CritterKeeper

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1163 Never watched it. The phrase "cunning plan" is too generic to expect it to be recognized as being a reference. And it mostly makes me think of "cunning linguist".....

We've got two competing perspectives here. One angle is to look at the odds that somewhere out there, two people exist who look almost identical and were born within twenty minutes of each other, and yet are anything other than identical twins. We just happen to be seeing them because, well, stories have to focus on someone unusual because not unusual is boring. The other is the possibility that two girls who are closely related (half-sisters, cousins, etc) look very similar, and that perhaps the father had some influence on the time of birth -- some people really want their baby to be in the papers as the First Baby of the New Year, once they realize the "due date" is near there, and might even do what they can to try to make it happen. Scheduled induction or Caesarian, herbs, exercise, even orgasm is supposed to have a chance of stimulating the start of labor. I can kinda picture the guy, pretending to be squeamish and having to step out of the room his girlfirend is laboring in, only to go down the hall and around the corner to his wife's room in time to "get to the hospital just in time" to be there for the moment of their daughter's birth. (I can come up with other scenarios, too.) Depending on the size of the hospital and the busy-ness of the night, plus or minus privacy policies or how much the staff gossips, it might be possible to either keep staff from noticing or keep word from spreading too far about the guy whose wife and girlfriend were in labor at the same time. Bribery could also be involved. I suppose it's even possible that the girlfriend knew full well his wife was also pregnant, and made an effort to make things difficult for him by figuring out a way to get her own labor to overlap with the wife's, just to force him to choose. (I say girlfriend because it seems likely the wife didn't find out about his cheating until Susan told her, but it's also possible that particular Other Woman was a this-is-your-last-chance type situation.)

Not exactly. Ellen copied Nanase's Guardian form directly, she didn't copy Nanase and then cast the spell. There's also the fact that the Guardian spell is an extremely special case, which may or may not require divine intervention/approval to use. If Ellen could copy Cheerleadra and obtain all her powers, I would think Ellen and Elliot would know it by now, given how much time they spend together and how willing Elliot would likely be to try it once the idea occurred to them. Huh. Now why didn't it occur to me before to see whether a wizard could learn the Cheerleadra spell itself? That would certainly solve a great many problems, plus add to the wizard's arsenal of tricks considerably! I suspect it wouldn't be that easy, though; most likely Elliot's Dewitchery Diamond-influenced spells would be a bit "off" to other magic users, and thus difficult for anyone else to obtain. Read a few comics further. As soon as this is brought up, Edward tells Elliot to just change his face more the next time he becomes Cheerleadra. Elliot can control what he looks like as Cheerleadra, probably as much as he can control his appearance any other time he's female. This is later comfirmed when he becomes a completely different-looking superhero with the griffins later on. This might be another case of magic with a lot of moving parts, with Elliot's "girlie-morphs" spell and his "superheroine" spell interacting. That would likely make it even harder for anyone else to truly become a fully-powered Cheerleadra copy. Tedd was having trouble reading Susan's fairydoll spell, remember, because it was an interaction between her summoning chest and Nanase's fairydolls. I'd love to see Tedd's reaction to observing Elliot using his Cheerleadra-cell-phone spell.... :-D

Lisinopril is a blood pressure medication. When you stand up quickly, your body has to adjust the blood flow to your head to accomodate the new position. There's a moment of lower blood pressure to your brain before the adjustment is made. If you're starting with a lower blood pressure, there's not as far to go for the change to wind up dropping it low enough to affect your brain momentarily before the adjustment is made. And what makes me happy enough to come to this thread is that, after a long dry spell of checking for updates with no joy, There are now three new episodes of Sunstone up!

TLAIDK

I've always thought that the T-shirts must be enchanted to make the wearer look human, or at least be perceived as human, and the writing on it is either part of the spell, or a joke on the part of the maker, or perhaps they have other enchanted T-shirts for appearing to be Uryuom or invisible and the label just helps keep them straight down in Supplies.

Nah, Tedd is currently in a male form, I think you're okay using "he" unless/until there's some indication that Tedd is feeling female/wishing he could take female form right now. Dan has been using pronouns to fit Tedd's form and/or spirit for a while now, I tend to follow his lead. I suspect part of Tedd's reticence is because he knows that his dad knows the criteria for giving a magic mark -- telling his dad he got a transgender mark would be the same thing as telling him he has a strong desire and/or it's part of his inherent nature to be able to switch gender. Personally I'm hoping that Tedd's dad isn't as condemning as Tedd fears he'll be. Edward expressed an honest worry that spending too much time transformed as a girl wouldn't be good for Tedd. If/when Edward learns more about gender fluidity, or figures out that it applies to Tedd, he might express relief to learn that there isn't anything harmful in it after all. Maybe even gratitude to the existence of the TFG for sparing him gender dysphoria. I can see Grace slowly influencing Edward, slipping bits of information on transgender and gender fluidity into conversations or leaving web pages open on the computer for Edward to find.

