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WMG/Sluggy Freelance. Blatant spoilers unmarked.

Either that, or they were subjected to a more successful experiment than the one that made the Reavers. They have 20th century technology and at least one missile, and most of the technology they had must have been developed in war. Also, they could not have developed so much by just eating rice cakes.

Somehow, he got trapped in the Sluggy universe, which also caused him to become an ordinary rabbit rather than his original anthropomorphic form. Santa was somehow responsible for this, hence their conflict.

• Actually, Something Positive's Aubrey mentioned in one of the flashback storylines that she used to own a lop-eared bunny that her mother made her give to a pet shop because it liked sharp things. And in the very next panel, she's wondering where her switchblade is. . . .
  • Non-canon. Bun-bun was deposited in the pet shop by Uncle Time after his future self gave him a concussion and they both fell into the oceans unmoving in timeless space. Before that, and being a pirate captain for a while, he was a barkeep. That is the earliest point we know about him.

But I doubt the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch would do anything except piss him off.

• Maybe the killer rabbit was his mother.

The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch was the first Deus Ex Ova, and Brother Maynard was Santa Claus in disguise. It didn't kill Bun-Bun, it just banished him to Timeless Space.

Every time her meds start to work, she 'moves away'. But when things go weird, she moves back. Maybe she gets used to the meds, forgets to take them, suffers another breakdown...lets face it, Torg and Riff aren't safe to be around.

Torg and Riff are in madhouse, and loving every minute of it. Torg was institutionalized when he ordered a stuffed rabbit on eBay and got Black Hat Man's mountain lion (he got a real stuffed rabbit toy later). Riff became ill from gases or pain resulting in a failed experiment. Gwynn got into the arcane a little too enthusiastically. Sam the Man was an inmate who thought he was a vampire, then killed himself trying to prove it. Kiki was Sam's stuffed animal, Zoe is a recurring visitor, Aylee may be a product of their collective imaginations or a want-to-be Hannibal Lector/alien Otherkin that was taught to eat potatoes in place of people. Dr. Schlock is a corrupt or ineffective psychiatrist (or a clown who makes baloon animals), Kzk is an orderly with a foreign name, and Oasis is a Stalker with a Crush on Torg, very violent and prone to nudity, and with her own made-up backstory that introdces the whole Kusari thing. Zoe wants Torg to stay away from Oasis because it's obvious she's just faking out the psychiatrists that she's safe in order to get back with Torg, and everyone else is a hospital employee or part of their collective delusions and stories they made up based on television (most early arcs), fairy tales (the alt-worlds), and the Harry Potter movies (kind of obvious there).

They were both introduced roughly around the same time, and even went on hiatus around the same time. But Kusari appears as an oppostie to Oasis and calls her sister, Oasis and Sasha have met once and Sasha gave her a message that drove Oasis insane in her next incarnation. It was also revealed recently by Schlocke that Kusari does indeed have had interactions with the Sluggy gang.

• Except that Sasha and Kusari were both in the same place when Kusari was introduced, so unless Kusari can teleport and assume a disguise at the same time, Sasha isn't Kusari.
  • If the WMG below is correct, Dragons will casually be revealed to have powerful magic. Someone will casually mention some body duplication trick in passing. This will make this WMG suddenly very relevant.

Sasha and Kada look the same (but that might just be the art), and both have some skill with transdimensional technology. Sasha runs off well before Bun-Bun returns from Timeless Space, so he would not have had a reason to comment on the similarity. Forum guessing includes Sasha being Kada's mother, Kada being Sasha's mother, and them both being the same person.

Only people and a situation that weird could produce Torg, who manages to be well-adjusted and off his rocker at the same time. Plus it would give the Oceans Unmoving storyline a bigger tie into the main plot, which would be no bad thing.

Just because.

Oasis can control fire. She doesn't stay dead. Without the first fundamental piece of information, the guess never would have happened, although an Archive Trawl reveals that a lot of Oasis's deaths did involve fire directly, or very near to the point of death. This troper wouldn't be surprised if it IS all of them.

Chapter 50: Phoenix Rising was also another great big hint from nearly three years ago.

This just proves the next WMG entry.

Because she's a Phoenix.

• There's at least one of her deaths that didn't directly involve fire: When Torg holds her hand in the hospital as she dies, she's back to life a few panels later, with no mention or evidence of fire.
  • Aren't dead Jane Does cremated to save the state the burial costs?

