It stinks when you have to awkwardly crash someone's date because you want a Gym Battle.

... Also yes, I very intentionally made Misty's date look like Ash. :) Brings me back to the good old days of schoolyard shipping wars!

 

This one is making fun of how news stories try to make a paleontological find sound more exciting by proclaiming it as the "first ever found in such-and-such location".

The joke here is that Teton County is a hotspot for dinosaur finds, so if you want to make yet another dinosaur fossil found here seem attention-grabbing, and it's not a super remarkable fossil to begin with, you're going to have to reach quite a bit.

Shadow Play, Chapter 13

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7
Chapter 8 - Chapter 9 - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11 - Chapter 12 - Chapter 13

The next morning, much to Terra’s surprise, Zoltan elected to join them for breakfast in the cafeteria. Although once again they did not all fit into one lift, today he seemed in much better spirits about sharing a lift car with Terra and Hyren.

“Have you been practicing your summoning?” Zoltan asked the owner as the lift descended. “I vant to make sure you are vell-prepared vhen next you are asked to fight.”

Terra nodded. “Yeah, a little,” she said. “Sometimes I summon it just to make sure I still can.” She leaned away from Hyren and Zoltan, reached to her opposite side, and twitched her wrist slightly, as though she was loosening a blade from its sheath. In a flurry of magic, the sword appeared, and she grinned.

 

 I was listening to an episode of a paleontology podcast where one of the hosts said he wanted to see a reconstruction of a sauropod with a bullwhip of feathers at the end of its tail. I'm never one to turn down a wildly speculative reconstruction, so I went for it. 

 Come to think of it, isn't this sort of thing how Ash earned the majority of his Kanto Gym Badges? Kinda seems like cheating the system. No wonder he only placed in the top 16 in the Indigo Plateau Conference.

... Oh wait, this comic is about the video games.

 I, and many professional astronomers, are extremely tired of people blowing pareidolia out of proportion. Yes, sometimes things are almost sort of shaped like other things if you use your imagination. No, it's not aliens. It's never aliens. It's going to take a lot more than these sorts of shenanigans to convince me it's aliens.

... Now I'm hungry for poutine.

 I'm honestly not sure what's so scary about someone being able to see into your soul? Like... now they know your favorite color, I guess?

I had way too much fun with those little ghosties.