Yeah, one thing that's kinda sweet about Tesaided is that he never seems to show a pervy interest in Cheerleadra. He's pure fanboy. I felt similarly about meeting Vincent Ventresca in person -- he was happily married with kids, and I honestly had no desire to do anything sexy, I just thought it was really cool to get to meet the guy who played a character I loved. I probably squeed at least as much, if not more, about meeting the writer of some of my favorite episodes. (Now, if it were Darien Fawkes I were meeting, all bets are off.... ;-)

Well, I don't remember the exact dates, but the end of "Playing With Dolls" ijuin links to below has a 2015 copyright date. (Darn it, Dan, why couldn't you leave dates on the NP comics like everything else??) --- I usually have my car radio tuned to the local NPR station, with news at the top of every hour. I also usually have the radio on in the kitchen, even if I'm not actively listening to it. I did turn it off this weekend to watch bits of the Downton Abbey marathon. I can see Susan not bothering with the news, most young folks don't these days, and none of the main characters are social media junkies. I'm betting Susan will be pissed no one called her, though. Unless she turned her phone off to concentrate and then fell asleep, in which case she'll be mad at herself. I can see how he might come to that conclusion. He strikes me as exactly the sort to cling to his own fanon even after it's contradicted in canon. A classic Harry-Hermione shipper. ;-P ETA: Occurred to me that Susan will probably also be hurt if no one thought to call her, although she likely won't show that part (unless Nase or San are summoned. And/or, I guess.)

Still highly dependent on location. The university campus I spent a quarter century on was quite a liberal town. Some suburbs average more conservative, some more liberal. There's also the individual social circle and family to consider. You can live in a liberal town, but have a conservative family who go to a conservative church and send their kids to a conservative private religious school (cliche would be Catholic school, but there's a huge Evangelical-type K-12 school in my home town), and thus mostly be exposed to highly conservative attitudes your whole life. Practical upshot is that a writer has plenty of options. ;-)

Cool! May I ask what brand and where you got them from?

The New Madrid fault is at the southern tip of Illinois. There were reports of church bells ringing in Boston during the last big New Madrid quake. Interestingly enough, I attended a talk on potential disasters and disaster planning in which they explained that, due to the placement of bedrock and slate and other stuff I don't recall the details of, the energy from a New Madrid quake would likely travel a lot further and stronger to the east than to the north. Pennsylvania would likely be harder hit than Chicago.

Has Grace's family kept in touch? The only communication we've seen so far was the video call on Grace's birthday, but that doesn't mean that's the only one they've made. I'd like to think that Grace gets to talk with her family on a regular basis, even if there may be some subjects they can't discuss openly. I'd really like to see her visit them, or them visit her!

Yes, DGB is not the official government title for where Edward Verres works. It has become fan convention to use this TLA to refer to them, because we've nothing better in canon so far. At this point, we're so used to it that I suspect many of us will continue to use DGB even if Dan does give them an official title someday. (TLA = Three Letter Acronym)

Hmm, it likely depends on the test(s) being run. I know when we did PCR tests in chem lab, we had to set up the gels, and then it physically took a certain amount of time for the molecules to move across them. At least overnight, possibly later in the week or even the next week, I honestly don't recall now. I don't know what sort of advances have been made since then, but I suspect for a proper comparison it would be more like days than hours. How old does Susan look in the flashback when she tells her mother about The Other Woman? If we assume she was conceived in wedlock and not out, that would make it at least your guess of her age plus a year, but it could be longer. Yes, if Mr. Verres has been keeping the DGB up to date one everyone's powers, then he's likely also told them about the TFG. I'm not sure if he knows how far Tedd has gotten in developing the watches, though. His work takes him away, and Tedd clearly isn't comfortable sharing everything he does with his dad, especially things involving transformation. If he sees Tedd or his friends transformed, he may have just assumed it was with the TFG. He might be downloading copies of all of Tedd's files to a secure government server every night, for the government's magical scientists to analyse and expand on. Or, it might be that Tedd is the only (successful) magical scientist in the DGB, or even in the world, because only he has the combination of the ability to see magic and a magic-rich environment to work in. There are two possibilties. Either Susan's dad is someone we know about already, or he isn't. If he isn't, then that's it, there's not much to speculate about. I think even if we think it's far more likely he'll be someone we don't know yet, it's only natural that we spend more time discussing any possibilities for him being someone we know, just becasue there's so much more to be said about that option. Yup, it's when the ovulation happens that's most important in timing pregnancies. Interestingly enough, when people give the figure of "she's x number of weeks pregnant," that number of weeks starts with the first day of the woman's last period. That means, on average, it considers a pregnancy to have begun about two weeks before conception. I believe it's a holdover from when the process wasn't fully understood, which has stuck around partly because a woman is much more likely to know when her last period started than when she ovulated. He may well have run that test "off-screen" after the first fire demon, and/or after the dragon incident. At that point, Justin was only marked, not awakened. Have they said for certain how that device responds to someone who is marked? Or, it might be that Justin had already shown magic ability from his ASMA training and everyone just assumed that was how he hit so hard. (Or maybe the wand has a 'silent' mode now and he scanned Justin without telling the group....)

