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Ok, something that I just realized--since in EGS, time travel (specifically, sending anyone, anything, or any information backwards in time--going FORWARDS is as trivial as finding a safe place to go into suspended animation, as with Abraham's stone statue act) is stated as being the ONLY thing that magical researchers have determined to be absolutely impossible, then it is implied that a number of OTHER rather far-out things are, in fact, believed to be possible.

Most particularly, it seems that certain things related to death and The Other Side are possible. A dead person might be restored to life (probably requiring an intact body to inhabit that is not to degraded). Also, it may be possible to communicate with the spirits of dead people (at least during any intermediate period between death and the departure to Heaven/Hell/Reincarnation).

Anyway, if Dan had intended for restoring the dead to life to be absolutely ruled out, then he probably would have added it to the list of impossibilities. Not that this means that he intends to have anybody return from the dead within the story--merely that he has not decided that it is completely impossible. There may of course be a huge cost to pay for such a thing (e.g. exchange one sapient life for another, and the person being sacrificed must be willing).

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1 hour ago, ijuin said:

then it is implied that a number of OTHER rather far-out things are, in fact, believed to be possible.

Well, no; there could be a lot of things in the category of "we think this is probably impossible, but we aren't absolutely certain".

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

A dead person might be restored to life (probably requiring an intact body to inhabit that is not to degraded).

With TFG and actual permanent shapeshifting (as Tedd can now do), I doubt that an intact non-decomposed body would be absolutely required. Not having one would probably raise the difficulty and reduce the number of people/organizations that can do it.

That is, of course, assuming that the number of people that can do it under ideal circumstances is nonzero.

However, you also get into questions of what constitutes a person, whether there is an afterlife,...

Considering how unspecific and generically inoffensive the religious references in the comic have been so far, I seriously doubt that Dan will go there.

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"Intact" in this context would be "sufficiently intact that the person wouldn't die again immediately due to lacking some usable vital organ that isn't being regenerated by the resurrection". On the other hand, a spell that regenerates a new body based on a DNA sample, the person's soul, and enough raw feedstock (e.g. a couple hundred pounds of raw meat) is imaginable . . .

I agree that it probably won't come up, since it would be too much of a Deus Ex Machina to have a character completely die and return from death (as opposed to "just barely survived and was believed dead", such as ye olde "we're pretty sure that s/he didn't make it out of danger in time, but then s/he shows up alive later").

There is indeed a huge gap between "not impossible" and "practically achievable". It could be a matter of "nobody's ever been proven to have done it outside of myths and legends", or it could simply have impractical requirements (e.g. the aforementioned "must trade a life for a life" plus requiring such a level of power and skill that only the greatest Mage in a generation could perform it--in fact, given Magic's desire for drama, a spell that would let the caster sacrifice his/her own life permanently in order to resurrect one other person might happen once in a while . . .).

Anyway, what I was trying to get at particularly was that because so little has been asserted to be outright impossible in the realm of EGS-universe magic, we ought to think "outside the box" a bit in terms of what may be possible.

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8 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

That isn't necessarily that useful.

Super Beings in comics have a bad habit of not staying dead.

That is merely a tendency, not a rule. A surprising number of very powerful superbeings have died and never returned. This is because the staying power of death is linked to the popularity of the dead character in an equation that may be written as:

(P + (tD/E)) + R > D, then character is resurrected.

P equals popularity, tD is time passed since death of character, E is editorial interference, R is readership demand and D is of course death. Please note that while E may be either positive or negative, it may never equal zero as editors are constitutionally incapable of not interfering.

In other words, as long as there's a few very powerful but unpopular characters in the graveyard, Dead Dennis is still doing fine.

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