said it was possible.

While I love the fact that Ellen is fighting back, I hope Dan has a good explanation for why she is able to when none of Sirleck's previous hosts apparently could. The most likely possibilities in my mind are that it has to do with either her status as a Dewitchery Duplicate, or the change in magic. Another possibility is she has some spell not covered in the Ellen Demo which could help. Edit: Actually, given what we know about the change in magic it seems unlikely it would have an effect on Ellen or Sirleck, unless maybe Sirleck was somehow using his own magic defenses to subdue his victims. I'm not going to totally abandon the idea until we know for sure, but it seems a lot less likely than I initially thought. The jacket looks the same to me. The "taller" and "no sign of breasts" might be due to Ellen's mental image / astral form not matching her physical form, but more likely it's just the camera angle and the way they're "standing" (their arms and SirleckEllen's torso are in the way of most of the area where we could see signs of her breasts, and the hold Ellen has on Sirleck would seem to be responsible for SirleckEllen's head being slightly lower than Ellen's; also both SpiritEllen and SirleckEllen are larger than the image on the right of Ellen's body, so we can't judge height by comparing them to Ellen's body). It's been stated before that the change in magic wouldn't affect Uryuoms. I don't remember if the way it was stated would rule out changes for Seyunolus or Immortals; at the very least I doubt the change would affect how Seyunolus use Uryuom "magic".

1. The attack was on the physical plane, Sirleck was not. 2. Several miles from each Immortal. Apparently there are a lot of Immortals, spread out across much of the world.

You forgot Arthur J Arthur. Also, I thought I remembered one of the Aberrations being a wizard, but I don't remember which one and I don't have time to look it up right now.

In my scenario where the only curse the Diamond is "aware of" is Elliot's changed hair color, Magus would gain the ability to shoot a TF beam that turns the subject's hair blonde. (Or, if somehow missed the alterations Magus made to Ellen's TF beam, it might give him his own FV5 beam.)

Yes!!! I've been waiting twelve years for this moment, but that waiting has finally paid off!!! * recovers composure * On the one hand, this tells us nothing new. On the other hand, it looks like Magus is separate from Elliot again, and has finally achieved his goal of getting his own body. I'm going to save some of my celebrating until we confirm everything worked out all right, but I'm still incredibly happy to see this turn of events. So, now the question is, what next? My best guess is that Sirleck attempts to take over Magus, there's a fight, and in the process one or more artifacts are activated, affecting one or more of the people there (Asheley seems the prime candidate). Another possibility that occurs to me is the force of the explosion might fling Magus and/or Elliot into those crates behind them, causing the artifacts in them to activate (or at least providing weapons for the upcoming fight). The Diamond is supposed to "remove" enchantments, and I doubt possession by Magus counts as that. However, Elliot probably will gain the power to change the color of his hair while male.

So much for my idea that the player with 8 points would need to keep them for a full round in order to win. I'm not too surprised, because that would be the sort of thing that should have been explained at the beginning of the game with the basic rules if it were the case. I still think the last transformation in the game only lasting for a moment doesn't seem fair when all the other transformations lasted at least a turn. And judging by the commentary, it looks like Dan might feel the same way (or at least he implies that he doesn't think one panel is long enough). Hopefully he has a good solution up his sleeve. My current speculation: All of the transformations in effect at the end of the game (besides the ones Catalina had before winning) will remain in effect for a preset amount of time (I'm leaning towards either one hour or one day) but Catalina's new scepter is a wand which she can use to undo any player's transformation early if she wants. ... (Once again I shall decline to cheer for the starburst-and-smoke backgrounds because I now believe the transformations actually are accompanied by a flash of light and puffs of smoke.)