Don Edwards

There's an important factor that Elliot, when he was "Ellen", had connections to put together a (rather thin) cover-up of the temporary change. Then when Ellen became a separate person, those same connections established a historical record for her. But they did not have to also cover up the disappearance of male Elliot. Sam, at present, does not have such connections, as he hasn't been brought inside the veil of secrecy surrounding MIB. And if Sarah borrows the wand to change him, there will still be people who remember him as female. Graduation from high school, or transfer from one school to another, is a good time to change one's public presentation of sex, but it's recommended that one travel a good distance in a direction one's compatriots are NOT traveling (or at least not that far).

Depends on how vulnerable to magic weapons they are. Which we don't know. And perhaps on precisely where they hit.

Well, if I remember correctly a single loading is 50 rubber bands. Barraging a vampire with that many magic (summoned) rubber bands, he's gonna notice. And Susan can unsummon the emptied weapon and summon a new fully-loaded weapon in a second - which is pretty fast as speed-loaders go.

Rubber bands.

Or...

DO NOT TRUST IT. Some of the recipes and formulas are flat wrong, and it skimps on safety precautions. Come to think of it, that seems totally appropriate for anarchists... Susan and Elliot?

The Chinese tale of the guy who dreamt he was a butterfly - then upon waking wondered if he was actually a butterfly dreaming of being human.

It's the first playtest, and the test group is all female. Perhaps the game requires all-female now but there is intent to expand that later. Or perhaps there's a plan to allow male players to transform to female as a free start-of-game transformation (that won't be affected by transformation-swaps or other in-game stuff, but will terminate at end of game like the others).

Or a rubber-band machine gun

A couple months I read a science-fiction comedy wherein it was incidentally (stuff unrelated to the story) reported that Godzilla had flattened Tokyo. But this was such an ordinary event that, the monster having returned to the sea, they expected reconstruction to be finished within three months.

There's a good reason I'm in southern Arizona for the winter... (Based on the changes in traffic on Main Street since we arrived in early October, I'd say the population of this town and its surrounding area has gone up in excess of 10x. And on reports of past years, will again go up more than 10X in the next week or two. We aren't the only ones who like coming here for the winter.)

Or a stream of explosive fairies - re-summoning as they explode - so she doesn't have to aim the throws so precisely and can respond to Gullet moving. Gullet couldn't ignore Susan but dare not turn her back on Raven.

Squabs do not swim well.

Yeah, that one! Some of us figured it out, some of us thought it was obvious. Or the really dangerous one - a congress of baboons. (I'm pretty sure Congress is even more dangerous than the baboons.)

Understand your goals. If your goal is to defend a certain target, you going in and killing the enemy is only one of many possible ways to achieve that goal. In fact, if the enemy can be dissuaded from even attempting to take/attack the target, that's a complete success. Even if it happens while you're busy taking a nap. Check with Sun Tsu for details.

Isn't "I am not weak" a callback to a scene of Nanase in Gregg's dojo? (Don't want to take time to hunt it down right now.)

My approach to colds for years has been that at the first sniffle I eat something like chicken noodle soup with hot sauce, take cold medicines, then crawl in bed with extra blankets and pretty much stay there for a day. Usually - not always - I have one-day colds.

In his defense, he hasn't seen them in anything even vaguely approaching this high-stress a situation.

Dan, it's called "fanservice". And Ashley is definitely a fan.

Yeah, ring species are an amusing puzzle sometimes. They cast doubt on some of the attempts to define species in a clear-cut manner. However, it's a simple thought experiment to shoot down most such attempts. A mother animal and its children are the same species. Any problem with that statement? No? Good. Somewhere in the distant past there was a female animal which was the ancestor of all dogs and all cats. (And quite a few other critters.) Dogs and cats are not the same species. If you insist on drawing a sharp line between species, the three paragraphs just prior to this one are not compatible.

As far as we know, humans are the only critters that use tools to make their tool-making tools... I once read something on the order of "we may not be able to define precisely when day ends and evening begins, but we can certainly distinguish between noon and midnight." ----- Part of one of the working definitions of species is that two populations are of different species even if they *could* jointly reproduce successfully and have fertile offspring, if they would never meet (or for some other reason never mate*) absent human intervention. This is problematic when applied to humans. We NEVER meet without human intervention. We NEVER reproduce without human intervention. (Aside from a very few alleged events all of which, coincidentally, are associated with the founding of one religion or another; none of said alleged events being recent enough for rigorous documentation including medical records or DNA analysis.) So, by this definition, we became extinct in the wild the day our distant ancestors first qualified as "human". (Identifying that occasion is left as an exercise for others - see previous remark about noon and midnight.) * There are several species of firefly that differ primarily in the patterns of flashes they use to signal readiness to mate. Scientists have used LEDs to make females' flashes match the pattern of another species, and gotten cross-breeds... who happily mate with each other but not with either parent species, because their flash-pattern is a mix. Artificial species.

If you are in one of those programs where you can call and talk to a medical practitioner to see if you need to go to the doctor, I strongly recommend making that call. Otherwise, you should be contemplating whether you need medical attention. And if it gets even worse or you start showing other symptoms in spite of the benadryl, then stop contemplating and start going.

Susan can easily see this as mostly not-her, as it was dictated by the game - although not entirely not-her, as she agreed to play the game and even had some input on the design. That may be relevant to her acceptance of it. Contrast that to the other extremes: where a form is put upon her totally WITHOUT her consent, even indirectly; and where she gets to do blank-page design of the form she'll wear. In the first of those she would be angry at the coercion; and in the second she'd be totally responsible for the outcome and would never choose a form like this or admit, probably even to herself, that she wanted to. The real question, of course, is: why aren't they playing this game in front of a mirror or three?

Maybe she's afraid of the dark?

With the current NP storyline, that footnote might change. (Probably won't though.)