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Yes, well, people who don't know about magic genderbending would be more likely to assume that it is Ellen who is Cheerleadra than Elliot . . .

Yes, the summer games are ruled by the Gods of Surfing instead.

Well, those people ARE superhuman . . .

Oh yes, when Ashley finds out about Tedd and the TF Gun, she will have a nerdgasm.

Given the known reaction rate of the human nervous system, in order to start moving within 100 milliseconds, either the athlete's brain and motor nerves function superhumanly fast, or else the athlete was NOT acting in response to the start signal actually beginning, and instead merely predicted it.

We haven't seen that demonstrated yet, though Ashley might volunteer . . .

Yes--typical human reaction time is upwards of 200 milliseconds--which is six to ten times as long as the window for hitting the ball (or any similarly precise action by a pitcher). This means that correct timing not only requires knowing where the ball is to a greater precision than your brain is actually capable of perceiving, but also requires that you start the action quite a ways ahead of time.

Tune in next week, same Shive-time, same Shive-channel!

What is that on the leftmost transformation example? TG? AR? TG + AR?

Hmm, if Elliot were Tedd's soul mate (and come to think of it, that might have been a motivator for giving Elliot a girly transformation via the whole "Sister" plot), then I would have expected that Pandora would be trying to play matchmaker for them a bit . . . On the other hand, if Pandora wasn't behind the bulldog dragon, then it's very likely that it WAS Voltaire . . . Perhaps he found out that Cheerleadra was too tough to withstand the bulldog dragon (being merely stunned by its direct blast which would have killed an ordinary unprotected human), and tried to up the ante by getting a more powerful being (like a griffin)? But then that raises the question of why it took him seven months to make his second attempt, given that Elliot's death was apparently a high enough priority to him that he wouldn't likely wait that long without trying anything.

Catching or hitting a ball is indeed a high-precision task. Consider the batter in baseball--assuming a pitch speed of 30 m/s (about 110 km/h, not too fast for a baseball), the ball is within the strike zone for literally less than 1/30 of a second--the length of ONE frame of a typical video--and we know that video frames pass by so quickly that our brain is unable to distinguish one frame from the next (sort of the point of animation, after all). So, the baseball is going past the batter in less time than a human can usually perceive, and yet at the professional level, a batter can hit the ball a good fraction of the time (typical professional batting averages are around .300 to .400, meaning that they strike out no more than about two-thirds of the time at most). I think that is pretty impressive.

From Pandora's reaction in the second panel, I think that we can safely assume that she has an interest in the welfare of Tedd's friends, if for no greater reason than because they are his friends and allies.

Yeah, it's also reasonably-public knowledge that Ellen and Elliot are siblings, so getting to meet Ellen and Nanase now that she's associating with Elliot is not too big of a surprise . . .

In http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2222 Disco Wizard implies that he would not even recall who Grace is without the spell, so I think that speaks for the notion that he does not know Grace in his waking life.

Also, Federation (and apparently Klingon and other comparable-level-tech societies) use EPS distribution rather than electrical-current-conductive cables because of the sheer quantity of energy that many ship functions demand. How many gigawatts do you think that it takes to fire a phaser bank that is capable of blowing up an (unshielded) target larger than the starship itself in a single shot? And how many gigawatts to power the deflector shields to protect against multiple hits from such weapons? These ship functions demand energies on the same order of magnitude as the ship's main propulsion, and once you've already got the conduits in place to transfer all of that energy, then you may as well tap into it for other power needs rather than build a second, separate system for all of the lesser functions.

Yup, Pandora was busy with Sarah while all of this was going down, and since she didn't bother paying attention to Carol when the elder sister left, or to the news broadcast made by Carol, she remains unaware of the events at the Mall. Anyway, it seems that Arthur J. Arthur was correct in his assessment way back when the Masquerade was blown open--it was the method of getting Magic that is the true secret that must be kept from the general public.

On the scouters: Consider that even Master Roshi, who was capable of blowing up the Moon (which is a whole one-quarter of the diameter of the Earth) with the Kamehameha back during the first Tenka-ichi Budokai arc, had a power level only in the three hundreds. Even if the scale is linear (i.e. twice the number means twice the power), that means that anybody powerful enough to overload a Scouter is also powerful enough to smash planets into rubble easily. Anyway, since the two panels in today's comic are explicitly a "dramatization", I think that the effect to Pandora is rather like what happened to Luke when he used his aura-vision on Tedd and saw a blinding flash. As for Ashley, this story is taking place just before Halloween, so two and a half months before the "present", which means that she has not yet met Elliot in person (only seen him in videos and from afar at school), and doesn't yet know about anybody who has transformation abilities. Her yearning for it must be strong indeed.

I had a knuckle sandwich. Literally. Take the meat from a pig's knuckle, broiled up nice and tender. It's quite good with BBQ sauce and cheese.

Given how Pandora was describing that before the Rule Change, the whole invading army was depending on a particular type of magic (Pyromancy) to be their main weapon, I am thinking that the pre-change rules were more like the magic that we hear about in traditional stories. Particularly, what EGS currently calls "Wizards" were more common, with the ability to choose which spells to acquire through study and practice. When Magic changed the rules, It changed things so that most Mages now gained spells that reflect their subconscious selves rather than being chosen by the conscious mind.

Given Rich's reaction, I think that we can Yup, given Rich's reaction, it's clear that he is planning to "perv out" on his access to a female form, whether it be by viewing/groping it, or using it to infiltrate places where he would be otherwise unwelcome (e.g. girls' locker rooms).

Yes, "third grade" was probably the earliest that Elliot had noticed Tedd (Ellen and Elliot were discussing Noah being comparably awkward to "third grade Tedd" in http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1076 and mentioning that that was when Elliot first met Tedd).

I wouldn't know. I can't say that I've ever had the privilege of seeing any Alpha Males "behind the mask", being more of a Gamma or Delta rank myself in the opinion of most of them.

The "fungus/microbes that tend to consume refined sulfur that isn't sterilized and hermetically sealed" version from D&D is probably the most plausible way of making gunpowder not work, which means that the adoption of explosives would get delayed until the discovery of nitroglycerin and methods of stabilizing it (dynamite or nitrocellulose/guncotton). Anyway, as for magic being widely available, it does appear that magical energy is a limited resource. Living beings can generate internal energy to a point, but any "industrial" type uses would have to draw on environmental energy--and there may be minerals or something that contain a relative concentration of magical energy that could thus be consumed like coal. Universal use of magic thus seems likely to deplete the world's magical energy supply. At best such a situation would lead to a limited availability of non-personal magical energy and a forced rollback of industrial usage. In a more dystopian situation, people or animals capable of generating enough energy to be useful but not enough to be powerful combatants may be enslaved as energy sources. Even worse, environmental magical energy might turn out to be vital for life (think of Mako/Lifestream depletion in various locations due to Shinra's activities in Final Fantasy VII).

There's no fun in killing boring people, unless one just happens to like killing for its own sake.

That would be neat, but didn't Luke scan everyone besides Sarah at the card tournament?