Home Artists Posts Import Register

Content

Spell casting budget

- At egscomics

EDIT - Added a "for" in panel one ("a few times FOR testing")

Commentary

For the record, I did not work backwards from that last option! I was legitimately brainstorming ways to make the spell less costly to cast before getting "trades" involved!

Creating a smaller duplicate? Makes sense!

Creating a duplicate that doesn't do much of anything without manual control? Makes sense!

Duplicating only the bare minimum necessary? Makes sense!

So yes, I genuinely don't think it's a stretch that it's an option. It makes sense (in so far as any magic makes sense, at least). That doesn't mean there's any chance that Nanase's actually going to do that in the comic, but still!

Files

Comments

Anonymous

Seems like a fair trade off. She just has to give the clone clothes from her closet, for example

Hurley

Honestly, they really should do the clone without clothes thing. It's already canon that there's a dressing screen in the basement. Put some clothes out, zap out the duplicate behind the screen, and then let her get dressed.

Anonymous

Nanase may not be doing that in a comic, but she's definitely doing it in Ashley's imagination now. Shrink *and* nude trades? Ashley's going to be really distracted for at least the next few comics.

Windscion

I expect the screen isn't up full time and might take a bit of work to set up.

Stephen Gilberg

Glad Kevin understands the importance of clothes to humans.

Chordat

Well. We're not doing that one unless Ellen's present. and NO ONE ELSE.

egscomics

Part of the reason she’s doing this at Tedd’s house is so Tedd can, repeatedly, use seer sight while observing her use the spell.

Hurley

Sure, but she's not the one that'll be naked, and Nanase can make Fox appear wherever she likes, yeah? So Nanase and Tedd stay outside of the screen, Tedd watches Nanase cast the spell, and Fox manifests behind the changing screen. This also lets Nanase cast the spell more times without fatiguing, especially if she manifests a tiny, mindless, naked Fox. Honestly, you don't even need the clothes. Just summon and then unsummon immediately. Tedd will get to observe both aspects of the spell multiple times.

Daryl Sawyer

That's also how you max out your stealth bonus.

KiTA

> Duplicating only the bare minimum necessary? Makes sense! *Bare* minimum. I see what you did there.

Anonymous

I predict that Dan will, at most, only vaguely hint at Ellen and 2xNanase enjoying physical contact in private. (I'm also hinting, of course.)

egscomics

I apologize if my correcting is annoying, but canonically, that will not work. She cannot make Fox appear wherever she wants. Visually, Fox sort of “slides off” Nanase and forms (I believe I showed this in Sister 2). There’s no materializing Fox on the other side of something. Nanase also cannot rapid summon and dismiss. She can dismiss Fox pretty quickly, but not “nobody who is looking will see her” fast. This is something I decided just now when presented with the question, but it makes sense to me. There would be a brief moment after casting the spell of recovery, like after setting down a heavy weight after a set of lifts. All of which is moot regardless, because part of observing the spell is seeing the outcome. Tedd needs to see Fox.

A Red Mage Named Blue

Once she's powerful enough to copy the spell, I'm sure Ashley will come up with many wonderful uses

Hurley

I'm sorry if I was annoying! For some reason I was thinking the duplication spell worked like Susan's fairy summoning. Thank you for the clarification!

James C

I'm sure that one Nanase has a firm grasp of the other trade-offs, she'll experiment with that one. With Ellen's "assistance".

James C

No, she won't be the one who's naked. Just someone who looks *completely identical* to her. There's enough of an issue IRL with "deepfakes" where it's 'merely' a computer-generated image that looks sort of similar to how someone might theoretically look naked.

Some Ed

I had a similar idea, though slightly different: I wasn't imagining her deliberately putting Fox on the other side of a curtain from herself. I was imagining her standing beside the curtain, with the curtain running perpendicular to the line between Tedd and Nanase, and having Fox appear beside Nanase such that she'd be behind the curtain relative to Tedd. That still doesn't work if Nanase can't control roughly where Fox shows up. Though thinking about it more, I wonder if it's not that, at Nanase's current skill, Fox' initial location is controlled by Nanase' subconscious, and annoyingly enough that generally works out to "If Nanase is showing off the spell, Fox will appear somewhere visible to the people Nanase is showing the spell off to."

Some Ed

I expect that the strongest possible hint at this is going to be Dan not specifically denying that such a thing might happen at some point. That said, I have the feeling they're still a bit too early in their relationship for it to be happening yet. If they were experiencing the same amount of time since they started dating, then probably yes, but they're not and they have a lot of stuff to work through.

Some Ed

Tedd's looking at up front ways to save on the cost. Is there any way to recover energy at the other end? For example, are there any options to how the spell is ended that could facilitate a recasting shortly thereafter? Or would that fundamentally be "extending the cast but changing parameters" or some such, which could be interesting but decidedly not what they're trying to do here?

KiTA

Imagine if she's not strong enough to properly copy the spell without certain cost reductions... Or if she pretends she isn't for... a joke.