I would be! She'd just lost her beloved, she'd be quite scared of losing their son, too, and want to give him every defense she could! Plus, a vaguely medieval timeframe really had no idea of eighteen being an age of majority. Children were small people who had to do whatever work they were capable of. It was quite common to get married much younger than eighteen, or to leave home to apprentice in a trade. She'd probably started teaching him magic even before his father died.

Security didn't seem to have any problem with the pirate girl wearing nothing but a couple of Xs of tape above the waist. We can assume that there is similar tape beneath the badges, and something behind the towels too. Either that, or this is a different alternate universe, one with much healthier attitudes towards nudity and the human body.

Is anyone actually surprised at the idea of magic being a huge dork? :-D Dork pride!

Oh, I didn't mean the plot would come back, that was only an example of the multiple realities with alternate versions of people, one which I was sure Mr. Verres was aware of. Ellen's second life experience would be another possible example. Someone has to bring up the possibility of Diane being an alternate universe double, or I'll end up thinking less of the characters and the comic -- not a lot less, but a little.

Sounds like they've both got good points, here. That's often the toughest kind of argument to be in. I'm still curious whether Mr. Verres already knew about the Other Side of the World. And whether Wolf and Cranium did, too, or whether it's been considered top secret (until now, when it'll be all over YouTube). And which of them will bring up the Alternate Universe Double explanation first. Surely someone will remember about Lord Tedd eventually? Or will it be up to Tedd or Grace to bring that up?

And totally unrealistic shape, don't forget that! Antigravity is a built-in part of the most common superpower. There are two acceptable shapes for women in these sorts of cliches. One is tall, hour-glass shaped with long legs and big perky boobs. The other is the "tomboy" character, who usually manages to look flat-chested until they are seen naked, when they suddenly have shapely boobs which would never have fit under their clothes without a hint of being there, maybe a bit smaller than the standard super-heroine model but still.... Sarah used to fit the "tomboy" model, but she seems to be a bit of a late bloomer, so to speak.

Adoption records can be hard to get....except for places where there are open adoptions and adoptee-right-to-know approaches. Gosh, isn't it convenient that Diane just turned 18, which is the usual age for adoptees to be able to request their records? Depending on which little box was checked when she was given up, it could be as simple as filling out a form.

Something that came up in the story discussions that seemed worthy of moving here.... Makes me wonder if this isn't one of the reasons Immortals so rarely have mortal lovers or children. The temptation is too great to wait just a little longer to reset. Wait until the lover dies, until the child finishes high school or college, settles into a new job, escapes a civil war or plague, recovers from a broken leg....there's always something happening in this life, often several things at once. It's like when Sarah wanted to break up with Elliot, but couldn't do it right then because it was too close to Christmas, and then after that New Year's. There's always a reason to wait just a little longer....until suddenly you've waited far too long. If the child of a mortal and an immortal were a normal mortal and couldn't have children, at least there'd be a limit on how long it would be an excuse/reason to delay. If their children were immortal they wouldn't have to worry about them. If they were mortal but could have children, their immortal parent could see their family growing and see them surrounded by loved ones, and it would be easier to let go. Seems like the combination of long but still limited life, with inability to have children, is the worst possible situation for an Immortal parent.

I wasn't exactly re-reading, but recent discussion of the Dewitchery Diamond made me realize that when, someday, we eventually met Kaoli, she is going to have the power to alter the skin, hair and/or fur colors of others, as well as alter their ages.

So normal Sarah is halfway between a boy and an FV5? I'm not sure how Sarah should feel about that....