Riiiiight... This guy's TOTALLY not being controlled.

Yeah, that's a guy who took on Alex's appearance.

I'm calling it- it's an elf.

Oof. See, I'm also terrible with names, so if I was in this situation...

What a trustworthy eye glow.

I can relate. "Whats the name of your office colleague?" "Wait, let me think..."

Not suspicious at all.

Either they took over his body or they're pretending to be him.

Why Alex, what luminous teeth and eyes you have!

MatthewTheLucky@ All the better to see you with....at night, and then eat you with

Something is taking over her body, maybe with the power of one of the magic childs?

yep... nothing wrong here... yep.

They are only a single step from lynching her as a witch! I would advise caution, remembering how this story started...

The correct answer would be "name escapes me, but their power was..."
Making your eyes glow and demonstrating a power the person you're impersonating doesn't have just isn't on.

Perfectly valid point, remembering the names of people you met only once can be hard.
Extremely suspicious wording however...

I'm not entirely sure real Alex (if this is a fake Alex) would get this one right either.

That feeling when...
You let yourself have characters that are not overtly sexualised...
The comments keep getting their gender wrong...
You spend 2 hours getting those lips looking feminine...
The comments get it worse than ever...
There is a pod-person situation and they might actually be male this time...
What is even going on.

Wait, that lipstick wasn't there before...

Whoever said “ask her if she’d rather date a robot” was on to something

Here's something that evades me: Alex's spirit is gone, but no other spirit is in its place. I'd have guessed that using spirit on her, or to 'clone' would show a trace from the inflicting spirit user, at least.
It seems to me that should someone be interfering here it's either a powerful spirit user able to conceal spirit from Noah or a tech-related person. Personally, the latter makes the most sense to me. Someone hijacked the telecomms to bait them there, it should be easy to intercept a particular 'radio', I assume, communication in a city/empire where tech is scarce or perhaps banned. Alex's lack of spirit might as well mean SHE's been replaced by a remotely controlled robot.

I mean, there are other options like magic-less dopplegangers, or some sort of kriptonite subduing HER spirit, but I stick to my first two options.

That is the worst question they could have asked i bet the real alex wouldn't even know that

It does surprise me just how many people manages to confuse Alex's gender.

I guess its because in most cases its a boys name.

@Tor: The name certainly contributes, but in English I cannot remember many cases of having it refer to men, really. Quite the opposite in German.

@Straightbackward
Perhaps she is being controlled by this pink spirit that seems to be everywhere...

@MCRedCreeper The spirit everywhere around is part of Picasso's magic-paint, so I'd rule that off, its purpose, afawk, is to make spirit detection a though job while, it might have further uses as Malhart and his 'kids' know eachother's spirits (I'd assume.) so that they can actually locate each others. On the other hand, yeah, the two spirit sources back at the academy are loose ends.

I'm biased towards the non-magic explanation since, to me, the relevant panel shows no spirit around her, nontheless there's the chance of someone being wery good at hiding, especially in this magic mist.