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She may be holding back because they are still inside Grace's mind and she doesn't want to hurt Grace needlessly. Speaking of Grace, since this conversation did take place within Grace's dreamscape, who here thinks that she may have overheard some of it and may remember bits of it later?

Well, the name "Blaike Raven" sounds vaguely Middle Englishey (i.e. post-Norman Conquest, but probably pre-Elizibethean).

Yeah, it sounds dry enough to help you sleep while being juuuust interesting enough that you want to keep reading.

All hail Hypnotoad!

Bipolar . . . yes, she seems to be more manic than irrational. The term "Maniac" might apply to her better than "insane".

Ballet dancing or ballroom dancing?

I would expect that it was written down somewhere, but the doc doesn't remember off the top of his head (after all, he's probably performed similar surgery for dozens of patients, so some of the details would run together in his memory after a while). Not all records are in one handy-dandy medical database file, however, so he might have to do some paper-file-cabinet diving.

I think that Pandora already said that giving people transformation spells would help to make magic much more visible in public, which presumably would help to convince the remaining skeptics that yes, magic is a real thing and not a hoax. She is hoping to see people get transformed (or be in a transformed state) in front of witnesses.

Pandora's crazy, but Voltaire is the only Immortal so far shown to be engaging in unprovoked malice.

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.