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We must speak good of the dead. He's dead. Good.

I'm not even from that continent!

It's Dan plotting out the preliminaries for his new cult movie project, Talk Club. Rule One: Do not fight about Talk Club.

Ah. This actually strengthens an old idea of mine: that it was the absence of Elliot in his world that helped to create Lord Tedd. Also, I had once before speculated on the possibility of targeting Elliot to get at Tedd. I am rather sorry to see my hypothesis confirmed in this way. :/

Tedd's got this covered

Get that barn door closed people!

No. A flying hall monitor would interfere with the ability of the students to see the murals.

Everything is up in the air again! Are Susan and Diane really sisters? Will Tedd confront Magic about his disappointment? Will PharaohRutinTutin's pyramid mortgage be foreclosed? Is mlooney's dishwasher secretly summoning Nyarlathotep? Is CritterKeeper really The Old Hack's maiden aunt? FIND OUT IN THE NEXT YEAR OF EGS! SAME EGS-HOMEPAGE, SAME EGS-FORUMS!

Three quarters of a century ago, the Nazis, the Gestapo and all its odious apparatus overran my homeland Denmark. Ignoring peace treaties and all civilised decency they stripped my home of its freedom and independence, reduced it to a mere cog in their war machine, a stepping stone for its conquest of Norway. As time passed, they gradually tightened the screws, taking away all our own mechanisms of government, arresting and imprisoning our police force and eventually inflicting their merciless acts of genocide on Danish homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled, Jews -- anyone that did not meet their nightmarish ideals of Aryan perfection. My family had to flee to Sweden to survive and not everyone made it to safety. Of those that did not, few survived, none of them unmarked. But the darkness that had fallen across Europe did not last. Eventually a restless giant stirred in its sleep, awoke, and rose to come to the rescue of the Old World. Many nations fought the evils of the Nazis. Of those, few brought as much, sacrificed as much as America did. That war is long gone now, but I have not forgotten. I and my family directly owe our lives, home and freedom to America and her people. To the soldiers who fought so long and hard, to the working men and women in the factories, to the ordinary people who made the marvelous industry of the giant work and run when it was needed the most. To fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters who sacrificed so much, lost so many they loved. To all of America's people, whatever race or creed, for all of them paid for that war, for that freedom I now have today. Many years have passed since then. America has changed, since. Grown, and suffered growing pains. She is not perfect and never has been, but she still struggles to improve and make herself better. And precisely this is why America is great: because she always tries to be better. I will give the last word to my father, who feels this debt as keenly as I do. He is certain that whatever troubles America is enduring she will in the fullness of time rise above them -- because Americans are their own harshest critics, because they cannot rest while they believe injustice reigns. It has been so for two and a half centuries. And that much, at least, has not changed. And so, in this dark time of vitriol and partisanship and division, do not forget your roots. America IS great. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. I believe in you. Thank you all.

This is one of the things I love about this forum -- our moderators are reasonable people who aren't afraid to apologize when they make a mistake, and to do so just as publicly as the mistaken warning was made. (I know usually we aren't supposed to comment publicly on Moderator actions, but in this case I felt like it was worth risking it ;-) ) Back on topic, I recall Jerry referring to parties where one or more Immortals named Zeus get into a fight...so it looks like Pandora really *is* an introvert!

If I had a spellbook, I'd want it to have "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover...

....them? Sensei Greg, Hanma, Vladia. Of those three, which two are "Normal"? Let them interact like the unusual and extraordinary beings they are.

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...

Someone call the Vatican, the Imperial Omyouji, the Van Helsing family, all the shamans, the Freemasons, the priests of all major religons, and reconvene the Round Table. And prepare to reopen the crypt of Merlin. We MIGHT have an emergency here.

Well, I finally got caught up with reading the NP comics I missed only to land in this debate. So for what it's worth - Goonmanji II should not be a video game. It should be a spectator sport with mandatory audience participation. Could you imagine the disclaimers on the tickets or Pay-Per-View receipts to meet the "Informed Consent" requirements?

Pandora just became one of Tedd's favorite people. She's a mother who's stayed by her son for centuries.

And suddenly certain things click, like one reason I like Elliot so much. In him, I see a small reflection of my son. A story, by way of explanation: My son is 19. Lives with me now, but when he was living with his mom, there was a girl he dated towards the end of middle school. That ended when her folks moved her to another school precisely because they (being pretentious religious jackasses) didn't approve of him. High school comes along and he finds himself back in the same school as her. By this time, she's started to try to sort out identity issues and has a fairly serious girlfriend. To my son, this is no big deal; the only part that weirds him out at all is that he is the one his ex comes to for relationship advice, and being a friend he listens. I got the impression he may have been one of a very few who did that. Advance a couple of years. My son's ex is still with the same girlfriend (partly due to having my son as a good listener), but has realized that he (here's where I'm changing pronouns) is trans. Again, my son doesn't bat an eyelash; he just goes on supporting his friend. So the last panel on today's comic -- that hits home in an unexpected way. A good way.

