Friday stupidly forgot to save after an hour and half of work (and was about done) and the program had an "unexpected error" and locked up. So Eye Gouger #5 was finished up in 20 minutes and uploaded about 5 minutes till midnight.



----
Vote for Sluggy Freelance at Top Web Comics. Remember to vote EACH day.

Well, Schlock definitely deserves this for giving Chen another chance. This isn't too far off from the stunt he pulled with Kusari and Schlock had to have known he was going to try something like this. It was Schlock's arrogance that he could use Chen and still avoid whatever he was planning that led to this. And now Torg will have to do what he has to do.

Hmmmm making himself too important to be killed.....

Or the start of his bid for total takeover.


Wait and see I suppose.

Isn't this the point where the villain says, "Screw it" and has the person killed anyway?

Well, honestly, on some level we all saw this coming.

We all knew Chen was going to make a bid for control of Oasis, for sure. From the moment he picked up that watch. Pretty cleverly executed on his part. Honestly I'm surprised he would tell Schlock a strategy to control Oasis that he himself believed would work, but it seems he did.

We haven't seen whether Oasis is responding to his commands yet... stay good, Oasis. Or at least better than 'Chen's slave'.

At first I thought "free yourself of your binds" meant "drop all commands currently affecting you", which would be weird (and potentially catastrophic), but it would get rid of such nuisances as override b1. I'm pretty sure though it actually means something more like "escape Kusari". I wonder how Oasis will interpret it though.

That's clever!

That conversation was a year ago. This reminds me of when the Christmas elves built the casino and tricked Bun-bun into being its boss, and we got to see how Squishy-do-do's conversation with his wife earlier actually meant something else if you added some missing panels.

Chen admitted to Dade he was playing the long game/Chess. That might have been before Nash/Straw released important prisoners and Chen stayed.
I'm curious to see how this pans out. It feels like a good Friday cliff hanger.

Yeah, I thought the same thing at first too. It would be hilariously bad for Chen if Oasis interpreted it that way too. Also, we know from the very first Oasis arc that she can indeed misinterpret commands given to her.

Damn, that's clever.
My reaction to Dr. Chen right now:

"Quick, someone run find somebody named, "Marcus"!"

Well played sir.

Well played Marcus, well played. Freeing her right now is a terrible idea though since both Kusari and Chen work for Hereticorp. Can the watch even stop Override B-1 or is that hard coded into Oasis? And even if Chen orders her to ignore the override would that stop it or would it put her into another feedback loop between the two orders where she can't decide which to obey? I don't have the link but it's happened before. Oasis couldn't decide whether to hug Torg or kill Hereticorp goons so she would hug him, override, hug him, override then hug him then override. She wasn't able to do anything because she flipped back and forth so quickly that she couldn't kill anyone or get a good hug in.

I wonder if Oasis is currently conscious.
And how strongly "mind over matter" applies with mind control.

I guess we'll see tomor....oh wait, it's friday.

I guess we'll see Mond.....OH WAIT, PETE DOESN'T UPDATE REGULARLY ANYMORE

I guess we'll see next we... OH WAIT, PETE KEEPS JUMPING BETWEEN STORY ARCS.

I guess I need something new to obsess about if I want to retain sanity.