Tuesday is just wondering. Has anyone taken a stab at reading a GÜD book recently?


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good luck convincing bun-bun. unless it's shiny he might not look favorably. ;)

the sword may not have killed farahn but the book does seem to have a mind of its own so i'm wondering if stabbing it did something after all.

I'm not sure the book actually has any kind of mind or soul. That may just be the appearance of it following the death magic enchantment Quint placed on it.

Chaz being totally factual and logical somehow makes him more annoying. We WANTED it to work, dammit. Usually magic works in such a way that whatever would look dramatic will succeed. Just like when you throw a sword it always hits the target with the pointy end. (Don't tell Torg.)

Whisper's host is dead? I figured she was in a post-possession coma and woke up later and would appear later as a side character. Assuming she survived that full height - head slamming fall.

That would have been too easy, wouldn't it have?

If the book has a soul of its own, it's possible it's like Horribus, whose hard parts of his body actually protect him from a deadly cut and you need a more direct hit to his heart/soul to kill him.
https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?book=13#2004-11-21
So you'd need to hit whatever is the "heart" of the book who happens to be protected by layers of papers.

I also expected her to be in the same situation as Zoe's body at the end of the 4U arc, as her body had but a slice, but it seems to be enough. Chaz mentioned such thing, earlier.

The sword seems to work on blood and spirit - conveniently the two things it uses to determine whether someone is innocent enough for it to activate. For some folks like a demon lord that means striking the heart - everything else is too solid. For a human, anything that sheds blood is enough. For a ghost or a spirit or other physical-but-not-quite-physical entity, damaging any part of the body is enough - but it's also the only scenario where we have seen Chaz seriously wound something with his power, while powered up, while also not killing it.

Still, it seems like blood or a-spirit-corporal-enough-to-cut are the key, and a book doesn't really have either.

Talking about the Demon King? Now might be a good time to review Chaz's powers and some of the "special cases".

Kron, an half god, as well as his mother, got killed by a deadly wound, a clear and cut case, so to speak. Would they have survived with just a scratch? Maybe at some god-level status, a more direct strike is required, or maybe not. It's for souls (demonic or otherwise) that we have seen the most cases of only requiring a simple scratch to be killed. The physical body seems to at least provide, if not some level of protection, at least some delay. Let us all not forget that the sword never killed Oasis nor Sasha, but as it has been explained before, the activation itself do not kill, but once powered, a simple cut or stab will be enough to kill any being, no matter how immortal one might think they are(hence why I was hoping for the second book-bride to still survive for having only activated the sword, but alas...).

Whisper's host might be the only case of human dying from a non lethal cut we know of, though we never got a confirmation of her death. An other case could arguably be DOL fred, who, while deadly wounded, got an attempt of rescue by that dimension's Gwynn. But in the end, she failed, it however establish that it might take some time for a Chaz's wound to give a lethal result, for a human body, way slower than a direct scratch of the soul, even with grave injury (please note that the parasite survived, which is coherent with today's situation)

I think the Demon King survived mostly because he is that much of a powerful entity you'd need a more direct strike to be effective. Also, as "indirect" as it might have been, he had at least the good reaction to disconnect himself from the decaying part of him that had been directly scraped by the sword before too much of that decay reached him (it still did quite the damage). Add to this that, the Demon-King's sword was made of solid/solidified part of himself, so you might consider the Horribus rule might apply to some level, here (as Horribus Horns are made of "solidified part" of Horribus's body, after all, though maybe made of dead cells, like hair on top of the skin surface or a rhino horn, are, so not part of the living body).

With all of this said, now is a good time to bring up an old forum post where Pete himself has aluded to the fate of the Demon King, but without providing anything definitive:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10498&p=327330#p327330

We can't conclude from this that the Demon-King is actually dead, now. But from that "yet" word at the end of his sentence, can we conclude that it is, nevertheless, inevitable? That might be jumping to conclusion, or at least be speculation, if all of this post wasn't already...

I'm really curious to know just what Farahn felt when Chaz as "in" the book.

I know Riff has been through a lot ... but trying to get Bun-Bun to agree to help you by threatening him does not seem like the wisest choice for anyone who has grown attached to their spleen.

I'm still not convinced Chaz could actually kill Oasis or Kusari by cutting one of their bodies while activated. Chaz did not understand the true nature of Kusari and Oasis and, confident as he was in his ability to kill any apparently unkillable entity, I have significant doubt that he could "kill" a machine by killing the human body it controls. Honestly, seems like a much bigger leap than killing Farahn by stabbing the book he inhabits.

It has been said that the consciousness of Oasis mostly stem from the connection of both the machine and the organic brain.

Not sure if it's exactly the same for Kusari, though. She might be just remote-controlled, as she might not have benefited from the same technology.

I would rather face the police, than face Bun-Bun.

Didn't think much would happen when stabbing the book. That would be too easy. Also logically, it's merely the prison their souls are in, not their body.

Actually, we have seen Kusari get stabbed by a powered up Chaz and survive (minus one body of course). https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?ch ... 2018-01-17

Actually, pedantically speaking, Chaz was not powered yet. You can see in that strip that stabbing Kusari activated Chaz.