Hey, is that some sort of demonic duct tape?

Dear Big Fashion, Regarding your advertisement in the January 18, 2017 EGS NP comic. Please stop. Outerwear without the ability to carry something other that itself and the person wearing it is a waste of fabric.

The author, he is jerking us around.

As for why Jerry doesn't tell them that directly? Did you see the look on Susan's face? Nanase is a dangerous warrior and Susan can summon magic weapons. If any humans can hurt an immortal who reset less than a year ago, it would be them.

I hope Edward doesn't swing it. DNA testing requires expensive and fragile equipment. I would hope Edward handles government property like that with care.

I like talking to myself. That way I always have an attentive audience no matter how inane and idiotic my rambling gets. My shrink tells me that talking to yourself, to include answering yourself, isn't a bad thing, as long as you know you are doing that. It's when you talk to yourself and you think you are talking to someone else that life gets, as he puts, "somewhere between not real good and very very bad".

Maybe a series of "You're Always Covered" adds? "My house got stomped flat by a monster!" "That was actually a tornado, but even if it was a monster you'd still be covered."

Nope. And on that thought, Ashley and Elliot are both dorks, so it would have been the will of Magic to get them together, it wasn't just a coincidence that Elliot just had to morph at the time that Ashley went to talk to him about Susan.

Noah thinks he can knight people. Humans with high magic are royalty on the flip side of the world which would make him a prince, and therefore able to knight some one. We don't know where Noah came from. That makes it possible that he is from the griffin's side of the world.

Even though I disagree strongly, I respect the courage Dan has shown here. I was raised to believe that those who claimed to prefer "mild" seasoning were culinary wimps. I may have been wrong about that broad generalization. But I still contend that those in the highest levels of the food service business have done a disservice to their customers by not including Spicy AND Sweet as a standard option.

Congratulations Elliot. You're now a magi-cyborg. Get a better smartphone, fool! You now can watch Youtube videos and read internet forum threads directly via your body while superheroing. On second thought, let's not read internet forum threads, they are a silly place.

My job often requires jerk-like behavior. Why should I be a jerk when no one is paying me?

Sorry, I'm not N2 that kind of thing.

In honor of Earth Day, I shall be spending this entire day on Earth.

This may be the most painful page of EGS that I have read in quite a while. I don't think I have seen anything even near it since the time Tedd acknowledged Mr. Verres' transphobia. It is clear that Susan has held a mental image of her father close in which she tried to preserve at least some sort of person worthy of love. It would be easier to think of him as someone who started with good intentions but stumbled into a bad mistake. Being brought face to face with the possibility that not even this much was true... yes, anger and denial are two of the first steps. Having it all intermixed with her immensely traumatic experience with the vampire back in France would not make it any better, to put it mildly. I am torn. Nanase unquestionably meant well. But I am starting to think that she would have done better to think this more carefully through. Even so, I am doing this from hindsight so I am not precisely in a position to criticise her. Her intentions are obviously good and based on the fact that not only is Diane in danger, she also deserves to know of her half-sister's existence... and that Susan deserves to know the truth as well. The problem with that is that while truth indeed has the power to set you free, it can also open old wounds and do grave harm. It is for that very reason that Ellen rejected the notion of telling Tedd what they had learned about his mother. This situation is of similar complexity and may well reopen old wounds for Susan... and possibly even make them worse.

I think you are all wrong. He's a manipulative jerk. He wants Elliot to be trying to prove he's not a coward at a future event.

Dangit. I was in the middle of making this thread. Stupid Wi-Fi signal... So...show of hands. Who here thinks Tedd "more dangerous rarity" Verres is this rare type of wizard? Back before the Crash, I speculated that Magic changing has to do with werewolves being a thing in the past but not the present.

Christopher Robin Hood -- Robs from the rich to give to the Pooh

The sequel to my "Elliot vs. Lord Tedd" slay:

I hadn't heard about "stale", but there was the little problem that any water not from wells - and water from some wells - was contaminated with whatever sort of bacteria the folks upstream were currently suffering from. And the denser the population, the more of an issue this was. Population was, of course, densest in cities. Yes, they regarded water as unhealthy to drink, for the very simple reason that people who drank it tended to get sick (not including drunk or hung-over) more than people who didn't. So they drank wine and beer instead. And they also mixed wine/beer (and later rum and other distilled spirits) with water, to reduce the intoxication (and stretch the expensive stuff), but if it had enough alcohol to kill the bacteria they didn't know was in the water... In China they had the same problem; rather than fixating on alcohol, they drank tea. To make good tea you have to boil the water. Which kills the bacteria they didn't know was in the water. So China invented the tea ceremony, and Europe invented the "Hold my beer and watch this!" ceremony.

Every time I see a terrorist act committed by people who claim to be of the same religion as me, I die a little bit inside.