Related to the above. The first time Oasis seemed to die by fire was on October 17th, 1999. To repeat, the first clue about her identity was put in plain sight in nineteen ninety nine, a god-damned decade ago.

Somewhat related to this WMG, Pete plans everything so far in advance because if he tried to pack in all of the awesomeness he's got planned over any less of a timeframe, the Crowning Moment of Awesome after Crowning Moment of Awesome would wear us down until nothing seemed awesome or special any longer.

• Somewhat related: Sasha's last appearance before showing up recently was seven years ago.
• Much shorter by time, but still a number of arcs—Chapter 39 ends with a pair of hints for the future, foreshadowing events more than two years and nine arcs later.

Explains his general incompetence and the fact that he wasn't used to being a demon in the That Which Redeems flashbacks.

• It actually is implied.
• "When you start out with wussy mortals, you get wussy demons." This statement makes it entirely possible that every Dimension of Pain demon (except for the Demon King) is a mortal turned into a demon by the Calimar spear, since every other demon seen in the strip so far lacks a physical form and needs a mortal host to interact with the world around them, except for the Demon King, and even he was ethereal in nature.
  • K'Z'K doesn't need a mortal host except situationally. His real bug-centaur body is what we see after he's freed from his mortal host (Gwynn).
• A recent chapter features a rather incompetent worker in Nofun Labs called Reik, who accidentally turns all of his colleagues into horrible mutants, with a squid on a stick. If it's not painfully clear enough, they end up screaming "PAIN!!!" We may have witnessed Reak Prime's birth here.

Same basic model, same incompetence as Torg. And if Real Riff blasted Torg into Dimension of Pain, whats to say Lame Riff didn't do the same thing?

It makes total sense, right?

We didn't see the bodies! We don't know the rules of the necklace!

...or we just don't trust Pete to not turn it around five or ten years down the road.

• Even Zoe somehow survived the explosion that forced out the necklace, the robots that shot them probably did the trick. They're dead, Jim.
  • There is, however, a difference between being dead and staying dead.
• This is a comic that made a big deal about the importance of being recurring characters, questionable circumstances of death, and not seeing the body. There's reason for a lack of trusting that what is on the panel in a discretion shot is exactly what you thought (Hello Oasis and Pyrokinesis!)

Pete even hinted at this himself. Most of the "dominoes" have fallen, although a few still are. Zoe and Riff are in fact dead, and the rest of the cast is going to die soon too. Torg will die last, because he's the closest thing the strip has to a main character by now. Expect the comic to end on the next anniversary day...

• Written by guest artist Tom Batiuk.
• Not exactly next anniversary. When the 'Aylee' chapter started, Pete explicitly stated that Sluggy will end in no less than five years. That still leaves at least two more anniversaries to go.

And has became an angel. However he fell from grace quickly, and can known be found in the webcomic School Bites.

They are interrogating her on how and from where she and Riff got there. Riff's too dangerous to leave undrugged, but Zoe's imprisoned (or simply comatose.

The psychiatrist could be screwing with his head and trying to convince Torg that the original events were a delusion, something far different had happened from the suppressed memories or the events originally shown... Heck, Zoe's involvement could have been nonexistent and it was Oasis' body that Riff was holding. If the cursed necklace wouldn't be ripped out by mere existence displacement, there are so many different things that could have happened now that we know the minimum time since Torg started being an Unreliable Narrator to leave Zoe alive but incommunicado.

Or [same number of alts]-Torg, who would be more difficult for Riff to fight but also far less likely than [same number of alts]-Riff.*

Almost definitely Jossed, as expected

[same number of alts]-Riff could have eventually designed the nanite and mechanical systems after reverse-engineering the ones used by Hereti-Corp or [same number of alts]-Schlock, then taken over because, for one reason or another, he didn't have [same number of alts]-Torg or [same number of alts]-Zoe, or even a non-overshadowed [same number of alts]-Gwynn to hold him back.

• The [same number of alts] thing is kinda confusing, but given what's been revealed recently, it seems highly probable that at least a Riff is His Masterness.
• Jossed, it's Schlock.

