HarJIT

I hope Edward doesn't swing it.  DNA testing requires expensive and fragile equipment.  I would hope Edward handles government property like that with care.

Adrian is telling the truth to Pandora here, and I admire him for it. It takes guts to stand up to a powerful immortal being like this, especially when she is your mother.

My guesstimate of how old Tiffany was when she caught her father cheating was five. She was carrying down a book for her dad to read to her, probably a children's version rather than a big volume of the very grim Grimm's Fairy Tales. Four is a bit too young to understand the no-no of mommy or daddy getting naked with someone who isn't mommy or daddy, and Tiffany/Susan being very smart would probably have started reading on her own quite early--in fact, insisted on it as soon as she could.
BTW, I read Moby Dick in Third Grade before anyone told me it was supposed to be work.

I dunno. I don't feel like iPad au vin.

Y'all should read the book "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves".

Modified for Stylish on Firefox and Chrome
https://userstyles.org/styles/136455/910cmx-interface-restoration-shim

Dangit, now I can't unsee that, more fuel for the Susan must be related to Pandora fire...

The Moderator: That is supremely simple. Read the courtesy rules. Adhere to them to the best of your ability. Post in good faith and with no intent to injure and harm. Assume good faith if at all possible. And you will have very, very little chance of compelling me to post, which is what I prefer. I would rather do as little as possible.
~tOH.

It's only been the last dozen generations or so that it has been more common for humans to have health problems from excess calories than from insufficient calories, and Evolution only works that fast when a large proportion of people are dying from something in just a few generations (e.g. a pandemic). Our bodies just haven't adapted fast enough.

That sort of rapid forced weight loss is neither healthy nor effective.  Sure, extreme conditions can make people lose weight, but as soon as you take away those extreme conditions, the body is very effective at getting itself back to what it thinks it should be.  Exercising five hours a day might get you in great shape, but who actually has time to spend that much time, every day, day in and day out, for the rest of their lives?  Likewise extreme calorie restriction can cause weight loss, but the body sends floods of neurotransmitters and hormones to the brain, increasing appetite to starving-to-death levels, slowing metabolism to hold on to every calorie it can, and it does not stop -- even a full year later.  Imagine starving to death for over a year, with a feast right there in front of you and only your own willpower to stop you from filling your aching belly.  All day, every day, without cease.  No wonder most weight loss studies that carry on for more than a few months show very little long-term change.
And all to correct an inborn error in their metabolism that is extremely genetically determined.  We're talking about twin studies, adoption studies, etc showing that body condition is on par with height in how heritable it is.  People studying obesity have tried to make naturally thin people fat, even temporarily, and have found that forcing a healthy-weight person to gain more than about twenty pounds or ten percent takes measures just as extreme as forcing an obese person to lose that much weight, and keeping that change is just as difficult, too.  For "normal" people, twenty pounds makes a visible difference; for someone not so lucky in their genes, the difference between 260 and 280 isn't really all that great, so they can do just as well at losing weight as the "normal" person, and still be obese.
Hypothyroidism can cause severe weight gain.  We figured out what wasn't working and found a way to fix it, with replacement hormone therapy.  We're starting to treat mental conditons like Depression as medical conditions, instead of just telling people to "cheer up" or "snap out of it," because people started researching and treating them as illnesses instead of moral failings.  We now know of a whole bunch of other metabolic disruptions causing weight gain, but they are much more complicated, involving interactions between hormones and causing all sorts of changes in the brain.  It will take a lot more research to figure out how to fix these medical problems.  Yet research into curing obesity is chronically underfunded and ignored.

And that TPTB continue to treat it as a moral failing instead of a medical condition.  If a drug had as poor a success rate as "Tell the patient they need to lose weight" then it would never make it past even the initial stages of getting approved.  And yet that continues to be the best modern medicine has to offer.

There's a similar saying in medicine, "If you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras."  Often phrased as "not zebras" but the fact that horses are far more common does not mean that you'll never encounter a zebra.  In fact, one of my favorite CE lecture titles in recent years was "Horses, Zebras, and Gerenuks."
Another similar 'old saying' which seems to make sense but leads to wrong conclusions is, "Where there's smoke, there's fire."  That makes the assumption that you can tell smoke from steam, dust plumes, evaporating dry ice, and the smoke machine someone set up to try to convince people their opponent's pants are on fire and dustract from their own glowing flames.  ;-)

After I reuploaded my profile image, it started showing up again.  @mlooney, @Pharaoh RutinTutin, @The Old Hack and @PSadlon, you may wish to do the same.

On the subject of doing this, I'd like to hear some of this forum's thoughts on shortening the 'history' section of the character pages to avoid putting the entire comic's story on every single character page.  A character's History is what they did before they became a mainstay in the story - for example, Tedd's would be a note about William and Gillian and their CMD which he's modifying for them, a note about mad science, and a brief blurb about his most recent exploit.  Elliot's would be a note about his ASMA training, a sentence about Ellen's creation, and a short recap of Cheerleadra's most recent adventure.  Sarah's would be a note about how she and Tedd did a science project that had a side effect of her being temporarily stuck as a catgirl, a sentence about how she used to date Elliot, and a quick summary of her new spell and what her having magic means to her.

I, for one, C what you did there.

I'm also fond of DIane's response. It even made me like her more. That woman has spirit.

That gives a whole new meaning to "Supersize me."

Was that deliberate?
Elliot may even have died/been killed in the alpha world.

Are immortals protected under their own laws, or can Pandora come in and tear this *&%*&$ in half. I hope it's the second one.

Poor Tedd. It makes sense that having one's dreams crushed like this should produce some kind of trauma. Hopefully he can recover.
And Voltaire is utter evil. No doubt about it. When the goal of your plan is literally psychologically traumatizing someone, you're evil.

Hmm, there was that grave Tedd visited in his nightmare. I'm betting it was by Damien's hand, though, considering the timing and some of the words. (Or at the hand of the *real* master of fire)

Sorry, typo. Pandora may be "Immoral", but I had intended to type "Immortal".

Ah. This actually strengthens an old idea of mine: that it was the absence of Elliot in his world that helped to create Lord Tedd. Also, I had once before speculated on the possibility of targeting Elliot to get at Tedd. I am rather sorry to see my hypothesis confirmed in this way. :/

I never really hated Voltaire before, just strong dislike.  I do now.