They were also attacked by (an) Oasis, but that doesn't mean it's the Oasis, and could be a completely different project. Riff-Prime and Zoe-Prime are still lost, but currently-in-4Universe-Riff-and-Zoe (or just currently-in-4Universe-Riff, if his respective Zoe really was killed) will be important only in the future, when their actions cross over with other characters (possibly in the main dimension, possibly by running into Riff- and/or Zoe-Prime in the 4Uinverse).

Sam is an idiot, and since just about everybody can see it vampire hunters won't bother to go after him. At the same time, he has just enough intelligence and dumb luck that he's quite good at survival.

• The problem is, Vampire Hunters don't care about a vampire's intellect.

Oasis' fire blast caused the D.F.A to malfunction, sending Riff to a future where Hereti Corp has taken over.

• In the "past", we saw the Corp using 'REA 1's and they have captured Oasis.
• In 4U City, Riff has come up against 'REA 6's and Oasis Here
• This would require that Riff somehow makes it back in time, gets married, but never tells anybody about the future that he knows about. (This isn't necessarily a stopper; it's not hard to [tech] up a good reason why he couldn't tell, or perhaps in the end he likes the outcome and just doesn't want to screw with it.)
• Now that Schlock is researching a giant DFA, constructing a fortress-city based around Schlock's lab, and having one of his subordinates research "happy-juice", this is definitely a possibility.

So as not to torture you with a link to the documentaries of Doctor Viennason, it's the one were enough people gather together in Timeless Space to activate a self-powered time bubble (since a time line composed of two people has more strength than two individual timelines). Since Timeless Space can be entered earlier than it was left, it's possible that every universe started out timeless before somebody arrived. People seem to arrive in Timeless Space when there are other people who have time, but even if they didn't, it would take only a bubble large enough to continue expanding as living beings created more time than they spent to fill any world, let alone a world new enough that it only contained a small ball of water surrounding the head of Father Time's brother. Eventually, as people discovered travel through outer space and between worlds and into Timeless Space, they would spread organic matter and sentient beings through their own universe and others, and their descendants would one day discover their own universe before anyone existed there.

She was originally going to have died instantly. But so many people complained about her death and/or wanted he to be brought back that Abrams changed his plans and gave them what they wanted. While making it so horrible that it suddenly seems like a quick death would have been far better.

In what This Troper has come to deem the Aeris Effect, (Or 'Aerith Effect') an author or writer makes a character so likeable that readers/players/viewers will instantly cling to him/her. And then, just when the dramatic timing is right, they kill the character off for emotional value. This is so common that I know it already has its own trope, under another name.

When Abrams does drama, he goes all out, as shown with Zoe's fate. Therefore, it's possible that he may kill off another of the main cast. Torg is safe, as he has Plot Armor thanks to the prophecy, and I doubt he'd kill off Riff. Bun-Bun and Kiki are unlikely to be used to this effect as well. However, Sam and Sasha are well-liked enough to the point that their deaths would have a HUGE effect on the fanbase. Sasha in particular is in danger, as she has been getting more and more attention and characterization in the strips that she appears in lately. Also in danger of this treatment is the newly introduced Izzy.

• As of this strip, it seems I'm either psychic or Dangerously Genre Savvy. I doubt Sasha will die from that injury, though. Still, close enough.

Seriously, this is one of the most common WMGs in the fanbase. I had to throw it out there.

Almost every dimension so far had an equivalent of the main cast, except for this one. Or so it would seem. Nofun labs have an invention that looks and works exactly like the Demon spear that created the 'demons'. What if the demons of Do P are actually mutants created by Nofun Labs. This may also help explain why Lord Horribus was so obsessed with Torg: He IS Torg.

• Then who is the Demon King, Bun-bun?
  • Maybe after another Holidaycide, perhaps he killed the Groundhog's Shadow instead of binding it to him.
    • Not likely, seeing how much more dramatically different he is from his minions. But considering the later spec, it's entirely possible he's originally from the Dimension of Pain, just like the Goddess and the green skinned natives he conquered, and the first generation of demons that became his minions, were outsiders who were zapped there by 4U city's (or an alternate 4U city's) DFA cannon, along with the squid-on-stick.
• Now they're calling themselves the "Dim-sum Henchmen of Pang", so yeah.
• If you're running with this, tie it all together with 4U city being an alternate reality, the no-fun mutants being the wasteland monsters, and the dimension of pain is where they're being blasted to. The early lab mutants clearly resemble many Do P residents. We've seen characters travel in time through timeless space. If the DFA sends characters through there, that could explain how characters we see now, could also be in the past. It all seems to fit together.
• Anyone remember this one?
  • Also this one.

• Consider: he's pretty powerless himself, but quite effective through his network of underlings. He's also been recently revealed to have secretly amassed huge quantities of data on his minions, and is good enough with computers to where Bestseid is afraid to even let him near one. And he looks similar enough to pass...

Not the other way around, as implied in the comic and some places on this very site.

Doesn't this look an awful lot like Chen? It would also explain Operation Ferret Butt and how Bun Bun met General Mayhem who is associated with Killum.

K'Z'K stole people's souls, leaving them in comas. In 4U City, citizens are drugged to the gills and spend most of their time just lying there. Maybe it's just me, but there might be something there...

• As an addendum, let me speculate that His Masterness' real name will be Kenny Kizke.
  • Jossed.

• If they'd left things alone...
  • Rammer would still be alive, ready to plant the seed of the revolution.
  • Zoe and Riff wouldn't have "died" in the MK 19 explosion, removing from play the only man alive that could stop Schlock before things go too far.
    • Jossed - see Schlock's speech in the 4/25/11 update. Happened in a suspiciously similar way, too...
  • Torg, Sam, Bun-Bun, and Sasha wouldn't have linked up with the Minion Master. Without them, the missions against all the tech-groups wouldn't have happened, and the Nofun random-mutagen-squid wouldn't have turned the entire research staff into "demons".
  • Hereti-Corp wouldn't have been able to acquire the groups weakened by the MM missions and start the research that has the two timelines converging.
• Alternately, Riff gets zapped by an REA 6's DFA gun and it sends him back to the prime universe. Discovering that his home is well on the path to Government Drug Enforcement, he uses what he learned about 4U City to derail the upcoming disaster.

• Moreso than normal for Sluggy. I'm just guessing here, but it feels like all the timelines/dimensions are drawing closer together. What if all the surviving Riffs end up in the same timeline and set their intellects to repairing the damages that have been done? After all, Prime!Riff did time-travel, portals, DFA, etc. What could three of them (or more!) do?

• There may be Antagonist In Mourning stuff going on, or, perhaps...
• Oasis, the mind without her own body, will end up fixing Blank!Zoe, the body without her own mind.
  • Jossed. Zoe is fixed, Oasis is in HC custody.

What technology can't fix, maybe magic can. Recall that Gwynn herself was once in more or less the same state after K'Z'K's initial disappearance as well.

• Jossed. Riff used time travel to get a snapshot of non-blank Zoe.

• And Oasis and Kusari both have them. And they are programmable, which is why Dr. Steve was able to directly control Oasis in the way he did - he merely gave an order to the nanites to change her 'default' orientation. And the secret of making the nanites died with him, so the reason none of the Hereti-Corp higher-ups have injected themselves with nanites is that they don't want to be vulnerable to programming commands. Kusari's command protocols are known, so she's still under the control of Hereti-Corp, but Oasis' command structure was lost. They could probably figure it out if they had her captured and could study her for long enough. Oasis' pyrokinetics is her own personal mutation, nothing to do with the nanites.

• We've seen the birth of the demons in the prime world thanks to the Squid-On-A-Stick, with at least one plausible carryover character (Reik/Reakk). And for the Dimension of Sham-Pain, as they say, when you start with a wussy human, you get a wussy demon.
  • Potentially [[Jossed]] by Torg's sword activating on its own in the Do P because it's a supernatural plane (think I saw that somewhere). But I suppose it could be Hand Waved by saying that the innocence of that whole plane has already been spilled.
    • No, that was in a weird spirit realm, not in the Dimension of Pain.
  • And just to take the concept too far, the Goddess of Good is Gwynn's future, while the Demon King is K'z'k.

IS ACTUALLY FROG! No, stay with me on this one.

• Riff manages to convince Herti-corp's surviving leaders that time is degrading and the world is doomed.
• Bun-bun knows about Teknocon one, but can't afford to get thrown out of time again becaus he'd be a serial offender.
• In a combination of stable time loop and batman gambit, Bun-bun throws Frog-mech out of time to be sir John, betting on the possibility that Calix will find Teknocon and try to attack Jacobson.
• Frog tries to use the situation to his advantage... but Bun-bun has a few recorded messages for his former crew!

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